The Ballad of Lucy Whipple Page 6

  "Do you think she's dead?"

  "I reckon so. No one rightly knows."

  "If she's alive, I wonder what she looks like now." Butte snickered. "If she's dead, I wonder what she looks like."

  "Butte, how morbid and awful."

  "I wonder what Pa looks like now."

  "Butte!"

  I hurried on ahead, bucket bumping against my legs and more of the precious water splashing my skirt. But Butte, skinny and fast like Pa, caught up with me. "I don't mean to be morbid, Luce. He's still my pa, even now, and I wonder what he looks like, is all. Is his skin hanging in tatters? Is he just bones? Are his fingers and toes—"

  "Butte, you're making me sick. Why do you think about things like that?"

  "Sometimes I like to think of things that are bad or scary, kind of like practicing for being brave. I have to be brave now that Pa's dead and except for me you're all females."

  "Females can be brave too, Butte."

  "Yeah, but you ain't very and I'm the next oldest so I reckon it's up to me. I don't think I'd be near as brave if I didn't feel I had to."

  I stopped in surprise. I never knew that. Figured Butte was just naturally all guts and go-get-it.

  I put down the bucket and rumpled his hair. It shone red in the sun. Like Pa's. "Seems like I'm getting educated today as well as you."

  Dear Gram and Grampop,

  All of a sudden I am grown mighty popular and it is all due to the box of books from Miss Homer. Men I have never spoken to this past whole year come up to me, hat in hand, and say, "Excuse me entirely, little sister, but I hear you might have some books for borrying."

  I have become a one-person lending library. My library has two rules:

  1. I get to read books first.

  2. No chewing tobacco stains.

  I used to have a third rule—Return what you borrow to ME. Do not lend it to someone else—but everyone broke that rule. Besides, the books always come back to me eventually, so I have eliminated rule number three.

  Some of my books have gone fifty miles or so up and down the river and have come back with notes inside: "Ripping good story, miss!" or "What a conbobberation about nothing" or "Might you have one where the heroine has yellow hair and is called Marthy?"

  One miner wrapped about five dollars' worth of dust in a cigarette paper and put it between pages twenty-four and twenty-five of "Rip Van Winkle" and it was still there when the book came back to me. I have used it toward paying off Bean Belly Thompson for carrying the books.

  Next time you visit Pa's grave, please plant some flowers on it for Butte and me, larkspur if you can find it for we have that here and I would like to think we are looking at the same thing, even if I look at the flowers and he the roots. Mama says Pa is in Heaven with God, but the last time I saw him he was in a box in the ground in Massachusetts, so that is how I tend to think of him. Not that I don't believe in God. I do. I'm just not sure that I believe in Heaven, at least not like I believe in the public library.

  Writing about Pa made me more than ever homesick for Massachusetts, so I got my pickle crock and tried to guess how much money was left in it. I counted the coins and attempted to weigh the gold dust by holding it in one hand and a half pound of lard in the other. I still didn't know just how much was there, but I knew it was not near enough. Sighing a big sigh, I went to the kitchen to chop onions and cabbage for slaw.

  CHAPTER TEN

  AUTUMN 1850

  In which, I though unwilling, pick berries in the

  wilderness and am rewarded with a new friend

  September came clear and hot. Blackberry weather. And dewberry, elderberry, and huckleberry.

  "Why do I have to go picking and not Prairie?" I asked Mama. "She wants to go and I don't."

  "Prairie is only seven. I don't want her wandering alone out there."

  "Mama, you shouldn't want me wandering alone. I'm the one who gets lost and Prairie's the one who finds me. She'll do better than I will."

  "Nevertheless," Mama said, and I knew that I and not Prairie would be berry picking.

  Each morning I gathered up my wits and my buckets, hid The Count of Monte Cristo under my apron, and trudged away to the hillside off Ranger Creek. The hot summer had dried the grass and turned the oats yellow too soon, but the berry bushes still tangled along the creek.

