Caroline

by Sarah Miller

“Caroline, we don’t know—”

  She shrugged his hand from her shoulder. “I have to get back to the girls.”

  Caroline did not undress that night. She craved the feel of the barrier, however slight, that her corset and stockings and shoes made between her skin and the vibrating air. She sat up in the rocking chair while Charles squatted before the fire, making bullets. Her mind roiled with unwelcome thoughts.

  Why had they come? Why, when the mention of Indians made her mind recoil, had she consented to bring their children to a place called Indian Territory? Charles, of course. Charles, who made life seem like a song—a song so sweet and heartfelt she sometimes failed to hear its words. But to think that Charles would have foreseen something like this? Caroline would have laughed at the idea had she been able.

  She tried instead to feel nothing. There was no room for it. In a single room with two little girls near enough to watch every blink, without even a pantry door to hide behind, there was no space for anything like anger or tears. The only place to cry was the necessary, and Caroline would not go out where that raw sound might touch her.

  Again and again she watched the thin silver stream of liquid lead flow into the bullet mold, then pop out a moment later, hard and shining. If only she could do just that—pour all her scalding thoughts into a tight, smooth ball capable of piercing the very thing she was most frightened of.

  Caroline imagined herself sighting down the barrel of a rifle loaded with such a bullet. Toward what would she fire? Images of Towel Thief and Green Shirt faded before fully materializing; she could no longer picture their features. Charles’s face came into focus instead, and Caroline jolted back so that the rocking chair creaked.

  No. She did not want to take aim. She wanted only to fire, to feel the hard recoil of the stock against her shoulder as the anger and fear were propelled outward into the empty black air.

  They sat up all that night without a word passing between them. When the first cry finally sounded, Caroline gasped, as if inhaling the sound. Carrie cried, too, and would not be soothed. The harsh union of Carrie’s shrieks with the Indians’ made Caroline tremble with the effort of holding her own voice at bay. She pressed her forehead into the heel of her hand and plunged her fingernails slowly into her scalp. The child was hungry, yet Caroline would sooner scream herself than unbutton her bodice. It was more than the habit of concealing the key while Indians were abroad. Even with the door latched and the curtains drawn, she still did not want to bring her bare breast out into the open. As though there were any real choice in the matter. The milk would come. Caroline felt the hot pricking, half pain and half pleasure, as it corkscrewed downward, and submitted.

  They did not recognize when it was over. The fifth morning came and silence rang in Caroline’s ears. The sensation was oddly discomfiting. It was as though she could feel the space where the sound used to be—a space that now felt too large and open.

  Caroline had been so intent on deciphering its meaning that she had lost sight of the one crucial piece of information the wailing-song had imparted: where the Indians were. Now, it seemed, they might be anywhere.

  But they were not. For a day and a night she and Charles stood at the windows with weapons loaded and cocked, rebuking the children for the slightest whisper that might muffle an Indian footfall—and saw nothing. Jack paced and peered and sniffed, and did not find anything to growl at.

  Near midday a quick burst of barking signaled the approach of something from the north, out of the creek bottoms. Caroline glanced first at the pistol, to be sure, yet again, that a bullet was in the chamber. She closed her eyes for an instant, peering inward for courage, before looking out.

  A rider. A white handkerchief was tied to the muzzle of his rifle, which he waved in the air. Scruffy curls of golden-brown hair glinted in the sun.

  Edwards. She and Charles recognized him at the same moment and flung open the door to meet him.

  Edwards pulled his horse up inches from the threshold. “They’re gone,” he announced.

  “Gone?” Charles and Caroline asked together.

  “Packed up their camp and left. I went there, to see,” he said.

  “Mr. Edwards!” Caroline exclaimed. “They might have—” Her tongue hovered half-curled, groping for the next word. Her mind seemed to have lost its footing. They might have enacted any number of the horrors she had envisioned these last several days and nights. Plainly, they had done none of it.

