The Midwife's Revolt (3 page)

4

A SHIMMER OF dawn was just rising
to the east, casting faint light across the village, when I found myself knocking at the shack door of Isaac Copeland, who lived behind the small barn on the Adams property. He seemed to have slept through everything. Only my frantic rapping woke him, and when I finally stated my business, the young, dirty lad rubbed the sleep from his eyes with black knuckles.

Isaac shook his head. “We have no lady’s saddle, ma’am. The missus always rides in the chaise.”

“It is of little import to me, so long as you have a saddle of some kind and a horse to go beneath it.”

He glanced at me briefly, then went to the barn, which had but three walls and a sorry thatched excuse for a roof, and brought out a sweet little mare to greet me. She came right up to me and pressed her forehead against my side. I took consolation in her warm breath and soft muzzle. Isaac offered his dirty hands to my grimy boot and up I went, sitting astraddle just like a man. Isaac then handed me a tattered blanket, which I placed across my lap. It was the first time I had ever sat in that fashion, but I was heedless of any discomfort.

The dawn grew brighter on my right flank as Isaac and I made our way up the coast road toward Boston. With the rising light, my strength rallied and my fear calmed.

Many were awake and running about Milton when we arrived in that town; it was Sabbath morning, but there would be no Sabbath that day. Not even the most fervent pastors could draw the people off their hills as the pummeling of Charlestown by British cannons continued, accompanied by a thunderous din and choking black smoke.

People stared rudely as I passed through the center of town. A woman upon a man’s saddle had never been seen in those parts before. Despite the blanket, my legs were exposed from my knees to the tops of my boots. I hardly cared; it seemed a trifle given the burning of Charlestown.

The closer we came to Cambridge, my birthplace, the more fearful I grew. Isaac looked drawn and jittery, but said nothing. At Roxbury, we came across a camp of ragtag militia. A band of boys with bayonets, giving themselves the airs of soldiers, was stopping all those headed west toward Cambridge. Across the street stood a large and bustling tavern. Isaac said he wished to water and rest Mr. Adams’s little mare, and I longed for a dish of tea and a biscuit.

I took my refreshment, and when I exited the tavern, a young soldier approached me.

“They say the fighting intensifies at Charlestown.”

“My husband is there with Colonel Prescott,” I answered simply, and moved to cross the street, where Isaac and his charge waited.

The boy let me pass, but at the last moment called after me. “Colonel Prescott is already upon Breed’s Hill. You can’t reach him. It’s a foolish effort! Everyone seeks to leave Cambridge, not enter it!”

With Isaac’s silent help, I hopped upon the little mare and urged her west toward Cambridge and the Great Bridge. On the road through Brookline, we saw many fleeing in the other direction: families with all their worldly possessions heaped onto carts, crying children, dogs darting wildly about, and young men on horseback with the guilty expressions of deserters. They stared at me as if I were a madwoman, but I pressed on.

At last, we arrived at the bridge. The late-morning air had grown hot and, in that moment, I was able to enjoy the grandeur of God’s earth. Here the Charles River was beautifully winding and tranquil, and the trees were all in bloom. Two months earlier, the planks upon which I stood had been removed to prevent the British from crossing over. The ruse had failed: the troops found the planks and put them back.

I glanced at Isaac. He looked as if he might actually faint. His mouth hung open, and his eyes had a wild and desperate look.

“Isaac, go no farther. Please return to Mrs. Adams. I’m certain she needs you.”

Once Isaac had gone, I felt freer. My flagging strength rallied from the tea and biscuit. As I entered Cambridge, I could almost feel my Jeb’s presence. Prescott’s regiment would have spent the night on the Common, or perhaps upon Prospect Hill farther east. I would soon have news of them, if nothing else.

At the Cambridge Common, a strange scene awaited me. Across the yard lay scattered the vast detritus of a recently abandoned camp: heaps of ash and coal, iron cauldrons too heavy to carry, the stench of urine and feces and horse dung, the tents of men too ill to have moved east with the others. I heard groans and the cries of illness. I shrank before it all, everything made worse by the unnatural summer heat.

On the southernmost edge of the Common, Parson Boardman was in the midst of a sermon. Though his lecture was clearly meant for the soldiers, not half a dozen men of fighting age sat in the audience. Women and old men listened with half an ear. The parson was a large man in a thick wig; perspiration rained down upon his black habit on this hottest of days. He decried human frailty just as officers and servants scrambled to gather their tents and munitions and head east. I stopped one dirty boy as he raced off with an armful of muskets and inquired as to the whereabouts of Colonel Prescott’s regiment.

