by Sarah Miller
The first few days she constantly felt the scant weight of the key around her neck, felt it nudging her ribs when she bent or leaned just so. Even after she became insensible to the press of the cool metal teeth against her flesh, the brass left a faint green print like a brand on her skin.
Nineteen
How often the world seemed to bend for Charles, Caroline thought as she watched him crank the windlass, in a way it did for no one else. When they were mired along the Missouri, Mr. Jacobs had ridden up out of the trees to trade horses. The log fell on her ankle, and along came Edwards to finish raising the cabin and stable. Even the ride that had ended with Charles’s terrifying encounter with the wolf pack had brought them, in a roundabout way, the man who now shoveled at the bottom of their half-dug well.
He was a round, squinting fellow, his fair skin scoured to peeling by the sun. No shirker, though, for every morning at sunup Mr. Scott was at the door, calling out, “Hi, Ingalls! Let’s go!”
Scott was pleasant enough, but he was not convivial like Mr. Edwards. After a polite “Morning, ma’am,” he hardly seemed to notice her, or the girls. He swore mildly but absently during his spells down in the shaft, and Caroline tried all day long to keep Laura from straying near enough to hear the short blasts of execration echoing up out of the dirt walls.
At night, Charles was tired. Work with Scott was ordinary work—the bite of the shovel and the crank of the windlass. Occasionally a bark of laughter, but no rhythm, no real harmony between them.
Still, she was thankful for his work. Thankful even before the morning Charles said, almost in passing as he headed out the door with his shovel, “Scott said he spoke to his wife and she’ll come for you. When it’s time.”
A flush crept up her neck to think of the men speaking together of such things.
“Did you thank him?”
Charles nodded.
Good then. It was done, however awkwardly. A space had cleared around her lungs, as though the news had loosened her corset strings.
Mrs. Scott would come. But now Caroline’s greedy mind wanted to know what Mrs. Scott’s voice sounded like, how many children she’d borne, whether her hands were large or small. Things Caroline did not know how to ask her own husband without betraying apprehensions that had no business intruding on such good news.
Mrs. Scott would come, Caroline repeated to herself. That alone told her something about the woman. If she could leave her own claim long enough to attend a lying-in, any children she had were weaned. There might be an older girl, big enough to keep up the housework and get the meals. She had volunteered to come, that much was almost certain. Caroline could picture Mr. Scott talking to his wife over supper, telling her about the Ingalls family from Wisconsin: a carpenter and his wife with two little girls, and the missus in the family way. A man who cursed the sun and wind—however mildly—in a woman’s presence might not be so reluctant to say it right out, Caroline reckoned.
“No other kin?” asked the imaginary Mrs. Scott.
Mr. Scott would shake his head. Would he know why she had asked?
“You may tell them I’ll come for her.”
Charles’s voice strayed into her imaginings. “Scott? Scott! Scott!” A pause. “Caroline, come quick!”
She might have scoffed at the words. Quick, indeed. Nothing she did felt quick these days. The sound of them was something else altogether. Caroline had never heard his voice like this. Dread billowed up around her so suddenly, everything else fell away—the sheets from her hands and the thoughts from her mind—and Caroline flew outside.
Charles was down on all fours beside the hole, peering into it. “Scott’s fainted or something down there,” he said. “I’ve got to go down after him.”
“Did you send down the candle?” Caroline asked.
“No. I thought he had. I asked him if it was all right, and he said it was.”
She had seen Mr. Scott shaking his head at the way Charles lowered a candle down the well to test the air each morning. Foolishness, he’d said. At once Caroline knew that blustering, impatient man had not done it. He had shimmied down the rope into who knows what kind of miasma while Charles finished his breakfast. She shaded her eyes and squinted into the hole. Not a glimmer of light, nor a glimpse of Mr. Scott’s sun-bleached hair.
What shall we do? The words never reached her lips. Caroline looked up to ask, and Charles was tying a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. “Got to get the rope around him or we can’t pull him out.”
