My Name Is Resolute

by Nancy E. Turner

  Cullah took the gold and then August was gone into the night. I watched him ride away with the same mix of longing and anger I felt every time he left me. I felt cross. It seemed to me that what I wanted most in the world was having everyone always to abide with me. “Cullah, you must be careful with that.”

  “I will. Here. Put it where you hide the other money. And count it first.”

  I opened the bag. Without pouring it out I saw at least a dozen gold crowns and more than that of doubloons. “It is at least twenty pounds. You told me you needed a new blade for your saw.”

  “Two men in town owe me for cabinetwork. I will wait until they pay. This will go toward our sons’ schooling if we leave it be.”

  As we readied for bed, Cullah lay in the darkness, his face searching the ceiling. I crawled in next to him, but his arms did not reach for me. “Good night, my love,” I whispered, and rolled to face the wall. I was exhausted. I would have had him if he had reached for me, but if he would not, I would sleep hard.

  “Resolute?”

  “Yes?”

  “Write it, then. The letters that make my name. I watched him read that paper. It is important. I have no time for schooling. Never have. But you write it on something I can carry to the shop. I will learn it.”

  In a few days, Cullah came home, puffed himself up, and said, “I signed an order for seasoned hickory today.”

  As the meaning of that dawned in my heart, I swelled with pride for him. “Fine. Very fine, husband.”

  Cullah added a room for my brother’s use alone, should he ever have need again of a safe harbor this far inland. By the time Benjamin was six months of age, our house had eight rooms including a kitchen under the same roof, not counting the lower stony level where the loom sat.

  * * *

  In the summer of 1739, I lay thrashing and sweating in our bed on a mercilessly hot night. Some, I have heard, plead for death, preferring its quiet knell to even one more hour of childbed. By dawn, when the world had a gentler coolness and a light breeze came in the windows, the babe was born. A woman child, at last, I thought, with great swelling of my heart.

  Cullah was beside himself with her wee presence. He stared at the little mite as if he had never imagined himself the father of anything but an army of brawn and bone. Jacob marveled at the fineness of her fingers, long and straight, as they explored his face and clutched his hair. He wanted to name her Mary Barbara, after his mother, but that made me cry. So, in a spell of quiet when all the children slept and the three men in my life sat upon the foot of my childbed, I told them stories of my captivity, and how Birgitta had called me “Mary” by her own whim. I could not allow my first daughter to bear the name Mary.

  For almost a week we bantered about names, though we had worked on that through my expectation, too. At last I said, “Eugenia Gwyneth is my choice.”

  Cullah put his hand against his chin. At length he said, “It is a good name. A fine one.” He picked her up, as tiny in his hands as a loaf of bread. “Gwyneth? Eugenia? Gwenny, my love? Wee darling, Eugenia Gwyneth. Besides, she likes it. She smiled. And don’t tell me any prattle that it was just her tummy bubbling that made her do it. Yes, she’s our wee Gwenny. It suits her ladyship fine.”

  “Eadan, you are smitten beyond all reason.” I adored him for the way he adored Gwyneth. Yet, fear clutched at the back of my neck as if it were a hand, or a strike from old Birgitta’s goat stick. Best never love a child too much. Best never think they are yours to keep. This one was not a week on this earth, and might be snatched away from us any moment. I knew so many women, now, who suffered the loss of so many, sometimes three or four children carried away in a single night by some scourge or other. As Cullah placed Gwyneth in my arms I snuggled her to me and kissed her perfect little bald head. Kissed her pinched-shut eyes. No, I will not love you, I promised myself. The women in my life whom I have loved, even those I have not, have all left me for death’s dark shadows. I whispered, “Gwyneth, leave me not.” The babe smiled again. “And be not so pretty a thing that your father’s heart breaks never to mend when you do.”

