The Midwife's Revolt (11 page)

18

IN THE EARLY days of 1777, Abigail
and I finally set about being of some use to Washington’s army. In January, we took up a collection for spare blankets and men’s shirts, and our efforts were rewarded with the receipt of some hundred blankets and near two hundred shirts.

“Being of some use” defined our lives that year. It became increasingly necessary to use one’s energy and wits to find clever ways to subsist when provisions could not be had. Sugar, flour, and labor were now entirely out of reach. Abigail set about selling lace and pins. I was obliged to sell Bertha, one of my milk cows, and also some of the fine linen we had woven that winter. We began knitting and weaving small items, those we could create in a spare moment, for sale in town. In exchange for our muffatees, tippets, gloves, and socks, we received such items and provisions as we had most urgent need of.

John Adams left home for Philadelphia once more on a cold Thursday morning. I was present to witness his departure, for Martha and I had arrived at Abigail’s very early that morning to help her fold shirts for Washington’s package. As John performed a hasty, last-minute search for some forgotten item, Abigail affected great preoccupation with her gathering and folding of the shirts. I thought her stoicism admirable and infuriating in equal measure. We averted our eyes as John embraced her before venturing out of doors to his waiting horse and companion.

Abigail glanced up and smiled at him with a self-possession that tried my worn patience to breaking.

“Abigail! For goodness’ sake, throw your work down and run to him!”

She stared at me, taken aback; and then, sure enough, she did.

“Oh, my love,” I heard him say as he embraced her one final time.

She waved until he and his traveling companion, Mr. Bass, were out of sight. Then she collapsed into my arms and wept long and hard. She had good reason to weep, for she knew something John did not: she was with child.

In April, the Episcopal Church closed its doors. Abigail and I bade good riddance to a number of Tories among us. Abigail wished aloud that all such families as the Millers, Vezeys, and Cleverlys might be “extirpated from our midst” and “shipped back to England.” But, suddenly recalling that my own dear father had been “shipped back” in this manner and that I had never laid eyes upon him again, she put her hand on mine and said, “I’m sorry, Lizzie. I forget that Tories are still human beings, with fathers and mothers—and daughters—quite like ourselves.”

“My father was no Tory. I do believe that, had he been forced to choose, he would have chosen our side.” I smiled, for she had not offended me.

The churches may have closed their doors, but that did not prevent the Tories from designing to foil the revolt in secret.

In May of that year, her body visibly heavier with child, Abigail appeared at my door looking very agitated. I was planting my medicinal seedlings in the kitchen garden when she alighted from her chaise waving a large five-pound note.

“I’ve been duped!” she cried angrily. “Monsters!”

She asked for tea, and, as I prepared it, she recounted a dastardly plot to which she had just fallen victim. Apparently, a certain Mr. Holland, of Londonderry, New Hampshire, had left his home and gone into hiding, where he was attempting to destabilize our faltering economy by introducing counterfeit currency. He had been a tavern keeper and prominent citizen but had disappeared just before the scandal broke. Abigail had been handed one of Mr. Holland’s false notes somewhere in Boston. She looked livid.

“Calm yourself,” I said, bidding her to enter.

“I will not be calm. I’m furious!”

She then proceeded to tell us the news she had in heated tones.

Martha, who had listened to Abigail’s rant in silence, suddenly offered, “Perhaps he is here among us.”

“What a terrible thought, Martha.” I shuddered. But Martha, usually sensitive, ignored my peremptory tone.

“You must admit it is possible that is how Abigail got her false note,” she persisted.

“No, I agree,” Abigail said, looking quizzically at the girl. “It’s entirely possible that the fellow hides in Boston.”

“Or in our very own parish.”

I stood, angry now. Why had Martha not taken my hint to be silent on the matter?

“Martha, that’s quite enough. Would you have us not sleep at night? Are things not bad enough that you must frighten us out of our wits?”