  I quickly settled into the work. From late morning to noon I'd read in the shade of a tree. At noon I'd eat my biscuits and cold gravy. Early afternoon, yearning for the cool waters of spring, I'd stick my feet in the warm, sticky mud of the creek and read some more. Late afternoon would find me running from bush to bush, grabbing frantically at whatever berries I could reach. And at night I'd try and explain to Mama why berry picking was going so slow.

  After several days of this I reached an especially exciting part of the book, and before I knew it, late afternoon was almost gone and the first evening stars were getting ready to come out. I jumped up and ran for the buckets.

  They were full.

  From a bush came a voice, slow and soft: "Don't be scared, missy. I noted that you looked to be running out of daylight afore you run out of book, so I thought to lend a hand."

  "Thank you," I whispered, and took off for home, buckets bouncing and spilling berries all the way, wondering was it elves or fairies or was God speaking to me from a bush the way He spoke to Moses.

  The next day I looked around a little for tiny footprints or signs of burning before I sat down to read.

  "Morning, missy," said the voice from the bush. "Looks like we're in the same business, you hunting God's bounty in the bushes and me in the creeks."

  The stranger parted the bushes and looked through. He was no elf or fairy. He was a grown man with curly hair and whiskers. And he was brown. Very brown. Not like the sailors from the Sandwich Islands we had seen in San Francisco. Browner. He was not an Indian, for he wore more clothes than the Indians I'd seen around Lucky Diggins. Nor was he from South America like Friday in Robinson Crusoe, for his hair was not long and straight like Friday's.

  I had never met a brown man before. There were none in our small Massachusetts town. I had heard that the barber in Acorn was the kind of brown man called colored man. Was this a colored man like the barber? My thoughts were so busy I stood stock-still and stared.

  The brown man came out from behind the bush, lifted his pan in a salute, and walked down to the creek, where he swished that pan in the muddy ooze all day trying to wash gold from the gravel. I picked some and then ran home to help Mama make soap.

  "Mama," I said, carrying out a bucket of meat scraps and bacon grease, "I saw a brown man. A colored man."

  Mama looked up from the bubbling tub but said nothing. I could barely see her for the smoke from the fire and the steam rising from the kettle.

  "Why are some people brown?" I asked her.

  "Some people are brown like some people got red hair. We all belong to God," Mama said, stirring the boiling fat and ashes in the kettle.

  "Are colored people same as us?"

  "Probably have harder lives but otherwise I reckon so, though not everybody agrees. Some people think what you look like makes you what you are." Mama straightened up and stretched. "Only have to know Jimmy Whiskers to know that ain't so, such a good gentle heart in such an ugly bear of a man."

  I saw the brown man every day as I continued picking berries and soon came to trust his soft voice, sad eyes, and kind face behind the scruffy beard. Sometimes he spoke, sometimes not. Sometimes he left me berries or greens, pigweed or miner's lettuce, which I took home for supper.

  His name was Joe. He sang while he worked, songs full of sadness and longing.

  "What you readin' there, missy?" he asked once.

  "A tale of romance and adventure," I said.

  Well, nothing would do then but for him to join me. Soon we were both sitting with our feet in the mud of Ranger Creek, swapping stories. He told me of Anansi the Spider, old John and the Devil, and Bruh Rabbit, who was
puny but smart. Then I would read out loud a spell. He greatly admired my reading and asked all the right questions: "Lord, what made him do that?" and "Couldn't she tell what a villain he was?"

  Sometimes we shared my noon dinner, but he'd never eat bacon or salt beef. "Give me hog and hominy, and I'll live on hominy," he said. "Pigs is living critters treated like things, the way I was, and I'll not be eatin' 'em."

  I finally got up the courage to ask the question Mama had failed to answer satisfactorily. Why are some people brown Joe?"

  "Good Lord saw fit, and I figure I don't need a better reason than that."

