by Sarah Miller
So when Jack barked just before milking time that night, snarling so that Caroline could hear the snap of his teeth from inside the house, her eyes darted from the bowl of cornmeal in her hands to the pistol box, high up on the ledge above the bedstead. Wood clattered and the bulldog’s chain rattled. Someone yelped—a man.
“Call off your dog!” At the sound of English, Caroline exhaled. Another clatter of wood.
“Call off your dog!” the man yelled again, and Laura shouted, “Mr. Edwards!”
Caroline dropped the bowl and dashed out the door. Mr. Edwards indeed, crouched atop the woodpile, scrabbling backward from Jack and scattering stove lengths onto the ground. “He’s got me treed!”
Caroline grasped Jack’s chain as best she could with her meal-dusted hands and reeled the snarling animal toward her until she could reach his collar. “No, Jack,” she said with a jerk that cut his wind. The slant of the bulldog’s brow seemed to challenge her judgment, but he obeyed. Resentfully. “I’m so sorry,” Caroline said to Edwards as Jack continued to grumble. His collar vibrated beneath Caroline’s fingers so that she did not trust letting go. She twisted awkwardly to try to meet Edwards’s eye. “I declare, Jack seems to know Mr. Ingalls isn’t here. He’s gone to town. Oswego,” she added.
“Yes, ma’am, I know. Mr. Ingalls passed my claim this morning and asked me to come by these next few days and see that everything was all right. If you don’t mind, I’ll see to the stock for you while I’m here.”
“Mind?” was all she could say. Caroline was so taken by surprise, Jack seized the opportunity for one last half-hearted lunge at Edwards.
Edwards grinned, dancing backward from Jack’s teeth. “I didn’t suppose you would.”
The next day the knock came just as she was finishing the dinner dishes. Caroline’s heart bobbed, lifting and sinking almost simultaneously. Because Edwards was not Charles. And, if she was entirely honest with herself, because he had come too early for the milking. Of all things! she scolded herself. Caroline took a moment to smooth her face into a welcome. She had no right to show Mr. Edwards even a speck of disappointment for his trouble, no matter what time he arrived.
“Oh,” she said as she opened the door, “Mrs. Scott!” Caroline thanked her lucky stars Jack hadn’t treed the woman on the woodpile. Mrs. Scott did not reply, and Caroline recognized that she was out of breath. “Is everything all right?” Caroline asked, scanning the horizon off toward the Scotts’ claim.
Mrs. Scott waved a hand. “Just windblown,” she puffed. “Thought I’d stop in and see how you folks was making out.” She looked up and smiled. “My, but you do look well, Mrs. Ingalls.”
Caroline’s cheeks felt as though they might split with pleasure. A visit. Mrs. Scott had walked nearly three miles for no other reason than to pay a friendly call. “Come in,” Caroline said. “Come right in and let me fix you some ginger water.”
Theirs was a singular blend of ease and formality, Caroline thought as she mixed sugar, vinegar, and ginger into a pitcher of cool water for her guest. Mrs. Scott behaved as though she had never seen Caroline bare and trembling with pain or fever, never sponged blood from her thighs or rinsed her chamber pail, never shared her bed. Yet the knowledge of those things permeated their every word and action, for they knew almost nothing else of each other. They had never met on level ground before, and every comfort Caroline could provide Mrs. Scott now, from hanging her lavender sunbonnet on the peg by the door to inviting her to sit in the new willow-bough rocker, gave Caroline the greatest of satisfaction.
“I’m sure she’s grown since I saw her last,” Mrs. Scott exclaimed over Carrie. “Heavier than a pail of blackberries.”
“How heavy am I, Mrs. Scott?” Laura interrupted.
“Laura,” Caroline murmured, with a subtle shake of her head that said Mind your manners.
