Caroline stood in the middle of the big room with a burst of breath puffing out her cheeks. Charles always saw the beginning of a new start, never the loose ends of the old one that must be fastened off.
The cabin had not seemed overlarge before, but it was more than would fit in a wagon box—the straw ticks alone would fill a third of it. Every object she laid eyes on suddenly demanded a decision of her. To look at it all at once made her mind swarm. One thing at a time, Caroline told herself. She pulled the red-checked cloth from the table, and the shepherdess from the mantel. Some few things, at least, there was no question about.
In the bedroom, Caroline opened her trunk and lifted the upper tray out onto the bed. In one of its shallow compartments lay the glass ambrotype portraits from their courting and marriage, and her three schoolbooks. She opened the reader. Its cardboard cover shielded her certificate of good behavior and the little handwritten booklet of poems she’d sewn together as a youth. She slipped a fingernail between its leaves and parted the pages. “Blue Juniata” stood out in Charles’s writing. She smiled, remembering the cornhusking dance where she had first heard Charles play the tune. He had not sung the words correctly, and she had been so bold as to tell him so. “That’s the way we Ingallses sang it back East,” he’d said, and his eyes twinkled at her. They’d twinkled again when she asked him to inscribe his version in her booklet. “Now no matter which way I sing it, it’ll be by the book,” he’d teased.
She did not hear Mary and Laura come pattering down from the attic until they stood in the doorway.
“What are you doing, Ma?” Mary asked. “Can we help?”
“May we,” she reminded, secreting the fragile booklet back into the reader.
“May we, Ma?”
Laura was already peering over the rim of the trunk. A tongue of frustration licked at Caroline’s throat. She could not let children of five and three pack her best things, yet they would make themselves busy getting underfoot if she did not give them something to do. She smoothed back a sigh. “Very well. Mary, please bring me the scrap bag, and Laura, you may fetch the newspapers.”
Into the bottom of the trunk went her books, together with the family Bible and the volume of Sunday school lessons her mother had given her. The lap desk just snugged in beside them. Caroline slipped the ambrotypes beneath the trunk’s lid and cushioned them with a length of flannel Mary fished from the scrap bag.
“Now, Laura, we must fill all the cracks and corners with newspaper. Pack them tightly, so nothing can wiggle.”
While Laura crumpled and crammed newsprint into every cranny, Caroline showed Mary how to roll the silver spoons up in squares of felt. The girls occupied, she packed a sturdy cardboard box with her thin china teacups, leaving a hollow in the center for the shepherdess. When Laura finished, Caroline folded her wholecloth wedding quilt with the red stitching and squared it over the layer of books.
“Now Mary and Laura, please bring me the good pillows.” She let them put one at each end of the trunk, then nested the box of porcelain amongst the goose down. Her pearl-handled pen and the breast pins she slipped into the red Morocco pocketbook before tucking it into the lid compartment.
The delaine, shrouded in soft brown paper and tied with string, came last of all.
“Please, Ma, can’t we see the delaine?” Laura begged. Her mouth fairly watered for its strawberry-shaped buttons.
Caroline could not help remembering her mother’s broad hands sewing those buttons onto the rich green basque by lamplight. Just now, she did not want to unwrap that memory any further, even for her girls.
“Not today.”
“Aw, Ma, please?”
Caroline raised an eyebrow. “Laura.” Her tone dwindled the child into a half-hearted pout.
Over it all Caroline smoothed the red-checked tablecloth, then lowered in the tray and latched the lid. Tck went the latch, and the band of tension broke from her chest. “There now,” she said, and felt herself smiling. “Thank you, Mary and Laura.” With such things out of sight, she could begin imagining them elsewhere and other people’s possessions in their places.
By the time Charles came back from town, she had packed one of their two carpetbags tight with trousers, calico shirts and dresses, sunbonnets, and cotton stockings. At the bottom waited her maternity and nursing corsets with the baby gowns Mary and Laura hadn’t worn out. The other would hold their spare sets of woolens, along with their nightclothes and underthings. At the sound of Charles’s boots on the floor, the girls abandoned their half-folded pile of dishcloths, napkins, and towels and scampered to him for their treats.
“Sweets to the sweet,” he said, handing them each a sugared ginger cookie. “And something for your ma.” A quick little inhale betrayed Caroline’s hopes for a letter. She looked up eagerly as Charles flopped a drab bundle tied with twine from his shoulder onto the bed. The whoosh of its landing fluttered her stacks of linens.
“There you are, Caroline—thirty yards of osnaburg canvas and the stoutest thread goods in Pepin.”
She sat back on her heels. “Thirty yards!”
“Fellow in the dry-goods shop said four widths ought to be enough to stretch over the wagon bows, and it’ll have to be double thick. Need extra to double-sack all our dry provisions besides. How long will it take to make?” Charles asked. “Lake Pepin’s solid as a window pane, but the cold can’t hold out too much longer.”
Three doubled seams more than twice as long as she was tall, plus the hemming and the sacks. If each stitch were a mile, her needle could carry them to Kansas and back dozens of times over. Caroline’s fingers cramped to think of it. “No longer than it will take you to bend those hickory bows and fit up the wagon,” she told him.
He chucked her under the chin. “Got some extra crates for packing, too,” he said.
On mending day, she gave herself over entirely to the wagon cover. Laid flat, it stretched from one side of the big room to the other. In the time it took Caroline to fetch her papers of pins, Laura had already taken to tunneling under the carpet of canvas.
“Mary, be a good girl and take Laura upstairs to play with your paper ladies,” Caroline said after she’d scolded Laura. “There isn’t space to have you underfoot down here. If you play nicely until I’ve finished, you may cook a doll supper for Nettie on the stove tonight.”
Mary needed no more enticement than that. She took her sister by the hand and marched Laura to the ladder. Caroline straightened the lengths of fabric and settled down to her long chore. With every stitch she pictured the journey in her mind, envisioning the views the hem now before her would soon frame.