Caroline

by Sarah Miller

  Nights, she and Charles took to sitting before the fire, talking. Or rather, Charles talked while Caroline concentrated herself on the mending.

  “What’s that?” Charles asked.

  Caroline held a yard of the fabric up before her. Some days before a set of threadbare pillowcases had caught her eye in the scrap bag. In spare moments she had split their side seams and joined them into one long stretch. “A curtain,” she answered. “To go under the loft.”

  “Looks fine. I’ll help you hang it in the morning.”

  Caroline smoothed it thoughtfully across her knees. “I thought I’d blanket stitch the hem in red first.”

  Charles smiled and gave his head half a shake. “Here,” he said. He handed her his mittens. The tops of them hinged backward to uncover a row of finger gussets; when she put them on, only the tips of her fingers were left exposed. He watched her adorn a few inches, then said, “Wherever we are, you’ll always contrive to make it look like home.”

  Caroline’s breath caught. For a moment she thought the baby had given a little flutter, but it was only a quick beat of delight at his compliment.

  “Thank you, Charles,” she said.

  He balled his fists into his pockets and tipped his head back to look at the sky. “If I could build a roof so fine and high as that, I’d never want to move again.”

  Caroline watched the firelight stroke his whiskers. He was a man in love with space. Every mile they traveled seemed to loosen him. How, she wondered, could she learn to find such ease in being wholly untethered?

  “Charles, tell me how it will be in Kansas.” Like a child asking for a bedtime story. “Not the giant jackrabbits and horizons. Tell me how we’ll live this first year.”

  “Well, I figure we ought to save all the money we can toward preempting our claim. For a quarter section at $1.25 an acre we’ll need $200 plus filing fees, and the land office won’t take pay in pelts. So I’ll hunt and trap this winter and trade furs for a plow and supplies enough to last until Gustafson’s payments arrive. Should be plenty of game to see us through until spring. Then I’ll plow up a plot for sod potatoes and another for corn. Land won’t raise more than that the first season. The next year we’ll sow fields of wheat and oats and anything else we want.”

  “I’ve brought seeds from our garden,” Caroline said, “and Polly’s. She sent me with the best from her pickling cucumbers.” Those cucumbers would be like a little taste of Polly herself—crisp and sharp with vinegar.

  What, Caroline wondered, would make the home folks think of her? When they wanted for music, even the music of laughter, they would pine for Charles, of course. What taste, what sound might make their hearts whisper: “Caroline?” Perhaps no more than a fragment of red cloth in their scrap bags.

  Caroline swallowed hard. Forward, she coaxed herself. Not back. “And the house?”

  “The turf’s so thick out there, some of the emigrants carve up the sod and use it for bricks. Makes walls a foot thick, easy. Keeps them cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and there’s no end of supply.”

  “Oh, Charles! Not a soddie?” A house of dirt, the walls crumbly and hairy with roots. She shuddered as though one of them had reached out to brush her back.

  A glint of consternation, then, “I’ll build anything you say.”

  Caroline regretted the sound of her words as soon as she’d heard them. She gave a half-wincing smile and spoke more carefully this time. “I hadn’t thought of anything but good clean wood.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll have,” he said, good-naturedly as ever. “I expect the timber won’t be so big as we’re used to, so it’ll have to start small.” She could see his mind pacing the place out in the space beyond the campfire. “One room, say twelve by fourteen, with a fireplace at one end, and windows east and west. Puncheon floor. A good slab roof will do as well as tar paper and shingles, and cheaper, too.” His voice slowed to a leisurely sway as he plotted out the details. Caroline’s needle stilled to listen to him. “Dunno if there’ll be enough fieldstone for a chimney in those parts. I halfway hope there isn’t—I’d rather patch a stick and daub chimney now and then than spend the next thirty years plowing stones out of my fields.”

