Caroline

by Sarah Miller

  There was no time for music that season. Instead there was the rhythmic slop and slap of brain slurry rubbed onto dried hides. Charles brought her the brains, which she screwed into canning jars until they were needed. If it was cold enough, they were put out to freeze. When it was not, she put the jars in a pail and lowered them down into the cool shaft of the well.

  Once a hide was scraped and stretched and dried and soaked, Caroline heated a bowl of water on the hearth until it was just warm enough to bathe a baby. Then she unjarred a brain and kneaded it into the warm water, grinding the soft bits between her fingertips to form the milky slurry that Charles would rub into the rawhide to tan it.

  With the head of a dulled hoe, Charles scraped the moisture from the brained hides until they were barely damp. Jack sat beside him, waiting to lick up the accumulated scum of liquid rawhide that Charles wiped from the blade every so often. Finally he wrapped the hides around the bedpost and worked them back and forth—as though polishing the toe of a shoe—to turn them smooth and supple.

  All winter long, the house smelled of brains and skins and sweat. Caroline took to looking out the east window as she worked. There would be her kitchen garden. She could see it as clearly as Charles could see his fields of corn and sod potatoes: cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions, squash and carrots and beans, all drenched in the morning sun. In the afternoon, the cabin would shade the plants from the harshest heat. She would plant them as she always had, so that the rows of colors would meld from one to the next in a living rainbow. All those seeds had come from home. Wisconsin seeds bred in Kansas ground. Like Carrie, Caroline thought, and smiled. Alongside Polly’s cucumbers there would be sweet potatoes, from Mr. Edwards, for she had saved one back from Christmas dinner. As soon as the ground softened and the sunlight grew less watery, she would bring in a few spadefuls of earth and start the sweet potato in a flat before the window. Perhaps when Charles went to Oswego for the plow, she could busy herself and the girls for an afternoon with that small task.

  They were both of them giddy the day Charles set out for Oswego. Giddy and giggly, for Caroline had a case of hiccoughs that interrupted every attempt Charles made to kiss her goodbye. Carrie squawked in surprise with every spasm that jostled her. Caroline laughed herself breathless. Finally Charles kissed Mary and Laura all over their faces and said, “Give that to your ma!” They just about knocked her down with kissing her.

  The next days were chill and muddy, but Caroline could feel a change in the cold, as though a warm breath had been exhaled into it. Each evening before supper the girls came in rosy-cheeked, a faint halo of sweat dampening the hair beneath their woolen wraps. In the morning, the lines of the hopscotch squares Caroline had traced in the yard for them the day before were crystalized with frost.

  The first three days passed easily. On the fourth, the girls ticked like pocket watches, conscious of every minute. “Last time it was only four days,” Laura complained on the fifth morning.

  “Pa came home so late on the fourth night, it might as well have been five,” Caroline reminded her.

  Laura frowned as though she’d been tricked. “Today is five. That means Pa has to come home today.” she declared. Caroline made no attempt to dissuade her. Charles would be home or he wouldn’t; nothing she said would soften Laura’s disappointment if he did not arrive on time.

  Neither could she pretend that her own anticipation was not buoyed higher and higher as the day passed. Every few minutes she glanced up from plucking the prairie chicken Mr. Edwards had brought the day before to glance down the creek road. The wagon would be brimful. Not only with the new steel plow and the seeds, but fresh sacks of flour, sugar, and cornmeal. Caroline thought of salt pork, fried until the fat had crisped, and licked her lips. That would be a treat to savor after so much lean winter game. She had not asked for anything for herself. There was nothing she particularly wanted, except perhaps a letter. With the expense of the plow, there might not be enough to spare for extras, though she hoped for Mary’s and Laura’s sakes that there would be. Surely a stick of penny candy, at least. Charles never forgot his girls.

  As she admired the pictures in her mind, Caroline found herself humming without regard for where the tune had come from. When she realized, she swallowed and stood still, listening, to be sure.