Mrs. Scott raised an eyebrow at Laura, even as she answered, “Oh, I’d guess you’re almost as heavy as a bushel of cotton.” To Caroline she said, “My husband’s people raised cotton in Kentucky. Mr. Scott and I tried our hand at it in Missouri. We kept ourselves quite comfortable for a few years. Up until the war, anyway. After that there wasn’t money in it anymore,” she added. Pointedly? Caroline wondered. Or was that her own ears, hearing more than what was said where the virtue of the Union was concerned, as she was so apt to do after her brother fell at Shiloh? The sound of Mrs. Scott’s voice dimmed as Joseph’s soft smile, so much like her father’s that she could no longer distinguish between the two, appeared in Caroline’s mind. How strange to think she was older now than her eldest brother had ever been. Or ever would be. She had long ago become accustomed to his absence, but not to these odd reminders of her lifetime eclipsing his.
“Mr. Scott reckons he’ll try planting a few acres here, too, if the Indians ever clear out,” Mrs. Scott continued, oblivious. “No telling what they’d do if they came across a field of cotton. They’ve just got no sense of personal property. The way they come in and out, it makes a body feel as though you didn’t own the place.”
“It was different in Wisconsin,” Caroline ventured. “In Pepin the Chippewas kept to themselves. When I was a girl in the eastern counties, even the Potawatomis weren’t so bold as the Osages.”
Mrs. Scott’s brow furrowed. “Pepin County? How far were you from the Minnesota massacre?” she asked, continuing without an answer. “I’ve heard the stories. Like to scare me to death. My brother wrote me how they—”
Caroline cleared her throat, cutting her eyes toward the girls.
“Anyway, I hope to goodness we won’t have trouble with the Indians,” Mrs. Scott said. “I’ve heard rumors.” She raised her eyebrows to show that she would not speak of them in front of the children and gave a smart nod.
Jack would not lie down. His fur bristled and flattened, as though the wind were blowing inside the house. He circled and paced, sniffed at the windows and whined at the door. When Caroline opened it, he would not go out.
“Jack’s afraid of something,” Mary said.
“Jack’s not afraid of anything, ever!” Laura declared.
Even as Caroline admonished Laura for contradicting, she wondered which of them was right. She had never seen Jack frightened, but there was no doubt he was uneasy. All of them were. The girls were mostly impatient. Every minute Charles did not come disappointed them. They had counted four long days without complaint, eager for the first hour that they could begin to hope for his return. All the care Caroline had taken all day long to say might and maybe each time they asked if Pa would be home tonight did not matter once the sun began sloping toward the horizon. Insensible to the rising wind, Mary and Laura huddled shoulder to shoulder at the window, peering down the creek road with an intensity that might have parted the grass.
For all her own eagerness, Caroline could not keep from watching Jack. It was as though he were stirring some intangible something with his body, trying to smooth it, or herd it from the house. Perhaps, she thought, they both were roused by the same vague apprehension. Her mind had circled in the same way for two days, veering around the invisible forms of Mrs. Scott’s unspoken rumors. “Indian trouble” could take so many shapes; without one to fix upon, Caroline felt as though her head were clouded with smoke. Something dark and shifting passed continually along the edges of her internal gaze, so persistently that when she unlocked the provisions cabinet for supper, she did so with a furtive glance out both windows. The treeless vista was a comfort and a worry, both. Any man or beast intent on doing harm would have to belly crawl twenty rods or more through the grass to avoid being seen. Why, then, was Jack so restive? The wind? Caroline wondered. Perhaps it carried some far-off scent only Jack could detect, as it had the day Charles outran the wolf pack. That was a mistake, Caroline chided herself, thinking of the wolf pack.
Jack kicked up a clamor of barking, and all of them jumped. “Someone’s knocking,” Mary said over the racket. Caroline hesitated. Jack’s nose pointed to the roof and t
he force of his baying had lifted his front paws up on tiptoe, yet his tail waggled and he did not snarl. It could not be Charles, for the latch string was out. Caroline had not made up her mind before the door flapped open and there was Edwards, thrust across the threshold as though the wind were shoving him forward.
“You snuck up on us, Mr. Edwards,” Laura scolded. “We’ve been watching the creek road for Pa all afternoon.”
Edwards’s answer came so readily, Caroline wondered if he had rehearsed it. “I was out hunting jackrabbits for my supper, and came up the Indian trail instead.”
“Did you get any?” Mary asked.
