The Ballad of Lucy Whipple (7 page)

Then the mountain mist covered the moon again. Pa was gone, and I was back in Lucky Diggins, looking for Mama.

Mama stood near the stump all alone.

"What are you doing, Mama? There's no stars or anything to look at."

I could see her smile in the light from the tent flap. "I'm just talking to your pa."

I felt easier. The Gent would have a long row to hoe if he wanted Mama.

S
PRING
/S
UMMER
1850

In which Butte and I both get educated

The warm days of spring brought an explosion of wildflowers—mustard, lupine, and golden poppies, wild lilac and wood anemone—that nearly concealed the holes, pits, and ditches the miners left behind. Spring also meant we could finally remove the heavy winter underwear that covered us neck to ankles in scratchy gray wool. I felt almost bare naked and so free.

We finally moved into the wooden boarding house. Though it was little and crude by Buttonfields standards, the feel of a real house above my head and under my feet just about made up for the added chore of scrubbing the floor with clean river sand and the hog-bristle brush. There was room for twice as many beds,
which meant twice as many biscuits, twice as many beans, and twice as many sheets to boil in great kettles outside, pound with battling sticks, and spread on bushes to dry.

As if all this weren't enough, Mama decided that Butte was getting too rough and wild and uneducated and that I should teach him after supper each day and some on Sunday afternoon.

"What do you mean, uneducated?" said Butte when I told him. "I already know forty-eight words for liquor."

"You lie. You don't," I said.

"Do."

"Don't."

Butte stood up and cleared his throat like someone about to make a speech. "Hooch, cactus juice, catgut, cougar's milk, gator sweat, jack-a-dandy, kingdom come, knock-me-down, mother's milk, throat tickler, firewater, alky, gullet wash, tangle legs, diddle, courage, bug juice, corpse reviver, popskull, stingo, blue ruin, panther piss, pig sweat, rotgut, sheep wash, snake juice, whoopie water, witches' piss, lightning flash, neck oil, ammunition, oil of joy, joy water, tiger milk, nose paint, sorrow drowner, bosom friend, snake medicine, bust head, cut throat, coffin varnish, craw rot, liquid fire, smile, blackstrap, corn juice, gut warmer, and chain lightning. Two more and I'll have fifty. Reckon that will be some sort of record."

I was impressed in spite of myself.

"And I know ten words for saloon: rumhole, mug-house, groggery..."

"Butte."

"And seven words for privy: outhouse, ajax, necessary, shi—"

"Butte!" This was Mama. That settled it. Butte had to quit sweeping the saloon and get educated.

Dear Miss Homer,

I bring you greetings from Mama and all of us at Lucky Diggins. Thank you for the box of books. When it came, I just sat and stared at the miracle of a parcel with my name on it. I thought I'd make a plan for opening it over a long period of time, so I could savor it. Open the box one day, remove the contents another. Instead, I was so excited, I just ripped the box open and sat down on the floor with the packing paper piled around me and my chores undone.

I took each book, smelled the paper and glue, felt its weight in my hand, and rubbed the raised letters on the cover and spine. I have lined them up on my shelf in the order in which I will read them. I am reading
The Corsican Brothers
now and think to start next either
Evelina
or
The Book of British Ballads.
I plan on saving
The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes
for last, thank you nonetheless for sending it. The packing paper I have saved for writing letters.

The books got here at just the right time. I am to educate
Butte, and I would get mighty tired of hearing him butcher
Ivanhoe.

Please send my greetings to the class, especially Essie Beck and Opal McCurdy. Tell them not to forget me before I figure a way to get back. I have been planning to write them but I fear that they never could understand my life here. How could I tell them about living with a bunch of men who never wash or change their clothes or speak below a bellow, in a space so small I can lie in bed and stir the beans on the stove without getting up? Those of us lucky enough to have a house instead of a tent paste calico and packing paper on the wall to keep the wind and dirt and bugs out. No one has a book or a new dress or flowers growing outside the door.

Besides, postage costs so danged much.

