by Sarah Miller
“Is Baby Carrie full?” Mary asked. She said the name as though it were a single word: Baby-Carrie.
Caroline tried it for herself. “Baby Carrie is nearly finished.” She liked the bridge it made so well, she said it again to herself. Baby Carrie. “You may fetch a clean flannel and lay out a fresh diaper while you wait.”
Laura came scampering in with Jack trotting behind her. Charles followed. “He had a great big book, Ma,” she said, breathless with the news, “and he wrote my name in it, and asked me how old I am, and put that in, too. He’s going to send it all the way to Mr. Grant in Washington.”
“My goodness,” Caroline said to Laura. “That sounds very important. What is all this, Charles?”
“Census taker.” Charles fanned his forehead with his hat. “Amiable enough fellow,” he said, with a nod toward Laura. “Funny thing, though—he didn’t mark anything down for property value. Whole column’s left blank.”
Caroline raised Carrie to her shoulder and leaned her cheek against the top of the baby’s head. It fitted neatly as a teacup into a saucer. “We don’t own it, Charles,” she said gently.
“Not yet, but that doesn’t make it worthless.”
Twenty-Three
Caroline knew the moment the sickness touched her. It had been all around her—first Mary and Laura, then Charles, all within a single afternoon—but the moment it breached her own body was different.
“Oh,” she said, and sat down on the end of the bedstead. She was panting. Her nose tingled with something more than the smell of scalded broth, and her eyes were warm beneath their lids as they roved over the disheveled room.
The chamber pail needed emptying, the water bucket had to be filled, the soup pot must be emptied and scrubbed before she could begin supper again, and Caroline knew—knew with her whole body—that she could do precisely one more task. She pushed herself up, and her shoulders rattled with a chill. Sit, she told herself. Get a minute’s rest, then try. She had hardly sat for two days.
Charles had still not taken to his bed, but Caroline was not fooled. He had not so much as lifted his gun from its pegs. Not even in the depths of a Wisconsin winter had he huddled by the fire making bullets in the middle of the afternoon, much less for two days straight. She’d seen the sheen of cold sweat on his brow in the firelight and watched his hands tremble. It had been all he could do not to spill the molten lead onto the hearth. She did not know how he was managing to keep the stock fed and watered.
Caroline looked again at their own water pail. From where she sat, she could not see past the brim to gauge what little was left. They must have more. To drink, to make more broth, to sponge the perspiration from Mary’s and Laura’s fevered limbs, to rinse the baby’s diapers and her own flannel pads. Just the sight of the pail waiting there by the door made her skin prickle with unease. Charles had not taken it out to fill when he left for the stable, as he always did. That alone told her he was not well. She did not know if she could ask him to go out again, with the chores already taking him so long.
Caroline stopped to think. How long had he been gone? The girls had been so fretful in the meantime, she could not begin to guess. Their fevers and chills never coincided. One was hot and the other cold. She had finally made each half of their small bed with a separate quilt, so that they might stop pulling and kicking at the one they shared. That, at last, had soothed them enough so they could sleep—Laura muffled in her quilt and Mary cringing away from the slightest touch of a sheet. Charles had not been in the house during any of it, or he would have saved the broth from scalding.
In her nest of pillows in the middle of the big bed, Carrie began to snuffle and kick at the air.
“Oh no,” Caroline begged. “Please don’t wake yours sisters. Here.” She opened her bodice, but the fastenings on the flap of her nursing corset would not yield. Her fingertips felt . . . the word would not come to her. Dumbed, she thought, but that was not right. Her mind worked slowly as her hands, fumbling for something she could brush against but not quite grasp.
Caroline leaned down onto one elbow and stretched herself toward the baby, her other hand still working at the stubborn fastenings. “Shh-shh-shh,” she insisted. “I’m coming. Ma’s coming.” The flap had moved only partway. Carrie was on the verge of a squall. Caroline could see her color rising, and all the points of her little face sharpening. She would have to manage. Caroline lay down alongside the baby, letting as much of herself spill through the gap as possible. It was enough.