“There.” He turned and nodded toward Charlestown. “They passed the night on Breed’s Hill. Some of us are bringing aid.”

Aid indeed. I studied the boy and his pile of bad muskets that I doubted could kill a crow at a rod’s distance.

“Well, God spare you,” I said.

It was, in all, a journey toward death. You must not suppose me fool enough to believe otherwise. And yet I hoped. In my mind I saw Jeb, dirty yet whole, running toward me. I saw him stumble toward Mr. Adams’s little mare and press his weary head upon the creature’s warm flank. Oh, I saw many a ghost of things that might have been in those hours before I saw what truly was.

I looked back to the parson and felt only a mounting anger. Of what earthly use were his words about human frailty? Let him take up a rotten musket like my Jeb and risk his own mortal skin upon Breed’s Hill!

By now the sun was quite high in the sky. The clock in Christ Church told the time: past one. To the east, I could hear cannon fire, which seemed to intensify. And still the parson droned on. Though hot and faint with exhaustion, I could not bear it on the Common a moment longer and made the decision to move down the road to Charlestown. Unlike in Roxbury, no one stopped me. I met with no orderly rows of soldiers, no organization of any kind, only chaos. Frightened boys—some bloodied, others looking at me wildly—fled past me.

At the base of Prospect Hill, I found evidence of a recent encampment and a few horses. No sign of Star. I pressed on and within ten minutes came at last to our “army”—a bedlam of sick and dirty men and boys. There was blood and gore such as I dare not describe. I had arrived at the ninth circle of hell, but even the great Italian poet could not have imagined the scene. The clear, still air was pierced by unceasing and wild cries of the wounded and dying, to whom there were not women enough to tend. All around, the suffering of our boys was extreme—some were black with burns; others had multiple bayonet wounds and leaked like stuck sausages. A hasty surgery had been set up in one tent, and it was from this tent that the most terrible sounds arose. At one point, I had the misfortune not to have averted my eyes in time and saw an arm unceremoniously tossed into a pile of white and bloodless limbs at the back of the tent. Oh, Lord, what misery!

I tied the mare to a post where several other horses stood. Looking about me, I saw a boy with a bucket and stopped him, asking would he kindly water my horse. He nodded and went off, I hoped, to get water. I then approached a woman who, though bent with fatigue, I recognized as a Cambridge lady. She was streaked with blood and dirt, but her face was pale and fine. I asked if I could help her, and without a word she nodded to a boy lying on a pallet of straw some ten yards off. He was blue-white in color, and his lips were drawn back across his teeth in suffering. He could not have been more than sixteen.

“Hold his hand,” she replied. “It can’t be long.”

I went to his side and took his hand. “I’m here,” I said. “I won’t leave you.”

His eyes rolled to the side, catching me in their enlarged pupils. He grasped my hand, and when I looked down I saw that half his chest had been torn away.

“Marmy,” he said. “I would like my Marmy.” His eyes leaked tears; he knew his “Marmy” was very far away.

“I won’t leave you, brave soldier,” I murmured. Those two words seemed to give him some faint comfort, and he soon shut his eyes. His face relaxed. In a few minutes, he was gone.

Oh, the suffering of this world!

Around five in the afternoon, when for the better part of an hour we had ceased to hear any sounds of war, I saw a young man lying facedown beside another dead boy, upon a rustic cart. He wore a fine linen ribbon in his hair.

It was the ribbon I recognized first. I ran to him and turned him over. I may have cried out but was not sensible of doing so. I knew at once he was dead. And may the Lord forgive me if I say that this understanding was a great, selfish relief. Had there been time for a parting scene with him, I surely would have gone mad.

“This is my husband,” I told the gentlewoman I had been helping all that day. She looked at me with astonishment; my calm must have surprised her. “Would you like me to wash him?” she asked. “It is more than a wife should have to bear.”

“No, I want to. You are kind to offer.” I did not say that I wished to
feel
something; I had grown cold and numb.

I will leave my reader to imagine that final caress: the young, healthy man and his single, fatal wound, which I gently felt around. I marveled at how so small, so insignificant a thing as a bayonet tip could bring down my Jeb’s strong spirit. I gently untied the linen with which I had gathered his hair the morning he’d left and placed it around my neck.

After I had washed his body, I began to shake and sat myself upon the ground to keep from falling. The blanket I had brought from Isaac’s shack was upon the mare, but I had no energy to fetch it. I was in a quandary. I knew I could not make it back to Braintree. After a long and anxious wait, I finally saw the boy who had brought water to Mr. Adams’s mare. He was a welcome sight, and I called to him.

