“Not yet,” Charles said. “I’ll cinch them up behind me from the outside and hand them in.” He turned up his collar, screwed his hat nearly to his eyebrows, and tipped himself out into the storm. The opening shrunk like a knothole behind him. Then his fist full of ropes punched down between the canvas and the wagon box.
Caroline crouched down and took the ties from him. Each gust rattled her shoulders as the wind tried to fillet the canvas from the wagon’s back. For forty beats the storm lashed its rhythm through her body before she heard Charles’s call, muffled through the wet canvas. The ropes burned across her palms as she loosened her grip, and a snarl of straps and traces came at her. She bailed them in one-handed, kneeing them into the corner, all while groping for the rope she had lost hold of. Rain planed across her face and into her ear. Then came Beth’s collar, a leather doughnut heavy with rainwater.
“Close up,” Charles shouted.
She had not the muscle to pull the canvas tight again, so she coiled each rope twice around her fists and braced her heels. “Mary, Laura, get back,” she called.
“Why, Ma?” Mary asked.
“Get back,” she said again, her voice cocked and loaded, and threw herself backward into the spring seat. The twists of jute crimped the skin on the back of her hands as the wagon clamped its mouth shut.
It was like driving a team of runaways, holding those ropes. They pulled so insistently, the joints at the base of her fingers scraped against one another. Before she could rearrange her grip, she felt the yoke strike the ground and Charles bellowed again. She stood and threw her arms wide, opening the wagon’s throat as Ben’s half of the tack spilled inward.
“I’ll be in soon as I’ve got them chained to the feedbox,” Charles shouted. “Can you hold a little longer?”
Caroline’s pulse thumped cold in the pads of her thumbs. She mustered up a shout and flung it out to him. “Yes, Charles.” Again she hurtled herself backward, and the canvas shrank shut.
In a moment the girls jolted at the sound of the chains rattling out of the jockey box and through the iron ring. Then Caroline felt the wagon jounce and knew Charles had climbed to the doubletree. His boot heels knocked against the falling tongue, and then his hands were parting the canvas.
“Give me some slack,” he called, and Caroline let loose the ropes. With a gust of wind the wagon cover seemed to inhale, raising Charles to his toes. “Great fishhooks,” he cried.
Caroline grabbed for the canvas flapping below his fists, and together they tugged it back down.
“Reel one end of the rope in taut and stand on it,” Charles yelled to her. “Clamp it under your heels.”
As soon as Caroline had done as he instructed, Charles tumbled in with the other end. He crouched on the floor and knotted his length around hers. Then he hooked the pair of horse collars onto his elbow and heaved them over. “Step back,” he said, and wound both ends of the rope through the collars until they were secure. When he let go, the wind pulled the knot tight against the weight of the collars.
Charles sank down into the bramble of wet tack. “Caroline, how did you ever hold against that wind?”
“I don’t know, Charles,” she admitted. She looked at him, and the girls. “I only knew that I had to.” She was so rigid with tension, she could not even shiver. “Girls, my shawl, please, quick.”
The fabric was warm as they were. Caroline swathed it close around herself and stroked the rain from her face with its ends. Wet streaks of hair channeled rainwater down her temples and neck. With her fingers she pried the strands from her skin and combed them into place.
“I tell you, that rain is falling every which way but down,” Charles said. He took hold of his whiskers as though he were about to milk his chin. With a twist, he wrung a fistful of water onto the floor.
Laura giggled first, then Mary.
“Think that’s funny, do you?” He did not quite snap at them, but all the expression seemed to have vacated his voice. The girls pinned their lips together.
Caroline could not cipher his tone, so she frothed up her own voice with cheerfulness. “Charles, let me take those wet things,” she said, hoping a layer of his frustration might peel away with them. “Mary, Laura, find Pa some dry clothes in the carpetbag and make room for him on the straw tick while I see to supper.”
Caroline spread the poncho across the spring seat before making her way to the back of the wagon. There, she unswathed the crate and picked over the provisions. There was the bake oven half-full of cornbread, but that she would hold until breakfast, to warm over a fire. If they must have a cold supper, Caroline decided, she would make a treat of it—crackers and cheese and dried apples—though what she wanted most just then was a mug of tea and a baking of light bread hot enough to melt butter.
To distract herself from useless wanting, Caroline fanned a handful of apple quarters like a flower on Mary’s and Laura’s plates. She planed long yellow strips from the wheel of cheese and layered them in between the apple petals. A few crumbles of cheese brightened the center of each plate, and a white ring of crackers framed it all. For Charles she made no such dainties, only neat stacks of apples and crackers, with a cut of cheese thick enough to make her wince as the knife’s handle pressed into her rope-roughened palms.
“What happened to your hands?” Charles said as she passed him his plate and a mug of water. He was hoarse from shouting.
Pink welts striped them from side to side. “Only a bit of rope burn,” she said. “Nothing that won’t mend.”
Charles put down his supper and reached for her wrist. “Let me see.”
He would blame himself if he saw them—no matter that he was not the one who had coiled the ties around her hands. “It’s all right, Charles,” she insisted. “I can manage.”
A sigh hissed between his teeth.
“Your cornbread won’t be any less sweet for it,” she ventured to tease. I never ask any other sweetening, he’d said since that first supper in Pepin, when you put the prints of your hands on the loaves.
A short snuffle—almost a laugh—escaped his nostrils. “All right, Caroline,” he said.
She saw from the way his movements loosened when he bowed his head to pray that it had been levity enough to oil his hinges. He cleared his throat for the blessing and winced.
“Rest your voice, Charles,” Caroline said. “I think Mary is old enough to say grace for us. ‘For what we are about to receive,’” she prompted.
Mary straightened up and refolded her hands primly. “For what we are about to receive,” she repeated and then took a careful breath, “. . . may the Lord make us . . . ,” another breath, “. . . truly thankful.” Her eyes popped open, looking to see if she had done right.