Caroline Read online

  Mother Ingalls handed Caroline a jug of maple syrup. “You won’t find this in Kansas for anything like a reasonable price. Eat it or trade it—whichever brings you the most sweetness,” she said with a wink.

  “Thank you,” Caroline said. “I wish there was room in your sleigh for my rocker,” she told Eliza.

  “Hasn’t Gustafson bought your furniture?”

  Caroline leaned across the press of Eliza’s belly to kiss her sister’s cheek. “I’d rather keep it in the family,” she whispered. “Promise me you’ll take it if Peter can contrive a way to get it home.”

  “Of course.” Horses’ hooves crunching across the snow interrupted her. “Oh my land,” Eliza said.

  Caroline turned, and there was Charley Carpenter’s sleigh coming over the hill, with her sister Martha beside him. Martha’s oldest boy, Willie, jumped out to help his mother climb down over the runner so Charley could lower a bushel basket swaddled in woolen veils into his wife’s arms.

  “Martha,” Caroline gasped. “Oh, Martha, you shouldn’t have, not so soon.”

  “I know it,” Martha said, trying to laugh, “but that can’t be helped.” Her voice knotted. “I had to see you, sister, and you had to see our Millie.”

  “Martha Jane Carpenter, you don’t mean to say you brought the baby?” Mother Ingalls said.

  “Oh, pshaw. She’s snug as a dumpling. My Charley made a nest of buffalo robes down between our feet for the basket, and I put two hot flatirons under her pillow. Look and see, Caroline.”

  Caroline pared back the layers of veils. Wreathed in flannels and goose down lay her niece, a wren-faced little thing, still ruddy with newness. The warmth of the baby’s breath moistened the air around her. “Three weeks old yesterday,” Martha said.

  “I’m glad you came,” Caroline said, though they’d only made it harder. The longer she looked at the child, the more the membrane holding back her tears thinned.

  “You’ll come to our place and warm up those flatirons before you go,” Polly told Martha. “You’ll all come.”

  The image of all of them crowded into Henry’s cabin burned Caroline’s throat like hot maple sugar. All at once, there was no more to be said but goodbye.

  The men embraced briefly, a mittened clap on the back signaling the moment to break away. Caroline hugged her sisters and Charles’s as long as she dared, tightening her clasp as she felt the flutter of emotion rising and then thrusting herself apart with a kiss. Eliza clung to her a moment too long. “Write,” she said again. Caroline forced herself to nod. Something like a wad of wool had lodged behind her tongue.

  Mother Ingalls saw her struggling and said not a word, simply took her by the shoulders for a good, bracing squeeze as they pressed their cold cheeks together. The older woman’s firm smile tightened Caroline at the seams, so that when she reached the men Caroline found herself able to do for them what Mother Ingalls had done for her. She would not have them shame themselves with tears on her account.

  “Look in on Ma and Papa Frederick when you can,” she asked her brother. “I wrote to tell them.” Henry nodded. A flash of heat stung the rims of her eyes and nose. She had not written of the coming child, had not told them that if it were a boy, he would be called Charles Frederick, for her husband and her stepfather. “There hasn’t been an answer. I never expected them to come, not with the way driving pains Papa Frederick, but I had hopes for a letter,” she confessed.

  “There could be one waiting by now. If there isn’t, I’ll send Ma’s reply on to you when it comes,” Henry promised. “You know they would be here if they could.”

  “Kiss your cousins,” Polly commanded her brood. “You might not ever see them again.” So the children solemnly kissed and hugged Mary and Laura, like little ladies and gentlemen performing a soundless square dance.

  “You first, Caroline,” Charles said into the long pause that followed. “I’ll hand the girls up after.”

  With Charles at one elbow and Henry bracing the other, Caroline stepped up onto the doubletree and turned to perch on the edge of the sideboard. She grasped a bow and swung her legs over the wagon box. Inside it smelled of hemp, pine pitch, and linseed oil.

  “Upsy-daisy,” Charley Carpenter said as he scooped Mary up by the underarms. Her feet scrabbled in the air until her toes found the sideboard. Caroline steadied her with a smile and a pair of firm hands around Mary’s waist.

