The Ingalls are coming, hurrah, hurrah!
The Ingalls are coming, hurrah, hurrah!
The Ingalls are coming to Indian Territ’ry,
All the way ’cross the Missouri!
All the way ’cross the Missouri. Caroline traced the map in her mind as she figured the sum. Some four hundred twenty-five miles they had come. Four hundred twenty-five miles. With still two hundred more down into Montgomery County—Indian Territory. She did not like to call it that, but that is what it would be until the Indians moved on. It made her sort of flutter inside to imagine what this land might be holding in store for them. Caroline shivered a delicious little shiver. She had felt this eager, frightened tremor only twice before: stepping up to the justice of the peace with Charles on their wedding day and again five years later with the first tentative pangs of Mary’s birthing. Crossing the river Missouri was the same sort of threshold, Caroline realized. Like the other times she must go ahead, uncertain of whether the world was about to open or close around her.
Nine
“What would you say to stopping early, Caroline?” Charles asked.
“Now?” She did not know what else to say. It was only midafternoon; they were not ten miles inside the Kansas line.
Charles nodded. “I don’t like the look of that sky.”
Caroline turned westward. The horizon was like a pan of dishwater. A rumble, faint as a cat’s purr, ruffled the air. “Well, I’d be thankful for rain enough to fill the washtub and the time to use it before Sunday,” she said.
Charles’s mouth hooked into half a smile as he unfolded his map. The points where the creases met were wearing thin as the elbows of his red flannel shirt. “I’d stop right here if the ground were higher.”
Caroline scanned the landscape. They stood in a gentle hollow, broad and shallow as the center of a platter. The slope was so gradual she had not felt it.
“We can’t be but a few miles from the Saint Joseph and Western line as the crow flies,” Charles said. “Ought to be some good level stretches along the railroad bed. First likely place I see, we’ll make camp.” With that, he eased Ben and Beth due south. The edge of the wind angled across Caroline’s face as they turned off the road, flapping her bonnet brim eastward. The wagon cover gave a shiver as the same stiff breeze strummed its ribs.
Caroline let her core ease as the wheels sighed into the spring-softened earth. Already the smell of rain dampened the air. Caroline smiled to herself. Even a fleeting thundershower might grant her enough rainwater to rinse out their stockings and drawers. Perhaps even soap the crust of molasses from Laura’s cuff.
Alongside the wagon Caroline watched the breeze carve shapes through the grass. The long blades whispered, then hissed, too bent by the wind to stroke the wagon’s belly.
They had not gone a half mile before the storm struck them like a roundhouse.
Rain stabbed down as though it were intent on piercing the wagon cover, while the wind gusted it against the canvas with a sound like scattershot.
“Jerusalem crickets!” Charles thundered into the weather. “I never saw a storm come on so fast.”
Ben and Beth tucked their chins to their collars, turning their faces from the sally. Charles stood to grab the gutta-percha poncho from its peg and began hitching it toward his shoulder, searching for the neck. He had not stayed the team.
“Charles? Shouldn’t we stop?”
“Ground’s too soft. If we don’t keep on, we’ll be mired in half a minute. Best we can do is try to walk it out. Here,” he said, handing her the reins. “Hold them while I find my way into this thing.” With the lines in her hands Caroline could feel the forward slide of the horses’ hooves that preceded each step. “Go on back with the girls and keep as dry as you can.”
Caroline clambered over the spring seat and straw tick into the aisle. Standing on solid ground, she had only begun to feel the child’s downward pull on her balance, but in the moving wagon, tension ricocheted between her heels and the balls of her feet as she fought to keep upright. Staggering, she made her way to the tailgate and cinched down the ropes, closing the back into a keyhole. Still the wet canvas shuddered and snapped between the wagon bows.
She turned, barking her shin against the provisions crate. Its edges were damp with spray. She tugged, but the crate would not move—pinched by the boxes of kitchenwares crowded around it. Caroline snatched up the dish towels and blanketed the bags of flour and meal.
With a sound like a spank, the wind broadsided the wagon. “Ma!” Mary and Laura wailed.
Behind her, rain was hissing up over the sideboards to spit at the girls.
They had left too much slack between the bows; the row of knots along the wagon’s sides were not drawn fast enough against the weather.
Two solid feet of boxes and bundles stood between Caroline and the sideboards. She hinged at the waist, putting her hands out to catch the wooden lip.
From either side of the bows, the wagon cover bellied toward her. Caroline tucked her cheek to her shoulder and thrust one hand down between the wagon box and the cover, searching for the rope. A whiskery wet knob of jute met her fingers. The knot was already so fisted with water and wind, she could not feel its loops and strands, let alone part them. Every crack of the canvas kicked a spray of rain into her face. Defeated, Caroline shifted her weight to the heels of her hands and vaulted herself backward.
She stood panting a moment in the center of the wagon, mopping her face in the crook of her arm while lightning flared and Charles shouted calm to the horses. Then without a word to the girls she stripped the gray blanket from their knees and began bunching it into the gaps as best she could.
With every ram of the blanket she upbraided herself for being so ill prepared. She had known it must rain. Of course it would. On the trek she and Charles had made from Jefferson County to Pepin it had rained every afternoon for a solid week. As she sewed and oiled this wagon’s cover she had thought of little but the wind and rain and sun that would strike it.
But she had not considered all the ways in which a storm such as this could reach beneath it. Thunder vibrated the boards at her feet. Lightning backlit the canvas as though it were the wick of a kerosene lamp.
In the midst of it all, the girls cowered at the far end of the straw tick like two doused kittens. Mary clutched Laura, too frightened herself to be any comfort to her sister.