  Indians.

  It could not be. Their camps had been empty since before Christmas. But it was. There was no mistaking that sound. She let go of the fistful of feathers and wiped the sweat from her palms. Was that why Edwards had come calling the day before? She had been so pleased by the prairie chicken, she suspected nothing but neighborliness.

  Caroline felt as she had the night on the prairie when they had lost Jack and Charles had nearly shot the bulldog by mistake as he approached the campfire. Her body had poised itself on the edge of fear, but her mind was not yet fully afraid. Her mind wanted to know more. She went to the window and listened again.

  It was music, at least. The melody was unlike any song she had ever sung, but Caroline could find the pattern in it. The beat was choppy, like the sound of the girls jumping in and out of their hopscotch squares. Perhaps that was why she had not recognized its source sooner. This song was the opposite in every way of the sounds they had heard in the fall. Even as she cautioned herself that she could not be sure, Caroline ascribed joyfulness to it.

  What sort of song would they sing after killing a man?

  Caroline stepped back, bewildered. That thought had come from her, as if her mind had no concern for the consequences of its thoughts. “Stop that,” she said, as though one of the children had talked back to her. It had no business asking such questions of its own accord, questions she did not want asked, much less answered.

  A little more than two hours after that, Charles was home. Laura yelped and Jack whined, but Caroline did not let them outside to greet him. She went alone to help him unload. Together they hefted the new plow into the stable. Charles locked the door.

  The Indians were still singing.

  “I thought they’d gone,” Caroline said.

  Charles sighed. He had expected this, though Caroline could not tell whether his reaction was composed of relief or dread. “So did I. Word in town is they’ve come back from the winter camps one last time,” he said. “The Indian agent will lead them south to the new reservation in a few weeks.”

  She felt herself calculating the time as if it were an absolute measure—as Laura had calculated Charles’s absence. Not a couple, not several. A few. Three weeks, then. Twenty-one days. She would allow them that much without complaint. Every day of it, she would pray morning and night for their departure.

  Inside the cabin all was smiles and jollity. Charles had traded well. Everything they needed and more was piled on the table, down to coffee and seed potatoes. Instead of white sugar he had bought all manner of treats. Out of a paper sack came a packet of crackers and a jar of cucumber pickles. Caroline’s mouth and eyes both watered at the sight of those little green gherkins bobbing in their brine. It had been nearly a year since she had asked him to look for pickles at the store in Independence, and all that time he had not forgotten.

  From beneath the flour sack Charles drew an oblong package, wrapped in paper and tied with white string. He dropped it onto the table with a soft slap and raised his eyebrows at her. It could only be fabric—enough for a new spring dress. Caroline pinched her lip between her teeth as she untied the wrapping. Charles had only once come close to choosing a calico she did not like, but his indifference toward the proprieties of fashion always carried a certain amount of risk. He would have bought yards and yards of brilliant Turkey red, if he thought she possessed the gumption to wear it.

  Caroline exhaled at the sight of it. The softest lavender ground, like lilacs, with a spray of feathery gray fern leaves. In the center lay a fat coil of narrow gray braid to trim the hem. Had there been a woman at the store to help him coordinate the goods? she wondered. They complemented each other perfectly: the
trim, a few shades darker than the gray in the fabric, serving to accentuate the delicate pattern. The calico was Charles’s doing, that was sure. Lavender was not a color she would have thought to choose for herself. It was a demure shade, fit for a little girl’s Sunday best, and entirely impractical for an everyday dress.

  Caroline loved it. Under the hot Kansas sun it would be gentle to the skin and refreshing to the eye. Already she could imagine how Charles would look at her when she wore it. He loved to see her wreathed in color.

  “It’s too much,” she told him, as she always did.

  His face told her it wasn’t nearly enough, as it always did.

