The Ballad of Lucy Whipple Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Author's Note

  About the Author

  Clarion Books

  a Houghton Mifflin Company imprint

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003

  Copyright © 1996 by Karen Cushman

  The text is set in 13/18-point Horley oldstyle.

  Title calligraphy by Iskra.

  All rights reserved.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003.

  For information about this and other Houghton Mifflin trade and reference books and multimedia products, visit The Bookstore at Houghton Mifflin on the World Wide Web at (http://www.hmco.com/trade/).

  Printed in the USA

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cushman, Karen.

  The ballad of Lucy Whipple / by Karen Cushman.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In 1849, a twelve-year-old girl who calls herself Lucy is distraught when her mother moves the family from Massachusetts to a small California mining town, where Lucy helps run a rough boarding house and looks for comfort in books

  while trying to find a way to get "home."

  ISBN 0-395-72806-1

  [1. Frontier and pioneer life—California—Fiction.

  2. Family life—California—Fiction. 3. California—

  Gold discoveries—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.C962Bal 1996

  [Fic]—dc20 95-45257

  CIP

  AC

  QUM 10 9 8

  For my parents, Arthur and Loretta Lipski,

  who brought me west,

  and for Phyllis

  CHAPTER ONE

  SUMMER 1849

  In which I come to California fall down a hill,

  and vow to be miserable here

  "Mama," I said, "that gold you claimed is lying in the fields around here must be hidden by all the lizards, dead leaves, and mule droppings, for I can't see a thing worth picking up and taking home." I did not say it out loud, but I sorely wanted to, for I was sad, mad, and feeling bad. The rocking wagon had upset my stomach, my bottom hurt from bouncing on the wooden seat, and my head ached from too much sun and too much emotion.

  It was a hot day in late August, and nothing was moving in the heat but the flies, when our wagon pulled out of the woods and stopped at the edge of the ravine Dense evergreens towered above us, the hillsides so dark with them the mountains seemed almost black, while over all the fierce yellow sun burned in the blue bowl of the sky. All was silent, with an impression of immensity. Later, folks would call it majestic, noble, imposing, magnificent. But not me.

  "Awful," I said, climbing out of the wagon. "Just awful." And I thought with longing of snug spaces, of tree limbs that touched the ground and enclosed safe places within, of the big chair in Gramma Whipple's parlor cozy with the curtains pulled around, of the solidity of Grampop's strong arms and rock walls and houses with porches.

  "California Morning Whipple, quit your mooning and come here and help me," Mama called, so I wiped my sunburned face with the back of my hand and went to help.

  We woke up the little ones and they, along with the mule and the loaded wagon, were pushed and pulled down the narrow ravine path to the bottom. Sierra, being only two, fell once or twice, so Butte, acting grown-up now he was ten, put her on his shoulders and continued pulling back on the wagon so it didn't move too fast. I fell too, but since there was no one to help me, I brushed the dust off my apron and took to skittering down again with Sweetheart, the mule, beside me.

  Finally, in a burst, we skidded down the last feet of the trail to a stop. Everyone, including Sweetheart, was hot and sweaty and dirty. Everyone, especially Sweetheart, was tired and hungry and glad to be done.

  Mama and I stood and looked at the settlement along the river. The air, heavy with heat and dust, burned my nose and stung my eyes.

  "Oh, my, look at this place, California," Mama said.

  I looked. The ground was sunburned and barren except for patches of scrub here and there. Small tents, shacks, and brush-covered lean-tos huddled along one bank of the river. On the dirt path that served as the only street, several large, tattered tents shifted in the wind. The biggest had sulune painted across its front—saloon, I figured, spelled wrong but people seemed to have gotten the meaning all right, judging from the noise inside. The hot wind howled; the tents flapped and creaked; thick dust mixed with the smoke from a hundred cook fires, tinted red by the setting sun. Surely Hell was not far away.

  I took Mama's hand. We'd go home now, of course. How disappointed she must be.

  Mama and Pa had long dreamed of going west, even to naming their family for western places: me, the first, California Morning Whipple; then Butte, Prairie, Sierra, Golden Promise, the lost baby Ocean, and Rocky Flat, the dog.

  When Pa and Golden died of pneumonia the autumn of 1848, people told Mama, "You got to stop dreaming, Arvella, settle down, and take care of them kids." But Mama was not one to listen to what she didn't want to hear—mule stubborn, her own pa used to call her. After grieving for a spell over what was lost, she took a deep breath and started to look toward what was to come. Butte, Prairie, and Sierra were caught up in her excitement, but for weeks I lived in fear of what Mama would do, for our small Massachusetts town fitted her like a shoe two sizes too small. At night I had dreams of fierce storms that blew us to desert islands, of whirlwinds and whirlpools, of great sea monsters that swallowed the whole Whipple family, including Rocky Flat.

  Mama had no patience with what she called my wobblies. She sold the house and stable and feed store, gave the dog to Harold Thatcher at the mill, packed us up like barrels of lard, and in the spring took us on a ship with raggedy sails to seek our fortune in the goldfields of California.

