The Ballad of Lucy Whipple (2 page)

So I sat back on the privy seat, put my feet up on the door, and searched my mind for a new name. I tried and discarded Rosamund, Louisa, and Desdemona before I settled on Lucy, from Mr. Abbott's "Cousin Lucy" books, which were a bit too preachy for me but were there when I had read everything else in the lending library in the basement of the Buttonfields church. I decided to call myself Lucy because it was not beautiful but ordinary, because it meant nothing but Lucy. Let some Californian be called California; I would be Lucy. It was a very Massachusetts name.

I knew I didn't fit in Lucky Diggins and I never would. I was no rough, dirty Californian. I was a child of rich green fields and soft Thanksgiving snowfalls, of two-story houses and churches with steeples, of dairies and bake shops and stores, a gentlewoman from the east dragged all unwilling to the wilds of the west. "I am," I called proudly to a fly on the privy door, "a New Englander, with a history and culture and accomplishments!"

The door rattled. "California! Is that you? Come out of there this minute!" I opened the door and got pulled by my apron strings back into the tents that were supposed to be home now.

We passed through the front tent, with its table and benches and, behind blankets hung from the tent poles, a bed for Mama and Prairie, a mat for Butte, and the trundle I shared with Sierra and the occasional tree frog or legless lizard Butte would put beneath my quilt to devil me, into the big tent in the rear, full of bunks and boxes and chamberpots for the coming boarders. There Mama put me to work, weaving rawhide strips on wood frames for mattresses and stuffing pillow slips with cornhusks and brush.

Day followed day with no change—except for the arrival of the cookstove ($11.69 plus delivery charge) Bean Belly Thompson loaded over the mountains and down the ravine—until one morning a strange face appeared at the tent flap, a face with more hair on it than most people have on their whole head.

"Morning, sis. My tent has been invaded by a tarantula big as a chicken, so I've come to get me a bed. I ain't much for spiders. Name's Jimmy. Folk call me Jimmy Whiskers. Reckon you can tell why." Jimmy Whiskers stroked his beard and smiled the biggest smile I had seen since Pa's. His two front teeth were missing.

"We've got mice, gophers, and bugs," I said.

"As long as they ain't spiders," said Jimmy.

Mama settled with Jimmy Whiskers, who was a giant of a man. He planned to stay through the long, warm autumn and even longer if he was lucky. "I aim to find enough gold to make golden teeth for these here empty gums," he said.

Then Amos Frogge, all bones and bushy eyebrows, who had come from Texas to be a blacksmith and was building a shed out behind the general store, moved in. And the scowling Mr. Coogan, sunken eyed, scar faced, pinch mouthed, and as friendly as a thunderstorm.

I mourned my privacy and longed to have just my family about, but when I tried to tell Mama, it didn't come out right.

"Mama, do we have to have all these strangers living here? I don't..."

Mama narrowed her eyes and tightened her lips.

"I mean they're rough and dirty and, well, strangers."

"Get to know them," Mama said, "and they won't be strangers."

"But I don't know how to talk to them—"

"What do you mean? I've heard you babble like a brook."

"But Mama, it's different with family You and Butte and Prairie and Sierra and Gram and Grampop and everyone, all family. These strange men..."

"... pay our keep," Mama interrupted. "Now go beat biscuits for supper."

Only in the early afternoon, when the babies were sleeping, and Butte was off hunting, and Mama was kneading dough and humming "Of Dan Tucker," and the prospectors were off at the river washing for gold, was I able to escape, be by myself, and hide in a book. The one book I owned was
Ivanhoe,
won in a school spelling bee. I'd gotten mighty tired of it during the months of travel, but the only other thing around to read was a broadside posted on the general store about titter worm in horses.

Fortunately Massachusetts had been bursting with books, and all those I had ever read were still there in my head. So one day, good and sick of
Ivanhoe,
I leaned back against the taut canvas of the tent, closed my eyes, and found a way to leave Lucky Diggins. I became the beauteous Madeline following her lover through icy corridors in "The Eve of St. Agnes" and imagined the lava pouring over my body during the last days of Pompeii. I took on the elegance and culture of Queen Elizabeth and Juliet and Maria Edgeworth's ladies: "Lord Rackrent, how excruciatingly delightful to see you," I murmured to the tent pole and sighed lavishly.

