The Family Greene (5 page)

"You ought to be asking your aunt and uncle that," he said. "Not me."

"Uncle Greene?" I looked at him appealingly.

"She can come with us," said one of the women. "We're going in a rowboat. We'll take care of her."

Uncle Greene said something then that I shall ever be grateful to him for. He looked at Nathanael. "If you two were wed, would you allow her to go?" he asked.

Nathanael appeared taken aback for a moment. But just for a moment. His eyes met Uncle Greene's directly, in solemn understanding. And then he gave a small nod. "Only if she stays with the women. And away from us," he pronounced.

It was done. But what? What was done? Uncle Greene and Nathanael knew. And then, as Nathanael rose and put his hand on my head and left the table, so then, finally, did I.

Whatever happened this night, Uncle Greene had given his blessing for me and Nathanael to be wed. He had turned me over to the care of Nathanael, there and then, over a dish of fish and chips in the Green Grapes Tavern.

***

S
ILENTLY, AS
figures in a dream, I and the girl named Sally and the other, named Judith, rowed quietly across the waters a good distance from the men. I heard the voice of one of Nathanael's men carry toward us, as voices will carry on the water. "There are scarce more than three or four manning her." Next thing you know, Nathanael and his men were scrambling aboard the
Gaspee.
There was some scuffling in the night. We heard some thuds, some curses, and then a shot, and a man screamed.

"Nathanael!" I started to cry out, but Judith put her hand over my mouth and muffled the sound. Then all went silent. In the next moment, we saw the outline of three men being escorted into our men's boats and then a giant blaze, which grew bigger and bigger in the night, as the
Gaspee
was set afire. We girls sat entranced by the flames that ate up the darkness around us.

"What'll we do with 'em?" a man's voice called out.

"Put them in one of the ship's rowboats," Nathanael's voice answered.

"Lieutenant Dudingston is badly wounded, sir."

"He'll make it back," Nathanael insisted.

Somebody gave the boat with the Englishmen in it a push toward shore, and in the light from the burning ship, I could see the lieutenant seated and bending over in pain. What I did not see was Nathanael's rowboat, with three other men in it, row up beside ours.

"Oh, Nathanael, I'm so glad you're all of a piece."

He handed his oars to one of the men in the boat, who happened to be his brother Jacob. "Take it back to shore," he directed. Then to Judith, "Is there room for me in there?"

All agreed there was. And he hopped into our rowboat and put his arm around me. And I was not at all cold on the way back to shore.

The next day the two of us took a double ender and visited Pa and his wife and family on Block Island. Nathanael was alone with Pa awhile in Pa's study. I petted the cat. I held the new baby. Nathanael had a private talk with Pa. Exactly what was said, I do not know, but when we left, Pa kissed me and said, "If you wish to wed that young man, you have my permission."

***

L
IEUTENANT WILLIAM
Dudingston of the
Gaspee
had been critically wounded in the escapade that night, and the Loyalists had raised a hue and a cry.

For the first time in the delinquent American colonies, British blood had been spilled. Nathanael was accused, and it struck fear in my heart, but then, with all of New England talking about the incident, Nathanael's name was on everybody's lips again.

He joined the Kentish Guards, a group of fifty-four men around East Greenwich who received a charter from the General Assembly to form a local militia. Nathanael ran for lieutenant, but when the votes were counted, he found that he had lost. His friend James Varnum, a lawyer, became head of the Kentish Guards. Nathanael became morose and thought he had lost because he was a Quaker and had never fired a gun.

Then he thought it was because he had a limp, a stiffness in one knee that he'd acquired from working in the forge.

He wanted to quit the Kentish Guards before he even started. "The uniform is ostentatious," he told me.

It boasted a red coat with green facings, white pantaloons and white vest, silver jacket buttons, knee garters.

He was going to resign, but then his friend Varnum talked him out of it, reminding him how he was needed. He not only stayed on but secured a British deserter to work as a drill master for them. Nathanael drilled with the Guards three nights a week and he pledged his financial support.

