We feared for our lives when war broke out between the rebels and the British Crown. If any so-called patriot suspected us of aiding our loyalist husbands, we could be jailed or killed, our children left to fend for themselves.
          Our neighbors who had lived beside us for five, ten, twenty years, turned on us swiftly. We saw the mobs gather outside our homes and shout for our men. They razed our fields and set fire to our barns. They watched us choke on the billowing black smoke as we tried to rescue our screaming horses and cows.
          We streamed into New York, a loyalist stronghold, from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts. When we arrived some of us had scarce more than bundles of clothes and coins sewn into the fabric of our skirts.
          Those of us who had resided in the city before the start of the war were mandated to house British soldiers. We let them sleep in our beds and on the floors of our parlors. They brought us carved ivory buttons and tortoiseshell combs and sugar candies for our younger siblings. They told us of their boyhoods in London and Bristol and Liverpool. They asked us to accompany them back to England at the end of the war, and some of us vowed that we would.
          Others were not so friendly. They brandished their swords and swore loudly in front of our children. They drained our wine cellars and ransacked our winter supplies. They cut up our bed frames for firewood. They broke our windows. They left us standing in the ruins of our gutted houses with the feathers from our torn marriage beds drifting about our faces. Two soldiers came to the house of Elizabeth Johnstone, threw her on the bed, threatened to kill her if she screamed, and had their way with her while her child cried and cried. They made no distinction between loyalist or rebel, for we all spoke the same language, practiced the same religion, and had the same manners.
          Some of the men were punished. Others evaded justice and we never knew what became of them. When death sentences were handed down, we went to the hangings and watched with blank faces as the ropes slipped over our tormentors’ necks.
          Some of us decided to follow the army camps. We wanted to be with our men who had enlisted. We feared starvation and rape and murder if we stayed in our homes. Once in camp, the soldiers worked us to the bone. We stirred so much grey porridge we saw it bubbling when we closed our eyes at night. We bathed the sick and wounded. We comforted them when they suffered chills or grapeshot wounds or missed their homes. We stroked their foreheads when they raved with fever and called out for their mothers.
          Some of us spied on the enemy. Anne Bates disguised herself as a follower of the Continental Army and smuggled the information back to her commanders. We chewed secret messages to keep them out of enemy hands. We disguised ourselves as men so that we might serve in battle and infiltrate enemy camps.
          We carried our lives in great baskets on our backs: pots and kettles, furniture and babies.
          We went barefoot. The poorest of us cursed and drank and spit like men, stole so that we wouldn’t starve, and could not afford to retreat from the world when we became pregnant by the soldiers. We picked our way across battlefields to forage for hardtack, whiskey, rainbow-sheened salt beef we knew was really rotting horse. We ignored the blood that soaked our feet, the spill of brains and innards.
         Some of us sold ourselves in camps, forests, brothels. We goaded men into fights, sold them liquor, screamed at the officers who would not give us the provisions we asked for. They called us trulls, doxies, whores, banshees, harpies, hags, jills, bitchfoxy jades.
          In one graveyard we axed the heads of the soldiers who lay with us and tried to cheat us and sent them rolling away into the darkness. They would be found by morning with purple lips parted in shock, peering up from the dry grass with empty eyes.
          We received word that our husbands had died and could not bring ourselves to marry again. We took new husbands almost as soon as we were widowed because we could not bear to be alone. We were true to our husbands and did not touch any man for the entire war. We took lovers and wept with despair and relief when we gave birth to stillborn babies. We drank decoctions of parsley to bring on our bleeding when it was late. We smothered newborns in the dead of winter because our youngest had died and our other six were already starving. We lay down to give birth during marches and were left by the armies we followed.
          When the empire found itself defeated and the world turned upside down, when chaos triumphed over order in a manner none of us believed we would witness until Judgement Day, we fled again, this time to Canada. We boarded tiny, crowded ships bound for Nova Scotia and were greeted by cold gray wilderness after weeks at sea. We held our infants close to our chests to keep them warm and still woke to find their little bodies gone stiff and cold in the night.
          We grieved. Our youngest children grew up without memory of the farms in New Jersey and the townhouses in Philadelphia and the golden sunsets over the harbors in New York. They had never known the fathers, brothers, and uncles whose lives were extinguished on the battlefield. They knew enough to leave us alone when we seemed to gaze at things beyond their sight. Even after all we had endured, we longed for the only places we had ever called home.