Looking up, I saw Prairie—almost seven, short and round, big eyes even bigger behind her wire-rimmed spectacles, and nearly the whole of one grubby hand in her mouth, fiddling with a loose front tooth.

Prairie mumbled something.

"Take your hand out of your mouth and say it again," I told her.

"What are you doing?"

"Never mind. What do you want?"

"Mama said you would help me find a place for a garden."

"You can't plant a garden until spring. Why do we have to find it now?"

"The soil must be got ready, of course, if things are to grow right." Prairie loved growing things. Grampop always said Prairie was like him—just tickled the ground and it laughed beans.

Dear Gram and Grampop,

Please do not address yours truly as California anymore, California Morning Whipple being a foolish name for a duck much less a girl. I call myself Lucy now. I cannot hate California and be California. I know you will understand.

I miss you so much. A prospector who slept here one night had two mules, which I had to feed. I called them Gram and Grampop. The lady mule was gray like Gram and the other laughed just like Grampop.

With much love from your
granddaughter,
Lucy Whipple

A
UTUMN
1849

In which Mama tries to make me a mighty hunter
and I finally get hungry enough to shoot

"If you want to eat, missy, you are going to have to find a way to put food on this table," said Mama, sweeping at my feet with her broom.

Lord-a-mercy, I thought, fixing Mama with my fiercest glare. Don't I do enough what with helping to cook and wash for all those hairy strangers in the bunks in the back tent? Don't I teach Prairie her letters, her numbers, and a little about the history of Massachusetts each morning? Isn't that enough?

"Not nearly enough," said Mama, as if reading my mind. She snatched
Ivanhoe
from my hands and tossed it into the soapy water of the laundry tub. With a yelp I fished it out and spread it in the sunshine to dry. I expected it would soon be as good as new except for some wrinkled pages, but I decided I'd better take Mama seriously.

"What do you want me to do, Mama?"

"Take this shotgun and shoot us some rabbits or a squirrel."

"But Mama, I can't go shooting little animals!" I didn't relish the idea of shooting living things. I was much too sensitive, and the powder would make my hands stink.

"Don't Mama me. What do you think stew is? And bacon? Meat. From animals. Butte can't hunt, now he has his job with Mr. Scatter, so you will have to do it." Butte was sweeping and stacking at the general store and had started calling himself the man of the family, until Mama grabbed his nose and said, "No, you ain't the man of this family. There is no man in this family, only a lady and some little children, and that will have to do." Didn't keep him from swaggering and counting his pay in front of me before he gave it to Mama. For all he was just ten, almost two years younger than me, Butte sure could lord it up.

"Couldn't we just buy meat from the store?"

"One, Mr. Scatter doesn't get much meat. Two, what he does get is too darned expensive. Three, I have a perfectly able daughter with a perfectly good trigger finger."

"Prairie doesn't do anything but watch Sierra and pull weeds. She could hunt."

"Prairie is only six. It will have to be you. I can't feed three hungry boarders and the five of us on beans and the bits of salt pork and dried beef Bean Belly Thompson hauls in from Sacramento every few weeks. Now go."

Mama shoved the shotgun into my hands and pushed me out the door quick as a cat.

My pa had taught me and Butte to shoot back home, but I never took to it, preferring a book any day to the jolt and noise and smell of shooting. Now Pa was dead and we had come west and Mama was trying to make a westerner out of me.

The first morning I sat on a stump outside the tent and fretted. The place was so wild, just trees and hills and tents. I could almost see wild Indians coming up the Sacramento River to the Yuba and up the Yuba to the Forks and on to Lucky Diggins, right to where I sat on the stump with a gun in my lap.

Near noon I saw a movement in the dry grass. It looked like feathers. Indians! I bolted into the tent.

"I had to come back, Mama," I said. "I saw feathers and..."

"I know, I know," said Mama. "They were wild Indians and you were in imminent danger of being captured and living the rest of your life on acorns and roasted grasshoppers."

"But Mama..."