  Edwards nodded. “I know. I couldn’t stand it any longer. Seemed like risking a look was better than sitting in my cabin, bracing for a tomahawk between the eyes every time a stick of kindling popped. I crawled on my elbows the last hundred yards,” he said, tilting a forearm. The dirt was rubbed so deeply into the fabric that it shone softly, like leather. “When I finally worked up the nerve to lift my head over the grass I never felt so foolish in my life. Hardly anything there but ashes and sunflower shells and gnawed-over buffalo bones.”

  “Where are they now?” Caroline asked.

  “South’s all I know,” Edwards said. “The tracks all pointed south. Winter camps, maybe, or the new reservation.”

  Caroline stood in the white-gold afternoon sun. Gone. Day after day she had listened to the world being torn asunder, and it had not happened. Every blade of grass and every atom of the broad blue sky remained as she had left it. Nothing but the terror and the ire had been real, and all of it of her own making.

  It was still there. Caroline could feel it within her, a thick, dark inner lining, suddenly stripped of its purpose. A tremor came over her, clutching her by the gut and radiating upward. Her breath tasted of acid. Her body, preparing to purge itself. Caroline walked to the necessary and emptied herself of it.

  Twenty-Eight

  “It has to snow,” Laura said. “It has to.”

  Caroline had given up polishing the girls’ nose prints from the window panes. Their breath misted the glass until it ran in narrow streams that mirrored the rain falling just beyond their fingertips.

  “Even if it does,” Mary asked, “how will Santa Claus find us, so far away in Indian Territory? Ma?”

  Mary had used different words yesterday, and the day before, but it was the same question. Patience, Caroline told herself. They would never learn to have patience for others if she could not first be patient with them. “I don’t know,” she said. “I expect he’ll find a way. Santa Claus knew where to find my stocking when I moved from Brookfield to Concord,” she added.

  “That was back East,” Laura said, as if it were another country. And so it was.

  Caroline scrabbled for a reply. “Well, we are not the first family to move to the Indian Territory. You don’t suppose all those other pas and mas would stay where Santa Claus couldn’t bring presents to their little boys and girls?”

  Caroline looked up from her work, ready to show them a buoyant smile. Two sets of narrowed blue eyes met hers. The difference amounted to the width of a blade of grass, but it was enough to put a twist in her conscience. Caroline squirmed. Her daughters had never looked at her that way. Was it any wonder, she asked herself, when all she gave them were answers that would not hold still?

  Perhaps they would find some contentment if she said no, Santa Claus would not come this year. He would go to the Big Woods and find them gone, and bring all their presents to Kansas next year. But Edwards. Caroline could not discount the slim possibility of Mr. Edwards. He still had the nickel Charles had given him over a month ago to buy Christmas candy for the girls in Independence. What he did not have was a horse.

  “You’ll tell us if you run short of anything,” Charles had said when Edwards came to warn them to lock their stable. Edwards had not even heard the horse thieves. He could not say whether they might be Indians or white men, though his missing saddle pointed away from Indians.

  “Anything we have, you’re welcome to,” Caroline added.

  “I’m well provisioned,” Edwards assured them. “And I can still get to town s
o long as my boots hold out,” he’d said, knocking one heel against a fencepost. None of them had given a thought to anything so trifling as Christmas candy.

  Now, though, she and Charles had room in their minds for nothing else. Caroline gazed out over the girls’ heads at the blurry gray morning. She longed for snow almost as much as Laura; there had never been a Christmas Eve so leaden. If the rain did not let up, it would not matter whether Edwards had fetched the girls’ Christmas treats from town. Twice this week Charles had tried to reach Edwards’s claim, and the rising creek had held him back.

  The rain stopped as if by magic. Mary and Laura bit their lips and grinned at each other. Then Caroline opened the door to the sunlight, and their faces fell. The wild whoosh and tumble of the flooded creek, inaudible over the rain, now filled the room. They had not considered the creek a barrier. Of course they hadn’t. Winters in Pepin, the frozen Mississippi River became the smoothest road in the county.

  When Charles came in bearing a great wild turkey, Caroline looked past it to his pockets, searching for a telltale bulge.