Summer came and was very hot and—impossible as it seemed after that wet winter—very dry. Where had all the water gone? No one washed body or sheets or shirts. Mama boiled potatoes in such a little bit of water that they scorched and Jimmy took to calling them "smoked potatoes."

Prairie had planted beans and carrots and potatoes, hoping to store enough to see us through another wet winter if necessary, but the plants grew limp and sorry-looking in the heat. In August, when the river dried up, we looked to lose them all. So Butte and I took to walking downriver to the Forks, filling buckets in the Yuba,
which still ran, warm and shallow but wet, and lugging them back to Lucky Diggins.

I thought to use the walking time to continue Butte's education. "If we walk six miles each way, that is two times six, which is how many miles?"

"Too many."

"Be serious, Butte."

"I'm mighty serious. This ain't no fun and you're making it worse with this two times two stuff. I'm tired enough and I'm certainly hot enough and I think I'm educated enough, too. Why do I have to know two times everything?"

"Butte, even miners got to know how to subtract and multiply to figure out, oh, their expenses and whether Mr. Scatter or some banker is cheating them."

"I don't aim to be a miner."

"You don't? I thought you had gold fever and wanted to do nothing but search for color and strike it rich."

"Not hardly. Too much dirt. I want to be the captain of a ship, a beautiful sailing ship that goes to the South Seas and the Sandwich Islands and maybe even around the world. I was never so happy as on that ship from Boston to San Francisco."

The very memory set my stomach to churning, so I changed the subject back to arithmetic. For a while we practiced adding big numbers in our heads—4,786 plus 392—but we concentrated so hard on carrying numbers that we forgot we were carrying buckets and sloshed nearly half our hard-gotten water over our boots. We moved on to history.

"Sea captains don't need to know history," said Butte.

"Of course they do."

"This one don't."

"Butte, you don't even know what history is."

"Do so. It's old stuff that nobody cares about anymore."

"Did you ever stop to think that someday we will be history, part of the great Gold Search or some such? Maybe we'll be in history books—the mighty Whipples of Whippletown who struck it rich in California."

"No more educating today, Lucy. Tell me more about the mighty Whipples."

"Well," I said, relieved to be imagining instead of educating, "there is Mrs. Whipple, the mother, who serves tea every afternoon in her big mansion and wears ruby velvet dresses and a big hat with a bird's nest on it. And the oldest daughter, Lucy, who is very beautiful and sought after by all the men but who prefers to lie in a hammock on her green and glorious Massachusetts estate and read. She does not eat oatmeal or possum or boiled milk and bread, and never has to chop onions or lug water in lard buckets. Next is Captain Butte, the famous mariner."

"What's a mariner?"

"A sailor. I told you you don't know everything. He sails the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to the Sandwich Islands and has a beautiful Kanaka wife who waits with flowers and pineapples for his return. Next there would have been Ocean Whipple, but she died. Then Prairie..."

"Say more about Ocean. Nobody talks about her, as though she never was. I remember Golden and the pneumonia, but all I know about Ocean is she was there and then not there."

We stopped to rest our arms and take a few bites of the cold potatoes I carried in my apron pocket. "Papa used to talk to me about her, but Mama won't," I told Butte. "Never said her name to me as far as I can recall. Papa used to say she was no bigger than a minute, with yellow ringlets and a dimple in her chin. She called him Popsy.

"Once Mama took her through the woods to Oakbridge. You and I were just getting over the quinsy and stayed with Gram, and Prairie and Sierra weren't born yet. On the way back from town, Mama sat down to get a stone out of her shoe and Ocean disappeared. They searched a mighty long time, but nobody ever saw her again. We don't know was it Indians or outlaws or wolves or what." I shivered. It seemed a whole lot more scary to me out here than it had back home, like something that could happen to anyone, not just a toddling baby.

"Do you think she's dead?"

"I reckon so. No one rightly knows."

"If she's alive, I wonder what she looks like now." Butte snickered. "If she's dead, I wonder what she looks like."

"Butte, how morbid and awful."

