The Ballad of Lucy Whipple (14 page)

"That was right brave, Mama," I said. Bernard nodded slightly in agreement and went off by himself.

"Not hardly," said Mama. "Those ruffians don't have the guts of a rabbit when they're not liquored up."

"Why did you call Bernard a youngster? Isn't he old?"

"Hardly older than you, girl. You mean you never noticed that?"

"Must be the beard makes him look old," I said, "or his sad face." I was a little ashamed that I had never really looked at Bernard as a person but more like a plaything, something I found up by Ranger Creek, called by my father's name, and brought home to play with.

While the men of Lucky Diggins stood and argued about what to do next, we women set about gathering what branches and brush we could for shelter and beds. Whatever the men decided, we weren't going anywhere for a while. The fire had made the trail into Lucky Diggins a tangle of stubble, half-burned branches, and ash. No one was going to be passing over, under, or through that anytime soon.

"How old are you, Bernard?" I asked later, as we hunted nuts and seeds and spring greens that had escaped the fire to serve as a supper of sorts.

"Don't rightly know, missy. I ain't twenty yet, I know that. Mr. Sawyer, he used to beat all his slaves when they got twenty so's they didn't get any ideas about being grown-up and independent. And I never got that beating."

"You look older. Old, even."

"Mr. Sawyer, he's looking for a young runaway slave. Better I look old. Plenty of time to be young when I'm free."

"Bernard, I was thinking." I looked down and chewed on my lip. "I was thinking, maybe it wasn't right of me to name you, like a doll or a dog or something. You're a man—maybe you should be choosing your own name."

"I agree, missy. I agree. And I'm choosing the name a friend offered. Bernard. I'm proud to have it."

"Mr. Sawyer will never think to look for an old man named Bernard. I guess you're pretty safe here."

"I hope you're right, Miss Lucy."

I smiled. "Just Lucy."

"I hope you're right, Just Lucy." And Bernard smiled, finally smiled. He looked much younger.

That evening was cool and eerie, with the smoke still rising from the ashes with an awful stink and the terrible quiet of a place without birds or squirrels or lizards, without crickets or bees or grasshoppers, a dead place. We mixed up all the edibles we had found into a sort of stew and tried to eat it. It tasted like ashes. Then, just as it was getting dark, from all along the ravine, from down off those hills and mountains spared from the fire, came rivers of light. The flickering, shimmering rivers all converged at a spot above the ravine and flowed down toward the burned-out town. Everyone watched silently, curious and anxious.

The river came closer and showed itself to be lanterns and torches of branches and tiny pine trees aflame, carried by hairy, dirty, bearded men in flannel shirts and torn pants, men loaded with blankets and tools and bedrolls, onions and coffee and beans. Miners from the hills who had seen the smoke and flames and had come to help, stumbling and tumbling through the pathless mountains, owning little but willing to share.

They put down their bundles and stretched. A couple of the biggest took off their shirts and started chopping scorched trees into logs. Others shoveled ashes out of the way, while some made tents of twigs and branches and threw blankets over. We all stood around and watched for a minute. Jimmy said, "Seems gold's not the only thing of value in California," and started working right along with them. Finally we all did.

In the waning light I saw a movement near the river. "Ma!" I hollered. "Something is there!"

Amos Frogge came over and called out, "Stranger coming. Indian."

I watched the stranger get closer and closer, coming out of the smoke and gloom like some sorcerer or evil spirit. What trouble was coming now? Milly pushed Prairie and Sierra behind her. Poker John Lewis, his face all twisted and ugly, said, "Plug him," and some of the miners pulled their pistols. We waited.

The Indian was buck naked except for a sort of leather apron. Smelling of bear grease and pine, he walked right up to the Gent and began chanting, low and soft and mesmerizing. Suddenly he pulled from behind his back a high silk hat, wet and muddy and a little dented; but there it was, the Gent's hat come home. The Gent clapped it on his head, pounded the Indian on the back, and laughed the only laugh heard around Lucky Diggins all day.

By the light of treetops still on fire, I took the opportunity to see what book I had saved from the fire. It was
The Little Christian's Book of Pious Thoughts.

Then I cried.

