The widow's war (11 page)

Lyddie woke to the smell of the try yards and thought of Edward, not alive, but dead, and the heavy air that had followed his drowning for weeks afterward. She ate a quick breakfast, milked the cow, and staked her in the meadow, pleased to be able to set off for Cowett’s with a fresh pail of milk for Rebecca. As she drew nearer the water she noticed a mast just topping the stunted growth between her and the landing, and her chest lurched reflexively as of old; was the ship Edward’s? Was he safe in it?

Sam Cowett had the news: it was Seth Cobb’s schooner, in from his second trip south, with all barrels full of blubber and half his original seamen, the other half having run into trouble with the law at Charlestown. Lyddie told the Indian she suspected she had met the replacement crew the day before in front of the tavern and attempted to make a humorous story out of the cow, but Sam Cowett didn’t
seem amused by it. After he left she went to Rebecca’s room with a cup of milk and a spoon. She lifted the woman’s head in her usual way, but as she spooned in the milk it ran out across her cheek. She propped Rebecca’s head straighter and tried again; the white runnel traveled straight down her chin. Three more attempts and she gave it up and began to do what she’d advised Sam Cowett to do—she talked to her. About Edward.

“He was no very big man,” she said, “not near the size of your husband. But he could lift my linen chest, or me, or our children’s coffins. He carried them alone to the churchyard. Always, afterward, he’d want to make another, or perhaps that’s where he took his comfort. Whenever he would go to sea I would crave that same comfort, so much sometimes it frightened me.”

But no, she wouldn’t tell Rebecca about that. She tried to think of other things, but it seemed to come back each time to the same thing, all the way back to the very first, before they were married, the day he’d put her up on the pillion behind him and ridden out to Eastham to tell his brother they’d published their names and would be married the next month. All the way there she’d felt his hard back beneath his coat and smelled his sweat and salt and listened to the rumble of his voice coming through his shoulder blades where she’d pressed her face, and she’d thought, this will be my husband. All my happiness in life will depend on the nature of this man. Have I made fair judge of him?

When they got to Eastham the brother and his family had all gone off somewhere. They checked in the barn and found the wagon out and the horse stall empty, but something about the total emptiness of the barn, or the yeasty smell of damp hay and animal, or the memory of their own physical closeness on the ride over, or perhaps just the sheer power of the commitment they’d just made to each other, pulled them toward each other until they were too close to look and it became all touch and feel. One minute they were standing there
perfectly ordered and the next they were all skirts up and breeches down. At first Lyddie thought Edward must have got it wrong because nothing happened but some pain and an odd kind of numbness, but then he gave a shiver and a low shout and the numbness started to go away and she grabbed hold of him so he wouldn’t go away and soon after that there was nothing wrong at all.

There were, of course, those times during their long marriage when Edward was neither coming nor going, and Lyddie wasn’t rushing between sick child and burned bread, where they took their time with each other’s pleasure, but ever since that day in the barn the rush-and-tumble times always quickened Lyddie as nothing else could do.

Lyddie balled up Rebecca Cowett’s dirty linens and carried them out of the room. She took a minute to step outside and let the breeze sweep through her hair like fingers.

A sin in the heart was
not
as great as a sin in the flesh, she thought, and someone should tell the Reverend Dunne so.

The Indian came in staggering with fatigue and looked down at the wasted, twitching form on the bed, at Lyddie making one last futile effort to dribble some milk into her.

“She’ll not swallow,” Lyddie said.

He walked out. Lyddie cleaned up Rebecca and straightened her linens. When Cowett returned he looked only at Lyddie. “How long?”

“Since this morning. She took no—”

“How long till she dies? I want to know how long till she dies.”

Lyddie studied the woman in the bed, her accentuated bones, her thin skin. She thought of her last boy, who, had he lived, would be the age of young Nate. He had died at five of the putrid malignant
sore throat. He had stopped eating on Monday, and each day thereafter she had run her fingers along his ribs and told herself that they were no more visible than the day before, that his breath was no shallower, until the following Sabbath he’d taken one gulping breath and no more, but he was a boy, a little boy…

“I don’t know, Mr. Cowett. Not long.”