No. Her whole body pulsed with the word. No, no, no. “Charles,” she said almost tentatively, as though her voice were backing away from the idea, “you can’t. You mustn’t.”
The triangle of handkerchief puffed out with each word. “Caroline, I’ve got to.”
The wide black throat of the well gaped silently at his knees. Cold tingled in Caroline’s belly at the thought of its depth. “You can’t. Oh, Charles, no!”
“I’ll make it all right,” he promised. “I won’t breathe till I get out.” Caroline stood so still, the world seemed to quiver around her. What made him think he could promise such a thing? He could not climb back up that rope quickly enough to guarantee his own safety without someone to crank the windlass and draw him out of the earth like a bucket. For weeks, Charles had not let her carry so much as a pail of water from the creek. Now he asked this of her. No, did not even ask. She was so big she could no longer lift Laura onto her lap, yet he never considered for an instant that she would do anything but leap to the crank to help him save a man she hardly knew.
“We can’t let him die down there,” Charles said.
“No,” Caroline declared. Better one man dead than both of them. There was no simpler arithmetic. “No, Charles!” she said again. Caroline watched, dumbstruck, as he sliced the top bucket free and tied the rope to the windlass as if she had not said a word. Her vow of obedience, broken, and it held no power over him. It did not matter whether she was willing to save Mr. Scott, Caroline realized in a dizzying rush, because once Charles stepped into that hole, there was not one fiber of her body that would refuse to strain at the crank to bring her husband back. He had not asked because she had no choice. Panic spurted into Caroline’s limbs, pooling hot and syrupy in the crook of her arms and behind her knees. “I can’t let you. Get on Patty and go for help,” she pleaded.
He shook his head. “There isn’t time.” He reached for the rope and leaned over the pit.
“Charles, if I can’t pull you up—if you keel over down there and I can’t pull you up—” The way he looked at her, so earnest and determined, cracked her voice.
“Caroline, I’ve got to.”
The ground swallowed him up, one silent gulp, and Caroline dropped to her knees. Above her the windlass squealed wildly, unspooling its last few feet, and thrummed to a sudden stop.
The rope trembled straight and taut, then went slack. He was at the bottom.
Oh, God, she prayed. Dear God. Her eyes reached and reached. There was nothing for them to fasten to but the moist brown walls of the pit. Sounds wafted up at her, sounds so muffled and magnified by their long ascent that she could not make them out.
Seven. Eight. Nine. If he did not shout, or tug at the rope within ten breaths . . . then what? Turn the crank? Run for help? Twelve. Thirteen. The rope jiggled and twitched. Caroline wrapped her fingers around it, felt the thin line of movement running through it. As long as it was moving, Caroline promised herself, Charles was alive. So long as it was moving, she would not let go of that rough jute, no matter how many breaths passed. Eighteen, nineteen.
Suddenly the rope twanged to the center of the well.
Caroline pushed herself from the ground. She took hold of the crank and yanked. It spun three-quarters of a turn and stopped so short, her shoulders jolted. She pulled again, wrenching the skin of her palms against the wooden handle. It wobbled but did not budge. There was not strength in her arms, nor the whole of her body to pull that crank.
I w
on’t breathe till I get out. The last breath Charles had taken would be pressing behind his teeth by now. Caroline shook the image away. There had to be a way—Charles was not so gallant that he would have gone down unless there was a way out. Frantically she searched her mind, calling up a blackboard charted in her own hand with wheels and axles, pulleys and weights.
Caroline ground her heels into the dirt until her almost-healed ankle was a welter of old and new pain. She refastened her hands to the crank and heaved, leaning backward so the weight of her belly swung her nearly to the ground. The windlass creaked, following. Caroline’s throat bulged with grunts she would not release as she propelled the leverage of her body up into the peak of the turn. Not one particle of energy would leave her unless she could direct it into the crank.
The crank reached the apex and continued moving—one full turn, then two, three.
Every strand of muscle in her arms burned. If they snapped or frayed before Charles reached the top— No, Caroline commanded herself. Only a few more turns and he would be out of reach of the fumes, high enough to risk a breath. Nothing mattered before that. Only give him time to breathe. So long as he could breathe, it did not matter how long it took to bring him to the surface. She could even stop to rest, once he breached clean air.
