Now 26 years old, Mary Ann Brother, the mother of Civil War Marine Charles Brother, sat in her front room, nursing her baby, “H. H.”, named after Bishop Henry Hobart.
It was 1834, ten years before Charles was born, but it was a familiar chair for her, the same place where she would nurse him too. Here she watched the traffic both on the stairs to the 2nd floor and out on Morris Street in Bath.
Pulling back the curtains, lifting her rear end, Mary Ann watched as Mr. Fowler greeted Mrs. Metcalfe and she returned to her breast, “What turn of events now?”
Soon, Mrs. Metcalfe entered the Brother home with just a short-tempered knock. The baby’s dark eyes shot back at her, reminding her of her husband’s mischievous appetite. “No harm in a good story, right Henry?”
Mrs. Metcalfe reported on the farewell party for the Narcissa Prentiss family, who were moving to Allegany County and then to Angelica. Narcissa, also 26, was an old classmate of Mary Ann’s but not yet married. This was because she had been trained, even pressed, to be a missionary.
Few men could tolerate the constant verbiage from the do-gooders or the thought of converting Indians. Mary glanced down at H. H. “I won’t make you pivot so hard and fast like that, son… How safe you are that I’m too tired!!”
Years later, reading in the biographies about Narcissa, famous for the massacre, Mary Ann winced, unable to stop the nausea, to learn that her friend had only met Mr. Whitman the hour before they married.
Despite being a physician, her groom could not control the disease they brought to the frontier. And Narcissa could not stop their ravenousness and riots over their new friends turning against them.
A Quiet Gossip (Library of Congress)