The Indian left the room for the table where Lyddie had set out his food. He pushed it aside and set down two cups. He took down the brandy bottle and poured a measured dose in each.

I should go, Lyddie thought.

He picked up his cup and nodded at hers. He drank, keeping his free hand firm around the bottle.

Lyddie stood in silence, watching the hand on the bottle. When the fingers whitened she said, “She needs you yet.”

“She needs nothing.”

“You’d leave her lie in her own filth?”

“You can tend her.”

“Not through all the night.”

“You’re afraid of their talk?”

She thought, I’m afraid of you, and then suddenly she wasn’t. The hand that gripped the bottle gripped it to keep it on the table, not to lift it. She picked up her cup and took a sip, and it felt like a warm hand on a cold heart. She reached for the bottle, and he slid it across. She barely tipped it against the cup and then set it on the floor, out of sight and out of reach.

The Indian’s hand lay in a tight fist a minute longer and then the fingers splayed, stretched, released. “I’ve naught,” he said. “Naught but that woman.”

“You have yourself, Mr. Cowett. And you have your neighbor, as you need her. And you may yet have a son who lives.”

“Is this how you count for yourself? You make your assets at three? Yourself, your neighbor, your daughter?”

Lyddie began to answer yes, but something in the darkening air made her loath to cloud it further with untruth. “I’ve come to count on myself, yes,” she said. “And I found when I was in need I could count on my neighbor. As my daughter has requested that I keep away from her house, I count on nothing from that quarter.”

“As I count nothing for my son’s life.”

“So that puts us even.”

“No, Widow Berry. I’m ahead in the neighbor.”

Lyddie said good night and moved to the door.

He called after her. “Take the bottle, Widow Berry.”

Lyddie walked home via the road, circumventing the wood, unsure of her footing in the half-light. The quail piped her along half the distance and then a mournful pigeon took up the beat:
poor Beck, poor Beck.
The breeze carried the cold off the water; she ducked gratefully through her own door and found Nathan Clarke sitting at her table.

He looked up at her and then down at the brandy bottle. “So the Indian pays you in his usual coin, I see. And yet it leaves you short enough that you must take to stealing cows.”

“Stealing? No.”

“’Tis the big joke at the tavern, my mother-in-law and her cow. Did it please you to make a spectacle of yourself and a laughingstock of me before all the town?”

“You may thank your brother for the spectacle and yourself for whatever laughter you collect. I did naught but claim what’s mine by right.”

“So you blame my brother. You aren’t satisfied with ruining his happy home?”

“I, ruin!”

“His wife’s in my parlor now and will not go home whilst he re
mains there. I made to send her off, and she cried and blubbed until my own children took it up. You’ve convinced them their cousins are to be murdered in their sleep.”

“Well, you have my room now; you may use it for those poor five children.”

Nathan leapt out of the chair. “
Your
room! This is the way you speak now, is it, everything yours? It’s nothing yours, not the room, nor the house, nor the bloody cow, nor the food you so freely take from my own four children to feed my brother’s five!”

“Well, then, you might send the children home with their mother and keep your brother Silas with you, as you hold such little objection to his charging about with knives.”

Nathan stood up and leaned into her. “You’ll be sorry you began this. You may send your lawyer to badger me all you wish and it will change nothing in the matter. This house is mine, that house is mine, the cow is
mine
—”

“And mine to use. As is one-third of this house. In truth, Mr. Clarke, I marvel you should want me back in yours, or that a man of your means would so miss one little cow that he—”

“The devil take the cow! But, by God, you will not deny me my own property, I don’t care how many threats Freeman sends me!”

