The widow's war Read online

  The Widow’s War

  Sally Gunning

  For the widows

  Now one of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one’s house. A man’s house is his castle; and whilst he is quiet, he [should be] as secure in his house as a prince in his castle.

  Are not women born as free as men? Would it not be infamous to assert that the ladies are all slaves by nature?

  —James Otis (1725–1783)

  Our happiness depends on ourselves, on the calm and equal state of our own minds and not on the versatile conduct of others.

  A state of war has ever been unfavorable to virtue.

  —Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814)

  Contents

  Epigraph

  1

  Lyddie Berry heard the clatter of the geese and knew…

  2

  Lyddie opened her eyes to black, shifted her head against…

  3

  The Sabbath broke with a continued heavy wind swirling down…

  4

  Lyddie moved through time with a mindless will borne of…

  5

  At a quarter to the hour of nine on Thursday…

  6

  February arrived and with it more bone-cracking cold; first the…

  7

  Mehitable came to Lyddie’s room in rare smiles and invited…

  8

  When Solomon Paine died, he dictated in his will not…

  9

  By the next week Rebecca Cowett’s length of ground appeared…

  10

  Lyddie snapped out of a nightmare about Edward in the…

  11

  Lyddie continued her walks to the water, although for what…

  12

  Lyddie was tightening her bed ropes when she heard several…

  13

  Lyddie slept poorly. The room she’d been given smelled like…

  14

  Lyddie came awake with the mourning doves. As she walked…

  15

  Cut loose. The words hung around Lyddie like so much…

  16

  The tea and cheese were gone and the second loaf…

  17

  The fish shrunk to nothing over the fire and tasted…

  18

  The doctor appeared at noon, drawing Sam Cowett with him…

  19

  The next day the Indian worked at the shore again…

  20

  Lyddie met the Indian next day and listened to his…

  21

  Lyddie woke in an anxious state, the kind that used…

  22

  The Negro Jot was just leaving the barn when Lyddie…

  23

  Lyddie woke to the smell of the try yards and…

  24

  Lyddie dreamed of her dead children. She woke the next…

  25

  Or nearly emptied. And Lyddie understood at once who had…

  26

  They stood around the grave with bowed heads: Lyddie, Eben…

  27

  On the short walk to Nathan’s house Lyddie saw nothing…

  28

  Lyddie set up the Indian with stews and pies and…

  29

  Lyddie lay awake, got up and walked the house, lay…

  30

  A young Indian woman from the nation began to walk…

  31

  The knee swelled and throbbed all night and throughout the…

  32

  The child was named Edward. Lyddie moved back into her…

  33

  Lyddie got Mehitable dressed and sat her up for several…

  34

  She’d been gone ten days, and in her absence the…

  35

  August came as it always came: hot and humid at…

  36

  The Lyddie who sinned walked about town more comfortably than…

  37

  Silas didn’t go to the tannery the next day. Not…

  38

  A lone sail swept into the bay and moored at…

  39

  Lyddie handed out seedcakes to all the children, sending the…

  40

  Sometime in the night the wind picked up even more…

  41

  Silas Clarke appeared full of remorse the next morning, setting…

  42

  The town called her Indian; it was the best they…

  43

  Lyddie composed her second note to Freeman and discharged it…

  44

  Lyddie moved through the days in the steady motion of…

  45

  Lyddie slept. It seemed to her she slept through night…

  46

  She ran short of wind after four crossings of the…

  47

  All was settled. Nathan Clarke would give over life use…

  48

  Except for three seamen off a storm-tossed sloop, directed her…

  49

  Eben Freeman dismounted in front of the barn and walked…

  Historical Notes

  Bibliographical Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  January 2, 1761

  Lyddie Berry heard the clatter of the geese and knew something was coming—Cousin Betsey, Grandson Nate, another wolf, or, knowing those fool birds, a good gust of wind—but when she heard the door snap hard against the clapboards she discounted all four of them; she whirled with the wind already in her skirts to see the Indian, Sam Cowett, just ducking beneath the lintel. He had the height and width to crowd a room, and the black eyes—what was it about a pair of eyes you couldn’t see through? She took a step back and was sorry she’d done it, but he’d not have noticed; already he’d looked past her, calling into the empty doorway behind, “Blackfish in the bay!” The words had been known to clear every man out of town meeting, so Lyddie wasn’t surprised to hear the instant echo of Edward’s boots or see the great sweep of arm that took up his coat and cap along with his breakfast. The bread went to pocket and the beer to mouth; he set back the mug and smiled at her; never mind it was a smile full of whales, not wife—she answered it, or would have if he’d stayed to see it—he was gone before her skirts had settled.

