Caroline

by Sarah Miller

  “I don’t know how I can ever thank you,” Caroline said to Mrs. Scott. It could not be done. Both of them knew that. Caroline refused to so much as contemplate what sort of misfortune would have to befall the Scotts before she could repay her debts to them. Two more days Mrs. Scott had stayed. Even after Charles staggered up from the bed, she insisted on getting the meals and spoon feeding the baby in the wee hours so they both might rest through the night.

  “Pshaw!” Mrs. Scott scoffed. “What are neighbors for but to help each other out?”

  Caroline nodded. It was so. She had not fully known it, living alongside family most of her life. Caroline thought of embracing her, as she would have embraced Polly or Eliza, but did not know how to do it. Instead she contented herself with imagining the momentary feel of her heart pressing its thanks against the big woman’s chest.

  Caroline leaned against the doorway, thankful for its support as she watched Mrs. Scott go. She raised an arm to bid a final goodbye, and her pulse guttered like a candle flame. She had made too much of a show that morning, making up the bed and laying the table and wiping the dishes to convince Mrs. Scott it was all right to go. The bed ought to have waited, Caroline silently admitted. She was not fully well, none of them were, but she was well enough to do the things that must be done. That much and no more, she reminded herself.

  Caroline sat down on one of the crates beside the table and surveyed the cabin. The wash was ironed and folded, the milk strained and the pan scalded. Mrs. Scott had given the floor one final sweep before leaving. Carrie lay freshly diapered in the center of the big bed. Caroline pondered a moment over what day it was. Wednesday. Carrie was five weeks old, and it was mending day. Both thoughts overwhelmed her. She smiled weakly at the scrap bag as if in apology, dazed at the realization that even so much as threading a needle required a precise sort of energy and focus she had not yet regained.

  “Will you set one of the crates by the fireplace, please, Charles?” she asked. Charles did and walked her to it. Then he tucked a pillow into the washtub and laid Carrie in it, so that Caroline need not move from the crate to reach her. And there Caroline sat all morning, tending the soup Mrs. Scott had put on the fire to simmer for their dinner and supper.

  Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, Caroline felt the slats of those crates pressing against her thighs whether she was sitting, standing, or lying down to sleep. Standing for any length of time brought on a queer fizzling sensation in her limbs, as though she could feel her strength being eaten away, so she sat to help the girls dress and undress, to mix the cornbread, to lay the table and wipe the dishes, to feed the baby and change her.

  As Caroline’s daily doses of bitters decreased, Carrie conceded to nurse again. Each time Caroline put her to the breast, Carrie’s small black eyebrows furrowed with concentration, tasting before settling in to feed. Caroline could not begrudge Carrie her wariness. She had tasted her milk herself, and while it was not so bitter as she’d feared, there was an odd, metallic cast to the flavor. But the way the child shrieked and writhed when her feedings came too close upon the quinine, Caroline’s breasts might as well have been filled with kerosene. Try though she might to down the bitters when Carrie was least likely to notice them—as soon as the baby finished a feeding or laid down to nap—Carrie’s fickle appetite seemed to thwart Caroline’s efforts.

  “You can’t be hungry now,” Caroline said, perilously close to a whimper herself, though it was plain from the shape of Carrie’s mouth and the tone of her cry that Carrie was. Caroline sighed. She could still taste the last dose of quinine, there at the back of her tongue where it was hardest to dislodge. She unbuttoned her bodice and resigned herself to the coming reaction.

  Carrie squirmed. She scowled. She jabbed at Caroline with her small sharp fists, determined that the good milk she had found in the same place not an hour before must still be there. Such a flood of warm sympathy filled the space behind Caroline’s breasts at the sight of Carrie’s consternation as would have drenched the child, but Caroline could not communicate it, except perhaps through the milk Carrie would not take. Defeated, Carrie threw back her fists. Her face flushed and her chest spasmed with a silent scream. The tiny body in Caroline’s arms seemed to beg for movement, but every speck of Caroline’s energy was rationed, with none to spare to walk the floor with her daughter. Again Carrie cried and Caroline’s milk answered, wetting the both of them.

