Sally reached toward the ragged stranger. “Cap-aw!” she cried.
The man moved! His arm swatted at the air as if he fought against awakening.
Sally called again and fought in my arms until I was forced to put her down. She ran to him. “Cap-aw, I keept you warm.” She petted his matted hair. I did not move, trying to think what I would do with this vagabond adopted by my grandchild.
He spoke one word. “Wife?”
“Cullah?” So haggard. So shrunken. I knelt in the dirty straw and held him to my bosom. “Cullah. Oh, my husband. They told me you were dead.” We wept, our tears washing his face. “My Eadan,” I moaned. Sally nestled herself between us and cried, too. I helped him rise and walk to the house. Soon as I gave him bread and fruit, and a cup of ale, I called Gwenny to come.
James was true to his word, and stayed until Cullah had been home a week. Then, with a cloak I had made him rolled around his other clothing, and a pushcart loaded with ten bolts of my best woolens, he walked away from our lives at sunup.
I loved them all, these people in my life, even he, Patience’s first child. We were all guilty in our own ways; all had been formed by our lot in life. Was I also the godless outlaw he saw in my husband? It must be, else I could not love Cullah, could not tolerate August. Was it unholy to love a person in spite of their actions? For the first time in years, I wished Ma sat by me.
Alice came to my side. “You sad Master James is gone?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t be, Mistress. He a man. You can’t mother a man fully grown. It isn’t natural. Best he leaves. Wasn’t good at farming. He t’ink everyt’ing in the world has to come on his terms. World isn’t like that. More natural that he find it out somewhere else, then he won’t judge you so harsh. That’s all I got to say.”
CHAPTER 36
May 23, 1769
Cullah’s strength grew. Every day I made him oatcakes and beef broth. I washed and cut and treated his hair and made him herb teas. He was so thin and reduced, so unlike the man of old, and his hair had gone straggly, grayed, and rough textured. Sometimes I studied his face, searching for the merry expressions I had known. He smiled wanly at me. He spent hours with his grandchildren upon his knees. He peeled vegetables while I baked bread. At night he clung to me as if I were all that kept him afloat in a stormy sea.
One night when he lay awake, he told me how he’d made his way here. They released prisoners one or two at a time. Another man had died along the way, and Cullah found the fellow by a swamp, lying frozen, wearing both a coat and cloak. He’d taken the fellow’s clothes and boots, even cut off the man’s pants and shirt and used them to wrap his feet and legs. Because none of the men had been allowed the luxury of bathing or shaving, there was about them all a uniformity, and sometimes only their height and the rags they wore marked their identities. He said, “I left rags there, what little was left of my coat, and when they found him, they probably thought it was I. I took all the clothes he had, poor devil.”
“But he was dead, and with them you survived.” I waited. It was not the same as Cora taking Patience’s shoes, the man had not needed them. “I am so very glad to have you home. Only that. I am thankful you are here and I will make you new clothes.”
After June turned to July, I felt secure in leaving him to call upon my friend. Margaret sat in a chair in her grand parlor with tears in her eyes. “Please stay,” she whispered, staring at the drapery at a window. “There is nothing but talk of war from every quarter. I am so tired of it. That night spent hunting for your grandbabe made me realize I have so little of what is real in this life. I have made a life of pretense and meddling. It is all for nothing. Everything that matters at all was in the eyes of your granddaughter, lost all night long, the face on that little girl when she saw her mother and father. The joy of finding your man. You have everything, Ressie. I am a hollow shell.” She burst into tears.
I sat by her, comforting her in my arms. “You slight yourself. If I thought of you thus, I would never have befriended you. Margaret, I believe you are afraid of war not because you think your husband is right, or because you are loyal to the Crown or sympathetic to the Patriots, but that you are so afraid you will be wearing widow’s black yourself the rest of your days, you cannot bear it.”
“Whatever shall I do?” Margaret cried.