  I studied her little form with apprehension that I had not felt at the births of my two sons, for though in the years of their births the chief source of our income had been the making of small coffins, we had been left unscathed. This year of Gwenny’s arrival was a year of no plagues, no fevers or distempers other than mild cases of quinsy or colds. That alone filled me with dread. This delicate woman-child had no reason to die, had been born with a shield, I thought. At least for now.

  At least for now.

  * * *

  By May of 1746, when I was twenty-seven, we had five children. Brendan, Benjamin, Gwyneth, Barbara, and Grandan Stuart, a wee boy with his father’s dark hair already thick upon his head at birth. Our lives were peaceable though I was always tired. When I looked back at those days later, I wonder I ever made it through a day. My house was never clean. No furniture went without scratches. The winters were long indeed, with the children confined indoors. Yet, never did I feel as haggard and as filthy as I had living in the Haskens’ house. My children’s clouties were cleaned daily, and Cullah built a walk-through to get to the barn where we boiled and soaped daily.

  We heard of Indian attacks, but they were always some distant place. New France had spread to the west, but none of that affected my family. We feared little, and life was pastoral, gentle, broken only by a squabble among the children.

  My husband and I had rare cause to disagree, but then, we had rare time to speak to one another. Other than my consternation at Jacob adding some tale or other of ghosts or fairies to frighten the children into being good, I felt happy. I wove when I had time, simple cloth for children’s clothing, though I made myself notes of things I had seen or imagined and wished to try. A silken weft on threes. A line of indigo, heavy-twisted, on tens. I spun if the children were quiet or asleep, though sometimes I fell asleep at my wheel. I even learned to knit in my sleep, I believed, often surprised at what I had done though my mind felt no more lively than a turnip.

  One summer’s day Cullah came in the door and said, “Wife, bring the children here to me.” I thought at the time it was an odd thing because every day, unless one of them was asleep, they came running to him when he returned from working. Grandan was nursing at the time, and I had long ago left off covering myself unless there were strangers in the house. The baby slupped at my breast and for a moment Cullah lost his grim expression and smiled, though it was but a moment. “From now on, your grandfather Jacob is coming to live in this house. He is getting old, and I want him to be here.”

  “What is wrong?” I asked.

  He turned away as if there were some answer in the stones of the fireplace. “I’m worried. He’s old. Some preacher walking the streets today spoke of doom. The Highlanders are gone. Not just defeated, butchered to the last. Culloden field. The British have killed us. My God. There is not a clan left, Ressie. Not a man left alive. Not a babe.”

  “Was this the cause for which you sent forty pounds? La, husband. Do not weep. Our lives are good, Cullah. There is corn growing in the garden, our little ones are—”

  “Stop! Say nothing more. You will pull ghosts from the trees by saying aloud we have some they want to prey upon here. I have to tell Pa. All our kin are dead. Do not wait up for me.”

  “What about your supper?” I asked, thinking that was what he meant.

  “I’ll have it with him,” he said, and charged out the door.

  Never mind that I had been in this house during many a stormy night. This night, terror struck me as I had not felt in a long time. Moments became hours. I lit candles, three upstairs and three down, to quell my fear. My heart beat so that everything I or the children said was muffled by the pounding of it. The storm began in earnest just as darkness drew in upon us. Though this house was not drafty, the wind came from a different direction, it seemed. An explosion of thunder came with a gust that snuffed every candle. It sent me
back in time to being that small girl in the hold of a ship under cannons blasting away. Lightning flashed, for some seconds charging up the room with blue light, then blackening everything beyond what we expected. Benjamin began to cry, and because he did, Barbara and Gwyneth also cried. Brendan made a brave effort to keep his face still, but as I got a taper lit, I saw him turn away from me and wipe at his face with his cuffs. I cleaned the little ones for bed and sent the two older boys upstairs.

  If Cullah were here, he would make them jolly, I thought. Cullah and Jacob would tease them and tell them God was beating bad angels with his fists, or blowing ghosts out of the trees. At last, seeing no other way to calm them, I called all the children in with me. Every time they heard thunder I bade them shake their feet to mimic God kicking bad angels out of heaven, and soon their tears became laughter. Grandan slept and soon Barbara did, too. The storm slaked, and the children calmed. The two oldest boys slept. Gwenny stared. “Close your eyes,” I said.

