My Name Is Resolute

by Nancy E. Turner

  Cullah raised his hand to me. “Leave this, wife. We will ask nothing and know nothing if asked. I know this kind of anger. Sir, go with our blessings, but if you change your mind and wish to leave the sea for a quieter life, you are welcome here.”

  My brother smiled at my husband, and I felt sadly left out of their unspoken communication. “If I don’t come back,” August said, “open the other trunks I left upstairs. You never have, have you, Ressie? I thought not.” He looked deep into my face in a way that felt almost as if he saw something I would not recognize in my own soul. “Ever I should meet a woman like you, sister, I would come home from the sea and never let her go. Trust is the one thing in a woman I have never found, so much that I have thought it was not in women to trust or be trusted. If ever I do not return within three years, everything in the trunks is yours, and the Boston house, too. I will have a will made in Philadelphia and recorded there so it will be kept out of the hands of Tories. I’m going there to buy iron and plenty of it. I should be back in six weeks.”

  I said, “Wait. We have a cannon, too. We found a small piece in a field. And the cannonballs, take them and melt them down for your purpose. They are all rusting in our barn. We meant to have them melted but that is no easy thing with something as obvious as a cannon.”

  At the end of seven days, two wagons approached our house, stopped, and one man left his wagon, climbed into the other, and drove away without a word to anyone. In the back of the wagon left behind were a set of similar clothing, a slouching, misshapen hat, and boots that were more wrapping than leather. August asked Cullah to help him roll the cannon in the blanket and get it into the wagon. He also took the old rusted small gun we had found long ago, the cannonballs, and the iron ring. In the morning, looking like any poor wight off to market before daybreak, the cannon nestled hidden in a load of hay surrounded by enormous barrels of salt cod, August left us, bound for the ironworks in Pennsylvania. We spoke words of farewell with our eyes locked. A fearful silence fell over us then, and no cheery waves accompanied his going.

  I took Cullah’s hand as we watched August’s squeaking wagon roll away. “I do not understand him, husband. His anger seems more than revenge upon Lord Spencer.”

  “This is not about Gwyneth. It’s about your brother. If I had had everything taken from me, I might feel the same. It feels even now as if the Crown could take everything a man has, all he has worked for, take it all so a fat sow in a silk coat is not inconvenienced by the national debt. Someone somewhere is getting rich by all this confiscation.”

  “Do the English not pay taxes?”

  “Never enough for a king intent on ruling the world.”

  “Goody Dodsil told me she heard there will be yet a new tax of five pounds per household across the whole of Massachusetts. She has no way of making five pounds.”

  “Five pounds to someone who has twenty thousand a year is pittance. Five pounds, if you haven’t got it, is a fortune. Aye. We will pay her tax and ours.”

  “Aye. Find a way to sell the silks before they all go to worms.” To change the subject I said, “I do miss my brother. If he would come home from the sea, he might meet a nice woman. He loved America Roberts.”

  “He is a hardened man, wife. What woman wants to share a man with the sea? He wants what I have with you. He will never find it if the only women he meets are in seaports pursuing a huzzy’s trade.”

  “Do you trust me as he said? I never considered myself trustworthy. I spend my days trying to make up for all the lies I have told.”

  “You have done that and more.” He raised my hand to his lips and kissed it, then looked at it as if it were new to him. “These wee fingers were never meant to have such calluses. They belong to a lady born. She should have all that is gentle and beautiful about her.”

  “I do. I have you.”

  “I am getting old, Ressie. I will turn fifty after next year. I have not provided for you as I intended. Without America Roberts here, you have no one to help you at the house. And now there is all this messaging to Boston. I am tired. I am going to tell them I will no longer carry messages.”

  “Are you ill? Is there something you have not told me?”

  “No, I am not ill, though I just watched August grow old before my eyes. When your brother arrived and smiled at you, he seemed no more than a youth. When he said farewell, he looked older than Pa. I saw myself grow old with him. Perhaps we should take in another ward to help you.”

  “I would like that.”