He strode out. Lyddie exhaled a great gust, dropped her shoulders, and immediately reined them up again. The cow. She rushed to the door, but Nathan had gone straight to his horse and, after a series of one-footed hops, managed to get himself astride. He wheeled and saw her standing in the door. Lyddie raised a hand in a wave. He spurred the horse hard and yanked the reins at the same time so the poor creature had no choice but to travel in a circle until his master had gained some control of himself and, by extension, the horse. As he rode off Lyddie was finally able to work the knots from her flesh until she thought of her daughter, waiting for the man at the other end, and a rich, dark fear enveloped her. What might one brother
learn from the other? Would Nathan Clarke arrive home so incensed by the mother he would take revenge on the daughter? Or his own children? Jane and Nate might know enough to keep out of his way, but Bethiah had been born without a shell, and she was the one who would test him soonest with her cough and her clumsiness and her foolish chatter…And there Lyddie pulled up short.

Four
, he’d said. His own four children. What a fool she was. The lingering winter gripe, the new fullness in Mehitable’s face and arms. Her daughter was with child and, if Lyddie counted from the winter gripe, well advanced in it.

Lyddie dreamed of her dead children. She woke the next morning and pushed the images away with age-old practice, only to come up against one of the cow. Her son would not leave the situation lie; for her to keep the beast unattended in the meadow asked to lose it. She got up, emptied her night jar, washed and dressed and took some tea and bread and butter. She went out to the barn and milked the cow, this time pouring the milk into her own milk pans in the buttery and covering them with the cloths. To be back at cheese making seemed to Lyddie like the world come right side up for the first time in a very long while.

In the end she brought the cow with her to Cowett’s and set her out with his. She went to the door and knocked. No one answered. She pushed open the door with all her old fears back in place. There had been another bottle of brandy at one time.

“Hello!” she called.

Silence.

She looked in on Rebecca and found her face strained and her body twitching. Please, God, end it soon, Lyddie thought, and then realized she’d just made her first prayer since Edward’s death.

Lyddie left the room and heard a grunt from the south chamber. She stepped nearer the door and saw a naked calf, a long, glistening thigh, a buttock. She stepped back.

“Mr. Cowett!” she called.

She heard the scuffle of corn husks under him, the creak of ropes. She drew nearer the door and saw that he had pulled a blanket over him and sat up, his eyes glassy. She would have left him to sleep it off if it weren’t for the woman in the next room.

“Mr. Cowett? Are you ill?”

He spoke in a rasp. “Aye.”

“Well, then, I’ll tend your wife and leave you to recover.”

She had cleaned and dressed the wife by the time the husband appeared in the doorway. He had clothed himself in a linen shirt worn thin with washing and a pair of faded breeches. He clutched the doorframe and looked down at the twitching woman.

“It started in the night. I sat by her but could do nothing to ease it. To watch such a thing—” He broke off with a spasm of coughing.

Lyddie swung around. The Indian’s face and that part of his chest exposed through the open neck of the shirt gleamed with sweat. “Mr. Cowett? You
are
ill?”

“I said.” His voice grated like a bound saw.

Lyddie stepped forward and put a hand to his forehead. “You’re fevered. Is it your throat?”

He nodded. Coughed.

And chest.

“Mr. Cowett,” she said, “you’ve watched your wife night after night and worked day after day. You’ve tired yourself till you’ve sickened. You need to rest now. Go back to your bed.”

He looked out the window, gauging the sun. “I’ve a crew waiting at the landing.”

“I’d be happy to take them a message. You can’t fish today. You’re weak; do you see how you stand?”

Indeed, he leaned hard against the doorjamb, and when he attempted to stand away he staggered. Lyddie approached and took his arm. He let her lead him into the keeping room but not beyond. He dropped into a chair.

“What message do you send?” Lyddie asked him.

He looked at the sun again. “Tell Jabez Gray. Tell him to fetch his useless brother and take him out with them. Tell him to tell his brother I’ll come after him with an oar if he refuses.”

“I’ll tell him to fetch his brother.”

“With an oar. You tell him.”

Lyddie went to the well for water, filled the smallest kettle, and set it over the fire. She stirred up the coals, fed in fresh wood, and went out to Rebecca’s herb garden, where she dug a geranium root, pulled up several young onions, and picked a handful of mint, yarrow, verbena, catnip, and sage.