  Before Mary’s shoes were on the floor, Laura was climbing between the spokes and the singletree. “I want to do it myself, like Ma did,” she insisted.

  “You’re not tall enough to reach over the sideboards, little Half-Pint,” Charles said. Only the tips of her mittens peeped stubbornly over the edge of the box. Caroline could hear her shoes scraping at the boards for a place to grip. “Maybe by the time we get to Kansas you’ll be big enough,” Charles teased, hoisting her up.

  Caroline settled the girls onto the straw tick with the old gray blanket as Charles shook his father’s hand and clambered in over the jockey box. With a lurch, he dropped down onto the spring seat beside her. Father Ingalls handed up the reins.

  Charles cleared his throat. “All ready?” he called over his shoulder.

  “Yes, Charles,” Caroline answered softly.

  Father Ingalls tipped his hat and stepped from sight. Caroline craned forward, but the wagon’s canvas bonnet beveled out overhead, blocking her view. They had already said goodbye, Caroline reminded herself as she straightened her shawl and folded her hands into her lap. They were her mother’s hands, nearly as broad as a man’s. Like her mother, she kept them always folded, the long fingers tucked neatly into her palms.

  Charles released the brake lever and the wheels hitched forward. The snap of movement loosed Caroline’s grip on herself. A sob juddered halfway up her throat before she could clasp it back.

  Charles looked at her, the tears in his eyes only adding a luster to his excitement. Caroline tightened her cheeks to echo his smile as best she could.

  Those she could not bear to leave sat close around her, yet as she looked backward through the keyhole of canvas at the blur of waving hands, Caroline could not help but wonder whether Charles and the girls would be enough.

  Four

  The town was muted with snow. A steamy chill hung in the air, as though the drifts were exhaling. Charles drove past McInerney’s and the Prussian dry-goods shops to the Richardses’s storefront. “Always one of them willing to strike a bargain,” Charles said. Caroline did not answer. Her back was striped with aches. The wagon rolled to a stop, and her body swayed with it. All the seven miles down into town she had held herself taut against the slope of the land. Now the leveling of the road left her unmoored, as though the steadying pull of the little cabin could no longer reach her.

  Caroline held Laura on her hip and Mary by the hand as Charles and the two younger Richards brothers piled provisions onto the counter. To the food Charles added painted canvas tarpaulins, a ten-gallon water keg, and a pair of collapsible gutta-percha buckets. “Need more powder and caps, and lead for shot, too,” he said.

  “What kind of firearms you carrying?” Horace Richards asked.

  “Rifle,” Charles answered.

  “That old single-shot muzzle-loader?” Linus Richards said.

  Charles bristled. “One shot’s always been plenty for me.”

  Linus Richards chuckled and put up his hands. “I’ll be the last one to impugn your aim, Ingalls. Nobody trades more bear pelts here than you do.” He glanced at Caroline and the children and dropped his voice only low enough to make her cock her ear toward the men. “Stalking a wild animal’s one thing—a mounted brave with a full quiver and tomahawk besides is quite another. All I’m saying is, I wouldn’t take my little ones into the Indian Territory without a decent pistol to level the field.”

  Caroline felt Mary’s grip tighten as Horace Richards pulled two snub-nosed guns from under the counter. “We’ve got Colt army-model percussion revolvers and one brand-new Smit
h and Wesson Model Three top-break cartridge revolver.”

  Dry at the mouth, Caroline put Laura down and guided both girls toward the row of candy jars. “You may each choose a penny’s worth,” she said. The girls looked up at her, their astonished eyes like blue china buttons. “Go ahead. You’re big enough to choose for yourselves. Any one you like.”

  From a neighboring shelf, Caroline gathered castor oil, ipecac, paregoric, rhubarb, and magnesia while the men haggled and the girls pored over the sweets. “Let’s get two different flavors,” she heard Mary tell Laura. “I’ll give you half of my stick, and you give me half of yours. Then we’ll both have two kinds of candy.”

  Caroline smiled. “That’s my smart girl,” she said.

