Lyddie

Dear Lyddie,

The world have not come to an end yit. But we can stil hop. Meentime I hav hire you out to M. Cutler at the tavern and fer yr. brother to Bakers mill. […] Lv. at once you get this.

Yr. loving mother,

Mattie M. Worthen

[…] [Charlie] took the letter from [Lyddie’s] lap, and when she wiped her face and tried to smile, he grinned anxiously and pointed to their mother’s primitive spelling. “See, we can still hop.”

Lyddie laughed uncertainly. Her spelling was no better than her mother’s, so she did not really see the joke at first. But Charlie laughed, and so she began to laugh, though it was the kind of laughter that caught like briars in her chest and felt very much like pain.

Once I walk in that gate, I ain’t free anymore, she thought. No matter how handsome the house, once I enter I'm a servant girl—no more than a black slave. She had been queen of the cabin and the straggly fields and sugar bush up there on the hill. But now someone else would call the tune. How could her mother have done such a thing? She was sure her father would be horrified—she and Charlie dredges 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. She and Charlie could have fed themselves—just one good harvest—one good sugaring—that was all they needed. And they could have stayed together.

“Lucky you’re so plain. Guests couldn’t leave the last girl be.” [The cook] was ladling stew into a large serving basin. “Won’t have no trouble with you, will we?”

[…Lyddie] 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?

[…] 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 presenting these visible signs that she was doomed to be female.

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, […] “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.

I’d give it good thought, Lyddie said to herself. I’d get it all figured out close and choose my time right. If I was running, I’d pick me an early summer night with a lot of moon. I just travel by night, sleep in the day…

“Can you believe these fools?” Triphena was saying in her ear. “They don’t know what it’s like to be trapped.”

Lyddie had never seen a black person. She tried to imagine how one might look and act. In a way, she’d like to see one, but what would she do? What would she say? And supposing it was a fugitive, what then? One hundred dollars! Would they really give you a hundred dollars for turning in a runaway slave? Surely, with that much money, she could pay off her father’s debts and go back home.

“Charles is at school today.” [The miller’s wife] replaced the lid on the kettle. “He’s a very bright boy.”

“Yes,” said Lyddie. She would not be envious of Charlie. They were very nearly the same person, weren’t they?

“My husband is growing very fond of him.”

What did she mean? Who was growing fond of Charlie? Charlie was not their child, not even their apprentice. She felt the need to explain to the woman that Charlie belonged to her, but she couldn’t figure out how.

[…] Well, she was glad. Hadn't she felt bad that he didn’t have a father and mother like Luke Stevens had to watch over him? But these weren’t his real family. She was his real family.

“I was my own schoolmaster,” he said. “At first I only wanted to read the Bible so I could preach to my people. But”—he smiled again, showing his lovely, even teeth—“a little reading is an exceedingly dangerous thing.”

[…] “I couldn’t leave my home,” [Lyddie] said.

“No? And yet you did.”

“I had no choice,” she said hotly. “I was made to.”

“So many slaves,” he said softly.

“I ain’t a slave,” she said. […] “We own the land. We’re freemen of the state of Vermont.” He looked at her. “Well, my father is, or was, till he left, and my brother will be…” But Charlie was at school and living with strangers. She hated the man for making her think this way.

[Lyddie] signed the paper where the clerk pointed, tried to listen carefully to all his warnings about what the contract demanded, and stuffed the broadside that he handed her into her apron pocket. She would study it tonight, she decided, her heart sinking. She could tell at a glance that it would be almost impossible for her to make out the meaning of such a paper. Oh, if only Charlie were here to read it aloud to her and explain the long words. Factory girls were not supposed to be ignorant, it would seem.

It would be several months before she could read with ease the “Regulations for the Boardinghouses of the Concord Corporation.” But she found out the next day that it concealed unpleasant truths.

Embarrassed to have talked so long about herself, [Lyddie] asked, “But I reckon you know how it is with families, ey?”

