Carrie said, “James said yes, so I reckon we are.”
“He don’t usually take time away from cabin-building since we came, but the main house is pert’ near done.” Laura looked between the two women. “Mayhap it is time for us to rest and have a moment away from our toils, with hardly a moment to breathe. A wedding sounds like fun.”
Emma smiled at Laura. “It will be a fine party, then.” She locked on to Carrie’s eyes.
Carrie’s face heated. She nodded woodenly. Her heart rose into her throat, turning her insides to mush. She gulped, bent her head, and said quietly, “I reckon they need me to load the cedar.” She released herself from Emma’s eyes, picked up a bushel basket of cornmeal, took it out, then returned for another bushel of wheat berries and smaller bags of coffee, tea, and tobacco.
Moose and Carrie helped James load the logs he had picked out for roofing.
After her father’s burial, Emma spent many nights on her own. One night, the door pounded. Jolted out of sleep, she rose quickly and put on her wrapper.
Lucas Ford stood on the step.
“Miss Reynolds. Faith has started. We need ye.”
“Give me a moment.” Emma rushed and dressed.
“I’ll saddle Titan,” Lucas called out.
Emma and Lucas arrived in the dark to the Fords’ cabin.
Faith, lying in a corner of the cabin walled off by a blanket, sweated and groaned, her chestnut hair undone and spread messily on the pillow. “Oh, Lord ’a mercy,” she grunted into the sheet.
“You’re doing very good, Faith. Just calm yourself and all will be well with both you and your babe,” Emma cooed.
Emma calculated that Faith had started around two or two thirty in the morning. The sun just coming up, it might take another four to eight hours. First births had no timetable.
Faith moaned again and Emma wiped her forehead with a cool cloth. “I’ll get you some water, my dear.”
Emma doused the two candles.
Lucas’s head bobbed in the chair where he kept vigil in front of the fireplace.
“Lucas, you get some sleep. It will be a while before this babe makes an appearance.”
“Huh?” He dropped his feet from the bench where they were propped. “Not here yet, I reckon. I hear no caterwauling.”
Faith’s cry split the cabin. “She all right, Miss Emma?”
“Getting her some water right now.” She brought back a full tin from the water barrel. “Here, take this in to her. She might feel better seeing your face.”
He bit his lip and exhaled. “If you say.” He took the cup gingerly, as if it might break in his large, calloused hands, and tiptoed toward the bed.
“I’m here, sugar pumpkin…”
Emma dropped onto the bench, puffed out her cheeks, and wiped a stray hank of hair off her forehead. Coffee would be good. She dipped more water, spooned grounds into the pot, and placed the pot onto the cookfire. It would be done soon.
Lucas came out of the birthing room, wide-eyed. “Nothing you can give her, Miss Emma? She surely is hurting.”
“It’s nature, Lucas. Women go through childbirth every day and she’ll be fine.” Emma spoke comforting words even though she never could predict how women would fare. They all had different constitutions and abilities to handle pain. Faith seemed sturdy enough, but she had a small frame and Lucas a rather large one. Faith might be in for a long day. Emma kept a calm face.
Emma dragged a small stool near to the bed and sat patiently next to the woman who continued to moan, softly then louder, when the cyclical pains hit her. Some grannies back in York State put a knife under the mattress to “cut the pain.” Or let blood from the woman’s arm, or used any number of equally useless methods to help with childbirth. She did not. She dosed Faith with chamomile tea for nausea and red raspberry tea to ready the womb for contractions. She rubbed Faith’s perineum with oil to prepare it to stretch.
Finally, at the end of a day filled with Faith’s intensifying cries and moans, the baby decided it was ready. Faith’s paleness worried her.
Faith emitted a high-pitched whine. The baby’s head appeared and Emma cupped it. “One more push, Faith.”
A large grunt and the baby’s body slipped into Emma’s outstretched arms. She rubbed its back and it wailed loudly.
Faith’s face paled.
“It’s a fine, big boy.”
Faith moaned. Blood ran onto the sheets.
“Lucas!”
Lucas bounded to the bed.