  “If it weighs less than twenty pounds I’ll eat it, feathers and all,” he announced.

  The false boom in his voice was unmistakable. Caroline knew there was no bag of candy hidden in his coat. “My goodness, it is heavy,” she said, trying to be cheerful over the turkey. Its oil-colored feathers still glistened with rain. The girls watched, disinterested, as a puddle of rainwater formed on the floor beneath the bird’s dangling wattle.

  “Is the creek going down?” Mary asked.

  With a little sigh, Charles abandoned the charade. “It’s still rising,” he answered.

  The news sank hard and fast. No Christmas for Mary and Laura. No company to share their turkey. Caroline blinked back the memory of how Edwards had been too pleased to smile when she asked him to dinner. “I hate to think of him eating his bachelor cooking all alone on Christmas Day.”

  Charles shook his head. “A man would risk his neck trying to cross that creek now.”

  With their chins in their hands, Mary and Laura watched her pluck and dress the turkey. Caroline wished they would go back to fogging up the windows. Their eyes had gone flat. At least with their fingers smudging the glass, they had been hopeful.

  “You are lucky little girls,” she said as she trussed up the bird and rubbed it with lard, “to have a good house to live in, and a warm fire to sit by, and such a turkey for your Christmas dinner.” She looked up, smiling. The girls had wilted further yet.

  Caroline’s smile went slack. The words might have come out of her own mother’s mouth. True though they were, it was she who ought to have been grateful—grateful that her children had grown up without want, that they had never felt the sort of cold and hunger that made it impossible to take food and warmth and shelter for granted. Instead she had as good as rubbed her daughters’ noses in their disappointment. Caroline did not know how to make them understand, short of telling them things she hoped never to speak of, stories that began After my pa died . . .

  The fire popped and hissed into the stillness. The girls lay in their bed with their eyes to the rafters, obediently waiting for the day to end.

  “Why don’t you play the fiddle, Charles?”

  He looked into the fireplace. “I don’t seem to have the heart to, Caroline.” His words might have been made of water, he was so sodden with disappointment.

  Caroline could not stand it. “I’m going to hang up your stockings, girls,” she declared. “Maybe something will happen.” They looked at her with such wonder, Caroline’s heart did not know whether to break or swell. She strode to the mantel and hung their two limp stockings beneath the china shepherdess. It was thanks to Edwards that she could do even this much, Caroline thought as she threaded the wool over the borrowed nails. Silently she wished him a happy Christmas. “Now go to sleep,” she said to Mary and Laura. “Morning will come quicker if you’re asleep.” Eager now, they squinched their eyes shut and tunneled deeper into the quilts. Caroline lingered there with her fingertips still on the mantel. Her thumb brushed the head of one nail as she looked down on her daughters. It was so easy to forget, now that there was Carrie, how little Mary and Laura still were. Quickly she bent and kissed them good night a second time and returned to her chair.

  Caroline heard herself humming faintly as she rocked. She gave no thought to the tune. Her mind scoured the cabin, pondering what sort of Christmas she might patch together. It must be something new and fresh, or Mary and Laura would not be fooled. Nothing from the scrap bag or the button box. Paper dolls might lift a rainy afternoon, but she could not expect them to bear the weight of Christmas morning. There could be no molasses candy without snow, nor vanity cakes without eggs.

  Charles’s voice was hardly a murmur. “You’ve only made it worse, Caroline.”

  Caroline’s stomach seized at the thought of them waking to empty stockings tomorrow morning. She had been careful to say maybe, but by hanging those stockings she had made them a promise, no matter the words she used. Something in that cabin must have the power to delight two little girls, her mind insisted, especially two little girls whose entire afternoon might have been altered by something as simple as a snowflake.

  “No, Charles,” she said as an idea shaped itself. “There’s the white sugar.” Together with what was left of the white flour she would make two sweet white patty cakes, drifted with sugar.