The steels pinned awkwardly under her body prodded at her, but Caroline did not try to move. Carrie was feeding. Carrie was feeding and the girls were asleep, and all was quiet. There was so much that needed tending to, before the girls woke again and needed her most of all. Rest, she told herself. Rest until Charles comes back from the stable.
Darkness, wavering like a dream all around her. Hot hands, hot fingertips tingling. Hot breath curling over her lips from nostrils like stove holes. She’d never felt such heat—heat that made her skin crackle and shiver. The soles of her feet were papery, as though they’d been peeled down to dry bone. The darkness advanced and receded, expanded and contracted, as though the thick black air meant to crush her, or inhale her. Caroline closed her eyes and the world went mercifully, mercifully still.
A sliver of gray light. Twilight or dawn, Caroline wondered muzzily. The air around her had thinned and cooled, stopped its pulsating, but her limbs, her head, her very eyelids might have been filled with sand for all that Caroline could move them. She felt a scrabbling between her body and her arm, and knew it was Carrie who had woken her. Caroline turned her head to look. The effort made her gasp, made the room reel. Her breast still protruded from the half-opened corset flap, but sometime in the fevered night she had shifted, and Carrie could not reach. The baby had fastened herself to a button on Caroline’s open bodice and sucked until she’d pulled the calico into a pointed wet teat. Carrie tugged and batted at it, confounded.
Tears blurred Caroline’s eyes. “Carrie,” she said, but there was no sound. Her throat was like bark. Caroline prized a quivering hand from the straw tick and managed to loosen the hard twist of fabric from Carrie’s mouth. Carrie instantly raged. Caroline whimpered at the shock of the sound striking her ears and at their own mingled frustration. She gripped the side of the bedstead and pulled. A chill shook her so fiercely, her joints rattled. She pulled again, and her body spasmed. The momentum of it rolled her sideways to meet Carrie, and there Caroline lay, gasping on her side, while Carrie took her fill.
She woke to the smell of filth rising up from the straw tick beneath Carrie. The cow bawled in the stable, and the sound and the smell whirled together. Pain buzzed under her corset, taut and swollen. A wasp sting? Carrie’s lips gave a little pull, and the throbbing doubled. Caroline groaned at the realization. Pinned between herself and the oak slab, Carrie could nurse only from the left breast, while the right slowly filled, caged beneath the steels. The weight of it burned so that Caroline yearned to roll onto her back, but she did not trust her strength to pull the baby with her if she turned over. She could only grip the side of the bedstead to keep herself within Carrie’s reach.
A wail rose up from somewhere beyond the bed. “I want a drink of water, I want a drink of water.”
Mary. Her patient Mary, begging. Caroline’s eyes smarted, but no tears came. Her body had no moisture to spare for anything so frivolous as tears. She felt a bump and a shudder against the board under her hand, and understood that Charles was on the floor beside the bed, trying to rise. His movements sent a cascade of aches through her body. Even the soft knot of her hair probed painfully into her neck. Caroline closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. She would bear it, if it meant he could manage to get up and tend to Mary. But the bed did not move again. Jack pawed, whined, howled. Then all was still—all but Mary’s voice ebbing into sobs so dry, Caroline could hear the thirst scraping at Mary’s throat. Hot needles of milk dampened the right side of her corset.<
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Caroline levered her head up, just enough to see over the slab. Her arm shook, and her heart seemed to flicker instead of beat. Laura was awake. Her face was dry and yellow, a tired corn husk of a face, but Laura was awake and looking back at her. “Laura,” Caroline whispered, “can you?”
“Yes, Ma,” Laura said.
Caroline dropped down beside the baby. Sounds moved back and forth across the cabin. Jack’s nails on the floor. Dragging, dragging, dragging. A rattle and splash. Then nothing. She could not tell whether Laura had done it, or collapsed trying—only that Mary stopped crying.
Twenty-Four
Caroline woke softly. So softly. Everything was exquisitely still—the air, her skin. Her toes brushed against cool sheets and she smiled dreamily to herself. Nothing had ever felt so fine as that crisp muslin against her skin. For a moment she could not make herself understand why it all felt so singularly different. Everything was as it always was. Charles lay on one side of her, snoring lightly. Caroline turned her head to the other side and found . . . nothing. She stared, unable even to blink, at the space where the baby should be.