She handed him the baby. “It’s a boy. He’s fine, but Faith needs some help. Rub the babe down with a soft cloth and get it cleaned up.”
“Yes’m.” Lucas looked about to flee, his face nearly as pale as Faith’s. He cradled the boy.
Emma quickly turned to Faith, who breathed very shallowly. Must’ve torn up the womb or something else inside. The blood continued to pool onto the bed. She cursed under her breath, bringing to mind any remedy she might have to staunch the flow.
Emma rustled in her medicine bag and crushed some turmeric. She ran to the fire hob.
Lucas rubbed off the baby boy. He looked up at her and she quickly looked away.
She filled a cup with her herbs and stirred in hot water from the kettle.
“Will she make it?” he stammered.
“I don’t know. I’m trying my best. If you’re a praying man, I’d pray about now.”
Lucas nodded. Tears welled and began to fall down his cheeks as he continued to gently brush his towel over the howling baby.
By the time Emma put the teacup to Faith’s lips, her face was paler than ever, her breathing erratic. The sheet ran crimson. “Come on, now. Stay with me, Faith. You’ve got a family who needs you.” Emma stroked her cheek and looked on helplessly.
In a matter of minutes, Faith shrank before her eyes.
Lucas walked to the bed, holding the squalling infant. “Darlin’. Oh, Faith.” He stooped over the bed, handed the baby to Emma quickly, and held Faith’s limp body in his arms. “Oh, dear God. No. Faith, darlin’, come back to me. Faith!” Sobs racked his shoulders.
Emma helplessly witnessed the scene. “I’m sorry, Lucas. Something tore inside her and wouldn’t stop bleeding.”
Emma searched the cold pantry, poured milk in a mug, grabbed a clean cloth and dipped it, then put the soaked cloth into the baby’s mouth. He immediately sucked it. She kept dipping and feeding him. Finally, his eyes drooped and he slept.
Lucas had not come back from Faith’s bed. His sobs filled the cabin. She wrapped a rag on the baby’s bottom, laid it in the cradle Lucas had built, and covered him with blankets Faith obviously had made in anticipation of the birth. Emma’s knitted booties and the other ladies’ homemade gifts, blankets and gowns, sat stacked neatly next to the cradle on a shelf on the wall.
She sent for Mrs. Conner to serve as wet nurse.
Emma tidied the cabin and fixed supper for Lucas, weighed down with sadness and failure Why? Death again.
Mrs. Conner arrived. “Let me have the wee one.” She shouldered the howling bundle, sat, and opened her bodice. He suckled in loud slurps.
“Thank ye kindly for coming at quick notice, Mrs. Conner.”
“Glad to help.”
“Make sure you eat something. Don’t want your own babe to suffer. You need to keep up your own strength.”
“I do fine, Miss Reynolds. I can come ever’ day until Mr. Ford tells me not to.”
When Emma was satisfied with the progress of the babe’s nursing, she checked on Lucas, slumped next to Faith.
“Lucas, I’ll stop by and see the preacher on my way home.”
He nodded, but didn’t look at her.
She returned home at candle-lighting, plodding atop Titan. So much death in such a beautiful prairie. Life was so taxing. All this work for a fine babe only to lose the mother.
Was life any different here than back home? She recalled illnesses and injuries, Indian attacks on their neighbors scaring her as a
wee one herself. And two women lost in childbirth when she apprenticed as midwife.
Without God, she would be hard pressed to go on. But, she was plucky. Lucas would go on, and so would she.
At the Moss Creek cabin, the three workers spent their days in unrelenting toil. They finished raising and chinking the log walls, then turned to the roof structure and the cedar logs. Blanton and James wielded a cross-cut saw they borrowed from Mr. Wallace and hewed each log into shake-length hunks. They then hammered a wedge into the chunk of wood to peel off thin, quarter-inch layers that would be tiered onto the lattice of the roof structure as shingles. The cedar James chose would weather well on the roof that entailed three days of climbing to complete.
Last were the puncheon floors that they laid in quick work of four days.
Carrie felt her exhaustion now that the cabin lay freshly bright in the clearing. Carrie and James smiled, admiring it. Red-winged blackbirds rasped their two-tone songs. Sunshine warmed the clearing.
