Later, when I got the children from the cupboard, I tried to cheer them by making sport of any robber who came but to steal yarn.
Brendan said, “He’s going to make a braw nightcap for his bairnies.”
Gwenny added, “Do Indians know how to knit and tat, Ma?”
We laughed. But I asked Cullah to buy us a pistol, and to teach me how to fire it.
* * *
That September old Barnabus died. He was found stretched out on his floor by someone peeping in the window, as if he had simply chosen a strange place for a nap on a warm afternoon, hands clasped upon his chest, a faint smile opening his lips. Cullah and I gave ten shillings for him to be buried beside the wife whom he so loved. We tried to get the man’s huge dog to come with us, but when we got to the edge of town the beast took off into the woods and we could not find him though we searched an hour.
That night following our burying Barnabus, we lay together for the first time since our poor infants had died. I felt little pleasure from it as I had before. He stopped and rolled over, staring at the ceiling. “Wife?” he said.
“Yes, husband?”
“My heart is not in it. I cannot.”
“Mine is so blackened, too, that I want to lie near you, nothing more.”
After so long a time I thought he had fallen asleep, he said, “Resolute? I want to read more than my name. I want you to teach me to read.”
I leaned upon one elbow and looked in his direction, though the room was too dark to see him at all. Leading with my lips pursed, I planted a kiss, surprised to place it on his eyebrow. “If you wish it, I will do it. I will become a teacher,” I said, and patted his beard, which had grown quite stout. “Although if you are to be my pupil, you must be sheared. I find too much wool does make the mind linty.”
After a moment of silence he drew in a breath and laughed a single loud hurrah, following it with a ripping gale of laughter. “Perhaps I’ll tie bonny ribbons about the mat so that it tickles my lady’s fancy.”
I laughed, too. Then I said, “I insist on shaven pupils, Mr. MacLammond.”
He reached out into the darkness and patted my arm. “Then if it cannot be skinned, I shall at least cut it nicely. Will that suit you, Lady Lamont?”
I followed his tease. “Aye, Sir Knight of the Realm, it will.”
“You will have to let me do the learning of it in bits here and there. Slip me a paper with something upon it. I do not want my children to know their pa cannot read.”
I suspected they already knew. “Discretion shall be our word.”
“I thought our word was ‘sword.’”
“Oh. Oh, yes, it was.”
“I love those old days, my Resolute, those days before we knew such pain and grief. We have lost them forever before we realized how happy we were.”
“Aye.”
“Would they could come again, I should never again be angry for a farthing shorted on my bill. I should never again curse the cold or rain or the heat of summer. If I could have them back, I would suffer no sadness upon any of our hearts.”
“Oh, Eadan. I do love you with all my heart. I love you more than I knew I could love anyone.” I lay back down upon my pillow. “I fear I shall spoil our children now.”
“Aye. It matters not. Life is short and must be lived. We must not let them become lazy or cruel, but beyond that, give them what they want.”
After a long handful of moments, I said, “Eadan? Give me a child.”
“What?”
“Give me a child, husband. I beg you. Give me a child.” I placed my hand upon his chest, right above his heart.
He felt in the darkness for my face and kissed me slowly, tenderly. “Is that your wish, wife?”
“Most earnestly.”
“I am but yours to command, then.”
CHAPTER 26
Michaelmas 1750
At last, in 1750 before I had turned thirty, Brendan was thirteen and Gwyneth was eight, I gave birth to another boy child. We named him Benjamin after our other Benjamin. That year, too, Brendan went to apprentice with his father and with that, Cullah confided to me, he apprenticed not only as a woodsmith but as a Highland warrior. Cullah slowed his business to spend two hours every day away from the shop with Brendan, teaching him Gaelic songs and charms, and how to fight with everything from a battle-axe to his bare hands. The boy grew quiet, taller, and along with a wisp of dark hair on his chin, a seriousness came to his face as the boyish joy left it.
Father and son became inseparable. I felt the loss of my boy. It was as if he saw that he was to become a man, and that women, particularly mothers, had no place in that. Perhaps that was true. I remember the battle I faced for so many reasons in just weaning him. This was another weaning. While I yearned for the lad’s head upon my breast as of old, I thanked God that he had a father. Without Cullah what would Brendan have done?
That year, Jacob’s eye had gone white. He had lost stature and strength, too, and slumped over, feeling his way about the house and grounds with hands outstretched. It was as if the manhood and strength that took hold in the younger Brendan drained itself from the older Brendan to achieve it.
Cullah came to me one morning before leaving for the shop. He held a leather piece, folded about a roll of plaid. “It’s gone to moths and rot,” he said as he opened it up. He spread the cloth wide. “Can you make this?”
“Of course I can,” I said. “Mostly blue, with a strand of white and then red, four blacks, five greens. How many yards do you want?”
“Maybe a bit longer, another yard would help. And more than one. Make the same for Pa and my boys. When it is done tell me and we will hide it. And you must tell no one as you work on it. It must be done in secret, even from the family. Resolute, I don’t want the children to remark to some playmate that their ma is making plaids in the basement. And there is that girl, too. We don’t know but what her loyalty might change with the attention of some young swain. What I’m asking is against the law.”
