I turned to Cullah and said, “Perhaps he is too grown to let us know he mourns.”
Cullah nodded. “Boys spend too much time crying. Their hearts are too big and there is so much they cannot understand. Then when a man begins to mature he believes he must not weep or he will lose his manhood. Sooner or later, he discovers that sorrow does not destroy it, but when it is all new to him, this growing, this strengthening, it feels too breakable to risk. His fear is so great a burden that he must carry it inside until sometime when he is sure that he will not become a boy again for it.”
Though Cullah prepared for war, though he haunted the woods with his pipes, and harried trees with his broadsword and battle-axe, war did not come. Not then.
*
Three soldiers came in July with another order of billeting. Cullah took his claymore from its closet and sent them flying for their lives through the fields. Jacob said, “They will come back with more and arrest us. If they do, I will go with them and hang. You will hide, Cullah.”
Cullah clapped his father on the shoulder and said, “No. If they return, we shall tell them I could not read their orders, and thought they meant war upon us. Then we will say we gladly will allow them billeting here, and they will cause us no problems at all, I think, now the fear of Eadan Lamont is in them.”
I shuddered and turned away from them as if men’s plots and power felt too brutal to behold. At least, the soldiers did not return.
*
Cullah returned to his shop. His sadness, rather than warping his work, made him put his heart into every piece. No longer was his furniture merely good, simple, and useful. He spent more time designing it, making drawings, sanding and polishing, as if everything were done for one of our lost children. The finished work was endowed with some ethereal quality of form and air, as if tables’ legs floated their platform, rather than held it. Chests rose to heights so tall that it took a step stool to reach into the topmost drawers; he carved shells into rich mahogany and black cherry cabinet drawers and put brass pulls in the centers, topped them with lathed finials fine as a wisp, and worked rosettes that looked like petals. The legs upon which each piece stood seemed too delicate to hold it. His prices went up and up, for his work was sought among the gentry of Boston, and to own a MacLammond highboy or table became a boast. No one asked why the mark he made on the back of each chest was a small thistle with EL in the center.
Cullah told me he had an order from the house of Spencer in Virginia, after having shipped a marvelous pair of matching chests to the house of Fairfax, the largest plantation in that province. “Imagine,” he said. “The old rotter, spending money for my work. I believe I should deliver it myself.” He said it, though, without a smile. Without joy. It was as if the sadness of his heart showed in his craft so that an inanimate object like a clover-shaped lampstand vibrated with his emotions.
With no more clouties to change and wash, I had time again to weave. My weeks of spinning wool had left me with plenty of supply, so I dyed the yarn black and made fifty yards of it by August. I embroidered it with black, so that it seemed richer than it was, a pattern that could not have been woven in.
*
This day, this muggy, misty August day, soon as Cullah had gone, I fastened my shoes to set out to the field, and heard a great din from the yard. There might be a bear in the goat yard, or a fox in the henhouse, so I grabbed a broom. Anything I could not chase with a broom, I would not chase at all, preferring to lose a goat than my own hide. I peered out the glass in the parlor, and saw the form of a man moving between the trees.
I ran the stairs two at a time, roused the children in their bedrooms and pulled them into the hallway with me. Someone intent on doing us harm would go up the main stairs. I called, “Brendan? Gwyneth? America? Follow me.”
Down we went, into the room behind the kitchen cupboard. I looked out the glass again. Here came the man. An Indian slipping from tree to outbuilding, now crouched by the wooden fence at the goat shed. I got behind the cupboard and pulled it shut.