Caroline

by Sarah Miller

  “I am Mrs. Scott.”

  “I am so—” Caroline’s voice caught again. “So pleased to meet you, Mrs. Scott.”

  “Well now,” Mrs. Scott said. “Looks like I didn’t get here a minute too soon. I reckon you ought to trade that apron for a nightgown and leave the rest to me.”

  Caroline could not argue.

  While Mrs. Scott made busy with the blanket and oilcloth, Caroline peeled off her corset and settled her damp nightdress around herself. She polished the key to the provisions cupboard free of her perspiration before handing it to her neighbor.

  “What a very tidy house,” Mrs. Scott said, helping Caroline into the bedstead. “It’s good to see more of our own kind of folks settling the place up.”

  In the bed, Caroline’s mind had nothing to attend to but heat and pain. The hearth crackled behind her in spite of the steamy wind barging through the open windows, for the fire must be kept high enough to scald the knife. Every crease of her body pulled the nightdress closer.

  Amiably as she spoke, Mrs. Scott’s voice crowded the cabin, while outside the insects’ cry ascended without end. The sounds held Caroline teetering even as the clench of her laboring muscles released.

  “Been here the better part of a year and I’ve never seen a one of those Indian women,” Mrs. Scott was saying as she fitted the yellow flowers into a mug of water. “The men have so little modesty abroad, it makes a body wonder if the women wear anything at all in those huts of theirs. I don’t blame you for locking up the foodstuffs with the likes of them prowling all over the countryside.”

  With the next spasm came a pressure so insistent, all Caroline wanted to do was scrabble backward out from under it. She pressed the heels of her hands against the straw tick and drew in all the breath she could hold. She did not want to push; she wanted only to put something between herself and that feeling. A picture of sausage-making filled her mind, how the filmy casings suddenly bulged and shone with each twist of the grinder.

  She had forgotten this part of it, how the pain metamorphosed. With Mary, it had taken nearly two hours.

  “Oh, Mrs. Scott!” Caroline cried.

  “Yes?”

  Caroline could not answer. She did not even know what she wanted.

  The big woman clucked and nodded. “I was near about your age when I had my first. Yelled like a wild savage. Wasn’t much quieter for any of the next four, either. Go on and shout if it does you good.”

  Caroline shook her head. She could not let go of herself, not with the whole world tilting and nothing else to hold on to.

  With her next breath the momentum abated enough for her to feel that the child had loosed its moorings. Before Caroline could steady herself around it, an oncoming surge broke another cry out of her. Tears leaked down her temples, doubling her shame. She tried to hum quietly and faltered.

  Mrs. Scott sat down on the edge of the bedstead and let her voice ring out:

  There is a happy land, far, far away,

  Where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as day;

  Oh to hear the angels sing, Glory to the Lord, our King,

  Loud let His praises ring, praise, praise for aye.

  Caroline surrendered to the hymn and together they sang, each verse more loudly than the last. She ended the final chorus gasping, “Another, please.” Her voice had become the only part of herself she held any sway over.

  From one verse to the next of “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand” the gait of the song quickened steadily until Mrs. Scott asked, “Shall we have a look, Mrs. Ingalls?”

  “Please.” The pain was fisted now, slamming itself downward. Still singing, Caroline parted her thighs and tented the gown over her knees for Mrs. Scott to see.

  Filled with delight my raptured soul,

  Would here no longer stay;

  Though Jordan’s waves around me roll,

  Fearless I’d launch away.

  The big woman nodded and patted her foot. “Any minute.”

  Mrs. Scott joined her for one more chorus, propping the quilt and pillows from Mary and Laura’s bed behind her until Caroline was nearly upright.

  She was full to quivering with the press of the child’s head. Her nerves boiled and crawled around its shape, her flesh unable to cringe away. Desperate for movement, Caroline gripped her knees like the two handles of a plow and began to push.

  With the hardening of her muscles the frisson ceased. Caroline’s mind cleared as all at once she released herself into the pain. Breath by breath, she filled her chest with air and pressed it down against the bulge of her womb, down through her flanks to the end of the bed where Mrs. Scott sat coaxing. The force of each thrust bowed her spine and bunched the cords in her neck.

