1
The Bear
The bear had been their undoing, though at the time they had all laughed. No, Mama had never laughed, but Lyddie and Charles and the babies had laughed until their bellies ached. Lyddie still thought of them as the babies. She probably always would. Agnes had been four and Rachel six that November of 1843—the year of the bear.
It had been Charles’s fault, if fault there was. He had fetched in wood from the shed and left the door ajar. But the door had not shut tight for some time, so perhaps he’d shut it as best he could. Who knows?
At any rate, Lyddie looked up from the pot of oatmeal she was stirring over the fire, and there in the doorway was a massive black head, the nose up and smelling, the tiny eyes bright with hungry anticipation.
“Don’t nobody yell,” she said softly. “Just back up slow and quiet to the ladder and climb up to the loft. Charlie, you get Agnes, and Mama, you take Rachel.” She heard her mother whimper. “Shhh,” she continued, her voice absolutely even. “It’s all right long as nobody gets upset. Just take it nice and gentle, ey? I’m watching him all the way, and I’ll yank the ladder up after me.”
They obeyed her, even Mama, though Lyddie could hear her sucking in her breath. Behind Lyddie’s back, the ladder creaked, as two by two, first Charles and Agnes, then Mama and Rachel, climbed up into the loft. Lyddie glared straight into the bear’s eyes, daring him to step forward into the cabin. Then when the ladder was silent and she could hear the slight rustling above her as the family settled themselves on the straw mattresses, she backed up to the ladder and, never taking her eyes off the bear, inched her way up to the loft. At the top she almost fell backward onto the platform. Charles dragged her onto the mattress beside her mother.
The racket released the bear from the charm Lyddie seemed to have placed on him. He banged the door aside and rushed in toward the ladder, but Charles snatched it. The bottom rungs swung out, hitting the beast in the nose. The blow startled him momentarily, giving Lyddie a chance to help Charles haul the ladder up onto the platform and out of reach. The old bear roared in frustration and waved at the empty air with his huge paws, then reared up on his hind legs. He was so tall that his nose nearly touched the edge of the loft. The little girls cried out. Their mother screamed, “Oh Lord, deliver us!”
“Hush,” Lyddie commanded. “You’ll just make him madder.” The cries were swallowed up in anxious gasps of breath. Charles’s arms went around the little ones, and Lyddie put a firm grip on her mother’s shoulder. It was trembling, so Lyddie relaxed her fingers and began to stroke. “It’s all right,” she murmured. “He can’t reach us.”
But could he climb the supports? It didn’t seem likely. Could he, in his frustration, take a mighty leap and … No, she tried to breathe deeply and evenly and keep her eyes fixed on those of the beast. He fell to all fours and, tossing his head, broke off from her gaze as though embarrassed. He began to explore the cabin. He was hungry, obviously, and looking for the source of the smell that had drawn him in. He knocked over the churning jug and licked tentatively at the blade, but Lyddie had cleaned it too well after churning that morning and the critter soon gave up trying to find nourishment in the wood.
Before he found the great pot of oatmeal in the kettle over the fire, he had turned over the table and the benches and upended the spinning wheel. Lyddie held her breath, praying that he wouldn’t break anything. Charles and she would try to mend, but he was only ten and she thirteen. They hadn’t their father’s skill or experience. Don’t break nothing, she begged silently. They couldn’t afford to replace any of the household goods.
Next the beast knocked over a jar of apple butter, but the skin lid was tied on tightly, and, flail away at it as he might with his awkward paw, he could not dislodge it. He smacked it across the floor where it hit the overturned bench, but, thank the Lord, the heavy pottery did not shatter.
At last he came to the oatmeal, bubbling—by the smell of it, sco
rching—over the fire. He thrust his head deep into the kettle and howled with pain as his nose met the boiling porridge. He threw back his head, but in doing so jerked the kettle off the hook, and when he turned, he was wearing it over his head like a black pumpkin. The bear was too stunned, it seemed, simply to lower his neck and let the kettle fall off. He danced about the room in pain on four, then two legs, the kettle covering his head, the boiling oatmeal raining down his thick neck and coat.
He knocked about, searching for the way out, but when he found the open door, managed to push it shut. Battering the door with his kettle-covered head, he tore it off its leather hinges and loped out into the dark. For a long time they could hear him crashing through the bush until, at last, the November night gathered about them once more with its accustomed quiet.
Then they began to laugh. Rachel first, throwing back her dark curls and showing the spaces where her pretty little teeth had been only last summer. Then Agnes joined in with her shrill four-year-old shout, and next Charles’s not yet manly giggle.
“Whew,” Lyddie said. “Lucky I’m so ugly. A pretty girl couldn’t a scared that old rascal!”
“You ain’t ugly!” Rachel cried. But they laughed louder than ever, Lyddie the loudest of all, until the tears of laughter and relief ran down her thin cheeks, and her belly cramped and doubled over. When had she laughed so much? She could not remember.
Her mother’s shoulders were shaking, but Lyddie couldn’t see her face. Mama must be laughing too. Lyddie dared to hope that her mother might laugh. Oh, there was the door to mend and the mess to be cleaned up, and the wasted porridge. But tomorrow she and Charles would find the kettle. The bear couldn’t have taken it far and he was sure to have left more than an adequate trail with all that crashing through the underbrush. Let her be laughing, she prayed.