  Lyddie ate her bread and drained her beer and stepped into her day, scouring down the pewter, building up the fire for the wash, shaving the soap into the kettle. At the first trip to the well she looked up at the trees and noted the wind, coming up brisk but constant in direction; by the fourth trip it had turned fickle, angling in first from the north, then the east, then the west, sometimes in a great gust and sometimes in a whisper. She went back inside and pounded out the shirts and shifts, tossing them into the pot to boil, all the while listening to the wind. She descended the ladder into the cellar to fetch the vegetables for the stew, and even there in the hollow dark she caught the echo; she climbed out and chopped turnips and listened, put the salt fish to soak and listened, trimmed and set the candles and listened, smoothed the bed feathers and listened. Once she’d hung the stew pot, poked the fire, and stirred up the clothes, she grabbed her cloak and cap off the peg and went out.

  The winter had begun mild, and the ruts were deep and soft in the landing road; Lyddie was muddied to the tops of her boots by the time she took the rise at Robbin’s hill and saw the ash-colored bay spotted all over with boats and foam. She leaned into the wind and soon had a clear view of the beach, blackened as far as her eye could see, by the whales, driven ashore by the men’s oars beating against the water. It was a rich sight and one not seen in the bay for some years; Lyddie stood on the bluff wrapped tight in her cloak and glo
ried in the view, but she made no peace with the wind. It worried her around the ears, it heeled over the boats and slapped them back; it herded the waves far up the beach and left them to die among the whales. She looked for Edward’s whaleboat, but they all looked the same, although she thought she picked out the great shape of the Indian. At length she gave up and let the wind push and pull her home.

  On her return she put out her midday dinner of the stew and bread and beer. They’d finished the old loaf at breakfast, and she set out the new one with her usual satisfaction at the symmetry of its shape, the tight seal of the crust blocking out the petrifying air. She had only one moment of unease, that she should waste a fresh cut into a new loaf without Edward home to share, but the minute she’d heard the word blackfish she’d expected to take the midday meal alone, and it didn’t trouble her long, wouldn’t have troubled her, if it weren’t for that wind. She hastened through the meal and put away the remains, wrapping the bread in the cloth with care. She washed her plate, hung the clothes in front of the fire, swept up the pieces of bark and dried leaves and pine needles that trailed everywhere on the heels of the firewood, scoured the floor with sand, watched the darkness lie down, and listened to the wind.

  When was it that the sense of trouble grew to fear, the fear to certainty? When she sat down to another solitary supper of bread and beer and pickled cucumber? When she heard the second sounding of the geese? Or had she known that morning when she stepped outside and felt the wind? Might as well say she knew it when Edward took his first whaling trip to the Canada River, or when they married, or when, as a young girl, she stood on the beach and watched Edward bring about his father’s boat in the Point of Rock channel. Whatever its begetting, when Edward’s cousin Shubael Hopkins and his wife, Betsey, came through the door, they brought her no new grief, but an old acquaintance.

  Shubael spoke. Lyddie heard that Edward’s boat had gone over, that the four men with him had been fished out alive, that they had searched till dark but had found no sign of Edward; after that Lyddie heard nothing until she realized there was nothing to hear, that the three of them now stood in silence, that the candle had lost an inch of height.

  She looked at Shubael. His coat was crusted with salt, his hair glued dark and wet below his cap.

  “You were near when it happened?”

  He dropped his eyes, shook his head. “’Twas Sam Cowett got there first. He recovered them. All but—”

  “How many hours past?”

  Husband and wife exchanged a glance. “’Twould be four, now. With the cold, and the heaviness of the sea—”

  Lyddie waved away the remainder of his words. Every wife in the village knew a man didn’t survive four hours in a winter sea. She felt her cousins’ expectation heavy in the air around her. They would have her weep or rail, but she felt no inclination to do either. She felt nothing but lightness and calm; her oldest fear had befallen her, and now it was over.

  Cousin Betsey stepped up to Lyddie, wrapped her in her arms, and pulled her into her splayed bosom. “Take heart, Cousin, take heart in God’s plan. Edward’s at a greater place; he’s answered the call made direct to him to come away; let us pray for your dear husband’s soul to find a quick safe route to his Master.” She dropped to her knees, bending her head. Lyddie looked at her cousin’s malleable neck, the thinning hair tucked into her cap, the dry lips moving in easy prayer—this cousin who had borne and raised eight healthy children, whose own husband still lived and breathed beside her—and felt her calmness leave her. Her hands wouldn’t fold in prayer. They itched to reach out and slap Betsey’s mouth closed. Who was she to hasten Edward away, to hand him over to God without a minute’s quarrel? The Reverend Dunne had promised that God could breathe eternal life into all men if it so pleased him; if he could breathe the great fire of eternal life into Edward, why not the small, flickering blaze of this earthly one? Lyddie had given over four small children to that other life; surely it was no great thing to ask God to return to her the sustaining warmth and hardness of her husband’s flesh.

