by Becky Akers
“What’s it mean?”
“‘Tis sweet and fitting to die for your country.’ Why?”
“See, Mama, he’ll die. I know it.”
But the months wore on without reports of illness or the cataclysmic battle at Boston that Alice feared. Instead, Jonathan grew worse.
At hog-killing time, the Deacon traded a fresh ham for some lemons, and Alice forced their juice down the little boy’s throat. By Thanksgiving, he was cranky, feverish. He had ever been a sunny child, but now he cried constantly, and his thin wail sounded nothing like his usual voice. They tried every remedy, from herbs to decoctions so vile that Jonathan vomited before he’d swallowed. The surgeon bled him, not once but again and again. Nothing helped. Alice sat beside his cradle each night, slept only when her mother or Joanna relieved her in the morning. Jonathan’s labored breathing tore at her as December gripped the farm.
This morning, a brutally cold one, she despaired as she held her flushed son. His cries had died to whimpers, and she peered into his wizened face. Jonathan returned her stare unseeingly, then gasped. His whole body stiffened as his eyes rolled back in his head.
“Jonathan! Oh, no, oh, someone help me, Mama, quick!”
Abigail was beside her instantly. She took Jonathan from her, patted his back, rubbed his limbs. He was no longer rigid but frighteningly limp. Alice watched with hands pressed to her mouth.
Abigail straightened, tears spilling down her cheeks. “It’s no use. He’s gone.”
“No, no, no!”
Alice continued screaming as Abigail opened her arms to her. She held her daughter tightly, trying to muffle such outsized agony, sobbing wildly as they clung together.
Then a voice intoned from the doorway, “‘The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.’”
For a long moment, grief stifled Alice. But at last she broke free of Abigail’s arms to confront the Deacon.
“Don’t you dare blame the Lord for this!” She stamped her foot. “’Tis your fault. You took Nathan away from me, you married me to a man who left me a widow and gave me a sick baby, and now he’s dead, too, and—”
“Alice.” Abigail put an arm around her, but Alice shrugged away. “Hush now, Alice. You don’t mean it. It’s not your father’s fault—”
“It is so! I do so mean it!” She was almost spitting in her rage. “I’d have been so happy with Nathan, and instead, my life’s nothing but one sorrow after another because of you! You wicked old man, I hate you!” She rushed past a Deacon too sorrowful to heed her.
Guy hurried to the farm as soon as he learned of the death. He found Alice at the spring where her stepfather had caught them kissing three years before and stopped short at sight of her unpowdered black curls against the snow, her cheeks and lips scarlet in the cold. He forgot that he was paying a condolence call, with Jonathan laid out in the parlor. Instead, he remembered their last time here, her head in the crook of his arm as he kissed her, the sweetness of her mouth.
He started to tell her again how he wanted her when she hurled herself into his arms with a desolate cry. “My baby’s dead!”
He patted her back, murmuring endearments against her mobcap. It tickled his nose, and he longed to pull it off, to free all her glorious hair so the sun and he could play with it. He had raised his hand to do so when another outburst of weeping startled him.
“My baby! Oh, he’s dead. He’s dead. What’ll I do?”
“Marry me, Alice.” He moved his hands to her waist. She quieted and leaned back for a kiss, or so he thought. He closed his eyes and bent to comply but met air.
He looked up to see her regarding him pitilessly.
“’Tis always the same with you, isn’t it?” She shuddered with another sob. “My son’s barely g—g—gone, yet you—you...you can think of only one thing.” She broke away and stood with hands clasped, eyes hopeless. “I thought you loved Jonathan.”
“Well, sure, Alice, but—”
“You didn’t, though, did you? You just pretended because you thought that would make me fall at your feet.”
“Alice, come on. That’s so unfair. I—”
“Yet you don’t understand why I won’t marry you, or why I love Nathan.” She gathered her skirts and ran for the house, however pleadingly he called after her.
CHAPTER 10
One afternoon two days before Christmas, Nathan met his brother Joseph for the long hike to Coventry. Both were looking forward to their month’s furlough, with soft beds, regular meals, and no need to wake in the night, expecting to meet British steel every time a dog barked. Joseph grinned at his brother. When Nathan’s enlistment with Connecticut’s militia expired, he had signed with the Continental Army and received a commission. “So, Captain, still fraternizing with us junior officers?”