All as a lowly private. That was my Nathanael.

I spent many a golden afternoon that fall watching them drill as the trees shed their leaves in the crisp autumn air. Under the British deserter, they were well trained.

No sooner was one crisis solved, however, than another one cropped up to take Nathanael's attention from me.

Now it was the tax on tea.

What could we do to help the people in Boston who'd had their harbor closed by the British Parliament?

In December 1773 things had gotten even more serious with the advent of the colonists throwing the tea off the ships into the water at Griffin's Wharf in what has come to be known as the Boston Tea Party.

My Nathanael went from being a lowly private in the Kentish Guards to a member of the Legislative Committee charged with the responsibility of preparing Rhode Island's defenses.

Then the General Assembly needed an officer to lead its "army of observation."

Somehow that marked a crossroads in our relationship.

"It's time we married," he said to me one day as we were taking a walk behind his house, looking at the river.

I stopped dead in my tracks. I just stared at him.

"Well, what's wrong? Don't you want to marry me?"

"Nathanael Greene," I said. "It's past time. You've been torturing me for years!"

"Caty, a woman is not supposed to say things like that!"

"Well, I'm saying it! Because it's true!"

"Talk about torture! What about what I've been through! This business of being honorable has driven me mad!"

We embraced. "But you've been so good about it," I told him. "I love you for it. I've watched you suffer and I've loved you for it. You are a dear, good man, Nathanael Greene. You gave me time to grow up."

He rested his chin on top of my head. "You will marry me, then?"

"Try and stop me."

More kissing, then he said, "No more will I have to say a prayer and turn away and say good night. No more."

***

A
ND SO
we were married soon after, from the wedding-cake house of Uncle Greene's. My friend Sarah was my maid of honor. Sammy Ward was Nathanael's best man. Nathanael's brothers and their wives, my family, and Aunt Catharine and Uncle Greene all gathered around us and wished us the very best of everything to come.

To come was the war. I didn't really believe it then, though I sensed the men did. Surely Mother England would stop her nonsense, with all those ridiculous taxes, and reopen Boston Harbor and go home and leave us be. I wouldn't have believed it if Nathanael told me Mother England would not let us be.

All I knew was that no matter what happened, I would be safe in Nathanael's arms.

W
E WERE WED
only a short time, and I was sitting in the study, while our cook, Amanda, was cooking a chicken in the kitchen. Nathanael was reading the
Providence Gazette,
delivered weekly by an express rider. I was reading Shakespeare's
Henry VIII,
attempting to find out what these English people were all about.

At the sound of approaching hoofbeats, Nathanael looked across the room at me. "You'd best tell Amanda to set another place at the table."

I started to get up, but he put up a hand to stop me. "No, wait." For the hoofbeats had come to a halt and there was now a pounding on the front door.

"Coming!" Nathanael shouted. And he disappeared into the hall. I set down my Shakespeare, knowing somehow the time for the Bard was long past. And that another time was upon us.

Nathanael did not come back from the hall. I listened to the voices, his and the other man's. They were anxious voices, Nathanael's questioning at first, then concerned. The other man's hurried.

"Can I offer you a rum?" Nathanael said.

"No, I must be on my way. There are others to tell."

"God go with you," Nathanael said, he who wasn't much for God, after being kicked out of Quaker Meeting.

He looked around then, as if to gather himself in. I went into the hall, carrying his cloak and his pistol, his hat and his gloves. "You'll need these, Nathanael," I said.

He then opened the door and called for Britain, a bay stallion, the fastest horse he owned.

In five minutes, while he readied himself, he told me what was afoot. On this beautiful spring day of April nineteenth, news had come to Providence from Massachusetts that British regulars had marched out of Boston to destroy military stores at Concord.

But they were stopped on the Lexington Green by the local militia, men and boys. There were shots. Nobody knew who fired first. All was confusion. But when the smoke cleared, men lay dead on the Lexington Green. And the British regulars marched in the direction of Concord while Americans lined the way, hiding behind trees along the route and firing at them.

