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WE WERE QUIET for a few moments after Amanda stopped reading. I finally asked, "Does anybody know anything about Isaiah? Did he even survive?"
Around me, women shook their heads, but nobody spoke for quite a while.
"I’d almost be willing to bet John’s wife was Rh negative," Amanda said. "All those miscarriages."
"It’s possible," Maddy said. "They didn’t discover the Rh factor until the late 1940s."
"Nice to know," Charlie muttered beside me. I ignored her sarcasm.
"It’s certainly a possibility," Carol said, "but we can’t jump to conclusions that aren’t supported by data."
So much could go wrong, I thought.
Although Ida and Amanda dutifully read the 1774 journal entry and letter, I have to say none of us thought they were very interesting. Just a lot—quite a lot—about the speed with which her older two grandchildren were growing. But not little Isaiah, who continued to lag behind all the other children of the town. There was just one reference to him.
Isaiah is a year old now, but he acts and appears more like a babe of half that age. He is biddable and good-tempered, though, with a sweet smile.
Mary Frances clearly loved him, as did his father. Whatever happened to Isaiah—for he seemed to have disappeared from the history of the town—I was convinced he must have died peacefully in the middle of a loving family.
We perked up, though when Ida started the next entry. "Tuesday," she read. "Eighteen April 1775."
Dee let out a hoot, sounding something like a steam engine. "This was the night Paul Revere rode—just like you said a little while ago, Maddy—and Mary Frances didn’t know about it yet."
"I bet she’d never heard of Paul Revere," Glaze said.
"I wonder if she ever heard about Sybil Ludington," Carol said.
"I know you mentioned her a while ago," Dee said, "but I don’t remember the details."
"Sybil Ludington was sixteen years old," Carol explained, "when she rode forty miles—that’s twice as far as Paul Revere rode—to alert the militia of a British attack on Danbury in April of 1777."
"Why hasn’t anybody ever heard of her?"
I thought Pat’s question was a good one. "I certainly never did." I looked at Glaze, who shrugged. I guess she never had, either.
"Remember," Carol said, "history’s written by the winners and, in most cases, by men."
"Or Longfellow," Esther said. "His poem is the only reason most of us know about Paul Revere."
Ida sighed and lifted the journal.
Tuesday 18 April 1775
My thirty-fourth year without my dear Hubbard, and yet I feel so close to him, for my son and the two oldest of my grandchildren might as well have had their faces built with Hubbard in the mind of the Creator. They look so like him. I still am astonished that the people from the original company who knew Hubbard back in Brandtburg—I do believe that is the first time in thirty-four years that I have written that town’s name—do not recognize him in my family’s countenances.
"Guess she never heard about genetics," Pat said.
"I don’t think it had been invented back then," Maddy said. "When was the monk with the peas?"
"Gregor Mendel," Carol said. "Not until the mid-eighteen hundreds, but people knew early on that there were certain traits that seemed to run in families."
"Yeah," Melissa said. "Remember how Mary Frances has mentioned several times about the big noses that all the Hastings men had?"
"Can we look at that sketch of Hubbard and John again?" Amanda sounded like she had something more than mere curiosity on her mind.
Maddy retrieved it and walked around the circle so we could all see it again. "So, what’s up, Amanda?"
"That Hubbard and today’s Hubbard," Amanda said.
Sadie interrupted her. "You’re right!"
"What?" I couldn’t figure out what was going on. "What did I miss?"
"If Hubbard Brandt’s gene line was so strong, why doesn’t Hubbard Martin look anything even vaguely like this sketch of Hubbard Brandt?"
"There have been several family traits that have made it all the way down through the generations," Rebecca Jo said, picking up on Maddy’s train of thought. "The Hastings nose that Melissa mentioned, for instance. Then it went to the Hoskins boys, probably through Rose Hastings, who married Baxter Hoskins."
Sadie nodded. "Perry Hoskins had an enormous nose, just like his dad."
I thought about the picture of the fair-haired man in my silver pendant. Large nose indeed. It was a good thing the baby girls never seemed to inherit that particular trait.
"That’s right," Rebecca Jo said, "and it’s been just as many generations from Robert Hastings to Perry Hoskins as it was from Hubbard Brandt to Hubbard Martin."
"Maybe the Martin—Brandt—line isn’t as strong a gene set," Amanda said, but I didn’t think she sounded like she believed it.
"I wish we had pictures of all the town chairs from way back when." Melissa looked at Maddy, almost as if Maddy could make it happen.
"You mean," Pat said, "that way we could figure out just where somebody stopped inheriting the Brandt genes because they weren’t a Brandt."
"People have been fiddling around like that since the beginning of time," Carol said. "No reason why it couldn’t have happened here in Martinsville."
"Did he ... Hubbard ... our Hubbard"—Maddy was having a hard time identifying the subject of her sentence. "Did Hubbard Martin’s dad have the high forehead Mary Frances always talks about?"
Sadie and Rebecca Jo looked at each other. "Yep," they both said.
"Did Hubbard have it, too?" No wonder Carol asked. She’d never seen Hubbard Martin. "The high forehead, I mean?"
All of us who’d known Hubbard Martin looked at each other. "Nope," we said, almost as one. In fact, the more I thought about it, Hubbard’s one distinguishing characteristic, other than his stubbornness, was his nose. Wide. Bulbous. Almost a Hastings nose.