Caroline did not stop to rest. Her thrusting thighs and heaving back knew better than to surrender their momentum. She could picture his face, hear the echo of his voice telling Laura: By jinks, you’re as strong as a little French horse!
Lit-tle . . . French . . . horse, lit-tle . . . French . . . horse, her mind and her muscles chanted together as the crank turned over and over.
The load lifted from the rope so abruptly, Caroline panicked at the thought it had snapped. Instantly the weight redoubled, and she cranked with a new fury.
In the same second a hand appeared on the ground; another gripped the leg of the windlass. Caroline’s heart seemed to bloom past her ribs, brimming into her breasts and deep into her belly as she watched Charles spill himself onto the grass beside her. He slumped low over his knees, gasping, his boots still dangling over the edge. Caroline let go of the crank and put her hands to his back, feeling the air rush in and out of him. Above them the windlass squealed and spun. From the well’s gullet came a heavy whump.
“Scott,” Charles coughed, and tried to pry himself from the ground.
“Sit still, Charles,” Caroline said. He had not caught his breath.
She could not hold him down. He staggered to the crank, pulling and panting. Caroline scrambled up and took hold of the crank again. Together it was simple as winding a spool of thread. Up ran the bucket, and, lolling on top of it, Mr. Scott. Caroline braced the crank while Charles hefted him onto the grass. Scott lay there, slack and rubbery, as if the fumes had half melted him. Charles put two fingers to Scott’s wrist, then an ear to his chest.
“He’s breathing,” Charles said. “He’ll be all right, in the air.” A little shiver rattled him, then Charles dropped beside Scott, limbs splayed and eyes closed.
Caroline could not feel anything. The quivers of exertion in her muscles, the blood pounding through her limbs, the warm cascade of relief—all of it had been stripped from her. She blinked at him as he lay there, so very still. Safe or dead? The question drifted somewhere nearby, a puff of thought shadowing her mind as it passed by.
“I’m all right, Caroline.” The words rushed out on a sigh. “I’m plumb tuckered out, is all.”
The tips of her fingers began to tingle. Her palms burned where the grain of the windlass handle had bitten into the skin. “Well!” Caroline said, and a hot torrent came whirling up out of her. “I should think you would be! Of all the senseless performances! My goodness gracious! Scaring a body to death, all for the want of a little reasonable care! My goodness! I—” The child kicked, and the wobbly, watery sensation shattered her fury. Caroline snatched her apron to her face and sobbed.
Naked, she lies in the grass, the well a gaping hole between her splayed legs. A rope runs out from somewhere deep within her, down into the well. From the pit, the plaintive sound of Charles’s fiddle rises. With each note the rope vibrates, as though it is strung across the neck of the instrument. Fibers of jute chafe her thighs, scour the delicate channel leading to the rope’s source. She strains at it, the rope a writhing umbilicus between them, but Charles’s head does not emerge from the hole.
A long, high wolf’s howl melded with the wail of the note rising from the pit, and Caroline found herself awake. Another dream, she soothed herself as she twined her ankles together and tugged her hem back into place. Her nightdress had hitched itself halfway over her belly. Only another dream.
But the feel of it lingered. The sense of being tethered to that dreadful pit coiled around her in the dark. And the nakedness, calling her shame back to the very surface of her skin. What spiteful logic dreams dealt in: she would have been less ashamed to show her bare flesh than let Mary and Laura and Charles see the way she had abandoned herself to wailing and sobbing the moment all danger had passed. Worst of all was Mary offering her own dry hankie in place of Caroline’s sodden apron. Fresh twists of shame wriggled through her at the memory, at the tentative pity on her five-year-old daughter’s upturned face.
Caroline considered whether to close her eyes again. In daylight she could raise a bucket from the well and her mind strayed to nothing more troubling than keeping the water from splashing her shoes. Nights, though, she’d lived that dreadful morning over a dozen different ways, each bent into something more grotesque than the reality.
