Free The Ballad of Lucy Whipple by Karen Cushman Page A

flapjacks, beans, and bacon, and ten or so cabins and tents in town and maybe fifty more stretched up and down the river. And on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights when miners came down from the hills, the population swelled by hundreds and there weren't nearly enough places for them all to eat and drink and sleep.
    Now I saw Lucky Diggins again through the eyes of a stranger. Small and dirty, the town smelled of privies. The streets were mud and dust, littered with oyster tins, ham bones, and broken shovels. Nearby trees had been butchered to stumps in order to erect the ugly raw wood buildings rising along the street. Worst of all, it wasn't Massachusetts and never would be.
    I turned my back on the stranger and went into the kitchen to stir the supper beans. My pickle crock, I thought. It had been sitting there untouched for months. There was no way to earn money in the winter unless I could sell mud to someone, but now that spring was here, I determined to get out the crock, dust it off, and start working my way back home once more. Time to fire up the pie business again.
    I sighed. More getting up early, traipsing up and down the river, and trying to avoid crazy men in their union suits.
    The big man came into the kitchen. "Young lady," he boomed.
    "Ma!"
    "Don't shout, Lucy. I'm here. Want a bed, mister?" she asked, wiping her hands on her apron and giving a cold, appraising eye to the stranger and the mud on his boots.
    "I do indeed, ma'am, praise the Lord. I am Brother Clyde Claymore, minister of the Free and Independent Church of Christ's Brethren, come to save souls, and I wonder if there is about here a family that might like the pleasure of taking me in for a spell in Jesus' name."
    Mama frowned. Our pastor in Massachusetts had baptized and married and buried Whipples for forty years and had eaten Sunday suppers and Tuesday lunches with them and had his socks darned and his coat pressed by one Whipple woman or another. But he had refused to bury Pa because Pa was not a church-going man, and ever since, Mama said she had no use for religious men. Said they left a bad taste in her mouth, like old mushrooms.
    Finally she answered him. "There ain't many families around here at all. There are the Flaggs, but you won't like staying there unless you like sleeping with coyotes, them being the wild sort. Mr. Scatter might do, but he has an unmarried daughter with marriage in mind, and most of the rest live in shacks or tents and don't have room to swing a cat by the tail, much less take in a stranger. This is about the only place in town to stay."
    "Then I will stay here, ma'am, thank you very much."
    "Mr. Scatter gets eighteen dollars and twenty cents for each of these beds each week and I'm not about to give one away. You got eighteen twenty, Mr. Claymore?"
    "Brother Claymore, ma'am," he rejoined, doffing his hat and flourishing it before him as if he were going to sweep the floor. "And you are Sister...?"
    "Sister nobody, Mr. Claymore. I am Mrs. Whipple and I have little affection for men of the cloth. Come back with eighteen twenty and you may have a bed. Good day to you. And next time wipe your feet."
    Seemed like Brother Clyde Claymore didn't have $18.20, for he got back on his tiny mule and rode into the camps up along the river, looking for shelter and praising God. The walls of the ravine rang with his call for all to forsake their wicked ways and accept God, hallelujah, and by the way perhaps make a small offering so Brother Claymore could get some food and a bed, amen.
    For all he was so big, Brother Claymore was gentle and soft-looking, an easy butt for the jokes of the miners. For a while he and his doings provided most of our supper conversation.
    "That crazy Clyde," said Amos one night. "Know what he did today? Leo Mack told him that Flapjack was yearnin' and yowlin' and missin' his wife and kiddies something fierce. Flapjack, who has no wife and no family and never said a kind word to nobody in all his