The Ballad of Lucy Whipple (3 page)

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.

A
UTUMN
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, and 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!

A
UTUMN
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?"

Standing there was a miner, booted and flannel shirted and very dirty. In my imagination already back in Massachusetts, I just sat and stared at him.

Mama shouted through the tent flap, "Get off that stump and dip some water for the poor man, you goose."

I took the tin cup hanging from a string on the tent, dipped it into the rain barrel, which had more leaves in it than water, and gave it to the miner.

He drank thirstily and handed me back the cup. "Thank you entirely for the water, little sister. Now maybe you could tell me what smells so durned good."

"The dried-apple pies I made for supper," I said.

"I think I might trade this whole bag of gold here for one of them pies."

"Done," I said.

The miner laughed. We settled on a bit of gold dust and I gave him a pie.

"California, there must be ten dollars worth of gold here," Mama said. "For one pie!"

The gold dust inspired me to bake another couple of pies. I sat on the stump with pies cooling beside me all afternoon, but lucky miners were rare, and lucky miners who would spend their dust on pies when the saloon was nearby were rarer still.

"The secret," said Amos Frogge, who stopped by to sniff but didn't buy because he got pie free with his supper, "is to get them before they head to the saloon."

So the next morning I got out of bed long before dawn to do my chores and bake my pies. I gathered enough chokecherries for six pies, put them in to bake, built a carrier out of the old straw basket we had come west with, and, not long after sunup, set out for the river to make my fortune. I didn't much relish the thought of talking all those strangers into buying pies, but I thought I could manage if it would get me away from this dirt pile called Lucky Diggins.

I sold my first pie to a man and his scrawny wife who were passing through. I got a dollar, and that lady just stood there, leaning on the mule, and ate the whole pie, washing it down with cold river water.

Pies two and three were bought by Jimmy Whiskers. It was late morning before pie four went to a group digging near the north bank.

I began to worry about getting home to help Mama clean up from breakfast, feed Prairie and Sierra, and begin peeling and slicing and boiling for dinner. As I walked back along the north bank, I saw a stranger wearing not a flannel shirt and boots like most diggers but just a red union suit and a straw hat. Most peculiar, but I approached him. "Mister, could I int—"

"Dag diggety!" shouted the miner in his underwear. "Git yer carcass off 'n my claim afore I bury my shovel in yer yella hair, you diggety dog. Spyin' on me! Waitin' to jump my claim and steal my gold, you diggety..." The miner continued mumbling while he pulled a pistol from the seat of his union suit and fired it in my direction.

Horror! Bullets were hitting the ground all around my feet, so I dropped the basket of pies and took off for home, scrambling over the ground like a blind chicken with the fidgets. The remaining pies were eaten by a badger, who then curled up inside the basket to sleep and nearly scared me to death when I went back the next morning, causing me to holler so loud that the badger took off toward the mountains and is likely running still.

Two things came of this encounter. "Dag diggety" began to creep into my vocabulary, especially on those occasions when the little girls were ill-humored or I was feeling unappreciated, though I never dared to let Mama hear it, lest it be judged blasphemous and forbidden. Second, I decided that a one-person pie business was too hard, too time-consuming, and just too dangerous, so I looked around for a partner.

Of course. Butte.

I called him to a business meeting out by the stump. "Listen, Butte, it's a great opportunity," I told him, feeding him bits of dried apple to keep him from wandering off. "I will make the pies, and you take them out to the river and the diggings and sell them. You'll earn a nickel for each pie you sell."

"Nope."

"Well, then, ten cents a pie. That's ten percent and it could add up to a lot of money. Why, there must be a thousand miners within a day's walk of here. If even half of them bought a pie, that would be five hundred dollars. Just think of it, Butte, five hundred dollars! A couple of weeks like that and we'd be on our way back to Massachusetts."