I winced at him calling me that. “I may be convicted of being foolish, your lordship, but as I see so much of it around me, I am sure it is not a hanging offense. I saw this bright color and found the coat in a bush, rolled up. I knew at once it was either hidden for someone’s return or placed as a trap by your men. I have mouths to feed and those buttons are sure to bring some beef tongue or a bit of hog back.”
“What is your name?”
“Widow MacLammond.” Those words felt like a firebrand upon my heart.
“Where do you live?”
“Me, sir? Why, down the main road and take the second path past where there was once a tree but it was taken down in a storm in seventeen and fifty-one. Then go as far as it takes to sing three verses of the Doxology and turn right on a path where there was a mill some years back but now it has become a grain house—”
“Enough. What do you do in this town, madam?”
I smiled when he interrupted me, as if I wished to appear helpful. “I do a little tatting and toting, you know. Selling odd bits I find. Cleaning shoes.”
“Let me see your hands.”
I held them forth. The tar-soaked hogshead had left my fingers blacked and the calluses were real. They trembled, but I exaggerated it to make it seem more of an old woman’s palsy than fearful trembling. My heart jumped and bucked like a spring colt.
“I think you are lying.”
“Lying? Sir, I am a woman of good repute. Honest as a fairy. Your accusation cuts me to the bone. I never, ever, lie.” I saw from the corner of my eye Bertram driving past, with Alice facing this way. I said, “Ask any soul in this town. Ask that woman there, or the boy driving. Everyone knows me, sir.”
The British colonel returned to the far side of Lady Spencer’s buffet he was using for his desk. He moved some papers and uncovered a pair of clippers. “Here,” he said, tossing them toward the edge of the table closest to me. “Cut it up for clouts.”
I put the thought of all those hours of work, the strain on my eyes, the tortured fingers, out of my head and as far from my face as the moon was from the land. “Are you going to let me keep the buttons?” I asked, as I began snipping them from the sleeves and coat front. My fingers trembled so violently the metal blades gave a little drum roll against the button’s metal shank.
“Cut it,” he said with a voice that sent a chill into the room.
I slashed into the sleeves, folding them out as I cut them from the jacket. I cut the front from the back and frowned to hide my lip quivering.
“Why do you stop?”
“If I cut it this way it will be too small, and if I cut it that way,” I said, turning the remainder as I spoke, creating havoc amongst the papers on the desk, “it is long and narrow. Look, it has padding inside. That will hold a wet bottom, will it not? Thank you, sir, for the use of your scissor. I would have had to take a knife to it on the kitchen table, and you know how clumsy that might be.” I shoved papers, strewing them to the floor. I stacked the scraps of blue wool, leaving shredded bits across his desk and whisking the papers about again; I reached for the buttons. He brushed them from my hand. I could not hide the dismay on my face. I said, “Those might be gold on top. I could feed my family with ’em, sir. Would you not give me a few?”
He poured them from one hand to the other, then into my outstretched hand, saving one last button. He took the last gold button and tossed it twice, catching it as he stared at my face. “I could have you searched, madam, to see if you are hiding blue coats elsewhere on your person.”
I stilled the rather silly smile I wore and stared. I unhooked the frog on my cloak and dropped it behind me. I unwrapped my shawl and let it fall before me, and took my apron by the strings, holding it loosely while never letting his eyes free of my stare, and made as if to drop it, too.
A harried soldier came in a far door. The colonel shifted his gaze. “All right. You are a simple old woman who found a rebel coat. Take your foul-smelling rags and be off with you, and for heaven’s sake wash yourself when you get home. All you rebels reek of rancid treacle.”
That very afternoon in the stone room below the house, where no sound penetrated outside, I sat upon the bench and put my feet on the pedals of the loom. Bertie lifted the strap over his shoulder and pulled his sticks from his back pocket. Back and forth on the pedals, click with the right foot, clock with the left, my hands pushed the shuttle loaded with blue across the warps of pure, good wool warping of rebel blue. I determined I would make five more in place of the one ruined coat. I had told a pack of lies to keep it yet no blood of any Son of Liberty had stained it. It was not ruined. It would become patching, buttonhole binding, facing, and pockets. It was the cost of war. I rubbed my sore hands with sheepskin. These hands are given, too, I thought. My soreness was nothing compared to what others suffered and gave.