  At the crowning, when it seemed as though the sun itself were boring its way out of her, Caroline lay back and held herself still as the seam at the base of her body unlaced, bracing for the snapping of the finest outer fibers. The hot squeeze of her heartbeat ringed the head and she felt herself stretched tighter and tighter until with a twist of lock and key the child bloomed into Mrs. Scott’s hands.

  For a moment she lay poised and panting. Her hips and knees were trembling and watery; her pulse thrummed between her legs. There was a tug and a sinewy slice as the cord was severed. Then the splutter of the infant’s cry. It echoed deep into Caroline’s own lungs and Caroline gloried in it, lifting her thanks to God.

  Suddenly freed from the crush and strain, she went all but blank inside as Mrs. Scott tended to the child. The grip around her began to unknot, making Caroline’s body her own again. She had not fully taken hold of the change before Mrs. Scott was laying the toweled infant across her chest.

  “Here we are,” Mrs. Scott said. “A fine little daughter, Mrs. Ingalls.”

  And there it was before her—the face her mind had been unable to conjure for all these months, so close Caroline felt the moisture of the baby’s breath. Caroline inhaled, tasting it, and the world gentled around her, waking her blunted senses to glimmering sensitivity. Even the heat seemed softer, carrying the scent of the prairie into the cabin, ripe and golden.

  Outside the shell of Caroline’s body, the baby girl looked small and crinkled as a nut meat. Her skin glowed reddish-purple from its rubbing of lard. Caroline dipped her finger into the downy hollow below one delicate ear. The child rumpled into a squall.

  “Ticklish,” Mrs. Scott observed with a smile, but Caroline’s heart jerked as though she’d been rebuked.

  Caroline cupped her palms over the hunched shoulders and clenched bottom. “There . . . there now,” she said as the firmness of her touch steadied them both. The child’s eyelids unbuckled, immersing Caroline in a deep, slow stare. Chest to chest, they rode the lengthening crests and troughs of each other’s breath. Caroline let her hands fill with the vitality before her—the gusting lungs, the bird-wing flit of heart. So much life throbbing within a space barely larger than a jelly jar.

  Without breaking her gaze, Caroline unbuttoned the yoke of her nightdress and bared a breast. The baby nudged toward it after a time, mouth agape. Her limbs moved in small ripples, still accustomed to the watery press of the womb. Even before they reached her nipple the little gums worked, sparking fine grains of foremilk to life beneath Caroline’s skin. Caroline closed her eyes and took her ease.

  As the baby suckled, Caroline stroked the lines of her—the gully at the back of her neck, arms and legs folded tightly as a fresh handkerchief. The top of her head with its wisp of tar paper–black hair had a faint honeyed scent, like pollen. Within a few minutes, Caroline’s womb constricted again and the afterbirth slicked out. The rich iron smell of it suffused the room. Mrs. Scott tied it into a cloth and carried it outside to bury.

  Lying open to wind and sun, Caroline no longer felt bounded by her skin. Her heart beat deeper, rounder, thrusting her awareness beyond herself, as though its vibration melded with all that touched her. Every inch seemed to breathe and taste. Caroline soaked in the silky essence
of the child nuzzled against her, the straw tick sighing beneath her, and reached for more. Putting a hand to the wall, she let the fibers of wood snag her fingertips, then smoothed them against the cool chinking. She turned her eyes to the rafters spreading overhead like open arms. All that sheltered them had been pulled, living, from the land. The whole of the house was a cradle of grass and timber and clay, proffered by the prairie and joined by the labor of Charles’s hands. Caroline listened to the bite of the shovel and the fleshy thump of the afterbirth dropping into the ground. After all they had taken from it, it seemed fitting that this most raw and nourishing part of her should be swallowed by the land.

  The strange flavor of that thought still wafted in Caroline’s mind when Mrs. Scott came in to sponge her clean. With each cooling stroke Caroline’s consciousness settled more deeply back into herself. Between daubings, she closed her eyes and waited for the singing of the droplets against the bowl. This water she so savored, Caroline realized as Mrs. Scott lifted the dripping sponge from the basin, had nearly cost both their husbands’ lives. Her thankfulness that she should be beholden to her neighbor for this day and not the other flowed like her milk, so free and warm Caroline could not bind it into words.

