Imagine my surprise when Morris walked out to greet the Holmeses’ carriage the day I arrived. I confess that I cried when I realized what the general had done, and I subjected Morris to an embrace, which he endured stoically, much the way I did when John first embraced me.
The general had not prepared either of us for the surprise, but when Morris saw me, he just shook his head, saying, “Well, I’ll be. Maggie told me you were a woman, and the general’s woman at that, but I didn’t believe it.” I should have known Maggie would see the truth. The women always did.
The day I arrived in Lenox was eerily similar to the day I arrived at the Thomases’. Both houses were brimming with strangers who needed me, and I had to find my purpose and my place. I realize now that my whole life has prepared me for this. In many ways, you prepared me too.
Unlike when I arrived at the Thomases’, I had no experience in the part I was expected to play at Paterson House. I’d never been a wife or a mother, and instead of being put to work and assigned a servant’s quarters, I was shown to a room that had once belonged to you, a room where all your possessions—even your clothes in the bureau and the wardrobe—still remained.
I found my letters—ten years’ worth—in a wooden chest at the bottom of your bed. It is still your bed. Your home. Your daughters. Your world. Even . . . your John, though he was somehow mine too, even then. The letters are soft and faded, like you enjoyed them often. It was odd, seeing them all together, how my writing changed and grew, lengthening with me.
Hannah discovered me reading the letters beside your open chest one night and summoned her sisters to demand that I “stop snooping in her mother’s things.” I showed them my name at the bottom of each letter.
“Your mother was my very first friend,” I said. “These are my things too.”
Hannah stared at me, suspicious.
“I used to write her letters. So many letters. And she wrote me back. She was a woman of consequence, and everything I was not.”
“You are strange looking,” Ruthie said. “That’s what Grandmother says.”
“Ruthie, that is not kind. You should not repeat private conversation,” Polly scolded.
“It wasn’t private if we all heard it.” Ruthie shrugged, unrepentant.
Polly tried to mediate. “But strange is not bad.”
“Grandmother says you are arresting,” Hannah admitted. “Aunt Anne says your looks are unsettling.”
John had said the same thing, but I did not tell them that.
“Would you like me to read them to you?” I asked. It was late, and they should have been in their beds, but I sensed a miracle at my fingertips. A bridge between us all. They sat around me and I read, starting with that very first letter dated March 27, 1771, which began:
Dear Miss Elizabeth,
My name is Deborah Samson. I’m certain you’ve been warned that I would be writing. I am not an accomplished writer, but I hope to be. I promise I will work very hard to make my letters interesting so you will enjoy reading them and allow me to continue. Reverend Conant tells me you are kind and beautiful and smart. I am not beautiful, but I try to be kind, and I am very smart.
With each letter, I introduced myself to them, as I once introduced myself to you. There are so many, and we read only a smattering that night, but the girls have warmed to me in a way that would not have been possible without our correspondence, and I have wept in quiet gratitude that you kept each missive and prepared a way for me here in your life. Here in their lives. You have prepared us all.
We continued our reading the next day, and the next. They like me to read the letters out loud under the tree where you are buried. They call it Mother’s tree, and I wonder if you are not there listening with them. They laugh at the ninny I was and the ninny I am and marvel that you were once my dearest friend. I marvel at that too, and Proverbs 16:9 has been ever on my mind.
“A man’s heart devises his way: but the Lord directs his steps.”
All my ways, all my steps, have brought me here.
—Deborah
General John Paterson returned home for good in December of 1783. When he left Lenox early on a Saturday morning in 1775, the thirteen colonies were bordered in the west by the Alleghenies. When he resigned his commission at the end of ’83, Lenox was no longer at the edge of the frontier. America stretched west to the Mississippi.
He’d been back only twice in the nearly nine years he’d been gone. Once to bury his sister Ruth in ’77, and once to bury his wife. He did not warn us he was coming, though we had been watching for him since soldiers had begun straggling back after the Treaty of Paris was announced.