Caroline

by Sarah Miller

  Home. The word sent a sort of tremor through her, as though a stout bone, long ago broken and mended, suddenly began to bend.

  Charles was still talking. “I’ll have to find work along the way. Someone between here and Wisconsin’s bound to need a carpenter or a field hand.”

  Caroline’s head spun like a weathervane slapped by a sudden gust of wind. All year long she had faced herself firmly in one direction. Now a single sheet of paper demanded she turn completely around. Charles sneered at the envelope in his hand. “Takes six weeks or better to get word of anything. If I’d known sooner—” Caroline heard the brittle quiver in his voice and knew the moment for words had passed. If she spoke, even to comfort him, he would snap.

  She looked at the cabin. Her eyes lingered on the half-watered kitchen garden, the open door, the low fire in the hearth, but her mind had not the strength to take hold of any of it. A hungry spot that did not want for food had opened itself at the parting of her ribs. Caroline pressed the heel of her hand into it. It was soft, yet unsatisfied, as though she had tried to slake herself with cotton bolls. She left Charles and walked toward the cabin, approaching it as if it were a structure out of a dream she might wake from before crossing the threshold. Caroline stopped in the middle of the single room, slack of thought. When the log had fallen on her foot, there had been a moment like this. The pain existed—she could feel its presence encircling the wound—but the weight of the news blocked the sensation from reaching her. There was no safe place to look: the glass windows with their curtains trimmed in red calico, the fireplace built of creek stones. And beside it, the willow-bough rocking chair. Her hands rose up in surrender and she sank down into the chair. She rocked herself, eyes closed.

  Outside, Carrie sputtered. Caroline heard Mary’s voice and Laura’s, trying to hush her. “Carrie, see the beads? The pretty-pretty beads, Carrie?” Then a catlike whine as Carrie protested. They were trying to jolly her with tones so fawning they made Caroline’s jaw tighten. The baby was having none of it.

  “Bring her here, Mary,” she said.

  Mary and Laura crept across the threshold together. Carrie was pushing her hands into Mary’s shoulder and her knees into her sister’s belly. She rarely consented to be carried now that she could crawl. Caroline took her long enough to kiss her, then set the baby down on hands and knees so that Carrie could move freely. Caroline closed her eyes and resumed her rocking.

  “Ma?” Mary asked.

  Caroline opened her eyes. “We’re going home.”

  The girls looked at her, at the china shepherdess on the mantel, the rifle over the door, and finally at each other. Caroline understood without their asking. The meaning of the word had shifted for her, too. Like theirs, her mind no longer reached backward at the thought of home. “Back to Wisconsin,” Caroline said. One dry, soundless sob clutched her throat, and then another. Caroline turned her face and drew her emotions inward, to the very center of herself. She exhaled, slowly, until her face relaxed. “Everything is all right,” she told Mary and Laura. It was the falsest truth she had ever spoken.

  Charles lay in the bed beside her, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. He had spoken only two and three words at a time since coming in for supper. Through the window, Caroline could see the plow where he had left it standing in the field. The gentle swoop of its blade shone out white in the starlight.

  “Charles,” she whispered. She touched his whiskers. He was mute. Likely fearing what might come out of him if he tried to speak, Caroline thought. So in need of comfort, and utterly unable to ask for it.

  She could grant him his silence. Words could not be relied upon to soothe him. But she would not leave him embedded in his own grief.

  Caroline turned to face him and drew her long brown braid across her body, stroking the thick length of it as he so loved to do. With its tip, she brushed his hand. He did not reach for her. His eyes continued to move up and down the ceiling, as though he were counting and recounting the beams and nails it had taken to fashion the roof.

  I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone, Caroline recited to herself. I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer.

  She slid a hand beneath his nightshirt. She caressed the narrow seam of soft hair up the center of his belly, ran her fingernails along the crease of his thighs. His body had no choice but to respond. She heard a small, defeated groan, and felt the sheet inch back ever so slightly as it began to tent below his navel.