I had a message for the Boylstons, I told him. They would give him a shilling for the news that their son was dead and their daughter-in-law requested help. I could not bear for soldiers to bury Jeb on this filthy hill, and I would not leave him. The boy offered to take John’s mare, still tied forlornly to that post, but I said no. That far, I wouldn’t trust him.

It was night before I was delivered of my agony among those dead and dying. At first, I kept glancing at Jeb, fearful lest I fall asleep and he disappear. Or perhaps I sought a glimmer of movement. It never came. At some point I must have dozed, though, for the first thing I recall after being lifted from that field is the voice of someone saying, “Gently, gently! Lift her gently!”

I could hear no horses’ hooves and at first knew not where I was. I then perceived that we were before the Boylston house, and I asked, agitated, “Star, where is Star? Did you find him? And have you Mr. Adams’s little mare?”

“Yes, ma’am. They’re in our stables, rest you easy.”

I was greatly relieved to know the animals were safe. I was led to bed upstairs. Someone came in to bathe and change me, for I was quite, quite filthy. Within the Boylston home, with its thick walls and dark, north-facing chambers, it was cool. A soft feather bolster caressed me. It was blissfully dark. A prayer escaped my lips for the Lord to take me as I slept.

5

IT IS NOT a Christian sentiment to
wish for death. But I was twenty-one and knew not how to suffer. My sleep that night was dark and restless, invaded by images from waking life. I kept dreaming of our parting scene, of Jeb’s kiss good-bye the morning he rode off to Cambridge.

With this memory, and the closer one of walking up Penn’s Hill, the mantle of sleep lightened. I rose up through my uneasy dreams to find one of the Boylston servants standing over me with a dish of tea.

The maidservant, a plump woman wearing a starched white pinafore, had the morally superior manner of someone who has been up for many hours. Handing me my tea, she said, “Whenever you’re ready, ma’am, the mister and missus wish to see you.”

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Past eleven,” she replied.

I had only yesterday been at a field hospital near the battle at Charlestown. I now found myself amid the fading luxury of those to whom time had been kind. Their home, on its third generation, bespoke a sense of ease and permanence. Only the large wooden crates placed here and there suggested that change was imminent.

Facing the Charles River, the Boylston house presented eight large, glitteringly clean glass windows to the world. Behind the house lay vast gardens and stables. On this day, cotton-tree blossoms had fallen to make a gauzy white carpet in the front garden.

But within moved a family in crisis. In the unreal brightness and brokenness of that morning, it took me some time to realize that the Boylstons were packing, readying, no doubt, to flee as soon as Jeb was buried. Where they planned to go, I knew not.

I rose and dressed. My limbs refused to move without constant command. While I was dressing, Eliza Boylston, Jeb’s older sister, entered my chamber without knocking. She looked as tall and haughty as I remembered her. Tears stained her red face, and she wiped them with the ruffled silk sleeve of her French gown.

“I see you’re awake,” she said.

“Yes, I hadn’t slept since early Saturday morning. I was overcome
. . .
” Upon saying the word
overcome,
I was indeed overcome and could not utter another word. There is nothing so humiliating as a show of grief before someone whose heart is unmoved.

“Indeed, none of us has slept. You have slept fourteen hours together. Mama despairs of your
ever
getting up. Shall I tell her you are coming? Papa is waiting, too.”

“I wish to see my husband,” I said. “Where is he?”

“He lies in his chamber across the hall. You may go there,” she said.

As if I needed her permission!

“Indeed, I shall. I must finish dressing.” As I stared at her, signaling her to leave, a smile played across her thin lips.

“Your skirts and bodice are being cleaned. You will find some of my things in that closet. Something will no doubt be suitable.” She nodded to the deep closet across the room—a real sign of the Boylston wealth. Jeb and I had not a single such closet. Each room in our house looked like a workshop of some kind: tannery, spinning shop, butcher’s, or bakery.

Eliza moved toward the door, cast me a look, and then departed. I hastily finished dressing, then peeked into the hallway. My heart beat quickly, though no one was there. Twice I nearly turned away, losing courage. But I told myself that some things are more important than one’s own grief. I had to say good-bye. I had to do him that honor.

He lay in an unfamiliar blue vest and jacket and clean breeches, his hair neatly brushed and pulled behind his ears. Scented candles surrounded him, casting a torpid yellow glow upon his once-handsome face. In the very neatness of his dress, he had already ceased to look like Jeb. In life he had been far too impulsive, too quick, to be tidy. But someone had tidied him, probably one of the maids. I gazed at his mouth; it, too, was still, set in a painfully grim expression. And in this stillness and grimness I knew Jeb was gone.

