The Ballad of Lucy Whipple Read online

  Dear Gram and Grampop,

  Please do not address yours truly as California anymore, California Morning Whipple being a foolish name for a duck much less a girl. I call myself Lucy now. I cannot hate California and be California. I know you will understand.

  I miss you so much. A prospector who slept here one night had two mules, which I had to feed. I called them Gram and Grampop. The lady mule was gray like Gram and the other laughed just like Grampop.

  With much love from your

  granddaughter,

  Lucy Whipple

  CHAPTER THREE

  AUTUMN 1849

  In which Mama tries to make me a mighty hunter

  and I finally get hungry enough to shoot

  "If you want to eat, missy, you are going to have to find a way to put food on this table," said Mama, sweeping at my feet with her broom.

  Lord-a-mercy, I thought, fixing Mama with my fiercest glare. Don't I do enough what with helping to cook and wash for all those hairy strangers in the bunks in the back tent? Don't I teach Prairie her letters, her numbers, and a little about the history of Massachusetts each morning? Isn't that enough?

  "Not nearly enough," said Mama, as if reading my mind. She snatched Ivanhoe from my hands and tossed it into the soapy water of the laundry tub. With a yelp I fished it out and spread it in the sunshine to dry. I expected it would soon be as good as new except for some wrinkled pages, but I decided I'd better take Mama seriously.

  "What do you want me to do, Mama?"

  "Take this shotgun and shoot us some rabbits or a squirrel."

  "But Mama, I can't go shooting little animals!" I didn't relish the idea of shooting living things. I was much too sensitive, and the powder would make my hands stink.

  "Don't Mama me. What do you think stew is? And bacon? Meat. From animals. Butte can't hunt, now he has his job with Mr. Scatter, so you will have to do it." Butte was sweeping and stacking at the general store and had started calling himself the man of the family, until Mama grabbed his nose and said, "No, you ain't the man of this family. There is no man in this family, only a lady and some little children, and that will have to do." Didn't keep him from swaggering and counting his pay in front of me before he gave it to Mama. For all he was just ten, almost two years younger than me, Butte sure could lord it up.

  "Couldn't we just buy meat from the store?"

  "One, Mr. Scatter doesn't get much meat. Two, what he does get is too darned expensive. Three, I have a perfectly able daughter with a perfectly good trigger finger."

  "Prairie doesn't do anything but watch Sierra and pull weeds. She could hunt."

  "Prairie is only six. It will have to be you. I can't feed three hungry boarders and the five of us on beans and the bits of salt pork and dried beef Bean Belly Thompson hauls in from Sacramento every few weeks. Now go."

  Mama shoved the shotgun into my hands and pushed me out the door quick as a cat.

  My pa had taught me and Butte to shoot back home, but I never took to it, preferring a book any day to the jolt and noise and smell of shooting. Now Pa was dead and we had come west and Mama was trying to make a westerner out of me.

  The first morning I sat on a stump outside the tent and fretted. The place was so wild, just trees and hills and tents. I could almost see wild Indians coming up the Sacramento River to the Yuba and up the Yuba to the Forks and on to Lucky Diggins, right to where I sat on the stump with a gun in my lap.

  Near noon I saw a movement in the dry grass. It looked like feathers. Indians! I bolted into the tent.

  "I had to come back, Mama," I said. "I saw feathers and..."

  "I know, I know," said Mama. "They were wild Indians and you were in imminent danger of being captured and living the rest of your life on acorns and roasted grasshoppers."

  "But Mama..."

  "But Mama nothing. That was most likely a wild turkey you let get away." Mama sighed. "Go feed Prairie and Sierra."

  That night we had no meat for supper. I, in fact, had no supper at all and wouldn't, so Mama said, until I brought home something to eat.

  I watched the rest eat their beans and biscuits. "If I were with Gram," I muttered, "I would be eating chicken from Larrabee's farm or store-bought bacon."

  Mama said nothing.

