Cullah missed the next town meeting, though. Jacob slipped in the barn and broke his leg in the biggest bone above the knee. It did not come through the skin, but I could see the lump in his leg. He groaned like a child, with tears in his poor blind eye. We sent Benjamin scurrying to town for a doctor. By the time the doctor arrived, Jacob had begun to sleep fitfully in a way I feared was not rest but near death.
The doctor said it might kill him to set the leg, but that it was also the only thing that might save his life, for the leg was blue and would go to infection if he did not bleed to death first. It was given to Cullah to hold Jacob’s chest and arms braced against himself, to me to hold Jacob’s good leg. The doctor began to pull. No matter what he did, Jacob’s wrenching and miserable screams broke our hearts yet the bones would not set together. At last, after one long, dreadful pull during which Jacob kicked as wildly as any horse with the leg I was holding, groaning and grimacing so hard that even with a wrapped stick in his mouth, chips of his teeth fell from his lips, the leg was set. Cullah had sent Benjamin and Dorothy to get wood for a splint from a shed by the house where he had some planks left, and they got back just as the terrible operation was performed. Both children burst into tears. The doctor put the splint on either side of his leg and wrapped cloths around the leg to hold it in place. “Do not loosen that binding. If you do it will come unset, and if it should come unset,” he said, “he will die. Better pray for him, even so.” He bled Jacob seven times before the old man calmed and slept.
After the doctor left, the leg swelled and swelled, above the wooden battens, around the wrappings. After three days of breathing hard and moaning like a woman in childbed, Jacob called out, “Mary?” one time and then slept the sleep of the ages.
Cullah dug his father’s grave on a bright, sparkling day, a day that seemed as if all the world should be at peace and happy. He sweated and his legs shook, but he would not stop until it was right. The children did not run and play and it seemed no matter what I told Dorothy, she would not believe that the doctor had come to help. She believed, because old Sam the horse had been put down the year before, that the doctor had come to kill her grandpa because he was old and his leg was broken. I was taken with a sadness that surprised me.
Once our funeral was finished, Dorothy ran across the fields, desolate with harvest already gathered, to Gwyneth’s house, and stayed there for a week. I missed her. I knew she was grieving but until she decided she wanted to come home, it was good for her to be with Gwenny.
A week later, I walked to Gwyneth’s house. She and Dorothy and I shared tea and we wept for Jacob. We talked. We smiled a little. Then I left my daughters and returned to my home. My empty home. I stirred the pot and waited for Cullah, and thought what a great emptiness was left by Jacob’s passing. At last, I sat at the front door, on the chair where Patience had died. I held my hands folded at my heart, and ached for all who had passed from my world.
People from our congregation did not leave us bereft. Every three days or so for the next four months, someone came with a cake or a sack of meal, a clutch of eggs or a noggin of rum. It was good to know now that we had made a place in the hearts of our community. I counted the worth of that place more valuable than the sack of doubloons August had left with us.
When I walked to Boston every other week, I took a doubloon to Revere’s shop and had Paul exchange it for minted Massachusetts coins by weight. The doubloons he could melt down for the gold and filigree a mantel clock or make bars for trade. When I entered the shop, he either found a way to pat the top of his head as if it were a nervous habit, or to touch his left elbow. Every time someone made either of the signs, the “high signs” to me, I thought of how clever my boy Benjamin was and it was easy to smile as if nothing in the world troubled me, though it was not safe to speak openly at the moment.
Christmas in 1759 found us gathered at our fireside with Gwenny, round with child, Roland, and Brendan home from battle at Ticonderoga. Smallpox, he said, had fought on the side of England, but cost the British army dearly in terms of men lost. He had a month’s rest leave coming and was glad to take it. I repaired his uniforms and sewed him many pairs of new linens and stockings until he laughed and said the generals were not outfitted so fine. When he left, I tried to keep myself from weeping, but it was not to be. He was a jaunty soldier, a man born to it.
*
In late March of 1760, the new year turned and Gwyneth’s babe was born. They named her Elizabeth Victoria, as English a name as could be. In private when we left them, Cullah winced. “Could they not find a good Scots name for her?” he asked.
“She has your features,” I said. “So pretty a wee thing.”
“Not as pretty as her mother,” he fumed. “Gwenny was beautiful from the first moment.”
“Grandfather, you have become a curmudgeon.”
“Grandfather?”
“Had you not realized it? Your daughter’s daughter makes you a grandfather.”
Cullah smiled with one side of his mouth. Then with both. “Grandfather,” he said. “Grandfather.”