“The general is not dead. And if something does happen, then you press forward. You find a purpose for your life.”
“But my purpose has always been effrontery. What else have I? I have no religion, and nor do I want that. I have no substance, Resolute. Nothing.”
“I think you do. I think you wish me to be here because your husband is gone and you are alone in the house. People are not visiting as before the occupation. You keep having parties because you do not wish to be alone and face yourself.”
Margaret looked up at me. “Resolute, you are so unkind.”
I said, “I am being honest with you, my dear friend. I will tell you what you will see when you do look. A lady. A real lady with courage and cunning and ideas in a mind so rich she should have been allowed to go to Harvard. Made to go. You must have some peace, Margaret, but you will have to find it yourself. I am not unkind. I am honest with the people I love.”
“Won’t you stay for my party? Dr. Warren will be happy to see you. The Hancocks are coming.”
“I will stay for your sake. Margaret, my dear friend, I will say this to you as if you were my child. Please find all the richness I see in you. It will not take you long, for it is not far from the surface. And though you may now be afraid to look at yourself, what you see there will fill you with joy and you will find that you think back and wonder why you were so afraid.”
* * *
Margaret came to visit me a month later in August, and stayed two days. While we spent our days chattering like ravens over a cornfield, we spent quiet evenings while I worked at my wheel and she read aloud. Cullah seemed to haunt the place, as if he feared her or hated her. He was polite, but claimed to be deeply tired, and would go up to bed soon as the food was done. It troubled me that he cared not for Margaret. I asked him if he preferred she not come, or whether he blamed General Gage for his sentencing, but he insisted he was simply, truly tired.
When she left, I asked him to stroll in the field. The trees were lush with fruit, the grounds smelled of vegetation and yesterday’s rain. Swirls of mosquitoes boiled in the dappled sunlight. We held hands and walked the length of the line of apple trees. I asked, “Husband? Are you well, now?”
“More, I suppose. Do not make me eat another oatcake. I will turn into a horse the way you feed me those things.”
I smiled. “You need some meat on your bones.”
“So, did your friend have something to say to me? There must be some reason you called me here as soon as she left.”
“No. Nothing she said was about you. But everything she says reminds me of you in some way. No, she believes I am the lucky one, and I agree with her. I only wanted to tell you that I miss you. I miss the old way you were. I felt as if you were invisible the last three days.”
Cullah asked, “Are you ashamed of me?”
“Whatever for?”
“I am a broken man.”
“I think your heart is broken but your spirit is alive. My heart was broken for you. Then, when I was told you had died—”
“I am so sorry.”
“You need not fear Margaret. She is as true a friend as a person could have.”
“General Gage’s wife?”
“An American. A continental American. Cullah, you used to stare into the fire or into your memories, and say to me ‘war is coming,’ do you remember?”
“Well and aye.”
“Cullah, war is coming.”
* * *
And still more British soldiers came from across the sea. Margaret wrote me that by then the streets of Boston smelled of ordure. No woman was safe walking alone even in daylight, and except
for her own, colonials’ houses and businesses were regularly searched and the latter closed for nonpayment of taxes.
Our men of the local militia from Massachusetts Colony began calling themselves Patriots, and meeting in fields, even my own, for drilling and instruction in musketry and swordplay. I remembered vivid images of Cullah swinging his axe and claymore, a man become a whirling, mighty fighting machine. He tried his best with them, but he had indeed lost vigor. I reminded him to learn the musket, too, very much afraid he would misjudge his strength against an enemy with cannon and musket, and like the Highlanders of old, charge against them with but a sword. I clucked my tongue, wondering how these lads and old men would stand against a regiment of soldiers from an army that controlled much of the world.
One afternoon Cullah met me in the barn as I milked the cow. He held a long-barreled fowling musket, and seemed startled when he saw me, as if he were guilty of something. “Where did you get that, husband?”
“Isaac Davis made it from parts. I carved the stock. He’s shot it. It’s a true aim.”