“Mama,” she whispered, leaning her mouth close to her mother’s ear. “You all right, ey?”
Her mother whirled toward her. “It’s the sign,” she said.
“What sign, Mama?” Lyddie asked, though she did not want an answer.
“Clarissa said when the end drew near, the devil would walk the earth.”
“That weren’t no devil, Mama,” Charles said. “It were only a black bear.”
“ ‘Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.’ ”
“Aunt Clarissa don’t know, Mama,” Lyddie said as firmly as she could, though a shudder went through her body.
“It were only a black bear.” Rachel’s anxious little voice echoed her brother’s, and then, “Weren’t it, Lyddie? Weren’t it a bear?”
Lyddie nodded, so as not to seem to be contradicting their mother out loud.
“Tomorrow we’re going to Poultney,” their mother said. “I aim to be with the faithful when the end comes.”
“I don’t want to be with the fate full,” Rachel said. “I want to be with Lyddie.”
“Lyddie will come too,” their mother said.
“But how will Papa find us if we’ve left home?” Charles asked.
“Your father went out searching for vain riches. He ain’t never coming back.”
“He will! He will!” Rachel cried. “He promised.” Though how could she remember? She’d been barely three when he’d left.
It was hard for the babies to go to sleep. Their stomachs were empty since the porridge had been ruined, and Mama would not hear of fixing more. Charles helped Lyddie clean the cabin. They propped up the door and put the chest against it to keep it in place until they could fix it in the morning. Then he climbed up the ladder to bed.
Lyddie stayed below. The fire must be banked for the night. She knelt down on the hearth. Behind her left shoulder sat Mama in the one chair, a rocker she had brought from Poultney when she came as a bride. Lyddie stole a glance at her. She was rocking like one dazed, staring unblinking into the fire.
The truth be told, Mama had gone somewhat queer in the head after their father had left. Lyddie had to acknowledge it. Not so strange as her sister, Clarissa, and her end-of-the-world-shouting husband, Judah—surely not. But now the bear seemed to have pushed her too far. “Don’t let’s go, Mama,” Lyddie pleaded softly. “Please, Mama.” But her mama only stared at the fireplace, rocking slowly back and forth, her eyes blank and still as though her spirit had gone away and left the body there rocking on and on.
It was useless to argue, and Lyddie gave up, hoping that the mood would pass, like her mother’s times of craziness always had. But the next morning her mother had not forgotten her determination. “If it ain’t Clarissa’s, it will soon be the poor farm,” she said.
The only charity Lyddie dreaded more than Aunt Clarissa’s was that of the township’s poor farm. It was to escape that specter that their father had headed West.
“I can’t stop you to go,” Lyddie said, “but I can’t go with you. I can’t leave the farm.” When her mother opened her mouth to argue, Lyddie went on. “The sow won’t fetch enough to provide coach fare for the lot of us.”
She sent Charles along to make sure her mother and the babies arrived safely at Uncle Judah’s farm. Charlie was a funny sight, hardly higher than a currant bush, but drawn up like a man in his worn boots and his father’s old woolen shirt with the sleeves rolled. He loaded up the barrow; they’d sold the horse cart for seeds last year. “It’s only ten miles to Cutler’s, where the coach stops. The little ones can ride when they get too tired,” he said. He put in their mother’s old skin trunk, which had carried her meager trousseau to this mountain and most of the food she’d managed to preserve before she gave up trying. Between them, he and Lyddie wrestled the old sow to the ground and tied her, squealing, to a shaft of the barrow.
“You want I should go with you as far as the village?” she asked him. But they agreed it would be better for her to tend the cow and horse and protect the house from the wild critters.
“You watch out for yourself,” he said anxiously.
“I’ll do fine,” she said. “Now remember, you got to get enough for the pig to pay coach fare for everyone.”
“And for me to come back again,” he said, as a promise that she would not be left alone on the mountain farm. He glanced about to make sure his mother wasn’t in hearing distance. “You mustn’t be afraid to go down and ask the Quaker Stevens for help, Lyddie. They mean to be good neighbors to us, no matter what Mama says.”
“Well, I’ll see how it goes, ey?” she said, tossing her thin plaits behind her shoulders. He should know she was not going to be beholden to the neighbors for anything so trivial as her own comfort. Their mother didn’t approve of heathens or abolitionists, and since she considered their Quaker neighbors a bit of both, she forbade the children to have anything to do with the Stevenses. “Ain’t no Worthen gonna have truck with the devil,” she said. Early last summer, when Mama was having one of her spells and not paying much attention, Charlie had again sneaked the cow down the mountain to the Stevenses’ place. As long as Lyddie could remember, long before their father had left, they had made use of the Stevenses’ bull. If their mother ever wondered about those calves that were born like miracles every spring, she never mentioned it. She knew as well as Lyddie and Charles that they could never have managed without the cash money those calves brought in.
Lyddie didn’t care one way or the other about the neighbors’ radical ideas and peculiar ways, she minded mightily being beholden. It couldn’t be helped. The use of a bull was a necessity she couldn’t manage on her own, but she would starve to death rather than go begging before this year’s calf was safely born and it was time to mate the cow once more.