Caroline Read online

  “Best-looking wagon cover in Wisconsin,” Charles proclaimed. He tossed Laura and then Mary up over the tailgate and cinched the rear flaps down so tightly they could barely peek through. “There we are—snug as a tent!”

  Caroline could not deny it was handsome, all clean and close-fitting as a new bodice. It was easily the largest thing she had ever sewn. And yet it looked to have shrunk. All that canvas, which inside the cabin had seemed vast enough to set a schooner afloat, now enclosed an area barely the size of the pigpen. “I declare, I still don’t know how it’s all going to fit,” Caroline said as the girls ran whooping up and down the length of the wagon box.

  “I’m whittling a pair of hooks for my gun. Tell me how many you need, and I’ll make you enough to hang anything you like from the bows.”

  “That will do for the carpetbags, but we can’t hang the bedstead and straw ticks.”

  “I’ll lay a few boards across the wagon box to make a loft for the straw ticks right behind the spring seat,” Charles said. “The girls and the fiddle can ride there, with the extra provisions stowed underneath.”

  But there was still the medicine box of camphor, castor oil, laudanum, and bitter herbs. The willow-bough broom, sewing basket, scrap bag, sadirons, soap and starch; the kerosene, candles, tinderbox, and lamps; the chamber pail. The whole of the pantry must go into the wagon, from the salt and pepper to the churn and dishpan. Always there was something small and essential turning up that must be wedged into a box—packets of seeds, scraps of leather and balls of twine, the little box that held Mary’s rag doll and paper ladies, the matches screwed tightly into a cobalt blue medicine bottle. And yet there must be room for Charles’s things: chains and ropes and picket pins, the metal tools and traps, his lead and patch box and bullet mold. It was a mercy the buckets and washtub could hang outside the wagon.

  “Don’t worry about the furniture,” Charles added. “We’ll leave all that. Once we get settled I can make more.”

  Caroline pulled her shawl to her chin, stricken. Over and over again she had imagined her things arranged in the new place Charles would build, until the picture felt familiar, almost beckoning. All at once there was no place to spread the red-checked tablecloth, nowhere to prop the pillows in their embroidered shams. Even her cozy vantage point—her rocker before the hearth—now vanished from the image. “That will help,” she said weakly.

  Charles loosened the rope and stuck his head inside the wagon. “Any Indians in here?” he called to Mary and Laura. Caroline measured the wagon one last time with her eyes, then left Charles and the girls to their play.

  The cabin still smelled of the linseed oil she’d used to cure the canvas. Boxes, crates, and bundles leaned in the corners, encroaching on her sense of order no matter how neatly she stacked them. Turning her back to the disarray, Caroline went to the hearth and lowered herself into the embrace of the rocking chair, listening for the accustomed sigh of the runners across the floorboards. Charles had fashioned this chair for her of sugar maple just before Mary was born. In the last days before the birth, its sway had soothed her nerves as much as it soothed the baby afterward. Beside it sat Charles’s own straight-backed chair and Mary’s and Laura’s little stools, like a wooden family. Charles had built them all, and he would build more. Caroline stroked the arms of her rocker. Her fingers knew the grain of their curves as well as they knew the coiled knot of her own hair. The work of Charles’s hands might make a new chair familiar to her touch, but it would not be the same.

  Three

  In the grainy dark before dawn, Caroline woke to the pull of her stomach drawing itself taut. Before opening her eyes she resigned herself to it; better to let her muscles express her dread of this day than give voice to it.

  Already the room had changed. Neither Charles’s clothes nor his nightshirt hung on the nail beside her own, though the usual sounds of him putting on his boots and taking up the water pail came from the back door. She lay still a moment more after the door shut, letting herself collect the feel of the roof and walls around her one last time before kneeling alongside the trundle bed to pray.

  As she fastened her corset, Caroline marked the faint rise of her waist, like the dome of a layer cake peeking over the pan. The quickening would follow before long. She was more impatient for it this time than she had been even with Mary. After spending weeks packing boxes and crates, it was disquieting not to have felt her own body’s cargo. Caroline flattened her palms below her ribs and drew a breath. Not a flicker, yet the steady press of the steels along her core eased the quiver of her nerves. With each successive breath she stretched her lungs deeper still, until she was nearly within reach of her accustomed cadence.

