In the Year of Our Lord 1753, when we heard the king had changed the calendar in a confusing eleven-day jump, I was thirty-three at Michaelmas. Shortly after my birthday, I bore the girl who was to be my last child. We waited to bestow her with a name, so much had we feared putting another child in the grave. All that time we agreed to only call her my ma’s word Gree-a-tuch, as if she were not real. When she had lived until the first of May, we named her Dorothy Ann. Dolly, for short. I kissed her warily, fearful of the pain of loving her, though love her I did; fearful lest she hurt me by dying.
America Roberts lived with us still, a young woman of twenty. Her suitors had to pass muster with Cullah, who enjoyed meeting them at the door, sweating and shirtless and smiling with the claymore in his hand. I would send him to dress for supper and the hapless young man would be forced to partake of our company as well as America’s. The only one she seemed to care for was a young ministerial student from Cambridge named Arthur Taylor. But he succumbed to smallpox the following year. It swept through the colonies, taking half of the families we knew with it. For reasons we knew not, its specter spared the loss of any in this family; though my Brendan was ill it was not severe. All the others had no illness at all.
America sobbed night and day for five days. Then she put up her hair and went back to work. She had learned to weave good woolens, and with dyeing and spinning, was every bit as perfect a hand as my own. I told her that twenty-one was not old and she must not resign herself to a spinster’s life unless she desired it, but she swore she did, and I said no more after that about it.
*
In 1754 when Dorothy Ann was two, Benjamin five, Gwyneth a comely fifteen, Brendan seventeen, and his father forty-four, two uniformed soldiers came with another order, this time wanting more than bed and board. The town of Lexington had been required to supply a certain number of soldiers to be pressed into war, they said, in service of the king against the Iroquois and all Indians. Cullah told them he needed at least a week to close his shop and set things right with his family. The soldiers agreed to it and said they were marching as far south as Braintree rounding up all able men over the age of sixteen, and would take my men along with them on the return trip in ten days’ time.
When Cullah ordered Jacob to stay with me, he frowned and threw his slipper into the fire on hearing it. Jacob was now blind. He could no more fight as a soldier than he could fly off the roof. I saw my men as prisoners. I hated everything about this, not the least their peril, not the most, their similarity to my capture.
Brendan blustered about the house, more pleased to be a soldier than he could name. That evening he proclaimed at supper that he was never so glad as to throw off the woodsman’s apron and sawdust to don a red tailcoat with white and blue trim. He polished his buttons, took his hat on and off until I told him he would wear it out before the morning. “Mother, all my life I have waited for this. I was born for it. I shall make you proud and I shall rise through the ranks. They will salute General MacLammond of His Majesty’s own First Regiment of Foot.” He snapped a salute as if to that image of himself someday in the future.
“Meanwhile, son,” I said, “take off that coat and let me fit it to you.”
“No, Mother. I shall grow into it, I am sure. Don’t cut it down.”
I looked toward Cullah. He pursed his lips. “Well and aye. Add some padding and stuff him up some. Perhaps he’ll look so frightful they’ll all surrender on the spot.”
“Who are we fighting, Pa?” Brendan asked with an eager grin.
“I know not. The king orders his subjects where he may.” Cullah busied himself putting a keen edge on his fighting axe. I thought of his use of that grim tool so long ago. He was still strong and straight as an oak tree, if a little wider around the middle. An ominous enemy to be sure, but a ball cared neither for strength nor training. A ball pierced with no regard for the strength of the man who fired it or the age of whom it struck.
“At least,” I said, taking Brendan’s coattail, “come here and let me trim this odd piece. Whoever sewed this left a snip here. It would not do for a general to have threads hanging off his coat.”
In the years since we started our farm, Goodman Considine had died. His daughter married a man by the name of Virtue Dodsil whose greatest happiness in life was farming. After supper a knock on our door opened to neighbor Dodsil, who was somewhat younger than Cullah but older than I. He was, we believed, a superior man to his late father-in-law, and honest. “Dodsil, come in, come in,” called Cullah.
We served him ale and asked if he would have chicken stew, but he took the ale alone. Then, he would not speak unless America, the children, and I left the room, and while that was not customary in our house, I bowed to proprieties and took them—minus Brendan, I saw with surprise—to the upper floor.