  The second day I sat three hours on the tree stump with the gun in my lap, imagining myself as the dashing Ivanhoe's secret love, as beautiful as Rowena and as plucky as Rebecca but much smarter and better read.

  Suddenly there was a rustling in the grass. "Mama!" I ran for the tent. "There's something out there. Sounded like a grizzly or..."

  Mama banged the skillet down on the cookstove. "Lord, you are the spookiest child. When you were little, wind spooked you. Lantern light blinking in the window spooked you. The clown at Hallelujah Purdy's Circus and Hippodramatic Exposition spooked you." She picked up a spoon and waved it at me. "Now you're near grown up, you've gotten worse instead of better. Grizzlies! Indians! Won't shoot a gun! Want to lie around with your nose in a book! What is to become of you, girl?" Mama plopped a gob of bacon grease into the skillet and shook her head. "Every tub has to learn to stand on its own bottom sometime."

  I got no supper again, but I must allow that in a curious way I was proud of myself. I might starve to death, but I'd go a New Englander.

  The third day I ventured off the stump. I watched a blue jay gather buckeyes from a tree overhanging the ravine, followed a lizard as it skittled from sunny spot to sunny spot, made shadow pictures of a fox, a duck, and a swan on the canvas of the tent. And I went to visit Sweetheart, the old mean and ugly mule with one brown and one white ear who had brought us to Lucky Diggins.

  Sweetheart lived behind the tent in a shelter Butte and I had made of canvas draped over a framework of tree branches. Missing Rocky Flat, the barn cats, and Gram's canaries, we tried to love Sweetheart. For the mule's part, she'd as soon bite. And she did. I rubbed the red spot on my arm that would soon turn into a bruise and returned to the stump.

  Finally, hungry and afraid to push Mama any further, I closed my eyes, pulled the trigger a few times, and, lo and behold, shot a squirrel. It was blasted near to pieces and no good for anyone to eat except a dog or a coyote but I took it into the tent, dropped it on the table, and lay down on my bed to read Ivanhoe.

  "I plan to rent out your bed," said Mama, "to someone who will pay for it. Kindly remove your carcass."

  At that I realized Mama's stubborn streak was a mile wider and a good deal deeper than mine. I sat outside the cabin day after day shooting rabbits and squirrels and any wild creature that moved until I discovered that I didn't mind killing birds as much, so we ate prairie chicken every day and would, I said, until someone else agreed to do the hunting. Jimmy Whiskers said prairie chicken with biscuits and lard gravy didn't taste bad at all, but the buckshot sure was hard on his gums.

  Mr. Coogan said nothing but looked at me as though I were a hog and he a butcher. I had a bad feeling about that man.

  Dear Gram and Grampop,

  More boarders have moved in, but we are far from full and won't be until spring. Amos Frogge says some miners are thieves and drunkards, men of bad habits and worse dispositions; others can be counted as the finest folk on God's green earth. I'm sick of them all—dirty boots and dirty sheets, loud voices and big appetites.

  We have to eat supper with them every night. Mr. Coogan near ruins it for me with his scowling and muttering and all-around bad nature. He isn't a miner like Jimmy or a blacksmith like Amos. I don't know what he does or is—except mean. He smacked Prairie once for spilling coffee on some papers he had, and Mama didn't even say a word to him.

  If we didn't have the only boarding house in town,

  Mama would be even more worried about business than she already is. Her cooking is no worse than it was at home, but her baking is so bad that I have, in desperation, taken it over, except that Mama still makes the bread. She claims I get too dreamy while kneading. Butte and the babies and I are used to Mama
's hard, dry bread, but we don't have to pay for it. The boarders haven't complained much though, even Mr. Coogan. And they eat as if it were fancy cooking sent us by the Vanderbilts in New York.

  Jimmy Whiskers has built me a shelf next to my bed. It kind of wobbles, but I put on it stacks of my aprons and stockings, a shell from the Massachusetts shore, my copy of Ivanhoe, and an empty herring tub where I plan to keep your letters, when they come. Jimmy says writing letters is like tossing words to the wind, for the mail takes three months or more to get all the way to Massachusetts and three months or so to get back here, if it doesn't get stolen by outlaws, lost in a landslide, or sunk to the bottom of the sea. He says writing letters is an act of faith.