“Then why are you asking it? You have carried this old plaid around for years. Why, now, do you need a new one?”
“War is coming.”
As I readied for bed that evening, I wondered if my husband were going mad. I asked God in my prayers whether the curse on this house, or Goody Carnegie’s spirit, or some other shade of evil had attached itself to him. I thought as I warped the loom, perhaps he believed that by being ready for war, he could forestall such an event.
Cullah renewed his practice of the pipes. To my greatest surprise one day he came home from town with a drum so large Gwenny could fit within it if we had let her go in. He had made drumsticks upon his own lathe, and began with a simple pattern to teach Brendan how to hold and play the drum.
In the evenings when Gwenny was sent to bed, Cullah learned not just to read and write in English, I taught him some Latin and French as well. The French were, after all, Scotland’s allies. This fact, we cautioned Brendan, was not to be spoken of before others. He looked at me with the most serious face, that tiny fuzz of darkening hair upon his lip, and said, “Mother, I swear to you, I carry a thousand secrets already. One more is nothing for you to have a care about.”
I sat up straighter, feeling as if I had just heard my own words from my son’s mouth. “Well and aye, then, Brendan.”
* * *
By 1752, for reasons I could not comprehend, the prices of all my wool and linen doubled and then doubled again. It took a shilling to buy what a farthing bought a few months before. Our money dwindled, not in the amounts, for I guarded and counted the coins once a week, then placed them back in their little hole. The dwindling seemed to come from some incredible force, something that made everything cost more and, consequently, the money worth less.
By the end of that year, too, another shock came to Lexington town, for the man who had been the minister at First Church for over fifty years suddenly died. The Reverend Mr. Hancock had always appeared to be older than Methuselah. What did surpr
ise Cullah and me both was that the church came to us for a share of his funeral. We gave them two pounds and seven. Deacon Brown received it with a frown. “Will that be all?” he asked. “You know the value of our money is dropping daily by the regulation of currency. It will take two hundred and twelve, we calculate.”
Cullah said, “I will give you three pounds then, but I would rather see that his widow had food and clothes this winter, than to clothe a dead man, no matter who he is.”
“Mr. Hancock’s widow has asked for five hundred bricks for the burial place.”
“Deacon, I am a working man. You know we honor the man as you do. Besides, a widow that presumes to need five hundred bricks for a single grave must be sending his horse and buggy with him.” Cullah smiled.
“Will you not preserve your standing in the church, then?”
My mouth fell open, but I could not speak. Cullah said, “I hear the talk about being ‘tight as a Scotchman,’ as they say. I think my standing is justly served by this donation. Now, sir, will you have supper with us?”
* * *
In the Year of Our Lord 1753, when we heard the king had changed the calendar in a confusing eleven-day jump, I was thirty-three at Michaelmas. Shortly after my birthday, I bore the girl who was to be my last child. We waited to bestow her with a name, so much had we feared putting another child in the grave. All that time we agreed to only call her my ma’s word Gree-a-tuch, as if she were not real. When she had lived until the first of May, we named her Dorothy Ann. Dolly, for short. I kissed her warily, fearful of the pain of loving her, though love her I did; fearful lest she hurt me by dying.
America Roberts lived with us still, a young woman of twenty. Her suitors had to pass muster with Cullah, who enjoyed meeting them at the door, sweating and shirtless and smiling with the claymore in his hand. I would send him to dress for supper and the hapless young man would be forced to partake of our company as well as America’s. The only one she seemed to care for was a young ministerial student from Cambridge named Arthur Taylor. But he succumbed to smallpox the following year. It swept through the colonies, taking half of the families we knew with it. For reasons we knew not, its specter spared the loss of any in this family; though my Brendan was ill it was not severe. All the others had no illness at all.
America sobbed night and day for five days. Then she put up her hair and went back to work. She had learned to weave good woolens, and with dyeing and spinning, was every bit as perfect a hand as my own. I told her that twenty-one was not old and she must not resign herself to a spinster’s life unless she desired it, but she swore she did, and I said no more after that about it.
* * *
In 1754 when Dorothy Ann was two, Benjamin five, Gwyneth a comely fifteen, Brendan seventeen, and his father forty-four, two uniformed soldiers came with another order, this time wanting more than bed and board. The town of Lexington had been required to supply a certain number of soldiers to be pressed into war, they said, in service of the king against the Iroquois and all Indians. Cullah told them he needed at least a week to close his shop and set things right with his family. The soldiers agreed to it and said they were marching as far south as Braintree rounding up all able men over the age of sixteen, and would take my men along with them on the return trip in ten days’ time.
When Cullah ordered Jacob to stay with me, he frowned and threw his slipper into the fire on hearing it. Jacob was now blind. He could no more fight as a soldier than he could fly off the roof. I saw my men as prisoners. I hated everything about this, not the least their peril, not the most, their similarity to my capture.
