Free Patience & Sarah (Little Sister's Classics) by Isabel Miller

won’t come.”
    “No, she won’t.”
    “I can’t stay here.”
    “No, you can’t.”

     
    By March I was healed up. Every outside part of me worked just right. There wasn’t a bruise to show. I didn’t cry for Patience except when nobody could see.
    I cut my hair. The family talked against it, but nobody stopped me. They stood around and watched, like watching a fist fight but not getting into it.
    We had no looking glass. I just felt and cut. My head felt light and strange and cool and free. It would take some getting used to. When I’d got to where I couldn’t catch any more locks, I stopped.
    Ma said, “I’ll even it up for you.” I felt the blades cold on my neck. Everybody allowed it was uncanny how like a boy I looked when she got through.
    I didn’t know what I’d do when my hair needed another cut. Patience was supposed to bring shears.
    “You know there’s a toll for walking down a turnpike?” Pa said.
    I didn’t know. For just walking?
    “I won’t walk down a turnpike, then,” I said.
    “There’s a toll for bridges,” he said. “And ferryboats.”
    “I’ll swim.”
    I figured I could walk fifteen miles a day, at least, and work here and there as I went for my eats. Ma’d fed many a man on his way like I’d be. I knew it could be done and was done. They’d been by our fire and told, and made me want to go. I don’t know why they didn’t make Pa want to. How could he stay in Connecticut on that rocky hilly farm that had been butchered before we ever laid eyes on it, and not feel his heart just break to go? The only way I can explain Pa on that is to say he never had that hopefulness you need to push out and try. He might look big and cheery and reckless, but inside he’s very scared to take a chance.
    There was no use starting till the mud dried out and let the farmers at their fields so they’d be glad to swap a meal for a little help. I was fit to go, but I waited around, teaching my sister Mary how to use an ax and drive the cattle. Pa skipped Rachel – he figured she was past the age. I wanted to teach Mary how to handle a gun too, but Pa said that was going too far. He wished he’d never taught me, he said. Mary was going to help him, but she wasn’t going to get big ideas about herself. He’d learned his lesson, he said. I have to laugh at Pa thinking it’s having a big idea to do like him.
    “I don’t want Mary claiming her name’s Mark one of these days,” Pa said.
    My new name was Sam. Did learning to shoot cause that? I expect it could’ve. It made me feel I could take care of myself, and not be beholden, and love who my feeling went to. I suppose lots of girls loved Patience but never said. Maybe it was because I could shoot that I could say. No matter that Patience changed her mind and I had to cry and go alone. I was never for a minute sorry I’d said.

     
    Came the day I left home, a Monday late in April. I was up early and everybody with me. I hoped the little ones would sleep on, but they got up, crying. I was crying too, but that had nothing to do with how I had to go.
    I laid my blanket on the floor and put my extra clothes and tinderbox along it, and the jag of nocake and jerky Ma had for me, and then I rolled the blanket long, like a log, and bent it and tied the ends together so I could hang it around my neck and over my shoulder. It rode easy that way. Pa let me take a hatchet, on grounds I’d be back before he could miss it, and I hung that at my waist, along with a little pan Ma gave me, and I was ready to go except I didn’t know how to.
    Ma kissed me and said, “I wish we had some money for you.”
    “I’ll make my way,” I said.
    “I know. You’ll be just fine.”
    “Ma, I’ll come back if you need me. Just let me know.”
    She nodded, playing there would be a way she could let me know, and said, “Now, off you go.”
    Pa said, “You won’t get twenty mile.”
    I kissed them all. Even Pa. “I won’t say goodbye,” he said.