Lyddie

by Katherine Paterson

  Safely on the ground, the woman lifted her head and looked about her. Her face was thin and white, her features elegant. She caught Lyddie’s eyes and smiled. It was a very nice smile, not at all haughty. Lyddie realized that she had been staring. She closed her mouth and quickly looked away.

  Then the encounter was over, for the stout woman who had come out of the kitchen door was hustling the lady, her escort, and two other passengers through the low gate and around to the main door at the north end of the tavern.

  Suddenly she saw Lyddie. She came over to the wall and whispered hoarsely across it to her. “What are you doing here?” She was looking Lyddie up and down as she asked, as though Lyddie were a stray dog who had wandered too close to her house.

  Lyddie was aware, as she might not have been minutes before, that she had no bonnet and that her hair and braids were dusty from the road. She crossed her arms, trying to cover her worn brown homespun with the gunnysack. The dress was tight across her newly budding chest, and it hung unevenly to just above her ankles in a ragged hem. Her brown feet were bare, her outgrown boots still slung over her shoulder. She should have remembered to put them on before she got off Luke’s wagon.

  Self-consciously, she raised her sleeve and wiped her nose and mouth under the woman’s unforgiving stare. “Go along,” the woman was saying. “This is a respectable tavern, not the township poor farm.”

  Lyddie could feel the rage oozing up like sap on a March morning. She cleared her throat and stood up straight. “I’m Lydia Worthen,” she said. “I got a letter from my mother …”

  The woman looked horrified. “You’re the new girl?”

  “I reckon I am,” Lyddie said, clutching her gunnysack more tightly.

  “Well, I’ve no time to bother with you now,” the woman said. “Go into the kitchen and ask Triphena to tell you where you can wash. We keep a clean place here.”

  Lyddie bit her lip to keep from answering back. She looked straight into the woman’s face until the woman blinked and turned, running a little to catch up with the guests who were waiting for her at the main door.

  The cook was as busy as the mistress and not eager to involve herself with a dirty new servant just when she was putting the meal on the table. “Sit over there.” Triphena shook her head at a low stool near the huge fireplace. Lyddie would rather have stood after the long, bumpy ride in the Stevenses’ wagon, but she chose not to cause a problem with the cook as well as with the mistress in the first ten minutes of her employment.

  The kitchen was three times the size of the whole Worthen cabin. Its center was the huge fireplace. Lyddie could have stretched out full length in front of it and her head and toes would have remained on the hearth with room to spare.

  Built into the right side of the brick chimney was a huge beehive-shaped oven, and the smell of fresh-baked loaves made Lyddie forget the generous dinner she’d shared noontime. The trouble with eating good, she thought later, is you get too used to it. You think you ought to have it regular, not just for a treat.

  Over the fire hung a kettle so large that both the babies could have bathed in it together. It was bubbling with a meat stew chock-full of carrots and onions and beans and potatoes in a thick brown broth. There were chickens turning on a spit, which seemed to be magically going round and round on its own. But as Lyddie’s eyes followed a leather strap upward, she saw, above the fireplace, the mechanism from which hung a huge metal pendulum. She wished her father could see it. He could make one perhaps from wood and then no one would have to tediously turn the spit by hand. But perhaps it was something you’d have to order from the blacksmith—in which case it was likely to be so dear that only the rich could afford one. She couldn’t remember seeing one at the Stevenses’, and they were rich enough to own their own loom.

  “Move,” the cook said. The large woman was beginning to take the food from the fire. She gave Lyddie a quick glance. “Lucky you’re so plain. Guests couldn’t leave the last girl be.” She was ladling stew into a large serving basin. “Won’t have no trouble with you, will we?”

  Lyddie picked up the stool and moved to a corner of the room. She knew she was no beauty, never had been, but she was a fierce worker. She’d prove that to the woman. Should she offer to help now? But the cook was too busy moving the food from the fire to the long wooden table in the center of the room to pay her any mind. Lyddie scrunched her body into itself and tucked her bare feet under the low stool, fearful of seeming in the way. Would all the guests come in here to eat? And if so, where should she hide?

  As if to answer her question, the mistress pushed through the door with a boy behind her. “Hurry,” she said. She supervised while the last of the food was transferred from the iron kettles into great china basins, which the cook and the boy carried from the kitchen to some other part of the house. The mistress mumbled and grumped orders, and in between complained of the guest who made herself out to be a lady when she was nothing but a factory girl putting on fancy airs.

  If the mistress saw Lyddie sitting in the corner, she never let on. Lyddie was glad to be ignored. She needed time and a chance to wash and change her dusty clothes. If only she hadn’t worn her better homespun to travel in. The one in the gunnysack was even tighter and more ragged. She hadn’t had a new dress since they sold the sheep four years ago. Since then, her body had begun to make those strange changes to womanhood that exasperated her. Why couldn’t she be as thin and straight as a boy? Why couldn’t she have been a boy? Perhaps, then, her father would not have had to leave. With an older son to help, maybe he could have made a living for them on the hill farm.

