The widow's war (2 page)

Lyddie opened her eyes to black, shifted her head against the bolster, and saw a pale gray square of window in a wall that shouldn’t have one. She shifted in the bed and felt a rush of cold that should have been a warm body positioned between her and the door. She closed her eyes to block out the window but was unable to block out the cold or the sound of the wind carping against her raw edges. She looked around in the rising light, recognizing the room now as the cold one in the northeast corner of her son-in-law Nathan Clarke’s house. Someone had packed her small trunk for her; she saw it against the wall jammed in between the chest and side chair. She pushed through her usual series of aches, threw back the bed rug, and searched out the night jar. Yesterday’s clothes lay across the trunk lid; she hurried the quilted petticoat and under vest over her shift, fastened the tapes, pulled on
the wool dress and stockings, pushed into her shoes, and hunted around for her shawl.

Something clattered behind her; she turned to find a young girl, thickly bundled in blue wool, picking a knitting pin off the floor. Mehitable’s stepchildren were all pale-haired and pale-eyed; Jane at thirteen had just turned womanish, young Nate at twelve was now studying with his tutor for Harvard; there followed a lengthy gap during which Nathan Clarke had wasted some years on a barren, consumptive wife before he was able to lay her in the ground and find another, that wife barely working in this child, the five-year-old Bethiah, before retiring to lie beside her predecessor and make way for Mehitable.

Bethiah lifted an anemic, heart-shaped face and coughed. “Mama says do you want to take breakfast with us.”

“Thank you, child. Tell Mama I’ll be along.”

The girl stayed where she was. “Mama says Grandpapa’s drowned. She says you live with us now. She says you’re to have this room for yourself and your own part of the hearth and your own day to use the oven. Mama bakes Friday. What’s to be your day to bake?”

“Not Friday, then.”

The girl cantered away. Lyddie went to the washstand and splashed her face and hands. She picked up her hairpins and twisted her hair around her fingers; she had to do it three times before she could jam the pins home. She found her shawl and pulled it tight, already trembling with the cold, or not the cold. She breathed in, breathed out, and walked into the keeping room.

All were seated at table except for the Negro, Hassey, who was busy crossing and recrossing the floor with mugs and plates. Lyddie sat down on the bench where young Nate made room, and Jane handed her the platter of bread.

“Well, Mother,” Nathan said, “you appear to have come through this ordeal unharmed. I’m told every man and boy returned alive
from yesterday’s excursion except for one and that one is, of course, our dear father. I have no words for such cruel luck. I’ve been at the shore and I may tell you the whales lie so thick I might walk to Rock Harbor on their backs. I can’t begin to calculate our take—I had two boats and ten men in it. I hear the price of oil is excellent.”

Nathan finished his bread, pushed back his chair, and pulled his waistcoat taut over his belly. “Come, Nate, we’ve Father’s stock to gather.”

The rest of the table broke up with them, each with her chore to do: Mehitable to the cellar, Jane to the stairs, Bethiah to the dishes, Hassey to the cows and chickens. Lyddie looked through the window at the tops of the trees; the wind had come onshore now; the tide would be near high, too. She collected her hat and cloak and went out.

Lyddie stood a minute in the King’s road and looked around, stunned that so little of the outside world had changed. The houses squatted low and gray in either direction along the road, their roofs peaked sharply against the wind; to the west the waterwheel at the mill roared around in its usual frenzy, and the horses outside the tavern did their perpetual snort and shuffle. Lyddie set off down the King’s road east, moving at a good pace, and soon the cold outside seemed hardly worse than that inside; she didn’t slow until she reached the landing road and turned down it. As she passed Edward’s house she heard sounds of the two Nathans in the barn, but she didn’t look or stop; she pushed on until she reached the bay, now gone from ash to slate, the beach a checkerboard of black and red, now the butchering of the whales had begun. As Lyddie stepped onto the sand a few of the men’s heads lifted like a ripple of wind through salt hay, but Lyddie turned her back on them and walked with the wind, westward along the sand, her eyes on the wrack line. None of the men carving up the blubber troubled her; they knew what she was after: not a living, breathing man, but proof of a dead one.

Lyddie walked the shore as far as the mill creek, then turned along the creek itself until hard peat turned to swamp, but she found nothing of Edward except the water that had suffocated him. She stood with her back against the wind and looked at the water, wondering what it was like, drowning, finding nothing in her life to bring her close to it until she turned around and the wind tore down her throat, snatching her breath. She tucked her chin and faced down the wind. This time, as she approached the bloody carcasses, she saw that a second phase of activity had begun; the try pots had been hauled from the try yard, and a handful of men and boys ran back and forth stacking firewood under the great kettles and lobbing thick chunks of blubber into the pots to boil down, while the old men stood by with their long-handled dippers, ready to skim off the oil. One of the men laid down his dipper and started toward her: Edward’s cousin Shubael Hopkins. Lyddie had had enough words from Shubael; she reached the track to the landing road before Shubael could hail her and turned down it.

