The Midwife's Revolt (9 page)

“Indeed, I shall. You’ve been very good to me, Lizzie.”

I noted with silent pleasure that Martha had finally used my Christian name.

Before we knew it, Christmas was upon us; a carriage arrived for Martha—presumably from her brother, Thomas. By this time I had grown attached to Martha and did not want her to leave me.

I told her to be careful; indeed, I was greatly worried. Rumors that Washington planned to attack the Regulars—even now, in winter, across the frozen Charles River—had our parish in a panic. The idea that the British commanders certainly knew of these rumors, if not of more concrete information, made me shake with fear at the thought of their attacking us first.

“I’ll take care, I promise,” she said as I wrapped a woolen scarf around her neck, patted her bonnet down, and kissed her. She laughed then, in good spirits to be on her way finally, to a most beloved brother.

I waved good-bye until I could no longer see the carriage. Then I returned to the house. I felt restless and did some chores, baking bread and spinning several skeins of wool. But when I paused for a moment, my fingers burning with the effort, the silence rang in my ears. I set aside my work and tried to read my beloved Shakespeare sonnets, but it was of no use. With Martha gone, the house felt too empty. After pacing a while, I gave up in disgust and decided to visit Abigail.

Although the sun shone, it was very cold that day. I had Thaxter saddle Star for me. As the afternoon light grew dimmer, the horse seemed grateful for the work and trotted energetically down the lane. Only the crows made any noise, cawing disapprovingly at us from their perches on neighboring fences.

My excitement at seeing my dear friend grew as I approached her house. I could not wait to tell her all about my new charge and share with her those things women shared with one another. I was ready to speak of my lost family, my hotheaded brother, and my dreams for the future. Despite the cold and the war and my loneliness, I had begun, in the past few days, to hope that someday I might feel love again.

I arrived before the Adams house to find it all lit up. I was ready to dismount when a certain vision made me pause.

Within, a family sat around a blazing fire. John Adams, our celebrated delegate to the Continental Congress, sat in the great chair with little Tommy on his knee. He was reading the child a book with colorful pictures in it, and the boy clung to his neck. Abigail was winding yarn upon a clock reel, which popped at regular intervals. Nabby wrote a number down in a little book each time it did so, keeping track of its length for her mother. Charlie and Johnny played chess on the table behind them.

Star scuffled his hooves impatiently, no doubt wishing me to make up my mind whether to descend or no. Abigail paused in her work and looked toward the window—a look, if not precisely of alarm, then of readiness. She knew from hard experience it could be anyone, friend or foe: a beggar, a drunk work hand, prisoners entreating a meal, officers needing a place to sleep out of the cold. That it was merely I she would not have guessed. She stood as if to move closer to the window, but I suddenly decided that I would not disturb her long-deserved idyll. I nudged Star with my heels and we returned back down the road, I having discovered a new level of loneliness, and Abigail having discovered nothing but a slight gust of winter wind.

14

THE IMAGE OF Abigail sitting by the
fire with John and her children brought me quite low. While I loved Abigail and rejoiced for her, reunited after nearly a year with her beloved John, the image of that family around the blazing hearth put me in a self-pitying frame of mind.

I could not bear going up to my cold chamber, whose fire had gone out, and so pulled a pallet by the kitchen hearth. I removed my bodice, petticoat, and stays, and lay in my shift to burn on one side and freeze on the other. I turned myself periodically, like a roast upon the spit.

From my shelf I took my volume of Shakespeare’s Tragedies—the third volume from Pope’s six-volume set—and began to read. The light was dim, and my eyes soon closed. I fell asleep, King Lear raging between my ears.

When I awoke, alone in my kitchen at dawn, it was Christmas morning, 1775. I rubbed the glass and gazed beyond my heat-fogged window. The fields shone with brilliant, blinding whiteness. It had snowed.

I lifted myself up with a heavy spirit. It was freezing cold, and I had not slept well. (It is not good to begin a winter’s day exhausted, as Nature takes no measure of one’s readiness before demanding Her tasks.) I moved to boil water for my coffee and spoke to myself with a firm tone. I told myself that I must stop sighing the lack of many a thing I sought. By many measures, I was a rich woman. I had sixty acres, a loom, a horse, two cows, and a servant. I had wood for fires, sheep’s wool for hats and mitts, milk for butter, porridge, and cheese.

Indeed, all about me were signs of my industry. Health and youth were mine as well. “The worst is not, so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’ ” Why, then, did these thoughts not console me? What was this heavy dolor that could not be consoled?

