Father and son became inseparable. I felt the loss of my boy. It was as if he saw that he was to become a man, and that women, particularly mothers, had no place in that. Perhaps that was true. I remember the battle I faced for so many reasons in just weaning him. This was another weaning. While I yearned for the lad’s head upon my breast as of old, I thanked God that he had a father. Without Cullah what would Brendan have done?
That year, Jacob’s eye had gone white. He had lost stature and strength, too, and slumped over, feeling his way about the house and grounds with hands outstretched. It was as if the manhood and strength that took hold in the younger Brendan drained itself from the older Brendan to achieve it.
Cullah came to me one morning before leaving for the shop. He held a leather piece, folded about a roll of plaid. “It’s gone to moths and rot,” he said as he opened it up. He spread the cloth wide. “Can you make this?”
“Of course I can,” I said. “Mostly blue, with a strand of white and then red, four blacks, five greens. How many yards do you want?”
“Maybe a bit longer, another yard would help. And more than one. Make the same for Pa and my boys. When it is done tell me and we will hide it. And you must tell no one as you work on it. It must be done in secret, even from the family. Resolute, I don’t want the children to remark to some playmate that their ma is making plaids in the basement. And there is that girl, too. We don’t know but what her loyalty might change with the attention of some young swain. What I’m asking is against the law.”
“Then why are you asking it? You have carried this old plaid around for years. Why, now, do you need a new one?”
“War is coming.”
As I readied for bed that evening, I wondered if my husband were going mad. I asked God in my prayers whether the curse on this house, or Goody Carnegie’s spirit, or some other shade of evil had attached itself to him. I thought as I warped the loom, perhaps he believed that by being ready for war, he could forestall such an event.
Cullah renewed his practice of the pipes. To my greatest surprise one day he came home from town with a drum so large Gwenny could fit within it if we had let her go in. He had made drumsticks upon his own lathe, and began with a simple pattern to teach Brendan how to hold and play the drum.
In the evenings when Gwenny was sent to bed, Cullah learned not just to read and write in English, I taught him some Latin and French as well. The French were, after all, Scotland’s allies. This fact, we cautioned Brendan, was not to be spoken of before others. He looked at me with the most serious face, that tiny fuzz of darkening hair upon his lip, and said, “Mother, I swear to you, I carry a thousand secrets already. One more is nothing for you to have a care about.”
I sat up straighter, feeling as if I had just heard my own words from my son’s mouth. “Well and aye, then, Brendan.”
*
By 1752, for reasons I could not comprehend, the prices of all my wool and linen doubled and then doubled again. It took a shilling to buy what a farthing bought a few months before. Our money dwindled, not in the amounts, for I guarded and counted the coins once a week, then placed them back in their little hole. The dwindling seemed to come from some incredible force, something that made everything cost more and, consequently, the money worth less.
By the end of that year, too, another shock came to Lexington town, for the man who had been the minister at First Church for over fifty years suddenly died. The Reverend Mr. Hancock had always appeared to be older than Methuselah. What did surprise Cullah and me both was that the church came to us for a share of his funeral. We gave them two pounds and seven. Deacon Brown received it with a frown. “Will that be all?” he asked. “You know the value of our money is dropping daily by the regulation of currency. It will take two hundred and twelve, we calculate.”
Cullah said, “I will give you three pounds then, but I would rather see that his widow had food and clothes this winter, than to clothe a dead man, no matter who he is.”
“Mr. Hancock’s widow has asked for five hundred bricks for the burial place.”
“Deacon, I am a working man. You know we honor the man as you do. Besides, a widow that presumes to need five hundred bricks for a single grave must be sending his horse and buggy with him.” Cullah smiled.
“Will you not preserve your standing in the church, then?”
My mouth fell open, but I could not speak. Cullah said, “I hear the talk about being ‘tight as a Scotchman,’ as they say. I think my standing is justly served by this donation. Now, sir, will you have supper with us?”
*