Caroline

by Sarah Miller

  Caroline took his hand in both of hers, clasping it for a long moment. “Mr. Edwards.” She steadied herself and spoke the thought one piece at a time, so that her voice would not falter: “You have been—as fine a neighbor—as we have ever had.” She gave his hand an extra squeeze at ever. “As we ever will have,” she amended.

  His thin lips fought for the words. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Oh, Mr. Edwards,” Laura cried out, “thank you, thank you for going all the way to Independence to find Santa Claus for us.”

  Caroline’s chest gave an almighty heave. Edwards’s hand broke from hers and he was away, striding through the long prairie grass.

  Caroline put her hand on the lip of the wagon box and stood a moment, looking. The place itself tugged at her. All of it. From the bluffs and the creek road to the north, to the thin blue-white lip of the horizon to the south. It had never belonged to anyone before. It had not even belonged to them.

  Eliza. Henry. Polly. Ma and Papa Frederick, her mind coaxed. Lansford Newcomb Ingalls. A stove and a pantry and rooms with doors.

  Caroline climbed up and took her place on the wagon seat. Charles handed Carrie up to her.

  Edwards, she thought. Mrs. Scott. The smell of the grass on the wind, and the everlasting blue vault of the sky.

  Her heart was full and heavy behind her ribs, like a breast in need of suckling. She pressed Carrie close, trying to suffuse its deep beats as Charles boosted Mary and Laura onto the straw tick.

  Another moment and Charles was beside her, the reins in his hands.

  “Ready?”

  No, she thought. Never. And yes. Quickly, before it breaks me. “Let’s go,” she said.

  “Pa, I want to see out.” Laura’s voice. “Please, Pa, make it so I can see the house again.”

  Caroline looked straight ahead, wishing he wouldn’t and sure that he would.

  The wagon lurched as Charles jumped down, then shuddered with the loosening of the rope at the back so that Laura and Mary could peep out through the wagon cover. For a long moment it was still. Then Caroline heard Charles’s footsteps, receding instead of approaching. She did not trust herself to look forward again if she looked back, but she turned. Laura and Mary crowded the small keyhole Charles had made in the canvas. Past their heads, a narrow swath of the cabin was visible.

  Charles stood in the doorway. Or rather, at its edge. He did not step inside, but stood with one hand on the lintel, the other on the latch. In her mind she could see all the things he would be looking at. The empty mantle. The place beside the hearth where her willow-bough rocker had stood. The glass windows.

  Caroline could not watch any longer. She put her cheek to Carrie’s head and closed her eyes. She inhaled deeply, drawing the smell of the baby’s hair through the clean cotton bonnet. When she felt the wagon lurch again with Charles’s weight, she lifted her head. A small dark circle dampened the pink calico.

  “Left the latch string out,” Charles said. “Someone might need shelter.”

  Caroline nodded, grateful for the bonnet brim that hid her wet cheeks from him.

  He chirruped to the horses. Caroline angled her face into the warm prairie wind. Before the first mile had passed, it would dry her tears.

  It was to be a piecemeal farewell to Kansas itself, Caroline realized as they drove northeast. That was a mercy. Mile after mile, the grass still rippled and the sky extended beyond the reach of her eyes. Tomorrow they would drive into the sunrise, across the same hills that a year ago had beckoned them west. The symmetry of it pleased Caroline in a way she could not account for.

  “Something’s wrong there.”

  Mary and Laura stood up on the straw tick and grasped the back of the wagon seat to balance themselves while they looked. “Where, Pa?”

  “There,” Charles said again, pointing with the reins. “Look right between Patty’s ears. See it?”

  It was a fleck. A pale, still fleck in a sea of swaying grass, perhaps a mile off. Caroline narrowed her focus and the shape became a wagon. A wagon, motionless by the side of the road in midday. No smoke meant no cookfire.

  “Sickness?” Caroline guessed, keeping her voice low. Or worse.