Nothing but her mind could move, and the sudden speed of it dizzied her. The sheets, her nightdress, the sense of comfort itself—all of it was wrong. Her memory groped backward and found Mary crying for water, the sound aswirl in a dreamlike haze of heat and inertia. Joining that moment and this one—nothing.
The memories stopped so short, Caroline’s mind seemed to plummet. Anxious to dispel the sensation, she fixed her eyes to the row of buttons up the yoke of her nightdress. White, round buttons. Their smallness and their neatness made a foothold for her thoughts, which came creeping up out of the void.
What had become of her shoes, her dress, her corset? Had she only dreamed the sobs and the howls, the throbbing in her breast and the terrible, shimmering heat? Had anything in that nightmarish whirl happened at all? Caroline concentrated harder yet on the small white buttons as another realization worked itself free of the void. Even if none of it had happened, Carrie should still be in the empty space beside her. Caroline shivered. A pinprick of fear, first cold, then white-hot, pierced her belly. Deep inside her head, a thin specter of a voice dared to whisper: Was the baby herself even real?
Caroline’s heart stuttered, too weak to pound. “Carrie?” The word was a creak. Her mouth tasted bitter and shrunken.
Suddenly Mrs. Scott’s face was over hers. “Don’t fret yourself, Mrs. Ingalls. The little one’s asleep in the washtub. Snug as a bug, next to the fire.”
The dreadful thoughts released her so suddenly, Caroline felt as if she were floating.
Mrs. Scott brought a mug of cool water and held it for Caroline to drink. The water rippled as it touched her trembling lips. She lay back on the pillow and her body continued to vibrate, softly, steadily. Not the ague, Caroline thought. Fear. It had lasted only an instant, but it had permeated her entirely. She could feel it melting away now, passing through her skin and lifting, harmless, into the air as Mrs. Scott used her knuckles to brush the matted tendrils of hair from Caroline’s forehead.
“Now you’re awake and the fever’s passed, let’s get this straightened out,” Mrs. Scott said. Her big nimble fingers coaxed the tangled hair pins loose as she talked, until she had Caroline’s long braid unfurled across her lap. “There’s fever and ague all up and down the creek,” she said, “all from watermelons, of all things. Some fool settler planted watermelons in the bottoms, and every soul that’s eaten one is down sick this very minute, with hardly enough folks left standing to tend to them. I’ve been going house to house day and night, but yours is the worst case I’ve seen. It’s a wonder you ever lived through, all of you down at once. Dr. Tann—he’s a Negro, doctors all over this side of the county, settlers and Indians both, heaven help him—was headed up to Independence when that dog of yours met him and wouldn’t let him pass. And here you all were, more dead than alive!”
“How long has it been?” Caroline asked.
“Couldn’t say for certain. I’ve been here since yesterday, and Dr. Tann stayed a day and a night before I came.” Her hands worked the braided strands slowly apart, all the way to the scalp. “No telling how long you’d all been down before that. Dr. Tann said by the way the stock went after their feed, he guessed another day or two anyhow.”
Three days, at least. Caroline tried again to call up some recollection. There was Mary’s voice. Then Laura’s face, and the sound of her crawling across the floorboards, and the next thing Caroline knew she was waking into that blessed stillness. In between was something abrupt as a ravine, the likes of which she had never encountered within her own mind.
Hidden in that deep, blank void were all the things Dr. Tann and Mrs. Scott must have done for them, Caroline thought—every one of them, down to the cow and calf. What state they had all sunk to by the time the doctor found them, she did not like to imagine. All of it was set to rights. Even the square of flannel between her skin and the straw tick was fresh and dry.
Caroline turned her head and covered her mouth, but Mrs. Scott heard the sound that slipped between Caroline’s fingers.
“Now,” said Mrs. Scott as she combed her hands through Caroline’s hair, “there’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
But Caroline was not ashamed. She was so grateful, her throat throbbed with it. Things she could not have asked of anyone but her own blood kin, these people had done for her. Such a debt could not be repaid, except perhaps to Providence itself.
Mrs. Scott combed and combed, not untangling now, but soothing Caroline with her long, slow strokes. To think that Mrs. Scott had it in her to be kind after everything she had already done. It was almost too sweet to bear, but Caroline had no strength to resist. The fever had wrung her so dry, she felt brittle, inside and out.
