Lyddie: Chapters 1–5

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.

Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

High in one of the apple trees a bluebird warbled his full spring song, chera, weera, wee-it, 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.

He looked at her, his honest head cocked, his eyes dubious.

Obediently, he quieted and stared in the same direction at the spindly maples that made up their stand of sugar bush.

They knew it was a rough and homely place compared to the farmhouses along the road and the ample mansions around the village green.

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.

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.

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.

The truth is, we’re taking the horse and cow to Mr. Westcott—in payment of debt, and we’re obliged to sell off this pretty calf straight away.

“Then the farm will just lie fallow?” Luke was asking Charles.

The pastures, a lush new green, were dotted with merino sheep and fat milk cows.

She was sure her father would be horrified—she and Charlie drudges on someone else’s place. It didn’t matter that plenty of poor people put out their children for hire to save having to feed them.

It was a very nice smile, not at all haughty.

He could make one perhaps from wood and then no one would have to tediously turn the spit by hand.

As it turned out, Mistress Cutler provided her with a store-bought calico gown. It was softer than her rough brown homespun and fit her much better, but somehow it suited her less.

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 cook was past her middle years and homely.

“You’re busy,” he said. “I don’t mean to hinder you.”

“You’re worse than a little mother,” the woman chided, but her eyes were softer than usual.

She could hardly move in the kitchen, large as it was, without tripping over the gangly legs of a man or having one of them bar her path to the fireplace with a poker.

The sap began to rise in the sugar bush, and Cutler’s was in a frenzy of activity.

Added to all her other chores was the task of clarifying the syrup brought up to the house.

She could pay for her trip by selling the sugar, and it would give her a chance to see the big city and her perpetually ailing sister.

It smelled as good as the air of coming spring. And though there was a bit of fresh snow toward the end of the month, Lyddie knew it for the sham winter it was.

“Where will you go, ey?” asked Lyddie wistfully.

When she rounded the bend, she half expected the cabin to have disappeared. But there it sat, sagging a bit, squat and honest as her father had built it.

She stifled a scream.