“Only when you’re well-dressed.” Nathan gestured at Joseph’s uniform. “Where’d you find a waistcoat and coat that match?”
Joseph winked. “Got me a sweetheart near Watertown who’s ashamed to be seen with me when I look like a Patriot. Taste runs more to the government’s dandies, though she claims she only likes their looks, not their politics. So she made me these and another set out of doeskin.”
“You better watch out. Word from Headquarters is any man doesn’t look ragged’ll face a court-martial for shirking his duty.”
Joseph laughed and gave him tales of his Lucy as they ambled from Cambridge to Newtown, where they spent the night.
They arrived home at sunset the third day. As they turned down the lane, they spied the Deacon in the yard, in ankle-deep snow, inspecting the piles of stone and timber for the new house he planned. He squinted in the twilight and murmured, “Praise God” as they took shape, coming nearer out of the dusk. “My sons. Thank God you’re safe.”
“Yes, sir, alive and well.” Nathan kissed his father’s cheek.
“Well, now, I don’t know about ‘well.’” Joseph jerked a thumb at Nathan. “He’s got a heel went lame there a while back. Slowed us down till I thought about leaving him, but figured he’d find his way home anyhow.”
Nathan leaned against the Deacon’s shoulder to say, “Don’t turn Joseph loose at the table, Father. He’ll eat you out of house and home. Place we ate last night, owner asked me why we didn’t swap him for a horse. Said it’d be cheaper to feed. Quieter, too.”
“I walked all the way here from Boston, I’d be hungry and lame, too.” The Deacon smiled before lifting his eyes heavenward. “’Tis all right, Lord. Bring them home to me limping, but just bring them home.”
“Amen,” Joseph said. Then he gestured at the stack of lumber. “What’s all this here?”
“Rain’s coming in at too many places.” His father hefted one of the planks, rubbing at a knothole with his thumb. “Best raise a new house. We’ll make it some bigger, too, so when you boys come back after the fighting, we’re not bumping into each other any more.” He dropped the board to put an arm around each. “Awful scrawny, both of you, but Abigail’ll remedy that. Nathan, let’s get that foot of yours into some hot water.”
Their homecoming was triumphant. While Joseph looked the swashbuckling soldier in his uniform, Nathan’s commission had the family bursting with pride. Abigail declared he must have a suit of clothes to go with his new rank, though he had grown so thin she would have to take his measurements anew. Sarah, who had returned to the farm when her husband enlisted, questioned them about John and life under arms. She and her mother bustled about the kitchen for hours, concocting delicacies “to put some covering on those bones of theirs,” as Abigail said. They conscripted Joanna to whip cream for syllabub, turn the spit, mix the cornbread.
“But I want to hear their stories,” Joanna said as she stirred pudding while Enoch, David, and Billy listened spellbound in the parlor.
“You can fight a war right here,” Abigail said. “Attack that dough there, and when you’re done fighting it, set the pans by the fire to rise.”
While none of the Hales lacked for admi
rers, Joseph and Nathan were irresistible now. Coventry’s ladies called ceaselessly at the farm, swamping the pantry with pies and preserves, cakes and cookies. Billy declared he was going to enlist come his birthday. David, not turning sixteen for a year yet, despaired of wearing a uniform since the Patriots would have licked the government before that. Joanna heard the shouts of laughter from the parlor, the amusement in Nathan’s voice as he told another story, and punched at her dough. “Can’t I go listen, please? Why can’t Alice help?”
But Alice moved in a dream, and Abigail left her alone, her heart wrung for the daughter who had suffered so much. Withal, Nathan would return to the war in a few weeks.
Alice absorbed every word Nathan said, lips parted, eyes shining. It was as if the last three years had not happened. The Deacon had not married her to Elijah, she had never birthed Jonathan, nor had he died. She was carefree Alice Adams again, worshipping her hero, hoping for a smile and a glance. Once in awhile, Nathan rewarded her. A look would pass between them, but that was all he permitted: his father had reminded him of his promise.