  Except for letters, I'm not strong on faith these days. I had faith Pa would always be with me and he died. I had faith that I'd be safe at home and here I am stuck in this wilderness. I suspect I'm about out of faith.

  Love to you both from your

  granddaughter,

  Lucy Whipple

  With the heat of the day and the blazing of the cook stove, the tent stayed hot as the Bad Place until well after dark. Finally I got out of bed and went outside in search of a breeze. The sky was full of stars. They looked almost like fireflies, but you can't catch them in your hands. I knew better than even to try.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  AUTUMN 1849

  In which I remember La, tell Prairie,

  and find some comfort therein

  "Call me Lucy," I finally said to Prairie.

  "Mmph?" said Prairie. I pulled her hand from her mouth. "Why?" Prairie said again.

  "I want it to be my name."

  "Why?"

  "I don't like California."

  "Why?"

  "It doesn't suit me—neither the name nor the place."

  "Why?"

  "Tarnation! I swear if you ask me why one more time I'll chop you up and feed you to the lizards."

  "Wh—"

  I shoved Prairie's hand back into her mouth. "Mercy! Mercy! Ask me anything but no more why."

  "Why not?" Prairie fairly gleamed at her own cleverness. "All right, all right. Then answer this: What did our pa look like? Did he look like me?" Prairie was too young to remember him well.

  I didn't much like talking about Pa, for it made me miss him terrible instead of just ordinary bad. Sometimes when a longing for Pa would get so big it was hurtful, I'd close my eyes and press the hog-bristle scrub brush to my cheek and pretend it was his red and scratchy beard and that he was not buried in the Massachusetts ground at all but was holding me on his lap, singing about California Morning to the tune of "The Holly and the Ivy," the way he did when I couldn't sleep.

  "Well," I said this time, "you have blue eyes, like he did, not no-color like mine. But you are little and plump and run around like a steam engine. Pa was the skinniest man I ever saw. He had red hair and a big laugh, and he liked nothing better than just lying in the fields looking up at the sky."

  Pa had been a reluctant shopkeeper, inheritor of a stable and feed store from his own dead pa, and dreamer of dreams about better things—new places, big land, out west, toward the setting sun.

  "On Sundays," I told Prairie, surprised to find a bit of comfort in the remembering, "he wouldn't put on his overalls. He would take clean woolen pants kept under the mattress to press them, and wear a clean shirt Mama had ironed with the heavy flatiron and his best coat and the paisley scarf he got in Boston. Sundays, when he could escape Gramma Whipple's eye, he wouldn't go to church at all but into the world beyond the town, often toting me along with him."

  Sometimes we walked in the woods, I told Prairie, other times rode on Pa's horse to Oakbridge and ate cold meat and apples on the village green, and in winter took the sleigh through the frozen fields, holding hot potatoes in our gloved hands to keep them warm. Once I asked Pa where the water from the creek went, so we followed it to the stream and then to the river and all the way to the sea. I was frightened by the noise and the vastness of the water but, as always, putting my hand into Pa's big brown one made me feel safe.

  The last Sunday in the October before we left Massachusetts, Pa and I walked in the woods to see the changing leaves, and he talked again about moving west. Word of the gold lying in the California streets and fields had reached Buttonfields, and Pa and Mama were more anxious than ever to go.

  "Gramma Whipple used to say it is wicked to want more than you have," I told Pa. "She said we should just stay put and thank God."

  "Your Gramma Whipple was a scared old lady with a hard life, California. Doesn't mean you should be scared of new things. Change is coming. It's in the air. People are opening their eyes and looking around and seeing there's more to this world than stables and fields and the general store."

  "I like the general store."

  He waved his hand. "I mean there is a whole world out there, and we are going to get us some. Just think, California, of the mountains and deserts and vast unknown places we'll see. It will be quite a change from this dull Massachusetts town."