The image of Abigail and her family—I did not have
that
. Nor would I ever, I believed.

It was in a feverish state of self-consolation that I did my chores that morning, and when I finally was able to make myself some porridge, I considered my relation to the parish women. They had been slow to call upon me—and why not? Could they not feel my self-pity? Could they not sense how I begrudged them their healthy babes? Henceforth, I resolved, I would endeavor to love my neighbor, not envy her. I had the gift of healing, and heal I would.

It was soon midday, and I had fallen asleep after taking a small meal of bread, butter, and ham. The stomp of boots by my door woke me. I had lain down in my petticoat and bodice with no stays. My hair was loose, and I hurried to wash my mouth with some saltwater and put my fingers through my hair. I greeted Abigail at the door with a crooked smile.

“Come in,” I offered. “It is very cold today.”

“It is.” She nodded. She did not take her eyes off me as I led her into my warm kitchen.

I took her muff and bonnet and cloak and set them on a chair where they would stay warm for her ride home.

Abigail frowned. “You look strange this morning, Lizzie.”

“Why, thank you,” I said wryly. “Care for some real English tea? It was a gift of my horrid sister-in-law.”

“Oh, I would! So long as John is not about.” She cast a quick glance around, as if I might actually be hiding him behind a door.

“Fear not. If ever he honors me by a visit, I shall serve him good patriotic blackberry tea.”

She sat at the table, noticing the pallet by the fire and the Tragedies open facedown upon the floor
.
Her warm, brown eyes noticed everything—quickly, too.

I served the tea with some Indian-meal cakes on a china plate, a beloved treasure of my mother’s.

“And you have been looking very carefully at me,” I said. “You see, I am astute enough to perceive your observance of me. What do you find, may I ask?”

She placed a hand on mine. “I find you alarming. Like those people left in forests to be raised by wolves.”

At this, I let out a decidedly unlady-like snort. “No, indeed. Though I lay awake half the night, it’s true.”

“Thinking what thoughts, may I ask?”

“That I must stop my self-pity and get on with the godly task of helping others.”

She smiled enigmatically. “That is indeed a Christian thought on this holy morning. But so hard to live up to in practice, I find. I often resolve to stop pitying myself, but am rarely successful.”

“In any case, I hope to try—” I faltered, not wishing my hard-won resolve to crumble.

“Oh”—she reached out to me—“I have given offense. I’m sorry. Don’t let my old bruised heart keep you one minute from a true heroine’s mission.”

“You laugh at me now.”

“Indeed, I do not.” But her lips tightened as if she would laugh at any moment.

I went to the fire to fetch more hot water. “The thing is, philosophical consolation is all I have. I can’t change my state. I can only change my relation to it.” I did not say, “loveless, lonely, barren state,” but it is what I thought.

“And you must
keep
that philosophy, Lizzie. But sprinkle upon it the flavor of the everyday. I mean only to warn you that it is human to feel lonely and sad and to pity oneself.”

We were silent for a while then, each lost in our own thoughts. Abigail was no doubt thinking of John’s imminent departure. In eleven years of marriage, they had lived together but half that time. Finally, she asked, “It was you last night outside my window, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I admitted, ashamed.

“And why did you not stay? We would have welcomed you, Lizzie.”

“I didn’t wish to intrude. You looked
. . .
happy.”

“One is most inclined to generosity when one is happy, is one not?”

I felt her mild rebuke. “Well—” I began.

“Well, nothing.” She stood. “I must go. But I—we—would like it very much if you joined us for Christmas dinner. My father will be with us, and the Cranches.”

It was an offer too tempting to refuse.

Oh, the memory of that dinner has lasted me many years: children ran everywhere, and Richard and John, still young and hale, carried on a most fascinating conversation about what kind of government we should have in the event of Independency.

“We
shall
have it!” Adams shouted, tongue loose with cider—or so I thought. When I knew him better, I would know he always spoke loudly and with great passion. They spoke of bicameral and unicameral systems. Adams argued most vehemently that no branch of government should have overweening power over another and that, at all costs, one must have a separate judiciary to balance the executive—or was it the other way around?

We were all so merry, and with the din of children all around us, we women listened to this most historic of discussions with scant attention, for children were asking for meat to be cut and drink to be passed. A servant-girl passed a savory tart, and by the fire in that tiny room it became so stiflingly hot that Abigail was finally prompted to open a window, letting in freezing air but stopping the conversation between John and Richard only momentarily. What a scene!

