She sent Charles along to make sure her mother and the babies arrived safely at Uncle Judah’s farm. Charlie was a funny sight, hardly higher than a currant bush, but drawn up like a man in his worn boots and his father’s old woolen shirt with the sleeves rolled. He loaded up the barrow; they’d sold the horse cart for seeds last year. “It’s only ten miles to Cutler’s, where the coach stops. The little ones can ride when they get too tired,” he said. 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.

“You want I should go with you as far as the village?” she asked him. But they agreed it would be better for her to tend the cow and horse and protect the house from the wild critters.

“You watch out for yourself,” he said anxiously.

“I’ll do fine,” she said. “Now remember, you got to get enough for the pig to pay coach fare for everyone.”

“And for me to come back again,” he said, as a promise that she would not be left alone on the mountain farm. He glanced about to make sure his mother wasn’t in hearing distance. “You mustn’t be afraid to go down and ask the Quaker Stevens for help, Lyddie. They mean to be good neighbors to us, no matter what Mama says.”

“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. “Ain’t no Worthen gonna have truck with the devil,” she said. Early last summer, when Mama was having one of her spells and not paying much attention, Charlie had again sneaked the cow down the mountain to the Stevenses’ place. As long as Lyddie could remember, long before their father had left, they had made use of the Stevenses’ bull. If their mother ever wondered about those calves that were born like miracles every spring, she never mentioned it. She knew as well as Lyddie and Charles that they could never have managed without the cash money those calves brought in.