During those years August made furtive sorties on land. Sometimes he boldly occupied his house in Boston. Often he unloaded his “trade” on the harbors. Once in a great while, he came in the dark of night with a wagonload of things to put in the double floor of our barn, or the upper room over my loom, or in the eaves where Cullah had built shelves then closed them off from view. While Lexington had once seemed rather isolated, and its only thoroughfare simply a path between Concord and Boston, now with a great influx of poor people we were hailed night and day by straggling travelers, so that I told Cullah we might as well open an inn, but he did not laugh at my jest.
Gwyneth had three more children, so that her life was constant in duties at home. I knew well the exhausting toll that took on a woman, so when Dorothy, by her own choice, lived with them I tried to believe that she felt no less love for her father and me. But she was twelve and still had not recovered from Jacob’s terrible death. She told me she would never marry, that she wanted to care for her sister’s children, and felt happy there.
Benjamin was apprenticed, not with his father but in Boston with Paul and the Revere family in the silversmith business. It worried us both that without Benjamin or Brendan, we had no hope to carry on his work when Cullah grew old. It came to me that someday our land would lie fallow, but I pushed the thought away. We had Roland, a good farmer, and now James, too. James had chosen to live in and repair Goody Carnegie’s old house. He kept secret his Roman Catholic ways and worked with Roland, tending sheep and cows, hoeing weeds.
In the midst of what seemed to be spreading poverty, the call and need for cloth grew. I turned to my loom and my spinning as I had not done since before the children. At the same time I developed a web of women whom I trusted and we traded and bartered for goods so much that I might see my own cloth worn by a magistrate’s wife who had traded a sow to the undertaker for some porcelain and the porcelain pitcher was on my table full of milk, the cups holding settling posset. I spun every moment I was not occupied with something else. I wove yards of motley and yards of fine, yards of linens as dainty as a shimmer, and woolens of every sort. I wove black and tan and gray, and I wove plaids of tartans when Cullah could remember the setts or patterns of color. If he could not, I made up my own pattern of color from what I found pleasant. I wove linen with silk chasing. I loved that the best. It was almost embroidery, doing chasing work.
“I want a girl to come in,” I told Cullah one night, while I cut chunks of lamb for a stew. “I need help with the work. When I am spinning, the weeds overgrow the garden, and while I cut out weeds, the sheep have gotten into the corn. Then the cows, the cows seem to need me there. They give better milk for me than for Roland.” That was not true. I knew that what I wanted was not so much an apprentice as someone with whom to talk. Cullah worked in town. “Remember?” I said. “You were to ask about, but Jacob fell. His death changed everything.”
“It did,” he said. “I am lonely. I expected my boys to follow my trade. But since they have not, without Pa here, I am also too much alone.”
I put down my knife. “We could force Dorothy to come home.”
“She’d be unhappy. Might grow melancholic.” Cullah looked at me with an old familiar longing. “I’d have been happy if you’d had more children. I did my best.”
I smiled. “You did, indeed. Perhaps we must be thankful for the quiet and a full night’s sleep.”
“Every season has its beauty.”
“You are become a philosopher, husband. Will you ask in town, then?”
April 2, 1765
Often, Cullah stayed in town and did not walk home until late at night. If ever I questioned him, he smiled and said, “It’s business, Mistress MacLammond, keeps me from your bosom,” or, “Not to worry, Goody MacLammond, your husband is neither a reprobate nor a drunkard. He is merely the most hated thing, a patriot,” and tell me nothing. I wanted to cudgel him into speaking it, but there was no use. I knew the man I had married by his stubbornness as well as by his face.
In spring he spent two nights away from home. When he got back in the darkest hours before Easter morning, April 7, 1765, he came with the oddest burden I could have imagined. Two sack-back and two comb-back Windsor chairs. They were large and comfortable. He had placed them back to back and putting his hand through the rungs lifted two in each hand and carried them all the way from Boston down a narrow path that led across a swamp, a bog, two neighbors’ farms, and through the woods. I asked him, “You brought them from Boston?”