  Caroline took her dress down from its nail and the bedroom turned gaunt—stripped and scoured down to the last bare inch. Vinegar still stung the air, sharpened by the cold. It crowded out the familiar traces of Charles’s shaving lather and rosemary-scented bear grease. Caroline washed her face, then with her damp palms smoothed the length of her braid before pinning it carefully up. Last of all she dipped the comb into the basin of cold water and slicked down the loose strands between her forehead and the nape of her neck.

  A fresh pail of half-melted snow already waited beside the cookstove for her. Caroline stoked up the fire and set the draught as deftly as Charles tuning his fiddle. She filled the coffeepot and skillet with snow, draped the girls’ underthings over the back of the rocker to warm, then went to fetch the last of the salt pork.

  At the threshold of the newly emptied pantry she hesitated. A score of years had passed since she’d faced such a barren set of shelves, yet the sight was enough to waken the old tremors of unease. The few things she had not been able to make room for—the last half-dozen jars of preserves, the eggs in their big barrel of salted limewater—beckoned to be packed as persistently as the bedstead and rocking chair. Tightly as they’d loaded the wagon, Caroline could not help wondering if hunger would find a place to lodge among the crates and bundles.

  Caroline shook herself free of such thoughts. This morning at least, they would have their fill of eggs and empty an entire jar of tart cherry jelly onto their cornbread.

  As she stirred milk into the cornmeal, her mind ran counterclockwise. Their first meal in this cabin, Caroline remembered, she had nearly cried. She’d forgotten the sugar—somehow forgotten it entirely when they’d loaded the wagon with their share of the provisions at Father and Mother Ingalls’s house that morning. She was just pressing the cornbread into the pan when she’d realized.

  Charles had looked at her, with her hands caked in cornmeal and her face on the verge of falling, and said, “I don’t see how sugar could make that cornbread any sweeter than the prints of your hands already have.” That night in bed, he’d kissed her palms instead of her cheeks.

  Once the salt pork was parboiling and the cornbread was in the oven, she dried her hands and went in to wake Mary and Laura. Caroline smiled as she crouched beside the trundle bed, at the harmony of their breaths beneath the patchwork quilt. She nudged them from their dreams, then sat back on her heels to watch for the moment she delighted in, when their faces seemed almost to shimmer as their minds began to stir. And then the way the girls looked first at each other, as though the sight of the other was what made the world real to them.

  When both had taken their turns with the chamber pail and washbasin, Caroline led Mary and Laura to the stove. They yawned and rubbed their eyes as she buttoned the bands of their flannel underwear over their stockings and layered them with woolens. She combed their hair until it lay straight and soft as corduroy, then sent them back into the bedroom to put their rolled-up nightdresses into the carpetbag and pull the linens from their bed while she finished breakfast.

  Charles stepped in. “Anything to take out yet?”

  Caroline split an egg against the lip of the skillet and opened it onto a saucer. Still fresh, though its white was tinged pink from the preserving barrel. “The second carpetbag is
packed,” she said. “As soon as the girls have stripped the trundle bed the straw ticks will be ready. The chamber pail and basin may both go once they’ve been emptied and rinsed. And my trunk.” She dropped the eggshell into the teakettle to take up the lime, wondering aloud how long it would be before they would have eggs again.

  “Indian Territory’s swarming with prairie hens,” Charles promised.

  Caroline’s fork jittered in the skillet. “I wish you wouldn’t call it that,” she said as gently as she could manage.

  “What?”

  “Kansas. Indian Territory.” She pricked at the curling strips of pork as she spoke. “I don’t like to think of the Indians any more than I have to. I saw enough of them in Brookfield.”

  “The Potawatomis never did your family any harm.”

  “Just the same, I’ve had my fill. I’ll be thankful when they’ve moved on.”