It had been his second night home, after supper and family prayers. The younger children were abed, while Joseph and Billy engaged in mortal combat over the checkerboard. The Deacon dozed in his chair. Sarah knit a muffler for Nathan to take to John, her needles clicking as the fire snapped. Enoch spoke with Abigail of the sermon he was writing and ignored Billy’s teasing about his sweethearts. Nathan sat staring into the flames, forgetting the chestnuts he was roasting, with Alice watching from her seat in the shadows.
A whinny carried to them from the barn, and Joseph raised a hand for silence. “Hear that?” He was too used to camp, where a horse’s restlessness might warn of ambush, to disregard such a thing, even on his father’s farm. “You don’t suppose—”
“Most likely, it’s the General.” Nathan got to his feet. “I’ll go check. Poor fella. He’s so old even the mares scare him.”
Nathan was scarcely out the door with a lantern before the Deacon rose and followed him.
He caught him at the barn as Nathan stopped to swing the door open. “Want some help, son?”
“Good at chasing away horse-monsters, are you, sir?”
The Deacon chuckled and closed the door behind them, shutting out the wind. The stock muttered and stomped, and their breath frosted the air as Nathan held his light over the General’s stall. The horse nickered at him, then went back to nosing in his feed-box. “Looks like all’s clear.”
“Son, let’s not go back to the house yet. I need to talk with you.” The Deacon cleared his throat as Nathan lowered the lantern. “You found any girls that interest you up around Boston?”
The question surprised him, though he saw where it was leading. His twenty-first birthday was six months away, and his father must be dreading that day when he would come of age.
The Deacon awaited his answer, and at last he shook his head. “No, sir, I haven’t. Though to be fair to the ladies of Boston, I haven’t done much looking.” He smiled, but his father forged ahead.
“Time you’re thinking on such things. You need to find a God-fearing girl, someone besides Al—ah, someone to care for.”
“There’s a war on, Father. I can’t marry anyone just now.”
“War won’t last forever. When it’s over, you’ll be taking a congregation, Nathan. Schoolteaching’s fine for a while, but the pulpit’s where you belong. You got such a gift for speaking, you don’t want to waste that. You’ll need a good, dependable wife, a serious girl—”
“Please, sir, this isn’t necessary.”
The Deacon pursed his lips, and Nathan returned his gaze levelly. Without another word, they left the barn.
Alice watched them resume their seats at the hearth with a sigh. She could imagine their discussion, but she no longer had any strength to battle the Deacon. She wanted only to sit and savor the firelight on Nathan’s face.
She often shared the settle with Asher Wright, who mirrored her devotion to Nathan. She had met Asher years ago, during her first hours in Coventry, for in those days, with eyes big and trusting and bare feet scuffing the dirt, he was always trailing her brother. Before long, she accepted him as Nathan’s shadow, took him for granted as did everyone but Nathan, until the day she asked Enoch about him.
“Asher?” Enoch had smiled. They were in the barn, milking, with Enoch teaching her how to squirt a stream unerringly into a cat’s mouth. In the year since their parents had married, she’d discovered in Enoch a fount of such knowledge. “Well, Sis, that’s an old one. He’s been hanging around Nathan since we were kids.”
“He told me he loves Nathan better than he does his brother Ben,” she said. She had thought that an odd comment for a boy, and disloyal to poor Ben, too, but Asher was forever saying odd things when he was saying anything at all.
Enoch nodded as much as he could with his head pressed against a cow’s flank. “That’s because of what happened the first day Asher went to school. I wasn’t there. None of us were because the corn was coming in. But Nathan was still pretty small, not much help, so Father sent him off to school. Well, anyway, even though we didn’t any of us see this, we sure heard about it from everyone else.”
He aimed a second shot of milk at Barney (“What else do you call a barn cat?” he’d shrugged when Alice protested that Barney was a girl) and cheered her neat swallow before explaining that Asher had been a slow child, and shy. The idea that he must stand before the class to recite lessons terrified him as few fates could. His brother Ben, two years older and a seasoned student, had teased him that first morning all the way to school, so that Asher took one look at the assembled boys and wet himself. Eyes stared and fingers pointed, while Ben shoved him and said for his friends to hear, “Big baby, get away from me.”