  Seemed like that was all the answer I was going to get. How did you come here? No other people like you around"

  Joe wiped the sweat off his face with his sleeve. "I spent all my born days on Mr. Sawyers place in Virginia, jist Sawyer and the missus and me and four other slaves. I never can remember anyone of my own. Mr. Sawyer, he decides that farm ain't enough for him, and he brung us out west. Near the Big Muddy, Mrs. Sawyer says, 'John, I ain't going a step farther and set fire to the wagon." Joe scooped up a mess of muddy water in his pan. "Lord, what a stubborn lady. They hadn't settled the dispute when she up and died of camp fever." He whirled the pan so that the water and lighter particles splashed out. "So Mr. Sawyer bought another wagon and we come to Paddy's Bar, miners like thousands of others. At least we five were. Since Mrs. Sawyer died, Mr. Sawyer took to drink and jist sat and waved his rifle about and beat us if he thought there wasn't enough dust at the end of the day." Joe picked through the muck left at the bottom of the pan, looking for bits of color. Nothing in that pan. He stooped and scooped up another.

  "One day a scraggly old fella on a mule says, 'Why do you take it? No slavery in California, you know.' I didn't know if he was right or he was wrong, but I saw this as my chance to take off, saying to Mr. Sawyer, 'You can shoot me, but you can't own me no more.' Mr. Sawyer, he was too dumb and too drunk to know was this true or not, just fell off his horse, so I left. Took nothing but this here pan and a pick and a bedroll; figured he owed me for all my free labor."

  Joe stood up straight and stretched, then stooped down to scoop again. "I ain't found much since, just work tired-out claims others have abandoned. But what I find is mine. The belly that gets hungry is mine and the shoulders that ache are mine and the hands that bleed are mine and no other man's. I ain't no slave out here. While I'm on my own, I'm as good as free, and being free is everything."

  His story sounded to me like one of Amos Frogge's ballads—coming across the country by wagon, escaping from a drunken master, fleeing alone into the wilderness to search for gold, living as a runaway slave.

  One thing I didn't understand. "What's it mean being a slave?" I knew about slaves in ancient Rome, but somehow I didn't think Mr. Sawyer planned to feed Joe to the lions.

  "A slave is a fella who belongs body and soul to another fella and has to do what he is told and go where he is bid and gets beat if he don't do it fast enough or good enough."

  "Like being a child," I said.

  "Nowhere near, missy. Chil'ren is loved and taken care of. A slave don't even own his own life or his wife or babies. A slave is a thing, like an axe or a bucket. Can be bought or sold or killed, whatever his owner wants. Ain't no light thing for a man to be a slave." He threw his pan high into the air and caught it with a grunt. "And I ain't one, not out here."

  As the nights began to grow cold, I worried for Joe, sleeping in his bedroll on the shores of Ranger Creek and living on nuts and wild greens.

  "Mama, with winter coming, we're going to have some empty beds, aren't we?"

  "I reckon, but not too many, I hope," said Mama, who was chopping potatoes and onions for rabbit hash.

  "Couldn't we rent one to my friend Joe? I know he could pay. He's had some luck washing for color."

  "Who's Joe?"

  "The brown man I told you about, at Ranger Creek."

  Mama stopped chopping for a minute.

  "Lucy," she said, "I can't rent a bed to a colored man. All my other boarders would leave."

  "Not Jimmy."

  Mama commenced chopping vigorously, as if she had to make up for that minute of rest. "Probably not Jimmy, but everyone else."

  "Why?"

  "Because lots of people think colored folk aren't fit to live with white people."

  "Why not?"

  "I don't exactly know why not. Scared maybe. Anyway, Mr. Scatter would never allow it."

  "But, Mama, what will happen when it rains and snows and the ice—"

  "Lord, Lucy, don't pester me. Your friend can sleep in Sweetheart's old shed and I'll make him breakfast and supper for ten dollars a week if he'll eat it outside. That's all I can do."

  I ran back to Ranger Creek and told Joe.

  "Now that's mighty nice, young lady, but I'll be fine—"

  "No, you won't be fine when it rains ice for days at a time and you have no food and no fire and no shelter. Be reasonable, Joe."