  For the girls there were cunning little black rubber hair combs that fit like bandeaus, with a star shape cut out from the center and backed with ribbon. Blue satin for Mary and red satin for Laura, just as if Caroline had picked them out herself. The girls were enraptured. They gazed at each other, then swapped combs so they could see their own. Laura put hers on Jack and squealed with laughter at his dubious face, crowned by such finery.

  “Charles, you didn’t get yourself a thing,” Caroline said. His eyes twinkled at her. Both of them knew that was not true.

  Thirty

  Caroline stirred one more half spoonful of sugar into the pot of stewed dried blackberries, smiling to herself. Charles would not expect a treat at noon, in the middle of the week. She could hear him calling to the mustangs: Gee up now, Pet. Come on, girls! Straight and true, straight and true. Below his voice, the blade of the plow went sighing through the earth. Caroline smiled inwardly. Charles handled that plow as though it were another wife, as though he had never owned such a thing. She suspected he had named it. In a minute she would send Laura out to wave him in for dinner. Mary was laying the table, and the cornbread needed only to brown.

  Caroline watched Carrie kicking her feet in and out of a sunbeam. She was so different than her sisters had been at this age, with their dimpled knees and deep creases of fat like furrows encircling their wrists and ankles. Carrie was lean and narrow, a little jackrabbit of a baby. Yet Caroline could not look at her puncturing the air with her small sharp heels and think that she was not beginning to thrive in her own hardy way.

  The sunlight dimmed between kicks. Carrie lay poised, her feet ready to strike. Slowly her kinked legs sank toward her belly as she bored with waiting. Caroline lifted her eyebrows and made an O of her mouth, in hopes the baby would mirror her surprise rather than be vexed. Carrie gurgled in agreement. The sunbeam had played a fine trick, melting into the air. The firelight seemed to brighten by contrast while Caroline stirred the pot of blackberries, until it might have been dawn instead of noon.

  “I do believe it’s going to storm,” she said to the girls. But the light was wrong. Rather than clouding, it had shrunken somehow, turned down like the wick in a lamp. Yet through the west window, the sky was clear. A dissonant twang sounded in her mind. Caroline put down the spoon and went out to look. Halfway across the room, she saw. To the south, the sky was black.

  The smell reached the cabin at the same moment as Charles’s shout: “Prairie fire!”

  For one crystalline moment, it was beautiful. Like silk, like water. Orange and yellow, a perfect saturation of color writhing over the prairie. The great curve of flame caressed the earth, its long arms slowly undulating outward. The fire itself did not appear to move forward at all. The black spume of smoke billowed so high and wide, it seemed instead as if the landscape were surging forward, passing into it.

  Her eyes feasted on the blaze, unable to deny its splendor, but Caroline’s mind made no concession. The radiant vista before her did not simply burn; it consumed. It fed on all that was put before it with the indifference of a threshing machine. If they themselves passed through it, there would be nothing left on the other side but the empty chaff of their bodies.

  Caroline ran.

  Bucket after bucket of water. Up from the well, into the washtub. Burlap sacks snatched from the stable, pressed down into the tub. The burlap would not take the water fast enough. It bubbled up around her hands, tried to float, even as the water beaded over the coarse fabric. All manner of creatures fled past her as she struggled. Rabbits, prairie chickens, snakes, and mice, dashing toward the creek. From them rose a nameless sound, a frantic rush of panting and scurrying.

  “Hurry, Caroline!” Charles cried. He was tying the team to the stable, plow and all. “That fire’s coming faster than a horse can run.”

  Caroline opened the mouth of one sack and dragged it through the tub like a dipper, scooping the water into it. Then Charles was beside her, taking up one handle of the washtub. Together they staggered toward the fire line. Faster! urged her legs. Mustn’t spill, warned her brain. Everything in the world moved in the opposite direction, even the fire itself. A jackrabbit leapt over the tub right between them, fearless in its panic.