Only Nathan, the same age as Ben, had not tormented him. Instead, he moved over on the bench to make room for Asher and his dripping breeches.
During recess, they surrounded Asher, intending to pummel him to the ground and feed him dirt, while Ben skulked in the schoolhouse. Nathan alone broke through the ring to defend him, until the others melted away.
“Coupla winters after that, Asher fell through the river-ice,” Enoch continued. Barney twined about his ankles, mewling for another taste. “Nathan pulled him out, saved his life. But Asher didn’t seem to care as much about that as when Nathan defended him. He’s never forgotten it, even though he doesn’t say much. You won’t get anything about it out of Nathan, either.”
He was right about that. She was still in the barn, practicing with the cat, when Nathan arrived to muck out the horse stalls. She skipped around him while he worked—she had been too much a child yet to stay still—and told him Enoch’s story. “Is it true?” she asked, breathless at such valor.
He had flashed his bewitching smile and run a hand through his hair. “Got stretched a bit in the telling, Ally.”
“Well, then, what really happened?”
He turned his back to shovel silently a few moments. When he spoke, it was with faint irritation, the only time she heard him sound that way. “Wish people’d just forget about it. Someone’s always bringing it up, and it shames Asher. He was only five years old—he couldn’t help it.” Though she wheedled, he said nothing more, only put her off with jokes and threats to roll her in the manure if she didn’t let him finish his chores so he could go fishing.
Alice and Asher had also worshipped Nathan for his skill at the feats children find important. Nathan could climb a tree faster than anyone and walk a ridgepole without losing his balance. He out-wrestled, out-ran, and out-swam most of his schoolmates, even those who were older and bigger. He trapped fish with his bare hands, swooping down on them from above as the old men in town swore the Indians had.
Then came the day Nathan left for college, the saddest Alice or Asher had known. For Asher, the proudest quickly followed, when Nathan wrote him the first letter of his life. Despite years of effort, Asher could barely read,
and he had never mastered writing. Alice recited Nathan’s sentences to him until he had memorized them. Over the next weeks, in moments snatched between her chores and his, she helped him frame a reply. Though he answered only that once, Nathan wrote periodically, and Asher’s most cherished possession after his Bible was a stack of pages covered in his friend’s elegant hand and bound with rawhide.
The letters continued when Nathan began teaching, and once he went to Boston, Asher received some describing life in camp. He brought them to Alice and sat fascinated while she read aloud. They agreed Asher would take to the Continental Army like butter to bread. Someone else, undoubtedly Nathan, for the Continentals and Nathan were one in Asher’s mind, would do the thinking. Someone else would tell him what to do and when. The tales he heard as he munched apples on the Hales’ settle or held skeins of yarn for Alice to wind convinced him that a life defending liberty would be a fine one. Asher took Alice with him for support when he told his father he wanted to enlist, but Mr. Wright only shook his head.
Asher spent as much of Nathan’s furlough at the Hales’ as he did at home, happy to sit in the same room as his idol. He whittled and listened to stories repeated for caller after caller. So he learned that Nathan was recruiting more patriots for the Cause, particularly for his own company. Several of the officers needed aides, too. Nathan had a good man helping him, but he’d fallen ill, leaving his post vacant. Asher thought that through. “Gonna mention it to my pa,” he told Alice before he left that night.
They were in the parlor when Mr. Wright appeared the next day. Alice and Sarah were sewing breeches while Abigail and Joanna fitted Nathan for a greatcoat. Joanna had donned Nathan’s tricorn and was giving him orders: “Sir, hold your arm out to the side, sir. Is the sleeve too long? Sir, put your hands above your head, sir.” Nathan had them nearly sick with laughter at his elaborate salutes, as though Joanna were His Excellency himself. Abigail set pie and coffee before their guest, and Nathan answered his questions about the situation at Boston. When Mr. Wright finished eating, he said, “Nathan, Asher’s got his heart set on enlisting.”