  He rolled sideways, meeting her in the middle of the bed. Their foreheads touched, but his eyes would not rise above her collarbone. As though what had happened to them today were something to be ashamed of.

  She took him in, hooking her heel into the crook of his knee and pulling him close. His belly touched hers and she drew him closer yet, until she could feel his heartbeat against her ribs. His embrace was wooden, as though he dared not let himself feel anything at all. Caroline closed her eyes. The only thing she would deny him was a place for his shame to roost.

  She held him as she rocked him with her hips, coaxing and coaxing until she felt his body begin to yield up its burden of sadness. She felt it break, as though it were a solid thing, felt his body clutching at itself as he resisted letting the pieces go. Caroline pulled him deeper, whispering, “I remember how you looked at me, driving into our first Kansas sunset.” His muscles clenched and shuddered and his breath went ragged. He could not cry, but his movements became a sort of sobbing. Caroline rocked and rocked, milking the sorrow from his flesh.

  He gave a muffled cry and she paused with her belly pressed to his, holding herself open for him while he spasmed.

  If there were a child to come of this, Caroline wondered, would it bear a trace of the sorrow that had made it? Her heart throbbed softly at the thought of a small woebegone creature—a boy, perhaps, with Charles’s blue eyes and long fingers. She surfaced from her thoughts and Charles was looking at her with those very eyes. The shadows at his mouth remained, shallower now.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  It pained her to smile. “So am I,” she answered.

  He brushed the edge of her face with his knuckles slowly back and forth until they slept, joined.

  Eliza, Henry, Polly, Ma and Papa Frederick. Caroline said their names to herself over and over again as she emptied the cabin into the wagon. And there would be Eliza’s new little boy. Lansford Newcomb Ingalls. To see them again in this world would be . . . what? Caroline knew no word to encompass it.

  Then shouldn’t the thought of their faces when the wagon arrived back in Pepin be enough to spur a smile? she asked herself once more. Caroline had a letter already written to drop at the post office on their way out, but there was every possibility that they themselves would arrive in Wisconsin before news reached the family. Imagine knocking on Polly’s door, with Carrie in her arms, and asking to borrow a jar of pickles as though no more than a day had passed. Imagine Polly Quiner, speechless. That scene raised one corner of her mouth. It was all the joy Caroline could summon.

  Think of the pantry, she told herself as she crouched before the little provisions cabinet to pack a crate with small bags of flour, cornmeal, coffee, and sugar. Think of cooking on a stove again, with an oven and enough room to boil and fry and bake all at once. Think of cooking and eating in one room, and sleeping in another. All of it made her want to be happy. None of it did.

  “It all fit on the way in,” Charles said when she handed the crate up over the tailgate. “Seems like it ought to all fit on the way out.” He stood stooping with the crate in his hands, surveying the inside of the wagon.

  “There’s plenty of space, here,” she said, patting the empty boards at the rear corner—the same place the crate had just vacated.

  Charles shook his head. “Saving that for your rocking chair,” he said.

  Oh, how she wanted to smile just then.

  Caroline turned numbly from the wagon and there was her k
itchen garden. She had neglected to water this morning. Though the plants were not truly wilting yet, she could see they were beginning to suffer. The leaves had a soft look about them, almost like cloth. A few more hours and they would be slumped, the thin rib down each center pliable as a hair. She went to the well and filled one pail, then another. There was no time for it, no sense in it. It was almost cruel. Tomorrow they would wilt again, and there would be no respite.

  Caroline could not talk herself out of it. Tenderly she watered the tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and carrots without risking a glance toward the wagon or the cabin. If Charles or the children asked, she would answer simply that the plants needed water. She did not need them to understand any more than that. Halfway through the cabbages she paused to look back over the ground she had covered. Already the jagged edges of the tomato leaves were tilting gratefully upward again. Caroline knew then that she could not abandon these plants to the mercy of the sun and the jackrabbits. Not after she had carried the seeds all the way from Wisconsin.