  Around the edges of the skillet, a dribble of egg white was beginning to form a skin like the rim of a pancake. Caroline’s stomach shuddered as the smell suddenly unfurled, thick and brown, saturating her nostrils.

  “Are you all right?” Charles asked.

  She swallowed hard, remembering that she had not taken her usual glass of warm water to insulate her stomach against the skillet’s odors. “It will pass if you’ll fill a mug from the teakettle for me, please.” Caroline dragged the skillet to the side of the stove and scraped the crusted membrane of egg loose before sinking onto the bench.

  Charles held the steaming mug by the rim as Caroline hooked her fingers through its handle. She leaned into the vapor and drew its blank scent through her nose and mouth. Immediately the steam began to melt her queasiness like a breath against a frosted windowpane.

  As each sip expanded her throat, Caroline became aware of Charles standing over her, silent but breathing quickly. He had seen her ill this way before, yet the pitch of his anxiousness was keen enough to draw the girls from the bedroom.

  Caroline raised her eyes over the rim of the mug. All three of them stood poised before her, waiting, and suddenly she understood that without a word she could stall their going. A simple shake of her head would send Charles to unload the wagon. But it was not going she dreaded—only leaving. Waiting would wind the dread more tightly. Once the break was made she would be all right. She held them with her silence a moment longer before saying, “Thank you, Charles.” And then with a nod toward the bedroom doorway where Mary and Laura hovered, “Go on with the packing. I can manage breakfast with the girls’ help.”

  While Mary and Laura wiped the breakfast dishes, Caroline packed the coffee mill and the tin dredging boxes of flour, salt, and pepper into an open crate with the iron spider and bake oven. “Put these where we can reach them easily,” she told Charles. “The skillets and other things may go anyplace you can fit them, but leave room for the dishpan.”

  Caroline emptied the dishpan into the snow, then lined it with a towel and collected one tin plate and cup at a time from Mary and Laura. Through the window, they heard the jostle and clang of Charles fitting the crates into the wagon. They finished just as he returned. “This is the last,” Caroline said, untying her apron and folding it into the top of the dishpan. She held the door for him, then turned to face the naked room.

  The bare hearth and table, the cooling cookstove—the bedstead, peeled of its mattress. They had not left, yet this place was no longer their own. Only the calico edging on the curtains and the coats and hoods on the line of pegs by the back door had the look of home about them. Without Charles’s fiddle box or her mending basket close by, even the chairs looked as though they might belong to anyone. There was more comfort in going than staying, now.

  In the middle of it, the girls stood looking at her. Mary hitched Nettie up close to her cheek. Laura seemed stranded, as though she were understanding for the first time all that “going west” meant. A tumble of sympathy rolled across Caroline’s breast. Like her pa, all of Laura’s visions of the West had begun with the journey, not the departure.

  Piecing together a smile, Caroline held out her hands for both Mary and Laura. “Come along, girls,” she said. “Pa and the horses will be waiting.” Laura took hold of her arm with both hands. Mary ducked beneath Caroline’s elbow and leaned her head into the cinnamon-colored folds of Caroline’s skirt. She felt a smudge of tears on Mary’s cheek, but did not scold. Her own eyes threatened to swim as she shepherded her girls past the empty cluster of chairs before the hearth.

  Mary and Laura did not speak as they bundled each other into their coats and rabbit-skin hoods. Caroline’s fingers stumbled over her shawl pin until a little berry of blood ripened on her fingertip, bright as the girls’ red yarn mittens. She winced and licked it clean.

  “I wish Nettie had a shawl, too, Ma,” Mary said.

  “I am sure there is something in the scrap bag that will do,” Caroline said as she tucked Laura’s coat collar under her hood. “When we are all settled into the wagon, you may see. Hold Nettie close for now and she will not feel the cold.” Caroline herself would have liked to take both of the girls up and tuck them inside her wraps. The steadiness she held so firmly for the children’s sake was forming a brittle shell around her, and Caroline wished to temper it with their softness. Instead, she stepped back and looked them over. “You look very nice,” she said, and nodded toward the door.

