Caroline

by Sarah Miller

  Caroline opened her eyes and instead there was Charles, tying the animals to the corner of the stable and shaking hands with the two cowboys. “Well, Caroline?” he called through the window. When she did not answer he untied a fat packet from his saddle horn and held it up. The beef. If that beef was real, Caroline thought. Her mouth fell open. She felt a laugh go tumbling out of her, heard it meet with Charles’s great rumbling peals, and knew it was not a dream at all.

  Of course it was providential. It could be nothing else. But a slab of beef, a cow, and a calf was too extravagant, even for Providence. A cow. And a calf. She could not help repeating it to herself. There had never been a word so impossibly big as that and. A cow and a calf. Both rangy and unruly but goodness, milk and butter. Perhaps, Caroline thought, the hand of Providence had only been passing over them, on its way elsewhere with these fine gifts, and had somehow dropped them.

  But the land continued to burgeon with gifts for them. Yellow-orange plums small enough to scoop up with a spoon. Walnuts, pecans, and hickory nuts still in their green husks, plumping for autumn. A queer purple flower with a turnip-like root that Edwards called Indian breadroot; Caroline could not get enough of its crisp, white flesh.

  “Close your eyes,” Charles said as he came through the door. It had become a game with him, bringing home little surprises to plop into their open palms. If not something to eat, then something to marvel at—a kernel of blue corn, a speckled green prairie chicken egg. “Now open your mouth.”

  Caroline hesitated. Last time it had been a sunflower seed, from the Indian camp. Charles had cut one of the great yellow flowers from its stalk and pegged it up on the side of the chimney to dry. She did not like to wonder what the Osages would think to see it dangling there, no matter how many times Charles told her the camp surrounding the crops was deserted. The idea of the Indians leaving their corn and beans and sunflowers to the mercy of weather and wild animals was nonsensical.

  She could feel Charles waiting, daring her not to trust him. Caroline opened her mouth.

  She smelled the juice on his fingers before it touched her tongue. A blackberry, hot and sweet from the sun. Caroline sighed as she crushed it against the roof of her mouth. The rapture of its smoothness, the burst of flavor like a pinch to her tongue. Nothing had tasted so bright since last summer’s tart cherries.

  “All along the creek,” Charles said. “The fruit just about brushes the ground, the brambles are so heavy. You couldn’t pick them all in a week.”

  Caroline salivated anew at the wealth of things she could do with them. Blackberry pie. Blackberries and cream. Blackberry jam. Dried blackberries, stirred into pancake batter and hasty pudding, or stewing over the fire. If she gathered them quickly, if the baking-hot sunshine held long enough to dry them, their rich, syrupy smell would brighten the cabin all winter long. And if Charles could find more prairie chicken eggs, Caroline thought, she could try blackberries in Ma’s blueberry cake recipe. She would send one to Mr. Edwards, and to Mrs. Scott if it came out well, she decided. Just to be neighborly again, for its own sake. That would be as sweet as the fruit itself.

  The next morning she dressed Mary and Laura in their oldest calicos and handed them each a pail. They gamboled around her, chasing rabbits and dickcissels all the way down to the creek. Caroline did not try to keep up. The hot wind made her skin feel dry and taut, as if moving too suddenly might split it open. Although there were only a few dwindling inches of lacing to spare along the sides of her maternity corset, she had not been so conscious of her increasing size lately. The child was not so much growing as ripening, so that most of what she felt now was the accumulating weight, and the straining of her body to contain it. And with better than a month yet to wait, Caroline calculated, panting a little. These last weeks she would spend both thickening and thinning, expanding outwardly while her own flesh stretched and narrowed itself to make room from within. The sensation made her thankful for her corset’s firm embrace.

  “Look, Ma!”

  Charles had not exaggerated. A bounty of great, fat berries shone purple-black in the sun.

  As Caroline and the girls clustered close to a tangle of brambles, swarms of mosquitoes billowed up then settled down to crouch on the fruit and pierce the skins with their needle-shaped tongues.

