The Ballad of Lucy Whipple Read online

  Everyone else had such a good time singing, as if they all had a home in Lucky Diggins and they were content. Brother Clyde said he was a stranger in a strange land, but I think it is me. There is no place for me here. If I cannot come home to you, I will just wither away into dust and let the wind blow me back to Massachusetts.

  I sighed and burned the letter in the candle flame. No use vexing Gram and Grampop. That night I fell asleep restless with sadness and unnamed longings. I had a dream. My pa was not dead. He was lost in the mountains of California. I woke up with my face wet.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SUMMER 1851

  In which I celebrate Independence Day

  Butte never completely recovered from his near drowning, as if the river water had done something to his innards. He didn't go back to work on the river but mostly slept or sat in the sun and tried to swallow all that Mama was pushing him to eat. To get away from her broths and tonics, he took over the hunting, sitting on the stump and shooting those rabbits and squirrels foolish enough to invade Prairie's garden. Since he was a much more willing hunter than I, and a better shot, we had more meat that summer and fewer suppers of that tough and stringy beef from the south we called sheet-iron steaks. But things were tight without Butte's wages, and in my pickle crock there were still more cobwebs than gold.

  Come July, Lucky Diggins prepared to celebrate the first Independence Day for the new state of California. There were to be fireworks, a picnic, music, speeches, and me, my mind on Massachusetts, selling pies.

  July fourth dawned hot enough to fry an egg on a bald man's head, if there had been an egg to spare. Butte was poorly, coughing and spitting and sitting with one hand to his chest, so he stayed at home with Mama. Prairie, Sierra, and I went down to the river, where some canvas awnings were set up. Everyone in town was there, as well as those miners from farther off who thought celebrating this day more important than striking it rich. The Gent fiddled and Mr. Scatter played the squeezebox and Milly from the saloon sang "The Boy I Left Behind Me" and "Maryland, My Maryland" until we all were heartily sick of them. Belle Scatter and her lawyer beau said they'd be happy to watch Prairie and Sierra until dark, "for practice," Belle said, and giggled.

  So I found a shady tree, spread a cloth, arranged my pies on it, and sat back to make my fortune. I had been sitting quite a while, fanning flies away and listening to the sounds of celebration—singing, fighting, gunshots, and the imperious voice of Prairie organizing the miners into a game of Ant'ny Over—when Bernard Freeman came by. He bought a slice of pie and said he thought he'd spend the day up on Ranger Creek: "Best I get out of town before the drinking starts. Seems like I always get in trouble when white folks been drinking too much." I gave him another slice of pie for free.

  Nobody else bought pie. There was a long line for watermelons, which Bean Belly Thompson had brought in from the valley and was selling for a dollar each. Even warm, I reckoned, those melons would taste awful good on a hot day, and I watched enviously.

  "Take something in trade for a slice of pie?" a voice behind me asked. It was Lizzie Flagg. Her brown hair was matted and dusty, dirt and scratches and mosquito bites marked her face, and her skinny arms and legs were dark with bruises. A tattered buckskin tunic left big holes where pieces of Lizzie showed through.

  But Lizzie looked at me with eyes as shiny as seed pods, the most beautiful, observant, intelligent eyes. It was the beatingest thing! There was a human being in there. And she was talking to me.

  "Need thirteen cents a slice," I said.

  Lizzie Flagg sat right down. "See what I have to trade." She held out a dirty hand. On it, sitting there like it was tamed, was a dragonfly, green and silver and a spot of startling gold that glowed in the sunshine. She had it tied by a piece of thread. When she moved her hand, it flew but, caught by the thread, could only fly in frantic circles around her head. "You can fly it till it drops dead and then pin it to your wall. The colors is so purty in the sun."

  "I will give you a small slice of pie for the dragonfly,"

  I said, reaching out a finger and tentatively touching a soft wing. Lizzie likely didn't have thirteen cents anyway, and the dragonfly was glorious. "It's so beautiful."

  Lizzie's face lit. "You think this is beautiful? Give me the pie and then I'll show you someplace special. Where I found the bug. Everything is beautiful there."

  "I can't leave until I sell all the pies."

  "Come on," she said, pulling me by the hand. "You can sell them when we get back."