  When we arrived near broke in the mud and garbage that was the Bay of San Francisco, Minnie Oates, who had come from Connecticut to fetch her husband, said, "Face facts, Arvella. My hogs lived better than this. You best come back east with us." But Mama wasn't going back. We lived on that idle ship for eight more days, its captain and crew having abandoned it for the goldfields, while Mama stalked through San Francisco in her black dress, new flowered hat on her head and a copy of The Emigrant's Guide to the Gold Mines (25 cents, 2 cents without the map) tucked in her reticule, talking to everyone who would talk back and finally getting herself a job running a boarding house in a mining town. We took a steamer to Sacramento and then to Marysville, where she bundled up us kids in a wagon, bargained a shopkeeper her copper pot from Gramma Whipple for a mule, and trudged three days through country jagged with hills and mountains, peaks and valleys, blazing sunshine and cold sharp nights.

  All along the way I watched for the gold lying on the ground, the fruit hanging from the trees, the magical possibilities that Mama said awaited us in California. I saw nothing but evergreens, dirt, and sun—hardly even another human being except for some Indian women grinding aco
rns by the side of the road. They looked up as we passed, and their tattooed faces frightened me so that I spent the rest of the journey under my old sunflower quilt, crying for my pa and my home and all that was dear to me. And that's how we came to Lucky Diggins, after six months on ship and steamer and wagon, with everything we owned in two horsehair trunks and a straw basket formerly used to carry chickens in.

  And here we were. Mama sighed. "Look at this place," she said again. "Ain't it grand?"

  "Oh, Mama. Grand?" It looked to me like the wilderness where Jesus was tempted by the Devil. "You said we'd find our fortunes, but I don't see any gold. Only rocks and holes and lizards."

  "Look around, California," Mama said. "Look at the color of the grass, the light trapped in the cracks of the mountains, the sun setting over the peaks. There's gold all around us if you just look."

  "Mama, I am looking. I'm looking for the school, the library, the houses. Mama, I want to go home."

  Mama looked up at the big trees and the mountains and the clear blue sky and smiled. "We are home, and we are going to be happy here."

  I looked down at the dirt. Happy? Towed like a barge around two continents? With no Gram or Grampop? No friends, no school, no big bedroom with Gramma Whipple's quilts on the bed and an apple tree old as Moses outside the window? Happy? Not on your life.

  Dear Gram and Grampop,

  Well, we are here, me having puked my way down the east coast of the States, around the entire continent of South America, and up the west coast to California. Your daughter Arvella and Butte and the babies had what the sailors called sea legs and were all over that ship. All I saw for five months was the bottom of the bunk above me. I have got very skinny. Butte says I look like a stewed witch.

  Mama got herself a job running a boarding house for Mr. Scatter, who owns the saloon and the general store here in Lucky Diggins. He said he was peddling whiskey from a wagon and this is where the mule died so this is where he stayed. The boarding house is a tent. So are the saloon and the general store. I think if you die here and go to Heaven, it too is a tent. Only bigger.

  Lucky Diggins isn't much of a town—just tents and rocks and wind. Besides Mr. Scatter, his grown daughter, Belle, and ourselves, the only inhabitants seem to be prospectors with loud voices and dirty faces, porcupines and grizzly bears, lizards, snakes, and birds. The weather is very hot and it doesn't seem like almost autumn. There are no red or orange leaves. In fact, except for the needles of the evergreens, there are almost no leaves at all. Mr. Scatter says California trees lose their leaves early because summer is so dry and hot. I think they have all fallen off and blown to Massachusetts. That is what I would like to do.

  There is no school and no lending library, no bank, no church, no meetinghouse, no newspaper, no shopping or parties or picnics, no eggs, no milk, and, worst of all, no Gram and Grampop. I miss you very much, Gram's hugs and Indian pudding with fresh cream, Grampop's laugh like a locomotive starting up. I could come home and live with you, couldn't I, and sleep in the room where Mama grew up? Please write and say yes.

  I am now twelve. Yesterday was my birthday but no one remembered, not even me.

  Your loving granddaughter,

  California Morning Whipple,

  formerly of Buttonfields,

  Massachusetts, and now an

  involuntary citizen of

  Lucky Diggins, California

  CHAPTER TWO

  SUMMER 1849

  In which we settle in and I decide to change my name

  The day was hot and still, and I was hiding from Mama, which was not easy to do in a place that was just two tents lashed together. Finally I ran outside to the privy, small and cramped and smelling something awful in the hot sun, but it was private.

  Sitting on the splintery plank seat, I cried from homesickness and desperate longing for Pa, for Golden buried in the Massachusetts dirt, for Gramma Whipple dead last year and Grandpa Whipple gone before I ever knew him, for the reluctant Rocky Flat dragged away by Mr. Thatcher, for Gram and Grampop, whom I could still see waving red handkerchiefs as the ship pulled out of Boston Harbor. I had yet to mourn for picket fences and ice cream socials and the very thought of living in this unfamiliar, unloved, intolerable wilderness, when I heard Mama.

  "California, where the Sam Hill have you got to? California!"

