My husband’s comfort, in his final years, was Hebrew. Many of our friends had left Plymouth by then. Susanna and Edward built an estate in Marshfield. Captain Standish lived in Duxbury. But us? Though we had the means, we never left the house in Plymouth that William built, just added more rooms.
Nightly, my husband lamented: Their appetite for land has caused the town, like a mother grown old, to be forsaken by her children. Not in affection but bodily presence … it will be the ruin of New England … and will provoke the Lord’s displeasure against them.
I told him to rest. I told him it would be as God intended.
He tested his life’s work and teachings to God’s original language. To get as close as he could to God’s words, he learned Hebrew. After thirty years as governor, he was a child again, learning language, and delighted in what he could recall, and agitated at what phrases he could not hold together. Sometimes, he wrote poetry that spoketh of God making this banquet in the wilderness for us. But my husband disputed over riverways with Dutch companies, both parties presenting Indian deeds they claimed were granted to them. Eight years after Billington’s punishment, Governor Winthrop asked for my husband’s help in securing safety for colonists to the north and soldiers my husband did send. The Lord blessed their endeavors. They slew or took in seven hundred Pequot Indians. The men not slain would not endure the yoke and were sold by Governor Winthrop to investors in Bermuda in exchange for African slaves, as were the male children. The women and girls were disposed about in the towns. Those that arrived to be our lifelong servants appeared so terrified that it was a fright to receive them.
That same year, it pleased God to bless Plymouth with several healthy calves, but also that year there was a fretful earthquake, heard before it was felt. What gave God such displeasure? The world rumbled, coming northward, which caused the platters and dishes that stood upon our shelves to clatter and fall down, and caused I myself to fall. People were afraid of the houses themselves. But my husband said henceforth that the summers were not so hot after the earthquake and therefore quite favorable for the growth of our corn.
One morning, William woke from bed, as the sun was cresting above the sea line. He turned to me, lighter in spirit than I had seen in months. He ran his hand along my thigh, upward.
Good Husband, I said. It had been years.
He found his way betwixt my linen slip, and placed his middle finger at the source of all my body’s tingling. He circled his finger there.
My husband said, I have just seen the entertainments of Paradise.
I bid him to stop what pleasure he was wishing to give me. So near it seemed he was, to the end, and so oddly joyous now. Is this profane? I wondered, but did not speak it. My husband continued.
We lay there, together, him and I. If these were his final moments, this was not the deathbed scene I would tell our children, our townsfolk, or the colony.
He closed his eyes and kept them that way. I closed my own.
Here we were. He was sixty-seven.
I let out little puffs of breath.
He said, My dove in the clefts of the rock.
I turned and kissed him and thought of that first time, on the shores of Plymouth.
The days tending to his care had left me more tired than I’d let myself realize. I had forgotten what pleasure could feel like.
Afterward, we both drifted asleep. When I woke, his hand was still betwixt my legs, but it was cold. I startled upright. I thought him dead. But he was not yet dead. God granted him two more weeks.
The final hours of a man reveal him.
On the ninth of May, in the year of our Lord sixteen hundred and fifty-seven, at sixty-seven years of age, my husband, William Bradford, said, I have heard God. He promises happiness in another world.
He said: Farewell, dear wife. I love thee. Your better husband is above.
To heaven he went, our dearest country. We buried him on the summit of Burial Hill in sight of the sand hills of Cape Cod.