  “Now watch.” She showed Mary and Laura how to tease the darkest berries from their spongy white cores without bursting the tender black globes. “Put them gently into the pail,” Caroline said, reaching all the way to the bottom before opening her hand. “The red and purple berries are not ripe enough to pull free.”

  Caroline watched them a moment. Mary picked just as Caroline had shown her, but Laura’s pail would have to be made into preserves, or put into a pie. In her eagerness, Laura pinched the berries, then let them bounce by the handful onto the bottom of her pail. Caroline smiled in spite of herself. She ought to teach Laura how to keep from crushing the fruit, but Laura was having such fun. Already her short fingers were stained purple to the cuticles. There was little that pleased her more than helping, and blackberry jam was no less valuable than blackberries dried whole.

  Caroline turned her attention to her own two pails and began to pick. It was lazy work, barely work at all with so many berries at hand, and heady with heat and the murmur of insect wings. Her belly snagged against the briars as she leaned to reach another cluster of fruit. A cloud of mosquitoes rose up sullenly at her approach, then crowded back in. They buzzed drunkenly, hardly aware of her fingers. Determined to pluck every berry within reach, Caroline stood in one place so long that her dress made a tent of heat around her. Sweat glossed the skin at her temples, dribbled between her breasts and down the backs of her knees. The key to the provisions cabinet clung to her damp skin, so warm that she could smell the tang of the hot brass. Mosquitoes pricked the back of her neck, her wrists, and even her ears. Purple smears streaked the girls’ legs and ankles, marking the places they had swatted.

  Breakfast wore thin as the sun climbed the sky, yet Caroline did not indulge herself with mouthfuls of berries as the girls did. Hunger made a welcome pocket in her middle, and she did not hurry to fill it. As a child she would not have thought it possible that the empty rumble could be pleasurable, but now, brimming as she was, the feel of that space as it opened was a momentary luxury. Now and then she found a blackberry that was almost hot to the touch, and those went into her mouth.

  If there had been this many blackberries in the thickets along the banks of the Oconomowoc, Caroline mused to herself, she and her brothers and sisters would never have feared winter’s coming. Berry picking had been as much a necessity as a treat in those days.

  With a smile she remembered little Thomas, silently scooping blackberries from Martha’s bucket with a serving spoon he’d smuggled from the house, and how he had lied when Martha finally realized why she could not manage to fill her pail. “Honest, Martha,” he said, clean palms upturned for her to inspect. “My fingers’d be all juicy if I stole your berries,” he reasoned with big solemn eyes, not knowing that his purple tongue contradicted his every word. Martha was mad enough to whip him and sly enough not to bother. Thomas’s comeuppance lasted all night long, running back and forth to the necessary. It had doubled them all over with laughter then, but now, watching how her own daughters filled their mouths casually, almost indifferently, Caroline’s smile slumped. If Thomas had not spent a winter making do with bread crumbled into maple sugar water, perhaps he would not have gorged himself. It wasn’t fair, she thought fiercely now, to shame a child for greed when he had no memory of plenty. One could not exist without the other. Children as small as Mary and Laura ought never to feel their bellies gnawing at nothing.

  “My pail is full, Ma,” Mary said. “Can I go back home? Please?” Her voice peaked into a whine.

  “May I,” Caroline reminded her.

  “May I, Ma?” Strings of Mary’s straw-colored hair trailed through the sweat along the rim of her sunbonnet. Her face glowed
pink and cross. Had they been in Pepin, Caroline would not have hesitated. It was less than a quarter mile back to the cabin. Mary could not possibly lose her way from the path through the tall prairie grass. But Caroline did not answer. She looked toward the east, toward the Indian camp. It was not that she did not believe what Charles had told her. If he said the camp was empty, it was empty. It was that he could not be sure where the Indians had gone, nor for how long.

  “You may help Laura finish her pail,” Caroline said, “and then we will all go home together.”