His arms lay at his sides. I touched one just below his shirtsleeve. It was quite cold. Then I kissed his cold cheek and turned away. I cried a moment—out of grief for him, pity for myself. I knew my womanhood had died with Jeb. Who would lay his tender hands upon me now? Who would kiss me in the dark of night, with the sea crashing upon the shore behind us?

Annoyed at my self-pity, I stopped crying and looked about me. His articles—such small, pathetic things!—stood on the dresser. Some were still in the sack he’d worn over his shoulder when we said good-bye. Other items, like his ring and billfold, lay alone. I took them all up in my arms and brought them to my room to go over with great care later. For now, I had to hurry to the parlor.

I found only Mr. Boylston. He sat in a wing chair by an unlit fire. His hands rested on his knees, as if to steady him. The haughty, self-satisfied air I recalled was gone.

“Sit, Elizabeth,” he said, nodding toward the sofa across from himself. “Would you like tea? Cassie can bring us some.” He turned to a small Negro woman who stood in silence by the parlor door. “Some tea for us, Cassie. And cakes.”

Far from appearing grief-stricken, Mr. Boylston appeared agitated, almost angry. I dared not tell him I’d already had my tea.

“The—the funeral will take place on Wednesday. At King’s Chapel,” he informed me.

“In Boston?” I asked, surprised.

“We have little choice in the matter.”

I then recalled that the church by the Common had been closed for regular service for many months now. Here again, I dared not suggest that Jeb would have preferred to be buried on our own land in Braintree, or even where he fell on Breed’s Hill, rather than in King’s Chapel.

Suddenly, Mr. Boylston slammed his fist on the parlor table and blurted out, “Deuced troublemakers!”

I bounced up from my seat with the sudden noise of his explosion.

“Deuced so-called patriots! He was smitten by the Devil! He was no more one of them than
you
are!”

I kept my eyes down, my heart mute. I feared that, were I to open my mouth, a wind the likes of Aeolus’ sack upon Odysseus’ ship might blow Mr. Boylston back to England. I recalled the grief that Mr. Boylston had given Jeb for not wanting to be a merchant like himself. When Jeb had told him he would enlist, Mr. Boylston had bellowed, “As useless and foolhardy a pursuit as ever I’ve heard! It’ll as soon get you killed as win you glory.”

Well, he had been right about that.

“After the funeral, we will send a man to return Mr. Adams’s mare and to pack your things.”

“What mean you, sir?”

“That naturally you shall come with us. We would not think of leaving you alone.”

“Come with you! In exile?” I cried. Many things had occurred to me since first standing on Penn’s Hill and realizing that Jeb might not live through the day, but one plan had never entered my thoughts: to join his family.

“Mr. Boylston,” I said, “I thank you for your kindness. But I cannot possibly come with you.”

“Of course you’ll come with us. Where else could you go? We can’t in good conscience send you back to that hell pit of a North Parish, what with the Adamses and Hancocks getting people killed every day. We can’t possibly abandon you, a gentlewoman and the wife of our son, to tend a farm alone. What would people say?”

“It’s my home, and I will return to it.”

Mr. Boylston turned red in the face and muttered, “Obstinate creature!”

“Mr. Boylston,” I entreated more gently, “the women need me there. They have no midwives such as myself. And soon there will be no men, either. There are many animals in need of tending and a rather large garden.”

I recalled my promise to Jeb to be a good farmer in his absence, and my resolve hardened within me. “I hardly need mention that we could not see more differently upon the subject of the current conflict, and that I consider certain members of the North Parish to be the best of people and my friends.”

“Yes,” he grumbled. “How that happened, and you with a father so respectable, I cannot guess.”

To this, I had no reply.

What I had said about my prospects in Braintree was not entirely true. While the women needed me, they still called upon me only in the direst extremity. The truth was, they did not yet trust me. The entire parish knew that my father had been a royal judge and had fled the country. Rumors abounded, as well, about my mother and myself: that she had been practiced in the alchemical arts, and that I myself grew strange plants in my garden and made powerful potions and poisons. This last fact was partly true. I grew deadly nightshade, whose derivative, belladonna, served me well for stubborn cervixes. I enjoyed delicious tomatoes as well, the seeds of which a friend of my mother’s sent her from Europe. But some believed the rumors about alchemy and poisonous potions and shunned me.

Jeb’s father grasped my hand hard, and a cry caught in his throat. “It is unsafe, woman.”

