Caroline

by Sarah Miller

  Caroline pulled all the awareness she could muster away from her throbbing foot. If anything had gone wrong with the child she could not feel it. The log had struck nothing else. That she was sure of. The rest amounted to no more than a stumble. Caroline tried to smile for him and managed mostly to wince.

  “Thank God,” Charles said. He cradled one arm behind her shoulders and another across her belly and helped her sit up. He looked at her, and his face seemed to shimmer with the effort of holding his relief in check.

  Caroline laid a hand on his arm. “I’m all right, Charles,” she said again, her voice far from steady. “It’s just my foot.”

  With shaking fingers he stripped off her shoe and stocking and pressed into the raging flesh to feel the length of every slim bone and work each joint. “Does it hurt much?”

  “Not much.” A bald-faced lie, and no compunctions. Anything to make him stop.

  “No bones broken,” he said. “Only a bad sprain.” The prodding stopped, but his eyes did not leave her foot. He stared at it, puffed and purpling in his palm—for once in his life overcome by what might have been. He ran his other hand over his forehead and up through his hair. His breath was shallow through his nose and open mouth.

  “Well, a sprain’s soon mended. Don’t be so upset, Charles.”

  “I blame myself. Should have used skids.” He still held her heel in one hand, his head in the other.

  She could not sit on the ground any longer, or Charles would be the one to break. That was something Laura must never see. Caroline put her palms to the ground and pushed. Without a word between them Charles’s arms were right where she needed them to be. Caroline felt him bracing for her weight and knew he would carry her, but she did not need Laura to see that, either. She pressed herself forward until his arms began to lift with her. Only a little wobble and she was upright on her good foot. Caroline stood still a moment, panting. Then she bent her grimace to resemble a smile and said, “Please bring my shoe and stocking, Laura.”

  Fifteen

  There is nothing in the world but the weight—pulling, tugging, dragging down. Not a log in her hands, but her own belly, too heavy to hold. If she lets go, it will break free, tearing her dress, her corset strings, her very skin. Barefoot, she roams the prairie for help. In one cabin, only men. In the next, Indians. Her arms ache; her breasts weigh like sacks of coffee. Her knuckles begin slipping past one another. Then the sound of ripping—fibers of cloth or flesh?

  Caroline blinked. Nothing had split apart but her eyelids. The weight was only Charles’s arm, hugged down into the dwindling valley between her belly and breasts. Caroline lay awake, feeling the throb of her pulse against the rags bound about her ankle. Her mind throbbed, too, making pictures in the dark: Charles pinned under the fallen log instead. The dreadful creek she must cross to reach help in Independence. Caroline pinched her eyes shut. The pictures changed but did not dim. She saw her own high belly, and the empty foot of a bedstead looming from between her drawn-up knees. The place where Polly should be. “Oh, Polly,” she whispered.

  Caroline pulled as deep a breath as she could wedge under Charles’s arm and willed herself to relax. That she could not manage. Her foot hurt, and the straw tick no longer smelled of home. It was thinner, and prickly in places with the new straw Jacobs had given them. Caroline tried to shift herself without rousing Charles and the child moved. A jerky little movement, as though she’d startled it.

  She was caught between them. Sandwiched queerly from without and within. Resigned, she laid her arm over his, her palm brushing across the soft curling hairs that belied the firm muscles beneath. How different it must feel to be a man: built solid through, with everything beneath the skin belonging solely to yourself. Did he ever envy what she could take into herself, how much she could contain? Could he comprehend all it meant for a woman to hold herself open for her husband, her children? For all it demanded of her Caroline knew she would not trade the depth of those open spaces, those currents of life passing through her. No man could encompass another life so fully as a woman, except perhaps in his mind. Perhaps that was what made Charles clutch her so close now as he slept. He had felt her slip through his fingers this afternoon. It was providential, he had said, that her foot had not been crushed. She had not told him that the same hollow that saved her foot had caused the fall.