"I wonder what Pa looks like now."

"Butte!"

I hurried on ahead, bucket bumping against my legs and more of the precious water splashing my skirt. But Butte, skinny and fast like Pa, caught up with me. "I don't mean to be morbid, Luce. He's still my pa, even now, and I wonder what he looks like, is all. Is his skin hanging in tatters? Is he just bones? Are his fingers and toes—"

"Butte, you're making me sick. Why do you think about things like that?"

"Sometimes I like to think of things that are bad or scary, kind of like practicing for being brave. I have to be brave now that Pa's dead and except for me you're all females."

"Females can be brave too, Butte."

"Yeah, but you ain't very and I'm the next oldest so I reckon it's up to me. I don't think I'd be near as brave if I didn't feel I had to."

I stopped in surprise. I never knew that. Figured Butte was just naturally all guts and go-get-it.

I put down the bucket and rumpled his hair. It shone red in the sun. Like Pa's. "Seems like I'm getting educated today as well as you."

Dear Gram and Grampop,

All of a sudden I am grown mighty popular and it is all due to the box of books from Miss Homer. Men I have never spoken to this past whole year come up to me, hat in hand, and say, "Excuse me entirely, little sister, but I hear you might have some books for borrying.
"

I have become a one-person lending library. My library has two rules:

1. I get to read books first.

2. No chewing tobacco stains.

I used to have a third rule—Return what you borrow to ME. Do not lend it to someone else—but everyone broke that rule. Besides, the books always come back to me eventually, so I have eliminated rule number three.

Some of my books have gone fifty miles or so up and down the river and have come back with notes inside: "Ripping good story, miss!" or "What a conbobberation about nothing" or "Might you have one where the heroine has yellow hair and is called Marthy?
"

One miner wrapped about five dollars' worth of dust in a cigarette paper and put it between pages twenty-four and twenty-five of "Rip Van Winkle" and it was still there when the book came back to me. I have used it toward paying off Bean Belly Thompson for carrying the books.

Next time you visit Pa's grave, please plant some flowers on it for Butte and me, larkspur if you can find it for we have that here and I would like to think we are looking at the same thing, even if I look at the flowers and he the
roots. Mama says Pa is in Heaven with God, but the last time I saw him he was in a box in the ground in Massachusetts, so that is how I tend to think of him. Not that I don't believe in God. I do. I'm just not sure that I believe in Heaven, at least not like I believe in the public library.

Writing about Pa made me more than ever homesick for Massachusetts, so I got my pickle crock and tried to guess how much money was left in it. I counted the coins and attempted to weigh the gold dust by holding it in one hand and a half pound of lard in the other. I still didn't know just how much was there, but I knew it was not near enough. Sighing a big sigh, I went to the kitchen to chop onions and cabbage for slaw.

A
UTUMN
1850

In which, I though unwilling, pick berries in the
wilderness and am rewarded with a new friend

September came clear and hot. Blackberry weather. And dewberry, elderberry, and huckleberry.

"Why do I have to go picking and not Prairie?" I asked Mama. "She wants to go and I don't."

"Prairie is only seven. I don't want her wandering alone out there."

"Mama, you shouldn't want
me
wandering alone. I'm the one who gets lost and Prairie's the one who finds me. She'll do better than I will."

"Nevertheless," Mama said, and I knew that I and not Prairie would be berry picking.

Each morning I gathered up my wits and my buckets, hid
The Count of Monte Cristo
under my apron, and trudged away to the hillside off Ranger Creek. The hot summer had dried the grass and turned the oats yellow too soon, but the berry bushes still tangled along the creek.

I quickly settled into the work. From late morning to noon I'd read in the shade of a tree. At noon I'd eat my biscuits and cold gravy. Early afternoon, yearning for the cool waters of spring, I'd stick my feet in the warm, sticky mud of the creek and read some more. Late afternoon would find me running from bush to bush, grabbing frantically at whatever berries I could reach. And at night I'd try and explain to Mama why berry picking was going so slow.