  His eyes had focused on a spot just outside the firelight. The depth of his concentration made it seem as though the darkness were no more than a doorway into something real and solid. Caroline fancied she could reach through it and touch her hand to the latch string. She joined her gaze to that spot, testing the feel of it. Her heartbeat quickened. Suddenly she craved a destination as much as she craved the taste of Polly’s pickles. Kansas was too vast a thing to pin herself to, and Montgomery County only an empty square on Charles’s map, without a single dot of a town. Caroline could not conceive of the infinitely smaller speck she herself would make on that map.

  Real or imagined, she needed some mark to aim toward, and what better place than a house? A home. She wanted to be able to see it in her mind, to picture herself inside it as she had not dared to do since Charles informed her they would be leaving the furniture behind. If she could do that, Charles might stop the wagon anywhere he pleased, and she could pin that vision of home to the map.

  Caroline’s hands toyed with her thread as though it were a latch string. It was risky, fashioning another such reverie with no firm promise that the reality would match. She looked again to Charles. The image he’d built was still before him, solid as though he’d made it out of boards. Perhaps yoking her vision to his would secure it somehow. Caroline gripped the leather latch string in her mind, and pulled.

  The room that opened before her was so new she could smell the freshly hewn logs, yet immediately familiar: a straw tick snugged into each of the corners beside the hearth, her trunk beneath one window, the red-checked cloth on the table and the bright quilts on the beds. Without looking she knew Charles’s rifle hung over the door. Even the curtains she recognized—their calico trim from a little blue and yellow dress of Mary’s that Caroline had loved too much to tear into rags.

  The whole house might as well have been standing there finished.

  “Will that suit you?” Charles asked. His voice was so near, it was as though he were standing beside her in the imagined doorway.

  Caroline whispered, “Yes, Charles.”

  Eight

  Caroline held the vision before her all the way to the very rim of Kansas—the Missouri River.

  It bore little resemblance to the map. On paper it was a thick line squiggling between Missouri and Kansas as though it were caught in a crimping iron. Creeks and streams veined the map with blue.

  This river was less than half a mile across and so yellowed with mud, it looked as though it had been dredged with mustard powder. The opaque water did not seem to flow, but to roll. It carved steadily at its own banks, paring away great slices of earth that crumbled, brown sugar–like, into the water.

  They waited almost three hours to cross at Boston Ferry and gave up four dollars from the fiddle box for the privilege. Ferries farther downstream in St. Joseph were apt to charge as much or more, Mrs. Boston said, and their lines were sure to be longer. “Why, by the time you get there you might not even cross today, and those that run their boats on the Sabbath aren’t the sort I’d trust with all my worldly goods.”

  That settled that. Charles could not keep himself confined to the wagon long enough for dinner much less another full day, not with Kansas in plain sight. He stood poised along the bank, hardly remembering to eat the wedge of cornbread and molasses Caroline put in his hand. Caroline considered the opposite shore. No pattern, texture, or color marked the Kansas side as distinct from Missouri. Yet there Charles stood, looking as though he were about to step from burlap to brocade. That land called to him, and he could scarcely wait to answer.

  Mary did not like it, not from the moment she spotted the ferryman opening up a hatch to shovel water from the hull. She spent the last half hour before their turn to cross scooted in close to Carol
ine, with Nettie clamped under one arm and her fingers woven into Caroline’s shawl, while Laura asked Charles a dozen questions. What’s this do, Pa? and What’s that? What makes it go, Pa? and Why does it go sideways? Charles named the stob and pulleys and cables for her, and tried to explain how the ferryman slanted the oar board against the current to trick the water into pushing the raft across instead of downstream, but it was more than either of the girls could grasp. For Laura it was enough that her pa understood how it worked. Mary was not comforted.

  Caroline ran her hand over Mary’s hair as Mary struggled to make sense of it. Barbs of chapped skin snagged the fine golden strands. On either side of the part, Caroline could see the lines the comb had scored that morning. All of them needed a good soak in the washtub. At home their hair would have been glossy by week’s end. Now it was only dusty and lusterless, the part faintly gray instead of white.

