Caroline

by Sarah Miller

  Green Shirt gave his wrist a violent flick. The key flew, glanced off the basket, and clattered against the toes of Mary’s shoes. Mary yelped and ducked behind the rocker. Carrie screeched, and Caroline’s stomach chilled with the realization that her grip on the baby had tightened so hard, she could feel Carrie’s thigh bone.

  One of them—Towel Thief—picked up the pile of pelts.

  No. Caroline was on her feet. She did not step toward them, did not speak, only let the force of the thought vault her out of the chair and billow from her skin like steam until it filled the room.

  Carrie stopped crying. The men stopped moving. They spoke in what sounded like half words. Towel Thief shook his head. Green Shirt struck his palm with the side of one hand, swiping as though he were brushing away an insect. Towel Thief glowered. Green Shirt jabbed a finger in Caroline’s direction. The entire core of Caroline’s body recoiled as he spoke, his hands making motions she did not want to interpret. Towel Thief dropped the furs in a heap and stalked out the door.

  “All’s well that ends well,” Charles said when she told him what had nearly happened.

  No, Caroline thought, it is not. She could not say so. If she opened her mouth, she would cry. Her every muscle was fixed with the task of holding the corners of her lips steady. The very sight of a man in green calico, even her husband, wearing a bright, clean shirt she had made with her own hands, made her almost dizzy. The only scrap of consolation was the absence of Charles’s usual blitheness. But the resignation Caroline heard in his voice instead was no comfort. The Indians would come and go as they pleased. Charles would do nothing about it, because there was nothing to be done.

  Caroline tried to imagine the scene as it would appear to Charles: the Indians had not hurt her, had not even touched her, nor made off with anything of value. On the surface the encounter did not sound considerably different from the first two men who had come into the house months ago.

  But it was. She had been wrong to be afraid of those first men. Caroline could see that now. Everything that had frightened her that day had risen out of her own dread of what they might do, not from anything they had actually done. Her fear had blotted out the subtle expressions and gestures that ought to have signaled civility, and so she had not understood that they were asking, not demanding. Green Shirt and Towel Thief’s behavior had been crude enough to violate not only her own standards but the Osages’ customs as well. There was no one thing she could point to as proof, yet Caroline was certain. All the courtesy she had been incapable of understanding before was entirely absent in them.

  “If you had seen the way they looked at everything,” Caroline began. Charles’s face stopped her. All the sympathy she had wanted so desperately after her first encounter with the Osages was there in his eyes and mouth. It was so genuine, it hurt, and all the more because it was misplaced.

  He believed he understood: his wife was afraid of Indians, the way a child fears the dark, and she had been left alone in the dark.

  It was as if he had no concept of malice, Caroline marveled. He would trust anything, man or beast, until it gave him reason not to. And, she thought with a sudden gust of understanding, he takes for granted that the same is true of the Osages. No wonder then, that he could leave her alone, that he was so imperturbed by the Indians’ intrusions. Charles knew that she and the girls would do nothing to provoke them, and so in his mind they were safe. The realization made her woozy. Perhaps if he had gone to war, Caroline thought, he would know better. Charles Ingalls was something out of a world that no longer existed—or a better one yet to come. She felt the flicker of a smile even as her breath hitched. More often than not, that was one of the things she loved best in him.

  Charles simply could not comprehend that she was at their mercy each time an Osage walked into the house. One Indian was like another to him. Unless there were weapons drawn Charles would never feel what she had felt, half-unbuttoned, with the baby clutched in one arm and the key all but burning a hole through her corset as those men pointed at her. Caroline tasted acid in her throat, remembering.

  If she did not put that scene out of her thoughts, it would score her mind with ruts too deep to pull herself out of. Caroline closed her eyes and made a picture of nothing—only the softly moving darkness behind her eyelids.