  “It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow some good,” Charles called from the dooryard.

  Her impulse was to hiss at him to hush, that Carrie was asleep, as anyone with the consideration to look before hollering out that way could see. Caroline looked up from her mixing bowl and saw him backing through the open door, carrying what seemed at first glance to be a strangely graceful armload of willow kindling. Charles stopped in the center of the room and put it down. “Didn’t have the strength to cut firewood, so I sat myself on a stump behind the woodpile and built this for you instead.”

  A chair. A rocking chair.

  Caroline could not speak. For a terrible instant, she thought she might burst into tears. She had never asked, never complained of leaving anything behind, yet he had known, and made her the thing she longed for most. And she had nearly scolded him for it. Now and again she had heard the sounds of his ax and hammer, and thought nothing of it.

  “Should I show you how it works,” Charles teased, “or are you happy enough just looking at it?” She was, nearly. It was such a lithe-looking thing, its frame a single swooping curve, its back and seat good plain wickerwork. Caroline reached out to touch the narrow willow arm. No further. She would make herself feel as lovely as the chair itself before sitting in it, she decided.

  First, she smoothed her hair and took off her apron, as though her momentary flicker of anger were a stain she could strip from herself. Then she went to her trunk and brought out her gold bar pin and fixed it to her collar. Charles put the pillows from Mary and Laura’s bed onto the chair, and draped the whole thing over with their small red and blue quilt. Then Charles took Caroline by the hand and led her to the chair with the girls prancing like puppies.

  Through the pillows, the woven willow strips cradled her back. She tested the chair’s easy backward sway and thought of the cool willows swishing like hoop skirts along the creek. Caroline closed her eyes. “Oh, Charles, I haven’t been so comfortable since I don’t know when.”

  How well he knew her, shape and size. When she rested her elbows on the rocker’s arms, they did not pry her shoulders upward. The seat’s depth precisely matched the span between the small of her back and the bend of her knees. Beneath her the floor seemed to rise to meet her feet at each forward swoop. Even the Big Woods rocker she had mourned all this time had not fit so well.

  That chair Charles had fashioned as much out of awe as wood, honing and polishing until he had created a frame worthy of the image he carried in his mind of his wife and child-to-be. Empty, it had been a beautiful thing to look at.

  This chair was another kind of gift. Five years had passed, and Caroline knew he had never stopped looking at her. Indeed, he had only looked more closely. He had seen—and remembered—how she rocked on tiptoe, the way she sometimes slipped her elbows from its arms to rest her shoulders as she nursed or sewed. From those memories he had woven a chair that held her as effortlessly as a pitcher holds water. And he had done it by measuring with nothing more than his gaze.

  Charles lifted Carrie from the bed. Caroline reached for the baby, hands already curving to her shape, softening in welcome. When their skins touched, it was like a kiss.

  As she leaned back Caroline’s elbows settled into the curling arms of the chair. All the crosspieces of her body seemed to loosen. With a sigh she looked at Carrie, and the child smiled up at her. Caroline’s breath hitched. Carrie’s eyes were still so big in her peaked little face, but her cheeks had shown a flicker of roundness. A feeling like a spreading of wings brushed Caroline’s womb and she pulled Carrie closer, roc
king deeply now, as if the motion might keep all that she felt from spilling over.

  With a thud, the floorboard bounced beneath her feet. Caroline nearly spilled the dishpan. She whirled toward the sound and saw a watermelon rolling just inside the doorway. Charles sank down beside it.

  “Charles! Are you all right?”

  “Thought I’d never get it here,” he said, slapping the melon. “It must weigh forty pounds, and I’m as weak as water.”

  A strange mixture of dread and desire fluttered Caroline’s stomach. “Charles,” she warned, “you mustn’t. Mrs. Scott said—”

  He only laughed. “That’s not reasonable. I haven’t tasted a good slice of watermelon since Hector was a pup. It wasn’t a melon that made us sick. Fever and ague comes from breathing the night air. Anyone knows that.”