“Nope.” He shifted his eyes toward Caroline, adding, “Didn’t see anything big enough to aim at.”
The way he said anything—with a tweak of emphasis that made it seem a sentence in itself—Caroline felt a tingle at the back of her neck. Nothing on the Indian path. Likely he meant to reassure her, but the knowledge that he had felt compelled to look there made her wonder if she ought to coax the girls from the window and bolt the shutter.
Edwards shook himself almost like a dog. “That wind!” he said. “You might be bundled up tighter than a sausage in its casing and it’ll still find a way through.”
“Warm yourself a minute, Mr. Edwards,” Caroline said. He took no more than that before trudging out for the chores, pushing back into the wind with his chin tucked to his collar. Caroline went out behind him to draw an extra pail of water for the night. The instant she passed from the lee of the house, the wind submerged her. Like the current in that terrible creek, Caroline thought with a shudder. Her shawl whipped around her, pulling as the wind pushed. When she turned back to the cabin after tussling with the pail and the rope, she could feel the wind splitting across her face as though her nose were the blade of a plow.
Edwards was not long behind. He set the pail of milk on the table and stooped down before the fire, putting his palms out to the blaze.
“I wish I could contrive a way to send some of this milk home with you,” Caroline said. “It’s been so kind of you to do the chores while Mr. Ingalls is away.”
Edwards ducked his head in a kind of nod and did not answer. Had she embarrassed him? Caroline wondered. No. She could see him thinking, turning something over in his mind as though debating whether to bring it out into the room.
“The Osages are camping in the shelter of the bluffs,” he said at length. “The smoke was rising up out of there when I crossed the bottoms.” Caroline did not permit herself to react. She simply took in the words, as though by saying nothing she could force the space they had occupied to seal itself over, leaving the room and everything in it undisturbed. Edwards rubbed his hands fast. They seemed almost to hiss. He spoke again, without changing the tone or volume of his voice: “Do you have a gun?”
“I have Mr. Ingalls’s pistol,” Caroline answered.
Edwards nodded. “I reckon they’ll stay close in camp, a night like this.”
“Yes,” Caroline said, as if saying it would make it so.
A furrow appeared between Edwards’s brows. “I can make myself right comfortable with hay in the stable. I’ll stay there all night if you say so.”
Did he know she was afraid, Caroline wondered, or only presume that she must be? She glanced furtively at the children. Laura’s face had brightened at the thought of Mr. Edwards staying all night, but the offer had made Mary wary. Her china-blue eyes were measuring Caroline, as if she were considering whether or not to be scared.
A little more fear toward the Indians would do Laura no harm, was Caroline’s first, rueful thought. But if by accepting Edwards’s offer she might be teaching her daughters to be fearful inside their own house—with the door latched and the pistol on its shelf and the bulldog keeping watch—simply because Indians existed? If they realized their ma was not certain she could protect them as their pa did—what then?
Caroline had no choice but to make the words brisk and calm. The way he had asked her about the gun, Edwards would surely understand. “No, thank you, Mr. Edwards, I won’t put you to that trouble. Jack will look after us. I’m expecting Mr. Ingalls any minute now.”
He looked at her long enough, Caroline wondered for an instant if she were making a mistake. Mary and Laura and even Carrie trusted her implicitly to keep them safe, without regard for how she accomplished it. Was it a peculiar strain of vanity that made her insist upon doing it herself?
“I don’t guess anything will bother you, anyway,” Edwards said, standing.
“No,” Caroline answered.
He crossed the room and put his hand on the latch, but he did not open the door. Caroline did not know him well enough to make out what he was thinking now. By his outward appearance alone she would never have suspected what kind of a man Edwards was. Tobacco stained the corners of his lips. His hair looked as though he’d been cutting at it with his razor rather than a pair of shears. It was long and fine and inclined to snarl, a lustrous golden brown halfway between Mary’s and Laura’s. He had been towheaded as a boy, Caroline reckoned, and not so terribly long ago. She rubbed her finger and thumb together, imagining the feel of it.
“Mr. Edwards?” She paused, sure of her intentions, yet unable to gauge how he would receive such an invitation.