  Elisha Richards stood at the till with his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his vest and his nails scratching beneath them as though he were tallying the Ingallses’s account against his flanks. With every undulation of his fingers, the sum mounted in Caroline’s mind, until her head seemed to teeter on her neck. The expense was well within their reach, yet she could not keep hold of the numbers any more than she could take her eyes from the storekeeper’s vest. It was cut from a rust-colored paisley that swirled her senses in a way she could not describe. Charles began to count one bill after another into Elisha Richards’s palm, peeling the wedge of cash like an onion, and the movement of gray-green against the paisley field made the room roll around her.

  It struck her that her body was behaving as though she could taste that vest and feel the pattern augering into her stomach. Caroline balked at the senselessness of it; she would not let such a thing as a swath of cloth take command of her. She set her jaw, refusing to acknowledge the saliva pooling under her tongue, but the queasiness that had overcome her before the stove was already at her throat. Senseless or not, she must put something between her eyes and her stomach.

  “Mary, Laura, it’s time for dinner.” They half turned, reluctant to obey. She knew they wanted to stand at the counter to see their two sticks of candy paid for, but that could not be helped. It did not matter now what she looked at. Another minute and she would be sick where she stood. She swept forward and took them by the wrists. “Come, girls. Pa will bring your sweets.”

  Out in the wagon, she unwrapped the bundle of bread and plunged her teeth into a slice as the girls gawked at her. The first bite worked quick as a sponge. Her stomach grumbled for more. It was not garish smells or sights that set her senses raving, Caroline realized as she parceled out portions of bread and molasses to Mary and Laura, but hunger. She would have to guard against that on the road.

  Cold stiffened the molasses so that it clung to their teeth in thin strands. Laura slipped a fingernail underneath a brown festoon and tried to pry it loose from her slice.

  “Laura,” Mary said with a shake of her head.

  “It looks like lace,” Laura protested. “It’s too pretty to eat.”

  Laura’s scolding melted on Caroline’s tongue. They had never noticed before the care she took drizzling the molasses. Perhaps for a treat she would try spelling out their names. She imagined her wrist guiding the graceful flow of the syrup, the smiles of her daughters as they watched their names drawn out in curls of sweetness. It was the kind of frivolity her own mother could never spare time nor money for, yet practical, too—it was high time both of them began learning their letters.

  “Ma,” Mary insisted, pointing at Laura. “Look.”

  Caroline’s hand blanketed Mary’s. “It’s very rude to point,” she reminded. “Now finish your dinner nicely, girls, so you may have your candy,” she said.

  The back of the wagon jolted under a hundredweight of flour. “All stocked up and cash to spare,” Charles announced. “Where are all those empty sacks, Caroline?” he asked, shifting through the crates and bundles.

  “Leave that to me, Charles,” Caroline said. “You must have something to eat before loading all those provisions.”

  Too eager to sit, Charles leaned over the front of the wagon box, joking with the girls while Caroline unrolled the sacks and threaded her stoutest needle. She slit open the unbolted flour, cornmeal, beans, and brown sugar and filled a ten pound sack from each to round out her crate of daily supplies.

  When the corners were sewn shut again she held the canvas mouths of the biggest sacks wide for Charles to lower the dry goods in, then quickly folded the edges together and basted each one shut. Mary and Laura knelt backward on the spring seat, watching as they sucked their sticks of candy. Their curled fists were like bright berries in their red yarn mittens.

  “Did you get the pepper and saleratus?” Caroline asked.

  “In my pockets,” Charles said. “Bought myself a gutta-percha poncho,” he added as he heaved one hundredweight and then another of cornmeal. “There’s bound to be rain somewhere between here and Kansas.” Caroline nodded. “And the Colt revolver.”

  Her mind veered around this news, as though she might avoid the logical progression of thoughts: The pistol could not have cost under fifteen dollars. Charles would not have spent such a sum without a reason.

  “Caroline?”

  “Whatever you think is necessary, Charles.”

  Charles cinched the wagon cover down in back, leaving only a peephole against the cold.

  “Have all you need, Ingalls?” Elisha Richards asked, stepping out to the hitching post to help unbuckle the horses’ nose bags.

  “And some to spare,” Charles answered. “Anything else, Caroline?” She shook her head. The wagon box was packed tight as brown sugar. Anything else would have to ride in their laps.