She went back inside, put the root and the herbs in the kettle to boil, set the onions aside for a poultice, and left for the shore.

The little cow lifted her head as Lyddie passed and went back to her hay. Lyddie followed the landing road to the water, which lay as slick and white as glass. Cobb’s schooner had not yet finished its unloading and lay at anchor, waiting for the tide to drop again. She spied Jabez Gray and the three remaining crew members, Simeon Cooke and two Indians, milling about the boat, looking alternately at the sun and then out over the dead water.

Lyddie delivered her message, minus the part about the oar, and
Jabez Gray turned with her to go after his brother. She heard the other men rumbling behind her as she walked off, her own name and Sam Cowett’s; no doubt Jabez Gray heard it, too, as he abruptly set off into some Cousin Betsey–type chatter.

“So now, Widow Berry, how do you fare these days? I’d say things are looking well with you. Me, I’m fair to medium, I’d have to say, fair to medium. We need a wind. Too much or too little, that’s the way of it. Either we’re stopped dead or we’re near overset, and it’ll go from one to the other in half a—” He came jolting to a stop, no doubt thinking, as Lyddie was, of another day of too much wind, another oversetting.

“Mr. Gray,” Lyddie said, “as it appears we come together to the subject, will you tell me, please, just what happened with my husband?”

Gray looked off, hawked up and spat some phlegm, and never quite looked back at her. “His boat went over, Widow Berry. His boat went over as any boat goes over, the wind, a wave, both together, they knock your stern around and you take a good one broadside and you’re over. We saw he was over, and Sam was steersman and he brought us around and we were on them in a heartbeat; we threw over our line and the block and we hauled them up one man at a time, all except your husband, Widow Berry. All except your husband. Sam finally went after him with his oar, at some risk to our own situation, and your husband took hold and Sam brought him close along, but then, I don’t know, Widow Berry. I just don’t know. It looked like he had him. It looked like he had him good. That Indian’s one big, strong ox; he just reached down and took him by the coat and pulled him up out of the water and I saw your husband breathing, I saw his chest heaving, he’d cut his head, Widow Berry, but he was alive. He was breathing. And I turned around to correct our heading and when I turned back your husband was gone, Widow Berry. That’s all I can tell you. Gone.”

They resumed walking in stiff silence until they reached the Cowett house, where they parted, Jabez Gray continuing into the village and Lyddie turning for the door. The house smelled of mint and sage and disease. She thought of what would happen if the husband died before the wife and decided that very little would change, that she would keep to her task until Rebecca died, an event which could not be far off now. But what if the wife died while the husband lay so ill? She feared that one, because she knew that one in herself, knew the strength of the temptation to give way when you were left with nothing. The Indian had said it himself, she remembered.
I’ve naught but that woman,
and his saying it had surprised her. Why? Because he was Indian, and a dark skin couldn’t grieve like a white one? Or because he was a man, and a man couldn’t experience the same dependence that was created and cosseted in women by law and custom? Or was it because he was Sam Cowett and he did as he pleased?

The house lay quiet. She moved softly from door to door and found both beds filled, all eyes closed. She had a scant minute to wonder at her situation, here alone, nursing two people she had lived beside and little known until a month ago, and then Sam Cowett opened his eyes.

“All’s well,” she said. “Mr. Gray does as he was bid.”

“For now.”

Lyddie poured out a cup of the herbed tea and brought it to him. She returned to the keeping room and cut up the onions to poultice his feet to draw the fever.

As she sat wrapping his feet he said, “I’ll have to pay you double, now.”

“A day’s nursing is a day’s nursing.”

“Best take advantage while you can.”

“Of your illness? I don’t think so, Mr. Cowett.”

“Then you’re none like your forefathers.”

“My forefathers?”

“When you English first came, we believed you carried sickness in your bags and let it loose to destroy us. Then we decided it came with your god, and that he must be more powerful than ours if he could wipe out so many people with so little trouble, just to make way for his own.” Cowett set into a long chain of coughing.