  But, hard as she wished, hard as she tried, she was only a girl. She was, as girls go, scrawny and muscular, yet her boyish frame had in the last year betrayed her. Her breasts were small and her hips only slightly curved, but she couldn’t help resenting these visible signs that she was doomed to be female.

  Even the last year before Papa left, he had begun sending her in to help her mother. “She never really got over the baby’s birth,” he’d say. But once there was no more wool to spin, she felt as though her presence in the house just made her mother try less. One by one, the household tasks had been turned over to Lyddie—cooking and churning and cleaning and caring for the babies. For a while her mother spun the flax. They had no loom and paid the village weaver in spun flax for cloth. Her father had left them in a new shirt her mother had made. But that was the last garment her mother sewed. Lyddie tried to keep up the spinning, but when she had to take her father’s place outdoors, she was too exhausted to try to spin and sew in the dim candlelight.

  Last winter she sewed one shirt. She had made it for Charlie because he, too, was outgrowing his clothes, and the old wool shirt their father had left behind hung on him like a nightdress.

  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. How could she enjoy the garment of her servitude? She was fit with new boots as well. They pinched her feet and made her long to go barefoot, but she wore them, if not meekly, at least with determined obedience. After a few weeks and many blisters, they softened a little, and she was able to forget them for an hour or so at a time.

  The people at Cutler’s were not so easy to forget. The mistress was large in body and seemed to be everywhere on watch. How could a woman so obviously rich in this world’s goods be so mean in the use of them? Her eyes were narrow and close and always on the sharp for the least bit of spilt flour or the odd crumb on the lip.

  Not that Lyddie would stoop to steal a bite of bread. But the boy, Willie Hyde, was given to snatching the last of the loaf as he carried the breadbasket from the table to the kitchen. He was a year or so older than Charles and growing like red birch, and to hear the mistress carry on, about as useless. He was sent to shed or barn or field whenever he was not needed in the tavern itself. Lyddie would n
ot have said so, but she envied him the chance to be outdoors and out of boots so often.

  Mistress Cutler watched Lyddie like a barn cat on a sparrow, but Lyddie was determined not to give her cause for complaint. She had worked hard since she could remember. But now she worked even harder, for who was there to share a moment’s leisure with? Who would listen with her to a bird call, stare at the sunset, or watch a calf stumble on its long, funny legs toward its mother? Missing Charlie was like wearing a stone around her neck.

  She slept under the eaves in a windowless passage, which was hot and airless even in late spring. She was ordered to bed late and obliged to rise early, for the mistress was determined that no paying guest in the windowed rooms across the narrow passageway should know that they shared the floor with the kitchen girl.

  She spoke rarely, but she listened intently, storing up stories for Charlie. She didn’t consider writing him. She was ashamed to have Charlie see her poor penmanship and crude spelling and, besides, there was no money for paper or postage—nothing except the calf money, and she would not spent a half penny of that. Indeed, at night when she was too tired or too hot to sleep, she would take the gunnysack out from under her straw mattress and count the money in the darkness. It’s like little Agnes sucking her thumb, she scolded herself, but she didn’t stop. It was the only comfort she had that summer.

  * * *

  * * *

  It was nearly September when she saw the pink silk lady again. She had come this time on the coach from Burlington, and was headed, Lyddie overheard her say at supper, for Lowell, Massachusetts. When another traveler asked her business in Lowell, she smiled and said, “Why I work in the Hamilton Mill there. Yes,” she added, answering her questioner’s stare, “I’m one of those factory girls.”

  The man murmured something and turned his face toward his bowl of stew.

  The lady watched him, still smiling, and then, catching Lyddie’s eye, smiled even more broadly, as though to imply that Lyddie was a comrade in some peculiar way.

  Indeed, when the men had left the dining room to go into the taproom, she stayed behind, reading a book she had taken from a small silk purse that matched her lovely dress.

  “I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?”

  Lyddie looked around to see to whom the lady was speaking, then realized the room was empty except for the two of them.

  “In late May, when I was headed home to the farm for the summer.”

  Lyddie cleared her throat. She had lost the habit of conversation. She nodded.

  “You’re not one of the family here.”

  Lyddie shook her head.

  “You’re a good worker. I can see that.”

  Lyddie nodded again to acknowledge the compliment and turned again to loading the dirty dishes on her tray.

  “You’d do well in the mill, you know. You’d clear at least two dollars a week. And”—she paused—“you’d be independent.”

  She was lying, Lyddie was sure of it. No girl could make that much money in a week’s time.

  “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.

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

  It was a stupid conversation. But both the cook and Willie were in the kitchen, and the mistress would be in and out. How could they say anything that mattered?