by Sarah Miller
They ate with thoughtful-looking faces, trying to keep their chewing inconspicuous. Charles handed over his plate without asking for a second helping. “That was a good hot supper,” he said.
Caroline flushed. He meant it—Charles always meant exactly what he said—but if she parsed that sentence on a blackboard, good would connect to hot and no further. It was not quite a bad meal, but they ought to have had better—a meal with more virtues than its temperature. She would rather do without any praise at all than be complimented for not failing completely.
She scrubbed the dishes clean with hard fistfuls of snow, thinking of her stove. Her stove, with its four round lids and good steady oven. Beside it, the neat stack of dry seasoned stove lengths. Every bean she baked in it came out a soft nugget of velvet. Caroline smiled a little at herself. It felt good to miss that stove, good as a long hard stretch. That was one thing she could let herself miss. It did not sting like other, dearer things.
Charles closed down both ends of the canvas tight as knotholes.
The wagon had a new odor with all of them sealed inside it: the moist, vinegary musk of skin encased all day long in woolen wrappings, their sweat chilled and thawed and now chilling again. And Charles had hung the new poncho up on a hook alongside his rifle. It added a dry, rubbery tang.
Mary and Laura watched Charles roll up the small straw tick from the pile of bedding and push it onto the floor at the front of the wagon.
“Where do we sleep, Ma?” Laura asked.
“Right down here,” Charles said, “where the spring seat was. Just like the trundle bed.”
The space was narrow, even for the small tick. Its edges curled against the sides of the wagon box and made a little nest of it. Their two pillows bunched together where the sides met in the center.
Caroline nestled one hot flatiron in each corner to warm the foot of the small bed while the girls stood on the big straw tick to be undressed. She worked their red flannel nightgowns quickly down over their red flannel underthings and tied their nightcaps fast under their chins.
First Mary, then Laura hopped down into the nest of straw. Both of them grinned through chattering teeth at the novelty.
“Snuggle up close, now.” They scooted together. Caroline laid two quilts over them. The third she tucked down in between the sideboards and the ticking, crimping the edges tight as a pie crust around her daughters.
Mary and Laura shivered gratefully under the stack of chilled blankets. Caroline watched them, so tired yet so clenched with cold that they fought to rest. She remembered how easily they had all settled down to sleep, warm and drowsy in the light of the cozy little bunkhouse fire the night before, and her breath hitched.
Suddenly it was not safe to look even that far back. Only forward. On the spring seat it had been simple. All day long she sat with the road reaching ahead and thought herself steadily forward. Toward the vague, bright notions of spring, the new land, the new house, the new child. Now there was nothing but the long still night before her, nothing to cast her thoughts onto but a blank wall of canvas as near as her toes.
No, it would be closer yet than that, Caroline saw as she and Charles undressed. Their own straw tick was longer than the wagon box was wide. A foot or more of it was folded under itself at one end. Unless he lay diagonally across the middle of the mattress, Charles must sleep with his knees kinked. Caroline was not sure she could stretch herself full.
She crawled across to the side nearest the girls and tried to crimp herself into something like a triangle to leave all the room she could for Charles. Mercy, it was cold. Cold filled every hollow straw beneath her. Her feet wanted to reach down for the hot flatiron she knew was somewhere beyond the icy stretch of muslin, but her body resisted and pulled her limbs in close to guard its own warmth. She would have liked to burrow into Mary and Laura’s little den, with her knees drawn up and the sides hugging her all around.
Charles lifted the quilts and a fresh rush of cold slipped in with him. He climbed quickly in beside her, closing the seam between them—his knees pointing into hers, her seat in his lap, his chin peaking at the crown of her head. The cold from his nightshirt rattled a shiver through her back. He slipped his arm under hers, settling his fist over her heart.