  Caroline tucked her fingers into her palms. They itched to spank that fat melon as Charles had, to hear its delicious green thump. In her mind she could already taste watermelon rind pickles, with lemon, vinegar, and sugar; cinnamon, allspice, and clove. Her thoughts seemed to cartwheel over each other, she was so eager to talk herself into it. She only half believed Mrs. Scott’s proclamations about watermelons and ague, and Charles’s logic could not be denied. None of them had so much as laid eyes on a melon since Wisconsin. Caroline glanced at the girls, and all her eagerness fell flat. The very fact that they were playing quietly indoors on a day such as this reminded her of all the ague had cost them already. The consequences were more than Caroline dared chance. “This watermelon grew in the night air,” she countered, then bit her lip. The argument was so weak, it had the ring of a joke.

  “Nonsense,” Charles said. “I’d eat this melon if I knew it would give me chills and fever.”

  Caroline knew that tone. There would be no persuading him. “I do believe you would,” she said.

  He heaved the watermelon up onto the table and sank the butcher knife to the handle into its deep green skin. He steadied it with one hand and levered the knife downward until his knuckles brushed the oilcloth. The melon creaked apart and lay rocking on the table, red and sparkling. The broken edges of its flesh looked crinkled with frost. With his jack knife, Charles prized a perfect little pyramid from the center and offered it to her.

  Caroline shook her head. “No, thank you, Charles. And none for the girls, either,” she said.

  “Aw, Ma!” they cried together.

  Caroline did not scold them. They were so disappointed, she could not stand to look at them. Never in her life had she denied her girls good, fresh food. Caroline hated the sound of every word: “Not so much as a taste. We can’t take such a risk.”

  Charles shrugged and licked a dribble of juice from his wrist. Then he popped the whole piece of melon into his mouth. It bulged his cheeks and made him purse his lips to keep the juice from spurting out. The sound of his teeth crushing each cool bite was more than Caroline could bear. “Take it outside, please, Charles. It isn’t fair for the girls to watch.” He went, Jack trotting behind.

  The girls returned to their play, but they were quiet and sullen about it, not quite sulking. Caroline knew they could picture Charles as well as she could: sitting on the stump behind the woodpile with his elbows braced on his knees, hunched over a giant crescent of melon. With no one watching, he would spit the seeds, gleefully as a boy. Caroline stopped herself. Her mouth was watering. Another minute of that, and she’d be glowering like Mary and Laura. She swallowed and blinked the image away, finished the dishes, then mopped the puddles of juice from the table and wrung out the dishcloth. She picked up Carrie and went to her rocker.

  It was hard to feel bereft of anything in that chair, with the baby in her lap. Caroline pressed her thumb into Carrie’s palm and rubbed a slow circle. It was a trick she had learned early on, when she could not get enough of touching Mary’s silken hands and feet, that made all of her babies go limp with pleasure. But now Carrie grabbed hold of Caroline’s finger and pulled it to her mouth. She gripped fist and finger with her gums, testing the strength of her jaw. Then her eyes widened and her toes splayed. She gave a little chirrup and sucked and sucked at Caroline’s fingertip.

  “What in the world?” Caroline wondered.

  Mary came running. “What is it, Ma? Is Baby Carrie all right?”

  “I declare, your baby sister is sucking my finger as if it were a stick of candy.”

  Mary offered her own waggling fingers, but Carrie would not be distracted. She was still at it when Charles came back, wiping his chin with his handkerchief. “The cow can have the rest of it,” he announced. He kissed her, and Caroline tasted the sweet juice on his mouth. She licked her lips. So sweet after days and days of bitter quinine, she shivered. And then she knew. It was the juice from the dishcloth that Carrie tasted on her fingers. Caroline looked again at Carrie and saw that she was happy. Happy, perhaps for the first time in her life.

  She waited until after supper, excusing the girls from wiping the dishes so that she might slip a spoon into her pocket unnoticed. Without a word, Caroline went outside. First to the necessary. No one had asked where she was going, and this would render their assumption true; no need for questions meant no need for lies.

  From the necessary, the woodpile beckoned irresistibly. The voice in her mind seemed not entirely her own. It chanted and whispered at her as she walked, reasoning, wheedling, stringing together every thought she’d had since she’d seen the contented look on her baby girl’s face.

