Lyddie never stops loving her father and never blames him, but she begins to doubt he will ever come back.
After the incident with the bear, Lyddie’s mother gives up on pretenses. Lyddie’s father left a year after her youngest sister was born. Her mother had never been right since then, and the two circumstances put them in a precarious situation. Lyddie said that it was hard to “escape that specter that their father had headed West” (Ch. 1).
Lyddie describes her father as unlucky, saying that his children “loved him fiercely.” He just was never a very successful farmer, and went west to try to make his fortune elsewhere. Lyddie values everything he tried to do, even if he failed.
But their father … had bought the land and built the cabin with his own hands before their birth, promising every year to sell enough maple sugar, or oats, or potash to build a larger, proper house with a real barn attached instead of a shed which must be found through rain or blizzard. (Ch. 2)
She doesn't consider these empty promises. Lyddie always feels that it is her mother's fault and not her father's that he had to leave. When Lyddie’s mother hires Charles and Lyddie out to pay off the family debts, Lyddie feels that her father would have been horrified. She idolizes him and does not blame him for leaving them with debts, but she blames her mother for not being able to hold it together and not trying to keep the rest of the family together.
Lyddie says that her father had sent her in to help her mother in the year before he left, because she never got over the birth of her last baby, Agnes. She felt that if she had been a boy, should would have been able to help him more, and then he would not have left. When he left, Lyddie had to take over both household and outdoor chores because her mother could or would do nothing.
As Lyddie works at the tavern, the dream of getting the family in one place again begins to fade out of possibility.
She rarely thought of Rachel and Agnes or their mother. The three of them seemed to belong to another, sadder life. The possibility of their father's return slipped into a back corner of her mind. She wondered once if he were dead, and that was why she seldom thought of him now. (Ch. 4)
Lyddie thinks mostly about Charles, her brother and the closest in age to herself. She wanted the two of them to be a family, and felt that they could have kept the farm going even without her mother and father there. Her mother was useless anyway, and Lyddie had been the one who did everything.
Hadn't she felt bad that he didn't have a father and mother like Luke Stevens had to watch over him? But these weren't his real family. She was his real family. More than their mother, really, who had shucked them off like corn husks to follow her craziness. (Ch. 5)
Even though Lyddie was abandoned by her father and then her mother, she never blames her father. She wonders what happens to him, but she never doubts him. Lyddie still loves her father even though he has been gone for years, and resents her mother for falling apart and making him leave.
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