  She moved more quickly through the beans, cucumbers, peas, turnips, and onions, more conscious now of both the time she had used and the time she still needed to accomplish her task. Then she went around back of the cabin, where the flat she had used to start the sweet potatoes stood propped against the chimney. Caroline counted the square partitions along two edges, multiplied, and divided. Room for only four plants from each row. By the numbers, it was not worth the effort. And her rocker was already straining the capacity of the wagon box. She dared not ask Charles to make room for one more thing. Caroline picked up the trowel, undeterred.

  Hurrying around the corner of the house, she met Charles on his way to the stable. He carried a small coil of rope. If he took notice of the garden implements in her hands, he gave no indication. Perhaps he thought she was carrying them to the wagon, to pack. “If you don’t object, I’d like to take the cow and calf over to the Scotts’ claim,” he said. “The mustangs will outpace the calf if we try to bring the cattle along. Maybe the cow, too.” He slapped the rope against his thigh and said with a faint note of petulance, “Even if they could keep up we can’t afford feed for all of them.”

  Caroline nodded. It was fitting, after all the Scotts had done for them. “That would be a fine thing, Charles. You’ll give Mrs. Scott my thanks?” she asked. “For all her kindness. She has been . . . ,” Caroline’s lips tightened, tugged by a pang of loyalty to her blood kin. Yet it was true. Though the threads were of different fibers, her tie to Mrs. Scott was as firm as the knots that joined her to Eliza, and to Polly. However true, it was more than she could ask Charles to relay. “We’ll always be beholden to them, cow or no cow,” she finished.

  “I’ll thank her as best I can,” Charles promised. “I want to offer Edwards the plow,” he added. “I can’t figure any way to pack it. The plow we left in Pepin ought to be there in the barn yet, unless Gustafson made off with it.”

  “Yes,” Caroline said. “I would be proud for Mr. Edwards to have the plow. He’ll want to pay you,” she supposed.

  “He will, but I won’t let him.” The challenge of compelling Edwards to accept such a gift seemed to buoy him so that he came within a fraction of smiling. “Can you be ready when I get back—say an hour or so?”

  “I think so. Yes.”

  That satisfied him. Caroline waited while he went into the stable. He came out leading the cow by her long twisting horns. The calf followed, untethered.

  “An hour, then,” he confirmed. He grimaced as if drawing a fine distinction. “Probably a little more. Scott’s a talker.”

  “An hour,” Caroline repeated. He made no move to leave. His eyes went over and over her face. Seeking something? A flush crept up her neck. Did he guess what she intended to do with the flat and trowel after all? Suddenly he ducked forward and kissed her cheek, then strode off to the east, the calf trotting behind.

  Caroline allowed herself a moment’s bewilderment, then set to her task. With the trowel she dug around the hardiest-looking plants, taking care not to sever their roots if she could avoid it as she prized them loose and fitted them carefully into the small wooden partitions. One by one she lifted them free and felt the tug and snap of the almost invisible fibers still clinging to the soil. When the flat was full, her neat kitchen garden looked bedraggled as a mouth full of pulled teeth.

  She went to the wagon and unlatched the tailgate. For the first time, her resolve flagged. There was nowhere, not even if she could have stood the flat on its end and slipped it into a crevice like a book onto a shelf. Though it was filled with every tangible fragment of their lives, the wagon box looked unfamiliar. Unopened bags of seed Charles had brought from Oswego bulged into the aisle, narrowing it considerably. Their winter wraps, which would not fit into the carpetbags, hung draped over the churn handle. The displaced provisions crate balanced on the seat of the rocker. Caroline put her hand to one of the arms and gave it a gentle push. The chair replied with a short lurch and a disconcerting creak. She bent to peer under the seat to see whether it oughtn’t to be wedged, to keep the pliant willow runners from stressing.

  “Oh,” Caroline said.

  The space between the runners was empty. She lifted the wooden frame filled with Kansas soil and Wisconsin plants and slid it easily between them. It was as though the rocker had been holding a place for it.

  By the time Charles came up the creek road, the empty coil of rope dangling at his side, Caroline had herself and the girls all freshly washed and braided, with their sunbonnets tied under their chins. “Come, girls,” she said. “Pa’s ready to go.”

