Mrs. Peck, for she was the rider, had brought a letter from the general store in the village. “I thought you might be wanting this,” she said. Lyddie fetched the coins for the postage from their almost empty cash box. The shopkeeper’s wife waited a bit, hoping, perhaps, that Lyddie would read the letter aloud, but she didn’t. Lyddie was not much of a reader, so it was later, the short wisps of hair around her face plastered with sweat, that she held the letter close to the fire and managed to make out the words in her mother’s cramped and painfully childish hand.

Dear Lyddie,

The world hav not come to the 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. The paschur, feelds and sugar bush is lent to M. Wescott to repay dets. Also cow and horse. Lv. at wuns you git this.

Yr. loving mother,

Mattie M. Worthen

Lyddie burst into tears. “I’m sorry, Charlie,” she said to her brother’s amazed and anxious face. “I never expected this. We were doing so good, ey? You and me.”

He took a deep breath, reached into his pocket, and handed her a ragged kerchief.

“It’s all right, Lyddie,” he said. “It’s all right.” When she kept her tear-streaked face buried in his kerchief, he gave one of her braids a tweak. “The world have not come to the end yit, ey?” He took the letter from her 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 stil hop.”

Lyddie laughed uncertainly. Her spelling was no better than their 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.

2

Kindly Friends

“She didn’t say nothing about the calf,” Lyddie said suddenly in the midst of their sorrowful packing up.

“She got no cause to,” Charles said. “We never tell her about it.”

“You know, Charlie, that calf is rightfully ours.”

He looked at her, his honest head cocked, his eyes dubious.

“No, truly. We was the ones asked Quaker Stevens to lend us use of his bull. Mama didn’t have nothing to do with it.”

“But if they’s debts …”

“She’s letting out the fields and the horse and cow. She’s sending you to be a miller’s boy and me to housemaid. She’s got us body and soul. We got no call to give her the calf.” She set one hand on her waist and straightened her aching back.

“What do you aim to do with it?”