The Rebellion of Miss Lucy Ann Lobdell (28 page)

* * *

The Delaware County Almshouse sat on the river flats across from the town of Delhi. It needed paint and leaned to the south, but the roof kept the rain out. The kitchen and eating hall were on the first floor, as was the large room off to the side where the men slept in bunks. The women and children stayed in the many small rooms upstairs. One of these, hardly more than a closet, was given to me.

After seven years alone in the woods, I had to learn again how to live with others. Mostly, I did what I was told and stayed out of people’s way. I wore pants and a shirt, and when my hair grew back, I kept it short. I wasn’t pretending to be a man. These were the clothes I wanted to wear, and no one seemed to mind. They called me Joe, for Joseph, or Jo, for Josephine, I don’t know which because you can’t tell how people are spelling things when they are speaking. I didn’t mention Helen to anyone, and Mrs. McNee kept my secret. For the house register, I went by the name of Lobdell.

I worked that summer in the large garden out back. After hunting for so many years, I came to enjoy the dirt. It was alive and ripe. Caring for plants calmed me. Not so calming were the daily moans and howls from the building near the garden. It might have been a barn for chickens, it had that look, but it wasn’t. It was a barn for the insane, and it never failed to throw a terror into me.

Mrs. McNee had strict orders to keep the inmates, as they were called, confined. But every now and then, when one seemed to have promise, the garden crew, with Mrs. McNee’s consent, would ignore the order and bring the poor soul out to work. Sometimes the sunshine and companionship brought about a cure. It did good things for me. I had just spent seven years in the gray land between the dead and the living. Now I was back in the living world, but even so, it was a world without hopes or expectations. And I didn’t want any—they had only caused me trouble in the past. Now there was nothing for me beyond each day as it unfolded—one day and the next, trying to follow the Lord’s commandments. People got used to having me around.

* * *

I had been at the almshouse for several months when one afternoon Mrs. McNee asked me to come to her office after dinner. I didn’t like the sound of it. Once the table was cleared and the dining room swept, I went to her office where she was at her desk, making notes in a ledger. She asked me to sit and forced a smile in my direction. I wanted to run.

“I received a letter yesterday,” she said.

“It’s from Helen.”

I tried to calm myself. “Is she well?”

“Oh, she’s fine,” said Mrs. McNee, letter in hand. “If you’d like, I’ll read it to you.”

I nodded but was strangely afraid. I wanted to hear Helen’s words but feared the failings they might call to mind. Mrs. McNee adjusted her spectacles.

“
Dear Mrs. McNee
,” she began, in a voice meant to enliven the words. “
I’m sorry I didn’t write sooner, but the days have flown by. I was very sad when Mr. Fortnam took me away, but now I am content. Tyler Hill is a lovely place
,
and everyone has been more than kind
…”

Helen told about the Fortnam farm and her new brothers and sisters. She said that she worked long hours, but that she didn’t mind, for everyone worked hard and she was treated well. She said that she missed Mrs. McNee very much and promised not to wait so long to write again. She signed it,
Love, your Helen
.

Suddenly, I felt bare. I had told myself when I left home many years ago that I was going to find work and a place for myself and my daughter. I failed. And somewhere along the way, I had begun to look for something else—freedom for myself. I had found it only in bits and pieces. But what good is freedom without love?

“She sounds happy,” I said.

“Yes, I think so. But you worry, because people sometimes take a girl, and the child finds herself a servant.” Mrs. McNee paused. “I will write back to her, Joe. Do you want me to say you are here?”

“Oh, please no!” I cried. “It’s enough to know that she’s well. If she thinks I’m dead, then perhaps that’s for the best.”

Mrs. McNee seemed startled by my outburst, but she didn’t ask why it would be for the best. But then, of course, she might know. She, herself, had given up Helen, broken her own heart, and let Helen go so that she might have a real home. And now that she had one, was it for me to suddenly appear and curdle the milk? What did I have to offer, except my shame and destitution? Beyond that, I was sure that Helen would hate me less if she thought me dead, and in this, I was thinking more about me than her—about what I could bear. And I didn’t want things to change for me. It might seem that I had fallen as far as a person could—that I had nothing to lose—but that wasn’t so. I had been to a place far below. I had been cold, hungry, and lonely enough for ten lives, and I never wanted to go back. At the almshouse I had a bed to sleep in, food to eat, and people to talk to. Things I hadn’t had for years. And if you haven’t had those things, you don’t think of them as nothing.

