The Ballad of Lucy Whipple Read online

"I guess there is no safety anywhere, except in God's abiding love and your own two feet. We just got to trust in both."

  "Butte trusted and he's dead."

  "And when you see God, you can ask Him why. Until then..." Mama sighed, and for a minute I could see the old Mama in her face. "Until then, I guess all we got is God and each other and our own selves no matter where we are. It's a hard world all right, but you got to stand on your feet and face it." She untangled my hand from her apron, sat me on her lap, and we both cried some. After, we felt better.

  That night as I lay awake listening to Cora tearing at her cage, I thought about what Mama had said. I had pains in my stomach, and my head, and my heart. Finally, sighing, I got out of bed.

  The night was warm as day, with the smell of pines and dust and cook fires that had become so familiar. I opened Cora's cage and let her out. The little raccoon tore off into the woods without one look back, never a glance to show she knew I had saved her and loved her and mourned her leaving.

  Dear Gram and Grampop,

  Butte is dead. He was eleven years old, could do his sums, and knew fifty words for liquor. I didn't know it but I loved him.

  The next spring I saw a raccoon family drinking from Buck Creek near the butterfly meadow. The female had two babies and no tail. She looked safe and happy. She did not look up when I called her Cora.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  AUTUMN 1851

  In which Mr. Flagg comes to a bad end

  and is not mourned

  September came, hot and still, and the remaining miners had to move farther upriver to find diggings that weren't already dug out, leaving behind them deep pits, bare hills, and piles of gravel. They had to dig deeper holes and wash more dirt, which meant they needed more water. Soon the land was crisscrossed with ditches and tunnels and flumes bringing water from here to there and there to here, all for washing dirt. We diverted some of that water our way and had less trouble with withering crops and thirsty mules, and I didn't have to carry water such long distances for drinking and washing. With the boarders working so far away, no one came home for noon dinner, and I had more time to myself for reading and writing letters, for making pies and money.

  In her mourning, Mama paid little attention to what I did, or Prairie or Sierra. The boarding house was neglected, the miners ill fed. Although Mama was always there, in her heart she was out in the meadow with Butte, and those of us left behind felt lonely.

  I took to tagging along with Lizzie as she checked her father's traps for critters. Thinking of Cora on her own in the woods, I begged Lizzie to let the animals go if they were not dead, but she just blasted them with her father's Springfield rifle. "Varmints is varmints," Lizzie said, "and good for nothin' but shootin', though some do make fine eatin'." Lizzie would skin the critters right there, put the fur and edible parts in her hunting sack, and rebait the traps with the rest. How different, I thought, from Bernard Freeman, who would not eat bacon even when he was hungry, and how odd of me to admire them both.

  As we wandered, Lizzie and I gabbled like turkeys. I told Lizzie about Butte and how he was as a little boy, about Golden and Pa, Gram and Grampop, and Cousin Batty, about school, county fairs, Massachusetts, and the pickle crock. "As you know it is my heart's desire to return to Massachusetts," I said one day. "How about you? Do you have a heart's desire?"

  "Seems to me," said Lizzie, "I have about all a body needs." She paused and chewed on her lip. "Well, maybe if Pa would quit hittin' ..." Sometimes Lizzie was covered with bruises, but that was the one thing she wouldn't talk about.

  Lizzie told me about the salmon that used to crowd the river before the miners arrived and turned the water to mud "too thick to drink and too thin to plow," about the Indians decked in condor feathers dancing their prayers, about grinding manzanita berries and skinning porcupines and smoking the leaves of the wild nicotiana plant.

  She taught me how to look at the trees. "They're not all just trees, Luce. They're oaks and firs and cedars and pines. Look here at the pines. Even they are all different. I call this one scaly pine because of the scaly look of the bark. And this one with the bark that looks like fungus I call mushroom pine. Here's smooth pine and there is mighty pine, the biggest."

  In this way I learned the names of California things: miner's lettuce, shooting stars, duckweed, thimbleberry, skunkbush, needlegrass, checkerbloom. I didn't know if they were true names or Lizzie's. It didn't seem to matter.

  We saw a bobcat rolling in catmint, looking for all the world like a giant kitten, and a hawk with a rabbit in its claws. Once we climbed all morning and came upon a bee pasture, ankle deep in flowers and miles wide, a meadow planted and tended by bees. There were wild rose and bramble and clover, yellow, purple, and pink, the air buzzing with the sound of bees and sweet with fragrance. We lay in the pasture awhile but after a few stings moved on, leaving it to the bees. I never found it again but never forgot it.