Most of all, she wanted to see Carrie, but she did not want to ask. To ask would be the same as confessing that she had believed the absurd notion that had risen out of the fever-addled coils of her brain. Mrs. Scott had told her the baby was safe, and Caroline did not doubt it. Yet her body was unsatisfied. Her arms begged for the reassurance of the weight and shape of the child, the perfect fit of her, belly to belly and cheek to breast. She felt the insistent press of her milk—Carrie’s milk—against her upper arms and took what comfort she could from its undeniable link with the baby.
While she waited for Carrie to wake, Caroline swallowed the powdered bitters Dr. Tann had left behind, puckering like a child at the way it drew every atom of moisture from her mouth. She lifted the mug for more water, but Mrs. Scott brought a spoonful of cream instead. “Don’t swallow it right off. Hold it in your mouth a minute.” Caroline obliged, and her entire face relaxed at the touch of that thick cream. It was silky-sweet and sank into the roughened surface of her tongue as softly as a kiss. Caroline’s eyes rolled up blissfully to Mrs. Scott, who burst out laughing. “My mother’s trick,” she said. “Never fails. Most folks put their dose of quinine right into a mug of milk, but it’s not nearly the same.”
The laughter stirred Charles, who roused long enough to down his bitters and roll over. Presently a thin complaint rose from the washtub.
With the prick of the child’s cry came a gentle bursting behind Caroline’s breasts, and two warm, wet spots bloomed on her nightdress. She craned her neck, and there was Carrie, curled on Mrs. Scott’s bosom like a little pink snail. Caroline’s whole body seemed to smile as her eyes fell across the baby.
Mrs. Scott laid Carrie in her arms and helped her with the buttons. Caroline touched Carrie’s wan little cheek with a fingertip. Carrie reached toward it, her lips poised in a taut pink oval. She briefly mouthed Caroline’s finger, then found her proper place and sucked so hard and fast, Caroline hardly recognized her.
In the time it took for their shared astonishment to register, Carrie’s face buckled. Her tongue darted in and out as she spluttered. Caroline wiped the milk from Carrie’s chin and tickled the child’s lips with her nipple. Carrie took a
nother great gulp, then arched backward and squalled.
“That’ll be the quinine,” Mrs. Scott clucked. “I imagine she’ll taste every dose of bitters same as you do, Mrs. Ingalls.”
Caroline pressed her cheek to Carrie’s forehead, stroking her back as she shrieked. Carrie’s skin felt loose, a garment too big for her spindly frame. At the touch of those tender wrinkles, a tremor rose up out of Caroline’s chest. A feeble sob, or a last rattle of fever, she could not tell. The baby’s cries were so penetrating, Caroline felt as though she were dissolving into them. “Poor thing,” she said.
“You’ll be squalling yourself unless you drain some of your milk,” Mrs. Scott remarked. “It’s a wonder you haven’t already come down with a case of bad breast on top of everything else. My sister-in-law uses cabbage leaves to take the swelling down, but there won’t be a cabbage in these parts for another month at least.”
Anger crackled between Caroline’s ribs so abruptly, she gasped at its sudden sharp heat. To lack something so simple as a cabbage! The baby would never have suffered so if they’d been struck with fever and ague in Wisconsin. None of them would, not with Henry and Polly so near.
“Why, Mrs. Ingalls!” Mrs. Scott exclaimed. “You look feverish all over again.”
“It’s only—” Caroline stopped and shook her head. She could not lie, any more than she could tell the truth. “It’s too much,” she managed. “Everything.” She looked helplessly down at Carrie, then at Mrs. Scott, ashamed to ask aloud for her to take the baby back again. But there was not one thing Caroline could do for her daughter.
Mrs. Scott understood what she wanted, if not why she wanted it, and scooped Carrie up. “I’m not surprised,” she said over Carrie’s screams. She gave Caroline’s elbow a knowing squeeze. “I saved back some of the cream for her, just in case. Don’t you waste your strength worrying.” Caroline nodded dumbly, aware only that her milk had become unspeakably bitter.