  “I will ask at the town meeting next if any have a daughter ready to go out.”

  Cullah missed the next town meeting, though. Jacob slipped in the barn and broke his leg in the biggest bone above the knee. It did not come through the skin, but I could see the lump in his leg. He groaned like a child, with tears in his poor blind eye. We sent Benjamin scurrying to town for a doctor. By the time the doctor arrived, Jacob had begun to sleep fitfully in a way I feared was not rest but near death.

  The doctor said it might kill him to set the leg, but that it was also the only thing that might save his life, for the leg was blue and would go to infection if he did not bleed to death first. It was given to Cullah to hold Jacob’s chest and arms braced against himself, to me to hold Jacob’s good leg. The doctor began to pull. No matter what he did, Jacob’s wrenching and miserable screams broke our hearts yet the bones would not set together. At last, after one long, dreadful pull during which Jacob kicked as wildly as any horse with the leg I was holding, groaning and grimacing so hard that even with a wrapped stick in his mouth, chips of his teeth fell from his lips, the leg was set. Cullah had sent Benjamin and Dorothy to get wood for a splint from a shed by the house where he had some planks left, and they got back just as the terrible operation was performed. Both children burst into tears. The doctor put the splint on either side of his leg and wrapped cloths around the leg to hold it in place. “Do not loosen that binding. If you do it will come unset, and if it should come unset,” he said, “he will die. Better pray for him, even so.” He bled Jacob seven times before the old man calmed and slept.

  After the doctor left, the leg swelled and swelled, above the wooden battens, around the wrappings. After three days of breathing hard and moaning like a woman in childbed, Jacob called out, “Mary?” one time and then slept the sleep of the ages.

  Cullah dug his father’s grave on a bright, sparkling day, a day that seemed as if all the world should be at peace and happy. He sweated and his legs shook, but he would not stop until it was right. The children did not run and play and it seemed no matter what I told Dorothy, she would not believe that the doctor had come to help. She believed, because old Sam the horse had been put down the year before, that the doctor had come to kill her grandpa because he was old and his leg was broken. I was taken with a sadness that surprised me.

  Once our funeral was finished, Dorothy ran across the fields, desolate with harvest already gathered, to Gwyneth’s house, and stayed there for a week. I missed her. I knew she was grieving but until she decided she wanted to come home, it was good for her to be with Gwenny.

  A week later, I walked to Gwyneth’s house. She and Dorothy and I shared tea and we wept for Jacob. We talked. We smiled a little. Then I left my daughters and returned to my home. My empty home. I stirred the pot and waited for Cullah, and thought what a great emptiness was left by Jacob’s passing. At last, I sat at the front door, on the chair where Patience had died. I held my hands folded at my heart, and ached for all who had passed from my world.

  People from our congregation did not leave us bereft. Every three days or so for the next four months, someone came with a cake or a sack of meal, a clutch of eggs or a noggin of rum. It was good to know now that we had made a place in the hearts of our community. I counted the worth of that place more valuable than the sack of doubloons August had left with us.

  When I walked to Boston every other week, I took a doubloon to Revere’s shop and had Paul exchange it for minted Massachusetts
coins by weight. The doubloons he could melt down for the gold and filigree a mantel clock or make bars for trade. When I entered the shop, he either found a way to pat the top of his head as if it were a nervous habit, or to touch his left elbow. Every time someone made either of the signs, the “high signs” to me, I thought of how clever my boy Benjamin was and it was easy to smile as if nothing in the world troubled me, though it was not safe to speak openly at the moment.

  Christmas in 1759 found us gathered at our fireside with Gwenny, round with child, Roland, and Brendan home from battle at Ticonderoga. Smallpox, he said, had fought on the side of England, but cost the British army dearly in terms of men lost. He had a month’s rest leave coming and was glad to take it. I repaired his uniforms and sewed him many pairs of new linens and stockings until he laughed and said the generals were not outfitted so fine. When he left, I tried to keep myself from weeping, but it was not to be. He was a jaunty soldier, a man born to it.

