by Sarah Miller
All of them waited before the new mantel shelf while Caroline went to her trunk and lifted the lid. Beneath the brown paper bundle that was her delaine, nested snugly between the good pillows, sat the cardboard box she had packed most carefully of all. She burrowed one hand deep into its center of crumpled newsprint until her fingertips brushed something cool and smooth. Please, Caroline prayed. If it were not in one piece—Caroline blinked away the thought. She would not cry over such a thing, not with Charles and the girls looking on. Gently she pressed the paper wrapping back, hollowing out a path until a glint of golden china hair peeped out. Once again Caroline tunneled down, wrapping her fingers protectively around the narrow china neck and waist. Up through the rustling papers, all in one piece, came her china shepherdess.
Caroline’s heart gave a happy lurch. No matter that the painted lips could not speak, nor the tiny molded hands return the warm embrace of Caroline’s palm. She was so bright and beautiful, so small and delicate, Caroline had never been able to get enough of looking at her. She flushed a little, feeling Charles and the girls watching. Here she was a grown woman with two dear girls of her own, and still she had as much affection for that china lady as Mary did for her rag doll.
Caroline wiped the dainty figure carefully with an apron corner, half cleaning, half caressing the smooth porcelain, then stood the china shepherdess right in the center of the mantel shelf, where she belonged.
Two words settled themselves comfortably in her mind: Welcome home.
Eighteen
If Charles brought home a prairie chicken, Caroline decided, she would lay a hot fire in the hearth and fry it up crisp and brown. She hummed softly to herself, half waltzing to the tune as she swept. The logs of the puncheon floor lay with their pale yellow hearts turned up to her. She almost hated to walk across them, they were so flat and new and even. But, oh, the sound of her heels on that thick floor. The swish of the willow-bough broom.
She leaned a moment on the broom handle, reveling in the shade of the new slab roof. Caroline missed the glow of the canvas as she’d known she would, but it was a welcome relief to have a place away, to close herself off entirely from wind and sun. That endless wind made her aware of every inch of her skin. It was too much, being touched so constantly. Once more Caroline gazed up at that good solid ceiling, silently thanking Mr. Edwards for the half keg of nails he had loaned so that Charles need not whittle pegs to secure the slabs to the beams. There had not been occasion before to consider the particular virtue of each fragment of a house. Apart from the occasional lashing of rain that made her fear for the shingles, their house had been a house, and she was thankful for it. Now Caroline harbored a separate admiration for the shutters, the hearth, even the chinking between the logs.
Every slab, every peg and nail inched them closer to owning the place. By the time the government opened a land office and offered the land, they would be firmly settled, and as settlers they would have first right to file a preemption on the quarter section they occupied. That was the law. The speculators and railroads must stand aside for the people who lived and worked on the land. The more she and Charles improved the land in the meantime, the more solid their claim, for the law had declared that a man’s sweat contained as much worth as his pocketbook—more, even. Caroline looked out at the roll of prairie sloping off toward the creek. This time next year there would be a field of sod potatoes and another of corn taking root. Right beneath the window, a garden green with unfurling sprouts. This time next year, there would be a child clinging to her hip, sucking its fist and fussy with teething.
Outside, Jack growled. Caroline turned toward the open door. “My goodness!”
Two Osages stood in the doorway, their tufted scalp locks brushing the lintel. A narrow belt of colored wool held up their breechclouts. Above that, their lower ribs pressed faintly against their skin. Caroline flushed at the sight of so much bareness.
At each hip hung a knife and a hatchet. Her muscles tensed, as though she might spring at them if they came toward her, but she knew she could not move. A horse hair roach, black at the tips, made a ridge from their scalp locks down the back of their shining skulls. The broad base was a color so vivid Caroline had no name for it—neither red, nor pink, nor purple.
One of them went straight to the crate of provisions. The other looked at her so steadily in the face, it felt indecent. Caroline folded her hands tight against the crest of her belly, hugging her sides with her elbows. She prayed they would see and leave her be.
Outside, Jack’s chain rattled and snapped against its iron ring. Caroline had never heard him so savage.
All at once the air seemed to shatter. She could not hear Mary and Laura—had not heard them since before the Indians came into the house. Alarm sluiced past her elbows and knees.
She could not look out the window without turning her back to the Indians. If anything had happened to her girls, Caroline told herself, she should have heard them scream. But she had not made a sound herself. She could not even call their names with her heart drumming at the base of her throat.
The first man set the sack of cornmeal on the checked tablecloth between them. Then patted it. Caroline shied from the sound. The Indian spoke—a low ripple of syllables. Caroline shook her head. She could not hear where one word ended and another began. The other man held out the sack, pointing it at her, then the hearth.
She understood, but she would not take the meal from his hand. Caroline forced herself to nod and point to the table.
Her mind pivoted back to Brookfield while her hands measured and mixed the cornbread of their own accord. She had been wearing her blue-sprigged calico the day the Potawatomi man walked into their house and took the peacock feathers from the vase beside the looking glass. Caroline could see him still, strolling away with those shimmering plumes gazing back at her from his hair. More vibrant than the feathered eyes was the memory of her ma’s groan when they realized little Thomas had disappeared with the Indian.