Mama, Prairie, Sierra, and I spent the night huddled close to one another and to the warmth of the embers of what we had lost. In the morning we poked through the smoking ashes to find what we could. In places those ashes were higher than my knees and too hot to touch. But Prairie managed to spy some spoons that had not melted into hunks of tin, a couple of pots, and Mama's cookstove, standing there just as good and proud as ever. Amos Frogge found his tools, though the wooden handles were burned. Mrs. Flagg and Lizzie found some cracked and blackened jugs, and I unearthed the scorched metal frame of the "Home Sweet Home" sampler. There were some unbroken bottles in the saloon and a barrel or two of salted meat in the ashes of the general store. Whenever someone found something good or whole or usable, he would call out, and everyone would cheer.

Scorched bits of paper had settled like snowflakes on the ash heaps and burned stumps. All that was left of my books. A phrase or two here and there was readable: "Friday: Yes, my nation eat mans...." "I now descended my rope ladder and joined my wife and children...." "You jest, Sir Knight...." And "...my heart swells when I think of Torquilstone and the lists of Templestowe." I collected the scraps and then, not knowing what else to do, threw them to the winds.

Mama sifted carefully through the remains of the boarding house, looking for something of Butte's. "Seems like he's really gone now," she said to Prairie and me. "Not even a shoe or a shirt left to remind me of him." Mama started to cry, so Prairie let her blow Butte's whistle, and then we all cried, thinking of Butte up in Heaven watching his family standing in the ashes of their home, blowing a whistle to remember him.

S
UMMER
1852

In which Lucky Diggins is down on its luck

Never before or since have I been someplace so quiet. It wasn't only that the birds and frogs and crickets were gone. There were no trees for the wind to whistle through, no rockers to rock, no nails to pound, no singing or hollering or laughing. Although a man and a mule might, with effort and plenty of time, get out of Lucky Diggins and over the pass, no wagon or supply train could get in. We were stranded, with the ashes of all we needed to survive. Every so often I'd reach for something—hairpins, a clean apron, or
Ivanhoe—
and realize it had turned to smoke and ashes, and we were out here in the wilderness with
nothing.
And I'd cry.

I mourned especially for those things that reminded me of people who were gone: Gramma Whipple's chicken basket that I'd carried pies in, Butte's India-rubber boots, a drawing of Grampop and Rocky Flat, Pa's old straw hat that Mama wore in the sun sometimes. Now that the things were gone, I had only my memories. In the end, I suppose, that's where dead people live anyway, in our memories, but I would have given a dozen eggs and a chocolate cake for Pa's smelly old straw hat.

Jimmy's mule, Arabella, her ears forward and eyes wide open, kept rubbing herself against the saloon wall, so we knew rain was coming soon. Mama, Milly, Mrs. Flagg, Lizzie, Ruby Ramona, and I took the rags and blankets, needles and thread, that those kindly miners had brought us and cut some into capes and coats and sewed some into tents. Jimmy said it was too bad his extra shirt got burned up, for it could have made a tent for our whole family with space left over for a card room and a privy.

Snoose and Jimmy were in charge of shelter, gathering and stacking what hadn't been burned for makeshift houses. Bernard, Prairie, and Sierra gathered brush, greens, and nuts. Amos made nails out of pots that had melted together in the fire, and the Gent tried to cobble together a fiddle sort of thing out of what wood and string he could find. It was like we were on a big town picnic, all of us working together to stay warm and dry and fed, but without the smiles and food and three-legged races.

The middle of June it began to rain, but by then everyone had shelter—a tangle of cabins and lean-tos, unpainted board shacks, and tents of canvas, of blankets, of brush, of potato sacks and old shirts. It looked a lot like the Lucky Diggins I had seen some years before from above the ravine, but smaller, dirtier, poorer, and certainly no prettier.

Snowshoe had been trapped by the fire with Hennit and his people. He came one day with acorn meal and wild greens from the Indians, and the Flagg boys brought meat from time to time. We had enough to eat, though I got mighty sick of rabbit-and-acorn stew, venison-bone soup, and grizzly with beans. I lay on my back sometimes, looking up at the sun, making rhymes about foods I hadn't seen in a goose age and likely would not for a while yet: "Tomatoes, corn, and rutabagas; oyster stew and cheese; fresh milk, butter, pumpkin pie; and lemons, if you please." Made my mouth water and my stomach groan with pleasure and pain.