  Lyddie had found her prayer. She dipped her head and clasped her hands. The outer door flew open; the candle flame shot high; Lyddie spun around and saw her one living child, her daughter Mehitable, start across the room toward her. Nineteen, Lyddie thought, the girl is nineteen and a girl no longer, Lyddie’s age at the time of her marriage and now three months into her own. Mehitable possessed Lyddie’s own high color and tall, strong body, but as Lyddie watched her daughter approach the girl seemed to fade and shrink, as if she’d walked into her mother’s past, or her own future. Lyddie dropped her head and closed her eyes, but her prayer now read as what it was: a childish effort to move back instead of forward; it would protect neither Edward nor her daughter. Lyddie reached for the other prayer, Cousin Betsey’s, but that one seemed as childish as the other. Why attempt to direct a God who did only as it pleased him?

  2

  Lyddie opened her eyes to black, shifted her head against the bolster, and saw a pale gray square of window in a wall that shouldn’t have one. She shifted in the bed and felt a rush of cold that should have been a warm body positioned between her and the door. She closed her eyes to block out the window but was unable to block out the cold or the sound of the wind carping against her raw edges. She looked around in the rising light, recognizing the room now as the cold one in the northeast corner of her son-in-law Nathan Clarke’s house. Someone had packed her small trunk for her; she saw it against the wall jammed in between the chest and side chair. She pushed through her usual series of aches, threw back the bed rug, and searched out the night jar. Yesterday’s clothes lay across the trunk lid; she hurried the quilted petticoat and under vest over her shift, fastened the tapes, pulled on the wool dress and stockings, pushed into her shoes, and hunted around for her shawl.

  Something clattered behind her; she turned to find a young girl, thickly bundled in blue wool, picking a knitting pin off the floor. Mehitable’s stepchildren were all pale-haired and pale-eyed; Jane at thirteen had just turned womanish, young Nate at twelve was now studying with his tutor for Harvard; there followed a lengthy gap during which Nathan Clarke had wasted some years on a barren, consumptive wife before he was able to lay her in the ground and find another, that wife barely working in this child, the five-year-old Bethiah, before retiring to lie beside her predecessor and make way for Mehitable.

  Bethiah lifted an anemic, heart-shaped face and coughed. “Mama says do you want to take breakfast with us.”

  “Thank you, child. Tell Mama I’ll be along.”

  The girl stayed where she was. “Mama says Grandpapa’s drowned. She says you live with us now. She says you’re to have this room for yourself and your own part of the hearth and your own day to use the oven. Mama bakes Friday. What’s to be your day to bake?”

  “Not Friday, then.”

  The girl cantered away. Lyddie went to the washstand and splashed her face and hands. She picked up her hairpins and twisted her hair around her fingers; she had to do it three times before she could jam the pins home. She found her shawl and pulled it tight, already trembling with the cold, or not the cold. She breathed in, breathed out, and walked into the keeping room.

  All were seated at table except for the Negro, Hassey, who was busy crossing and recrossing the floor with mugs and plates. Lyddie sat down on the bench where young Nate made room, and Jane handed her the platter of bread.

  “Well, Mother,” Nathan said, “you appear to have come through this ordeal unharmed. I’m told every man and boy returned alive from yesterday’s excursion except for one and that one is, of course, our dear father. I have no words for such cruel luck. I’ve been at the shore and I may tell you the whales lie so thick I might walk to Rock Harbor on their backs. I can’t begin to calculate our take—I had two boats and ten men in it. I hear the price of oil is excellent.”

  Nathan finished his bread, pushed back his chair, and pulled his waistcoat taut over his belly. “Come, Nate, we�
�ve Father’s stock to gather.”

  The rest of the table broke up with them, each with her chore to do: Mehitable to the cellar, Jane to the stairs, Bethiah to the dishes, Hassey to the cows and chickens. Lyddie looked through the window at the tops of the trees; the wind had come onshore now; the tide would be near high, too. She collected her hat and cloak and went out.

  Lyddie stood a minute in the King’s road and looked around, stunned that so little of the outside world had changed. The houses squatted low and gray in either direction along the road, their roofs peaked sharply against the wind; to the west the waterwheel at the mill roared around in its usual frenzy, and the horses outside the tavern did their perpetual snort and shuffle. Lyddie set off down the King’s road east, moving at a good pace, and soon the cold outside seemed hardly worse than that inside; she didn’t slow until she reached the landing road and turned down it. As she passed Edward’s house she heard sounds of the two Nathans in the barn, but she didn’t look or stop; she pushed on until she reached the bay, now gone from ash to slate, the beach a checkerboard of black and red, now the butchering of the whales had begun. As Lyddie stepped onto the sand a few of the men’s heads lifted like a ripple of wind through salt hay, but Lyddie turned her back on them and walked with the wind, westward along the sand, her eyes on the wrack line. None of the men carving up the blubber troubled her; they knew what she was after: not a living, breathing man, but proof of a dead one.