The same sound was rising in her now, grating against the back of her breastbone as her whole body strained with the effort of listening for Mary and Laura. She started to press her palms into the top of the loaves, then jerked back. Her pulse stormed in her fingertips. She would not give these men the sweetening of the prints of her hands. That belonged only to Charles. Caroline wiped the grains of meal briskly on her apron and dropped the naked loaves into the bake oven. The iron cover rattled into place.
They looked at everything. Caroline watched the loops of beaded silver wire sway from their long earlobes as they probed through the cabin. Charles’s tobacco pouch disappeared into one brown fist as though she had no more presence than the china shepherdess. They might take anything and she would not move, if only they had left her daughters untouched.
The Potawatomis had stolen only feathers, she reminded herself, not her baby brother. While the rest of the family watched the Indian decorate his hair with their peacock plumes, the little boy had toddled out of sight into the corn patch. She prayed these Osages might be as vain, that Mary and Laura were sheltered by Providence as Thomas had been.
But this was not Brookfield with its woods and corn patches. Through the window she could see clear to the willows along the creek—clear to the bluffs beyond—but she could not see her daughters. If she called their names, the fear in her voice would point the Indians straight to them. The baby thrashed against her bladder. Caroline’s jaw clenched with the strain.
Suddenly Jack erupted into such a fury the Indians went to the window. Caroline could hear the bulldog lunging against the chain, scrabbling at the dirt. With each charge the metal links clattered and thrummed.
In a flash of calico the girls darted into the house. Caroline’s relief frothed up like saleratus. Laura ducked behind the slabs Charles had left propped in the corner for the bedstead. Mary skittered barefoot across the length of the house and clung to Caroline’s sleeve. The instant she felt Mary’s hands around her wrist, Caroline closed
her eyes and offered her thanks heavenward. Now she only wanted Laura’s tangled brown hair under her fingers.
The Indians’ eyes traced her gaze across the cabin, where half of Laura’s face peeped from behind the slabs. They peered at her, bending down so that their hatchets dangled from their hips. One man spoke, and the other said, “Hah!” Laura jolted, cowering tight against the wood with nothing but her little white fingertips showing.
Caroline pulled Mary to the hearth and yanked the lid from the bake oven. “It’s done,” she announced. The Indians turned. Caroline thrust a finger toward the pale loaves and stepped back. The hot iron lid in her fist dared them to frighten Laura again.
The two men squatted low on the hearth, their legs bent like hairpins. Silently, each ate an entire loaf of the half-baked bread, pinching every damp crumb from the floorboards. By the time they finished, Mary’s tears had warmed her sleeve.
The Indians stood. The shorter of the two pointed his chin at Mary and said, “Mi’-na.” The other man smirked and nodded. Not a shred of malice slanted their expressions. Instead they looked amused, as though they had recognized something so plain they expected Caroline to see and join her smile with theirs.
She would do no such thing. Caroline shifted sideways, slicing through their view with her body. The lid to the bake oven was still in her hand.
The planes of the men’s faces leveled. Without a word, they turned their backs and went out. The lid dropped from Caroline’s fist and rolled on its edge to the stack of slabs.
Laura came running.
Caroline sat down hard on the straw tick, nearly pulling the girls with her. Relief corkscrewed through her.
“Do you feel sick, Ma?” Mary asked.
“No,” she managed. Tremors welled in every joint; even her jaw quivered. “I’m just thankful they’re gone.”
“We thought they would hurt you,” Mary said.
“We left Jack and came to help,” Laura interrupted.
Caroline cupped their cheeks with her palms and cradled their heads against her shoulders. “My brave little girls,” she said. Overwhelmed by their nearness, her breasts prickled, weeping warm flecks of foremilk into her chemise.
The table was set and a fresh mixing of cornmeal in the bowl when Charles came whistling through the grass. A jackrabbit dangled by its hocks at his belt, and he swung two headless prairie hens in one fist. The girls nearly toppled over each other in their scramble to tell him the news. Caroline was glad for their zeal. She did not want to recollect the Indians’ visit any more than she must.
“Did Indians come into the house, Caroline?”
She held her voice even as a line of print as she told him about the tobacco and how much cornbread the two men had eaten. “They took the meal straight from the crate with me standing there. The way they pointed, I didn’t dare refuse.” The memory swelled her mind. “Oh, Charles! I was afraid!” Her chest constricted; she had not meant to tell him that part of it. Nor the girls, for that matter.
He assured her she had done right, that it was better to sacrifice a few provisions than make an enemy of any Osage, but she was not comforted. “The cornmeal was already running short,” she added. It was petty; she had seen their ribs.
“One baking of cornbread won’t break us.” Charles lifted his fistful of game. The prairie hens’ blunted necks wagged at her. “No man can starve in a country like this. Don’t worry, Caroline.”
She did not know what she had wanted him to say, but it was not this. He had not even looked at the sack of meal. Nor was he the one who would have to make it stretch. Her chin stabbed out like a child’s. “If that’s so, I don’t know why they can’t make do without our cornmeal. And all of your tobacco,” she added, hoping to pry something more out of him.