There was nothing for it. The war had started.

"I'll be back as soon as I can." Nathanael hugged me.

How many husbands, I wondered, were saying the same thing to wives in Rhode Island this evening as they took muskets down from over fireplaces and mounted restless horses?

I did not cry. I said, "I'll be here."

Nathanael said something about sending Jacob and his wife, Peggy, over to "see to me," and before I could object he disappeared into the misty dusk of a now damp evening of that memorable day of the nineteenth of April, 1775.

***

N
ATHANAEL WENT
with the local militia group to the Massachusetts border, where they were stopped by an order from the Tory governor Joseph Wanton. All returned home but Nathanael and two other men, who went on into Mas sachusetts, where they found that the British regulars, beaten and decimated by the American militia, had retreated to Boston.

So in two days he came home again.

By the time he had returned, I knew a truth that I had only suspected when he first left.

I knew I was with child. Oh, I was so anxious to tell Nathanael! He had wanted a child so badly! But I could not tell him. I knew I could not burden him with such knowledge when he was going off to war again.

"The New England provincial brigades are meeting at Cambridge, Massachusetts," he told me, when home only a few days, "and they're being joined by brigades from middle and southern states. We have to drive the British out of Boston."

Jacob and Peggy came two days before Nathanael left for Cambridge. I liked Jacob. He was easygoing and paternal, a little like Uncle Greene. But Peggy proved to be as she had been when I helped Nathanael move into his house: sharp around the edges and immediately wanting to establish her superiority over me.

And she did so in those two days in the only way she could. In a way that left me in tears and acting like a little girl in front of Nathanael before he left.

I had taken to throwing up in the mornings because of my condition. Bless Nathanael. He was totally ignorant of the ways of women during their confinement time.

"You must have eaten something strange," he said to me the first morning I threw up into the chamber pot in our room.

Peggy, of course, with her eagle's eye, knew from the moment she laid eyes upon me that I was in a "child-carrying" way.

That first day, she pulled me aside. "How far gone are you?" she asked.

And, "Have you told him yet?"

And, "You mean you're not going to tell him before he goes away? Well, he has a right to know! Don't you think? Now, you tell him today. Or I'll tell him tomorrow!"

She wouldn't, I decided. She wouldn't dare interfere with our marriage like that. And every time I looked at her that first day, she returned the look with a significant one of her own.

And so the second day, after I had thrown up into the chamber pot in our room and was presentable again, Nathanael and I went to the breakfast table as if nothing had happened.

But he said something to Peggy almost immediately. "You'll have to keep an eye on my wife," he told her. "She's not feeling well. She's been having an upset stomach of late."

Peggy's fork clattered to her plate. Her eyes went wide. I clenched my fists in my lap. "You mean she hasn't told you, Brother Nathanael?"

Nathanael was taken aback. "Told me what?"

"I told her if she didn't tell you today, that I would. She's with child!"

Now it was Nathanael's turn to be taken aback. He set his mug down carefully and looked at me. "Caty?" he said. "Is it true? Are you with child?"

I looked up at him and nodded. Tears came to my eyes.

"And you didn't tell me, love? Someone else had to tell me?"

I was blinded with tears, as in a snowstorm. I reached for him in my blindness and he put his arms around me and held me. "I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't want you going off to war and worrying about me."

He rested his chin on top of my head. "My little Caty, going to be a mother. Come." And he pushed back his chair and lifted me up out of mine, and he took me off, through the hall, and into our own room, which was across the way. And Peggy followed, scolding us both the whole while.

"Well, you'd better scold her good. And if I'm to take care of her, you'd better tell her she's to mind me. Do you hear me, Brother Nathanael?"

Without taking his arms from me, Nathanael closed the door of our room with his booted foot.

W
ITHIN DAYS
, Rhode Island's General Assembly called an emergency session. They voted to form a Rhode Island army of fifteen hundred men. And they needed a general to lead it.