  She could banish the image, and that was all. The residue of everything she had felt remained, thick and unfamiliar in her chest. A sort of anger without heat, without focus. She did not want to aim it at Charles, but there was nowhere else for it.

  Charles sensed it. He spoke and moved carefully, as though she’d been bruised and he dared not jostle her. The instant Carrie began to flail and bleat after her bedtime feed, he picked her up, eager to spare Caroline anything that might further trouble her.

  He bounced and walked and patted. Tickled the baby, sang to her. Carrie was tired to a frazzle. Caroline could hear it in the breathy whine before each cry. Hweh, hweh, Carrie whimpered. Hweeeh-heh.

  Caroline closed her eyes, touched her fingertips to her forehead, rocked in her chair. Still, the baby fussed. Leave them be, Caroline urged herself. Let him find his own way. But Carrie. Carrie could not say more plainly what she wanted, any more than Caroline could pretend not to understand.

  “She can’t be hungry,” Charles protested as Caroline rose from the rocker. “And she’s bone dry.” If he had seen the thumb-shaped bruise on Carrie’s thigh when he diapered her, he had said nothing of it.

  Caroline held out her arms. Charles seemed to shrug as he lifted Carrie into them.

  Caroline nestled Carrie into the space between her breasts, fitting the little round cheek into her palm. The baby’s ear lay over her heart. Caroline enfolded herself around her daughter, so that every soft part of her body pressed gently against Carrie’s skin. “Shhhhhhhh,” she whispered, holding almost still. “Shhhhh.” Caroline began to sway, more gently than a breeze. The baby shuddered, panted, quieted. Out of the corner of her eye Caroline saw Charles’s expression, his half smile betraying a medley of admiration and hurt. Caroline leaned down to nuzzle her own cheek against Carrie’s hair and felt at once how the singular fit of their bodies excluded him. She was sorry for Charles, yet could not bring herself to separate herself enough from Carrie to open their tight circle to him. Selfish, she thought, selfish and spiteful, and closed her eyes so that she would not see if she had pained Charles further.

  Into the long silence came the snap of the fiddle box’s clasps. The bow glided through rosin, then there were the hollow woody plunks of the fiddle itself being lifted from the felt and into its place beneath Charles’s chin. The bow sighed tentatively across the strings, then sang out.

  “Blue Juniata.”

  Oh, Charles, Caroline thought, helpless. And there she was again, back at the cornhusking dance when Charles had looked out across his fiddle strings and seen that she was looking back at him—and only him. He’d seen her face and known that his own furtive, hopeful gazes had not been wasted. Caroline could still hear the laughter, the thrum of dancing feet swirling around her. She remembered the blush blooming on her cheeks and her pulse tingling in her fingers and toes. And his eyes, those twinkling, teasing blue eyes that were known on both banks of the Oconomowoc—how those eyes had shone. They might well have said their marriage vows right then and there, Caroline had thought ever after.

  The notes could just as well have been his hands, the way the music touched her. He was sorry. He could not have made it plainer, nor more sincere, with his own voice. Likely he did not know quite what he was apologizing for, Caroline thought. It did not matter to Charles. He would not hold to anything if it meant he could not also have her.

  Caroline let out a little puff of air, the tiniest signal of defeat, and began to sing:

  Wild roved an Indian maid, bright Alfarata,

  Where flow the waters of the blue Juniata.

  Strong and true my arrows are, in my painted quiver,

  Swift goes my light cano
e adown the rapid river.

  She sang it his way, adopting all the trifling mistakes she had so boldly chided him for that first time she heard him sing it—girl became maid, and snowy turned to sunny—every verse, just as he had written it into the little poetry booklet that even now was locked safely inside her trunk.

  Her words met his music, and the two joined to form one seamless sound.

  Twenty-Seven

  It sounded, at first, like the wind. High and long and wavering. Caroline had tugged the quilt over her shoulders before she woke enough to realize the chill that made her shiver was not from cold.

