While Mary and Laura told Charles about the manger and the ladder, Caroline considered the provisions. Until the cornbread ran out it had not occurred to her that nearly every bit of food they carried, from the salt pork to the flour, was raw. Even with sixty-odd dollars lining the fiddle box, they could not afford to keep making whole meals of crackers, cheese, and dried apples. She had enough flour to fill a washbasin and more water than she could ask for, yet she could not bake so much as a crumb. As a child, she could not have imagined such a conundrum. There had been want back home—during the spare times in Concord there was many a day without anything better than breadcrumbs in maple sugar water—but never in her life had she gone without for need of a cookfire.
Caroline tied on her apron and waited as though the garment itself would tell her what to do. If such a thing could speak, it would surely be in her mother’s voice. She knew what her ma would think to see her standing stock-still among sacks of food and thinking she had nothing to eat. Ma, who had fed a whole litter of children, sometimes down to the last pinch of dust from the flour barrel. Her mother would have wept for joy to see crates half-filled with salt pork and bacon, and only four mouths to fill—just as she had wept at the stranger who gave her a barrel of flour on credit. Caroline no longer recollected his face, but that barrel stood like an altar in her memory. All of them had knelt down on the spot to thank Providence for it; she could still feel the kitchen floorboards under her knees.
Caroline grasped the knife and carved the cheese into chunks large enough to fill their hands. They would eat it in spite of the expense, and give thanks for their plenty.
The girls nudged closer as she lay down beside them, seeking her warmth. Their teeth had clinked like china as they shrugged out of their coats and hoods and into their cold nightgowns. The best she could say for the sheets was that they were no wetter than anything else by the time she tucked them back over the limp ticking.
Now Caroline felt a thin layer of herself rising through the quilts to shelter her girls, as she always did when they were so near. Even when they were not seeking protection, Caroline could not help making a shield of herself between them and the world.
Their warmth was welcome, yet Caroline wished Mary and Laura could sleep in their own place, that it could be Charles alongside her instead. With Charles she could release that motherly hovering and settle fully into herself—and into him. To lie fitted side by side, bolstering one another without a word. That was all she wanted. Even after ten years of wedlock, Charles treated her touch, her very presence, as something he must earn. When she could give to him unasked, his deference became a gift to both of them. It would do them both a world of good after such a day as this had been. A man so chilled and stymied should not have to huddle alone on the floor. Yet tonight they must be Pa and Ma, not Mr. and Mrs. Ingalls.
Ten
“Pack up a few pounds of provisions, Caroline,” Charles called in through the canvas. “I’ve found a place to camp. Little rise just to the south.”
Caroline leaned out over the tailgate. Sometime in the night the rain had stopped. It was brighter, too, with the sun beginning to press against the clouds, yet cold enough still that she kept her shawl pinned at her collarbone.
“Charles?” she asked. “You don’t mean to leave the wagon?”
“I can’t see any way around it. Guess I’ll have to sleep here. Won’t be any worse for me than the last couple nights. Just give me time to lash together a shelter,” he said as he untied the ropes that held the team’s awning. “Hand me my ax?” he asked.
“Come in and have some breakfast first,” she insisted. With a grin, he hoisted himself up to steal a kiss good morning from her parted lips.
Caroline scooped a helping of dry oats into each bowl, then sprinkled them with brown sugar.
“Like the horses eat?” Mary asked.
“Eat that up and you’ll be strong enough to pull the wagon,” Charles said. His own bowl was empty before Caroline sat down. “I’ll be back soon as I’ve got a framework up,” he said. He pulled a length of twine from his pocket. “Roll up the bedding in the big straw tick. I’ll need the loft boards to make a floor.”
The roar of the creek scrubbed Caroline’s ears as she winnowed the kitchen crate down to bare essentials. Thankfully the sound did not prod at her a thousand times over as the storm had. Without the rain-beat constantly delineating the canvas’s perimeter, she noticed, it seemed as if the wagon had expanded overnight. She paused to consider the space around her. Cramped as it had felt the day before, the wagon would likely dwarf whatever shelter Charles was “lashing together” out in the open. Caroline’s next thought pinched at her: Kansas promised Charles a boundless horizon, yet they were hardly inside the border and already her own meager territory was shrinking.
It would not be forever, she reminded herself. Only until the creek went down. In the meantime they all must have hot food and flatirons to warm their bellies and their beds.
Caroline licked her lips and released the bitter little cloud. “Selfish,” she murmured, and shook her head. Always, it was selfishness that blighted her. What business did she have brooding over elbow room—as though Charles would do any less than his utmost to shelter them? As though he had ever done anything other than his level best for them.
Caroline pulled her mixing bowl and cutting board back out of the crate. She must do no less to keep them nourished in both body and spirit. If she sliced the bacon and measured out the beginnings of corn dodgers right here, dinner would be ready for the fire the moment she arrived at the camp.
In her vigor, Caroline knocked the floor through the bottom of the cornmeal sack with her enamel mug. The sound startled the girls. They came running up the aisle to peer down into it.
“Is that all we’ve got left?” Mary asked.
“There is another great big sack under the loft,” Caroline said. That was so, but it was not full. By now it had likely thinned worse than the straw tick. Before they moved on she would have to gauge Charles’s map against what remained.
Caroline tipped her bowl and brushed the meal back into the sack. She reached for Mary and Laura’s tin cup and began again. Until she knew how much time the delay would consume, she must measure with the smaller cup no matter how much distance the map showed yet to traverse.
Salt, lard, and saleratus went into the bowl, then Caroline covered it with a towel and took stock of the rest of the foodstuffs in her kitchen crates.
Both her dredging box and the flour sack were better than half-full. That would see them through when the meal sack gave out. And there were the beans. The time they must sit stranded would let her make good use of the beans at last. The brown sugar and molasses had not fared so well, but that deprived only their tongues. At least in this weather she did not have to worry about the sugar seizing up.
The meat was another matter. She had not thought to scrape the bacon since before the rain, and in the damp the usual stubble of mold had grown thick and mossy. Caroline upended the slab and shaved the green free. The salt pork had long ago gone from pale pink to a soapy shade partway between yellow and gray. That was no matter. Salt pork paled just as soon in a pantry as in a wagon.
Aside from the cornmeal, Caroline reckoned she could make do until the end of the week without pulling from the stock beneath the loft. She topped the crate with her apron then shooed the girls from the straw tick to roll it up, pillows and all.