  The next day Caroline laid a tarpaulin full of blackberries out in the sun beside the cabin and let Mary stay behind to guard it from birds and insects while Charles built a paddock for the stock. The drying fruit seemed to draw the mosquitoes up out of the creek bottoms and across the prairie. Long after the berries were picked and put up for winter, the insects lingered, indifferent to the smudges of damp grass Charles lit to smoke them from the house and barn. No amount of coal tar oil and pennyroyal rubbed into the skin discouraged the mosquitoes from biting. All day long the crock of apple cider vinegar stood open on the table, so they might dab each new pink welt the moment it began to itch.

  Caroline could not say by any stretch that she was thankful for the mosquitoes. She could not be thankful for a pestilence that found its way under the sheets to prickle her unreachable feet with bites while she slept. Though she could not speak of it, there was a measure of reassurance in their nettlesome clouds. The land had become so bountiful she was almost wary of it. Here at last was proof that it was not too good to be true.

  Twenty-One

  It started low, and early. The cabin was still dim when Caroline woke to the warming ache behind her bladder. She levered herself from the bedstead and went to the door. The sun was not up, yet already the breath of the wind warmed her face. She stepped barefoot into the hazy predawn. Jack followed, perturbed.

  Her waters broke just outside the necessary.

  For a moment Caroline stood dripping on the path, thankful it hadn’t happened in the new bedstead. The sight of the fluid soaking into the earth put a queer thrill high in her belly, at the spread of her ribs. This was something altogether different from emptying the family chamber pail along the roads of Iowa and Missouri. Had she been a papist, she might have crossed herself. Jack crept forward to sniff at the puddle and seemed satisfied. That was all the reverence Caroline needed, and she went about her business.

  Charles met her at the cabin door.

  “Caroline?”

  She knew how she must look—barefoot, with her hair unpinned and the back of her gown wet and likely stained. “You’d best go ask for Mrs. Scott to come today. I should think before noon I will have need of her.”

  A shimmer of fear and excitement lit his eyes. “It’s sooner than you expected. Isn’t it?”

  She tried to smile. “Only by two weeks. Maybe three.” Perhaps even four.

  “If I leave now, Scott’ll be up for chores by the time I get there.”

  “And the girls?”

  He nodded, shrugging into his suspenders. “I’ll think of something to keep them busy.”

  All through the morning, the pain stretched steadily upward, tightening the hammock of her belly. By the time she’d cleared the breakfast dishes, it was cresting beneath her ribs. Under the waves flowed a tension that never eased. The dull heat of it rose upward until her throat was rigid from cinching back the sounds of her discomfort. Determined not to groan or whimper in front of the girls, she tried humming a little over the dishwater and found a sort of harmony in letting her voice drift above the drone of clenching muscle.

  “One little, two little, three little Indians,” Charles sang, pointing at Mary’s and Laura’s tanned faces, then wagging his finger in the air. “Nope, only two.”

  “You make three,” Mary said. “You’re brown, too.”

  Caroline had never cared for that song, but the pulse of the melody pleased her now. As long as she hummed, she did not have to remind herself to exhale.

  “How would you girls like to go with me to see the Indian camp?” Charles asked. Laura danced up onto her toes, clapping. Even Mary dropped her dish towel and dashed to Charles’s knee.

  Caroline went cold. “It’s so far, Charles,” she said, clambering for words that would not show her fear. “And Laura is so little. She can’t walk so far in this heat.”

  Laura’s heels drooped to the floor.

  “Then she shall ride Jack,” Charles said. The lift of his eyebrows begged her not to press further. “Camp’s been deserted for weeks,” he added. “Not a whiff for Jack to trouble himself over.”

  Caroline nodded and turned back to the dishpan. There was nothing else for it; the girls must be away all day. She fetched the comb and sat down on the tallest of the crates with the small of her back pressed against the table. “Mary, Laura, you must be combed and braided. Indian camp or not, I won’t have you going out with your hair wild.”

  The smooth strands coiling over and around her knuckles soothed her—such softness in contrast to what was happening within her body. While Laura stood between her knees, Caroline felt her belly go taut against the little girl’s back. Laura spun around, her eyes wide. “Do it again, Ma,” she asked.