  The horses greeted Caroline and the girls with billowed breath as they rounded the corner of the cabin. Although her fingers knew each stitch of its skin and its ribs protected every portable scrap of their lives, the wagon did not beckon to Caroline as she had hoped. The sight of it, full and waiting, only made her sorry for the weight and space her own presence demanded—another burden added to the load. Immediately a ribbon of guilt ran down Caroline’s back as she imagined that thought rubbing against the bundle of living freight she herself carried.

  Before she could reassure herself of the absurdity of such a notion, Caroline stopped short. Her trunk stood on the ground below the tailgate. All her best things, huddled in the snow, and the wagon crammed to the bows. The finger she’d pricked with her shawl pin throbbed. She dropped Mary’s and Laura’s hands, afraid that they might feel the selfish rush of her pulse.

  “Charles?” she called.

  What would she say if there were no room for it? Nothing less necessary could stay behind in its place, yet he might as well leave her as that trunk.

  His boots sounded across the planks until he stood hunched, palms braced on his thighs, at the lip of the wagon box. Caroline watched the brim of his hat dip as he looked from her face to the trunk.

  “Didn’t want to chance lifting it by myself,” he explained, vaulting himself down into the snow. “It’s the size, not the weight. If you can help me get it on board, I can slide it up the aisle all the way to the front, under the straw ticks.” Caroline closed her eyes, unable to hide her relief in any other way. Charles paused. “You didn’t think . . . ?”

  A lie would have been simpler, but she could not make room for the weight of it. “I’m sorry, Charles,” she admitted. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  With a nod, she was forgiven. Caroline wished now and again that he were not so quick at it; Charles’s good nature hardly left her time enough to reap the satisfaction of repentance.

  As they bent to grip the leather handles, a chain of sleighs came hissing across the north field from Henry’s place. Spokes of light from their pierced tin lanterns sliced through the air. Mary and Laura clapped their mittens, prancing on tiptoe as they named one face after another: Grandpa and Grandma Ingalls with Aunt Ruby and Uncle George; Uncle Henry and Aunt Polly; Aunt Eliza and Uncle Peter, and every one of the cousins.

  Caroline braced herself to greet them. She could not let them see how much she craved and dreaded this moment.

  One by one, Charles’s and Caroline’s brothers and sisters lifted their little ones down into the snow. Caroline watched Peter hold his hands up for her sister Eliza, brimming with her f
ourth child, just as Charles always did for her. She loved to see the ways their families mirrored each other. With three marriages between them, the Ingallses and Quiners were interwoven close as tartan—first Caroline’s brother Henry had married Charles’s sister, and then Eliza had married one of his brothers. Their children were double cousins twice over.

  “Morning,” Charles said to the whole company of them.

  No one answered; they had not come to say hello.

  Apprehension feathered through Caroline’s stomach to see all of them together, yet so tight with quiet. The wagonload of family that had come to tell her own ma of her father’s drowning in Lake Michigan had been muffled by the same sort of silence.

  “Here, Caroline,” Henry said, taking hold of one handle of her trunk. “Let me.” Peter and George both stepped forward to latch the wagon box after them, and suddenly all the men were inspecting lashings and harnesses.

  The women stood before the wagon as if it were an open grave, their noses pink with cold and the labor of not crying. The children, made skittish by their parents’ restraint, collected in shy clumps around their mothers.

  Practicality coaxed Caroline’s tongue loose. “Take anything you can use from the pantry and the attic,” she told Eliza and Polly and Mother Ingalls.

  Polly thrust out a handful of brown paper packets tied with black thread. “Seeds,” she said. “The best of my pumpkins and tomatoes, and those good pickling cucumbers. And don’t you try to say no, Caroline Ingalls.”

  Caroline nearly smiled. Thank goodness Polly was always Polly. She could not have stood it if her brusque sister-in-law were soft with her today. Caroline obeyed and tucked the packets into her pocket.

  “Write,” Eliza asked. “We can’t send the circulator until we hear where you’ve settled.”

  “Charles has a handbill from the land office in Montgomery County. He’s told Gustafson to send the next payment there . . . ,” Caroline trailed off.