  Caroline lost count of how many days passed before she could wear her shoe again, never mind lace it. Her instep swelled until the skin shone taut and yellow. Beneath the joint itself the side of her foot looked as though it were pooling with ink; a streak of black and blue and purple marked a line along the sole of her foot. Bands of greenish-purple ringed the base of her toes. The deep rosy smudges running up her calf seemed almost pretty in comparison. The smooth white fibers that joined muscle to bone in the stringy drumsticks of rabbits and fowl, these she could feel now in her own leg, and it was there that the pain lingered most stubbornly.

  In the meantime she hobbled, and the house waited. Charles hewed out skids, and they leaned against the unfinished walls like a pair of crutches until the day he came up from the creek bottom calling, “Good news!”

  An upward rush of hope surged through her and then leveled. He had not been to town—it would not be a letter or a paper.

  “A neighbor,” Charles said. “Just two miles over the creek. Fellow’s a bachelor. Says he can get along without a house better than you and the girls, so he’ll help me build first. Then soon as he’s got his logs ready, I’ll help him. How do you like that, Caroline?”

  It was a trifle ridiculous that he should bring them seven hundred miles to be so tickled by the discovery of a neighbor. She smiled, almost without meaning to, and Charles was pleased. It was fine news, nonetheless.

  He was there before the breakfast dishes were wiped—tall and scruffy, a weed of a man. His manners were quicker even than Charles’s. “The name’s Edwards, ma’am,” he said without waiting to be introduced, and bowed so low that the tail of his coonskin cap brushed the ground. He looked at her almost in the way a woman would look—taking her in all at once, somehow acknowledging the evidence of her pregnancy without lingering on it or shying from it. Perhaps Charles had told him. Perhaps that was why he had come so willingly to help.

  From the moment he bent down on one knee to shake her hand, Laura could not take her eyes from Mr. Edwards. “I’m a wildcat from Tennessee,” he told her, and she was charmed. Mary liked him, too, but seemed to think she shouldn’t. Caroline saw the way she looked at his ragged jumper and watched her eyes widen with a mixture of awe and disgust when he spit a stream of tobacco juice from the corner of the house to the wagon tongue.

  Caroline had to admit, if only to herself, that she had never seen a man spit so purposefully. With most of them it was like emptying a dishpan, the careless brown stream splashing forth just inches from their boots. Edwards took aim every time he pursed his lips and sent a neat line arcing straight toward his target.

  Mary’s instinct was to tame Edwards, to mend his jumper and perhaps ask Santa Claus to bring him a pretty brass spittoon for Christmas. Laura wanted to be Edwards, to climb the walls and sing and swing an ax until the chips flew faster than the music.

  Charles and Edwards worked together like brothers, so fast and sure that it was bewildering to see. Caroline watched them singing and joking, riding the rising walls together and felt envy seeping into her gratitude. It had not mattered so very much yesterday when Charles had said their neighbor was a bachelor, but now Caroline longed for a Mrs. Edwards. Her girls helped, and eagerly, but it was not the same as working companionably alongside another woman.

  And Edwards, who was he accustomed to working beside, back home in Tennessee? The way his movements harmonized with Charles’s made it plain that he was used to being part of a team, and a good one, too. She and Charles could never have raised the walls in a single day. For that matter, neither could Charles and Henry, back home.

  They would have dumpling
s with the stewed jackrabbit for their supper, Caroline decided. Never mind that there was no milk, no egg, no butter. White flour would show Edwards what his day’s work meant to her. She dipped up a small cupful of broth and mixed it with bacon drippings, salt, and sugar. Then the soft, snowy flour, a full pint of it. She had not even opened the bag since . . . Christmas? Her eyes smarted at that, and Caroline shrugged one shoulder up to swipe her cheek. No use in summoning up thoughts of Christmas with Eliza and Peter.

  Charles stood beside the newly fashioned doorway, grinning. The house was just as he had said, just as she had pictured it: a little more than twelve feet square, with windows east and west and space for a fireplace at one end.

