Lizzie's Carefree Years Read online

  “Oh yes, I got you,” the first baseman said.

  Lizzie did not even know his name, but he was absolutely sure she was out, and Lizzie was absolutely sure she was not.

  “You didn’t!” she yelled, her face turning a dark shade of red as her temper increased.

  The boy looked embarrassed, because, after all, Lizzie was a stranger. He had never seen her before today and this was quite unusual—a girl yelling at him like that. So he just blinked his eyes and turned to look helplessly at the pitcher.

  “You’re out, Lizzie,” Ivan said quietly.

  “My foot was on the base when he tagged me,” Lizzie informed him firmly.

  The ball field became deathly still as everyone waited for Lizzie to give in.

  Emma broke the silence, saying, “Lizzie, take your out.”

  “No!”

  “Lizzie!”

  “I’m not out.”

  So Ivan shrugged his shoulders and the first baseman shrugged his. “Okay,” he mumbled.

  So Lizzie ran back to first base, putting one foot firmly on it, and her other one toward second base. She didn’t look at the boy on first base, because she didn’t like him very much. He should not have been so insistent, because she wasn’t out.

  Another pitch, and Harvey hit the ball way up and out to left field. Lizzie raced to second base, relieved to feel the solid mound beneath her feet—and then she heard her team yelling for her to go back.

  “Go back, Lizzie—he caught the fly! Go back!” Emma screamed.

  But it was too late. The first baseman had already caught the ball, and she was quite fairly and quite thoroughly out.

  Lizzie was horribly humiliated. She should have watched to see if anyone caught the ball. But she held her head high as she ran the full length of the ball diamond, back to home plate, and didn’t say a word. There was no use.

  Ivan’s eyes teased her and the first baseman held his baseball glove to his face. Raw fury coursed through Lizzie as the boys looked knowingly at each other.

  When the bell rang and Harvey said, “Proves it,” quietly to Ivan, and he threw back his head and laughed, Lizzie bit down hard on her lip. She could not stand boys, hardly ever, and today she decided she would show them yet, somehow, someday. But she was also old enough to know sometimes it was best to be quiet when you were wrong.

  Salina gave her a wide, kind smile before they were seated, which was a healing balm to her battered ego.

  chapter 2

  The First Snowfall

  The new school was soon the bright spot of Lizzie’s life. Every morning she hopped out of bed, anticipating another day of walking to school with her cousins. It was a different world, but a happy one, filled with new friends and places.

  The air was turning into a chilly north wind as they all walked home from school on a Friday evening. They pulled their coats tightly around their bodies, as goose bumps chased each other up and down Lizzie’s spine. The cold air turned their noses red, and Lizzie sniffed, wishing she would not have forgotten her handkerchief.

  The gray clouds looked cold and menacing, almost as if there was an angry man inside churning up the gray and white colors to make them darker. For some reason it made Lizzie think about when Dat disciplined her for disobeying or misbehaving.

  Lizzie was always getting in trouble. Emma hardly ever had to receive a punishment because she was not like Lizzie. Emma was just naturally a good girl who loved to wash dishes, clean up the whole living room, and sweep without complaining; she actually loved to go to the pantry, get the broom, and sweep a whole room. That was just how Emma was.

  Lizzie sniffed again and looked over at Emma. Her nose was red, but she was smiling and talking to Edna.

  “Aren’t you cold, Emma?” she asked.

  “Mm-hmm. Kind of,” Emma replied.

  “Let’s walk faster. I’m all shivery,” Lizzie said, a bit grumpily.

  “It’s going to snow!” Edna announced happily.

  Lizzie spun around, her attention turned to Edna. “You think so? How do you know?” she asked, walking backward so she could see Edna’s face better.

  “It just feels like snow. Mom says if the cold goes into your bones, it’s going to snow.”

  Lizzie was so excited. She loved snow, so it was almost incomprehensible to her, with the amount of hills that were all around their new basement house.

  “Do you . . . I mean, do you . . . where do you go sled riding? There are so many hills!” She spread her arms wide, gesturing to all the slopes and ridges.

  “Oh, we go all over the place! But the best place is right down past our house, past the barn. We start up at the sawmill,” Edna said.

