Caddie Woodlawn

Caddie looks forward to the Saturday spelldowns, as she often makes it to the final rounds or wins. On Saturday afternoons, the children have free time, and they often spend it sleigh riding, setting traps for muskrats or ice skating on the millpond with their father.

One Saturday afternoon, while Mr. Woodlawn is inside the mill, the children ice skate. Tom is skilled at skating, but Warren and Caddie make up for their lack of skill with daring. After Tom warns them to be careful of the black ice, as it might be thin, Warren dares Caddie to see how far she can go. Caddie accepts the challenge and falls through the ice. With no time to retrieve their father, Tom gets Warren to lay down on the ice and pushes him to grab Caddie’s hands. They save her, but she gets an awful cold. Caddie’s mom admonishes her that night, asking why she can’t act like a lady and stop the fighting and daring acts. When Caddie apologizes, her mother sighs that it is simply Caddie’s nature.

After Christmas, Tom, Warren, and Hetty go back to school, and Caddie is left in a lonelier house. In her boredom, Caddie makes her way to the attic. There she finds she finds a small child’s breeches and clogs, which she finds strange. Before Caddie leaves the attic, she looks through the clocks that are there for her father to mend. When she sees the circuit rider’s clock, Caddie takes a look, figuring she has watched her father fix clocks on countless occasions. As she finds the problematic screw, the clock breaks apart violently. Trying to figure out what to do, she hears her father laughing from the attic stairs. He suggests that they fix it together. While working, Mr. Woodlawn asks Caddie to be his helper in clock repair, as she has shown an inclination and aptitude. Caddie is thrilled. They take the repaired clock downstairs, and Mr. Woodlawn brags to the rest of the family that Caddie fixed it. For the rest of her life, Caddie can fix any clocks that happen to break near her.

During a winter evening spent around the fire telling stories and “recalling old adventures” (84), Caddie suddenly leaps from her place and retrieves the clogs and breeches. As Mr. Woodlawn looks at them thoughtfully, Mrs. Woodlawn prompts him to tell the children about them. The children are curious to hear about England, as they rarely do. Before starting his story, Mr. Woodlawn urges the children to be proud Americans because their country is free. He explains that in England people don’t always have the freedom to “pursue their own lives in their own ways” (89), while “some men live like princes [...] other men must beg for the very crusts that keep them alive” (89).

Mr. Woodlawn tells the children how his grandfather was a wealthy lord and had a large home with vast lands. His grandfather’s wealth was so great that he had peacocks, which Mr. Woodlawn once saw through the gate. Caddie asks why her father couldn’t see them from the grounds. In lieu of answering, Mr. Woodlawn tells how his father, Thomas, fell in love with the daughter of the village shoemaker and married her in secret, hoping that his father would forgive him for marrying outside his social class. Instead, his father demanded that Thomas forsake his wife, and when Thomas refused, Mr. Woodlawn’s grandfather disowned Thomas. Having been brought up the son of a lord, Thomas did not have many skills that would earn him a living; however, he had taken art classes as a youth, so he painted “panels and murals in taverns and public houses” (92). The family moved around in pursuit of work, and they were often paid in food and housing. When Mr. Woodlawn was 10 years old, his father died, likely because he did not have the “peasant hardiness” (92) to survive the cold and hunger.

After Thomas’s death, Mr. Woodlawn’s mother knew she could not return home. Her father had been equally upset at her for marrying outside her class. So, his mother worked as a seamstress and Mr. Woodlawn did odd jobs, but they had no home and wandered, hungry and in debt. Despite these hardships, Mr. Woodlawn learned to dance and begged his mother for clogs. She obliged, making him a costume and encouraging him to dance for money. The children are delighted that their father used to dance for a living, and they beg him to dance for them. Mr. Woodlawn starts to jig, and the whole family jumps up to dance with him. Mrs. Woodlawn goes to their bedroom to retrieve a Thomas’s painting of a three-year-old John. When she shows the children, they laugh with delight at the image, but Caddie grabs her father’s hand, feeling “a little bit as if she wanted to cry” (96). When Mrs. Woodlawn laments that her husband should have had some of his grandfather’s land and wealth, Mr. Woodlawn disagrees, stating that he is proud to have earned what he has.

As Clara and Caddie walk slowly upstairs for bed, Clara marvels at the family’s wealth and peacocks. Caddie thinks of her father looking through the gates with “wistful eyes [that] looked sadly out between his odd tufts of red hair” (97) and feels angry.

The day before Valentine’s Day, Caddie heads to the Dunnville store with some of her money. As she enters the store, she sees Tom going in the back, which seems strange to her. Inside, she sees the most beautiful valentine she’s ever seen. When she asks how much it costs, the shop owner tells her that it was purchased by a young man in the back who is working to pay for it. Caddie realizes that Tom purchased the valentine, and she wonders whether it is for her. However, Tom always gives her funny comics, so she wonders who it might be for, as she is his best friend; regardless, she keeps his secret.

After afternoon recess the next day, Katie Hyman finds a large white envelope on her desk. When she opens it everyone can see that it is the beautiful valentine from the Dunnville store, but when she turns it over there is no signature.

On the way home, Hetty thinks that Tom gave Katie the valentine and plans to tell everyone. Although Caddie knows she’s right, she tries to throw Hetty off his trail by suggesting that there is no way he could have paid for it. Hetty then wonders if Katie bought it for herself. Satisfied that she has kept Tom’s secret, Caddie wonders why Tom gave Katie the valentine. After all, Katie is afraid of nature and rarely speaks to Tom. However, Katie is “a little lady” (105), and Caddie wonders if maybe there is something to that.

Caddie’s birthday is February 22, the same as George Washington’s, and while Caddie does not get her own birthday celebration, she enjoys the festivities intended for Washington. When she finds out that Lincoln also has a February birthday, Caddie wishes she were a boy so that she could be president. During “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Caddie holds the flag with great pride. As they sing, she believes she loves America more because of the hardships her father faced in England.

Caddie heads home, still feeling the pride of holding the flag. She thinks back to the morning, when her mother said that at 12 Caddie should be a lady. Her father had argued that she should get a bit more time to do as she pleases.

When she gets home, Caddie’s mother is upset. Mrs. Woodlawn tells the children that Edmund has written, and Nero is lost. Caddie grabs the letter and reads that Nero was unhappy in the city and missed the children. Nero has been gone for several weeks, and Edmund proposes that he bring a puppy when he next visits. Caddie is indignant at the suggestion a puppy will replace the hole left by Nero. After running upstairs, Caddie recalls her own loneliness at Nero’s departure, but she is even more upset to know Nero was “unhappy and frightened in the city” (112). Caddie falls asleep crying and doesn’t wake until after her siblings have gone to sleep. When she goes downstairs, she finds a meal set by her mother. Caddie eats in silence and enjoys her parents’ warm company as they do their nightly tasks by the fire.

Just as Caddie finishes eating, a neighbor arrives with rumors that the Native Americans are planning an uprising. Mr. Woodlawn believes that the Native Americans are trustworthy and hesitates to believe they will attack, but he agrees that the white settlers must stick together, and he offers the Woodlawn house as a gathering place. Mrs. Woodlawn’s initial fear is replaced with a sense of purpose as she plans how she will feed and house people.