  “Where’s Pa?” she asked.

  “He’s coming with Grandpa.”

  “When is he coming?” she pleaded.

  I caught myself. It was as if she, too, knew something was amiss, felt that this strange night could be the end or the beginning of something dark. I smiled and said, “I am sure that with the storm, Grandpa said to him”—I mimicked Jacob’s accent, rolling all the r’s to great effect—“‘Cullah me boy, we shan’t go out on a colly-waddler of a night as this one. Just you sit by me fire while I tell ye about a real storm. Let’s see, that was in forty-three. Or was it twenty-three? Well, never mind. That storm was so bad, the wind blew so hard, it blew a stone castle all the way from Jamaica to Lexington. And you know what was in it?’” I paused, for Gwenny had heard the story before.

  “A princess?”

  “Yes. And do you know who she grew up to be?”

  She said, “A knight’s lady, who maked her own clothes and those of her bairnies, jus’ like in the Bible, she work-ed day and night to do it.”

  “You know all my stories,” I said, kissing my fingertip and touching her nose with it.

  “Tell me again about the little girls running across the roof to see the ocean.”

  “The widow’s walk was high up, on the tip-top of the castle. It had a staircase that went through a dark attic and came out on top where the sun was hot and seagulls turned cartwheels all day long.”

  “Just like Brendan does?”

  “Exactly. Though they were birds and had no such long legs. They put out their wings like this.”

  Gwenny stretched out her arms and waved them about. “I want to fly,” she said.

  I could not keep the smile in place. A quick image came to mind of all the little tombstones I knew, their carved baby faces couched by feathered wings above engraved names. “It is not in God’s goodwill for people to fly, Gwenny. That is for birds. People have something much more important to do.”

  “What? Sewing and numbers and weaving?”

  “Perhaps.” I heard the door open below.

  Gwenny sat up and said, “Papa!”

  I heard no familiar voices. In fact, no voices at all. “No doubt the door simply blew open. Keep quiet and let the other children sleep, now. You should be asleep, yourself. You stay here and I will go and help him and Grandpa off with their wet things. You keep my spot warm, all right?”

  “I shall, Ma.”

  “Good girl. Bless you, my Gwenny. I will be right back.” Then I left with a single candle, leaving one alight in the room over the heads of our dear little ones. I crept down the stairs holding my breath and trying to make no sound at all. At the foot of it I peered into the parlor. Two large figures crouched before my fire. I spoke no word. My hands trembled at my lips.

  One of them straightened up. “Colly-waddler,” he said. “Pure colly-waddler.”

  “Jacob?” I whispered, now mindful of the children.

  The other man turned. Cullah. “Oh,” I cried, and ran to him, setting the candle upon the table before I flew into his arms. “I was so frightened.”

  He smiled down at me, pulling off his cap and cloak. “Now, Resolute, I told you where I was gone. You didn’t expect me to trudge uphill in mud from one little house to my own in the black of night in the middle of a storm, did you?”

  “But so long? You could have gone to Boston and back in that time. You terrified the children with talk of ghosts before you left.”

  The look on his face changed and he studied my eyes. “You are afraid,” he said. “Poor wife. I terrified you, too.”

  Jacob knuckled Cullah in the arm and said, “You’d a done better by her to stay with her during the storm and get me in the morning. There was no reason to rush.”

  “A fellow in town was speaking on the corner near the shop where I could hear him the day long. Gave me to fright of the old ways, the fairy ways and the small people, brownies in the shadows, you know. He preached so well I thought the devil was at me.”

  I rubbed my forehead, trying to hide my astonishment. “Have you eaten?”

  “We did,” Jacob said.

  “Well, come up to bed then. We shall have to carry all the children to their beds for they are all in ours.”