I stood. The thing was taller than I was. “You have never owned one before now. Have you decided to go fowling, then?”
“I may not have the strength to swing a sword like a young man, but this war will be fought with weapons such as this.”
“Yes, I am sure you are right,” I said and sighed, trying to hide my relief. He was coming back, then, fully, and did not need a wife to tell him how to fight. Did I want a war? I asked myself. Naturally, surely, I believed, things on this continent would eventually be settled by courts, and justice will be more free. But for my husband, something about preparing for a battle gave him life, gave him courage that simple farming did not. I believed he always anticipated war the way some people always look for bad weather, but the man who was prepared for bad weather always had a snug roof, too. “Do you have shot for it?”
“I do. I took money from our last chest.”
“How much is left in there?”
“Ten pounds and seventeen shillings. I’m off now. Isaac is drilling us in shooting, all day. Will you be all right?”
“I will, Cullah.” As I watched him saunter away, I thought, Ten pounds? That would not get us through a year. Those who owned farmland as we did at least did not have to fear starvation. A paper of pins that had cost six shillings the year before was twenty, and none to be found. Black pepper to season food was almost nonexistent. Someone put a rhyme in the newspaper about seasoning his eggs with gunpowder and serving them to the royal army. The cinnamon with which I had once enlivened our Christmas pudding was to be had no more. Tea was up three shillings an ounce and coffee could not be found, so that those who preferred it were attempting to create it from burned wood bark and causing themselves illness. Myself, I boiled water and made a toddy of apple cider, and sometimes I boiled pears, too.
Dysentery rampaged through Boston, then started in Lexington, too. Influenza hit that December of 1769, and then smallpox was found on a sailor dead in an alleyway. His body had been eaten by rats, and for two days no one thought unusual a man lying facedown in a gutter after a ship of the line made port. The disease spread to three fourths of Boston, others being already immune, and then through the countryside.
And then with the new year it took my Gwyneth. I had sat by her side and sung to her, old nursery songs of windy days and Maypoles. Baby Peter got the scourge as well. Gwenny held Peter in her arms when she followed him to the next world, for the babe was already gone though she knew it not. We buried them together in the same grave. Gwenny and Roland’s oldest son died also; the eldest daughter, Elizabeth, recovered. Though Roland became ill it was short-lived, and little Sally suffered a day of fever and then was up playing. I watched her as she visited my house, fearing that she would return to illness even worse, but she did not. Two weeks later, she continued in good health. Dorothy escaped, too, though I knew not why. All one can do in these times is to be thankful for survival.
My dearest Gwenny. I missed her so. She was both a child and a sister to me. Cullah put down his musket, barely ate, and spent nine evenings sighing, staring into the fire. Alice, like me, had come through smallpox as a child.
I traded a bolt of silk for several bushels of roving, and wove a hundred yards of plain gray wool with no more color than the sheep had bestowed it for dyes were not to be had. I wore black. I did little embroidery for I could not buy silk thread and I could not embroider with my needles worn so small I could not hold them. I found that there was always someone who knew our signals and codes, and who could get me five pounds for a bolt of wool, ten for a bolt of linen. When I was not at my loom I spent days hackling linen in the barn.
* * *
On March 5, 1770, in Boston, some drunken young men threw snowballs at a soldier in uniform. They had caught the Redcoat alone and had been having fun at his expense when some of his fellows heard the commotion and rushed to his aid. Taunts and ignored orders came from both sides. The snowballs coming at the soldiers turned to ice chips and rocks, broken bottles, then horseshoes. The soldiers fought back with what they carried. Muskets. In a moment, five young men lay dead, a score more wounded.
Now a craftsman in his own right in Revere’s shop, Benjamin told me that he had helped, working well into the night on an etching, so that by March 6, the newspaper published a print of soldiers firing upon an innocent crowd. “They were warned to stop, Ma,” Benjamin said as I looked at the drawing. “They were told. Why would a person not take hold of themselves when faced with a musket? Why not simply cease? It was all in fun but they grew violent.”