We reckoned that soon a pack train or something would clear a path through the charred remains of the woods and reach Lucky Diggins. We could then eat a real meal and replace our pots and pans, buckets, linens, bushels of oats and wheat and dried apples. Funny how fast what little we had here in Lucky Diggins began to seem like luxuries.

But we'd need money when that pack train came. I reluctantly gave Mama half my Massachusetts money and buried the other half near the scorched stump. Mama and I gathered pigweed, plums, and acorns to trade for meat and flour. Prairie and Sierra sifted through the ashes of the town for gold dust and nuggets. At night we baked acorn-meal biscuits and doughy little crabapple pies to sell to the miners. Then for a few hours we slept on scratchy brush and branches, dreaming of what we no longer had, of hairbrushes and soap, forks and baskets and table spreads, ribbons and trimmings on caps and hats, flannel, cotton, wool, and featherbeds. Of books and clean paper and pens.

The days were longer now, which made everyone easier, for the remains of the town looked so spooky in the dark, silhouetted against the moon. By day the smell of char and ash was bad enough, but at night it smelled like the depths of Hell, ghostly and evil.

One morning we woke up afloat in mud and soggy ashes. The scorched hills were bare as a baby's bottom, Jimmy said, and with no trees or bushes to hold the ground together, the hillsides had slid down into the ravine. The weather stayed cool and gray, and many of us coughed all night with the damp. The Gent said the rheumatics had got him from standing so often in icy water up to his unmentionables, and he mostly just sat and brooded and strummed on his homemade fiddle.

The town was gone, the game was gone, and the miners were finding that even the far diggings were pretty much worked out, and many of them moved on into the mountains. Others took to digging tunnels, called coyote holes, in the gritty banks of the river; more than one digger was buried in a cave-in, and the rest decided not to risk it. There was talk about breaking the gold out of rocks, but that was beyond the miners' resources. Gloom hung in the air.

Real summer came at last. On a powerful hot day, while I sat with my feet dangling in the tepid shallows of the river, Snowshoe Ballou came by, his big feet stirring up the dust like an unlucky wind. I feared more bad news.

"Saying good-bye, little sister. Moving on." He tipped his hat and turned to go.

"Wait, Snowshoe. Wait. Where are you going and why?"

Two questions—it looked for a moment like they might be too much for Snowshoe, but finally he swallowed hard and answered. "Farther into the mountains. Me and Hennit and his kin. Too many folks around here lately. Done caught all the fish, killed the game, dammed the rivers, cut down the trees, scattered the acorns, then burned it all down. Indians can't live here no more, and neither kin I." He looked up into the woods. "Too bad. Mighty purty country once, afore it was fished and logged and mined to death. Me and Hennit, we got to go. Up there, where is more game and less people."

After this longest speech of his life, he tipped his hat again and left. I watched him climb up the ravine path to the edge of the woods, where he joined a group of Indians, backs laden with skins and packs and babies. I waved until I couldn't see them anymore.

Walking home, I whispered, "Know many, trust few, always paddle your own canoe." That's what Snowshoe wanted—his own canoe again. I hoped he'd find it.

Then one day Bernard said, "I been helping Mr. Scatter pick through the ashes of his store, and I found this here paper stuffed inside a jug. It's a page from a newspaper back in the old states. See, says here that there are colored men in San Francisco who own their own laundries, restaurants, shops, boarding houses. Help other colored folk, even slaves. Got meeting rooms and a library and everything. You reckon it's true?"

"I reckon so, if it's in the paper."

"I'm thinking maybe I'll go to San Francisco and see can they help me get free of this slavery thing so I don't have to hide from Mr. Sawyer anymore. That's what I'd really like: to be truly free."

"So you have a heart's desire, too."

"Yes, I guess I do at that." He bowed. "Farewell, Lady Isabella."

I curtsied, slow and graceful, almost like a lady. "Godspeed, Prince Alfonso. I hope you have better luck with your heart's desire than I've had with mine."

A week later Bernard Freeman was gone. I knew for certain I'd rather have him free in San Francisco than a slave back here in Lucky Diggins, but his leaving left a hole in my life.

"Lucy, come sit with me a spell. I want to talk with you," said Mama the day after Bernard left. She sat on our leaf-and-brush bed and patted the place next to her.