Gwyneth had three more children, so that her life was constant in duties at home. I knew well the exhausting toll that took on a woman, so when Dorothy, by her own choice, lived with them I tried to believe that she felt no less love for her father and me. But she was twelve and still had not recovered from Jacob’s terrible death. She told me she would never marry, that she wanted to care for her sister’s children, and felt happy there.
Benjamin was apprenticed, not with his father but in Boston with Paul and the Revere family in the silversmith business. It worried us both that without Benjamin or Brendan, we had no hope to carry on his work when Cullah grew old. It came to me that someday our land would lie fallow, but I pushed the thought away. We had Roland, a good farmer, and now James, too. James had chosen to live in and repair Goody Carnegie’s old house. He kept secret his Roman Catholic ways and worked with Roland, tending sheep and cows, hoeing weeds.
In the midst of what seemed to be spreading poverty, the call and need for cloth grew. I turned to my loom and my spinning as I had not done since before the children. At the same time I developed a web of women whom I trusted and we traded and bartered for goods so much that I might see my own cloth worn by a magistrate’s wife who had traded a sow to the undertaker for some porcelain and the porcelain pitcher was on my table full of milk, the cups holding settling posset. I spun every moment I was not occupied with something else. I wove yards of motley and yards of fine, yards of linens as dainty as a shimmer, and woolens of every sort. I wove black and tan and gray, and I wove plaids of tartans when Cullah could remember the setts or patterns of color. If he could not, I made up my own pattern of color from what I found pleasant. I wove linen with silk chasing. I loved that the best. It was almost embroidery, doing chasing work.
“I want a girl to come in,” I told Cullah one night, while I cut chunks of lamb for a stew. “I need help with the work. When I am spinning, the weeds overgrow the garden, and while I cut out weeds, the sheep have gotten into the corn. Then the cows, the cows seem to need me there. They give better milk for me than for Roland.” That was not true. I knew that what I wanted was not so much an apprentice as someone with whom to talk. Cullah worked in town. “Remember?” I said. “You were to ask about, but Jacob fell. His death changed everything.”
“It did,” he said. “I am lonely. I expected my boys to follow my trade. But since they have not, without Pa here, I am also too much alone.”
I put down my knife. “We could force Dorothy to come home.”
“She’d be unhappy. Might grow melancholic.” Cullah looked at me with an old familiar longing. “I’d have been happy if you’d had more children. I did my best.”
I smiled. “You did, indeed. Perhaps we must be thankful for the quiet and a full night’s sleep.”
“Every season has its beauty.”
“You are become a philosopher, husband. Will you ask in town, then?”
April 2, 1765
Often, Cullah stayed in town and did not walk home until late at night. If ever I questioned him, he smiled and said, “It’s business, Mistress MacLammond, keeps me from your bosom,” or, “Not to worry, Goody MacLammond, your husband is neither a reprobate nor a drunkard. He is merely the most hated thing, a patriot,” and tell me nothing. I wanted to cudgel him into speaking it, but there was no use. I knew the man I had married by his stubbornness as well as by his face.
In spring he spent two nights away from home. When he got back in the darkest hours before Easter morning, April 7, 1765, he came with the oddest burden I could have imagined. Two sack-back and two comb-back Windsor chairs. They were large and comfortable. He had placed them back to back and putting his hand through the rungs lifted two in each hand and carried them all the way from Boston down a narrow path that led across a swamp, a bog, two neighbors’ farms, and through the woods. I asked him, “You brought them from Boston?”
“Aye.”
“And why, on Easter morning, did you feel you must do that?”
“I made these chairs. Each one took a week’s worth of labor in itself. A good chair is the hardest thing there is, and these were my best work. I couldn’t let them burn.”
“Why were they going to burn?”
He cast his eyes about the room as if, I thought, trying to come up with a believable lie to tell me. “They were in the governor’s mansion, and there was a fire.”
“Who set it?”
“The Committee of Safety. It’s as well you know. We lit a candle for the cause of freedom, that’s all. I am taking these to the attic, and I ask you to come with me and help me lay something atop them. But ask me no other questions, wife, for I have been abroad for two days and I must eat and get to work now or seem conspicuous.”
“It is Easter Sunday. If you go to work, not only will you seem conspicuous to the soldiers, you will be called to question by the deacons. Nevertheless, husband, if you sold them to the governor, and you’ve taken them back, you stole those chairs.”
“You’ve a bitter tongue, Ressie.”
“Aye, well, I live with a thistle.” More and more I thought of Scotland’s symbol as indicative of her people. Rugged. Uncrushable. Beautiful. Armed with wicked thorns.