“The human heart is harder to turn from its course than a river,” I said.
“Five died, Ma. Five boys. I knew two of them. They were just drunk, Ma. Fools full of drink, throwing snowballs. Redcoats should all die.”
“No. Your brother is one of them, too. They are not all cut from the same cloth.”
“Few of them have any intelligence at all, then.”
“That may be true. Then again, a soldier follows orders and it is his ranking officer we must blame if something is amiss.”
As spring drew on we worked our own farm from sun to sun. Cullah’s strength seemed to come back to him, though not his size. He seemed thin, but he could still fell a tree and split firewood just as quickly as before.
One afternoon in mid-May, Roland came to the door. He sat at the table before us. He looked into Dorothy’s eyes, and asked her to marry him, to take her sister’s place. She already knew and loved the children, he said. They needed a mother. He needed a wife. Would she accede to his offer? He promised he would make her a good husband, and provide for her all the days of her life.
“But will you love her?” I asked.
“Fondness grows,” he said. “Like a wild rose. She lived with us for years. We are comfortable together. I am old, but I will be a good husband.”
Cullah turned to Dolly. “What say you, of this?”
She smiled. “Pa, Ma, I have always loved Roland. I loved Gwenny, too. When I felt my heart growing attached to my sister’s husband, I came back to your house so I would neither tempt nor be tempted. I could never marry another. I will go with Roland. I love Gwenny’s children.”
“Well,” Cullah said, “a girl needs a husband. But it seems so soon. I suppose if Reverend Clarke will approve it, I will not stand in your way.”
They married just two weeks later in the apple orchard. Reverend Clarke blessed their union under a bower of apple blossoms, their perfume drenching us like mist. It was as if the earth stretched herself at that moment, as if the loss of so many of her children allowed abundance of her other gifts. I looked at Gwenny’s poor babes, scars pitting their faces, and knew Dolly would be mother to them as if they were her own, for I saw them take her hands eagerly as only a child could.
Cullah decided not to reopen his shop. Though he had some tools at home and our friends and neighbors sought after his work, his large machinery could not be replac
ed with the money we had. I believed that in that year of deprivation, his heart was gone out of it. Our passion for each other seemed to wane, too, but our affection grew. I was startled one day to realize that my courses had ceased. There would be no more children for us. Cullah was no longer obsessed with making his lovely furniture, and I missed the sparkle that came into his eyes when he used to tell me about the challenges of it. Making a bead around a drawer front, set so that it had exactly a sixteenth of an inch on all sides when closed, was as exciting to him as a tracing of yellow silk on a gray linen to me.
We planted our fields, side by side, and spent our summer evenings hand in hand, walking the orchards and the fields, lingering by the stream when the wild geese led their goslings about, or settled on a bench he had built by the stream’s edge. If the weather was rainy, we stayed by the fire and read aloud. Cullah was quite proud of his ability at last to read, and though it went slowly, we had many a good evening’s entertainment that way. I found myself smiling at him as he worked at a word, thinking how humble and good he was, how earnest. How I loved him.
Alice kept the house, tending it until things sparkled in ways I never had managed before. Our house seemed so empty, to me, yet in every corner, I heard the echo of children laughing or squabbling over some slight by one of the others. I saw their little noses pressed against the window glass looking out at the snow, or remembered tending them and the endless days of illness.
* * *
When next I went to visit Margaret, intending to do some errands on the way, September’s first hint of frost was in the morning air as I set out to drive through barricades and questioning soldiers to brave Boston’s streets searching for needles and pins. Margaret seemed drawn and she wore a patch upon her face I had not seen before. “I am marked forever by this disease,” she said, pulling the patch from her face. “This ridiculous thing is the rage in London. People there wear patches though they have no smallpox scars to cover, did you know that?”
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