“Not really. I can hardly remember mine. Only my aunt that kept me until I was ten. And she's gone now.”

Lyddie made as if to sympathize, but Diana shook it off. “I think of the mill as my family. It gives me plenty of sisters to worry about.”

I stared down a black bear, Lyddie reminded herself. She took a deep breath, fished out the broken ends, and began to tie the weavers knot the Diana had shown her over and over again the afternoon before. Finally, Lyddie managed to make a clumsy knot, and Diana pulled the lever, and the loom shuddered to life once more.

The child was in some kind of poor house, it seemed, and he was hungry. Lyddie knew about hungry children. Rachel, Agnes, Charlie—they had all been hungry that winter of the bear. The hungry little boy in the story had held up his bowl to the poor house overseer and said:

“Please sir, I want some more.”

[…] She fought sleep, ravenous for every word. She had not had any appetite for the bountiful meal downstairs, but now she was feeling a hunger she knew nothing about. She had to know what would happen to little Oliver. Would he indeed be hanged just because he wanted more gruel?

Lyddie could not keep the silly song out of her head. It clapped and whistled along with the machinery.

Oh! I cannot be a slave,

I will not be a slave….

She wasn’t a slave. She was a free woman of the state of Vermont, earning her own way in the world. Whatever Diana, or even Betsy, might think, she, Lyddie, was far less a slave than most any girl she knew of. They mustn’t spoil it for her with their petitions and turnouts. They mustn’t meddle with the system and bring it all clinging down to ruin. She liked Diana, really she did, yet she found herself avoiding her friend as though radicalism were something catching, like diphtheria. She knew Mr. Marsden was beginning to keep track of the girls who stopped by Diana’s looms.

“You must see the doctor about that cough,” Amelia said. “Promise me you will.”

“I’ll make a pact with you, Amelia. I’ll see the doctor if you’ll promise to stay until summer. I can’t think of Number Five without you.” [Betsy] stopped to cough, then cleared her throat and said in a still husky voice, “How could I manage? You’re the plague of my life my—my—guardian angel.”

There was a funny kind of closeness between [Lyddie’s] roommates after that night, but even so, Amelia went home the last week of January to visit and didn't come back. She wrote that her father had found her teaching post in the next village. “Forgive me, Betsy,” she wrote. “And do, please, I beg you, go to see the doctor.”

Lyddie wrote the brother. He was only in Cambridge—less than a day away by coach or train—but there was a three-week delay before he wrote to say that he was studying for his final examinations and would, perhaps, be able to come for a visit at the end of the term.

Betsy only laughed. “Well,” she said, “he’s our darling baby boy.” Then she fell to coughing. There was a red stain on her handkerchief.

“But you sent him all the way through that college of his.”

“Wouldn’t you do as much for your Charlie?”

“But Charlie is—” Lyddie was going to say “nice” and stopped herself just in time.

“Our parents are dead, and he’s the son and heir,” Betsy said as though that explained everything.

[Lyddie] woke once in the night and pondered on what she had once been and what she seemed to have become. She marveled that there had been a time when she had almost gladly given a perfect stranger everything she had, but now found it hard to send her own mother a dollar.

Dear Brother Charles,

I hope you are well. I am sorry to trouble you with sad news, but Uncle Judah come tonight to Lowell and brung Rachel to me. They have put our mother to the asylum at Brattleboro. Now they are thinking to sell the farm. You must go and stop them. You are the man of the family. Judah won’t pay me no mind. They got to listen to you. I got more than one hundred dollars to the det. Do not let them sell, Charlie. I beg you. I don't know what to do with Rachel. Children are not allowed in corporation house. If I can I will take her home, but I got to have a home to go to. It is up to you, Charlie […]

She could hardly keep her mind on her work. What was the use of it all anyway if the farm was gone?