“Aye.”
“And why, on Easter morning, did you feel you must do that?”
“I made these chairs. Each one took a week’s worth of labor in itself. A good chair is the hardest thing there is, and these were my best work. I couldn’t let them burn.”
“Why were they going to burn?”
He cast his eyes about the room as if, I thought, trying to come up with a believable lie to tell me. “They were in the governor’s mansion, and there was a fire.”
“Who set it?”
“The Committee of Safety. It’s as well you know. We lit a candle for the cause of freedom, that’s all. I am taking these to the attic, and I ask you to come with me and help me lay something atop them. But ask me no other questions, wife, for I have been abroad for two days and I must eat and get to work now or seem conspicuous.”
“It is Easter Sunday. If you go to work, not only will you seem conspicuous to the soldiers, you will be called to question by the deacons. Nevertheless, husband, if you sold them to the governor, and you’ve taken them back, you stole those chairs.”
“You’ve a bitter tongue, Ressie.”
“Aye, well, I live with a thistle.” More and more I thought of Scotland’s symbol as indicative of her people. Rugged. Uncrushable. Beautiful. Armed with wicked thorns.
“I made them.”
“He paid you for them. That means you stole them.”
“Well and aye. There were too many high spirits last night. I didn’t think clearly. At the last I couldn’t watch my work go to the flames. Risked losing the hair off my back for them.”
“You have to give them back.”
“Will you allow me at least to say that I saved them from the fire? Must I confess all and be hung?”
“You heard the call to fire and saved them. That will serve.”
“Aye.” He kissed my cheek. “You are my rudder in an evil sea, Ressie.”
After the Easter sermon, Reverend Clarke received a note from one of the deacons. We sang a hymn. Then he announced that Imperial Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s mansion in Boston had been burned down and messages had been left stating it had been done by the Sons of Liberty. No one made a sound. I imagined that some cheered within themselves, some were saddened, even angered. Some wept, but that, I knew, was no indication which way their feelings leaned. I stayed myself from any expression and looked at my prayer book. I noted that the singing of the next hymn was so rousing as to shake the glass in the windows.
Cullah drove our new third-hand wagon to Boston the next day, whistling, as he carried the four well-made chairs to the governor’s new temporary quarters. The buggy had a seat for two with a shade behind them, and a place to stack things in back. He tied the chairs with as much gentle care as if they had been children. No questions were asked, he said, for he had found the menservants at home, and he left the chairs amongst their congratulations for the salvage.
He left for his shop carrying his toolbox on his back on a Monday two weeks later, a beautiful April morning, the kind of morning when the whole earth seemed to be celebrating its life and warmth. All the pear and apple trees had blossomed, frost was but a memory, and birds pecked at our windowsills. I had kissed him and he slapped my hip playfully before he left. I collected eggs. I put out bread dough to raise. I swept the floor. In that much time, less than two hours, he returned to the house, his face pale and wan, his right hand wrapped in cloths none too clean, and to my horror, he had lost half the li
ttlest finger on his right hand to a whirling blade. I cleaned his wound and wrapped it in linen bandages.
“Ah, I’m a terrible fool,” he said. His voice barely hid his pain.
“My poor husband. It must hurt so dreadfully.”
“I cannot hold a sword now.”
“But you can. You will.”
“It will feel different.”
I looked hard into his face. “Why do you need to hold a sword? Why did you not say a saw or an axe? Or a plane or chisel? Why did you say a sword?”
“Cooper and Prescott came by the shop just before I did this.” He held his bandaged hand up. “There is yet another new tax. It was passed six months ago without a single man from the colonies to question it in Parliament, without any of us knowing it beforehand. Every piece of paper must bear a stamp and every stamp must be paid for. A penny for a receipt. A pound for a license and three to sell a piece of land. Ten shillings for a pamphlet and five pounds for a newspaper! It will drive the newspapers out of business, and it is meant to do so, for they speak of nothing but angry outcries against the king. They say there will be open rebellion this time, far beyond this colony. War.”