  But looking at it did not feel the same as imagining it, not even with the homey smell of a company supper wafting in. Her mind had limned the image with warmth and softness, as though it would become home the moment it existed. The reality was simply a house—fresh and welcoming, yet surreal in its blankness.

  She had felt something very like this before, Caroline remembered, the first time Polly put Mary into her arms. All those months waiting for their baby, their child, their son or daughter—and what arrived was an infant. Bewilderment still overpowered every sensation of that moment. An infant in her arms, astoundingly complete and tangible, and as wholly unfamiliar as though Polly had lifted Mary out of a satchel instead of Caroline’s own body.

  Shyly, Caroline reached out and touched the slab that formed the doorway, then looked inside. She would sweep this space every day, sleep in it, wake in it. Bathe and dress in it. Come time, she would bear a child within these walls, and likely one day conceive the next. In the midst of it all, Caroline knew, the place would shift from house to home without her ever being able to pinpoint the moment of its happening.

  Poised on the threshold, she pressed her fingertips gently against the bare wood but did not step inside. A notion had taken hold of her, too foolish to speak aloud and too firm to brush aside. Not until we’ve properly introduced ourselves.

  They ate around the fire, halfway between house and tent—a respectful sort of distance that made Caroline wonder if all of them secretly shared her inkling to let the house acquaint itself with them. Or perhaps it was only that they wanted to sit back and admire it.

  Edwards lay stretched out on the ground, her dumplings plumping his narrow middle, while Charles played the fiddle for the girls. Soon Edwards was up and dancing, and Mary and Laura clapped their delight. Charles’s face gleamed behind the white flash of the bow, as though he were playing for a barn brimful of swirling couples.

  Caroline sat back and smiled. This, she thought to herself. This was how it had felt to imagine themselves at home in Kansas. The particulars were different, with Edwards kicking up his heels and her own foot still too sore for tapping and the house only an outline behind them, but the glow of it, that was the same.

  Caroline gazed beyond them, to the empty house with the pale ribs of its roof standing out against the sky. Tomorrow they would fill it.

  Sixteen

  Walls, straight up and down, and a ridgepole too high to touch. Caroline had not realized how much she missed the simple shape of a room. Her eyes could not get enough of the lovely squareness of the corners with their sturdy intersections. It did not matter that there was no door, no shutters, no curtains. Even with sunshine pouring through the chinks and the open roof Caroline felt sheltered, truly sheltered, for the first time in months. All this time she had held herself half-hunched against the elements, always ready to cock one shoulder against wind or rain or whatever else the sky might hurl at them. What a delight to turn her back almost defiantly to the sky as she swept the last of the chips from the floor.

  Above her, Charles wrestled with the wind, stretching the canvas like a skin over the skeleton of roof poles. All those onerous yards of stitches had held so well that the wagon cover could serve as their roof until Charles raised a stable. That in itself was so immensely satisfying that the idea of a cloth roof did not dampen the pleasure Caroline took in the house. Already the space it enclosed belonged to her in a way the inside of the wagon never had, for the wagon never held the same space—it only flowed through a place, borrowing as it went.

  A beguiling, radiant sort of shade fell over her. It was the canvas, suffusing the bright sunlight overhead. Caroline stilled the broom and pushed back her sunbonnet to watch Charles work. The wind was giving him fits, billowing and snapping the canvas and blowing his hair and whiskers every which way. He snorted and blustered so, she wanted to laugh at him. He would have that wagon cover lashed down in a jiffy. She knew it, even if he did not. Caroline pulled her bonnet into place and hurried to the bare tent poles to fold up the linens. The first thing she wanted to see inside the house were the straw ticks, all plumped up smooth.

  “There!” Charles barked at the canvas. “Stay where you are and be—”

  Caroline whirled, her arms full of quilts. “Charles!”

  “—and be good.” He blinked sweetly down at her. “Why, Caroline, what did you think I was going to say?”

  “Oh, Charles!” she cried. “You scalawag!”