  Charles held up a hand to slow them. “Edwards will be along soon,” he called.

  “For the plow?” Caroline asked.

  Charles shook his head. “Not yet. Creek’s still too high from the spring thaw to get it across, even for Edwards.” He pulled a padlock from his hip pocket. “He gave me this, to put on the stable door so he can come for the plow when the water’s gone down.” Charles tossed the lock an inch or two into the air and let it drop heavily into his palm. “He wants to say goodbye. To you and the girls.”

  “That’s kind of him,” Caroline said. A slim strand of sympathy twined around her heart at the thought of how it would pain the children. She shifted Carrie to her hip and rested a hand on Laura’s back. Mary and Laura both understood, in a way they had not before, how long and how far a goodbye might stretch. A year ago they had stood in the snow and kissed their cousins dutifully, without feeling the weight of it. Now the significance of the looming farewell made their faces long and sober.

  “I’ll hitch up,” Charles said.

  They waited in the shade of the wagon. The girls leaned against the wheels, holding the spokes as though there was comfort to be found in the smooth lengths of hickory. Caroline stood with Carrie in her arms, trying not to take it all in, trying to keep the freight of this single day from engraving itself upon all her memories of this place.

  Jack growled so softly it was almost a purr. Caroline stepped into the sun to watch the creek road. The girls crouched, peeking under the belly of the wagon. A moment later, Edwards’s long gangly shadow came loping toward them.

  First he shook hands with Charles. “Goodbye, Ingalls, and good luck.” Caroline knew from the jolly way he tried to say it that the men had already had their true goodbye. As Edwards approached, she saw the expression in his eyes that belied the smile he had determined to wear. Pleading she would do the same. She smiled back. For the children’s sake. That was what Caroline told herself, though she knew better. In truth they were playacting for one another, she and Charles and Edwards, only pretending the children were their audience.

  “Goodbye, ma’am,” Edwards said, and his relief called a genuine smile to her lips. “I sure will never forget your kindness.”

  “Nor I yours, Mr. Edwards. I don’t know how we would have done without your generosity,” she answered, wishing he could see all the memories that gleamed bright in her mind
as she said it.

  He gave her a quick little nod, almost curt, and set his jaw. Then Edwards crouched down on one knee and shook the girls’ hands as though they were grown-up ladies. First Mary, then Laura. Mary said, “Goodbye, Mr. Edwards,” as though she had rehearsed for days. Laura, Caroline knew, would not be able to speak. That child’s heart was too near her throat. Edwards’s lips bunched up tight as he and Laura regarded one another, helpless.

  What her girls had meant to him, Caroline could only imagine. When they left, she thought to herself, he would be rootless.

  It made no sense—he had come to Kansas without family, of his own accord—but Caroline knew it was so. Without feeling it happen, they had grafted him into their family tree, and he had done the same. And now they would leave him.

  The impulse rose so clear and strong, Caroline did not question it. She passed Carrie to Charles and hurried to the back of the wagon to unlatch the tailgate. There in the corner beneath the rocker was her miniature garden, the dozens of tiny pairs of leaves reaching up like small arms. She chose one sweet potato seedling and plopped it into Mary and Laura’s old tin cup. Then she hefted the flat of plants and carried it to where Edwards waited, standing before him as though offering a tea tray filled with dainties.

  “My best seedlings,” she explained. “Tomatoes, carrots, cabbage, beans, cucumbers, turnips, onions, peas.” Her voice hitched. “And sweet potato.” Her vision blurred, but she held her chin firm. “I’d thought to take them with us, but . . . ,” Caroline trailed off. She could not say what she wanted to say: They belong here. “They would stand a much better chance if you would care for them,” she finished.

  “I’ll miss your good dumplings and cornbread, Mrs. Ingalls, but come fall these vegetables will brighten up my jackrabbit stew just fine.” He took the flat carefully, propping it against his hip like a baby so he could offer a free hand for her to shake.