“It looks like a mansion.”
“Better than our Kentucky cabins by a jugful,” James answered.
“I love the smell of those cedar shakes. And we got more windows, more air and light this summer.”
“Aye, it’s a perty home, isn’t it?”
Carrie swelled with pride. She sighed. “When do we move in?”
“I reckon first thing on the morrow.”
After breakfast the next day, James, Blanton, and Carrie sweated while toting all manner of bedding, clothes, kitchenware, and the small number of pieces of furniture they had brought from Kentucky, and placed items at Laura’s instructions. They had a puncheon table and a cradle from Lucas, the young man whose wife died. He had moved to Wisconsin Territory in the Iowa region the previous week. Emma told them about his low spirits after the death of his wife. So now they had a rocking cradle for Permelia, a bittersweet gift originally meant for the Fords’ son, who had been adopted by a woman in Springfield who could not bear children.
Laura beamed as James, Blanton, and Carrie hauled in the new furniture, including a bed with a carved wood head and foot for her and James. James had fashioned pallets of straw ticking for the children. The boys would sleep in the loft. Carrie placed her own pallet in a cozy corner enclosed by a wool blanket strung from the loft above her. She hoped to have her own cabin next year, after they settled into their first year in Illinois State. In the meantime, she would make do, grateful for being under a warm roof behind four walls for the first time since March.
The hearth warmed them on their first night. Carrie sighed when her feet touched the warm rocks in front of the small fire. Even though it was now May, the nights felt like an April in Kentucky, and they needed the fire. Blanton had made shutters for the windows, another luxury they didn’t have in Kentucky. They were now shut against the chilly night air.
The cabin smelled of wood: newly cut logs, cedar shakes, and burning firewood. It also smelled of fresh venison stew, their first meal on the cookfire in the large opening of the fireplace another pioneer skilled in masonry had helped them erect.
The fireplace mason had asked that they help him gather any rocks they might find in their small piece of Moss Creek that flowed about one hundred yards to the west of the cabin. Carrie’d enlisted the boys and they amassed barrels of medium-sized rocks. But those larger fireplace rocks, unlike being found in creeks in Kentucky, had been found in a washout about a mile away from the creek in a small natural quarry.
The rock seemed to be a kind of limestone, light gray and others a more yellow color. Some had gem-like aspects that sparkled like diamonds. Carrie especially liked the rocks the mason called geode. Since the mason said it wasn’t good building material, Carrie and the boys kept the geode for themselves until Laura complained that the rocks belonged outdoors, not in. The geodes were now piled under a hickory tree.
Carrie had been positively swayed by the amount of labor their neighbors shared with them. A carpenter from Springfield made a door and windowsills in exchange for Carrie’s rabbit hides, a raccoon pelt, and a buckskin.
After their meal, the boys were sent to the loft to bed, so tired they went without fussing. Patch had his own nest of dried leaves outside the cabin door. Both James and Carrie yawned widely as they smoked Moose’s tobacco in the dim light of the evening.
“We best think about the planting next, Carrie.” James puffed a smoke ring into the air.
“Moose says we need a pretty good plow.”
“I heard from Elizabeth that plowing don’t work good here. The prairie has deep roots that’s hard to break.” Laura scrunched her brows.
James’s brow furrowed, too. “I heard some such.” He puffed silently while Carrie watched him stew.
Laura deftly drew her needle through the gingham for her new dress and glanced at them.
“What will you do?” Carrie asked finally.
“Been cogitatin’ on that,” James said with a sigh. “Moose knows of a man who’s a smithy and plowwright and I asked how much a plow would go for.”
“Oh?”
Laura turned her fabric around to start on another piece of the dress.
“More than we got?” Carrie asked.
“Well, now…” The furrows between his eyes deepened. “Moose said we would need something of value for barter. The smithy, Mr. Sanderson, takes all manner of goods in exchange for his work. Furs, garden produce, milk, cheese, eggs. That there kinda goods. But we ain’t got anything but a few rabbit furs. It’s a puzzle. Ya can’t plow unless you got goods and you can’t give any goods unless you can plow. We need another milch cow, a few hogs, chickens, but we can’t get ’em unless we have the goods they produce in exchange. You know I don’t like buying on credit.”
