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She needn’t have worried. Charlie came back in about two weeks, and together they made it through the winter. They shot rabbits and peeled bark for soup to eke out their scarce provisions. They ran out of flour for bread, so the churn stood idle, but “I never
craved churning,” said Lyddie.
When the time for the calving drew near, they reluctantly let the cow go dry. They had no need for butter without any bread, but they’d miss the milk and cheese sorely. Nonetheless, they were farmers enough to do what was best for their only cow.
The calf was born to great rejoicing and a new abundance of milk and cream. Lyddie and Charles felt rich as townsfolk. A sweet little heifer she was, arriving on the first warm day of March, the same day that they bored holes in the sugar maples and inserted the spills that they had made to catch the sap flow. They were able to make enough syrup and sugar for themselves. Hardly enough for a cash crop, but they were learning, and in another year, after another harvest, they would be experienced old farmers and sugarers, they told each other.
Years later she would remember that morning. The late May sky was brilliant dare-you-to-wink blue, and the cheek of the hillside wore a three-day growth of green. High in one of the apple trees a bluebird warbled his full spring song, chera, weera, wee-it, cheerily-cheerily. Lyddie’s own spirit rose in reply. Her rough hands were stretched to grasp the satin-smooth wooden shafts of the old plow. With Charles at the horse’s head, they urged and pushed the heavy metal blade through the rocky earth. The plow cast up the clean, damp smell of new turned soil. Cheerily-cheerily.
Then into that perfect spring morning a horse and rider had come round the narrow curve of the road, slowly, the horse gingerly picking its way across the deep, dried ruts of mud left from the thaws of April and early May.
“Charlie,” she said quietly, hardly daring to move, because for a moment she hoped it might be Papa, but only for a moment. It was plainly a woman riding sidesaddle, and not their mother, either. She never rode since she fell years ago and miscarried the baby that would have come between Lyddie and Charles.
“Charlie,” Lyddie repeated. “Someone’s coming.”
Mrs. Peck, for she was the rider, had brought a letter from the general store in the village. “I thought you might be wanting this,” she said. Lyddie fetched the coins for the postage from their almost empty cash box. The shopkeeper’s wife waited a bit, hoping, perhaps, that Lyddie would read the letter aloud, but she didn’t. Lyddie was not much of a reader, so it was later, the short wisps of hair around her face plastered with sweat, that she held the letter close to the fire and managed to make out the words in her mother’s cramped and painfully childish hand.
Dear Lyddie,
The world hav not come to the end yit. But we can stil hop. Meentime I hav hire you out to M. Cutler at the tavern and fer yr. brother to Bakers mill. The paschur, feelds and sugar bush is lent to M. Wescott to repay dets. Also cow and horse. Lv. at wuns you git this.
Yr. loving mother,
Mattie M. Worthen
Lyddie burst into tears. “I’m sorry, Charlie,” she said to her brother’s amazed and anxious face. “I never expected this. We were doing so good, ey? You and me.”
He took a deep breath, reached into his pocket, and handed her a ragged kerchief.
“It’s all right, Lyddie,” he said. “It’s all right.” When she kept her tear-streaked face buried in his kerchief, he gave one of her braids a tweak. “The world have not come to the end yit, ey?” He took the letter from her lap, and when she wiped her face and tried to smile, he grinned anxiously and pointed to their mother’s primitive spelling. “See, we can stil hop.”
Lyddie laughed uncertainly. Her spelling was no better than their mother’s, so she did not really see the joke at first. But Charlie laughed, and so she began to laugh, though it was the kind of laughter that caught like briars in her chest and felt very much like pain.
2
Kindly Friends
“She didn’t say nothing about the calf,” Lyddie said suddenly in the midst of their sorrowful packing up.
“She got no cause to,” Charles said. “We never tell her about it.”
“You know, Charlie, that calf is rightfully ours.”
He looked at her, his honest head cocked, his eyes dubious.
“No, truly. We was the ones asked Quaker Stevens to lend us use of his bull. Mama didn’t have nothing to do with it.”
“But if they’s debts …”
“She’s letting out the fields and the horse and cow. She’s sending you to be a miller’s boy and me to housemaid. She’s got us body and soul. We got no call to give her the calf.” She set one hand on her waist and straightened her aching back.
“What do you aim to do with it?”
“Hush. I’m studying on it.” Obediently, he quieted and stared in the same direction at the spindly maples that made up their stand of sugar bush.