* * *

When the weather turned and the ground became hard, those of us who worked in the garden were offered to the townsfolk as house helpers. The fee for our labor, paid to the county, was small, so many people took this service. But suspicious eyes fell on any new arrival who might be a thief as well as poor. I thought this peculiar, for in my experience, poor people were no less honest than others. Often, I found them more so. Still, because I was new and a little strange, I was given work two days a week cleaning the courthouse and the sheriff’s office, where my good conduct was thought assured.

Sheriff Evans was at his desk the day I first came.

“And what can I do for you?” he said, leaning back in his chair.

“I’m Joe Lobdell, sir,” I said, in military fashion. “I’m a resident of the County House and here to work.”

The sheriff shrugged as if to say it was all right with him, whatever the county wished to send. My hair was still short, and I was wearing trousers, but he knew, of course, who I was and that I was a woman—my story had made the rounds. I think he was a little amused, but whatever he was thinking, he didn’t make my time difficult. He went about his tasks, and I went about mine. Had it been my choice, I would have remained at the almshouse and done any kind of work, just to be with people I knew and not have to think of things to say to people I didn’t.

Curtis Evans was a close-shaved man with a tarnished pistol on his hip. He lived just outside of town with a wife and two daughters. I learned this from Mrs. McNee, for the sheriff and I didn’t talk much. That changed one afternoon when Evans saw me stop to admire the rack of rifles chained to the wall. “You know what you’re looking at?” he asked. I nodded. “You know how to shoot?” I nodded again. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“Most likely,” I said. That answer made him laugh. The sheriff then took out a key and unlocked the guns, pulling down a breach-loading carbine he was fond of. I saw his surprise when I held it with ease.

“I used to hunt,” I said. “Along the Delaware. And in Minnesota.”

The sheriff gave a disbelieving look. “You were in Minnesota? When?”

“Before it was a state.”

I handed the rifle back, and he leaned it against the wall. “I had thought to go myself,” he said. “How was it?”

“Cold in the winter, but I liked it fine.”

Evans smiled. Maybe he didn’t believe me. For my part, I hadn’t spoken of Minnesota in years.

“Did you see Indians?” he asked.

“Not many. Most of them had been penned up.”

“Lucky you weren’t there for the uprising.”

“Oh, I was. It just wasn’t as big as people first thought.”

“No,” said the sheriff. “I mean the one three years ago. Hundreds of settlers were killed—entire towns wiped out.”

Entire towns? I remembered the fear I had seen the day I walked into Manannah.

“Do you remember what towns?” I asked. “Would the names Manannah or Forest City sound familiar?”

The sheriff shook his head. “No. I just read that they got burned. Then they sent in the soldiers and rounded up all the redskins. Had a big hangin’ day. They won’t be bothering anyone now.”

Hanging day? I felt a rush of sadness for the settlers and the Sioux. And then the questions: What about the people who had offered me their kindness—the Whitmores, the Blanchards, Noah White, and Jenny Lindross? What had become of them?

W
HEN SPRING CAME, I contrived to continue my work in town. By then, Sheriff Evans and I got along pretty good. I liked when people stopped in and passed the news or played checkers with the sheriff. Sometimes, when he wasn’t there, they’d ask questions of me. When would the sheriff be back? Had the mail come in from Oneonta? Laugh if you care to, but each of these was evidence that I was, indeed, a living person. And to have it be a true test, I waited to be spoken to. I don’t know what they said about me when I wasn’t there, though I did hear that some people teased the sheriff by referring to me as the deputy. But in my presence, nobody went out of their way to be mean about my clothes or short hair, an unexpected acceptance that I wanted to keep.