  "I like things the way they are."

  "I know, but everything changes."

  "Why do they, Pa? Seems I just get used to green leaves when they turn red, just start liking red leaves when they fall. Or I just get used to baby Sierra and she's up and walking. Or people start moving away and places change. Why can't life just stay the way it is?"

  "Life changes. That's the way of it. This old Greek fellow Heraclitus said there is nothing permanent except change, and I reckon he was right."

  I don't know where my pa got his information. He'd had no schooling since he was twelve, and we owned no books except my Ivanhoe, but he knew all sorts of things. I didn't care if they were true or not; I believed them all.

  As we walked, he pointed out objects to me as he always did—birds' eggs, a snakeskin, bits of pottery and flint chips from the Indians who'd lived there before. "Look," he'd say, "look, California." Mama always said look was Pa's favorite word; it meant admire, wonder, goggle at the beauty and excitement all around us. I'd look at whatever it was and pick it up and lock it away in the wooden box I called my treasure chest.

  That Sunday he said, "Look," and there was a woodpecker tap-tap-tapping at a fallen log right in front of us. The tapping was so loud the bird did not hear us approach, and Pa reached right out with his big gentle hands and grabbed it. He calmed it by stroking its red feathered head and then brought it close so I could feel the beating of its heart beneath the softness of its feathers. The bird looked right at me, eyes bright in a black eye mask, so it seemed very like a tiny bandit in a red hat.

  "Let's keep it, Pa. We could build it a cage."

  "No, California, this is a wild thing."

  "But it would be much safer in a cage by the house than out here in the wild."

  "There are more important things than being safe, daughter," Pa said.

  "Not to me," I said.

  I couldn't keep the woodpecker, but I did get a red feather for my treasure chest. I couldn't keep my pa either. Three weeks later he was dead of pneumonia and the baby Golden with him. They were buried together so that only one hole would have to be dug in the frozen ground.

  I think Golden must have liked that. I would have if it were me, snuggled up against Pa's side with my cheek against his hog-bristle-scrub-brush-like red beard. I put my treasure chest in with them. And there they all are to this day.

  Dear Gram and Grampop,

  It is odd to think you will not get this letter until after Christmas. Butte thinks it silly of me to write, but it makes me feel closer to you.

  If I were home right now, Gram and I would be making squash pies and pear butter and stringing apple slices to dry before the fire, and the air would be heavy with their tangy smell. Butte would be out early to check the size of the pumpkins and likely drop a big load of dry leaves on Prairie and Sierra, who would laugh.

  Instead we are here in California, working too hard and doing none of those things, an
d it is hot, and I am a stranger in a land where they even speak a different language, full of derns and dings and have you a pickaxe about your clothes? The prospectors frighten me, being so loud and dirty, as well as the rowdiest bunch I ever did see, fighting and cussing and getting drunk as ducks, liquor being cheaper than food. One night we heard gunshots and looked out to find that someone had shot out the lanterns in the saloon and run off with all the gambling money. I was wishing Pa was here, but he's not and I am. I am bodaciously sorrow-burdened and wretched!

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AUTUMN 1849

  In which I go into the pie business,

  and Butte is overtaken by gold fever

  Early nearly every day I mixed and patted and rolled crusts for pies. I sprinkled sugar on them, pricked the crusts in swirling designs with the prongs of a fork, admired my artistry, and baked them for supper. Fresh apple was my favorite, but we didn't have fresh apples. We had to settle for dried-apple and, sometimes, even vinegar pie, just vinegar and sugar, with the only apples supplied by our imaginations.

  One fine morning I took a fistful of dried apples to munch on and went out and sat on the stump until my bottom grew sore, trying to come up with a way to get back home to Massachusetts. Here I was in gold coun try with fortunes being dug out of the ground. If I could figure out how to divert some of it my way, I had shot my last squirrel, surprised my last lizard, boiled my last sheet, seen my last min—

  "Pardon me, little sister, might you have some water about you?"