  He scraped at a hangnail. “Walked two miles in both directions, looking for a safe place to cross. Should have thought of Christmas candy when I went to Oswego,” he said to his knees. “I took for granted there’d be time for another trip to Independence.”

  “Charles,” she said. He raised his head. The look on his face belonged to a child. Caroline felt her center go soft, as it did when Carrie whimpered. “I can manage,” she promised. His expression eased some—grateful, and at the same time ashamed of his gratitude. That could not be helped. For all his looking ahead, this once Charles had failed. Rain and horse thieves did not disguise that plain fact. Caroline could not tell him otherwise. But she would do what she could to shelter the children from his oversight.

  White flour, white sugar, lard, and milk. Saleratus, and a pinch of nutmeg. The white flour was so silky and cool, Caroline mixed the dough bare-handed until it was warm and smooth as her own skin. She rolled it into a thick circle as large as the pie plate, then neatened the rough edges with the heels of her hands. With a knife she cut out two hearts and dredged them with white sugar until they glittered faintly in the lamplight. Quietly, she placed a layer of stones in the bottom of the bake oven, laid the heart-shaped cakes carefully into the pie plate, and lowered the plate into the oven.

  It was an extravagance, all that white sugar and flour. And yet it felt paltry. There ought to have been layer cakes, and cookies, and squiggles of boiled sugar candy, Caroline thought as she sat vigil by the bake oven. Swedish crackers, vinegar pie, dried apple pie. The cabin should be heady with brown sugar and clove, and the rich velvety scent of beans and salt pork lazily bubbling in molasses. At the very least, a dried blackberry pie. Even without a cookstove, Caroline knew she could have contrived to make some of it.

  We have left undone those things which we ought to have done.

  Caroline’s skin prickled at the gravity of the words. An empty cookie jar is not a sin, she assured herself. But still her throat grew hot and tight. Charles had been merely remiss, while hers was a disregard so sly she had been unable to recognize it. It was as if she believed she could keep Christmas from coming, Caroline thought, pressing an apron corner to her nose, as though without the sweet smells and tastes to remind her, she would not think to miss Eliza and Peter, and Henry and Polly. Or, she thought with a deep-belly resonance that signaled the greater truth, it was as if she believed the special things they’d so enjoyed together should not be enjoyed apart.

  Caroline Ingalls, what nonsense! That’s what Eliza would say. Caroline could hear her sister’s i
ncredulous laugh, see her starry-black eyelashes blinking back tears at the very idea. And Polly—Polly would be too heartbroken even to scold at the thought of such a bereft Christmas. Caroline shook her head, thankful that it would not occur to either of them to imagine what she had done. For oh, how it would hurt them to see her like this.

  I’m sorry, she thought to Eliza and Polly, and to Charles and the girls. I’m sorry.

  Silently Caroline unlocked her trunk and pulled out the blue tissue paper she had saved from the cake of store-bought soap. A trace of rose scent still clung to it. She teased the two thin layers apart and laid one patty cake in the center of each, taking care to keep the surface that had touched the soap to the outside as she wrapped them. The paper would rip when the girls pulled their gifts from their stockings, no matter how gentle they were. She was not sure herself whether she could nestle the little packets into the stockings without tearing them. Caroline touched her fingertips to the frail tissue one last time.

  Jack growled, rousing the hairs at the back of Caroline’s neck. She shrugged, trying to rub the sensation away with her collar. It was only what Caroline thought of as his grumbling growl, the sound he made to let them know there was someone passing outside. She cast about for something to hush him—a scrap of salt pork or a dab of leftover stew—before he woke the girls. But the bulldog’s growl deepened, shifting into a warning aimed at whatever was approaching the cabin door. He gave one sharp bark.

  Caroline panicked. The girls were already stirring and their stockings were still empty. She snatched up a dishtowel and tossed it over the presents.

  “Ingalls! Ingalls!”

  Her head snapped toward Charles. His face mirrored her own bewilderment.

  Charles blocked Jack with his boot and threw open the door. There stood Edwards. Edwards, fairly jingling with cold, the ends of his hair crackling with half-formed ice.