The gentle pressure of his hand melted her as though she were made of wax. One tear and then another burned across the bridge of her nose. She had kept her sadness so carefully lidded these last two days that it had thickened into a stock so rich she could smell the salt before she tasted it. Caroline’s throat narrowed so she could scarcely draw breath. Only a long thin note, too high to hear, seeped steadily through to warm the roof of her mouth.
In the morning, a thin frost rimmed the underside of the wagon cover—their breath, adhered to the canvas.
Caroline’s nightdress had climbed past her stockings, leaving her kneecaps bald to the chill even under the quilts. Charles’s space beside her was empty; she could hear kindling just beginning to snap to life outside. She leaned to peek at Mary and Laura, trying not to stray outside the warm outline her body had made in the straw. Only the white crowns of their nightcaps were visible.
Caroline’s breath hissed out in a pale cloud as she laced her corset. It was likely only her imagination, but it seemed she could feel the frigid lines of the steels through the heavy cotton drill. Her body warmed her dress, and not the other way around—that she did not imagine. She gathered Mary’s and Laura’s clothes and put them under her quilts. Perhaps the little heat she had left behind would warm them.
A rind of ice topped the water in the washbasin. Caroline broke it with the handle of her toothbrush. Charles came in just then with a pail of water steaming softly in his hand.
“Morning,” he said, and, “here,” as he poured the warm water into the basin. Caroline stood over it, not moving. The moist steam on her cheeks was heavenly.
“Are you all right?” Charles asked.
Caroline’s toothbrush quivered with one last shiver as she nodded.
“Are you sure?”
Her reflection in the water showed a nose already pinking from the chill—as though she’d been crying. Caroline smiled and dabbed it with her handkerchief. “It’s only the cold.”
He did not believe it was only the cold when she fled from the pan full of bacon to retch into the snow. But it was. Nearly. If she had not been so hungry for warmth, she might have realized the fire was too hot, that their breakfast was indeed burning. Never mind that she had been too—what? Stubborn? Proud?—to heed the better judgment of her own body.
Her nose had caught the first whiff of something barely beginning to scorch, and quicker than quick she flipped the meat. Every strip turned up pink as Laura’s hair ribbons against the black iron. Caroline stood over the pan with the fork in her hand, scoffing at her overactive senses. Why it was that a child in the belly turned a woman’s nose into a veritable magnifying glass, she would never understand. They that dance must pay the fiddler, she reminded herself.
That was all the time it took for the drippings beneath a twist of bacon to singe in earnest. Caroline’s nostrils flared in warning at the rising scent, but it was too late. All at once her gut rippled and her jaw watered, and still she held her ground. She would not be sick, she insisted to herself, any more than she would serve Charles and the girls two poor meals in succession. Caroline thrust the bacon to the edges of the iron spider and tried to whisk the burnt drippings apart with the tines of the fork until a wave of heaves bent her double. By the time she finished, the pan was smoking.
“It was the cold,” she made excuse before Charles could ask. “I might have noticed in time if not for the cold.”
Even through her watery eyes she could see the dubious cast of his face, but Charles did not argue. He handed her his handkerchief and leafed backward through his weather journal. “Another week or two at most and these temperatures’ll be behind us,” he promised.
Seven
A week, Caroline soon conclude
d, is too cumbersome a thing to count—or to be counted on. Even an hour was a deceitful measure. An hour might thin itself over three or four miles of level roads or be filled to bulging by one scant mile of sandy incline. An elusive ford or a single mudhole placed just so could swallow a whole string of hours right from the middle of a day. Time, Caroline decided, could be trusted to measure the distance between meals, and nothing else. But a mile was always a mile, no matter how long it took to traverse. Days spent on the road were best measured in miles.
Eighteen one day, just over twenty the next. Now and then a good long stretch of twenty-four, twenty-five miles. On the road a week became plain arithmetic: a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty miles, or maybe only ninety-five.
No cycle of washing, mending, and baking marked one day out as distinct from another. Each day formed the same narrow circle; six of them stacked together earned a Sunday. Only the Sabbath, immune to the tally of miles, managed to keep its identity.