I knew what I believed and I knew at last, not what I would die for, but for what I would live. I was caught up in this land, and its time. I no longer wished to go home, for this was home. And I believed in what I had heard all my years on these shores. First of all, the right of free people to live without tyranny.
Liberty.
The very word tattooed a cannonade across my soul as Bertie trotted the sticks on the drum to the rhythm of the loom. Faster and faster we went, Bertram’s eyes locked into mine, the drum and the loom beating out the words to a song. He added flourishes that would do any commander proud. We dared to raise our voices above the rattle and rhythm, singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
I watched closely this boy, whose skin was so like my own. His eyes had my color and spark, his hair more like Cullah’s than mine. He had come home yesterday for food and clothes and he would leave with the Massachusetts men in two days more. The battle was not done. The boy’s feet stepped with lively art, his dark hair, tied with a white ribbon, lifting against his back. I closed my eyes and felt my hands and feet moving quick-step, brandishing the only weapon of war I could use, my whole being doing the dance of freedom, as a man with a claymore and an axe once told me to fight, wielding my loom.
EPILOGUE
November 11, 1781
I am past sixty, now. The British have surrendered, and in just a few weeks, there were no Redcoats left on this shore, and if there are, they wear brown and mind their manners. I have not seen August since that night in July of ’75, when he showed up at my door with no less than General Washington himself. I like to think that somewhere, on some vast ocean, he and beautiful, exotic Anne are standing side by side, watching seagulls swirl above the mainmast as their ship crosses the waves. As Lady Spencer advised, I make believe all my dear ones are not gone, just out of my line of sight beyond some curtain or cluster of people, or tree. I tell no one, of course, though I am of an age when I might be allowed my oddities and still not be considered as frighteningly mad as Goody Carnegie had been. The ruse is most difficult on moonlit nights when I used to wake and behold the outline of Cullah’s profile next to me.
Benjamin and Brendan both came home and make their living together as brothers in trade goods. Roland came home after taking the food to Washington’s army, and though unwounded, he promptly died. We believe his heart gave way. Bertie married and I have given him and his fifteen-year-old wife a section of this land for their own farm. Dolly is a grandmother and that makes me a great-grandmother. Gwenny’s daughter Elizabeth died last year of milk sickness. Alice is still with me. She helps me carry on, though I have continued to encourage her to find a life of her own if she wishes.
Now, too, that my children’s children are grown and I become more useless by the day, I think sometimes of going to Jamaica. There is nothing to stop me. I have a little money. I have time. I have no one to care for who cannot fend for themselves. I think of the house on Meager Bay and when the wind freshens through the upper windows here sometimes I lean out, imagining myself on a ship cresting a wave, headed to the West Indies. My grandchildren cannot imagine that I came from a place with wide white bu
ildings and warm breezes, a place never touched by ice and snow.
I know that I would never return from such a voyage. Whether death found me on the ship or on the shores I remember so well, it would find me, so I choose now to not go. My life is too interwoven here to survive pulling its strings asunder. While I spent my whole being longing, aching for freedom and a chance at leaving this place, I see that I am also free to stay. Free to choose my ties. I will not go because to stay and live here, to die here, will give my children what I never had. Certainty. A headstone to polish. A mother who stayed.
My fingers ache so that I often dream of carrying a heavy iron kettle through the woods, and I wake afraid of bears and Indians, and I rub mutton fat on the swollen knuckles. My hands no longer slide a shuttle as if it were a smooth stone, rippling the warp as if it were water; my back is bent and will not straighten. My fabric has irregularities for which I take full blame. For a long time, I thought that my days mattered little beyond the children I bore and the labors I accomplished, that invisibility was virtue.
Any woman’s life has its heartbreaks and raptures, its evils, its blessings. My life has not been one of pure and even weft, smooth and strong, a warp of courage spanning the loom of my heritage. Out of ignorance or spite, hunger or anger, I have at times done what I must to survive, not thinking of the cost. There were also those times when I hid my tears and faced my enemies, when I won by guile and inner strength, and when I believe I touched, in my mind and heart, the highest capacity in a human for the divine.