Brendan blustered about the house, more pleased to be a soldier than he could name. That evening he proclaimed at supper that he was never so glad as to throw off the woodsman’s apron and sawdust to don a red tailcoat with white and blue trim. He polished his buttons, took his hat on and off until I told him he would wear it out before the morning. “Mother, all my life I have waited for this. I was born for it. I shall make you proud and I shall rise through the ranks. They will salute General MacLammond of His Majesty’s own First Regiment of Foot.” He snapped a salute as if to that image of himself someday in the future.
“Meanwhile, son,” I said, “take off that coat and let me fit it to you.”
“No, Mother. I shall grow into it, I am sure. Don’t cut it down.”
I looked toward Cullah. He pursed his lips. “Well and aye. Add some padding and stuff him up some. Perhaps he’ll look so frightful they’ll all surrender on the spot.”
“Who are we fighting, Pa?” Brendan asked with an eager grin.
“I know not. The king orders his subjects where he may.” Cullah busied himself putting a keen edge on his fighting axe. I thought of his use of that grim tool so long ago. He was still strong and straight as an oak tree, if a little wider around the middle. An ominous enemy to be sure, but a ball cared neither for strength nor training. A ball pierced with no regard for the strength of the man who fired it or the age of whom it struck.
“At least,” I said, taking Brendan’s coattail, “come here and let me trim this odd piece. Whoever sewed this left a snip here. It would not do for a general to have threads hanging off his coat.”
In the years since we started our farm, Goodman Considine had died. His daughter married a man by the name of Virtue Dodsil whose greatest happiness in life was farming. After supper a knock on our door opened to neighbor Dodsil, who was somewhat younger than Cullah but older than I. He was, we believed, a superior man to his late father-in-law, and honest. “Dodsil, come in, come in,” called Cullah.
We served him ale and asked if he would have chicken stew, but he took the ale alone. Then, he would not speak unless America, the children, and I left the room, and while that was not customary in our house, I bowed to proprieties and took them—minus Brendan, I saw with surprise—to the upper floor.
America and I sat at embroidery. Gwyneth sat with Benjamin and Dorothy Ann and told them the stories that I had told her so long ago. After two hours, we put the little ones to bed and I bade good night to the young ladies and went to my room. When Cullah came to bed I was near asleep. The sound of the door latch was all it took to make me sit up. “What news? Is Virtue conscripted also?”
He sat on the end of the bed and pulled off his boots and shirt. I touched his back. He sighed. “Ah, Resolute. Yes, he is. But this is not what I expected.” He doffed his trousers, raised the blanket, and rolled into the bed. Lying on his back, he took my hand and said, “I cannot fight the French.”
“The French?”
“Over in the Ohio Country, they put in charge some green fellow with no more sense than a goose who got himself pinned between French missionaries and bloodthirsty Indians. They drove him and his lobster-backs across the river back to the colonies and made a shame of the lad and the few soldiers that lived. His name was George Washington. Hell of a bad way for a man’s name to be remembered, is it not? Now Parliament has sent a pack of new generals and fifteen hundred more soldiers across the sea. They want to take Québec, Montréal, all the way north into the far Canadas. They intend to drive all the Frogs from these shores along with driving all the Indians from the land between British provinces on the coast and the French territory far to the west. It is rich with furs and gold, they say, farmable land, plenty of rivers to run trade goods to the ocean as far to the south as the southern oceans. Lands I never heard of before: in the north is Nova Scotee, colder than a Viking could stand; in the south, a port called New Orlean, where Dodsil said all the people are descended from golden Indians as tall as giants. The army will destroy them all, Dodsil says.”
I asked, “A land so vast. Can there not be something done just to portion it out? Can it not be shared? Why should there be war?”
“He says the French are bribing the Indians not to trade with the English. That they are taking up all the port cities and closing trade and soon there will be no more goods sold to English. A cup of molasses has doubled
in price.”
“I will do without it,” I said, though I rued the words even as I spake them. Living without treacle would be harder than living without salt. “How long will it take to take the land from the Indians and French?”
“Blast everything, Resolute. I cannot fight the French.”
“The English and the French have always been enemies.”
“As have the English and the Scots. How can I raise arms against men who fought and died beside my people? I cannot forget Culloden.”
I stayed silent for a long time. At last I said, “Could you not refuse to go?”
“And be hung for it.”
I sighed, flopping my hands upon the coverlets. “Our son thinks he will become a hero. I would rather he became a Quaker.”
“I will not wear a red coat. I will take my plaids and my pipes. I will fight with the Scottish regiments against the Indian tribes. I still do not know if I can slay a Frenchman.”
“Are there Scottish regiments?”
“Aye.”
“And will you take Brendan with you, then?”
“I will take him if he will go.”
“Just tell him and he will go. You are his father.”
“No more. A boy that goes to war is no more a boy. He must decide.”
I thought of August, and how he changed in just a few short weeks from a happy boy to a tormented boy, then grew to be a man with a deadly gleam in his eye.
Next morning, when Cullah told Brendan what he’d told me and laid before him the plaids I had woven, Brendan’s face wore his dismay. When Cullah wrapped the plaid around him, though, his expression changed. He said, “Will you keep this coat for me, Mother? If the Scottish regiment doesn’t get much fighting I will come back for it.”
My Name Is Resolute Page 45