Charles waved a hand. “Never mind. I’ll get along without tobacco until I can make that trip to Independence.”
Independence. The irony needled her. Two days she and the girls would be stranded on the high prairie while he went to town to replace what the Indians had taken. Maybe three. Three days with those men free to wander in and demand whatever else they liked of her.
“Main thing is to keep on good terms with them,” Charles went on blithely.
Indignation burned through her like spilled kerosene. She could not hear a word he was saying until “band of the screeching dev—”
Her head snapped up. Caroline pressed her lips together and jerked her chin at him. The straighter she tried to hold herself, the harder she trembled.
“Come on, Mary and Laura!” Charles said. His voice was so bright, it sounded as if the words had been whitewashed. “We’ll skin that rabbit and dress the prairie hens while that cornbread bakes. Hurry! I’m hungry as a wolf!”
Caroline sank down on a crate. There was nothing to do but collect herself. With the heels of her hands she slicked the perspiration from her temples into her hair. She heard Charles peg the rabbit’s leg to the wall, then begin peeling the skin from the flesh while Mary and Laura pelted him with chatter about the Indians’ visit.
Her ears followed only the ripples of their talk, until Charles’s voice came down like the ax. “Did you girls even think of turning Jack loose?” Each syllable struck the same low note.
A spike of fear fell straight to Caroline’s heels. What might she have done, had Jack come raging into the cabin? Likely stand by and watch the Indians kill the dog. That or shoot Jack herself.
Until this moment she had not thought about the revolver. What would the Osage men have done, as she drew the pistol and cocked it? Caroline began to tremble again. There was nothing she could use to protect herself or her daughters without inviting attack.
“There would have been trouble,” Charles was saying. “Bad trouble.”
There. He had said it, at least. But now the acknowledgment left her reeling. She listened to Charles reproach the girls and wished she could snatch his words from the air. That he should have been so cavalier with her, yet so grave with Mary and Laura was nonsensical. In Pepin they had been safe as buttons in the button box. Surely he could not expect them to comprehend the hazards of the Indian Territory.
“Do as you’re told and no harm will come to you,” Charles declared.
One objection after another crowded Caroline’s throat. The girls did not understand. She could hear it in the shrink of their voices even as they whispered, “Yes, Pa.” They were bewildered by his anger, and that was all.
Charles had not seen their fear, Caroline reminded herself. He had not felt Mary’s tears soaking his sleeve, nor watched Laura try to press herself invisible behind the stack of slabs. He had only seen them boiling over in their eagerness to share the news of their encounter with the Osages.
But he was turning them in the wrong direction. They had not set the bulldog loose, and they had not been wrong to be afraid of the Indians, nor to want to protect her. Instead of being reproached, they ought to be praised for following their instincts. In a place like this, there could be no room for blind obedience. It was all the more dangerous to render them more wary of upsetting their pa than of the Indians. Their fear would guard them—if only Charles would leave them free to obey it.
Caroline swallowed all her protests back. She could not interject. Contradicting Charles would only muddy the girls further. She rose and went to the window for a breath of air. Alongside the woodpile, Charles had one of the prairie hens pinned by the wings under his boots. He pulled slowly upward on the thighs so that the bird began to stretch apart. The feathers shuddered, then the whole of the body tore free to leave the breast, pink and glistening, between the crushed wings.
Charles nailed the provisions cupboard to the wall, to keep the Indians from making off with the whole thing. Caroline’s shoulders flinched with every smack of the hammer. She could hold her thoughts in check or her body, not both. If she felt entitled to her anger, she might have turned it loose, but she did not. The fact that Charles had devoted the very next morning to build
ing a cupboard complete with a padlock proved that he shared her concern over their supplies. But he would not say it. Caroline did not know why she needed him to; it was plain enough.
In went the cornmeal, the sugar and flour, coffee and tea. Charles flapped the lid shut and threaded a padlock through the slots he’d whittled into the wood. “There,” he said, and held out the key. “String that up on a shoelace or what have you and wear it where the Indians won’t see it.”
“Wear it?” Caroline said.
Charles nodded. “That way if they take it into their heads to search the place, they won’t find it.”
Caroline stepped back. She could just imagine standing by with that key dangling between her breasts while those bare brown men rooted through the cabin. “You keep it, Charles,” she said.
“No sense in you having to fetch the key from me three times a day to do your cooking.” He gave the key a little toss, fumbling to catch it when she did not. “All right?” he asked.
“That stands to reason,” she said, and reluctantly put out her hand to accept it.
Caroline went to her work basket and retrieved a spool of red crochet cotton. If she was to wear the thing, it would not be on a scrap of shoelace. Then again, she thought, it must not be so fancy as to attract attention. So she worked an ordinary chain stitch with her crochet hook until the string of red loops was long enough to let the key lie securely behind the steel boning of her corset.
It would be a lie, to put herself between the Osages and the cupboard with the key around her neck, pretending to be unable to unlock it. How much easier on her conscience to simply put down her foot and refuse. Then again, she did not want to provoke them—only thwart them. So a lie it would be.