  A smaller, darker smudge gradually appeared at the stilled wagon’s front as the distance closed between them. Where horses should be, yet too small to be horses. People. They were as motionless as the wagon.

  Charles guided the mustangs off the road, approaching cautiously.

  A man and a woman sat on the wagon tongue. They were young. Little more than twenty, the woman, perhaps less. Caroline could not see past the woman’s bonnet brim to her face, but her milk-white hands were so profusely freckled, they could belong only to a redhead. Her dusty hem did not obscure the fact that the dress was new. It was an everyday work dress, but the sleeves were shaped in a fashion that Caroline had not seen before, and every line of the paisley pattern stood out crisp. A few months in the Kansas sun and the sage-green print would hardly be distinguishable from the fawn-colored ground. Both of them looked so morose that Caroline began planning what she might cook for their supper while Charles helped the man dig a grave.

  “What’s wrong?” Charles asked. “Where are your horses?”

  “I don’t know,” the man said. “I tied them to the wagon last night, and this morning they were gone.”

  Stranded. A subtle wave of nausea trickled through Caroline’s stomach, cold as well water.

  “What about your dog?” said Charles.

  “Haven’t got a dog,” the man said. He sounded like a child. A shamed child, angry and embarrassed at not having known better.

  “Well, your horses are gone,” Charles said, as though the man had not fully realized it. “You’ll never see them again. Hanging’s too good for horse thieves.”

  “Yes,” the man agreed.

  Charles inclined his head toward her. Caroline knew his question as plainly as he knew what her answer would be. She nodded.

  “Come ride with us to Independence,” he offered.

  “No,” said the man. “All we’ve got is in this wagon. We won’t leave it.”

  Charles’s breath came out like a punch to the air. “Why, man! What will you do?” he blurted. “There may be nobody along here for days. Weeks. You can’t stay here.”

  “I don’t know,” the man said.

  “We’ll stay with our wagon,” the woman declared. Caroline turned back the brim of her own bonnet to look at her more closely. Was that small hump of calico behind the woman’s folded hands the beginnings of a child? Or was it only her slumped posture?

  “Better come,” Charles insisted. “You can come back for your wagon.”

  “No,” the woman said. Her tone signaled an end to the conversation.

  Charles’s lips worked silently, flummoxed. Caroline touched her fingers to his thigh. “Let’s go, Charles,” she said. “Leave them be.”

  “Tenderfeet!” Charles marveled under his breath as they rattled back onto the road. “Everything they own, and no dog to watch it. Didn’t keep watch himself. And tied his horses with ropes!” Charles shook his head. “Tenderfeet!” he said again. “Shouldn’t be allowed loose west of the Mississippi!”

  It stung to hear him speak so harshly, as though they had done him some personal offense. In a way, they had. He, who had done everything right, must leave the land he so loved, while they had shackled themselves to it out of pure foolishness. “Charles,” Caroline said. Tenderly, as though they were lying side by side on the straw tick. He sighed and leaned back a little. “Whatever will become of them?” she ventured.

  “I’ll leave word tomorrow when we pass through Independence. Someone will have to take a team and go out after them.”

  They spoke no more of it. Charles drove until the mustangs’ lengthening shadows leaned eastward. They had come seven or eight miles all told when he turned the wagon from the road to an overgrown trail. “I think this is the place,” he said. “Doesn’t look quite right, though. There’s
a good well a little ways off the road,” he explained as the horses nosed through the brush. “A young bachelor from Iowa staked his claim right near here, if I’m not mistaken. I made his acquaintance on my first trip to Oswego.” Charles cocked his head as he tried to align his memories with the landscape. “He’d just finished the well and was eager to show it off, so I humored him and stopped to water the horses. Nice enough fellow, talked a blue streak. Lonely, probably. He told me three or four times I was welcome to rest my team on his land any time.”

  A quarter mile down the trail, Caroline spotted a chimney. “There?” she asked.

  “Must be,” Charles said, “though I would have sworn the chimney was on the other side of the house.”