“Ma’am?”
“Mr. Edwards, I know it is quite some time off, but I wonder if you would consider having your Christmas dinner with us. Our family would be proud to have you.”
She saw how the words touched him, how he wanted to smile but could not trust himself to do it. He swallowed once before speaking. “Yes, ma’am,” Edwards said. Solemn. The muscles at the corners of his mouth jerked, once. “I should like that very much.”
Caroline shut the door behind him and pulled in the latch string.
It was too late for Charles to come home. There was no sense in sitting up, no call for him to drive so late, in the dark and the wind. By now he would be camping somewhere, surely. But Caroline was every bit as reluctant as the girls had been to go to bed—more so, even.
The latch clattered in the wind, and she forbade herself from turning to check the latch string again. It was pulled in. She had not laid a finger on it since letting Edwards out. No one had. The shutters were bolted. Jack lay between the lintels, his belly against the threshold. There was nothing to fear.
There was only the wind, which was certainly nothing to be afraid of. If Mary or Laura woke, frightened, Caroline would tell them so, and it would be true. The wind itself was no threat. Yet two facts remained: the wind was blowing, and Caroline was discomfited.
The way it touched the house—slapping the walls, snatching at the latch and rattling the shutters, like something trying to get inside—Caroline could not help thinking it was punishing them for standing in its way. And the sound. If anything living had shrieked that way, she would have rushed outside to assuage it. Or inside for the gun, Caroline thought as another gust crashed against the shutters. It did not matter how many times she assured herself that the sounds signified nothing. Every nerve in her body reacted to them, insistent that something was amiss.
Caroline rocked in her chair, thankful for its movement, and trained her eyes on the fire. One by one, she conjured up images of the things Charles would bring back with him: salt meat, linseed oil, sacks of flour and oats and beans, a keg of nails to repay Mr. Edwards, perhaps a jar of pickles for herself. Of course, there would be a treat for Mary and Laura to squeal over. She pictured Eliza, and Ma, and Martha, and Henry and Polly reading the letter she had sent, and felt her face soften momentarily.
But the pictures were no more than a haze; Caroline could not hold them before her for even a minute without the thing she did not want to think of showing through. Her eyes strayed to the shelf that held the pistol, and she closed them. There is no need, she told herself, rocking deeply. Only stop thinking about Indians. But her mind would not obey. It rubbed and rubbed at that thought until it shone too brightly to ignore.
; Caroline went to the bed. For a moment she stood, watching Carrie sleep. Her little fists lay flung open on either side of her head. Anyone with sense would stop fretting and climb into bed beside that baby girl, she thought. But the baby was not what Caroline wanted. She put one hand on the mantel shelf, stepped onto the bed rail, and reached up over Carrie’s sleeping form. Her fingers touched the cold metal barrel first. Then the stock, polished smooth with use. Her thumb found a scratch in the wood she had not noticed before.
Caroline did not look at the gun. She did not need to. She went back to her rocker and laid it in her lap, half-cocked. Its barrel she pointed toward the fire. The weight of it seemed to draw her shoulders down where they belonged. At the same time her eyes lifted, found their way to the china shepherdess, and settled.
The fear was not gone. She had only made a place for it, invited it to sit alongside her. That was less wearying than refusing to acknowledge its presence. For a time she was aware of nothing but the gun in her lap and the shepherdess on the shelf. Both of them cool, still, and shining. Both of them a kind of assurance.
The wind wailed long and high, and Caroline rocked, letting the sound pass through her as though she were an instrument. She thought of how the fiddle screeched on those rare occasions when Charles struck a wrong note and wondered if it felt the way she did now.
Something gasped, something inside the house, and Caroline’s fingers were around the pistol’s stock, her thumb poised over the hammer.
It was Laura, sitting straight up in bed. Mary lay beside her, eyes wide open. Caroline froze. She had not meant for the children to see her with the gun in her lap. It would not be at all like the familiar sight of Charles with his rifle. She could see Laura’s eyes following the firelight up and down the pistol’s silver barrel. It was then that Caroline realized she had not frozen at all. The chair still rocked, as though it rocked itself.