  He shimmied down the outer corner of the walls and scruffed up his hair until it looked like he’d crawled out from under a bramble bush.

  The laugh she’d held back earlier tumbled out of her. Charles grabbed her up in his arms, triumphant. The rascal—no one else in the world could make her forget herself enough to shout and laugh like a schoolgirl.

  “How’s that for a snug house?” Charles asked, pulling her close against his side so they could both look at it.

  The square yellow logs, topped with pale, smooth canvas, looked nearly golden against the soft blue sky. She could not begin to tell him how fine it looked. “I’ll be thankful to get into it,” she said.

  “We’re going to do well here, Caroline,” Charles said. All the teasing had slipped from his voice. “This is a great country. This is a country I’ll be contented to stay in the rest of my life.”

  Caroline’s heart paused for an instant. There was a weight to those words she had not heard from him before, a fullness. “Even when it’s settled up?” she ventured, scarcely daring to tilt her bonnet brim to look at him.

  He squeezed her in against his chest with each syllable. “Even when it’s settled up,” he promised, and leaned his cheek on top of her head. “No matter how thick and close the neighbors get, this country’ll never feel crowded. Look at that sky!”

  It was so. Surveyors might come with their compasses and chains to mark the necessary range and township lines, but they would never square the curve from the sky.

  Everything went where she wanted it—the broom in one corner, the churn in the other. Charles’s gun over the door, of course, and the beds against the back wall, leaving space between them for the fireplace. Every decision belonged to her. Charles and Mary and Laura would not put one thing down without looking first to her for approval, as though the map of the inside of the cabin existed in her mind alone.

  So she pointed out places for pegs to hang their clothing, the dishpan and dish towel, and Charles drove them into the walls. He hewed out narrow slabs for shelves and wedged those in between the logs in the corner that she designated as the kitchen. Caroline could have spent the afternoon admiring those plain, serviceable shelves. No longer would she have to bend double for a scoop of flour or cornmeal from a sack on the ground. Nor would her neatly packed crates be jumbled and jostled into disarray. She had accommodated so many trifling inconveniences over such a long time that she had not felt their accumulating weight. Now, so many lifted all at once that it seemed she might rise from the floor. If not for the inevitability of cooking supper over the campfire, she might have.

  But the campfire itself was more pleasant, too, because of the house. Because of the house, outside and inside had become distinct from each other once more. It was a rich feeling, sitting outside after supper for no better reason than because they wante
d to. There was something absurdly delightful in the knowledge that behind those walls their beds lay ready and waiting, with the nightclothes hanging neatly on their pegs. Nothing need be dismantled or rearranged.

  A warm, nectary scent glided by on the breeze. “I wonder,” Caroline said, “if the cherry tree back home is budded out yet.”

  “I wonder what Polly will do for her cherry preserves if the Gustafsons don’t share the fruit with her,” Charles answered.

  Caroline smiled. She could just imagine Polly scheming for her usual share of those good tart cherries. Perhaps she would simply send one of the children over with a basket, as she’d always done. Those poor unsuspecting Swedes would open their door to find three-year-old Charlotte beaming up at them. Wouldn’t that be just like Polly. “Eliza and Peter’s family must have increased by now,” Caroline said. She ran her hands along her own sides. She was still not so big as Eliza had been when they left Pepin. Niece or nephew, Caroline wondered. Live or stillborn? In a few months, Eliza would be wondering the same of her. No, Caroline realized with a pang—she had not told Eliza before they left, had not told anyone but Charles.

  “I should have had a letter ready to post when we stopped in Independence,” she said aloud. All she’d been able to think about was whether any news awaited her. How selfish. The home folks would be lucky now to have word from her before snowfall. Write, Eliza had said that last morning. Write.

  “I’ll have to make a trip into town one of these days for nails to finish the roof,” Charles said. “Soon as our stable and Edwards’s house are raised, I’ll tan those rabbit hides and take them in to trade. Be plenty of room in my pockets for all the letters you want to send.”