I have been swept along by life’s storms, made to choose my life’s path on the wing, often with few options. As I look back I see that even when I thought I was choosing, often I elected merely to survive. I have struggled with a natural tendency to anger and to fabricate tales, but my heart was ever watchful for rightness and goodness, and love. There are those like my Cullah, who stand stalwart without lies, without anger, against the gale of life, and I honor them. I was placed on this shore in a time that has changed, I think, the world—at least if I am to believe what I heard and read when at last our Declaration was read from an upper window in Boston. Perhaps, along with hundreds of other women in this place during this momentous time, I have made a difference. Perhaps I kept some from freezing or starving. The hidden room and unseen stairs in this house have been a respite place for one runaway slave and her babe on their way north.
I am my own tapestry, then, made as I could for myself. Some holes in my fabric have been made by others, some torn by chance. Missing threads in the weave represent all those I have loved who died so long before me. Sunshine and apple blossoms tint it, along with sea foam and stars. Dark places mark where tears dyed the cloth, darker still, the stains of blood, all of it laced with the crystal blue of Meager Bay on a bright day and a single strand of ruby the color of the ring of my mother’s that I still have. The strong, even places consecrate moments where love outmatched loss, and where great good came from sacrifice. When it was finished, it was not what I expected it to be. I had once imagined to live as a delicately fashioned bolt of fine silk of high and gentle quality, perfect but for a minor slub or two. The life I have lived was not a lady’s silk but a colorful, natty tapestry of embroidery, wincyette, lace, and motley. Many men I have known in my life will be written about and remembered for the deeds they have done these many years since the colonies loosed their bonds. My story is the story of other women like me, women who left no name, who will not be remembered or their deeds written, every one of them a restless stalk of flax who lent fiber to the making of a whole cloth, every one of them a thread, be it gold, dapple, crimson, or tarred. Let this tapestry be a record, then, that once there lived a woman, and that her name was Resolute.
GLOSSARY AND PRONUNCIATION GUIDE
Bewend (bee-WEND)—to berate
Blithest (BLEYE-thest)—loveliest
Eadan (AEH-dan)
Flawy (FLAH-wee)—flowery
Gamock (GAMM-ock)—fool, silly person
Gree-a-tuch (GREE-ah-touch)—a female child before baptism and bestowal of a name
Gumboo (gum-BOO)—transliterated from Scots giumbhu: Bless me!
Hack-slaver (HACK-slah-ver)—a rogue
Hasken (HAH-skuhn)
Hogshead (HOGS-head)—a barrel
Johansen (yo-HAHN-sehn)
Lamont (Scots LAMB-int)—a Highland clan
MacPherson (Mack-FAIR-sn)
MacLammond (Mack-LAMB-int)
Massapoquot (Mass-ah-POE-kwaht)
Meager Bay, Jamaica—later changed to Montego Bay
Mistick—old spelling of the town of Mystik, Massachusetts
Mummers (MUM-ehrs)—traveling theatrical band of poets, musicians, and mimes
Pasties (PASS-tees)—double-crusted pastries filled with meat and vegetable
Patois (pah-TWAH)—combination of French, English, and one or more native tongues
Sally—to commerce with, to venture, or to ambush
Sclarty-paps (SLAHR-tee-paps)—slovenly housekeeper, lazy
Scunging (SKUHN-jing)—dirty and unkempt
Williwaw (WILL-ee-WAH)—a turbulent storm
Wincyette (win-see-ETT)—cotton fabric with a raised nap on both sides
GAELIC CHARMS
FROM Carmina Gadelica (ca 1870)
Blessing the Loom
… Consecrate the four posts of my loom, Till I begin on Monday.
Her pedals, her sleay, and her shuttle, Her reeds, her warp, and her cogs,
Her cloth-beam, and her thread-beam, Thrums and the thread of the plies.
Every web, black, white, and fair, Roan, dun, checked, and red,
Give Thy blessing everywhere, On every shuttle passing under the thread.
Thus will my loom be unharmed, Till I shall arise on Monday …
Blessing the Cloth
The shank of the deer in the head of the herring, in the tail of the speckled salmon.
May the man of this clothing never be wounded, may torn he never be;
What time he goes into battle or combat, May the sanctuary shield of the Lord be his.
This is not second clothing and it is not thigged, nor is it the right of sacristan or of priest.
Cresses green culled beneath a stone, and given to a woman in secret.
The shank of the deer in the head of the herring, in the tail of the speckled salmon.
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