  It made no matter; there was no space between them that wanted for talk. To Caroline it seemed as though drawing the bucket from the gullet of that well had subdued Mrs. Scott. For all the earlier stridence of her voice, she spoke only with her hands as she guided the band of linen around Caroline’s middle and pinned it firmly in place. Mrs. Scott squared the heaviest pad of flannel-covered oilcloth beneath her to take up the bleeding, then evened the nightdress over Caroline’s knees as neatly as Caroline might have done herself. All the while she worked, Mrs. Scott kept her face turned steadily to her tasks, as though she understood that this birth had uncovered more of the meat of Caroline’s soul than of her body.

  She was skirting the edges of sleep when Charles and the girls returned.

  Before Mrs. Scott could hush them, Laura and Mary cascaded through the doorway, their hands and feet tinged pink from the sun.

  “Ma!” Laura cried. “Look, Ma!” Caroline’s chest stirred to Laura’s voice as though her affection were a living thing. It was nothing new to be called Ma, but the sound of the word was fresher now, and larger.

  At the sight of her ma in the bed in the middle of the day and a stranger at the hearth, Laura pulled up short. Mary had not moved. Charles wove between them, agleam. The naked shine of his pride made Caroline feel shy as a little girl with Mrs. Scott standing by. Modesty tucked her face down so that her nose touched the baby’s forehead, but Caroline could not mask the breadth of her smile as Charles drew near. He crouched along the edge of the bedstead and looked at the child coiled in the crook of her arm. One tiny hand was flung upon Caroline’s breast. The constellation of pink fingertips dimpled her skin. Charles rubbed a thumb over the back of his daughter’s hand, then leaned in to kiss Caroline’s cheek. The tenderness in his eyes touched her before his lips, and the empty bowl of her womb fluttered.

  “Look what Ma has for you to see,” Charles said to Laura.

  Neither of the girls moved until Caroline turned back the sheet so they could look. Mary’s lips parted in delight. She came, bringing Laura by the hand.

  At Charles’s elbow Laura broke loose and hung back. She peered warily at the bundle of black hair and red skin, then laughed. “Another Indian!” Charles twinkled at her. Caroline could hardly return their smiles for the trembling of her lips. All her months of apprehension had blinded her to this sparkling flock of moments. She had not savored their coming, and now each one settled only long enough to brush her with its wings before another took its place.

  Mary had gone down on her knees beside the bed, gazing at her new sister as though she were a stick of candy too sweet to lick. “Such a tiny, tiny baby,” she breathed.

  “Hardly bigger than a prairie hen,” Mrs. Scott agreed.

  Caroline’s passion flared. Mrs. Scott’s every word about this child seemed too vibrant with meaning, but Caroline checked herself before speaking. Least said, soonest mended. “She will soon be big enough for you to play with,” she assured her daughters instead.

  “We’ll call her Caroline, for you,” Charles said. “Carrie for short.”

  Caroline recalled how this baby had twirled inside her that night on the prairie, the night Laura told her the stars were singing. Her spine tingled with the memory. “Caroline Celestia,” she said.

  “Carrie can have my beads,” Mary said.

  Before Caroline could ask, Charles reached into his pocket and drew out his handkerchief, knotted at both ends. Two pools of Indian beads glittered inside.

  Laura stirred her portion slowly with her finger. “And mine too,” she offered, not taking her eyes from them.

  “That’s my unselfish, good little girls,” Caroline praised them, though her chest blossomed with sympathy for Laura. Mary was always so quick to show off her goodness. It was hardly fair to expect such a little girl to keep up. But Laura must learn. “Give them a strong thread, Charles, and they may string them.” She touched Laura’s cheek and felt the burn of the child’s disappointment. “There are enough to make a little string of beads for Carrie to wear around her neck,” she said. Laura was not consoled, but she nodded politely and went to join Mary.

  Caroline closed her eyes, veiling herself from all of them as best she could. Not one fleck of emotion had entered the cabin without leaving its print upon her, and she thirsted for a space out of reach. Beside her in the bed, the soft movements of Carrie’s breaths shifted and settled like whispering embers. In her newness, and her nearness, Carrie did not yet seem a separate creature unto herself, and Caroline welcomed the small animal comfort of her.