This time Lyddie snuck a look at Edward’s house and barn as she passed: the same gray salted shingles, the same heavy planked door, the same windows tucked up under the eaves, but the whole of it now seemed webbed in a strange new deadness. She hurried past onto the King’s road until Nathan Clarke’s house came into view, a grander thing than the others along the road, defying the wind for a full two stories.

Nathan Clarke was about to receive a visitor: a long, gangly, rusty-haired gentleman had just swung his leg over the rump of an equally long and gangly bay horse. Putting man with horse, Lyddie came to the name: Ebenezer Freeman, Cousin Betsey’s brother, late of the village of Satucket and now practicing law in the town of Barnstable. Lyddie had come to know the lawyer around the edges of meetings with her husband or in accidental intercepts of his visits to his sister; she pushed herself up the drive and caught him just as he finished tying his horse inside the barn.

Years of riding the court circuit in hard weather had given the once-clean planes and angles of the lawyer’s face a cobbled-together look; when he saw Lyddie his features disrupted themselves further.

“Widow Berry! I’m just come from my sister’s. I was there last night when Shubael…I wish to say—” He stopped and looked away. “I do not…I’m sorry, I cannot—” He brought his eyes back. “Here, let me take you in out of the wind.”

He reached for her arm. She pulled it away. Why must they all move so fast? From barn to house, from house to house, from wife to widow. She looked through the open barn door at Eben Freeman’s horse lipping hay off the ground; behind the horse stood a neat row of Nathan’s livestock: a pair of bays and a black, three cows…. She looked again. The black horse, the smaller cow, were Edward’s.

She turned to the lawyer. “You called me widow just now. Am I assumed so before the law?”

“Not now, no.”

“When, then?”

He paused. “You will be officially widowed when either your husband’s remains are returned to you or a court of law declares him dead.”

“You made up his will, did you not?”

Again, the pause.

“We need wait for no court here, Mr. Freeman. My husband is dead. I would know my situation.”

“Very well, then. In your husband’s will he gives you your standard ‘widow’s thirds.’ Mr. Clarke, as your nearest male relative, receives title to all property while you, as Edward’s relict, retain life use of a third of either the physical property itself or a third the interest resulting from its sale, whichever Mr. Clarke deems appropriate, for as long as you remain Edward Berry’s widow. Your husband stipulated that you might keep any personal property brought with you to the marriage; he further provided that you receive the use and main
tenance of the cow. Your keep and care is to be charged to Mr. Clarke, again, for that period of your life in which you remain widowed. If you should so happen—” He broke off. “Widow Berry, you shiver. Please, come inside with me now.”

He took her arm, and this time she let him turn her. Inside the house, the keeping room had grown livelier: Hassey scoured the floor, Mehitable tended a kettle, Jane trimmed and set candles while Bethiah sat at table scraping the mold off a squash.

At the sound of the lawyer’s voice Nathan came out of his study. “Freeman! Glad to see you.”

“My sympathies, Mr. Clarke. To you and—”

“Yes, yes, we are greatly distraught. I don’t see how we’ll recover. Now come in here, we’ve a great deal to discuss on the matter.”

He pulled the lawyer into the study and closed the door.

The Sabbath broke with a continued heavy wind swirling down the mill valley. The women and girls squeezed into the chaise, while father and son saddled their horses. The water mill stood quiet on the Sabbath, but nothing had quieted the creek, which foamed angrily out of the millpond, over the rocks and down the valley out of sight into the bay. Mehitable guided the chaise past the Smalley house and two more Clarke houses without seeing a living being; at Poverty Lane they overtook a cart full of Perrys and the Sears family on foot, and by the time they caught sight of the meetinghouse the King’s road was dotted with walkers and riders from both directions.

Nathan Clarke dismounted in front of the meetinghouse and took charge of the carriage horse; the family spilled out onto the ground. Cousin Betsey came up and offered Lyddie some further words about Edward’s great reward at hand; Lyddie managed to receive the bless
ing and disengage in one turn, but she lost the image of Betsey’s soupy eyes only to gain a similar one of the bay beyond. She hurried in. She found Mehitable and the children in their pew, set her hot brick at her feet, and sat down. There were, as usual, near three times the number of women as men at meeting. Would that ratio hold in the life beyond? Lyddie wondered. Was that the reward Cousin Betsey had in mind for Edward?

Linnell Foster brought his infant to the front to be baptized, and Lyddie heard a sharp crack of ice as the Reverend Dunne dipped into the bowl. The babe wailed as cold fingers touched the fragile skull. “Look not to this earth to find your comforts.” Those were the first and last of the minister’s words that Lyddie heard, but she couldn’t have said where her mind had gone for the remaining two hours; she would have said she thought of nothing, felt nothing, but cold.