  Carrie never had the fever and ague. She was the only one who didn’t. Carrie had endured every drop of bitters without ever taking sick herself. Charles must be right—watermelon could have nothing to do with their fever and ague. And anyway, Carrie had already tasted the melon. What harm in more? If Charles gave the melon to the cow, and they drank the cow’s milk, what difference then if Caroline ate the melon and Carrie drank her milk?

  The melon was there on the stump behind the woodpile, just as Caroline knew it would be. Charles had eaten the heart, the exact center out of it, and no more. Ants clustered around the seeds and drippings between his footprints, feeding on the sugary pink juice. Three yellow jackets sawed diligently with their jaws at the ragged edges of rind. Caroline did not wave them away. The sight of so much waste smarted; allowing the insects their fill was the tiniest consolation. “No great loss without some small gain,” she murmured to them.

  With her spoon she sheared a thin strip of flesh from the rind, so that it curled into a pink scroll. She put it in her mouth and waited, as if the ague might strike her then and there. Nothing, of course—only the foolishness of her fear and the foolishness of the risk silently warring with one another. Caroline thought again of Carrie’s rapturous face, of the child’s wordless realization that the world had more to offer than frustration and discomfort, and pressed the fruit against the roof of her mouth. The juice dribbled into the trough beneath her tongue. It was warm from the sun, the sweetness dense and syrupy. A kind of medicine, Caroline told herself, and swallowed, and scooped up another spoonful. A tonic to brighten Carrie’s bitter little life.

  She woke in the night to the faintest of nuzzling. Drowsily Caroline unbuttoned. In the dark, she could not see Carrie’s face. She felt the long pulls of lips, heard the rhythmic swallowing, and that was all. It should have been enough. The child had not fed so easily in weeks. But Caroline had so looked forward to watching the baby’s knitted brows soften, seeing her eyes pinch shut as her cheeks bulged greedily. Carrie’s hands pressed lightly as she fed, almost patting, the way Caroline patted Carrie’s bottom when she lifted the baby to her shoulder. The feel of it made her want to try to smile, but Caroline could not quite manage it.

  Be thankful for what is given. Caroline heard the words in her mother’s voice. No matter if it is not enough, be thankful.

  “I am,” she whispered to Carrie. But gratitude, Caroline had learned in childhood, was too often the feeblest of pleasures; gratitude was nothing like what she had been waiting to pass be
tween herself and her daughter. Carrie gave her another squeeze, and this time Caroline smiled softly into the darkness in spite of herself. And then there was another, larger hand. Charles. He fitted it over her free breast and stroked softly, the way she would finger a fine length of silk. Drops of milk beaded up on the nipple. He caught them with a fingertip and brought it to his lips. “Sweet,” he whispered to the curve of her neck, and kissed her shoulder. A lump bobbed hard in Caroline’s throat. Sweet.

  Twenty-Five

  The wind whipped the fringe of Caroline’s shawl against her elbows as she stood waiting for the wagon to disappear. Behind her, Jack whined and pulled at his chain. The pressure against her corset told her it was time to wake the baby for her morning feed, before Carrie cried and woke Mary and Laura, but Caroline would not turn her back on the wagon.

  Forty miles to Oswego. A span better measured by time than by distance. A day and a half, two days to get there. An afternoon or a morning to trade. Then back again. Charles could not accomplish it in less than four days. Four days, and no way around it. If there were to be enough provisions to see them comfortably through the winter, as well as repay Mr. Edwards the nails he had lent to finish the roof, they must be bought in Oswego.

  She could feel her awareness expanding as the wagon dwindled from sight, much as it had the day Mary had learned to creep across the floor, and Caroline had fully realized the perils of the stove, the woodpile, the washtub. Just as she placed herself daily between the children and the hazards of the house and yard, Charles stood between all of them and everything beyond the bounds of their claim. Now, with Charles away, Caroline became conscious of that greater perimeter, of listening for sounds from the stable and the path to the creek as well as the house. Anything that approached—from an Indian to a jackrabbit to a hailstone—would come first to her.