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“It’s a nice fat heifer,” she said. “We kept it so long on its mother’s milk. We’ll get a good price for it.”
“We’d be bound to give the money to her.”
“No.” Her voice was sharper than she meant, ground as it was on three years of unspoken anger. “We always done that and look where it’s got us. No,” she said again, this time softly. “The money don’t go there. She’ll give it away to Uncle Judah, who’ll give it to that preacher who says you don’t need nothing ’cause the world is going to end.” She turned to her brother. “Charlie, you and me can’t think about that. We got to think about keeping this farm for when Papa comes back. We should take that money and bury it someplace, so when we get free we can come back here and have a little seed cash to start over with.”
“Maybe she’ll sell the farm.”
“She can’t. Not so long as Papa’s alive.”
“But maybe …”
“We don’t know that, now do we? We got to believe he’s coming back—or he’s sending for us.”
“I hope he don’t send for us.”
“We’ll persuade him to stay,” she said. She wanted for a minute to put her arm around his thin shoulders, but she held back. She didn’t want him to think that she considered him less than the man he had so bravely sought to be. “We’re a good team, ey, Charlie?”
“Ox or mule?” he asked, grinning.
“A little of both, I reckon.”
They cleaned the cabin and swept out the splintery plank floor. They knew it was a rough and homely place compared to the farmhouses along the road and the ample mansions around the village green. But their father, the seventh son of a poor Connecticut Valley farmer, had bought the land and built the cabin with his own hands before their birth, promising every year to sell enough maple sugar, or oats, or potash to build a larger, proper house with a real barn attached instead of a shed which must be found through rain or blizzard. His sugar bush was scraggly and his oat crop barely enough to feed his growing family. There were stumps to burn aplenty as he cleared the land, but suddenly there was no need for potash in England and hardly any demand in Vermont. He borrowed heavily to buy himself three sheep, and the bottom dropped out of the wool market the very year he had had enough wool to think of it as a cash crop. He was an unlucky man. Even his children sensed that, but he loved them and worked hard for them, and they loved him fiercely in return.
Pulling shut the door, which, despite all Charles’s efforts, still did not close quite flush, they remembered the bear and wondered how they could keep the wild creatures from destroying the cabin in their absence. Finally, Charles suggested that they take all the wood left in the woodpile and stack it in front of the door. It took them close to an hour to accomplish the move, but, sweating and breathing hard, they admired their fortress effect.
That made it a little easier for them to go. Charlie rode bareback astride the plow horse, his brown heels dug into the horse’s wide flanks. Lyddie, leading the cow, followed close by. She carried a gunnysack, which held her other dress and night shift. Her outgrown boots were joined by the laces and slung over her shoulder. The long walk would be more easily done with her feet free and bare. There was no need to tie the calf. It danced around its mother’s backside, bleating constantly for her to stand still long enough for a meal.
It was the end of May. The mud was drying in the deeply rutted roadway, but Lyddie did not watch her feet. Birds were playing in and out of the tall trees on either side of the road, calling and singing in the pale lacy greens and rusts of the new growth and the deep green of the pines and firs. Here and there wildflowers dared to dance in full summer dress, forgetting that any night might bring a killing frost.
Lyddie breathed in the sweet air. “It’s spring,” she said. Charles nodded.
“Do you mind too much going to the mill?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t rightly know. Don’t seem too bad. Dusty, I reckon. And not much time to be lazy, ey?”
She laughed. “You wouldn’t know how to be lazy, Charlie.”
He smiled at the compliment. “I’d rather be home.”
She sighed. “We’ll be back, Charlie, I promise.” They were both quiet a moment remembering their father saying almost the same words. “Truly,” she added. “I’m sure of it.”
He smiled. “Sure,” he said.
They were in sight now of Quaker Stevens’s farm. They could see him, his broad-brimmed straight black hat surrounded by the black hats of his three grown sons. They had the oxen yoked to a sled, which was already half loaded with stones, and were digging away at more stones buried in a newly cleared field.
Their farmhouse, close to the road, had been added onto over the years. The outlines of the first saltbox could be made out on the northern end, which melted on the backside into a larger frame Cape Cod, then an ell that served as shed, storage, privy, and corridor to two barns, the larger one growing out of the smaller. They were rich for all their Quaker adherence to the simple life.
Envy crept up like a noxious vine. Lyddie snapped it off, but the roots were deep and beyond her reach.
Before they called out, the farmer had seen them. He waved, took off his hat to wipe his head and face on the sleeve of his homespun shirt, replaced his hat, and made his way across the field to the road.
“I see my bull served thee well,” he said, smiling. His face was broad and red, his hair curly and gray about his ears. Great caterpillar eyebrows crowned his kindly eyes.
“We come to thank you,” Lyddie began, thinking fast, wanting to be fair and honest but at the same time wanting a large price for the calf that she knew in her heart
was partly his.
“Thee brought these beasts five miles down the road for that?” he asked, his woolly eyebrows high up on his forehead.