  Overwhelmed by Lizzie's enthusiasm, I gave her a slice of pie. While she ate, creek plum juice dripping down her face, I covered the pies from the flies and then let the dragonfly go. It flew away, the summer sun glinting off its wings.

  "Why'd you do that?" Lizzie asked. "I ain't givin' the pie back."

  "No matter," I said. "Pa never would let us keep wild things. And Mama says they eat, same as people, and she already has enough mouths to feed."

  We climbed up out of the ravine, past a stand of young pines with their cones just starting to open, and over a rise. As I was getting so hot and droopy I thought I would perish, Lizzie said, "Here."

  "Here" was a meadow in a clearing surrounded by trees. The meadow was filled with wildflowers, white, yellow, gold, orange, striped, dotted, small, large, and in between. Then Lizzie clapped her hands, and the wildflowers took to the air. Butterflies! Yellow with black and red, black splashed with orange, white and pink and blue. They were everywhere, flying and landing, covering entire branches of trees.

  "Fairyland," I said.

  "What's that?"

  "You know, where fairies live."

  "What's fairies?"

  "You know, fairies, like elves and brownies."

  "What are they?"

  And so we spent Independence Day lying in a meadow like two pups in a basket, while I told Lizzie Flagg about fairies and elves and brownies. And the Count of Monte Cristo and the kind and beautiful Rebecca. If we lay real still, the butterflies would land on us so that we too seemed covered with wildflowers until we'd laugh and the butterflies would swarm back into the air.

  Lizzie in return told me about her family, living off the land and eating only wild things, fruits and herbs and meat. "My pa is a drinkin' man, and mean. The rest of us can take it, but a few years back Ma jist stopped talkin', so feared was she of sayin' the wrong thing and gettin' smacked with his fist or his boot. She ain't crazy or stupid, jist hidin', I reckon."

  I'd heard people complain about Linus Flagg when he'd been drinking, but I never thought he was such a bad egg that he'd beat on Mrs. Flagg and his own children. If Pa were alive, I thought, he'd fix Mr. Flagg's flint for sure!

  Picking at a scab on her ankle, Lizzie continued. "The boys mostly live outside—hard to tell them from critters sometimes—but I stay, mostly for Ruby Ramona and Ma."

  "Can't anybody do something?" I asked. "The sheriff maybe, or Brother Claymore?"

  "It's our business. Someday we will do something."

  Lizzie looked grim, and I was glad to change the subject. I told her about Robinson Crusoe, who lived off the land like the Flaggs, and she told me how to cook a wood rat, braid a slip-noose snare, and make a whistle out of bird bones and a deer-hoof rattle. We jawed away the afternoon.

  I was surprised at what good company Lizzie was, her not knowing about books or anything, although I couldn't imagine what Essie and Opal would make of her. Shoot, I thought, Lizzie is here and they're not. Finally, hot and tired and satisfied, we started back down.

  We arrived at the river to find the pies gone and a note: "Little sister, we et yer pies. They was good." And in one empty tin was enough dust for twenty pies, which meant I could buy a watermelon for myself and one for Butte, give Mama some dust, and still have some to put in my pickle crock! I was plumb rapturous.

  Lizzie and I sat against a tree slurping the melon, letting the warm juice run down our chins. Leo Mack scratched a friction match across the seat of his pant
s to light the firecrackers and instead set his rump on fire. He hopped around like a frog on a griddle until Jimmy knocked him to the ground and rolled him in the dust. Finally the firecrackers were lit, and we screamed joyfully at the noise. Amos Frogge climbed a tree, fired his pistol, shouted "Three cheers for the Declaration of Independence," and fell out of the tree. Jimmy slung Amos over his shoulder, and all the miners went to the saloon.

  I carried the melon home to Mama and Butte, stopping every few feet to rest my arms. Seems to me God made a big mistake when He failed to put handles on watermelons.

  The rest of the night I spent dosing Prairie and Sierra with spruce tea and sugar to combat the effects of too much watermelon. Mama said it appeared Belle Scatter could use a darn sight more practice watching babies.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SUMMER 1851

  In which I learn about living and leaving

  and letting go

  Butte came home from hunting one day with a young injured raccoon. She obviously had gotten the worst in a fight, for her tail was missing and her back legs were chewed up some. I washed her sores and put cobwebs on them to stop the bleeding. Mama sighed and said Butte could keep her until she got well. That shows how sick Mama thinks he is, I thought with sudden terror.