  * * *

  In late March of 1760, the new year turned and Gwyneth’s babe was born. They named her Elizabeth Victoria, as English a name as could be. In private when we left them, Cullah winced. “Could they not find a good Scots name for her?” he asked.

  “She has your features,” I said. “So pretty a wee thing.”

  “Not as pretty as her mother,” he fumed. “Gwenny was beautiful from the first moment.”

  “Grandfather, you have become a curmudgeon.”

  “Grandfather?”

  “Had you not realized it? Your daughter’s daughter makes you a grandfather.”

  Cullah smiled with one side of his mouth. Then with both. “Grandfather,” he said. “Grandfather.”

  * * *

  Our house, a quarter mile off the road from Lexington to Concord, could be seen on a clear day from the road, and was sometimes sought by travelers, so it was not a great surprise one day at noon, while Cullah was in town building a warehouse for a man named Parker, that a strange fellow approached me while I pulled weeds in the garden. He watched me, saying nothing, for so long that I felt uneasy. He was rather short of stature and wore a flat parson’s hat but nothing else in his attire marked him as a cleric. At last I asked, “Are you looking for someone, sir?”

  “Is this the woodsman’s house?” he asked with a very French accent that made my throat tighten.

  Had someone come looking for Roland? I said, “It is. Cullah MacLammond.”

  “C’est moi, James Talbot de Montréal.”

  I stepped closer to him. My hands began to shake. I questioned him in French. “Tell me how old you are.”

  Before he answered me, he pulled from his loose shirt the very first knitted cap I had sent him as a baby. It looked completely unworn. “I was a little too big for it when it came, Tante. Tante Rachael saved it for me to bring to you.”

  I could not decide whether to embrace this strange man, but I did say, “Stay with us a while, James, please. Are you traveling farther?”

  “I hoped to go to New Orleans. I can read and write, or I can work in your fields. I wouldn’t be a burden to you.”

  “You will be no burden. Stay a few days at least.”

  In the hours before Cullah came home, while I baked bread and roasted our supper, James and I spoke of the people I had known at the convent, how for years he had steadily made his way here, learning English as he went, working at farms for food, forever heading south, to me. He slept on our floor for two nights. Then Cullah told him about Goody Carnegie’s old house, and James asked us if he could work for us and stay in it. So rather than a girl to help in the house, at least now we had another man to help on the farm. No one said anything about how long he would stay, nor whether we should pay him, for he refused that immediately. Only that he would stay until he did not.

  * * *

  And then the king was dead.

  A new monarch was enthroned in 1760, the year I turned forty-one years old.

  George Second was replaced by George Third and still the word from England was, “The king is mad.” New King George’s first act toward the colonies was to levy upon us a sugar tax, making treacle as dear as thread. It forced up the cost of making rum in New England, and traders from the West Indies carrying sugarcane and treacle to us had to build new storehouses for their gold. The cost circled the ocean straight to England so the king’s proclamation cost even the British people dearly for their rum and sugar. Traders carrying rum to England returned to the colonies with their ships awash, their ballast bags of gold. The Crown would allow no sales of wool or woolen products, meaning the cloth I wove; all thread and cloth had to go to England for assemblage, just as iron had to be sent there to make implements. All of it came back to us, of course, but at twelve or more times the cost of keeping it here and doing it ourselves. I felt stunned. Now it wasn’t just the silk. I could not sell my own weaving without becoming a criminal. Cullah had built a false floor in our small wagon as if that were naturally what we would do. I wrestled with my heart. My yearning to continue as I had always done measured against the promise to myself to be honest and above reproach.

  And then one day Emma Dodsil, Virtue Dodsil’s wife, tapped at my door. She carried a bushel basket of eggs. “Mistress MacLammond?” she called. She was trailed by three of her children, who ran off to see my newborn goats.

  I let her in. “Oh, you poor dear. How have you done since the fire?”

  “I have come to try to repay your kindness, Resolute.”