Three things governed their moods: the quality of the road, the disposition of the weather, and the supply of fuel and water. Any one out of balance, whether leaning toward good or ill, left a mark in her memory.
First was the morning when the washbasin did not freeze. Her mind preserved other, earlier days, but that morning always stood out of its proper order. The water had been cold enough to sting her teeth, but it was not frozen. Close beside it was the night the knot in the wagon cover came loose, when the girls woke to find their noses and eyelashes sugared with snow.
Most of the meals she made were not worth the space it took to recall them: salt pork in the spider, cornbread in the bake oven. Now and then bacon, a bit of game. Ordinary mainstays that ought to have been simple to prepare. More often, cooking became a standoff between herself and the fire.
One could learn the temperament of a stove or a chimney, with patience and diligence master their most fractious moods. In the open, each new cookfire announced itself a stranger, and it was a rare one that did not require cajoling or pampering. Rain meant rigging up tarps and the delay of searching for wood dry enough to burn. High winds necessitated laying the fire in a hole and hunching over the pans. When there was nothing better to burn than weeds, she surrendered the fight and poured a quick batch of pancakes into the iron spider, hiding her frustration under a layer of Mother Ingalls’s maple syrup.
Her triumphs were lackluster; nothing, down to the coffee and tea, tasted quite like her own cooking. The water in each new place imposed its own flavors: swampy, sudsy, sulphured, greasy. Anything that did not fall from the sky carried the faint too-clean tinge of the powdered alum she used to clarify each day’s supply of drinking water. Some bucketfuls held stubbornly to their dust no matter how carefully she skimmed the sediment. Dusty water did not matter so much to the cornbread, but parboiling the salt pork from such a bucket left a fine dredging of grit behind to grind between their teeth. More than once Caroline thought it would be worth backtrailing to Minnesota’s frozen woodlands to fill the ten-gallon keg with pure clean snow, but even that would be seasoned with brass and rubber by the time it found its way out of the spigot. At least—the very least—she did not have to trifle with stove black or empty an ashpan on top of her other struggles.
Every day, while the spring seat squeaked against the wagon bows and Charles fidgeted and whistled beside her, Caroline wrote letters in her mind.
To Henry and Polly she described the lay of the land, its prospects for crops and husbandry, and its yield of game, as though her words might lay a path for them to follow. She wished she could put to paper the queer thrill of driving headlong into spring instead of waiting by the fireside for winter to melt and trickle away from them. The weeks seemed to warp and ripple beneath the wagon wheels. It made for such a pleasant sort of bewilderment.
For Ma and Papa Frederick she saved the news of their smaller travails, for her mother would neither believe nor enjoy a letter without some trouble in it. Things like the pheasant that somehow eluded Charles’s good aim, the quick spattering of hail that woke them their first night inside the Iowa line. She left out the occasional roadside grave markers, only hinting at them by mention of the picked-over piles of iron hardware showing the places where abandoned wagons had rotted down to metal skeletons. They passed by enough ox bones leftover from the gold rush days, she mused, to fashion a bushel basket full of crochet hooks, buttons, and the like.
The truest of them went to Eliza. To Eliza she could confess how keenly she felt the want of walls and doors—something solid to partition themselves from the space around them. The arc of canvas left her always penetrable, never fully sheltered from wind, or sun, or temperature. Caroline did not know whether Eliza would understand that, but there was no one else she wanted to try to explain it to. Perhaps Eliza would not even fully understand the elation she had felt over the first good dinner she had fixed. Caroline doubted she could adequately convey it without sounding like a hedonist.
They had camped late that Saturday night along a riverbed, in the shelter of a clump of shagbark hickory. The campsite alone was enough to make her half-giddy: good hardwood and good water in plenty, both within easy reach.
When Caroline went to start breakfast Sunday morning, there was a string of small catfish dangling from the tailgate, and Charles, grinning by the fire. They were lovely little fish, with spotless white bellies, and their pewter backs lustrous in the sunlight. Caroline traced her finger along one smooth whisker.