In her uneasy sleep [Lyddie] saw the bear again, but, suddenly, in the midst of his clumsy thrashing about, he threw off the pot and was transformed, leaping like a spring buck up into the loft where they were huddled. And she could not stare him down.

Lyddie blew out the candle. She lay listening to Rachel’s even breathing and heard in her memory the sounds of birds in the spring woods. If only she could hear from Charlie, Lyddie’s happiness would be complete. The money was growing again. She had nearly caught up with the wages lost by her illness, and even though Rachel made only a pittance, it paid her room and board. She had seldom been happier. She woke in the night, puzzled. She thought she had heard Betsy again—that wretched hacking sound that sawed through her rib cage straight into her heart. And then she was wide awake and knew it to be Rachel.

“I got good news, Lyddie,” he said, a little of the boy she knew creeping into his voice. Her heart rose.

“The Phinneys have taken me on as a full apprentice.”

“Ey?”

“More than that, truly. They treat me like their own. They don’t have no child but me.”

“You got a family,” she said faintly.

[…] She wanted to scream out at him, remind him how hard she had worked for him, how hard she had tried, but she only said softly, “I wanted to do for you, Charlie. I tried—”

“Oh, Lyddie, I know,” he said, leaning toward her. “I know. But it waren’t fair to you. You only a girl, trying to be father and mother and sister to us all. It were too much. This will be best for you, too, ey. Don’t you see?”

She let go of the bucket and grabbed Brigid’s hand. They began to run, Lyddie dragging Brigid across the floor. Behind in the darkness, she thought she heard the noise of an angry bear crashing an oatmeal pot against the furniture.

She started to laugh. By the time they were at the bottom of the stairs she was weak with laughter and her side ached, but she kept running, through the empty yard, past the startled gatekeeper, across the bridge, and down the row of wide-eyed boardinghouses, dragging a bewildered Brigid behind her.

She turned unbelieving from one man to the other, but they ignored her. She fought for words to counter the drift the interview had taken, but what could she say? She did not know what turpitude was. How could she deny something she did not even know existed? […]

She opened her mouth. They were both looking at her sadly, but sternly. In the silence, the battle had been lost.

The bear had won. It had stolen her home, her family, her work, her good name. She had thought she was so strong, so tough, and she had just stood there like a day-old lamb and let it gobble her down. She looked around the crowded room that had been her home—the two double beds squeezed in with less than a foot between them for passage. She thought of Betsy sitting cross-legged on the one, bent slightly toward the candle, reading aloud while she, Lyddie, lay motionless, lost in Oliver’s world.

Lyddie spent the night with Diana. Everyone was kind. Diana had her family at last. Then why had something snapped like a broken warp thread inside Lyddie’s soul? Wasn't she happy for Diana? Surely, surely she was—happy and greatly relieved. “You must write to Brigid and tell her you are fine, ey?” Lyddie said as they parted the next morning. “She can read now, and she worries.”

“I’m off…” [Lyddie] said, and knew as she spoke at what she was off to. To stare down the bear! The bear that she had thought all these years was outside herself, but now, truly, knew was in her own spirit. She would stare down all the bears.

[…] Tarnation, Lyddie Worthen! Ain’t you learned nothing? Don’t you know better than to tie yourself to some other living soul? You'd only be asking for trouble and grief. Might as well just throw open the cabin door full wide and invite that black bear right onto the hearth.

Will you wait, Luke Stevens? It’ll be years before I come back to these mountains again. I won't come back weak and beaten down and because I have nowhere else to go. No, I will not be a slave, even to myself—

“Do I frighten thee?” he asked gently.

“Ey?”

“Thee was staring at me something fierce.”

She began to giggle, as she used to when she and Charlie had been young.

His solemn face crinkled into lines of puzzlement and then, still not understanding, he crumbled into laughter, as though glad to be infected by her merriment. He took off his broad hat and ran his big hand through his rusty hair. “I will miss thee,” he said.

We can stil hop, Luke Stevens, Lyddie said, but not aloud.