"But Mama nothing. That was most likely a wild turkey you let get away." Mama sighed. "Go feed Prairie and Sierra."

That night we had no meat for supper. I, in fact, had no supper at all and wouldn't, so Mama said, until I brought home something to eat.

I watched the rest eat their beans and biscuits. "If I were with Gram," I muttered, "I would be eating chicken from Larrabee's farm or store-bought bacon."

Mama said nothing.

The second day I sat three hours on the tree stump with the gun in my lap, imagining myself as the dashing Ivanhoe's secret love, as beautiful as Rowena and as plucky as Rebecca but much smarter and better read.

Suddenly there was a rustling in the grass. "Mama!" I ran for the tent. "There's something out there. Sounded like a grizzly or..."

Mama banged the skillet down on the cookstove. "Lord, you are the spookiest child. When you were little, wind spooked you. Lantern light blinking in the window spooked you. The clown at Hallelujah Purdy's Circus and Hippodramatic Exposition spooked you." She picked up a spoon and waved it at me. "Now you're near grown up, you've gotten worse instead of better. Grizzlies! Indians! Won't shoot a gun! Want to lie around with your nose in a book! What is to become of you, girl?" Mama plopped a gob of bacon grease into the skillet and shook her head. "Every tub has to learn to stand on its own bottom sometime."

I got no supper again, but I must allow that in a curious way I was proud of myself. I might starve to death, but I'd go a New Englander.

The third day I ventured off the stump. I watched a blue jay gather buckeyes from a tree overhanging the ravine, followed a lizard as it skittled from sunny spot to sunny spot, made shadow pictures of a fox, a duck, and a swan on the canvas of the tent. And I went to visit Sweetheart, the old mean and ugly mule with one brown and one white ear who had brought us to Lucky Diggins.

Sweetheart lived behind the tent in a shelter Butte and I had made of canvas draped over a framework of tree branches. Missing Rocky Flat, the barn cats, and Gram's canaries, we tried to love Sweetheart. For the mule's part, she'd as soon bite. And she did. I rubbed the red spot on my arm that would soon turn into a bruise and returned to the stump.

Finally, hungry and afraid to push Mama any further, I closed my eyes, pulled the trigger a few times, and, lo and behold, shot a squirrel. It was blasted near to pieces and no good for anyone to eat except a dog or a coyote but I took it into the tent, dropped it on the table, and lay down on my bed to read
Ivanhoe.

"I plan to rent out your bed," said Mama, "to someone who will pay for it. Kindly remove your carcass."

At that I realized Mama's stubborn streak was a mile wider and a good deal deeper than mine. I sat outside the cabin day after day shooting rabbits and squirrels and any wild creature that moved until I discovered that I didn't mind killing birds as much, so we ate prairie chicken every day and would, I said, until someone else agreed to do the hunting. Jimmy Whiskers said prairie chicken with biscuits and lard gravy didn't taste bad at all, but the buckshot sure was hard on his gums.

Mr. Coogan said nothing but looked at me as though I were a hog and he a butcher. I had a bad feeling about that man.

Dear Gram and Grampop,

More boarders have moved in, but we are far from full and won't be until spring. Amos Frogge says some miners are thieves and drunkards, men of bad habits and worse dispositions; others can be counted as the finest folk on God's green earth. I'm sick of them all—dirty boots and dirty sheets, loud voices and big appetites.

We have to eat supper with them every night. Mr. Coogan near ruins it for me with his scowling and muttering and all-around bad nature. He isn't a miner like Jimmy or a blacksmith like Amos. I don't know what he does or is—except mean. He smacked Prairie once for spilling coffee on some papers he had, and Mama didn't even say a word to him.

If we didn't have the only boarding house in town,

Mama would be even more worried about business than she already is. Her cooking is no worse than it was at home, but her baking is so bad that I have, in desperation, taken it over, except that Mama still makes the bread. She claims I get too dreamy while kneading. Butte and the babies and I are used to Mama's hard, dry bread, but we don't have to pay for it. The boarders haven't complained much though, even Mr. Coogan. And they eat as if it were fancy cooking sent us by the Vanderbilts in New York.