  The jagged outline of a burned claim shanty emerged around it as they approached, blackened and spindly against the sky.

  Charles whistled a low note of astonishment. “Fellow said he was headed back East in the spring to fetch his sweetheart. Next time I passed by he was gone, but the house still stood. Shall we make camp here, or . . . ?”

  Caroline considered. The ruined shanty lent the place a hollow feeling that did not invite attachment. That suited her. She made an attempt at cheerfulness. “We don’t know where we’ll next find good water.”

  Mary and Laura circled the shanty, collecting fragments from the tumbledown walls that would burn, while Caroline mixed cornmeal with the sweet, cool water and endeavored to keep from thinking about what might have happened to the people who had once lived here.

  If she wanted to, Caroline could have made herself believe they were headed in, not out. Everything was the same. The unruly little cookfire hissing in the wind, the sinking sun setting the surface of her dishwater aflame with pink and gold, tucking the girls into their little bed in the wagon box. Everything down to the homeward pull of her heart was the same. Only the direction of that pull had changed.

  Before returning to the fire she paused over the crate of tin dishes to stroke the leaves of the sweet potato seedling. What if, she thought, wrapping her fingers around the mug of sandy soil, everything that feels like home is contained in this single tin cup?

  Home is where the heart is. That was what the samplers said, spelled out in small, neatly crossed threads. But her heart no longer knew where to roost. It was as though it had moved into the wrong side of her chest.

  “Do you know, Caroline,” Charles said as she sat down on the wagon seat, “I’ve been thinking what fun the rabbits will have, eating that garden we planted.”

  The pain was quick and deep and entirely without malice. He had not taken aim; he had taken a stab at fooling himself into cheerfulness and pierced her most tender spot instead. And he had done it with an echo of her own well-worn adage: There is no loss without some small gain. Caroline waited for the throb to subside, then said gently, “Don’t, Charles.”

  He was quiet a moment, looking into the fire with a brittle smile. He did not seem to sense her hurt, only that his own had not dwindled as he had hoped. Then his mouth curled mischievously. “Anyway, we’re taking more out of Indian Territory than we took in.”

  Caroline detected the sly undertone of a joke, but lacked the energy to guess where it was headed. “I don’t know what.”

  “There’s the mule colt. And Carrie.”

  Caroline’s burst of laughter took them both by surprise, it was so out of proportion to the remark. He grinned at her, eyebrows cocked wonderingly. Caroline covered her mouth and shook her head. She could not explain. Only a man could miss the absurdity of such a notion. He had not felt the weight of a half-formed child sloshing in his belly as the wagon clattered over every rut and stone in seven hundred miles, nor vomited his breakfast into the ditches of five states.

  Caroline wiped her eyes and found that he was gazing at her, his fist propped against his temple. The laughter had scoured her almost clean, and a soft, deep ache filled the space where the pain had been.

  Charles leaned down and slid the fiddle box from under the wagon seat. He plucked the strings, coaxing the four familiar notes to their round, sweet centers, and Caroline shivered with a tremor of emotion too rich to name.

  In that sound was the feel of her green delaine, whirling about her waist at the cornhusking dance; the scent of rosemary and pipe smoke and the shine of a crochet hook, flashing before a fire of stout Wisconsin hardwood. And now it was imbued with the first flutterings of a black-haired baby girl, and the unexpected delight of Edwards, dancing and whooping in the starlight. Caroline ached for all of it at once. The fiddle sang out high and sweet, as though it were pulling the notes from her chest, and Caroline remembered: It had been the sound of the fiddle that first awakened her heart to this country.

  Now her heart seemed to spread, to peel itself open so that it could span the full breadth of the memories contained in those sounds, and Caroline marveled that her body could hold them all, side by side.

  Her left hand slipped around her waist, her right settled over her breast.

  Here, she thought. Home.