A chill ran through me. “But, how did that make you cut your hand?”
“While they were talking across the street from my shop at Elliot’s Wheel and Carriage, Tories went in, front and rear, and confiscated all the wheel rims he had. Claimed they were illegally gotten iron not from England but made in Philadelphia. It caught my eye. I was trying to look as if I did not notice, for they aimed muskets in every direction, even at a young woman crossing the street with her bairny at her side. I looked away for just an instant. With a band saw, an instant is far too long.”
“I should say. Were they English wheels?”
“No.”
“Will Goodman Elliot get his wheels returned?”
“He’s out his inventory and can’t make his orders without wheels. Now they’re so high, he said, when he finally delivers the coach he has made no profit at all. Ressie, a man cannot stay in business making no profit!”
“Will you have some rum and willow water for the pain?”
“Well and aye. It did not hurt at all, did you know that? It felt like nothing, until now. Now it feels as if the devil himself has chewed it off.” I poured rum. Mixed him a toddy of willow water. He took a long draught of the drink and coughed. “Ah. Would you give me cider instead? I am not fond of this stuff. I feel it already, making my brains spin. I heard your brother is in Boston.” He coughed again. “The army has ransacked his house but not found him, yet Hancock just got a load of spices from Talbot’s ships.”
Ships? August had recovered his losses, then. “Will he come here?”
“I don’t know. I do know this. There is talk of rebellion in every quarter. Your brother is planning something that might get him an appointment with the hangman.”
That, I knew, I could not change. August would do what he willed.
The Reverend Mr. Clarke came to visit and spent a long afternoon with Cullah on the bench outside by the parlor door. I knew nothing of what they spoke. The gentle rumble of men at talk felt soothing to me, same as it had when Pa had had ships’ captains in our parlor. It troubled me a great deal, though, when they lowered their voices and I could hear nothing but an odd word. I told myself the Reverend Mr. Clarke would never do anything against the law, whereas I did not believe that of my husband. Yet, the two, with heads together and voices lowered, made them seem more alike than not. I tried to go about my chores and ignore them. Was that always the way with men? Were the soothing rises and fallings of their voices indicative of plots of subterfuge and rebellion?
After Reverend Clarke left, Cullah took to his chair before the fireplace, and stayed there for five days. In pain, perhaps, or sulking, or both, perhaps. I could not guess at his malaise, and he would barely speak at all until I feared we might have to send for a doctor, that he had some sickness of heart or mind that time and clean bandages could not salve. I carried his meals to him, for he would not so much as come to the table to eat. He refused Gwenny’s invitations to their home. He stared into the fireplace whether a fire burned there or not.
* * *
In the warming of May, after working in the field alongside Roland one long day, James seemed exhausted. One thing I had discovered about him already was that the man could stand little in the way of nervous excitement. He was a fair farmer, but not energetic, as if he’d never known a man’s strength. He worried that the cause of distress in our household was his presence, but at last Cullah told him what had happened. He asked him, “Will you swear to keep our secrets, keep our home as if it were your own?”
I repeated it all in French. James agreed. “Of course, sir,” he said. Simply because this man was related to me, being a nephew, did not make his allegiances ours or ours his. He smiled, laughed a little, trying to make light of it. In his smiling face, I saw Rafe MacAlister’s grimace. A coldness came into me at that moment. I feared I would never look at James without seeing his father, again. I resolved to guard well my actions.
That evening as I sat to spin and he sat spellbound by the flames, I imagined Cullah standing at the great saw with its blade encircling a gear in the roof, the only control of it a brake pedal. It ran by a waterwheel, or if the stream was low, by apprentice power on a spoke. This time of year there would have been rushing water, making the blade run faster than normal. British soldiers had been searching the shop across the street, ransacking the place, and my husband had been distracted. Distracted by guilt for his part in burning the governor’s mansion? Had he stood there pretending to work, all the while terrified of them repeating the same orders at his place?