What was hidden between the folds of her brain that would not be content with the awful memories themselves, Caroline wondered, but insisted on conjuring them into such unearthly images?
The child shifted, as if it, too, were discomfited by such thoughts. Caroline fitted her hands around the mound of her belly and pressed, hugging inward with her palms. Poor thing. Not yet born, and already it had shared in each of her most fearful moments. What must it have felt when the dread and terror went coursing through her—did the same chilling-hot currents flood its budding limbs? Caroline winced at the thought.
No more, she promised it. No more. A promise she could not hope to keep. She had no power to seal herself off from fear any more than she could conjure tides of happiness. If nothing else, Caroline suddenly chided herself, she might resolve to stop her mind from fondling the worst of her memories night after night. Her lip trembled at the thought of allowing herself to touch the store of fine things she’d locked in her heart the moment she’d begun packing her trunk in Pepin.
Caroline closed her eyes and imagined her rocking chair. The swish-swish of the runners across the floor, the gentle curve of the slats against her back. Her shoulders felt the soft embrace of her red shawl, its ends tucked around a swaddled bundle. The child’s face still would not form in her mind’s eye, but her arms summoned up its weight, its warmth against her body. Past and future, twined together.
In her mind Caroline fashioned a snug little haven for herself, entering it each night to call up the dearest of her memories for the child to feed on. The taste of her mother’s blueberry cake and cottage cheese pie. The springtime riot of pinks in the sailor’s garden up the road, all the way back in Brookfield. Her first week’s pay as a schoolteacher, two dollar bills and two shining quarters. The cornhusking dances in Concord—the rich green swirl of her delaine skirt, the sound of Charles’s fiddle, the feel of his hands on her waist as they danced. Their first night together in their own little house in Pepin. Eliza. Henry. Polly. Ma and Papa Frederick. These memories ached, but softly, so that the ache itself became a pleasure. The ache hurt less than the blank places she had carved out by trying not to remember.
Nights passed, and Caroline found she did not need to reach so far back to find a memory that would unfurl into something so bright and warming that she thought surely the child must be sharing in her contentment. The child, after all, had been there, floating in the c
enter of her every moment: Their first piping hot meal after the miring storm. The sky reflected in Laura’s eyes the night she said the stars were singing. Supper with Edwards, with the newly built house outlined against that same starry sky. These recollections were not edged with wistfulness. They burned cheerfully, leaving no dim corners for darker thoughts of the creek, the Osages, or the well to congregate.
Then came the night after Charles finished the bedstead, when she could not think of one thing more comforting than the feel of that bed against her back. If she had not filled it with her own hands, Caroline would not have believed she lay on the same straw tick. The prairie grass beneath her was finer than straw, with a warm, golden-green smell somewhere between hot bread and fresh herbs, and it enveloped her like broth welcoming a soup bone. Her hips and shoulder blades, which always seemed to sink straight to the floor, floated above the rope Charles had strung between the framing slabs. She shifted deeper, and the rope sighed and the grass whispered. “I declare, I’m so comfortable it’s almost sinful!” she said and closed her eyes, the better to savor every inch of the sheets cradling her body.
Twenty
At the sight of Charles and two cowboys leading a cow and calf up out of the creek bottoms, Caroline thought she must be back in her soft bed, dreaming. She had sat down on the end of the bed by the window with the mending, waiting for the fire to slack enough to put the cornbread on to bake, and the midsummer heat had lulled her to sleep. Caroline blinked, trying to sift the few fragments of reality from what she saw. It was already a stretch to make herself believe that a herd truly had chanced to pass by their claim, that the men driving it offered Charles a day’s work keeping the longhorns out of the ravines instead of Edwards or Scott or anyone else in Montgomery County. Absurd as it was, that was real, and that itself—a day’s work in exchange for a piece of fresh beef—had felt like a dream even as Caroline clasped her hands for delight. Now she closed her eyes and stretched her shoulders, waiting for the image to scatter and refashion into the familiar lines of the roof and walls.