but dead.393 “Why,” she cried, “after nine months of toil, a severe and tedious labor, a yearning panting hope of a living son, [are we] pierced with this sharp sorrow?” To her Puritan forebears, a dead baby was considered a message from God that the parents had sinned.394 Abigail pondered the meaning of the “mysterious little being” that made her “drink from death’s bitterest beaker.395 . . . Oh, for that quickening power to breathe into its nostrils the breath of life.” She could only “wait, pray, hope, live, watch!” For the rest of her life the anniversary of the stillbirth would give “a gray tinge to the world and my Soul.” Bronson felt despair and anger, too. “My thrill of Hope proved a pang of grief,” he wrote in his journal.396 The baby boy was “a Joy in a Winding Sheet” that seemed, mysteriously, “a true son of its mother.” In his own attempt to pinpoint the cause of the stillbirth, Bronson wrote, “So a mother, in a fit of rage, poisons the fountain at which her child draws sustenance, and he dies, slain by her choler.397 . . .