“Lizzie,” Abigail objected, placing her hand on mine, “consider that perhaps I have come here and frightened
her
, not the other way around. For which I am sorry, Martha.”

“Oh, don’t be sorry,” said Martha. “I, for one, am not afraid. And for another, I think it wise that we prepare ourselves for such an occurrence. As you yourself have said, Abigail, designing Tories are everywhere.”

With that dark thought, we were all now silent, and a deep gloom settled upon us. Had I heard irony in Martha’s voice when she had said, “Designing Tories are everywhere”? I knew not. Nonetheless, when Abigail had left, I soundly scolded Martha. She said merely, “Forgive me. But is it not better that she, of all people, remain on her guard?”

“Perhaps,” I admitted. “But keep in mind her state. I fear for her, Martha. I have a very bad feeling about this baby and have had these several months. Indeed, I can’t shake it.” Martha looked at me askance. “Isn’t that just the sort of superstitious nonsense you loathe hearing from the mouths of ignorant midwives?”

“True.”

Just as I moved to return to the garden, I caught her looking up at Jeb’s musket on the wall. I walked out of doors into the sunshine and heard her say, “We should learn to use that.”

“An excellent idea,” I replied.

We did learn to use that musket, Martha and I. It was a simple, if not a very accurate, mechanism. We got Thaxter to show us how. You had to pour a small amount of the powder into the pan of the lock, close the pan, and then drop the cartridge, powder first, into the barrel. Ram it home, cock the lock, look down the barrel—and pray. There were no sights to aim by.

We shot crows from the sky, a plague of them that blackened our fair spring and stole our food besides. The crows kept coming back. We made a scarecrow, arguing about whose face we should give it. I said Eliza; she said King George. So as we had the need, we made two of them. Eliza stood in the pumpkin patch; King George watched over the vegetables and herbs.

Martha frowned as we stuck George in between the rows of beans. “Is he guarding his troops, and are our legumes now Loyalists? In that case, I shouldn’t like to eat them.”

I hesitated to reply. Was Martha telling me that she was on the Rebel side? I fervently wished to ask but feared her answer. Instead, I replied merely, “It’s best not to stretch our minds too far on the scarecrows’ allegorical significance. It will suffice if they serve to keep the crows away.”

In fact, they did do their job well—especially as Martha and I often could not resist taking a small stone and throwing it at one of the faces as we passed by, laughing.

“It’s very un-Christian, what we do,” I said one time.

“Indeed. But if we succeed in scaring the crows and thus subsist another year, is that not a virtue?”

We were back to our old argument of whether ends justified means, for which I still had no answer.

All that spring and into summer, I kept a watchful eye on my dear Abigail. I simply could not shake the feeling that something was amiss. I don’t know why I felt this way—call it an intuition. But I didn’t like her fatigued look or her pallor. Her back gave her a great deal of pain as well, and through the month of June I visited her near every day on some pretext or other.

One day I came bearing a newfangled instrument, called a London Dome, by which I believed we would be able to hear Abigail’s babe
in utero
. I had received this instrument from an odd source: a servant of a doctor from Milton had come up to me after meeting. She asked would I like a few of the “good doctor’s” things. Apparently, this doctor, of unpopular sympathies, had returned in haste to England, leaving both his wife and much of his equipment behind. I inquired of the servant what the instrument was for, but she said she didn’t rightly know. As soon as she pulled it from the back of her missus’s carriage, however, I saw at once what it was. I had only read about such things; they were quite rare in our parts.

On this day I had brought the Dome with me. In my naive excitement, though, I had not thought through the possible consequences of using such a device.

I had Abigail lie back on her bed and then placed the large trumpetlike end on her belly, where I felt the fetus. I could then hear, to my great delight, a muffled but distinct heartbeat. So fast it beat, like that of a little bird! I let Abigail listen, and, at the sound of her child’s heart, she burst into tears.

