“He won’t be wanting any more now, Mistress. Ross is dead.”
They buried him down the hill by Goody’s grave. We discovered that of the men staying in Jacob’s empty house, two had died already, and the other four were ailing. Within two days, Brendan and Jacob had a fever and a hard, dry cough. Cullah came down with it the same day as America, Gwyneth, and Barbara. I recognized this from what other women had described. We had contracted throat distemper.
That evening, after an afternoon of plaintive wailing, my precious Barbara died in my arms and dear, tiny Grandan got fever. While I tended him, my head ached, my ears hummed, and dizziness caused me to lose footing as I tried to nurse him while moving from the parlor to the kitchen. Benjamin and I began coughing the next morning, and a couple of the soldiers did their best to bring us warm ale and boiled potatoes they made. Fever raged through me along with chills, sweating, but a nursing babe cannot be denied, so I took him to my bed with me, and I held my darling Grandan as he took his last ragged breath. We had our other children now on pallets in our bedroom, and that night, Cullah, coughing as if he would turn himself inside out, dragged himself from his bed to adjust Benjamin’s coverlet and found our second boy had left us, too. I was too ill to weep. When I woke and sobbed, I fainted.
I took to my bed as Cullah and the last whole man of the soldiers lit a fire in the graveyard yet again to soften the earth for another grave. I do not remember them burying the children. I knew not whether any of them lived. I thrashed, for I remember my hand hitting the wall and something making a loud noise. Soaked in my sweat, I could not eat and did not want the water on a spoon someone tried to force between my lips.
I was told that one of the soldiers went to Concord for a doctor, but the man would not accompany the soldier to our house, for the town was full of it then, and there was little to be done. Children lived or died at the will of God. Adults took it and had half a chance, but most children below the age of twenty perished.
The ache I felt in my back and arms was treachery, but the ache in my throat and belly alarmed me even in my sleep, but I did sleep, unable to do anything else. I felt the warmth, though, slickness flooding around me. The hands, gentle but strong and somewhat fumbling, moved me back and forth, a sort of soft tumble, as they cleaned around me.
When at last I could raise my head and take my own broth from a spoon, I no longer carried a child. Jacob, we still had, as well as America and our two, Brendan and Gwyneth. Cullah would speak nothing of it all. I took his hand and we wept bitter, wearing tears, until at last he left me there and I wept until I slept again, in that dark, dreamless void of illness that is more a treading the line between living and dying than true sleep.
It was the eighteenth of December when at last I rose to don clothes. I had lost all my motherly plumpness, and though I had mourned the loss of a narrow waist that allowed me to show off my lavender dress so long ago, I now mourned the sallow, shrunken hag I felt I appeared. Cullah, too, seemed drawn and wretched, America dragged herself from one chair to another, Gwyneth whined every moment she was awake, and dear Brendan alone seemed ready to return to life. I took no joy in anything. My babes had been buried before I saw them dressed and cleaned for their last repose, I remembered in a mysterious, cloudy way. I spent days weeping or on the verge of it.
Of the soldiers, four remained alive on December twenty-sixth. That day I told Collin Trask and Corporal Landon to go in the woods and cut a tree and bring it to the hearth for Christmas. I was not going to deny my remaining children a bit of plum pudding, a shining shilling, and a warm fire. In a place where celebrating Christmas was a crime, I made us criminals, witnessed by these men who had the power to arrest us, these harbingers of death who had already done worse.
Corporal Landon nodded, said nothing, and did as I bade him. Collin scratched his head and said, “I’ve never had Christmas before. Will there be pudding, Mistress?”
“I will do what I can, son,” I said, feeling so ancient that this boy but fifteen years younger than I seemed as a child to me. I made a small pudding with hard rum sauce, and Cullah lit it the way my pa used to do. I watched the blue flames lick the edges, remembering how the rules dictated it should be the size of the smallest child’s head, and though the others moaned with delight I wept at the table. Cullah’s face washed with red; he could not stop his tears. The children and the soldiers thanked me for the pudding, but I ate none of it, apologized for having a headache, and went upstairs to bed.