“It’s hard work, but maybe easier than what you do here, and you’d have some time to yourself, to study or just rest.”
“My mother’s promised me here,” Lyddie said quickly because the door from the kitchen was moving and suddenly Mistress Cutler was in the dining room. The woman looked from the lady to Lyddie, opening her mouth to speak, but Lyddie didn’t wait. She hurried past her into the kitchen.
That night, again she counted the calf money. The lady had been lying, of course. But still, how had a farmer’s daughter bought a silk dress?
4
Frog in a Butter Churn
When Lyddie first came to the tavern, Willie built up the morning fire. But he overslept often and several times the fire went out and someone had to be sent to the neighbor’s for live coals. The mistress was too mean to invest in a tinderbox, but she was mortified to be thought a careless housewife who let her kitchen fire die, so she put Lyddie in charge of it.
The first few nights Lyddie was fearful that she would not wake up early enough in her windowless room and slept on the hearth all night, so as to be sure to be the first up in the morning.
Triphena came in one morning and found her there, but instead of scolding, took pity. A sort of friendship began that morning. The cook was past her middle years and homely. She had never married, preferring, as she said, “not to be a slave to any man.” She was large and vigorous, impatient with Willie, who had to be told things more than once, but, as the days wore on, won over by Lyddie’s hard work and quiet ways.
One morning while Lyddie was churning, just as the cream was breaking into curdles, the cook told Lyddie about the two frogs who fell into the pail of milk. “One drowned right off,” she said, nodding her head in the direction of the door, which had just slammed shut behind Willie’s back. “But the other kicked and kicked, and in the morning they found him there, floating on a big pat of butter.”
Lyddie smiled despite herself.
“Ehyeh,” Triphena continued. “Some folks are natural born kickers. They can always find a way to turn disaster into butter.”
We can stil hop. Lyddie nearly laughed out loud.
Triphena cocked her head in question, but Lyddie only smiled and shook her head. She couldn’t share Charlie’s joke with someone else.
* * *
* * *
Autumn came all too quickly. The days grew suddenly short. And never, though she dreamed and plotted as she scrubbed the iron kettles and churned the butter and bellowed up the fire, never a chance to take the calf money home.
There was no word from Charlie. Not that she truly expected a letter—they had neither money for stationery and postage nor the time or energy for composition. She tried to keep him in her mind—to picture, as she lay upon her own cot, how he was growing and what he was doing. She rarely thought of Rachel and Agnes or their mother. The three of them seemed to belong to another, sadder life. The possibility of their father’s return slipped into a back corner of her mind. She wondered once if he were dead, and that was why she seldom thought of him now. There was no pain in the thought, only a kind of numb curiosity.
She and Charlie had left their mother’s note and notes of their own to Papa on the table in the cabin, weighted down by the heavy iron candlestick, so, in case he returned, he would know where they were. But the old vision of him coming up the narrow track had faded like a worn-out garment. When she realized that the dream she’d clutched for three years had slipped from her grasp, she wondered if she should feel bad that she had lost it. Her own voice said crossly within her head: “He shouldn’t have gone. He should never have left us.”
The flaming hills of early October died abruptly. At last, the dreary rains of late fall turned into the first sputterings of snow until the world was beautiful once more with the silver branches of the bare trees and the lush tones of the evergreens against the gleaming banks of snow, so white you had to squint your eyes against it on a sunny day.
The master put the wagons and carriages in the shed and set Willie to cleaning the mud off wheels and undercarriages, and the sleds were brought out. The stagecoach came less often now. Though there was plenty of work to be done in the short winter days, there were not many guests to feed or look after. The few who came seemed as closed and secretive as the freezing grayness of the weather, bent on some narrow business of their own. “Slave catcher,” Triphena was heard to mutter after one dark, sleekly well-dressed gentleman departed. “I don’t like the smell of them.”
If she had been home, she might have spent the dark afternoons spinning or sewing, but the mistress bought her woolens and calicoes at the village stores. She did not even card or spin the wool from their own sheep. It was sent to Nashua or Lowell, where it could be done in a gigantic water-powered mill. All the wealth that had once been Vermont’s seemed to be trickling south or west. In fact, the master was heard to say t
hat come spring, the sheep would be sold, because the western railroads were bringing such cheap wool to the Lowell factories that a New England sheep farmer could no longer compete.
It was what her own father had said, but his flock had been much smaller than Cutler’s, so their family had felt the pinch years sooner.
One late morning, as she was peeling and cutting potatoes for the boiled noon meal, she felt a presence behind her shoulder. Then someone tweaked her right braid. She looked about, annoyed, expecting to say a sharp word to the bothersome Willie, when she saw it was Charlie.
She stood up, the knife and potato still in her hand. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, you surprised me.”
He was grinning. “I meant to,” he said. “You look well.”
“You’re taller,” she said, but it was a lie. He looked smaller than she remembered, but he would have been pained to hear that. “How are you, Charlie?” It wasn’t a pleasantry, she really needed to know.
“Stil hopping,” he said with a grin. “Work is slow in winter, so they let me come to see how you were.”
Now that she was seeing him at last, she hardly knew what to say. “Have you heard anything from Mama and the babies?” she asked.
He shook his head. His hair was longer, but neater somehow. A better barber than she had trimmed it, she realized with a pang.