  On the way back through the woods, Lizzie and I saw an Indian girl, hair matted and dirty, face black with dirt or ashes or bruises. She stumbled as she passed us, and I reached out a steadying hand.

  "No," said Lizzie. "Let her be. She ain't hurt. She most likely just turned woman and can't wash or comb her hair or talk to nobody for a few days. She's prob'ly just goin' to piss in the woods."

  "Turned woman? You mean her bleeding come on?" I asked, my cheeks on fire. "Why do they send her away for that?"

  "She needs to be alone to have her dreams." Lizzie shrugged. "It's what they believe. Like we believe a bleeding woman sours milk and snaps fiddle strings."

  "I don't believe that. Nobody does. It's just a monthly illness."

  "And I suppose you don't make a stew of pigweed and snakeroot to ease it?"

  "No, we just lie down in darkened rooms."

  "That something you learned in Massachusetts?" asked Lizzie. "Boy, it sure must be a peculiar place. You do at least know it has something to do with babies?"

  I blushed again. "I know that ... but not exactly what. Anyway, it doesn't really matter to me because I can't imagine myself courting and marrying and having babies and all that."

  "I ain't gonna mess with it either. I have enough trouble and bruises from my Pa."

  While we were talking, the Indian girl passed again, her eyes on her bare feet. I thought she looked the kind to wink at us if she were allowed.

  That was the last time Lizzie and I wandered for a while. The next morning Jimmy Whiskers came running into town, red faced and breathless. Said he was sinking a shaft and came upon Linus Flagg, "lying at the bottom of the hole, dead as a can of corned beef." Snoose McGrath went to fetch the deputy from over at French Bar.

  While we waited for them to get back, the news spread through Lucky Diggins fast as a fire through dry grass. Everyone was right curious to see the body, so we hiked out up the river and over a rise to Moon Creek to pay our respects to the former Mr. Flagg. Then we all hiked home, some merry and grateful for an outing, some somber thinking about death and all. I shed a few tears, but not for Mr. Flagg—for Butte, who never drank or beat on anybody and didn't deserve to lie dead at the bottom of a hole.

  I thought I could be of comfort to Lizzie, me having lost my pa, too, but Lizzie didn't come to hunt, bake pies, or go wandering. No one saw any of the Flaggs, except for what remained of Linus. Jimmy said they were most likely holed up like wild things, waiting and sorrowing, and just to let them be.

  The miners mostly stayed in town and mended shirts and pants. No one dug or shopped or planted. The air was hot and still, as if the whole world were holding its breath until the deputy came.

  Then on Friday he appeared, a short, fleshy man with spidery lines on his nose and cheeks, who frowned and grumbled as if Lucky Diggins was the last place, next to Hell, he wanted to be on a hot October day, and it probably was. Everyone hiked back to Moon Creek. The hot weather had caused Mr. Flagg to smell something fierce, so no one but the deputy got very close.

  "Been shot," sa
id the deputy.

  "Shot ... shot ... shot" echoed along the line of those watching.

  "Dead a week or two," he added.

  "Week or two ... week or two ... week or two," the watchers muttered.

  The deputy did his detecting: "You seen anything?"

  First fellow: "Nope."

  The deputy spit and moved on to the next fellow. Didn't seem like he was working too hard.

  After a day or so of this and about a hundred of my whortleberry pies, he rode over the river and came back with Mrs. Flagg. Everyone gathered in front of the saloon to see what was going on.

  "Excuse me, ladies and gents," said the deputy, "I have broke the case" (meaning Mrs. Flagg agreed she shot her husband) "and I must take Mrs. Flagg to the lockup" (meaning the storeroom in back of the saloon) "until we can convene a jury" (meaning twelve men all sober at the same time) "and have us a trial."

  Mama and I took hot soup over to the saloon for Milly, who was ailing. Several men were there setting up for the trial. "Mama," I said, "couldn't we help Mrs. Flagg get a little cleaner and less shabby? I don't think she'd want everyone looking at her the way she is now."

  Billy Parker, overhearing, spat and said, "You can put a bow tie on a pig and call him Maurice, but he's still a pig."