  She sat up in bed. Charles stood at the door in his nightshirt, lifting his rifle from its pegs. A feeble gray light fringed the curtains. An hour or so remained until dawn.

  “Is it wolves?” she whispered.

  Charles shook his head. It was too early in the day for wolves.

  Caroline drew her knees to her belly, gathered two fistfuls of quilt under her chin, and listened again.

  The sound traveled on the wind, but it was not the wind. It was shrill, and arrow-sharp, as if it had been aimed at them. At intervals it was punctuated with bursts of speed and volume that made Caroline’s shoulders jerk.

  It was human, she realized, and female. Women. The pitch told her that, though she had heard bull elk reach notes as high.

  “How far is the Indian camp?” she asked.

  “Two, three miles northeast.”

  Two or three miles. How could they hold their throats open so wide that they could be heard at that distance, even with the wind to carry their voices? Caroline could not imagine what it would take to make her turn loose such sounds—what immensity of grief, or rage. Ma had not made sounds like that when Pa had drowned, nor when Joseph was killed. Yet it was not unbridled wailing. Each tone had been honed into a particular shape. Though Caroline could grasp neither rhythm nor meaning, she perceived that there must be notes and words. A song?

  If it were a song, it bore no resemblance to anything Caroline could call music. It had no beat. They did not seem to pause for breath. Now and again Caroline thought she caught a semblance of melody, but it followed no pattern she was familiar with. This was continual, and alien. All she could be certain of was that the sounds did not signal fear. The women were not being savaged, at least.

  Mary and Laura woke, saw Charles standing guard in his bare feet, and soundlessly crawled into the big bed. Caroline tried to hum to them, but it only accentuated the strangeness of the Indian song. She held them and was thankful for the firm press of their bodies, which kept her from shivering. When it was time for Carrie to feed, they shifted to make room. Otherwise they stayed still and quiet.

  At sunup, the sound stopped.

  “What was it?” she asked.

  Charles propped the rifle barrel against the wall and wiped a sweaty palm across his nightshirt. “Never heard anything like it,” he said. “Never even heard a story of anything like it.”

  It began earlier the next morning. Caroline felt it before she fully heard it. Her nerves quivering at the same high pitch, Caroline pulled the quilt from the bed and took Carrie with her to the rocking chair. Charles sat with the nose of his rifle resting on the lip of the east windowsill. They said nothing. There was nothing to say. Caroline put the baby’s head under her chin, so she could feel the rhythm of the small fast heart against her own, and cupped her hand over Carrie’s ear. When Mary and Laura woke, she motioned for them. They came with their quilt and hunched against her knees to hide their faces in her lap. The harder she tried to be still, the more her body trembled.

  Her throat ached with inarticulate frustration. If the sound was a warning, a threat, they did not know how to heed it. It was not screaming or singing or yowling or wailing. And yet it was all of those things. It rose and rose, dipped for a merciful instant and then rose again so sharply that Caroline flinched. Even weeping had a cadence. This had none. Caroline closed her eyes and rocked, counting a deliberate tempo for each gentle sweep of the rockers across the floorboards.

  One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three.

  She dozed without any awareness of being asleep, for the sound penetrated her dreams. When she woke the sound had ceased. The vague fragments of her dreams evaporated as she blinked into the silence, but the count of the waltz, and the hot stricture in her throat, remained. One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. As she braided Mary’s and Laura’s hair, stirred milk into the cornmeal, walked from the table to the fireplace. The rhythm circled her every movement until she was half-dizzy with it.

  All day, her mind replicated the Indians’ strange high notes at the slightest provocation. She heard them in the whinnying horses and the squeaking of the windlass and the ring of Charles’s ax at the woodpile. Anything pitched above a whine snatched her entire focus, leaving her feeling foolish and lightheaded when she realized its source. Yet when Jack broke into a deep rolling growl, Caroline went absolutely still. She knew down to her bones that this sound—the opposite of everything her senses had been attuned to—signaled something actual.

