When the pads of her thumb and forefinger grew rutted from the press of the needle, Caroline laid the canvas aside to dip the steel knives and forks in soda water and roll them in flannel to keep against rust, or to melt rosin and lard together to grease the outside of the bake oven, the iron spider, and Charles’s tools. With the leftovers she would waterproof their boots and shoes.
By noontime the close of the center seam was less than an arm’s length away. She might have finished it before dinner, if not for a burrowing sensation low in her middle that would not be ignored. Caroline pinned her needle carefully over her last stitch and stepped out from under the stiff blanket of fabric. Her forearms were heavy with fatigue from holding the everlasting seam at eye level.
“Girls,” she called up the ladder into the attic, “I’m going to the necessary. Keep away from the fireplace and cookstove until I come back.”
“Yes, Ma,” they sang out.
It took longer than she intended; where before the slight pressure of her womb had driven her to the chamber pail three and four times between breakfast and dinner, now the child had taken to making her bowels costive.
She could not hear the girls’ voices overhead as she stripped off her shawl and mittens in the narrow corridor that led in from the back door. A twist of unease tickled the place she had just voided. “Mary? Laura?” she called. Giggles in return, muffled. Caroline cocked her head, not entirely relieved. “Girls? What are you up to?”
She strode into the big room and stopped short. Her rocking chair stood twisted halfway around, bare of its canvas cloak—they’d dragged the wagon cover over the table and benches and made themselves a tent of it. Her needle dangled in a widening gap that formed the flap of their door.
Caroline threw up her hands and dropped into the rocker. A woman can resolve that, whatever happens, she will not speak till she can do it in a calm and gentle manner, she recited to herself as she waited for the flare of temper to ebb. Perfect silence is a safe resort, when such control cannot be attained. “Come out of there, the both of you,” she said evenly after another moment.
They crawled out on hands and knees. “We’re playing ‘going west,’” Laura explained. “I’m Pa, and Mary’s Ma, and this is our wagon.” Laura was so earnest, Caroline pinched back a smile in spite of herself. Mary stood by, sheepish.
Caroline made herself sober. “You know better than to tangle with my mending,” she said, mostly to Mary. “Our wagon cover must have good strong seams to keep us safe and dry. You may not play—”
“Aw, Ma,” Laura mourned.
“Laura. It’s very rude to interrupt. You will have more than enough time to sit under it when we go west.” She looked again toward Mary. “There will be no doll supper tonight.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Mary said.
“And no bedtime stories from your pa,” she told Laura. Caroline stood and gathered up the span of canvas. “Now set the table for dinner and sit quietly in your places while I repair this seam.”
Caroline felt as though she needed a good starching. Dinner had not been started, the wagon cover still lay in pieces, and already her body simmered with exhaustion. Well, there was no great loss without some small gain—at least she would not have to hover over the cookstove with Mary and her pattypans.
“Ready?” Charles asked.
Caroline nodded. Together they leaned over the sideboards of the wagon and took the corners of the folded sheet of canvas from Mary’s and Laura’s outstretched hands, pulling it square over the hickory bows.
“Best-looking wagon cover in Wisconsin,” Charles proclaimed. He tossed Laura and then Mary up over the tailgate and cinched the rear flaps down so tightly they could barely peek through. “There we are—snug as a tent!”
Caroline could not deny it was handsome, all clean and close-fitting as a new bodice. It was easily the largest thing she had ever sewn. And yet it looked to have shrunk. All that canvas, which inside the cabin had seemed vast enough to set a schooner afloat, now enclosed an area barely the size of the pigpen. “I declare, I still don’t know how it’s all going to fit,” Caroline said as the girls ran whooping up and down the length of the wagon box.
“I’m whittling a pair of hooks for my gun. Tell me how many you need, and I’ll make you enough to hang anything you like from the bows.”
“That will do for the carpetbags, but we can’t hang the bedstead and straw ticks.”
“I’ll lay a few boards across the wagon box to make a loft for the straw ticks right behind the spring seat,” Charles said. “The girls and the fiddle can ride there, with the extra provisions stowed underneath.”
But there was still the medicine box of camphor, castor oil, laudanum, and bitter herbs. The willow-bough broom, sewing basket, scrap bag, sadirons, soap and starch; the kerosene, candles, tinderbox, and lamps; the chamber pail. The whole of the pantry must go into the wagon, from the salt and pepper to the churn and dishpan. Always there was something small and essential turning up that must be wedged into a box—packets of seeds, scraps of leather and balls of twine, the little box that held Mary’s rag doll and paper ladies, the matches screwed tightly into a cobalt blue medicine bottle. And yet there must be room for Charles’s things: chains and ropes and picket pins, the metal tools and traps, his lead and patch box and bullet mold. It was a mercy the buckets and washtub could hang outside the wagon.
“Don’t worry about the furniture,” Charles added. “We’ll leave all that. Once we get settled I can make more.”
Caroline pulled her shawl to her chin, stricken. Over and over again she had imagined her things arranged in the new place Charles would build, until the picture felt familiar, almost beckoning. All at once there was no place to spread the red-checked tablecloth, nowhere to prop the pillows in their embroidered shams. Even her cozy vantage point—her rocker before the hearth—now vanished from the image. “That will help,” she said weakly.
Charles loosened the rope and stuck his head inside the wagon. “Any Indians in here?” he called to Mary and Laura. Caroline measured the wagon one last time with her eyes, then left Charles and the girls to their play.
The cabin still smelled of the linseed oil she’d used to cure the canvas. Boxes, crates, and bundles leaned in the corners, encroaching on her sense of order no matter how neatly she stacked them. Turning her back to the disarray, Caroline went to the hearth and lowered herself into the embrace of the rocking chair, listening for the accustomed sigh of the runners across the floorboards. Charles had fashioned this chair for her of sugar maple just before Mary was born. In the last days before the birth, its sway had soothed her nerves as much as it soothed the baby afterward. Beside it sat Charles’s own straight-backed chair and Mary’s and Laura’s little stools, like a wooden family. Charles had built them all, and he would build more. Caroline stroked the arms of her rocker. Her fingers knew the grain of their curves as well as they knew the coiled knot of her own hair. The work of Charles’s hands might make a new chair familiar to her touch, but it would not be the same.
Three