Caroline

by Sarah Miller

“Great fishhooks, Edwards!” Charles cried. “Come in, man! What’s happened?”

  Edwards stepped gingerly, as though his boots were lined with frost. “Carried my clothes—on my head—when I waded the creek,” he gasped.

  Caroline’s mouth fell open. That icy, raging creek. She shuddered at the thought of all that cold water rushing past her own bare skin and did not imagine any further.

  “I’ll be all right, soon as I get some heat in me.”

  “Oh!” said Caroline, and ran for the kettle and the stew pot.

  Charles shook his head. He was still trying to picture it and having no better luck than she. “It was too big a risk, Edwards,” he said, heaping the fire with fresh wood. “We’re glad you’re here, but that was too big a risk for a Christmas dinner.”

  “Your little ones had to have a Christmas,” Edwards replied with a cock of his head. “No creek could stop me, after I fetched them their gifts from Independence.”

  Caroline’s heart stopped beating. If he were joking about such a thing, she would not know how to forgive him.

  “Did you see Santa Claus?” Laura shouted. She was up on her knees in the bed, like a dog begging.

  Caroline stilled every thought, trying to imagine how she might absorb the words from the air if Edwards’s answer was not what her children needed it to be.

  “I sure did,” Edwards said, matter-of-factly. Mary and Laura erupted into a flurry of questions. “Wait, wait a minute,” Edwards laughed. He opened up his coat and brought an oilcloth sack from an inside pocket. Caroline took it dumbly. The stiff fabric was creased with cold. Then Edwards sat down cross-legged on the floor beside the girls’ bed, and leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, he spun Mary and Laura a tale tall enough to rival the likes of Mike Fink and Davy Crockett.

  Caroline opened the mouth of the sack and everything else melted from her consciousness. Two gleaming tin cups. Two long sticks of peppermint candy as big around as her thumb. And winking up from the bottom of each cup, a new copper penny. Her throat burned and her eyes swam. How many months had it been since he’d seen Mary and Laura sharing their single tin cup, and he had remembered. The sudden burst of affection she felt toward Edwards was too big for her heart, too big for her chest. She filled the stockings with shaking fingers, then sat down on the edge of the big bed and scooped up Carrie. Carrie’s warm body filled her arms. Caroline held the baby close, pressing gently, gently, with each grateful thud of her heart.

  “We shook hands,” Edwards told the girls, “then Santa Claus swung up onto his fine bay horse and called, ‘So long Edwards!’ And I watched him whistle his way down the Fort Dodge trail until he and his pack mule disappeared around a bend.” Edwards leaned back with a smart nod that said, There!

  Mary and Laura regarded Edwards as though they were not sure he was fully real. A man who had spoken to Santa Claus—shaken his hand!—sitting near enough to touch. They had entirely forgotten their stockings.

  Caroline waited a moment, savoring their awestruck faces before she prompted, “You may look now, girls.”

  Half a second passed before they understood. Then they flew to the hearth in a tumble of bare feet and red flannel. There had never been such squealing and laughing. Right away Laura wanted to feel and taste everything about her gifts. She pretended to drink from her empty cup, licked her peppermint stick, nibbled the underside of her patty cake. Mary held each object with utter reverence, reluctant to touch their surfaces overmuch and mar their aura of newness. She only stood, utterly transfixed by the brilliance that now belonged to her: the cool polished tin, the twirling red stripes, the bright white sugar.

  The way Edwards watched the both of them—smiling, yet subdued, his eyes far away as if he were envisioning faces other than the ones shining before him—made Caroline wonder. Were there little boys and girls somewhere in Tennessee, lonely for their Uncle Edwards this Christmas? Once her mind had invented them, Caroline could not think otherwise. Silently she thanked Edwards’s nieces and nephews, real or imagined, for the loan of him.

  “Are you sure your stockings are empty?” Caroline asked just when the girls’ giddiness had begun to dwindle.

  They blinked at her—all of them but Edwards, even Charles. Caroline nodded toward the stockings, and Mary and Laura obediently snaked their hands down to the toes. Caroline watched the puzzlement drop from the girls’ faces as their fingertips brushed smooth, cold copper. They froze, wide-eyed, and looked at each other. Both of them knew what it must be, yet could not believe it. Even as the coins emerged pinched between thumb and forefinger, they could not fathom possessing such a thing. They held their pennies wonderingly in the palms of their hands, as if the coins might melt like snowflakes if they dared turn away.