When he ceased Lyddie said, “If your forefathers thought all that, why did they go to such trouble to help mine?”

“Because yours had guns and armor. My ancestors thought to use them against the Narragansett. Until they got too many and mine decided to drive yours out. And lost.”

“You call them your ancestors, Mr. Cowett, but no Cape Cod Indian warred against the English.”

“Because the English had preachers here who told us their god was our god, and as he directed them, so he directed us. As my wife believed. As she believes yet. She would go to English heaven when she dies.”

“And you would not?”

“I do as I do. I take what comes or doesn’t come. I’ll not trouble myself over it.”

It made such sense to Lyddie, and yet she trembled at it.

Cowett had finished the tea; Lyddie took the cup from his hand and stood to go, but he stayed her.

“I don’t talk of this for naught, Widow Berry. I would ask. If I perish—”

“You’ll not perish, Mr. Cowett.”

“If I do. Before.”

“I’ll look after your wife, Mr. Cowett.”

He dismissed the sentence with a wave of his hand, as if it were something he knew without asking. “She wished to be buried in the churchyard. You’ll see to it?”

“I’ll see to it. But I’ll take it as an unkind return if you continue to
willfully deplete your health for the sole purpose of leaving me with all this trouble at the end. Now go to sleep.”

He blinked, and closed his eyes.

Sam Cowett slept and woke, slept and woke, rambling during sleep about his wife, the churchyard, the cousin at the Indian nation. Twice, she heard Edward’s name, once shouted violently, once whispered.

But shortly after dawn, when Jabez Gray stopped by on his way to the landing, he was lucid. Gray made a fair job of covering his surprise at Lyddie’s presence so early in the morning and hustled into Cowett’s room. Lyddie heard fragments of the ebb and flow of Gray’s report and Cowett’s instructions, and was heartened to hear the Indian’s voice so strong.

But his mind remained weak. Or so it seemed to Lyddie when with each trip into the room he moved further back in time, until by noon they were again with their forefathers, a subject that seemed to greatly agitate him. At length, in an effort to move them forward, Lyddie asked what made one Indian remain in the
wetus
by the ponds while another, like himself, went to live in an English frame house in town like a white man.

But Cowett seemed to struggle with the answer to this as well, and after a while Lyddie saw that it was not so much a struggle for an answer for her, it was a struggle for an answer for himself. He began to take apart the town, Indian by Indian, counting up how each had fared in the white world, and as he took it apart he put it together to form a picture Lyddie had never seen. She learned, for example, that Jot’s wife, Hassey, was not a slave but an indentured servant, half Negro, half Indian. She learned that the mother of the “white” Mrs. Hale, the grandmother of the “white” Lot Oakley, and the great-
grandmother of all those “white” Morrises were, in fact, Indians. Was this, then, another explanation for the slow disappearance of the “Indian” population? But Lyddie noticed that in Cowett’s list she found no examples of an Indian man married to an Englishwoman.

The next day Lyddie found Sam Cowett’s bedding drenched and the fever broken, his legs strong enough to carry him to his wife’s room unassisted. He looked down at her wasting twitching flesh, he watched her strangled breaths, and so many emotions flew across his face Lyddie had some trouble keeping up with them: shock, disgust, relief that she lived, regret that she lived, all of it followed by a hot, black anger. He turned away, pulled out of Lyddie’s grasp, lurched into the keeping room, and crashed down at the table.

“Why will your god not take her?” he shouted. “Why did she trouble herself over him if this is all the attention he pays her?”

“I’ve asked myself the same,” Lyddie said. “I know only—”

He whirled on her. “Go home. Leave us be. I’ve no need of you now. If I’m not well enough to fish I’m well enough to see to her.”

Lyddie saw no choice but to obey him.

She went first to the meadow to collect the cow, and then home, through the woods. After two days gone the sight of her house had seldom looked so welcome, even without any smoke from the chimney. She put the cow in the barn and watered her well, opened her back door and looked around.

The house had been emptied.