  Emma, always the practical one, asked how they could get across the road safely.

  “Can you get your sled stopped before you hit the road?” Lizzie asked, thinking about flying down that hill and the headlights of a car approaching in the dark.

  “Oh, we have to take turns standing down by the road to yell back up the hill if it’s safe to go across,” Edna assured her.

  “Wow!” Lizzie breathed, her heart skipping in excitement. “I cannot imagine how fast you must go across that road!”

  “We do. And we always have to ask Debbie to go along. She loves to go sled riding, too.”

  Lizzie became quiet suddenly, because she still didn’t know Debbie. They had met her once, on the day they moved, but she felt shy around English girls. She didn’t even know if Mam would let her play with Debbie. They never had little English girls to play with before, so she didn’t know if Dat and Mam would approve of it or not. It wasn’t that she couldn’t speak English well enough; she just wasn’t sure if she wanted to become friends with Debbie, because she was allowed to dress much nicer and have her hair in bangs. It was something new to worry about, so Lizzie fell silent the rest of the way home.

  That evening, just as Lizzie started carrying wood to fill the woodbox, she noticed little bits of wetness hitting her face. The air was gray and heavy, the cold hurting Lizzie’s fingers as she carried armload after armload of wood. Mandy tailed along with Lizzie, but she only carried a few pieces at a time, because she was so thin and small.

  Lizzie enjoyed carrying wood. She wished she’d be allowed to split the big chunks with an axe, like Dat did, but he never allowed her to use it. That irked Lizzie, because she saw no sense in being forbidden to split wood. She told Dat even if she missed the chunk of wood, the axe would only thump into the ground. He informed Lizzie that she could also hurt herself, sinking the axe into her toe. Lizzie thought that was the dumbest thing she had ever heard of—her toe wasn’t even close to the axe head.

  Dat would not budge about letting Lizzie split wood. She always had to sweep the wood chips away after they were finished, and she was allowed to put wood into the black stove in the living room, but she still wanted to split wood.

  She held out her hand, palm up, and—sure enough!—the wet little splotches were real snowflakes. Tiny little ones, but snowflakes nonetheless. Lizzie turned her face to the sky, and suddenly she could see thousands of little whirling snowflakes.

  “Mandy, look!”

  Mandy turned her face up and gasped in awe. “Wow! Lizzie, look how many snowflakes there are!”

  “Millions! Kajillions!” Lizzie shouted.

  They leaped and bounced. They ran in circles, shrieking and laughing as the tiny flakes increased. They forgot all about carrying wood to fill the woodbox, and reveled in this wonderful surprise, so early in the season.

  Dat came walking in the drive, on his way home from building his pallet shop. He looked tired and a bit preoccupied, but lifted his head when he heard the sound of the girls’ joy. He smiled when he saw their jubilance, remembering the thrill of the season’s first snowfall when he was a boy.

  “Dat! Dat!” Mandy shouted. “Did you know it’s snowing?”

  “No. Really?” Dat teased her.

  Mandy took Dat’s hand and skipped beside him till they r
eached the porch. Dat stood quietly beside his boisterous daughters, watching the snow swirling in from the northeast. He could tell that this snow would not be just flurries. It might snow a foot or more. He was glad they had the roof on the pallet shop, even if it wasn’t quite finished yet. He wanted to be making pallets before January, that was for sure.

  As they entered the warmth of the kitchen, Mam was standing by the sink, enveloped in a cloud of steam. She was mashing potatoes, and the smell of frying meat made Lizzie weak with hunger.

  Emma looked up from putting knives and forks carefully beside their dinner plates.

  “Hey! Emma, it’s snowing!” Lizzie shouted.

  Emma’s eyebrows were drawn down in disapproval, sniffing as she said, “Lizzie, don’t be so loud. I know it’s snowing.”

  “Are you going to go sled riding with us?” Lizzie yelled.

  Mam stopped mashing potatoes, turning to look at Lizzie. “Lizzie, quiet down. Go take off your coat and help Emma finish setting the table. Hurry up!”