  I could see her feet under the privy door and held my breath until they had passed. California: What an unfortunate name. No one in any book I ever read was called California. I never paid much attention to my name back home, because there it was just a name, like Patience or Angus or Etta Mae. But in California it was not just a name. It was a place, a passion, a promise. It was a name that caused people to notice me, talk to me, remember and expect things. It was in no way the right name for me.

  So I sat back on the privy seat, put my feet up on the door, and searched my mind for a new name. I tried and discarded Rosamund, Louisa, and Desdemona before I settled on Lucy, from Mr. Abbott's "Cousin Lucy" books, which were a bit too preachy for me but were there when I had read everything else in the lending library in the basement of the Buttonfields church. I decided to call myself Lucy because it was not beautiful but ordinary, because it meant nothing but Lucy. Let some Californian be called California; I would be Lucy. It was a very Massachusetts name.

  I knew I didn't fit in Lucky Diggins and I never would. I was no rough, dirty Californian. I was a child of rich green fields and soft Thanksgiving snowfalls, of two-story houses and churches with steeples, of dairies and bake shops and stores, a gentlewoman from the east dragged all unwilling to the wilds of the west. "I am," I called proudly to a fly on the privy door, "a New Englander, with a history and culture and accomplishments!"

  The door rattled. "California! Is that you? Come out of there this minute!" I opened the door and got pulled by my apron strings back into the tents that were supposed to be home now.

  We passed through the front tent, with its table and benches and, behind blankets hung from the tent poles, a bed for Mama and Prairie, a mat for Butte, and the trundle I shared with Sierra and the occasional tree frog or legless lizard Butte would put beneath my quilt to devil me, into the big tent in the rear, full of bunks and boxes and chamberpots for the coming boarders. There Mama put me to work, weaving rawhide strips on wood frames for mattresses and stuffing pillow slips with cornhusks and brush.

  Day followed day with no change—except for the arrival of the cookstove ($11.69 plus delivery charge) Bean Belly Thompson loaded over the mountains and down the ravine—until one morning a strange face appeared at the tent flap, a face with more hair on it than most people have on their whole head.

  "Morning, sis. My tent has been invaded by a tarantula big as a chicken, so I've come to get me a bed. I ain't much for spiders. Name's Jimmy. Folk call me Jimmy Whiskers. Reckon you can tell why." Jimmy Whiskers stroked his beard and smiled the biggest smile I had seen since Pa's. His two front teeth were missing.

  "We've got mice, gophers, and bugs," I said.

  "As long as they ain't spiders," said Jimmy.

  Mama settled with Jimmy Whiskers, who was a giant of a man. He planned to stay through the long, warm autumn and even longer if he was lucky. "I aim to find enough gold to make golden teeth for these here empty gums," he said.

  Then Amos Frogge, all bones and bushy eyebrows, who had come from Texas to be a blacksmith and was building a shed out behind the general store, moved in. And the scowling Mr. Coogan, sunken eyed, scar faced, pinch mouthed, and as friendly as a thunderstorm.

  I mourned my privacy and longed to have just my family about, but when I tried to tell Mama, it didn't come out right.

  "Mama, do we have to have all these strangers living here? I don't..."

  Mama narrowed her eyes and tightened her lips.

  "I mean they're rough and dirty and, well, strangers."

  "Get to know them," Mama said, "and they won't be strangers."

  "But I don't know how to talk to them—"<
br />
  "What do you mean? I've heard you babble like a brook."

  "But Mama, it's different with family You and Butte and Prairie and Sierra and Gram and Grampop and everyone, all family. These strange men..."

  "... pay our keep," Mama interrupted. "Now go beat biscuits for supper."

  Only in the early afternoon, when the babies were sleeping, and Butte was off hunting, and Mama was kneading dough and humming "Of Dan Tucker," and the prospectors were off at the river washing for gold, was I able to escape, be by myself, and hide in a book. The one book I owned was Ivanhoe, won in a school spelling bee. I'd gotten mighty tired of it during the months of travel, but the only other thing around to read was a broadside posted on the general store about titter worm in horses.

  Fortunately Massachusetts had been bursting with books, and all those I had ever read were still there in my head. So one day, good and sick of Ivanhoe, I leaned back against the taut canvas of the tent, closed my eyes, and found a way to leave Lucky Diggins. I became the beauteous Madeline following her lover through icy corridors in "The Eve of St. Agnes" and imagined the lava pouring over my body during the last days of Pompeii. I took on the elegance and culture of Queen Elizabeth and Juliet and Maria Edgeworth's ladies: "Lord Rackrent, how excruciatingly delightful to see you," I murmured to the tent pole and sighed lavishly.

  Looking up, I saw Prairie—almost seven, short and round, big eyes even bigger behind her wire-rimmed spectacles, and nearly the whole of one grubby hand in her mouth, fiddling with a loose front tooth.

  Prairie mumbled something.

  "Take your hand out of your mouth and say it again," I told her.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Never mind. What do you want?"

  "Mama said you would help me find a place for a garden."

  "You can't plant a garden until spring. Why do we have to find it now?"

  "The soil must be got ready, of course, if things are to grow right." Prairie loved growing things. Grampop always said Prairie was like him—just tickled the ground and it laughed beans.