Here, the old man’s entreating look made me feel that perhaps Mr. Boylston did have some feelings for me after all.

“Come now,” I replied, grasping his arm, “there is nothing unsafe about the North Parish.”

He shrugged off my grasp. “I can’t reason with you now. We’ll discuss it by and by. Rest assured, I shan’t leave you in Braintree alone. You
shall
come with us.”

I stood, curtsied, and left just as the maid was bringing us tea.

Back in my chamber, I bolted my door and let out an exasperated groan. I took Jeb’s sack and musket. I could smell the powder and knew he had fired it. I pressed the sack to my face, smelling for traces of him. Then, carefully opening it, I removed its contents: the oatmeal biscuits I’d given him, now but two broken ones remaining; a bladder that had once contained water, but now had neither cork nor liquid. My heart flooded. Had he reached for it, parched with thirst, at the last? A small piece of dried beef. A lock of my hair tied with string. Then, tucked far at the bottom, my last letter to him. I unfolded it and read:

Dearest Jeb,

I am grieved to hear you move closer to danger. But what can I, a mere woman, do to steer the course of generals, colonels, and the world? I steer my shuttle to fashion you a shirt, and the plough to make a straight line for the corn. You see I keep my promise to be your good little farmer while you are gone. Come back, and I’ll be your better wife.

Your ever loving Elizabeth.

Overcome, I lay back in my bed clutching the sack and willed myself into unconsciousness until dinner, when one of the servants woke me.

The funeral, a solemn affair, took place two days later, and we were alone neither in the church nor at the cemetery. Several other families surrounded us, including some quite prominent ones. They looked as flushed and harried as the Boylstons, as if at war within themselves. The choice was acute: leave Boston immediately or grieve their dead.

It was another hot day. Women in black skirts fanned themselves and looked upon the point of fainting as they listened to an unfamiliar parson and wept.

It was a group service and burial, and we mourned as one. Perhaps because of this, I felt somewhat buffered from my own pain. I looked about me and felt mostly a welling pride for all those boys whose families had discouraged them, boys who had nothing to give in going off to Breed’s Hill except their mortal selves.

As the parson finished his business and moved to condole with each family, Jeb’s family and I walked slowly away, heading toward our carriage to return to Cambridge. It was then that I saw an officer emerge from the crowd and approach me.

He was quite tall, over six feet, and bore himself like a man of some rank. His hair, parted in the middle, was braided in the back, revealing a high forehead and brilliant blue eyes. His grim face betrayed a compassion that threatened to undo me. As he approached, I saw that he was holding something in his gloved hand. Then I knew who this man was.

“Madam Boylston?”

“Yes?”

“Colonel William Prescott.” He bowed to me and kissed my gloved hand. “I’m so very sorry. Would you allow me to give you this?”

He handed me a folded paper.

I took it from him without breathing. Then I swayed, as if a strong wind had tipped me to one side.

“Ma’am,” he said. “Let us sit. I have important things to share.”

He took me by the arm and led me toward a stone bench. I looked back at the Boylstons, who were speaking to the parson and making their way slowly toward us. Colonel Prescott sat by my side and spoke quickly, rightly sensing that his time alone with me was short.

“Your husband was among the few who did not desert me when the fighting began. He fought right by my side. I have rarely seen anything like it. But we were far outnumbered, and easy targets. Still, he refused to hide himself behind a barricade, but stood tall. I’ve never seen a braver man.”

“He was a fool!” I cried, then felt instantly ashamed. For, to this brave and noble man who did not know my heart, I must have sounded just like my father-in-law.

I stood up. The colonel stood as well.

“You will be anxious, no doubt, to read that. He gave it to me the morning of the battle. Why he believed I would make it out alive, I know not. I was as close by his side in the battle as we are now. It was only blind chance that the Regular’s bayonet ran him through and not me. He was but a boy himself, perhaps sixteen. I killed him.”

I shut my eyes at the horror of Colonel Prescott’s narrative, yet was glad he did not spare me.

“But what’s done cannot be undone,” he concluded. “If you need anything, anything at all
. . .
” He grasped my hand.

“Thank you. You are very kind. I did not mean to say Jeb was a fool. I am very much for the Cause. I meant—”

The colonel looked me in the eye. “I know what you meant. Perhaps we
are
fools, Mrs. Boylston. You are an honest woman, and Jebediah was a lucky man.”

He bowed and left, and I was alone with my letter. I had to read quickly; the parson was just bowing and taking his leave of the Boylstons. Soon they would be upon me. Carefully, I broke the seal and read:

Dearest Lizzie,