  Lizzie sighed. There was no one like Mam and Emma to bring her down to earth. Her shoulders drooped as she hurried into the laundry room. She hung her coat on a hook, but it slid off, so she just let it lie on a heap below the hook. She threw her scarf across the hook and hurried back into the kitchen. It wasn’t her fault she didn’t pick up her coat, because she had to help set the table in a hurry.

  She yanked open the cupboard door and started thumping the plastic drinking glasses into a tower. Whack! Whack! She carried them precariously across the kitchen and thumped them down at each place setting. Dat watched her from his seat at the head of the table, knowing why she was thumping them like that.

  “Lizzie,” he said quietly.

  She stopped. “What?”

  “Not so loud.”

  Lizzie said nothing, but the thumps definitely decreased in volume. Emma brought a steaming dish of macaroni and cheese to the table, which promptly made Lizzie’s mouth water. Jason scrambled up on the bench behind the table, his curls bouncing as he scooted himself over to his plate.

  Lizzie bent to bury her face in his curls. “Jason, Jason!” she sang to tease him. Jason giggled and reached up to slap her playfully. He was growing into a little boy, no longer a baby, and his talk delighted the whole family. He was smart for his age, speaking as clearly as a six-year-old child. He voiced his little opinions about everything, which often had Emma and Lizzie laughing uncontrollably.

  When Jason was born, Lizzie thought he was the ugliest baby she had ever seen. She used to be embarrassed by his curly hair, but now she thought he was adorable. His hair was curlier than ever, making his head appear much bigger than it actually was.

  “Did you see the snow, Jase?” Lizzie asked. “Look out the window!”

  Jason clapped his hands and squealed. His hair bounced as he kept clapping and asked, “Are you going to pull me on your sled?”

  “Of course. As soon as the snow is thick enough.”

  After they had silent prayer, Lizzie piled mashed potatoes and gravy on her plate, adding a heaping tablespoon of macaroni and cheese. She bit into a crispy piece of fried chicken and passed on the bowl of green beans. Emma watched as Lizzie kept eating her fried chicken.

  “Lizzie, you have to eat green beans,” she said, always practical.

  “I don’t have to.”

  Mam looked at Lizzie and said, “Take some.”

  “I hate them.”

  “So?” Emma said.

  “You should eat them, Lizzie,” Jason said seriously. “They’re good for you.”

  Mandy threw back her head and laughed, her mouth full of potatoes.

  “Close your mouth, Mandy,” Emma said.

  Mandy and Lizzie looked at each other without smiling. Mandy closed her mouth and finished chewing, while Lizzie took a spoonful of green beans and plopped them down hard on her plate. It was just an unspoken feeling about Emma. She was actually bossier than Mam, and the older she became, the greater the difference was between Emma and Lizzie. Mandy was more with Lizzie now, and they roamed the fields and fencerows, planning all kinds of projects for spring. They only did the jobs they had to do, while Emma washed clothes, learned to sew, and helped Mam with everything she did.

  Darkness settled over the supper table, and Mam got up to light the gas lamp. They all sat in its soft glow, enjoying their warm cherry cobbler with cold, creamy milk as the snow swirled outside. Dat said they were as cozy as hibernating groundhogs in their basement home. Mandy said they weren’t really like groundhogs, because only a part of their house was underground.

  After the dishes were finished, Lizzie dashed outside to see how much it had snowed. The grass was still showing, so Lizzie knew it hadn’t snowed enough to go sled riding yet. The air had a quiet, solemn tone if it snowed in the dark, Lizzie thought. You could hear for miles—everything was so hushed. The snow whispered as it hit the grass—that’s how well you could hear. Lizzie was cold, so she wrapped her arms around herself and shivered, but it was hard to go inside. She wished she was an Indian. They lived in teepees with a real fire in the middle, wrapped in blankets, so they were closer to the snow in their houses than Lizzie was. It was sad if you had to go to bed and sleep while the snow swirled outside and you missed a whole eight hours of watching the snow being driven in by a north wind.

  “It’s still snowing!” she announced triumphantly. “It’s really coming down thick and fast!”

  “And it’s barely December,” Mam said, glancing up from her hand sewing.

  “Looks like we’ll have a white Christmas,” Dat said, looking up from his paper.

