The widow's war Read Online Free PDF Page B

Nathan decided to take the advice offered him by Freeman and make the Indian an offer for the wood rights.
    Lyddie had just ventured into the keeping room with a pair of stockings for Mehitable and been met with a stiff thank-you when Nathan burst into the room.
    “Well, Mother,” Nathan said, “what do you have to say for your neighbor now? He will sell no wood rights, nor will he divide, nor will he engage in civil converse on the matter. I’ve a good mind totalk to the constable. ’Tis not to be borne! If a man can’t sell his own lawful property—”
    “You might sell it to someone other than Deacon Smalley,” Mehitable said. “Mr. Dillingham’s daughter is to be married soon.”
    “Dillingham’s a damned Quaker, that’s what he is, and he’s already cost me dear. The town’s now voted to exempt them from paying the soldier’s bounty, in honor of their peaceable principles! I said at meeting, ‘ ’Tis my principle not to pay any man’s share but my own, what say you to that principle?’ And Smalley—by God, it was Smalley—stood up and said—”
    Bethiah, who had been cutting up pumpkin, gave out a screech.
    “God’s breath!” Nathan shouted. “May I not have a minute within doors without all this noise rising to the ceiling?”
    Lyddie rushed over, a step ahead of Mehitable. The child had cut her finger, but not deeply. Lyddie took her to the bucket, washed and wrapped the wound, and settled her in front of the fire with some yarn to unravel, the girl’s already pale face now the color of watered milk. When Lyddie’s first boy had sickened he’d turned just such a color. Edward had left a pale boy and gone to the Carolinas after spermaceti; he’d come home with his casks full of blubber to find his child dead in the ground. He’d shed no tears, voiced no despair, was all concern for Lyddie’s sorrow only, until one evening after supper he’d gone out to meet his cousin and was gone so long Lyddie had walked out to the King’s road to look for him. She had found him in the churchyard, staring down at the fresh-mounded dirt.
    She walked up to him and stood beside him, silent.
    “I have some trouble reconciling it,” he said.
    “As do I.”
    “Yes, and I wished to help you in it. Now I do naught but hinder.”
    “’Tis a task best tried together.”
    He took her arm and pulled it through his, pinning it fiercely tohis side, anchoring her fingers in his. After a while, they walked home together.
    Lyddie pushed her dead children back into the dark recesses where she had kept them for so many years, much as she had kept their old beds under the eaves in the attic. Soon, very soon now, she must find a place to push Edward. On Tuesday Lyddie had almost joined Cousin Betsey’s lament over the impending departure of the whale men for the Canada River until it struck her she was now spared this small grief on account of the greater. On Friday Lyddie woke from a doze to the smell of Nathan’s pipe, and in that sweet, thick minute before full consciousness thought, “Edward’s home.” Sunday at meeting, when James and Betsy Lincoln stood up to confess to the sin of fornication after giving birth to a six-month child, Lyddie’s mind had trailed off after memories of that thing she would no longer be knowing.
    Nathan’s voice hit a high note and pulled Lyddie back to the present. He was now listing the sins of those less peaceable Quakers who used to charge into meeting to denounce the standing order’s religious practices. Lyddie had heard this particular rant before and knew it to go on some minutes; she finished cutting up Bethiah’s pumpkin, collected her cap and cloak and muffler, and moved toward the door.
    “Where are you going?” Mehitable asked.
    “To walk.”
    Lyddie couldn’t wonder at the look her daughter gave her; such idle behavior would have seemed strange in good weather. She left the house, steering carefully away from the landing road, past the water mill and