Then, on a hot morning in July, when Martha and I were going full tilt at weeding one of our gardens, a boy came from Mrs. Adams, who bade me come at once.

“Oh, Martha, I’m afraid,” I said as I ran to saddle Star.

I was soaked through by the time I reached Abigail’s, having been obliged to turn around at the meetinghouse when I realized I had forgotten my sack, which included the London Dome.

I had expected to find Abigail in bed and in distress. But she was not. She was sitting upright on a stool in the kitchen, working dough for bread. Lacking wheat flour or leavening, it was stiff and heavy and hard to knead. The doors and windows banged on their hinges to receive what scant breeze saw fit to blow across her sweaty brow.

Seeing her up and seemingly well, I sighed with relief.

“What is it, Abigail?” I asked, setting my bag down. “Have you news from John?”

I took the dough from her and forced her to rest. Still, she said nothing, but she wiped her brow with a cloth. Normally her keen brown eyes held mine; today they would not meet mine at all.

“I have,” she said, and once more my relief was palpable. God forgive me for saying so, but at that moment I would rather have lost the Revolution than Abigail and John’s baby.

“The news is bad. We have lost Fort Ticonderoga.”

“That is bad news.” I made a fist and continued pounding the dough.

“You will make it stiff as wood like that, you know.”

“Oh, sorry.” I ceased my pounding and used my fingers instead. “Well, what is the strategy? What does John say?”

Once again she was silent. After a pause, she said, “There is more.” She looked at me at last. Seeing her eyes, I actually felt a pain in my groin. “I believe my baby is dead.”

I stared at her. “But you are two weeks away. Nay, not two.”

“Even so.”

“What makes you say this? Come and sit by me. No, better—lie yourself down, and I will listen.” I proffered the Dome.

“No.” She put her hand out in defense, as if my fancy London Dome were a weapon.

“But it may yet be alive,” I protested.

“Which would be even worse, to know it to be alive yet in distress.”

It had begun to occur to me that perhaps I had been mistaken in my quest for more “modern” tools such as the London Dome. What good was knowing something without the means of changing the malady? Cassandra knew the torment of such knowledge all too well.

“All right, don’t fear. Come lie you down and tell me what has happened.”

I lifted her to her feet and laid her in the bed in the parlor, for her own chamber was far too hot to suffer in these summer months.

“Last night,” she began, “I was given to a fit of violent shakes.”

“But you’re not shaking now,” I observed.

“No, it passed after an hour’s duration. But I’ve felt no movement since that time.”

“Lie quietly and let me feel you, at least,” I said. I helped her unfasten her petticoats—stays had been absolutely forbidden by me after the fifth month, despite the custom to wear them throughout one’s pregnancy. I thought such a practice nonsensical in the extreme. A mother passing out every half hour because she is unable to breathe cannot be good for the child inside her.

I placed my hands on her belly and felt the baby’s position. It was head down, not entirely engaged, and I could perceive no movement whatsoever. The Dome would have told the tale, but I would not press the point. Knowledge where there is no possibility of action, as Abigail correctly noted, can only cause suffering.

I removed my hands. “Truthfully, Abby, I do not know whether your baby lives. But I do know that you have done nothing to cause it harm. Nothing at all—” I grew angry then and knew not why. Tears sprang to my eyes as I slapped my hand on the bedstead.

“Nor you,” she said. I then realized I blamed myself with thoughts of that unsavory Dome. As if reading my thoughts, Abigail smiled wearily and said, “I’m glad I heard her heartbeat. She was mine for a little while, at least.”

Oh, God! These generous words tore at me the way cool ones would not have.

I stood, seeking to steady my emotions with those prescribed procedures all medical people rely on.

“Abigail,” I said, “whether it lives or no, I believe it best to make the quickest possible delivery. If it be alive, it will have its best chance this way. If it be
. . .
gone, ’tis best for you as well we not tarry.”