  Lizzie threw herself on the sofa, grabbing her book that lay on the stand beside it. She tucked her feet beneath her skirt, settled herself comfortably, opened her book, and started to read. She had started to read a book called Little House in the Big Woods and it was such a cozy book. It made little warm circles around Lizzie’s heart, to think how Laura and Mary Ingalls would have felt, playing under the eaves of their little attic of the log cabin they lived in. It wasn’t really as exciting as some books she had read, but it was so intriguing, the emotions it stirred in her. She loved Pa and Ma and Baby Carrie, the house they lived in, what they ate, how they did their work, and everything.

  She was reading about the dance at Grandpa Ingalls, when there was a hurried knock and the kitchen door burst open.

  “Hello, Melvin Annie!” shouted Danny.

  Edna, followed by Debbie, piled in the door, their hair covered with snow, scarves tied around their mouths.

  “Hey, we can go sled riding,” Edna said excitedly.

  “May they go along, Annie?”

  “It’s bedtime,” Mam said anxiously.

  “Not yet,” Edna burst out.

  Dat looked up over his paper and Mam’s eyes met his. They both looked as they always did when they meant “No.”

  Lizzie threw down her book, scrambling to her feet. Mandy stuck her head out of the laundry room door, already getting her coat and scarf.

  “Ivan and Ray made a track!” Danny said loudly.

  Dat looked at Mam, as doubtful as ever.

  “Can we go?” Lizzie asked.

  “It’s dark and cold out there,” Mam said. “Don’t your Mom and Dad mind if you’re traipsing around in the snow?”

  “Who? Mom and Daddy? Naw!” Danny said.

  Dat burst out laughing. Mam shook her head in disbelief, as Dat grudgingly allowed them to go. Emma decided it was too late and too cold for her to go, so Lizzie and Mandy scrambled into their coats, boots, mittens, and scarves.

  “One hour—that’s it,” Dat said sternly.

  “Alright! We’ll be home!” Lizzie called back.

  She shivered with excitement as she fell into step with Edna and Debbie. Mandy squealed when her feet slid unexpectedly and she waved her arms to keep her balance. Debbie’s feet slid out from under her and she sat down hard on her backside. The girls giggled and laughed as Debbie rolled around on
her stomach. She was so small and round, she could not sit up, so she rolled over and pushed herself up. Her pants were completely covered with snow, but she briskly brushed it off, saying, “You guys!” and Edna burst out laughing.

  “Come on!” Danny shouted, because he was way ahead of them.

  “We’re coming!” Lizzie yelled, as they all hurried along on the slippery macadam.

  A soft, mittened hand crept under Lizzie’s arm, and Debbie panted, “Let me hold onto you, please.”

  Lizzie swelled with pride, because Debbie trusted her to keep from falling. Debbie slipped and slid, giggled and sputtered as she struggled to keep going. She told Lizzie the reason she kept falling was because she had to wear last year’s snowboots and the soles were much too smooth. Lizzie told her that you couldn’t wear snowboots too long, because they got wet inside and then you always had cold feet, no matter if you started out warm or not.

  When they reached Uncle Elis, there was a dark blur of movement and a sled shot across the road. Ivan and Ray were both on one sled, as they sped through the dark, cold night.

  For the next hour, the night was filled with cries and shrieks of fear and excitement as the sleds silently sped down the hill. Danny stood sentinel at the bottom, making sure there were no cars approaching. After a while, he stopped watching because he was cold, so they all quit sledding. Debbie said her feet were cold, and Mandy looked quite pale, becoming more and more quiet as the hour went by.

  The door of the stone house opened and Aunt Mary told them their hour was up. Lizzie wasn’t cold, but she was so tired she could hardly put one foot in front of the other.

  “Can you walk home with Lizzie?” Edna asked Debbie.

  “Why?” Debbie wanted to know.

  “Because I’m too cold and wet to walk home with you. And your house is close to Lizzie’s,” Edna answered.

  “I guess I can. Lizzie, will you go home with me? I mean walk clear over to my house till I’m inside the door, ’cause my mom locks her door and when I ring the doorbell she might not hear me, and then what?” Debbie said, peering anxiously into Lizzie’s face.