  The wagon gave a little jolt and Mary startled. The ferryman was signaling Charles onto the raft. “I don’t want to see anymore,” Mary said. “I want to go back on the straw tick.”

  Caroline put her hand to Mary’s knee. “Stay here where I can reach you until we reach the other side.”

  “I don’t want to.” She was beginning to flutter with panic as the raft loomed nearer. Caroline pressed more firmly. “Ma? I don’t want to.”

  Charles heard and slowed the team. The ferryman waved again. “Move ahead!” he called out.

  The wagon stayed in place. Caroline could feel both Charles and the ferryman turn toward her. She must appease the child or scold her, and fast. The quickest would be to let Mary go and burrow under the gray blanket. But this was no two-mile ice crossing. The child had watched the ferry shuttle more than half a dozen wagons safely from shore to shore. She could not let Mary’s fear keep cutting itself larger and larger patterns.

  Caroline spoke low and swift. “Mary, we must all learn to do things we don’t want to do. You may be afraid, but you may not let your fear chase you away from what must be done. This is a good sturdy raft, and it will see us to the other side if we all sit still and let the ferryman do his job. Be a brave girl, now, and don’t keep the ferryman waiting.” She gave Mary her handkerchief and faced herself forward.

  “All ready?”

  Hands folded, she nodded pertly to Charles and ahead they rolled. Mary hiccoughed silently beside her. Each little spasm jabbed at Caroline’s conscience. She had been sure of herself when she spoke, but how could it be the right thing if it left the both of them stinging? Caroline gave her head the tiniest shake. She could not ask herself such things. A question like that had no serviceable answer. If she did not block its path, it would circle her mind, searching for one. So she began to sing:

  We are waiting by the river,

  We are watching on the shore,

  Only waiting for the boatman,

  Soon he’ll come to bear us o’er.

  All of them perked up at that, even the impatient ferryman, and it cheered Caroline to see it. She matched her tempo to the sharp ringing of the horses’ hooves on the boards, and so she could not help slowing nearly to a stop as the ferryman motioned Charles to drive closer, closer, closer yet to the front of the raft. As the wagon began to tilt toward the center of the river Mary closed her eyes so tight the lashes all but disappeared.

  Caroline resisted the urge to pull Mary onto her lap. She had promised the child she was safe where she sat and must not do anything to contradict that. Caroline made herself as still as she had told Mary to be, except for her toes, which slid forward to brace against the wagon box. Laura leaned back and gripped the edge of the spring seat and asked, “Why, Pa?”

  “The logs at the ends of the ferry boat are cut at a slant like the blade of my ax,” Charles said. “That makes them fit snug to the riverbank’s slope under the water. The ferryman can’t move us unless we help tip the logs off the bank. Watch him, now.”

  Behind them the young man—Mrs. Boston’s son, judging by the look of him—unfastened the mooring rope and sank a pole into the water between the raft and the bank. He pried upward against the hull until with a sandy scrape the ferry came loose. Then with a leisurely swoop he leapt aboard.

  “Center them up now,” he instructed Charles.

  Ben and Beth found level, and Caroline felt herself lift as though the water had unhitched her from her own weight. “Oh!” she said. Mary and Laura and Charles all looked at her. “It’s so light.” She did not know how else to explain. Her own bed was not half so yielding as this river. There on the hard spring seat her whole body felt as though it were suspended in that soft space between wakefulness and sleep. She leaned back and let the swaying, swishing current rise up through the logs, the wheels, and the boards to rock her.

  This was altogether different from tiptoeing across the brittle Mississippi. This river was a living road. It opened itself for them, made room for them to settle into its waters, beckoned them with the tug of its current. This river would not crack behind them.

  Just over halfway across the ferryman cranked the windlass and the ferry’s nose swung around to angle downstream. “Back them up a couple of yards now, if you please,” he said to Charles.

  With his hand on the brake Charles persuaded the team backward. One step at a time the front of the raft began to edge out of the water. Mary’s breath hissed in and no further. She did not breathe, but she sat there with her hands folded just like Caroline’s, a perfect little statue of obedience and bravery. Pride buoyed Caroline up so light, she was still floating as the ferry docked and the wagon pulled off down the road.