After the service they stepped out into stinging snow. Nathan Clarke decided they would pass the time before afternoon service at Bangs’s Inn across the way and led the family into the road. Lyddie found herself separated from her family by the Gray brothers, Jabez and Roland, who shouted back and forth to each other above the blow.

“Sea won’t lay down for a week now.”

“’Twouldn’t bother that mad Indian.”

“He knows his way in a whaleboat, mad or no.”

“Mebbe so, but I’ll not crew for him.”

“He makes me more per share than any Englishman I know.”

“Talk to me about shares when they fish you out of the drink.”

“He saved those four, didn’t he? I guess I’ll not quarrel with him.”

“Then I guess you’re not Edward Berry.”

Edward’s name came back at her on the wind like a slap, bringing her up to pace, allowing her to catch up with her family just as they entered the inn. She set her brick in the fire with the others to re-warm, and looked around. The long room was thick with chattering folk likewise sheltering from the storm; the steam rose from their
clothes, smoke whirled outward from fire and pipe, Lyddie felt more breathless than she had out in the wind. She took a step toward a nearby door and felt her arm gripped as if by a hawk’s claw. She whirled around and discovered that she’d been speared by the old midwife, Granny Hall.

“Take heart, Widow Berry. Your husband sits at God’s hand, helping Him look after your children.”

“Cannot God tend his dead alone? He should have ample time for the task, as he spends so little of it in care of the living.”

Granny Hall blinked. Several people near Lyddie turned around. She could feel the iron band of control that had wrapped her tightly for three days begin to rust at the edges; she slipped out of the old woman’s grip and passed through the nearest door into a smaller, empty room. The fire there had been neglected; she moved her skirt aside and got as near as she dared, but the heat failed to reach her face.

A voice cut through the chill—a familiar voice—echoing from the depths of the next room.

“Three good-size chambers below,” Nathan said, “plus one smaller, and the pantry, and nice, tight attics above.”

“And the woodland?”

“Six acres. And if you want his share in the sloop—”

“What need I of shares in a sloop? I’m after setting up my daughter at housekeeping. Now if you were to offer furnishings—”

“Furnishings! Certainly. But we barter separate on furnishings.”

“Very well. For the house and woodland I’ll offer three.”

“Four.”

“Three-twenty.”

“Three hundred and eighty pounds, Smalley, and there I rest as if against a wall. What say you?”

“Very well. How long till we settle? The court must declare the death.”

“’Tis no great matter; we’ve witnesses saw him go down.”

“Yes, all right. But I shall want to look the place over.”

“Then you shall look it over. Thursday nine suit you?”

“Thursday nine.”

The footsteps divided, one pair fading, one sharpening. Lyddie turned, preferring to meet whichever party came her way eye to eye, and as she was tall and Deacon Smalley short, she did so literally. He looked surprised to find her off alone in the empty room but recovered himself with the usual civility.

“Good day to you, Widow Berry.”

Lyddie dipped her head. “You were speaking to Mr. Clarke about my husband’s house?”

“Ah, so you’ve heard, and now you must chastise! Very well, I give you my word there’ll be no more talk of business on the Sabbath. Will that satisfy?”

“My concern is not the Sabbath, my concern is the house.”

“Then you’ve no concern, Widow Berry. Your son and I have it well in hand. Now I must be off to collect my family. Good day to you, Widow Berry.”

Lyddie woke to a clean, pure silence, as if a cloud of nagging insects had suddenly flown off. No more wind, but in its place came the smell of oil from the try pots, seeping through the cracks as insistently as the wind had done in the days previous.

And it was colder. Lyddie used the night jar and hurried into her clothes, pausing when she heard a sharp crack on the outer door. Early for a visitor. She heard hushed voices, heavy feet, shuffling feet, Bethiah’s piping, “Who is it? Oh! Who is it? What, Jane? What? ’Tis not! Oh, ’tis not!”

Lyddie heard the rest as if inside a well: Nathan’s order for a blan
ket, the scrape of a chair, the clatter of a bucket, the thud of booted heels on wood. She opened the door and crossed the keeping room to the table, where the family had assembled around the thing that remained of Edward. She reminded herself that this was what she had been hunting on the shore, this proof of him dead, and here was proof beyond testing. His rough work clothes remained intact, but his exposed face and hands had been ravaged by the sea bottom or whatever scavengers still lurked in the frigid water; she had trouble finding her husband under the discolored, misshapen, tattered flesh. Better the sea had kept him.

She felt a not ungentle hand on her elbow. Nathan’s.

“Let us pray.”

The family dropped to their knees around the table. “Blessed are they who die in the Lord,” Nathan said.

The amens rang around her.