When I had kissed Abigail good-bye and shaken John Adams’s hand, knowing it was futile to refuse the offer of Mr. Cranch’s chaise, I departed, feeling as happy and full of life, friendship, and hope as I had felt lifeless, alone, and hopeless the night before.

15

MARTHA RETURNED FROM town the following week
lighthearted and at ease. She had seen her brother. Despite the fact that he was a Tory, he must somehow have been a decent human being to be so beloved by his sister.

Her first gift to me upon entering my warm little cottage was a frown and, removing her cloak, the words, “This house is not nearly so clean as I should like.”

“Well, get going then,” I retorted. I had taken to sleeping by the kitchen hearth in her absence and was embarrassed by the arrangement now, for it spoke not only of my powerlessness but also of my loneliness.

“Give me some of that good British tea of yours first, and I shall.”

Saying nothing about my pallet by the fire or about the books and teacups scattered about me, she removed to her room, presumably to tidy herself and take off her wet boots. I was left to boil water and marvel at how glad I was of her return.

Martha had arrived just in time to help me with two births, both uneventful. We left the women cleverly and were compensated a few days later by a packet of pins for one baby and some fine linen for the other. Fewer and fewer people could pay us with actual money.

“At this rate,” Martha mused, placing the linen on a table in the parlor, “we will soon be able to open a store.”

“Yes, we’ll call it The Midwives’ Bounty.”

We laughed, ignorant of the prescience of her words. Within a year, we would be compelled to sell all our goods for cash to buy the necessities of survival.

But for now we were comfortable, and as the weather warmed, leaving the bitterest cold behind, we grew ever more content. There were three more babies that February—three more gifts, we joked, for “the store.” These babes all arrived on the Sabbath, to the great dismay of Parson Wibird.

There came disease, too. Canker rash, pleurisy, and the throat distemper all arrived that spring of ’76, followed hard upon by mumps. Parents and children died. I tended to many, and while I could do little more than Dr. Phipps, the simple people of our parish had, at long last, begun to trust me. They liked my gentle ways, my slow, soft, comforting presence. Since Christmas, I had made every effort to hide my envy of the healthy babes and their mothers. Hiding it did not extirpate this envy from my soul, but at least I was no longer weeping at every birth.

But the biggest event that spring was the departure of the British Army from Boston. Oh, happy day!

All winter we had awaited some dreadful event, an aggression from one side or the other. Then, on Sunday, March 3, we all heard the roar of twenty-four-pounders from the north. I saddled Star and, with Martha behind me—she was a slip of a girl, her weight hardly more than that of a good winter cloak—we cantered off to Penn’s Hill.

We ignored the rude stares of the townspeople—they should have known by now that we had neither means nor the inclination for a lady’s saddle!—and arrived within a quarter of an hour. Once more was I moved by a wild desire to don a man’s costume. Oh, the freedom such costume might afford! In truth, I found my onlookers’ disapprobation both shaming and distracting. To remove these painful emotions from my sensibilities would grant me leave to accomplish my tasks unimpeded. I even went so far as to imagine wearing something of Jeb’s, for while he was broader than I, he had not been much taller.

We alit from Star, whereupon Abigail came to greet us. Shivering at the din and rattle of the windowpanes around us, we three ascended Penn’s Hill together.

What we saw while upon that hill can hardly be described: our cannonballs sailed through the air, and then fell directly down upon the enemy’s encampment in town! At first, Abigail could not understand why we should defend such an inconsequential little hill, but I contradicted her.

“No, you’re mistaken, Abigail. This is a war of the mind as well as the sword. Our enemy will no longer feel so safe as they have done. Nor will they look upon us with such contempt as before. We are a force to contend with,” I said exultantly.

“I hope you’re right,” she replied cautiously.

My words proved somewhat prophetic when, on the seventeenth of March, from atop Penn’s Hill, we saw the entire British fleet readying to depart our shores. It was the largest fleet of ships anyone had ever seen in our waters.

“They look like a forest,” Abigail said. Then, as they began to move, almost in unison, she cried. “Look, oh, look, Lizzie!”

Abigail and I hugged each other at this happy event. I cannot adequately describe the relief we felt. The oppressive fear of attack, the daily doubt, the diseases the soldiers had spread—pitiable soldiers, on both sides—they were truly gone from our midst. Gone to New York, we soon heard, where disaster lay in wait for our men.

But in Braintree we rejoiced and welcomed a much-needed spring.