  Butte made the raccoon a cage of stout twigs. We called her Cora. When she improved, Butte wanted to let her go but I wouldn't, fearing the woods out there were not safe, what with bears and Indians and hunters. Next time the raccoon might not be so lucky. "Cora is better off right here with us, thank you very much," I told him. Pa might not have approved, but Cora stayed, getting well and getting bigger and getting mighty restless in that cage.

  My pies turned out to be such a success at the Independence Day picnic that Mr. Scatter ordered ten each day to sell. Soon I was able to take some of the money and hire Lizzie Flagg to help roll crust and cook fruit. Mama said Lizzie was so dirty you could plant potatoes on her neck and not to let her near a pie. I helped Lizzie wash in the laundry tub and Mama gave her an old smock to wear. Lizzie looked a little like a weasel in a dress, but she sure smelled better.

  "Never knew a Flagg could be so pretty," Butte said. Lizzie spit at him between her teeth.

  Each day that summer Butte was worse. He coughed something awful, got real feverish, and sometimes seemed plumb out of his head. Mama fed him on slippery elm tea and onions boiled with honey, but all her tending did no good. He was so poorly in August that he had to give up hunting, and Lizzie took that over. I went with her sometimes, but I feared a bullet would bounce off the trees and rocks and come back and kill me like it did the bear in "The Ballad of Rattlesnake Jake." Dying was on my mind.

  When he was well enough, Butte mostly sat by the cook fire and whittled axe handles and butter paddles, which I sold to Mr. Scatter along with the pies. What with buying supplies, paying Lizzie, and giving what I could to Mama, my pickle crock grew no fuller. Massachusetts might as well have been China.

  One day when I was reading to him from The Castle of Otranto, Butte interrupted. "Lucy, do you ever think about dying?"

  "Sure I do, all the time. I think about being shot by outlaws or eaten by a grizzly..."

  "No, I mean just dying, piece by piece, feeling yourself dying a little bit at a time. You know how when your shoes get real wet, you put them on the stove and steam rises from them and pretty soon they're dry? Well, I feel like that, as if the life is drifting out of me like steam rising from wet shoes."

  I shivered, although my face grew hot. I wasn't ready to admit Butte might not make it. "Don't be foolish. You're not dying. You're not even twelve yet."

  He leaned back and closed his eyes. "I ain't scared though," he said, and I could see him trying not to be. "I figure I ain't never had a chance to do nothing worth going to Hell for."

  "You're not dying," I repeated, knowing no other way to comfort him, or myself, and we sat then in a silence broken only by the constant ringing of hammer on anvil from Amos Frogge's blacksmith's shop.

  July and August were hot and dry as a cookstove. The ground cracked, the rivers dried up, and I was homesick for Massachusetts summer rain. There being no water, the miners had to break rock to look for gold instead of washing it out of the gravel. Many of them just gave up and went to the saloon or to Sacramento or even back home.

  Nights were too hot for sleeping, which was just as well since no one with ears could have slept for the noise of Cora tearing at her cage and Butte coughing.

  So many people turned up kind. Bean Belly Thompson brought from Sacramento a bottle of "Dr. Lippincott's Celebrated Lung and Nerve Tonic With Sarsaparilla, Garlic, Pennyroyal, Verbena, and Elecampane Root, Effective Against Disorders of the Lung, Hysteric Affection, and the Bite of a Mad Dog" and wouldn't take a penny for it. It didn't help Butte. Snowshoe Ballou brought some elk clover root that Hennit sent. It didn't help either.

  Mr. Scatter heard there was a doctor in Skunk Valley, so Jimmy Whiskers and his mule, Arabella, went to fetch him. It took three days, during which only Mama's hope kept her and Butte going.

  The Skunk Valley doctor was near as young as me, with a skinny, spotted face. When he saw Butte, he grew so pale that his spots stood out like poppies in the sand.

  "I ain't really a doctor," he whispered. "Pulled a few teeth and tended cuts and bruises with some salve my mother gave me for sunburn. Hog's grease and cowslip flowers. But this boy looks real sick, and I ain't no real doctor."