  Charles was jubilant. “Kansas!” he said, and that was all for nearly a mile, he was so lost in his own satisfaction. Then his toes began to bounce. Next thing Caroline knew he was whistling “The Campbells Are Coming,” and then he was grinning too broadly to whistle. He slapped his knee and chortled instead.

  “Charles?” Caroline said. Her own voice curled toward laughter.

  His eyes did not twinkle—they shone. Charles bellowed out:

  The Ingalls are coming, hurrah, hurrah!

  The Ingalls are coming, hurrah, hurrah!

  The Ingalls are coming to Indian Territ’ry,

  All the way ’cross the Missouri!

  All the way ’cross the Missouri. Caroline traced the map in her mind as she figured the sum. Some four hundred twenty-five miles they had come. Four hundred twenty-five miles. With still two hundred more down into Montgomery County—Indian Territory. She did not like to call it that, but that is what it would be until the Indians moved on. It made her sort of flutter inside to imagine what this land might be holding in store for them. Caroline shivered a delicious little shiver. She had felt this eager, frightened tremor only twice before: stepping up to the justice of the peace with Charles on their wedding day and again five years later with the first tentative pangs of Mary’s birthing. Crossing the river Missouri was the same sort of threshold, Caroline realized. Like the other times she must go ahead, uncertain of whether the world was about to open or close around her.

  Nine

  “What would you say to stopping early, Caroline?” Charles asked.

  “Now?” She did not know what else to say. It was only midafternoon; they were not ten miles inside the Kansas line.

  Charles nodded. “I don’t like the look of that sky.”

  Caroline turned westward. The horizon was like a pan of dishwater. A rumble, faint as a cat’s purr, ruffled the air. “Well, I’d be thankful for rain enough to fill the washtub and the time to use it before Sunday,” she said.

  Charles’s mouth hooked into half a smile as he unfolded his map. The points where the creases met were wearing thin as the elbows of his red flannel shirt. “I’d stop right here if the ground were higher.”

  Caroline scanned the landscape. They stood in a gentle hollow, broad and shallow as the center of a platter. The slope was so gradual she had not felt it.

  “We can’t be but a few miles from the Saint Josep
h and Western line as the crow flies,” Charles said. “Ought to be some good level stretches along the railroad bed. First likely place I see, we’ll make camp.” With that, he eased Ben and Beth due south. The edge of the wind angled across Caroline’s face as they turned off the road, flapping her bonnet brim eastward. The wagon cover gave a shiver as the same stiff breeze strummed its ribs.

  Caroline let her core ease as the wheels sighed into the spring-softened earth. Already the smell of rain dampened the air. Caroline smiled to herself. Even a fleeting thundershower might grant her enough rainwater to rinse out their stockings and drawers. Perhaps even soap the crust of molasses from Laura’s cuff.

  Alongside the wagon Caroline watched the breeze carve shapes through the grass. The long blades whispered, then hissed, too bent by the wind to stroke the wagon’s belly.

  They had not gone a half mile before the storm struck them like a roundhouse.

  Rain stabbed down as though it were intent on piercing the wagon cover, while the wind gusted it against the canvas with a sound like scattershot.

  “Jerusalem crickets!” Charles thundered into the weather. “I never saw a storm come on so fast.”

  Ben and Beth tucked their chins to their collars, turning their faces from the sally. Charles stood to grab the gutta-percha poncho from its peg and began hitching it toward his shoulder, searching for the neck. He had not stayed the team.

  “Charles? Shouldn’t we stop?”

  “Ground’s too soft. If we don’t keep on, we’ll be mired in half a minute. Best we can do is try to walk it out. Here,” he said, handing her the reins. “Hold them while I find my way into this thing.” With the lines in her hands Caroline could feel the forward slide of the horses’ hooves that preceded each step. “Go on back with the girls and keep as dry as you can.”