“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.