“Deborah. Come here,” he insisted.
I descended with swimming eyes and moved to sit beside him in the straw.
“Tell me what is wrong, soldier.”
“Don’t call me that!” I snapped.
“You were one,” he said, unbothered. He picked a piece of straw from my hair and ran his hand down the length of my braid. “You always will be.”
I shook my head, adamant. “I never will be.”
“Deborah,” he murmured, still stroking my hair. I wanted to push him away, and I wanted to draw him closer.
“The Thomases sent ten sons,” I blurted. “Middleborough sent many of her sons, but no one gave more than the deacon and Mrs. Thomas.”
“No one did,” he agreed softly.
“It was my one regret, when I enlisted, that I might cause them more sorrow or shame. I thought I did not care what my mother believed of me. I told myself I did not care aught what anyone in Middleborough thought, though I scurried away like I did.”
His hand tightened in my hair, like he knew to hold on.
“Reverend Conant was gone, and I was glad I couldn’t disappoint him, though I’m not certain he would have been ashamed. He was not that kind of man. He was always so proud of me, in all of my peculiar stages.”
“He saw the wonder of you, just as Elizabeth did. Just as I do.”
I bore down, trying to hold back the water that kept rising, rising.
“I never went back. You know this. I never went back to Middleborough. I allowed the Thomases and my mother to endure the stories and speculation that must have ensued. I never explained. Never thanked them. I just left with my tail tucked between my legs. And after Phineas . . . I never felt like I could.”
“I will take you to Middleborough,” the general offered without hesitation. “If that is what you wish, that is what we will do. We will go to Sproat’s Tavern and the First Congregational Church. And we will tell them who you are and what you’ve done. I will be your witness. I will attest to every word.”
“You will make me respectable.”
“You are respectable.”
I challenged him with a stony glare and trembling lips. “If people knew the whole truth, I would not be. If you were not by my side, I would not be. Not to them. Not to most people.”
“You did something no other woman—to my knowledge—has ever done. You should be proud.”
“I am proud. But I am also deeply . . . ashamed.”
He recoiled like I’d slapped him, but I continued on. There were things that needed to be said. So many things, and if I didn’t say them now, I might as well throw myself into the harbor and let my skirts drag me under.
“You know my ancestry.”
“William Bradford, Myles Standish, John Alden,” he parroted dutifully. Our children had heard the stories too. I’d felt I owed it to my mother.
“Yes. I wonder sometimes if William Bradford knows me the way I’ve always known him. I think he might. Every soul that has ever been born is a pinprick of light in an enormous net, and his light and mine are connected.”
“An enormous net,” he murmured. “Yes. I think so too.”
“But it is not William Bradford I think about most. It is her.”
“Who?” The word was soft, and he had grown still.
“His first wife. Dorothy.”
“Your grandmother.”
“No. I have no relation to her at all. Not by blood. But she is the one I think about.”
“She is the one who threw herself overboard, into the sea,” he said, remembering. “The one who lost her hope.”
“Yes. We are the descendants of his second wife, of Alice, who came to Plymouth Bay in 1623, a widow with two children. She gave William Bradford three more, and one was Joseph, my ancestor. But it is Dorothy I dream of. She haunts me. She cries and asks her son, John, to forgive her. I cry and ask my husband, John, to forgive me. And now . . . my mother haunts me too.”
“Why?” he asked, wiping the tears that had begun to spill over onto my cheeks. I bowed my head and began to weep, and it was not the quiet weeping of frustration or the pained weeping of a bullet in my flesh. It was not even the sorrow of death or the reassertion of life. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it was roiling up from someplace deep, from my well of miseries, a place I thought long dry.
“Deborah. Deborah,” John moaned, pulling me into his arms. “Shhh. Don’t do that. I can’t bear it.” But there were tears in his choked rebuke. I was not prone to tears, and he didn’t know what to do with this version of me. For several minutes, I was too overcome to tell him.