  Caroline smiled so broadly, her temples ached. Who but a bachelor would think to give two little girls a penny apiece? Only a man without children would think so broadly, unhampered by any limits as to what kinds of things could come out of Santa Claus’s sack. At the Richards brothers’ dry-goods store in Pepin, those cups could not have cost less than four cents each. What he had paid for them in Independence, and the candy besides, Caroline did not want to suppose. And yet it was the pennies that dazzled them. After all that she and Charles had fretted, believing they had nothing worthy of their daughters’ Christmas. It was like a parable, acted out before her own hearth.

  Laura plunked her penny into her cup and jingled it round and round. Mary studied hers, making out the numbers stamped on its face. “One. Eight. Seven. Zero,” she read, triumphant. Caroline nodded her praise, happy beyond speech.

  They would never, never forget this Christmas. None of them. Already Caroline could feel the morning embedding itself in her own memory. Her mind was bottling it whole, so that it would remain fresh and glistening as a jar of preserves.

  Charles gave a little cough that was not a cough at all. He pumped Edwards’s hand up and down, broke loose to give his nose a quick swipe with his cuff, and took Edwards’s hand again, holding it so firm and steady that Caroline could feel the gratitude passing between them. She stood to offer her own thanks, and Edwards’s hand disappeared into his coat pocket. Out came a sweet potato. Then another, and another, each one a full handful. Caroline did not have arms enough to hold them. Edwards piled them into her apron until the knotted ties at her back strained with the weight. Nine fat, knobby sweet potatoes.

  There was no name for what she felt for Edwards then. She had never felt this way toward anyone. Her husband, her brothers. There was not a reason in the world for Edwards to have been so generous. Never in all her life had there been a Christmas so rich.

  “Oh,” Edwards said, and patted his shirtfront. Something rustled partway down. He undid a button and drew out two envelopes. “Mail,” he said simply. One went to Charles, the other he held out to Caroline.

  At the sight of Eliza’s handwriting on the envelope, Caroline felt her face crumple. She could not get her breath; she was crying without tears. The paper was warm, the envelope so fat it could only be the circulator. Eliza and Peter, Ma and Papa Frederick, Henry and Polly, Martha and Charley. All of them had put their hands to these pages. Caroline pulled a hairpin loose and slit open the envelope where she stood.

  Ma had begun the letter as she always did: Dear Children . . .

  The words filled her chest. One person at least knew she was yet a child in this world. Oh, Ma, she thought as comfort rained through her. Caroline’s lips fluttered as she read the first lines—scolding them all, as ever, for not writing more and sooner—holding her suspended between laughter and tears. Save some of it, Caroline urged herself. News won’t spoil; don’t gorge yourself all at once. Only she could not fold it back up without treating herself to a glimpse of Eliza’s section. What Caroline saw there sent a warm shiver through her, as though her sister’s news had reached out and brushed every inch of her skin.

  “Eliza and Peter had a boy in April,” she told Charles, “named for your father.”


  “That’s fine news,” Charles said. He held a twenty-dollar banknote in his hand. “First payment from Gustafson,” he explained. “Sent it on the third of September.” Almost a year since they’d left, and Gustafson had sent what amounted to two dollars a month. A spark of unease nipped at her, then winked out as soon as her eyes returned to Eliza’s news. Lansford Newcomb Ingalls arrived April 5, 1870. Caroline touched her fingertips to the baby’s name, imagining a boy with Eliza’s bright eyes and Peter’s gangly limbs; the soft Quiner mouth, the untamable Ingalls hair. She looked at the date on Eliza’s portion of the letter and marveled at the passage of time. The nephew in her mind was only a few minutes old, yet by now the real Lansford Newcomb Ingalls must be crawling.

  The dipper jangled in the water bucket—Laura, trying out her new cup. Caroline blinked once before realizing that of course she was still in Kansas. For the briefest flicker of consciousness, she had been wholly elsewhere. Not so far away as Wisconsin, Caroline was too far grown for that sort of make-believe, but someplace both high above and deep within, where distance was of no consequence. That was as much a gift as the letter itself.