  Caroline waited for the sounds of the cabin to carry her toward sleep—the plick-plick of the girls stringing their beads, Charles whistling “Daisy Deane” as he went to tend the stock, the jingle of Jack’s chain. Mrs. Scott’s tempo with spoon and mixing bowl was quick and steady. Beneath it all, Caroline silently strummed the notes of Carrie’s name.

  The smell of Mrs. Scott’s good supper was still in the air when Caroline woke. The baby lay curled up tight as a bud beside her; Mary and Laura were already tucked into their small bed, their freshly combed hair lustrous against the white pillow cases. Her body felt loose, open. There was nothing taut and pressing inside, though she could feel where the weight and the pressure and the pain had been. Every inch of it hurt yet, but the remnants of the pain were so subdued as to be almost pleasurable. Caroline took a deep, languorous breath, treating her lungs to their first leisurely stretch in months. There was not a thing in the world that she wanted.

  “I’ll sleep in the stable,” Charles was saying. He looked around the room. “Where’s the gray blanket?”

  Mrs. Scott grimaced. “It wants washing,” she said.

  Charles colored a little. Then he knelt down by the bed and fitted his hand like a bonnet over Carrie’s head. His thumb roved over the baby’s black hair as if it were a grain of wood finer than any he had touched. The look in his eyes was still too rich to meet; even with all the newfound space inside her, there was not room in Caroline’s chest for the affection he was stirring. Without a word, he squeezed Caroline’s hand and kissed her knuckles.

  “Come wake me if you need for anything at all,” he said to Mrs. Scott. The door shut behind him. Mrs. Scott did not pull in the latch string.

  Caroline closed her eyes and listened to the sounds of Mrs. Scott undressing: the creak of shoe leather as she eased her feet free, her loosed corset strings sighing through the eyelets, the click of the metal busk unfastening. Then Caroline felt Mrs. Scott crawl up over the foot of the bed, settling into Charles’s accustomed place by the wall.

  They lay alongside each other, politely still. Only Mrs. Scott’s voice moved toward her, softer yet than Caroline had heard her speak. “My Robert . . . he told me how you helped Mr. Ingalls pull h
im from the well,” she said. “My family and I—we’re much obliged.”

  Guilt sliced through Caroline like a scythe as her own panicked voice reverberated in her memory: No, no, Charles! I can’t let you. Get on Patty and go for help. If I can’t pull you up—if you keel over down there and I can’t pull you up . . . She could not bear to hold such selfishness alongside Mrs. Scott’s gratitude. “Please,” she started. “It wasn’t—”

  “Don’t say a thing,” Mrs. Scott said. “Please. I don’t have words deep enough to thank you as it is.”

  The words Mrs. Scott would not let her speak bulged Caroline’s throat so that she could not swallow. Silently she prayed for forgiveness, though she knew it could not come swiftly enough to keep the guilt roiling behind her breasts from tainting her milk.

  Caroline smiled grimly at the ceiling. If Mrs. Scott would not allow her to beg pardon, there was no choice but to make do with the consolation of penance. Tired as she was, she must lie awake and make certain her shame had wholly subsided before the child next woke to feed. Suckling on such agitated passions would likely give a newborn convulsions. A fitting punishment, Caroline thought with rueful admiration. The more she fretted over what she might have cost Mrs. Scott and her family, the longer she endangered the blameless babe asleep beside her.

  Mrs. Scott stayed for two days.

  Caroline kept quietly in bed, letting herself reknit outside and in. When she sat up to sip a mug of Mrs. Scott’s velvety bean soup, long threads of soreness flared through the muscles beneath her ribs. Inside, Caroline felt as though she needed a good tidying up. Everything had become so accustomed to leaning aside to make room for Carrie that the space where the baby had been still remained, an entity of its own. It was a queer, hollow feeling, not unlike the sudden emptiness of a room after a dance, with all its furniture pushed against the walls. The passage Carrie had traveled had a lingering warmth to it, like a fever slowly fading. Caroline felt its tender outline no matter how still she lay. When she passed her water, the soft ring of swollen flesh radiated in protest.