“Will he take something we do have?” Carrie asked. “I can get the pelts together we already got and get more rabbits pretty easy. Josh makes a good trapper and we could make some trips around the timber down the creek. How many pelts you reckon it would take?”
“I’m thinking a goodly number. Upwards of twenty or thirty mayhap. I’d need to ask the plowwright directly.” James tamped his pipe on the hearth and brushed the ashes into the fire. “I’m sorely tired tonight. Think I’ll hit the hay.”
Carrie, surprised by the number of pelts she and Josh would need to gather, watched James stand wearily from one of the two rush-seat chairs they had brought from Kentucky.
The next day, James went off in search of a plow he could borrow. Carrie and Laura cleaned the cabin, and arranged furniture and kitchen items, when a voice outside the cabin interrupted them.
“Good morn,” Emma said. “I have housewarming presents for you.” Titan was loaded with a bucket and two baskets.
Laura took the covered tin bucket.
“Goat’s milk. You can make cheese.” She handed a basket to Carrie. “Dried herbs, here, for cooking.” Emma held out the bundle, looking reluctant to let it go. “Father’s breeches and shirts I thought you could use.”
Laura gazed down. “Why, that’s mighty kind of you, Miss Reynolds. You need not gone to the trouble, but we’re grateful to have them. Come on in. We was just getting things settled. We slept here last night, but I want to set up my kitchen the way I please. Carrie’s been helping like a good sister.”
Emma and Carrie followed her into the cabin and Laura poured coffee into mugs for them all.
“We ain’t got much to go with it, but we got biscuits left over from breakfast.”
Emma took her eyes away from Carrie to take the mug handed to her. “I had my breakfast. I’m not really hungry.” She took a sip. “You make a good cup of coffee, Mrs. Stratton.”
They women sat at the various benches and seats in the main part of the cabin.
“I won’t keep you from your work. I have an invitation for you both for tea. Now the cabin is completed, do you think you would have time from your work on the morrow after midday?”
“I don’t know about me…I reckon I could spare Carrie. Th
e girls will be taking their naps. The baby is in her new crib, come see.”
Permelia rested in Lucas’s cradle.
“What a sweeting.” Emma cooed softly and lightly stroked the baby’s hair.
Like a mother, she is, Carrie thought. “I best be making the puncheon benches we need,” Carrie said, not really wanting to leave Emma.
Emma smiled. “I’ll see you anon, Miss Fletcher.”
Emma stroked milk into a wooden pails and hummed into the sunrise. Despite the calm rhythm the milk made, loneliness still crept into her heart.
When she finished the milking, she drank tea and nibbled at her porridge, still not having much of an appetite. She stood on the cabin’s stoop, in the air of ripening prairie, and yearned for Father. She bolstered herself and gathered eggs and fed her clucking chickens.
Charles Winters approached on one of Dixson’s pretty chestnut horses. “Good day, Miss Reynolds. I reckoned to continue the planting this fine day.”
“That suits me, Charles. Have you eaten?”
“Yes’m. I’ll just go to my work.” He tipped his hat, unsaddled the horse, tethered it in the pasture, and walked out to her father’s fields.
Thus far, Charles had measured up to Caleb’s recommendation with constant toil and asked little of her. Even while missing her father’s steady presence, she trusted the young man’s enterprising ways.
She planned for Carrie’s arrival after midday. Which tea set to use? Mother’s good china or her pottery one, newly traded with Mr. Mumford a few months ago? The china one would make the tea party more formal, perhaps. Would the delicate bone china with painted flowers be to Carrie’s liking? Would her strong farmer hands feel like mitts, or would she cherish the specialness Emma wanted for her?
Carrie held many mysteries. Dressing for work in fields and gardens, not for housework. Big boots. A man’s slouch hat to keep off the rays of the May sun. Long breeches. A vision that had taken her aback for a moment when she first saw her. Unexpected, a woman dressed like that, although she heard of some women in the Hudson Valley who donned farmer’s clothes for their work.
Prairie Hearts Page 5