The Long Year

A diary such as might have been kept by any of ten thousand wives left to hold the farm, the children, and the fear while their husbands went to war. Kept by Lydia Tarbell, of Pepperell in the Massachusetts Bay. Lydia and her family are imagined; the year she endured — 1775 to 1776 — was real for them all. Pepperell — the 20th of April, 1775 The alarm came at first light yesterday, and by the time I had the fire up Amos was gone — his musket from over the door and the powder-horn his father carried before him. He would not wake the children, only kissed them abed. “Keep all close, Lydia,” was the whole of it, and then the lane was full of men walking fast toward Concord and not one of them looking back. I have not slept. The bread is risen and I do not know if there will be anyone come home to eat it. Late April The men being all marched off, it has fallen to the women to watch the roads. A party of us went down to the bridge at Jewett’s with what arms the town had left, one of us in her husband’s coat and hat to seem a man, and we stopped a rider they said carried letters to the Tories. I am not a bold woman; my hands shook upon the pitchfork. But I would not have it said that Pepperell let the King’s post through while its men lay bleeding at Concord. Midsummer, 1775 I have learned this summer what my two hands can do that I never thought to ask of them. I have followed the plough, and mended the harness, and dosed the sick ewe, and got the hay in with only the boy and old Mr. Procter, who is past seventy and means well. In June came the dreadful news from the hills above Charlestown — a great battle, and our men holding twice before they were thrown back for want of powder. For three days I did not know whether Amos was among the fallen. When the list came it had not his name. It had two I had danced with as a girl. I was ashamed of how glad I was, and then I wept for them and could not stop. Harvest-time We do without, and I have grown near proud of it. There has been no tea in this house since before the troubles; we steep raspberry leaf and call it Liberty Tea and make believe. The salt is so dear I measure it out like silver. What we cannot buy we make: I have set the great wheel by the fire and spin till my back is iron, for every yard of homespun on our backs is a yard the merchants in London do not sell us. The Reverend says our spinning is as good as a soldier’s musket. I should like to see him sit a day at the wheel. January, 1776 This has been the hardest winter of my life. The pox is in the camps, and they say a body is safer to take it on purpose from a doctor than to wait for it to come of its own. I sat up two nights over the choice, and have had the children inoculated, and watched them sicken on purpose — a strange cruelty for a mother to choose. They are mending now, thank God. Amos writes when he can, a few lines, the hand grown worse with the cold. I keep his letters in the Bible at the Psalms and read them over when the house is too quiet to bear. March, 1776 Word to-day that the British are gone out of Boston by sea, driven from the heights without a battle. The whole town set the meeting-house bell ringing. I stood in the dooryard with the baby on my hip and listened to it carry over the old snow and thought, perhaps now he will come home. He did not come; the army follows them yet. But the dread lifted a little, the way a fog will. The 18th of July, 1776 They read out a paper from the meeting-house steps this forenoon, sent up from Philadelphia. It declares the Colonies free, and no longer under the King — and that all men are created equal, and have rights no government may take. The men cheered and fired their guns into the summer air. I held my children by the hand and listened to the grand words, and thought of all that is not in them: the wheel and the plough and the watched road, the two boys on the list, and the long, plain, unwritten labor of women that has kept this country fed and clothed and alive while the gentlemen in Philadelphia found the courage to put it on paper. I do not know what this freedom will cost before it is done. Amos is still in the lines, and the rye will not bring itself in. But I have kept this farm a year and a quarter with these two hands, and I find I am not the woman who watched the men march off and could not sleep. Whatever the great paper promises the men, it has taught me a thing it never meant to — the measure of what I am able to bear. I will set this book away now. There is bread to put in.