  “Good luck to you, then. It’s been my pleasure trading with you.” Caroline ventured a glance at the storekeeper’s vest as the two men shook hands. Her eyes still had no appetite for it, but the garment claimed no sway over the rest of her. Richards nodded at Caroline as Charles swung himself up over the wheel. “Take care of yourselves and those fine girls.”

  The compliment touched Caroline squarely at the base of her throat. A small rush of pride ironed out her shoulders and trickled down her core. She bowled her hands together in her lap, as though they might catch the runoff. Behind them, a whorl of warmth embraced her womb—not the child, but the space it occupied suddenly making itself known. It was enough to remind her that she was more than a passenger.

  “Thank you, Mr. Richards,” she said.

  The road ran straight out onto the lake, narrowing between a pair of slump-shouldered snowdrifts. Away from the plowed track, the ice looked tired, blotched here and there with a sweaty sheen where snow had melted.

  “Charles?” Caroline asked, laying a hand on his wrist.

  He stayed the team. “Pay no mind to the snowmelt,” he said. “Ice’ll be at its thickest here, where the snow’s been plowed, so long as they’ve kept it bare all winter.” Charles stood up to survey the track. The hills two miles distant seemed no more than waist high. “Looks clear as far as I can see.” He gave the reins a gentle slap, and the wagon dipped from the creaking snow.

  The horses’ shoes struck the ice road as though it were the skin of a drum, and their ears pricked at the sudden sharpness. Through the plank of the spring seat, Caroline felt the wheels grind like sugar under a rolling pin. The sound made her shoulder blades twitch. She turned her attention to the rhythm of the team’s gait. They had not sped up, but they raised their feet more quickly, as though they too mistrusted the sensation of metal meeting ice.

  The flash of their shoes lifted a memory in Caroline’s mind of the circus that had once passed along the road by the Quiners’ door back home in Concord. Caroline smiled to think how she and her sister Martha had laughed at the great gray elephant delicately putting one foot and then another on the first log of the corduroy bridge spanning the marsh.

  For all its bulk, that timid elephant must have been on firmer footing than this wagon and the supplies newly added, Caroline realized: hundredweights of cornmeal, unbolted flour, salt pork, bacon, beans, and brown sug
ar; fifty pounds of white flour; ten of salt; fifteen pounds of coffee and five of tea; the feedbox brimming with corn. Better than three thousand pounds of horseflesh pulling it all. Surely that corduroy bridge had been thicker than a plate of ice nearing the edge of spring.

  Suddenly Caroline did not want her girls boxed in like cargo behind her. “Mary, Laura, come here and see the lake,” she said, beckoning them over the spring seat. Mary settled onto Caroline’s lap, big girl though she was, while Laura stood solemnly at her pa’s elbow.

  Charles halted the team. The lake lay like a mile of muslin, seamed by the ice road with the sheared hilltops of the Minnesota shore binding the distance. Sounds from Pepin’s banks seemed to bob in the air alongside them, small and clear as a music box.

  “See that, Half-Pint?” Charles asked. “That’s Minnesota.”

  “All of it?” Laura asked, poking her mitten toward the opposing shore.

  “All of it,” he answered. “Wisconsin’s already a mile behind us now.”

  Mary huffed at Laura’s pointing, but Caroline had no voice to settle her. It was too much to hold in her mind all that was behind them, beneath them, and before them. A lump thin as a sparrow’s egg blocked her throat; if she so much as swallowed, its shell would shatter.

  The waiting horses fidgeted. Their scraping hooves sent unwelcome tingles through Caroline’s underbelly and the backs of her thighs as though she were poised at the edge of a precipice. Her breath was coming too quickly, as it had at her parting from Eliza. If they did not move forward, the surge of emotions would overtake her from all sides.

  Caroline turned her cheek to her daughter’s fur hood. Mary’s candied breath pricked her nose with sharp, sweet notes. It was a summer scent, thick as the last sip from a pitcher of lemonade. First her mouth and then her eyes watered with the memory of that taste.

  If Charles saw her striving to keep hold of herself, she did not know it. She only heard him chirrup to the team and felt the horses leaning into the harnesses.