Charles leafed idly through his weather journal as Caroline scraped the cold beads of molasses from their breakfast plates. “Hasn’t been a rain like this in years,” he said. “Not in our parts, anyway.”
She folded her apron into the kitchen crate and took in the length of the wagon. Disarray crowded every edge of her vision, most of all the big straw tick, its quilts splayed back and the sheets rumpling beneath Mary and Laura. Sunday or not, the bed must be straightened if the four of them were to have anywhere to sit. Caroline shooed the girls into the aisle. As she pulled the top sheet from the mattress a flare of aches lit the backs of her arms.
“Mary, please climb up on the bed and help me fold the sheets.” She handed Mary one end and began backing down the aisle with the other.
“I want to help, too!” Laura insisted, grazing Caroline’s bruised shin to reach for the hem.
Soreness blurted past Caroline’s elbows as she hoisted the bundle away from Laura’s fingertips. “Climb up beside Mary and take one of her corners,” Caroline told her. “There isn’t room for both of us here.”
Caroline’s breath began to heat the back of her throat as she stood idle, waiting for the girls to negotiate who should take which side. She would have done better to fold it herself in spite of her aches than let this sort of peevishness stain her morning.
“Mine’s wet, Ma,” Laura said.
“Mine, too.”
Caroline’s elbows went slack. Her end of the sheet brushed the aisle. “The weather makes everything feel damp today, girls. It can’t be helped. Now please, help me fold this sheet up nicely.”
“No, Ma,” Mary said.
The contradiction came within a hair’s breadth of lighting Caroline’s temper by the wick. She opened her mouth and found she had no words to parry such bald-faced disobedience—especially from Mary.
Mary climbed down and held up her corner. “It’s wet. See?” It was. Not clammy with cold, but more sodden than freshly sprinkled laundry.
“Is the bottom sheet wet, Laura?”
Laura tugged it up into her lap. “Yes, Ma.”
Caroline stifled a groan. She skimmed her hands across the mattress. All along the west end, the cover was heavy with moisture. Practically wincing with reluctance, she unbuttoned one corner and fished out a handful of damp straw.
Baffled, she touched the canvas wall above it. Dry.
“How in the world?” she wondered aloud, and then she saw. A tongue of the gray blanket had lapped out into the rain. Caroline pulled it, black and drooling, back under cover. In the places where the two abutted, the ticking had spent the night supping rainwater into itself silently as a cat at a saucer.
Caroline’s sigh formed a small gray cloud as her whole morning deflated under the weight of one soaked blanket.
With Charles’s help she spread the sheets, one over each side of the aisle, to dry as best they could. The gray blanket Charles strung from the front bows with its wet hem drooping, frown-like, toward the floor. The entire wagon dimmed. Caroline pulled the end of the straw tick across her lap and resigned herself to plunge her arms in to the elbows. At least it was soaked only at the foot, where she could sift out the wet straw without emptying the entire mattress. For that small mercy she managed a pinch of thankfulness.
It did not last long. Each stiff fistful of straw stabbed at her sore palms. Cold and pain numbed her hands until they became insensible to the task—her fingers could no more feel the difference between wet and dry than between nutmeg and pepper.
Caroline sat back and balled her fists beneath her arms. Two pillowcases full of straw slumped beside her, and more yet to come. “I declare, I don’t know what to do with all this.” In such weather it would sooner mildew their pillowcases than it would dry. Yet she could not bring herself to simply toss it out into the rain. Waste not, want not, her mother’s voice chimed, but what earthly use could there be for wet straw?
She might as well empty it out onto the boards before the spring seat to catch the muck from their shoes when they came in from their necessaries. And then how long before the wagon began to smell of a barnyard?
A thought cocked her head. “Charles, would it do any good to spread this under the tarpaulin for Ben and Beth?”
The question brought him to his feet like a slap of reins. “Wouldn’t do any harm.” He chucked her chin on his way past. “Leave it to a Scotchwoman,” he said.
Boredom saturated all four of them by noontime. They sat clumped in the utmost center of the gutted mattress, hitching themselves inward from its edges—edges Caroline knew would not dry before nightfall.
The girls were sullen and peckish. They did not complain, but Caroline could sense their moods fermenting. The slightest provocation and up they would foam. Charles was no help, twiddling with his compass and twitching as though every spat of rain were a backward footstep. She had never known a man so prone to rusting the moment his momentum was stilled. He had positioned himself, she noticed, on the west side of the wagon, as though cringing from the eastward pull of the sunken wheel.
Caroline drew her shawl to her earlobes and exhaled down into her collar, warming her neck and the underside of her chin with the feeble cloud of warmth. Cold limned her nostrils and fingertips. All the heat she could muster had settled at the back of her throat—two little burrs of it—and these she tried to smother. What glowed inside them did not belong to the Sabbath.
This was not the sort of stillness she had craved, with every inch of her laboring to rest. The energy her body needed to resist the cold tightened her muscles until they begged to be moved. Her mind itched just as badly, piling up a stack of undone tasks: the balding fabric at Charles’s elbow, the molasses piping on Laura’s sleeve, the thinning heel of her own stocking. A little droplet glimmered at the tip of Laura’s nose, winking in and out. The hot pinpricks in Caroline’s throat gleamed brighter with every breath Laura took. How long could the child leave it dangling there? As Caroline reached for her handkerchief, Laura’s mitten swiped the dribble free.
Caroline’s temper tried to rear, but there was not spark enough in it to burn past the chill. “Laura, please. Use a handkerchief,” she said, blotting the soiled wool. “We don’t know how long it will be before I can wash these mittens again.”
The scratch and hiss of a match interrupted her. Caroline and Laura both looked up. A tiny flame cored with blue lit Charles’s face, then dipped into the bowl of his pipe. He puffed, then exhaled a soft column of smoke. Caroline did not protest. Behind the blaze of sulfur, the pipe’s sweet smell ached of home. Charles lay back on an elbow and blew a languid ring for the girls. Laura reached up and tickled it into wisps.