  After that time, on Cullah’s insistence, Jacob lived with us. I watched my husband change somewhat. He seemed suspicious of everyone and everything outside the circle of our hearth, and began a series of changes to the house. Where there was an ample room, a new wall was built a foot or so away from the old, with shelves and notches in the paneling to lift and move things, so that every square of panel hid a secret box as if his new fears could only be assuaged by building places to hide. Some of them could have hidden one of the children, some were too small to house a thing larger than my hand. On the outside, too, he built an addition that would look to the world as if it were always part of the saltbox house, yet it enclosed a stairwell to the barn. The two of them worked through the rest of the summer on all the little secret places of this house, until it was as honeycombed as the home in which I grew up, in Jamaica.

  I asked him to put a siding of rock around the original house where I worked. In it we could store all things of value which might be lost in a fire, such as the deed to this land and our marriage papers. I stored the old tattered petticoats, the pearls, the brooch, and the ruby ring, along with Ma’s other jewels in their caskets on a shelf behind the loom. All I had to do if I wished to wear them was take a piece of wood from the wall which appeared to be a brace. Behind that, a flattened piece of lead flashing could be moved, and it revealed a slot where I could push a narrow stone aside to the little crypt. Before I closed it that first night, with a satisfied smile, I also placed within it thirty-one pounds in gold coin as savings against any need in the winter to come. Cullah and I spent hours devising hiding places for things large and small.

  Fall turned early so that by the third week of August we were chilled at night and needing blankets put back upon the beds. I awoke one night in September with a familiar flutter in my belly. I stood and looked out our window upon the full-moon-lit fields below. A child. A sixth child. Oh, la, I thought, and sighed, leaning my head against the panes of glass. And the little one not out of clouties, yet.

  From the dark, Cullah’s voice asked, “Resolute? Where are you?”

  “Here.”

  In a moment he was behind me, his great hands warm on my shoulders. “Can you not sleep?” he asked.

  “I felt a babe.”

  “Is he not in his cradle?”

  “No. Another babe. A new one. I felt the flutter.”

  The thrill he used to show was gone, as this was now so familiar, but he smiled as he rested his cheek against mine, wrapping his arms about me from behind as we looked out the window. “I will have to build the tower your ladyship once asked for.”

  “Well and aye,” I said, with a tired smile. “This one will come too soon and there will be two in clouties at once.”

  “No matter.”

 
; “Not to you. I wash them.”

  He patted my arm and led me back to the bed. “It’s time to take in a girl, then. A maid. Apprenticed out, you know, same as with boys. There are likely girls in town. I will ask about for you.”

  After he had asked throughout Boston, Cambridge, and Lexington, fate decreed that it was America Roberts came to live at my house. She was the last of the Roberts girls, all her older sisters already married. Her mother was caring still for the two boys until they could be apprenticed, yet her new husband refused money to send them to any worthy professional man, so they would have to be attached to a tradesman.

  I lay awake one night, restless at having America in the room we had made for her in the attic. I wondered if she felt as I had when sold to the Haskens. At last, I could lie there no more. I got up, put a wrapper about me, and took a candle up the stairs. At the attic door, barely tall enough for me to go through without lowering my head, I paused and tapped. There was no answer. The girl was asleep. I chided myself on foolish worries. Being with child had often kept me awake with goblins of the mind. I turned on the stoop, just as the door swung inward.

  “Yes, Mistress?” she asked.

  “I came to see if you are warm enough,” I said. “Sorry if I awakened you. I could not sleep thinking you might be cold up here.”

  “As long as I undress quickly, I am warm enough once I have the coverlets on.”

  I held the candle up to see her face. “Do you have need of another?”

  “No, Mistress.”

  “You will tell me, please, if you do? And tell me if any of my children are cross with you, or tease you? I will not have them being unkind or rude. You are not a slave. You shall withstand no ill-treatment in my house. Report it to me at once.”

  “Thank you, Mistress.”

  “And, America?”

  “Yes?”

  “I will get another bed warmer that you may use each night.”