  Bristling at that and the laughter that followed, I muttered under my breath all the way back to the boarding house: "I should have said, 'Handsome is as handsome does,' or A loud voice bespeaks a vulgar man.' I should have said A tongue is worth little without a brain.' I should have said..."

  It wasn't until we reached home that I thought of the right thing to say.

  "Mama..."

  "Leave me be. It don't matter what she wears."

  "But Mama, listen. You always listen to Gram, and Gram says, 'It's not only fine feathers that make a fine bird, but it sure don't hurt.'"

  At that Mama almost smiled. "Well, look at you. You're getting mighty good at standin' up to me lately."

  Gram also said, "Grief don't benefit the dead if it injures the living," but I knew better than to say that to Mama.

  We got Mrs. Flagg from the saloon and gave her a bath. Clean, Mrs. Flagg proved to have curly red hair, not greasy brown, and a whole lot of scars and bruises, which Mama clamped her lips tight to see. In my old blue dress, Mrs. Flagg looked young and pretty except for her sad eyes.

  Benches were set up in the saloon for the jury: miners who were more curious than greedy for gold, and Mr. Scatter, Amos Frogge, Billy Parker, and Poker John Lewis. Lizzie and Ruby Ramona and the Flagg boys stood at the edge of the crowd. Lizzie looked closed off and silent, as if she had climbed inside herself and blown out the lamp.

  Mama did not go. She said the poor woman had enough to contend with without a gaggle of no-accounts goggling at her. So Mama didn't hear about the trial and the outcome until supper, when Jimmy Whiskers told her all about it.

  "That ole fat deputy was sweating like a cheese in the sun. Mops his face and asks Mrs. F. did she shoot Flagg? She says not a word but just nods.

  "'Guilty!' cries the deputy, banging his shoe on the table, but Scatter up and hollers, 'Now hold on.' He looks at Mrs. F.

  '"Did you shoot Linus?' She nods again. 'Why?' She shrugs. 'What was he doing just before you shot him?' Mrs. F., she says nothin', but little Ruby Ramona calls out, 'He was beatin' on her with a sycamore stick.'

  "'Your honor,' booms Scatter like he was talking to someone in Marysville, 'everyone here knows what a mean son of a gun Flagg was when he was drinking and how he beat up on the missus with every drink. I say she shot him in self-defense.'

  '"In the back?' asks Billy Parker. No one had an answer for that, and it appeared that those Flaggs were going to lose their ma as well as their pa. Why, I felt so low I could of rid horseback under a snake.

  "Then someone, smart as a whip and twice as sassy, speaks right up and says, 'Maybe it was like in "The Ballad of Rattlesnake Jake," with the bullet bouncing all over before hitting Mr. Flagg from behind.'

  "Well, she tells the whole story of Rattlesnake Jake and we all listen and say 'Whoo-ha!' and 'Howdy-do!' and 'Beat that' until the deputy bangs with his shoe again and shouts, 'Not guilty, gol durn it, now get me a beer!'"

  Jimmy took a deep breath and a swig of his coffee grown cold. "And it was your daughter, missus, our little sister, that saved that pore lady. You should be right proud of the girl, right proud."

  Mama gave me another one of those looks, like she never saw me before, and I squirmed. Jimmy beamed at us both and gave a big smile, splendid with the glimmer of gold.

  "Your gold teeth, Jimmy!" I cried. "You finally got them."

  "Yep. From the biggest nuggets I found yet, up in Willow Creek. A doc over to Sacramento City pounded them and wired them in." He smiled again, teeth gleaming in the twilight. "And I can pop them in and out anytime I want." He demonstrated, and there for a minute was the old toothless Jimmy.

  They buried Mr. Flagg the next day—"put him to bed," as Jimmy said, "with a pick and shovel." In Brother Clyde's absence, Mr. Scatter said a few words. And I recited some lines I'd learned from a poem of Sir Walter Scott's back in Massachusetts long ago: "He is gone from the mountains; he is lost from the forest." Seemed right for Mr. Flagg the trapper, even if he was a drinking man.

  The Flagg boys stayed in the shack across the river, but Mrs. Flagg, Lizzie, and Ruby Ramona moved into a room over the general store and started working for Mr. Scatter. Looked like the pie business was all mine again.

  I went over to the store to see Lizzie once she was working.

  "Sorry your pa is dead," I said.

  Lizzie shrugged. "He was a varmint."