  “All done,” Caroline said, shooing her along. “Mary’s turn.”

  She tied their sunbonnets under their chins and handed the girls off to Charles, all brightly framed in calico. Her breath hitched, she wanted so badly to draw them up into her lap until Mrs. Scott came, but she made herself cheerful and followed them to the door. Charles lifted Laura onto Jack’s back. Caroline smiled a little when the bulldog reached around to snuffle her bare toes.

  “Now we’ll all be Indians together,” Charles said.

  Mary turned in the dooryard. “Ma?” Her blue eyes looked like she very nearly understood.

  Caroline softened her face as best she could and nodded toward the open prairie. “Go with your pa,” she said.

  A tremor of panic climbed Caroline’s throat as the tall grass enveloped Charles and the girls. There was not a sound in all the world but the swishing of that grass and a rising whir of insects. She was alone, without even the bulldog. And this cabin was not fully home, despite the china shepherdess standing on the mantel. She laced her fingers beneath her belly and hugged herself. Her mother, widowed a month before Thomas’s birth, had not been so forsaken as this.

  Caroline blinked away the memory. There was not time to think of such things. Not with Mrs. Scott on her way, and work yet to be done before she arrived.

  Sweat simmered out of her as she rubbed her nightdress over the washboard. She could not help feeling misplaced; leaning over a wash bucket at this hour on mending day skewed the rhythm of the week. If she could not be near Eliza or Polly or Ma this day, Caroline wanted to be busy with her work basket as she knew they would be. But her soiled nightdress must be washed. It ought to have been done sooner if it were to dry in time, but she had not known how to explain the stain to the girls.

  Much as she concentrated on her task, Caroline could not rinse nor wring the images of her kin from her mind. She paused to wipe a wet cuff along her hairline as a pang took hold. There was no sense in missing Eliza and Ma, she scolded herself as she squeezed the water from the nightdress. Neither of them had ever lived near enough to attend her deliveries. Yet with every stricture of her womb the stretch of the seven years since she had last seen her mother seemed to broaden. And Eliza. The thought of her sister nursing her own little one in the rocker they had left behind watered Caroline’s eyes.

  The twisted nightdress creaked before she realized her elbows were trembling. Caroline shook the garment free of itself and stood a moment, letting the rising wind snap the last droplets from its hem. One still morning, Charles had pointed out the smoke from the Scotts’ cabin to Laura. Now the blowing grass leaned toward the neighbors’ claim, its thousands of bending fingers leading Caroline’s eye’s ever eastward. The air carrie
d a hearth-like smell of hot clay and browning grain, but not a sign of habitation breached the horizon. Her low voice sidled shakily into the wind:

  Come to that happy land, come, come away,

  Why will ye doubting stand, why still delay?

  Eyes combing the prairie, Caroline hummed through another spasm. The drone of the cicadas cut in and out of the melody. She scanned the blue-white edge of sky once more, then hurried inside to strip the good quilt and muslin sheets from the bedstead. The gray blanket and the old oilcloth must cover the straw tick, if only she could steal enough time between pains to manage them. First, she folded up the red-checked cloth and laid the table with everything Mrs. Scott would need: lard, linen and pins, clean rags, flannel swaddling, and the butcher knife.

  All the while, the heat grew heavy and muscled as the spasms, which pulled against her back as if the child had rooted itself at the base of her spine. By the time the knock came to the door, each breath demanded Caroline’s full attention. Panting a little, she smoothed her hair and blotted her forehead with the hem of the gray blanket before turning to the open door.

  The sight of a stranger, stocky as a barrel, standing on her threshold with a fistful of wildflowers stilled her. Again the cicadas’ whir surged and then fell, as if impelled by the swells of her homesickness. Caroline dabbed the corners of her eyes with her apron.

  “Good morning,” the woman said.

  Caroline’s womb clutched in response, echoing the words from Saint Luke: For, lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy.

  “Mrs. Ingalls?”

  Caroline unstoppered her throat. “Good morning.”