  “That is not needed, you know, Emma.” In truth, I wondered what I would do with all those eggs. And how on earth could the ones on the bottom of a bushel still be whole with the weight of all the others on top of them? I poured us ale and we sat quietly for several moments as she looked about the room, guiltily.

  At last Emma said, “These are boiled.”

  “All right. I will make a pie of them.”

  “These are not the gift.”

  I lowered my head. “I do not understand, Emma.”

  “I have done work. It’s nothing much.” She lifted the rag of hopsacking holding the eggs, and underneath them were folded clothes. “I made these things from our remnants.” She lifted forth an apron, a child’s pelisse, and a kirtle. “I sew, you see, and now it seems I am able to provide more than we need. I, I have heard that you sometimes go to Boston to trade. If you could sell these, I would give you half the money. That is my gift, for—”

  “Stop. You know that is against the law, now.”

  “Yes, Resolute.”

  “Who told you that I do such a thing? Do you suspect me of not being loyal to the Crown?”

  “Oh, no, Mistress.”

  I noted how her friendly familiarity had gotten formal when I confronted her motives. I rose and stood with one arm against the mantel of our fireplace. With my other hand, I touched the rim of my house cap twice and watched her from the corner of one eye as I pretended to stir the bean pot. She made no like movement. I said, “I hope your family has stayed warm with the blankets I gave you.”

  “Yes, indeed, Resolute.”

  “It is only against the law to trade in such. I am still allowed to make them for my family and my friends. It was a gift to you from our best, Emma. Nothing less than any neighbor would do.”

  “Of course, dear friend. I meant nothing by it. It’s just, we have need of so many things. Prices are so high. I hope you don’t think I would do anything against the law.”

  I turned to face her and smiled. “Absolutely not. It was but a misunderstanding. I am sure you need the money.” I wondered if she might even be paid for witnessing against any neighbor thwarting the law. Lest my words seem like the accusation it was, I added, “We are all finding prices higher. Doing with less.” We finished our ale and she packed up her goods, with her cloth of boiled eggs atop the basket so it looked as if that were her only burden. As I watched her call her children and walk away, the smile left my face. I would have to be far more discreet in everything I did and said from this da
y forward.

  Before long the ladies to whom I sold cloth made it clear whether they would flaunt British law or not. I came very near to being caught trading in woolens one day. I rolled a length of wool in a sack, and once in Boston, placed it in the coal bin of Constance, the dressmaker. I made other stops and returned, to find inside a pouch holding a pound and ten shillings. Then the next week when I repeated the charade, I opened the coal bin and found the pouch, but in it were two colonial paper notes, virtually worthless unless I were to trade in Loyalist shops. I took the money and boldly walked inside. I wanted gold, not paper, and I would have it. There were four people in there, three women and a man I knew not. I handed Constance the notes. “For my bill,” I said, then whispered, “Would you please change these for gold?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Whatever do you mean? I carried no credit for you, Mistress MacLammond.” She raised her brows to the man. He stepped closer to me.

  I felt the hairs on my arms rise and a tingling took my fingertips. Angered, fearful, I said, “No, no. Fancy that. I have gone to the wrong shop. It is money I owe the butcher. What a silly mistake I have made. I’m sure the only things you butcher in this shop are ladies’ gowns.” I made my way to the door, resolved never to trade with Constance again. I felt doubly sad for it, though, knowing that the split between Loyalists and the rest of us would only deepen.

  CHAPTER 33

  January 2, 1765

  Five years can pass like the blink of a cat’s eye. I had not opened the chests my brother left with me. Though I spoke not of him, he would return, I knew, for when he was not with us, I heard about him instead. He had gained repute as a smuggler, and it was sometimes said with a low voice and a wink, “This be got by trade or by Talbot?” as a way of acknowledging the fact. He was hailed for it. Though I feared for him, I took pride in his reputation, too. Every day I held his image in my mind’s eye and thought of him standing on the foredeck of his great ship, the wind filling the sheets as she moved across swells. I pictured him happy, standing there. Each woman I met, I considered as a bride for him, but none was fitting. None could replace his first love, the sea.