  "I suppose I could manage ten dollars a week if I traded some of this dust and maybe got me a town job. But..."

  "But what, Joe? Spit it out." I sounded to my own ears like Mama.

  "Out here where I see no one but you, I am a free man. But I worry that Mr. Sawyer or some other white man will find me and take me off to be a slave again. A town, even a little town, is too dangerous for me. I best stay out here."

  "You have to come. You've never seen winters like we got here, with ice storms and buckets of rain." Besides, I liked having him around. We were friends. I enjoyed his stories, and he admired my reading. Not many people admired anything I did. "Please, Joe."

  Joe was silent. Then he sighed. "Well then, Miss Lucy, now I got me this fine place to live, all I need is a name."

  I stopped my gleeful hopping and spinning to ask, "Isn't Joe your name?"

  "Mr. Sawyer, he called all the men Joe so's he didn't have to bother remembering who was who. I think I need me a real name that belongs only to me."

  I thought of The Count of Monte Cristo under my pillow. "Maximilian," I said. "Maximilian is such an elegant name."

  Joe rubbed his chin. "Maximilian don't seem to suit me, missy."

  "Ivanhoe or Damian or Appassionato?"

  "No, seems like I don't feel like an Appassionato, thanks all the same."

  A few days later, when Joe showed up to claim his bed in the shed, I said, "I have a present for you."

  "You ain't got no call to get me presents, missy."

  "Nevertheless, here it is." I stretched out my fist and slowly opened it. The hand was empty.

  Joe looked at me.

  "It's a name. For you. My father's name. Bernard."

  "Bernard." Joe rubbed his beard. "Bernard. It's a mighty fine name, missy. A name I'd be proud to carry. Bernard."

  "There's more," I added, sticking out my other fist. "A last name." He blinked.

  I opened my hand. "Freeman," I said.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SPRING 1851

  In which a wandering preacher saves Butte's body

  and Amos Frogge's soul, and my new

  Massachusetts scheme goes awry

  Clyde Claymore came riding into Lucky Diggins with the wildflowers the next spring. He was a big man, tall and bulky, dressed in rusty black linsey-woolsey and a wide-brimmed black hat. He rode into town on a mule so small that Clyde's enormous square-toed boots dragged in the mud. I thought Clyde could more easily carry that mule than the mule carry Clyde.

  I first saw him from the boarding house porch, where the broom and I were engaged in our constant war against mud.

  "Young lady," he boomed as though calling in a canyon, "where is the town of Lucky Diggins?"

  "This is it," I said.

  "The rest of it, I mean."

  "This is all."

  "All? This little place?"

  Surprised, I looked around. California was now one of the great United States of America, and Lucky Diggins was booming. The town boasted Mr. S
catter's saloon and a new drinking place opened by a gambler called Poker John Lewis, a general store of wood as well as the boarding house with a real porch, the smithy, the card parlor, a supply store with picks and axeheads and shovels, a restaurant that served flapjacks, beans, and bacon, and ten or so cabins and tents in town and maybe fifty more stretched up and down the river. And on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights when miners came down from the hills, the population swelled by hundreds and there weren't nearly enough places for them all to eat and drink and sleep.

  Now I saw Lucky Diggins again through the eyes of a stranger. Small and dirty, the town smelled of privies. The streets were mud and dust, littered with oyster tins, ham bones, and broken shovels. Nearby trees had been butchered to stumps in order to erect the ugly raw wood buildings rising along the street. Worst of all, it wasn't Massachusetts and never would be.

  I turned my back on the stranger and went into the kitchen to stir the supper beans. My pickle crock, I thought. It had been sitting there untouched for months. There was no way to earn money in the winter unless I could sell mud to someone, but now that spring was here, I determined to get out the crock, dust it off, and start working my way back home once more. Time to fire up the pie business again.

  I sighed. More getting up early, traipsing up and down the river, and trying to avoid crazy men in their union suits.

  The big man came into the kitchen. "Young lady," he boomed.