  Author’s Note

  Caroline is a marriage of fact and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s fiction. I have knowingly departed from Wilder’s version of events only where the historical record stands in contradiction to her stories. Most prominently:

  Census records, as well as the Ingalls family Bible, demonstrate that Caroline Celestia Ingalls was born in Rutland Township, Montgomery County, Kansas on August 3, 1870. (Wilder, not anticipating writing a sequel to Little House in the Big Woods, set her first novel in 1873 and included her little sister. Consequently, when Wilder decided to continue her family’s saga by doubling back to earlier events, Carrie’s birth was omitted from Little House on the Prairie to avoid confusion.)

  No events corresponding to Wilder’s descriptions of a “war dance” in the chapter of Little House on the Prairie entitled “Indian War-Cry” are known to have occurred in the vicinity of Rutland Township during the Ingalls family’s residence there. Drum Creek, where Osage leaders met with federal Indian agents in the late summer of 1870 and agreed peaceably to sell their Kansas lands and relocate to present-day Oklahoma, was nearly twenty miles from the Ingalls claim. I have therefore adopted western scholar Frances Kay’s conjecture that Wilder’s family was frightened by the mourning songs sung by Osage women as they grieved the loss of their lands and ancestral graves in the days following the agreement. In this instance, like so many others involving the Osages, the Ingalls family’s reactions were entirely a product of their own deep prejudices and misconceptions.

  Though Wilder blamed her family’s departure from Kansas on “blasted politicians” ordering white squatters to vacate Osage lands, no such edict was issued over Rutland Township during the Ingallses’ tenure there. Quite the reverse is true: only white intruders in what was known as the Cherokee Strip of Oklahoma were removed to make way for the displaced Osages arriving from Kansas. (Wilder mistakenly believed that her family’s cabin was located forty—rather than the actual fourteen—miles from Independence, an error that placed the fictional Ingalls family in the area affected by the removal order.) Rather, Charles Ingalls’s decision to abandon his claim was almost certainly financial, for Gustaf Gustafson did indeed default on his mortgage. The exception: Unlike their fictional counterparts, the historical Ingalls family’s decision to leave Wisconsin and settle in Kansas was not a straightforward one. Instead it was the eventual result of a series of land transactions that began in the spring of 1868, when Charles Ingalls sold his Wisconsin property to Gustaf Gustafson and shortly thereafter purchased 80 acres in Chariton County, Missouri, sight unseen. No one has been able to pinpoint with any certainty when (or even whether) the Ingalls family actually resided on that land; a scanty paper trail makes it appear that they actually zigzagged from Kansas to Missouri and back again between May of 1868 and February of 1870. What is certain is that by late February of 1870 Charles Ingalls had returned the title to his Chariton County acreage to the Missouri land dealer, and so fo
r simplicity’s sake I have chosen to follow Laura Ingalls Wilder’s lead, contradicting history by streamlining events to more closely mirror the opening chapter of Little House on the Prairie, and setting this novel in 1870, a year in which the Ingalls family’s presence in Kansas is firmly documented.

  Acknowledgments

  I am indebted to:

  William Anderson, for kindling my interest in Laura Ingalls Wilder by so willingly sharing a number of uncommon resources. Had that information not been so easily accessible, the idea for this book might never have fully germinated.

  Christopher Czajka, for reading the manuscript with a keen eye for accuracy and an impeccable instinct for authenticity.

  And to Little House Heritage Trust, for entrusting me with Caroline Ingalls. I have never been, and never will be, unconscious of that honor. My time with her, and my partnership with you, has enriched my life in more ways than I could have hoped to foresee.

  About the Author

  Sarah Miller began writing her first novel at the age of ten, and has spent the last two decades working in libraries and bookstores. She is the author of two previous historical novels, Miss Spitfire: Reaching Helen Keller and The Lost Crown. Her non-fiction debut, The Borden Murders: Lizzie Borden and the Trial of the Century, was hailed by the New York Times as “a historical version of Law & Order.” Sarah lives in Michigan.

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