Lyddie didn’t care one way or the other about the neighbors’ radical ideas and peculiar ways, she minded mightily being beholden. It couldn’t be helped. The use of a bull was a necessity she couldn’t manage on her own, but she would starve to death rather than go begging before this year’s calf was safely born and it was time to mate the cow once more.

*  *  *

She needn’t have worried. Charlie came back in about two weeks, and together they made it through the winter. 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.

When the time for the calving drew near, they reluctantly let the cow go dry. They had no need for butter without any bread, but they’d miss the milk and cheese sorely. Nonetheless, they were farmers enough to do what was best for their only cow.

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. They were able to make enough syrup and sugar for themselves. Hardly enough for a cash crop, but they were learning, and in another year, after another harvest, they would be experienced old farmers and sugarers, they told each other.

Years later she would remember that morning. The late May sky was brilliant dare-you-to-wink blue, and the cheek of the hillside wore a three-day growth of green. High in one of the apple trees a bluebird warbled his full spring song, chera, weera, wee-it, cheerily-cheerily. Lyddie’s own spirit rose in reply. Her rough hands were stretched to grasp the satin-smooth wooden shafts of the old plow. With Charles at the horse’s head, they urged and pushed the heavy metal blade through the rocky earth. The plow cast up the clean, damp smell of new turned soil. 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.

“Charlie,” she said quietly, hardly daring to move, because for a moment she hoped it might be Papa, but only for a moment. It was plainly a woman riding sidesaddle, and not their mother, either. She never rode since she fell years ago and miscarried the baby that would have come between Lyddie and Charles.

“Charlie,” Lyddie repeated. “Someone’s coming.”