When the men played checkers, I would usually find a way to watch from a polite distance. I liked the game and hadn’t forgotten the tricks I had learned in Minnesota. I would see things that others didn’t and often had to hold my tongue. But one slow day I didn’t hold my tongue but instead challenged the sheriff to a game. I had overstepped my bounds—I was not his equal. But there was no one around, and the sheriff agreed to play. I beat him that first time, and from then on, it wasn’t hard to get a game out of him. He was eager to get back at me, and he did, often enough. One afternoon he caught me daydreaming and jumped me twice.

“What were you starin’ at?” he asked, taking my pieces.

“The cells in the back,” I said with a yawn.

“They’re the same ones that were there last week.”

“I thought they might be,” I said, taking the bait, “but are they the ones where they kept the Calico Indians?”

The sheriff dropped one of the checkers and looked at me like I might be a ghost. “What would you know about that?”

I paused, because I knew a lot of it. The struggle between the farmers and the fancy-name landlords—Van-this and Von-somethingelse—had gone on for most of my girlhood. “Back then,” I said, “we lived a little east of here—out near Schoharie. Men were called to help the farmers. My father went out. Were you here then?”

“Oh, I was,” said Evans with a smile that meant more than he was saying.

“You were on the other side?”

“It weren’t no
other side
,” he said. “It was the law.”

It all came rushing back. My father going out in the night. My uncle Tom getting arrested and losing his land. Land on which he’d built a barn. “The farms should belong to the people who clear the land,” I said, repeating what I had heard many times when I was a girl.

The sheriff shook his head. “The land belongs to the person who holds the deed!”

“Deed?” I said, unable to let it be. “A deed that came from some duke or earl? We had a war to end all that if I remember my lessons.”

I wasn’t saying anything new. Neither was he. This was an old argument—we both knew how it went. So I was surprised when I saw Evans getting worked up. “They had no damn right to break the law!” he shouted. His knee hit the checkerboard and the pieces went flying.

I wasn’t going to say anything back to that. I just ducked down and tried to pick up the checkers, but the sheriff told me to get out.

I didn’t tell Mrs. McNee about my argument with Sheriff Evans. I was afraid. There I was, once again, making a mess of things. And what would happen now? After all, if I were not good enough to work at the jail, would I be allowed to stay at the almshouse? Perhaps the sheriff would make up some story that had nothing to do with the farmers’ uprising. He could say almost anything. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell Mrs. McNee—even for her to know my side of things. Like every child in trouble, I hoped it would go away on its own. I wasn’t due at the jail for another four days, and I was certain by then I would hear not to come. When that didn’t happen, I expected the sheriff wanted to tell me himself. But he wasn’t at the office when I arrived, so I started cleaning in the back. Evans came in soon enough, didn’t say a word and went about looking through the mail.

So that was how it was going to be—back to us hardly talking. I regretted it, but I was relieved and kept on with the work, making my way into the front with the broom. A little later the sheriff put down his reading. “Listen,” he said, “I was an up-renter because my Pa was an up-renter, and that was the way it was. It mostly depended on if you owned your land and who your friends were.”

“I think it was hard on everybody,” I said, looking for common ground. “Whoever was on the other side, well, I guess it was natural to think the worst of them. Did you hate the Calicos?”

“Oh, I hated them all right,” he said, showing a little color.

“Why? They were just farmers.”

“Not after dark, they weren’t. One night they caught me on the Bovina road. Tied me up and told me they were gonna to hang me. I was eighteen. Near pissed my pants.”

“And?”

“They had their fun and let me go. Then three of them got arrested for tarring the land agent and were locked up, right back there, just as you said. Their friends decided to get ’em back and put out the call. They had three hundred men on horseback right outside of Delhi, blowing those horns all night and promising to burn the town and turn it into a cabbage patch. You remember that?”

“No,” I said, a little put off. “I was just a girl on a farm. All I remember is the coming and going—Mother pleading with Father, begging him not to go out.”

Evans glanced over his shoulder, as though to make sure no one else was in the room. “You ever see those costumes?”

I smiled to myself. “I found my father’s in the attic,” I said, having spoken of that to no one.

The sheriff’s eyes grew wide. “Did he have the mask?”