  She turned to Edwards, ready to lavish him with thanks. His face, both wistful and sated, stopped her. She could not escape the sense that it was he who was trying to repay them for kindnesses already given. Had a plate of white flour dumplings and a half dozen fiddle tunes by the fireside meant so much? Caroline regarded her neighbor more thoughtfully, recalling how he had settled his shivering self right down on the floor alongside the girls and launched into his Santa Claus tale without taking a sip of hot coffee or turning his palms toward the fireplace. That alone gave her cause to believe that Edwards wanted no more than to feel at home with family. To laud his generosity and enthrone him as a guest of honor now? That would almost certainly spoil his pleasure.

  It was a guess, and one she was willing to hazard aloud. “Charles,” she said, “why don’t you and Mr. Edwards see to the stock while I warm the stew and set the breakfast table for five?”

  Charles looked at her as if she’d blasphemed. But Caroline saw the happiness soak Edwards straight through. He buttoned up his coat, loped to the milk pail, and called, “C’mon, Ingalls!”

  Caroline could not remember the last time she had been so full. Of food, of affection, of gratitude. The cabin was redolent of tobacco, peppermint sticks, gravy, and browned sweet potato skins. She had allowed Edwards the satisfaction of gallantly refusing the rocking chair, and so she rocked Carrie in her lap while the men leaned over the table with their pipes and picked at what remained of the turkey.

  “What’s the news from town, Edwards?” Charles asked.

  Edwards glanced at Mary and Laura’s bed. “Little ones asleep, ma’am?”

  Caroline nodded. Laura was snuggled up with her new tin cup.

  “Is there trouble?” Charles asked.

  Edwards nodded. “Up in Cherry Township. A young doctor from Pennsylvania tried to run a half-breed and his family off his claim. Fella’s name is Mosher. Guess he’s part Osage, but he married a white woman. Been there four years, even raised a few fruit trees. A week ago yesterday Doc Campbell’s posse ordered Mosher and his wife and child out of their beds in the night and torched the cabin. Pistol-whipped the lot of them right there in the yard while the place burned.” Edwards’s eyes flicked toward Caroline. He dropped his voice further. “I hear Mrs. Mosher’s in the family way.”

  A twinge of horror iced across Caroline’s middle. “Mercy on us,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Edwards turned a turkey rib in his hands as he spoke. “Marched the whole family into the woods in their nightclothes. Those Campbells must have threatened him something fierce.”

  “Are they all right?”

  “I hear Mosher was well enough to register a complaint with the Indian Board, but beyond that I don’t rightly know. A few days after that, another half-breed’s cabin was torn down.”

  The news was so at odds with all that had happened that day, Caroline could not make a place for it to lodge in her mind. It hung outside of her, like something that had happened in a book instead of two townships northeast. The men seemed ashamed of it—Charles for asking and Edwards for telling. They scraped silently at the turkey carcass until Charles asked with a note of cheer so deliberate it was jarring, “Did I ever tell you about the time my father took a sow sledding on the Sabbath?”

  “Twice,” Edwards said. Caroline burst out laughing.

  “I’m sorry, Charles,” she said, then buttoned her lips between her teeth so that they could not smile.

  Charles grinned and shook his pipe at her like a schoolmaster brandishing a pointer. “Caroline Ingalls, you are not the least bit sorry.”

  “Did I ever tell you how I got the coonskin for my cap?” Edwards countered.

  Charles shook his head.

  “Well,” Edwards said. “I wasn’t but eight years old, and I treed a fat old daddy raccoon one Saturday night at twilight, right in our own front yard. My mama said it’d be a sin if I shot and dressed one of God’s creatures on the Sabbath, so I asked her for my blanket and my catechism and sat under that chestnut tree all night and all day Sunday, studying the sacraments and waiting to shoot that varmint. I kept the Sabbath and the raccoon, both.” Charles leaned back against the wall and chuckled. “He was so big, Mama made me two caps—one boy-sized and one man-sized. When I outgrew the one, she lopped off the tail and sewed it onto the other.”

  Caroline watched the smoke from the men’s pipes twine together as they all laughed. She blew out a long, silent exhale, envisioning how the smoke of her breath would meld with the tobacco smoke were they sitting outside before a campfire instead of under the good roof Charles had built with Edwards’s nails. It was moments like these that she had envied when Charles had gone to help build Edwards’s house, moments when the thread of one story joined into the next, forming a lattice of shared memories. The thread extended toward her now, well within reach, if she dared unlock her store of memories to grasp it.