  "You are as useless as a wart on a hog's bottom!" Jimmy hollered, and threw him out the door. The boy left, Butte got no better, and Mama got sadder and quieter, as if all her hope had ridden out of town with the boy who was no doctor. Jimmy and Arabella set out for Marysville or Sacramento or San Francisco, or "even, bygod, all the way to Boston," he said, in search of a real doctor. Mama let him go, but she didn't hold out hope for his coming back in time to help Butte.

  Prairie and Sierra and I took turns feeding Butte the peppermint tea Mama made and the awful-tasting herb tonics Lizzie brewed up. He didn't talk about dying in front of Mama and the little girls, but when we were alone, he had a lot of questions: Would he see Pa and Golden like the preachers said? Would he see Jesus? Would he see anything or just lie in a hole in the ground while rain leaked in? I had few answers for him.

  "Law, Butte, how would I know, never having been dead? Seems to me anyone who'd know isn't around to tell about it. What I'd hope is that all the good things preachers tell us about Heaven and angels and seeing God are true, and all the bad things aren't. I reckon it's hot enough around here without having to worry about Hell, too."

  Once he asked, "What will happen to you without me? You're all girls and not even a little boy to be man of the family." He thought a minute and then said, "I think the Gent is sweet on Mama. If—"

  "We don't need the Gent. If you were to die, and you're not, Mama and me could take care of this family."

  "Maybe you could at that. You got more guts than you think." He grinned. "Maybe everything will turn out."

  Brother Clyde came back from bringing the word of God to other towns and camps. He sat with Butte, telling him about God's heavenly kingdom and resting in Abraham's bosom. As Brother Clyde talked in his great ringing voice, Butte's fears seemed to leave him much the way he said his life was: like steam from wet shoes. When Brother Clyde assured him that in Heaven even a boy could be a ship's captain, Butte smiled.

  One night Butte lay in an awful silence, no strength left even to cough. Mama, Prairie, Sierra, Brother Clyde, the Gent, and I all sat around his bed. I prayed silently that he would make a sound, even choke or moan, so I would know he was still alive.

  Suddenly he opened his eyes wide. "Lucy," he said. "Phlegm cutter."

  "What?"

  "Phlegm cutter. The forty-ninth word for liquor." He closed his eyes again. That was the last we ever heard him say.

  The morning we buried Butte, Jimmy Whiskers came back with a peevish, glowering doctor tied to his mule. While Jimm
y helped us dig a hole, that doctor got free and took off, running all the way to San Francisco, I'd guess.

  Butte was buried upriver in a meadow with his whittling knife. As Bernard Freeman shoveled the dirt over Butte in his canvas blanket, I dropped a paper in beside him. Tarantula juice, it said. Number fifty. Took me a long time asking around town that morning to find it.

  I sat afternoons holding on to Cora, crying until her fur was damp. It got harder and harder to stuff Cora back into her cage, but I needed more than ever to keep her.

  Prairie and Sierra cried, too, but not Mama. Mama's mouth got harder and her eyes got sadder and she skinned her hair back even tighter, but she did not cry. I watched this woman who looked a little less like Mama every day and grew frightened. I would not let Mama go. What Mama did, I did. Where Mama sat, I sat. Where Mama went, I went, my hand tangled in her apron and my eyes on her face.

  "California Morning Whipple, what do you think you are doing besides driving me crazy and keeping me from working?" Mama snapped finally. "Go and make yourself useful."

  "I'm afraid, Mama," I told her, tears sliding down my face again. "The world is so dangerous and everybody dies—Gramma Whipple and Pa and Golden, Ocean, and now Butte. I got to hold on to you or I'll die. Or you will."

  Mama's face suddenly grew gray and wrinkled, as if she had turned a hundred years old. "Have I done wrong, dragging you children to this wild place where there is not even a doctor? Oh God, would Butte be alive if..."

  "Mama, don't. It's not your fault. Pa and Golden died in Massachusetts. People die everywhere. It's not your fault. People die."

  Mama sniffed. "Listen to you, lecturing me for a change." She patted my cheek. "You and me are so different. Me always looking ahead, face to the west. And you looking behind, at what you had and loved. And lost." Mama looked at me as if seeing me for the first time.

  "I just want us all to be safe."