The Ballad of Lucy Whipple (11 page)

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 Jimmy 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."

"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.

A
UTUMN
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.