  Her eyes darted to the latch string, then to the girls. They had seen her look. If Mary and Laura had not guessed already they knew now that she was afraid.

  But they shall not see the depth of it, Caroline silently declared, and resisted the impulse to take the pistol down from its shelf before going to the window. With her shoulder to the wall she peered out sidelong, so as not to move the curtains. Jack was up on his back feet, straining on tiptoe against the chain on his collar, snapping at the air. Charles had put down his ax and stood with his rifle pointing east. He was not squinting down the barrel yet, but his thumb was poised to cock the hammer. Caroline’s breath fogged the glass in quick bursts as she watched and waited.

  A voice called out. Male. Then another.

  “Eng! Gulls!”

  “Eng! Gulls!”

  Charles lowered the gun as two men came into view. Caroline’s long exhale blanked an entire pane as she fit the syllables together: Ingalls. Both held rifles, the barrels propped against their shoulders.

  “It’s Mr. Edwards,” Caroline said, “and Mr. Scott.” Mary and Laura came to peep out. It could not be so bad, Caroline reasoned to herself, if Mr. Scott had left his wife and children at home. They lived to the east, nearer the Indian camps.

  Scott and Edwards did not come into the house. Nor did they rest the butts of their rifles on the ground. They stood together outside the stable, talking. Their talk was at once intense and distracted. Caroline saw each of them survey the eastern horizon in turn. Jack had returned his attention to that direction, too. Edwards caught sight of her and the girls, pressed up against the window glass, and favored the children with a nod. Mary and Laura waved, but Caroline had seen the look on Edwards’s face. It was more wince than smile.

  When they had gone Charles called to her through the latched door. “Caroline, will you come give me a hand with the milking?”

  A cold tingle threaded up Caroline’s spine. He was an hour ahead of milking time. Whatever news the men had relayed could not be said inside the house. “Yes, Charles,” she answered. “Mind the baby, please, Mary. I won’t be long. Laura, will you pull the latch string in behind me and open the door when I come back?” Laura nodded eagerly. Caroline wound her shawl across her chest and went out.

  Charles was standing in the stable, waiting. He kneaded the back of his neck as he spoke. “The removal act passed the House and the Senate in July,” he said. “The Osages were granted a reservation south of the Kansas line. This land will be sold at $1.25 an acre, just as we were promised.”

  News they had waited months to hear. News that should have made Charles whoop and grab her up in his arms. Now he said it with a grimace.

  “July,” she repeated. And then, when he did not explain, “Why haven’t they gone?”

  “The Osages only just approved the act. They were late returning from the summer hunt and took five weeks to think it ov
er.”

  That, too, was good news. Caroline peered at him. He spoke as though he were confessing a sin.

  “Charles,” she said. “Tell me.”

  “Fifty Osage warriors went into town a week after they’d approved the act. They stood in the middle of Independence and put on some kind of fancy garb and painted their faces.” Caroline’s skin began to creep as she pictured them undressing in the street, streaking their faces and heaven knows what else with slashes of red and black. “And then they danced,” Charles said.

  Caroline blinked. She could not adjust the scene in her mind to match what she had heard. “Danced?”

  Charles nodded. “Scott heard it from a man who was there.”

  “What does it mean? Is that what they’ve been doing these nights?”

  “I don’t know. Neither did Scott. The Indian agent has called in troops.”

  “Thank heaven for that, at least.”

  Charles swallowed. He would not look at her. Caroline clutched her shawl closer about her neck even as her center filled with heat. Anger or dread would overtake her in a moment—she could not tell which.

  “Charles?”

  “Scott said their orders are to protect the Indians.”

  “The Indians?” Her voice was shrill. She spun so that he could not see her face and stood panting with shock. She would break apart. Caroline could feel it happening. Every tiny grain of her was loosening, preparing to fly apart.