OXFORD, MASSACHUSETTS         
JULY 7, 1769

The plague fell upon our house during the hottest days of summer. Diphtheria. That old, wicked scourge. And even though it did not discriminate among the homes of Oxford, we felt as though it treated our family with particular malice. Ephraim and I waited, certain it would consume the two of us as well, but it did not. Maybe that was the miracle, but it was a bitter one, for we watched each of our children tumble into fever, one after the other, after the other. All six of them limp and coughing, their throats swollen and rashed so badly they could hardly swallow the broth we dripped into their mouths.

That wasn’t the worst of it. The thick gray mucus that coated the backs of their mouths and throats was enough to drive us to our knees. They couldn’t swallow. Couldn’t speak. Could barely breathe.

“Is there nothing we can do?” Ephraim asked, holding Jonathan against his chest, both of their shirts soaked through with fever.

“Cold baths. Broth. Licorice and chamomile for their throats, but that will only soothe the pain, not treat the sores,” I told him.

We did the best we could. We hauled buckets of cold water from the well every day. We soaked the children in the washtub one by one, but no sooner had we dried and clothed them than the fevers returned.

And they cried. Not the angry or frustrated cries that we had grown accustomed to in a house full of children, but whimpers. Soft and weak and helpless. Like mewling kittens.

I held them all as often as I could, but I had six children and only one lap. And even that was crowded by the seventh that grew heavy beneath my ribs. But holding them only seemed to make them worse. Hot. Sweaty. Restless. And yet they all reached for me with limp arms anyway, looked to me with glassy eyes, desperate to feel better.

Our prayers accomplished nothing.

“Why is this happening?” I asked Ephraim that third week in June, as we collapsed into bed, the windows thrown open to let in a meager breeze. We’d spread pallets across our bedroom floor to keep the children close. “What have we done wrong?”

He pulled me to his chest and cupped the back of my head with his big, calloused hand. “It rains upon the just and the unjust, love. And we no more deserve this than our friends or neighbors do.”

We watched our children weaken. Watched their throats swell. Watched the gray caul spread across their windpipes. Watched their lips turn blue and their breath grow shallow. It was Cyrus we worried most about. For two days he hardly moved at all. Our boy, a mere twelve years old, hovered at the point of death for weeks.

But it was Triphene who went first. Triphene, the girl we had named after the first woman I attended in childbed. Five. She was only five years old. One night our daughter crawled into bed with us, tucked herself between our bodies, and when we woke, she was gone. Cold and still, her hair a pale blonde curtain thrown across my arm.

We sent for Elspeth. And even though she could neither see nor help, she stood with us while we took turns doing the impossible. Ephraim dug the hole, then I placed Triphene inside, then he filled it in again, and I set the stone on top. We could not leave the others alone inside lest one of them expire in our absence. We could not expose Elspeth to their illness. But neither could we do what had to be done without comfort or witness. Elspeth was both for us. It was a cruel thing to ask, but she never faltered.

And then she did it again eight days later.

At dusk this time. But Dorothy was only two. She was the child I had named after my mother. And I cradled her in my arms as I wept beside her grave. It lay beside that of her sister, the soil on top still fresh and dark from the week before. The sight of them was fire between my ribs. A void within my soul.

Three days after that we called for Elspeth a third time.

Martha was the one who should have lived.

Martha, our second daughter, the one that Ephraim insisted be named after me. She was eight years old and looked like her father. She seemed the least ill of them all. She never wheezed, never seemed to lose her breath. Her throat was never covered with the rancid gray sores. But her heart—oh God, her heart—grew slower and slower as her illness progressed. It slowed and then it stilled and then the next breath never came. And the weight of her in my arms, wrapped in linen, was the weight of a thousand heartaches.

I don’t remember if I screamed. Or if I cried. In that whole, awful ordeal, it is the one detail I cannot summon from the depths of my memory. I’ve never asked Ephraim. I don’t have the heart.

I was certain then that the sickness would take them all. It would take them and then it would take us and then it would all be over. It’s possible that I even wished for that to happen as it would be the only way we could be together again. As a family. As God intended.

But Cyrus got better. The morning after we buried Martha, he sprang out of bed like a wobbly new calf, wanting water and toast. But when he came to me, asking to be fed, his voice was gone. I’d only heard that voice crack a single time with looming manhood. But now it was gone. Paralyzed by illness. And though we waited—days, months, years—it never returned. Never more than a gentle croak or groan that he soon became too embarrassed to use. His life was spared, but his voice was stolen. And with it, any chance of a normal future.

Jonathan recovered the day after Cyrus. Then Lucy the one after that. Their fevers broke and their coughs faded and their lungs cleared. Their voices never so much as wavered. And when they asked after their sisters, we had only tears for an answer. Though you never think it possible, you can celebrate and grieve in the same breath. It is a holy abomination.

“I want to leave this place,” Ephraim told me as we stood beneath the oak tree where our daughters were laid to rest. “I want to move somewhere else where there is more land. Where we can have a real farm, not just a garden. Somewhere we can start over. Perhaps build a mill.”

“What?” I looked at him as though he’d spoken some other language. I could not comprehend his words. He had carved Martha’s name in the third stone that morning. We had only just set it upon her grave ten minutes earlier. The tears were still fresh on our cheeks, our hearts still an open wound. And he wanted to abandon them? “No,” I told him. “We cannot leave our girls.”

“Martha,” he whispered, pulling me tight against him. “Our girls have left us.

Only once before had I been so angry that I’d slapped him. And, as he had on that hillside the day we married, he grabbed both wrists, startled by my fury.

I shook out of his grasp.

Ephraim pointed to the graves. “They are not here. Not anymore.”

I turned and left him there, alone.