“Went out before daybreak,” Charles said. “I know I shouldn’t have, not on the Sabbath, but I tell you Caroline, it didn’t feel a bit like work.”
Caroline laughed out loud. She could not help it, had not even felt it coming. It was the way those eyes of his twinkled. He looked as though catching those fish had already done him as much good as a full day’s rest. They gleamed brighter yet at the quick chime of her laughter. “Sounds like we’ve both got something to repent for now,” he teased.
A blush rouged her cheeks. She felt a girlish impulse to bat playfully at his arm, but they had played too much already. There would be even more to answer for if Mary and Laura caught them behaving this way on a Sunday morning. “Charles Ingalls, you’ll be the death of me,” she whispered. She lowered her eyes before he could give her that look again, for the one that followed it—the one where his smile crinkled into his whiskers—she never could resist.
At noontime the good hickory coals glowed bright and steady. Outside the campfire ring the temperature hovered on the fringes of fifty degrees. Now and then a bit of breeze, but nothing strong enough to tussle with the fire. Caroline dredged the dozen delicate fillets with white flour and fried them up crisp and golden brown. In a little kettle beside the skillet she stewed some dried apples with brown sugar and cinnamon. The familiar way the fish snapped in the hot lard while the apples bubbled made it nearly like cooking at her own stove again.
No milk or butter, no light bread, pickles, or preserves, and yet the meal had the flavor of a true Sunday dinner. The fish’s thin skin crackled and its moist white flesh flaked apart on her tongue. Caroline ate until her belly was more than filled, and still her mouth wanted to keep hold of that fish. Sinfully good, Charles had said with a wink.
If she wrote it all down and sealed it in an envelope, Caroline wondered, would the humor keep fresh long enough to reach her sister? She liked to think their heartstrings were so closely interwoven that they might still share such moments in spite of the distance. And yet she could not blot out the worry that the months between the happening and the reading would only stale the story and leave Eliza too shocked to laugh.
How many miles had they come? Less than halfway, and already Caroline had the sense that a separation such as this could put more than miles between folks, could right this minute be working changes she might not be entirely conscious of and might never realize at all unless she and Eliza saw each other again.
Caroline gave her chin a little shake and smoothed her hands into her
lap. Such far-off things did not bear worrying about. Not when there was one fact this journey did not change, one fact that did deserve more than idle concern. But those uneasy thoughts Caroline could imagine committing to paper for no one, not even herself.
When she tried to think of the coming baby, the pictures formed in the back of her mind instead of stretching out before her. She could see herself only in the rocker where she had nursed Mary and Laura, with a hazy-faced bundle in her arms and Black Susan purring at her feet. Out on this widening land there was no frame to hold new scenes of rocking and feeding. Was that the reason the child had still not quickened—because her mind had not made it properly welcome? Or had her body already communicated to her brain that there was no need to imagine such things for this baby? If there were no life in it, Caroline tried to reassure herself, her body would have expelled it by now. Wouldn’t it? That was such cold comfort, it made her shudder. The days were so full of jostles and bumps, she told herself, how could anything so small possibly make itself felt? But she had felt both Mary and Laura when they were smaller yet.
Only a little more pressing was the matter of who would help her when it came time to bear this child. Even a stillborn babe must have hands to catch it. At home she never needed to explain. She had only to ask Charles to run for Polly, and he understood.
Always it had been Polly at the foot of the bed, Polly, with her face so stolid that Caroline could hardly consider quailing at the pain. That was the one thing she could not bring herself to try imagining: a different face looking up from between her knees, different hands reaching where none but Polly’s had reached before. Worse yet was the thought of no one at all.
Caroline knew what Charles would look for in land: good running water, timber, and plenty of game. Not one of those daily necessities could be sacrificed for the momentary need of a claim alongside a neighbor with a wife, and so she kept these thoughts to herself as each day made another small stitch in the long gap between them and Kansas.