  A crooked gash in the earth framed the house and yard. Two slashes slanting south from the half-plowed field and a third joining them east to west. “I couldn’t plow but one furrow; there isn’t time,” Charles panted, and dashed back to the house.

  One furrow. Fifteen inches of bare dirt to wall them off from the fire. The torn sod lay belly up, the exposed roots splayed in every direction. Those fine white threads would burn quick as hair, Caroline thought. She stood before the advancing curtain of smoke and flame, aware now of its warmth against her skin. Its roar was such that there was no other sound, almost no sound at all—only the faintest of crackling as it licked and chewed its way over the grass. One furrow, and one tub of water.

  Charles came out of the house at a run with a stick of firewood held like a candle in one fist. His other hand shielded the small flame. He stepped over the furrow and touched flame to grass. Behind him the air shimmered.

  The fire Charles set was so small, Caroline could have held it in the palm of her hand. It seemed made of a different element from the blaze that engulfed the horizon. These flames were not enough to cook over. They only lapped placidly at the blades of grass within their own circumference, oblivious to their freedom. “Burn,” she urged. Whispering, as though the big fire might be the one to hear and obey. “Burn.” Charles lit another, and another. The grass began to hiss and seethe. One by one, the little fires seemed to reach out and join hands. A thread of orange spread itself around the house. Ring around the rosy, Caroline’s thoughts sang. Ashes, ashes.

  A hot current of air gusted from the south, and the little flames bowed down. Caroline watched as a clump of roots lit up. They looked like fine wires, all gold and copper. Like Charles’s whiskers in the light from the hearth. Then the flames were on her side of the furrow.

  Put it out.

  With the swing of the wet burlap, Caroline felt her mind unhitching itself. Shuuush went the sack through the flaming grass. Again. And again. She heard the sounds of her own exertion as she swung and stamped, felt the heaving of her chest as she grunted. Her heels bit into the soil as she ran to the next fire. When it was gone, there was another—two more, three. Where her thoughts had been, there was only clean space. Beyond that space was an awareness that the fires north of the furrow must not be allowed to spread. The children were north of the furrow. And the house, and the livestock. The command hung suspended in front of her, where she could not lose sight of it. The fire could penetrate her skin with its heat and her lungs with its smoke, but it could not touch that edict.

  A dickcissel, wing tips flaming, streaked to the ground. Breast to the sky, it flapped, spattering flames into the yard. Caroline’s sack swooped down. The little bulge pulsed, heart-like, beneath the burlap. Caroline brought her heel over it and stamped. Beneath the crunch a single desperate squirm, then nothing. She ran to the next small blaze.

  Her cheeks were dry and taut. Her feet were wet, and the hem of her dress. The line of sweat down her back met with the spray from the swinging wet sack. None of it had significance. There was only awareness. Each sensation briefly registered and then was dis
missed. Only those things that might prevent her from beating out the next fire were retained. The lightening of the sack as the water evaporated. The blurring of her vision and the cough that cut her breath if she lingered downwind of the smoke.

  The change did not sink in immediately. No more than one surface of her body had felt the approaching fire as it loomed up out of the south in a flat, pulsating wall. The heat intensified as it neared, but its shape never altered. No matter which side of her body faced the blaze, it met her squarely. Then Caroline’s cheeks felt the heat bend incrementally. It crept along the curve of her face, but her skin did not communicate the meaning of that fact to her mind until she became aware of the hot waves beating against both of her temples at once.

  Caroline looked up and saw the fire breaking in two, the sky a blue-white knife between the wedges of flame. There was no backfire now. The two had fused some half-dozen rods south of the furrow, then split sideways, plain as a square-dance call. Forward and back, bend the line! Two lines of flame meeting, rotating, and parting.

  Two flanks, east and west, rose on either side of the break. The cabin stood in a valley of orange and yellow. Above it, a narrow streak of pale, pale blue. Charles’s voice shouted: “West!”