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.”