  Knowing how she felt about varmints, I've wondered ever since if maybe Lizzie didn't just up and shoot him herself.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  AUTUMN 1851

  In which the men of Lucky Diggins take to

  courting Mama and I take action

  Cholera was ravaging California, and people took sick and died before anybody even missed them. What with everyone dead or dying, whole towns disappeared, like Rocky Bar over the ridge. Jimmy Whiskers said the trail from Skunk Valley to Sacramento was so thick with graves, a frog could hop from marker to marker and never touch the ground.

  Lucky Diggins was spared—no one sick, no one dead. Bean Belly Thompson heard somewhere that the cholera was caused by eating beans, so folks stopped eating beans for a while, but slowly we forgot or ran out of other food or just missed the taste of beans cooked up with hog fat and molasses, so we started eating beans again, and still no one died. As the weather cooled, life returned to normal.

  Prairie and Sierra harvested the last of the corn and laid it in the sun to dry. I spent my mornings getting meat and boiling sheets and such, my afternoons cutting pieces for quilts and making over my aprons for Prairie and Prairie's smocks for Sierra, and my evenings making pies. While they baked, I sat with Bernard teaching him to read until the sky grew too dark. Our favorite books were those about lords and ladies and knights—we finished the last page of The Castle of Otranto one day and the next started it all over again—but we read whatever we could get our hands on: newspapers, advertising broadsides, legal announcements, anything with words. Bernard didn't get much practice, for we both loved to hear me read, but slowly he grew from passable to proficient. And what he lacked in he made up for in fervor, his particular favorite being Highlights from Shakespeare.

  "Bernard," I asked one evening after King Richard's opening speech, "you ever think about being an actor, like that traveling troupe that's over to Marysville?"

  "Folks might let me live here and eat here and work here, but that don't mean I kin do whatever I want. No way nohow they'd let me on a stage."

  I blushed, glad that in the dark he couldn't see. "I'm sorry," I said.

  "For what? It ain't your fault none."

  "I'm sorry for bringing it up, for being so stupid and not paying attention to what life is like for you. I'm sorry y
ou're treated the way you are."

  Bernard said nothing.

  Mr. Scatter and Snoose McGrath started building a big new kitchen on the boarding house so Mama could feed more boarders. There were Mama and Mr. Scatter together every day, deciding where the kitchen was to be and how many shelves she would need. And there was Mr. Scatter saying, "Why now, you're right, ma'am. How did a purty little thing like you figure that out?" and "Mrs. Whipple, I wouldn't let ole Snoose go a whit further until I got your advice on this."

  Poker John Lewis came back from Sacramento with a sack of flower bulbs—yellow daffodil, purple crocus, and iris "the sure-enough color of your eyes, Mrs. Whipple, ma'am." Mama's face shone like the sun as she planted them outside the door of the new kitchen. Then the Gent disappeared for a week. Happens he went to San Francisco on the steamer Hulda Mae and returned with a sampler that had "Home Sweet Home" embroidered in colored wool, trimmed with flowers and trees made of human hair. The next week Mr. Scatter showed up with a real glass window for the kitchen and asked Mama, "What, Mrs. Whipple, ma'am, would you like to be lookin' at while your beans are boilin'?"

  Belle Scatter had gone and married her lawyer fellow—"Guess this proves there's a lid for every pot," said Mama with a shrug—and now I had marriage on my mind. I feared Mama's suitors were exhibiting more than an outbreak of generosity and good manners toward a poor widow woman, so I watched carefully. Too many lids in Lucky Diggins seemed to be searching for pots.

  Dear Gram and Grampop,

  It is October and my birthday, but it seems like Mama is getting all the presents. She did make me sweet honey fritters and we had a little party. Lizzie and Ruby Ramona came, and Mr. Scatter, Poker John Lewis, Beppie Parker, the Gent (who brought me Pride and Prejudice from San Francisco), Jimmy, and Bernard because it was my birthday and I insisted. While others danced, I commenced to read and didn't look up until I heard loud angry voices over the sound of the Gent's fiddle. I was afraid they were making trouble for Bernard, but it seems Mama had sat down to rest at the end of the divan we made from sacks of flour and a red plush throw, and Mr. Scatter and Poker John Lewis were arguing over who would sit next to her. The Gent put down his fiddle and tried to slide onto the seat, too, and then all Sam Hill (pardon me) broke loose