“No. I did it for love. There was pain, yes, but it was not the kind that hurts deep. I chose it. Your mother thinks it makes me ugly.” Patience wrinkled her lips at me.
“I never said that!” I protested. “It but makes you look like you belong more to some other life than here. It makes me feel foreign from you.” Finally, I said to Gwenny, “Daughter, if John Hancock had an eye for Gwyneth MacLammond, nothing on earth would keep him from our door.” She cried bitter tears and told me I knew nothing of the human heart.
*
Patience seemed to rally some strength, but then by the end of April did not leave her bed for four days. Against her wishes, I sent for a doctor from Boston. The man, Dr. Witherspoon, came with two other physicians, a Dr. Banbridge and Dr. Crawford. The second two were students, and they spent two hours examining and questioning her. At last, Dr. Witherspoon led his fellows to the door of the parlor and we all went outside. He said to me, “She has more than one disease, I’m afraid. Cankerous stones and parasites have infested her intestines, her gut. The infestation is so severe that to remove them would kill her. She’s weakened and malnourished, not for lack of your care but because the disease organisms digest her food and leave her starving. Does she cough?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t believe I have heard her cough. She is quiet.”
Dr. Crawford said, “No doubt due to abuse by the Indians who kept her.”
“She has not spoken of any abuse, sir. She claims to me that she was as well kept as any white woman.” I wanted neither to defend Massapoquot nor condemn him. I only asked, “What can be done for her?”
“Keep her clean and warm. Cleanliness is not only good for the soul, it prolongs the body. Beef broth. Warm compresses for pain. If she will drink a glass of vinegar every day, it may drive the parasites out. Very little else, actually,” Witherspoon said, shaking his head. “How did she come to be this way?”
I detected in him more compassion than the others so I addressed him, though I intended the others to listen. “Thank you for seeing my sister. We have traveled a great many miles, she and I, from whence we began our lives. She was born in England, you know, on an estate. We were both taken to Canada. They, the Indians, let me escape, though I know not why. Patience chose to go with them.”
“Tragic,” he said.
“Doctor? Will my children have been exposed to some pestilence?”
“I do not believe so. Boil her bedding and shift, just to be sure. When she dies, burn everything.”
I paid them each two pounds and bade them farewell. Patience sat up after they had gone. She stared ahead, her eyes fixed on some thought, perhaps. “Ressie?”
“Yes.”
“Do not let them touch me again, those duppies.”
“Duppies? Patience, those men were doctors.”
“Duppies.”
“I will not let them touch you again.” I went to her and touched her head. She raised her arm and surrounded my hips with a caress. I sat upon her bed. She reached for me and put her face on my neck, weeping bitter tears, hard sobs stifled by her weakness and pain. I could do little else but hold her and weep, too. In those moments, time itself dissolved into liquid that was all at once both the present and long past. We held each other, our eyes closed against the light, caught on that terrifying staircase from which the only escape was plunging into darkness. I forgave her every ill-thought act of her youth, even as I grew amazed that I remembered them, and all the anger I had felt at her for the decades behind us melted into the honeyed light of time.
CHAPTER 30
June 6, 1756
Hard against my heart as May began to wane was one simple fact. The year of my husband’s and son’s impressment had passed. Brendan and Cullah should have been home but they were not. I would not think of them lying dead, I told myself. I patted Patience’s head, fed her some chicken soup, then went to help Dolly learn her letters. Benjamin came to me and asked if he could see Auntie Patey.
“Of course, son. There she lies. She’s quite ill today.”
“I wish she had not got so ill, Ma.”
“I do, too, son.”
“I love her.”
“I do, too. She is kind, my sister.” I saw him take the chair where I had been, watching over his aged aunt. She slept, her ravaged insides placated at least for a while with the soup. I wondered at this son of mine. Our older boy wanted to be a soldier from the time he was a lad, and would have brooked no patience for a sick old woman marked by a life so different from ours. Patience had been so lovely as a girl; she was haggard now. This boy, my Ben, had a different heart. “Perhaps,” I said, “you will be a doctor, or you will help people in some other way.”
Benjamin looked up at me. “Maybe. I thought I would build things with Pa. Is she going to die?”