  “I remember—” Caroline ventured. The men turned toward her, the lift of their brows encouraging. “It was the year we were married, Charles. Thomas and Papa Frederick strung up a swing on the big maple tree beside the riverbank for Lottie. My half sister,” she explained to Edwards, “she must have been six or seven years old. It was a perfect place for a swing, all smothered in shade, and the river so near, you felt as if you might sail straight over it and land on your feet on the opposite bank.” The smell of that place wafted through her mind, green and silvery and dappled with yellow sun. “We called it Lottie’s swing, though the big boys and girls used it just as much as she did, never mind that every one of us was at least ten years older than she. Lottie never complained, until the day one of the cows decided to take a swing.” Edwards’s face twitched. He squinted at her, to see if he were being teased. Caroline went on without a stroke of embellishment. “That cow walked up to the plank seat, put her front feet through, and she was stuck. She couldn’t walk more than three steps before the swing scraped her udder, and she didn’t know how to back out. Oh, how that cow bawled.” The men snorted with laughter, even Charles, who knew the story as well as she did. She might have stopped there, but the memory, once loosened, begged to be stretched to its full length. “Lottie just shrieked, she was so taken aback. That was the only time in my life I saw Papa Frederick come running. It winded him so, he wheezed like a broken penny whistle when he laughed. Thomas had to cut the ropes to get the cow out. Lottie cried and cried. She declared she wouldn’t drink a drop of milk until Thomas fixed the swing.” Edwards shook his head and slapped his thigh, and Caroline feasted on the knowledge that he would tell this story by the light of campfires and hearths for years to come.

  It was as fine a day as Caroline could remember. She felt it tapering to a close well before Edwards pocketed his pipe and looked resignedly at his coat. “Let me at least warm it by the fire,” Caroline offered.

&nbs
p; Edwards raised his palms to her. “I’ve stayed longer than I ought to already,” he said, rising, “and I’m as warm as I’m likely to be. Once I get into the creek, it won’t matter if you’ve set me ablaze, coat and all.”

  Caroline winced. She had forgotten the creek. The water would be black, its cold surface like a blade against the skin. The moon was no more than the width of an onion skin.

  “You know you’re welcome to stay,” Charles said.

  Edwards shrugged into his coat. “And I thank you.”

  “You’ll come back if the current is too high,” Caroline added. He wouldn’t, she knew that, but it bore saying.

  Edwards touched his mittened fingers to Carrie’s belly and gave her a jiggle. “Next year it’ll be your turn for a treat from Santa Claus, little miss,” he told her. He looked at Mary and Laura, content in their beds, and nodded to himself. Their happiness bolstered him, Caroline mused, as if they were his own.

  Had he been Henry, or Peter, Caroline would have taken hold of his arms and leaned her cheek against his then. Instead she laid a hand on his sleeve and pressed, gently. “Merry Christmas, Mr. Edwards,” she said.

  His long, flat smile all but cut his face in two. “Merry Christmas, Mrs. Ingalls,” he replied.

  Twenty-Nine

  They prepared for the purchase of the plow, both she and Charles, as though it were an impending birth. When they ate from their first harvest, it would join them with the land, not unlike how Mary had joined them. Her existence had fused them in a way they could not otherwise achieve, even when their bodies were linked one within the other. So it would be with the plow and the prairie. The blade would part the soil, so that it could be filled with seeds. As soon as the crops had put down roots and began reaching up out of the ground, there would be no mistaking to whom this quarter section belonged. After that, the papers and the filing were a formality.

  Every pelt nailed to the cabin wall, scraped clean, and worked soft before the fire was as good as a banknote, stacked up against the purchase. All winter long, the talk was of little else. While they worked, they spoke of the seeds Charles would buy, not only this year but the next and the next, and of which section of earth would best suit each variety. Charles had every acre mapped out in his mind, and he could twist and turn his plans for each one like a kaleidoscope. Hearing him talk night after night of the varying patterns, Caroline savored the knowledge that the plow was already rooting Charles to the land. From time to time he must hunt, of course, but the planting, watering, and hoeing required that he stay within earshot of the cabin. With luck, Caroline promised herself, she and the girls might never be alone with the Indians again.