* * *
That summer, soldiers walked every street of Boston, every avenue of Lexington. County lanes were as often trod by Redcoats as by farmers. I created bolts and bolts of cloth. Cullah had made me a wheelbarrow with a false bottom that fit the rolls of cloth. I carried some of them to Lexington town, sold them in private homes as if I were a fishmonger, or took them to Boston under layers of ragged but clean muslin surrounding tarred canvas, and topped with old vegetables. Sometimes the vegetables, so oft used that way, grew limp and withered. Once on my way to Lexington, when stopped by a gaggle of six young soldiers who inspected my load, I told them in a rather silly voice, “Your Honors, I be just a poor goodwife. This is the best I got. It wo’ not bring me a farthing but maybe sixpence for someone’s pigs to eat.”
“What’s under the top, there? I see some cloth.” His accent was Irish.
I smiled and cocked my head as if I were simple and I mimicked Mistress Boyne’s manner of speech. “Why, it is cloth, you clever one! ’Twas once a cloth from the altar at a papist shrine. And there is something under it! I got a cat that was kill’t by a fairy down in the dell by the grave of a witch. There’s a power to that one. I have seen her meself, a-prowling the land on a winter’s eve. The cat is to keep fairies awa’ from me whilst I walk. ’Tis the only way. Would you like to touch it? Marvelous charm, it is. If ye take one of the worms and put it in your collar, you cannot be shot by elves on your journey. Tha’ knows what a pity elf-shot is.”
The men wrinkled their noses and backed away from me. “Be off with you, woman,” one said. He turned to his mate and whispered, “What a creature!”
I nodded and smiled, and walked on, amazed myself at the drabble that had poured from my lips without so much as a pause to concoct it. Sister Joseph would have been appalled.
He called after me, “And for Christ’s sake, go to church. Damned colonials.”
When I met him at his shop, Cullah took my barrow and said, “I was thinking that you work too hard, always at the cloth. You will cause yourself to go blind.”
“I will be careful, husband. I will rest my eyes.”
“There. Working, working. Resolute, my wee wife, you are as determined as a badger, and for what? Our children are grown.”
“I supp
ose I cannot stop. I feel I must work at something.” And like a chant or an old string of Latin prayer, the sentence finished itself in my mind as, “or I shall not get home to Jamaica, to my mother,” and that surprised even me. It was true, now that I was alone so much, the children gone, those old words echoed more and more.
Meanwhile, Cullah had continued talking and I had not heard anything until he said, “You need a diversion. Let’s stay the night in Boston. I’ll drive the wagon. I have chests to deliver. We’ll bed at your brother’s house.”
I stopped walking and said, “I have no way to dress my hair in the morning. What shall we eat?”
“What is the fuss with hair? Women fiddle for an hour and then cover it with a cap so you would not know if she were bald as a pumpkin. If your brother cannot give us meat, we shall eat at an inn or a stall in the street. He has had provender at our table often enough, August could grant us a stale crust and a noggin of something. I must get there today, Resolute.”
I said nothing still. What could he know about my pride? My hair?
When we got to Boston we went to Revere’s, and Benjamin showed us a hammered brass charger he had created. I was so glad then that Cullah had come with me. Our son was growing so quickly. Seventeen already, and tall as his father, but with my lighter hair and skin. We all went to have a meat pie and ale at a nice tavern nearby, but Cullah grew more sullen as the meal continued, until he ceased speaking at all.
When we returned, Deborah Revere herself met us, smiling, and she kissed my cheeks. “Come next Thursday to our supper. Dining at eight o’clock. There will be music by seven, so come early. We are having some new music done.” She looked from my face to Cullah’s. “It will be a good place for all our sons.”