The game he carried did nothing to contradict his flourishes of excitement. Two fat fowl hung from his belt, and in his hand was a rabbit so outlandishly large its feet brushed the ground with every swoop of his arm.
Charles held up his catch to her and said, “I tell you, Caroline, there’s everything we want here. We can live like kings!” The monstrous jackrabbit dangled from his fist, its long belly neatly silt. Where its vitals should have been, there was only a glistening cavern. A drop, then two, of rosy pink blood splashed the ground before her.
Caroline’s viscera lurched. The dead rabbit loomed too large, a glory of waste and feast. She was thankful she had never seen it living. All the power and vibrance were gone from it, and what was left would feed them for no more than a day.
Be that as it may. Caroline shook the shudder of regret from her shoulders and took the rabbit by its ears. It was dead and they must eat. If she could not make the creature live again she would roast it up fine, wrapped in slices of fat salt pork, and they would take nourishment from every morsel.
Caroline scraped the bones from Charles’s plate into the bake oven.
“Bet it weighed near seven pounds, field dressed,” he said. Boasting, almost. She could not blame him. Not one fiber of the jackrabbit had gone to waste. Tomorrow there would be the good thick broth with dumplings for supper. The hide was pinned to the wagon box. She could hear Jack working over the head and feet beneath the wagon, and this once the rough sounds pleased her.
The sun nestled itself down into the horizon, tinging the water in the dishpan with shades of pink and orange. Caroline scrubbed slowly at the plates as the colors deepened. She was tired and sore from leaning over the washtub. But it was not the same weariness she had become accustomed to. Not the indifferent fatigue of travel, nor even the drain of childbearing. That never fully left her. Something she could not harness for herself was busy, always busy—building, feeding. At odd times she tired unaccountably, and that was when she was most conscious of the current of energy flowing past her to that teeming place. It was akin to the feeling of strength rebuilding after sickness. Even her thoughts were short of fuel, leaving her at times almost lightheaded.
This was earned, a vigorous sort of fatigue that came from doing, and the grateful cooling of muscles pulled and stretched under the sun, and Caroline greeted it with matching gratitude.
Behind her, Caroline heard the familiar snap of two metal clasps. She turned from the dishpan and found Charles with the fiddle box open on his lap. The whiskey-colored wood gleamed rich and warm in the firelight. Caroline left the tin plates to dry themselves and sat down by the fire.
One by one the strings twanged and wavered and then found their steady centers. Four pure notes emerged, and then with the tiniest twists of his fingers Charles sweetened them in a way Caroline had never yet learned to describe. Those sounds were a tune in themselves. They carried memories of firesides and cornhuskings and sugaring-off dances reaching all the way back to the threshold of her youth on the banks of the Oconomowoc. Her heart rose, tight and aching, to hear them at last. No matter what songs he played, those four notes always sang out first in welcome. That, more than anything, was the sound of home.
There was nothing to hold the music close around them, and so it rose with the smoke, higher and higher until each silvery note seemed to pierce the sky. Caroline wished for something to send out into the deepening night with it. Something sweet and fine and all her own. There was nothing but her voice, and she could not imagine her low contralto rising to meet the stars.
Yet Caroline felt a loosening in herself as the bow stroked the strings. Until the music began to release it she had not known that she had been holding on to anything at all. A space opened inside her as she listened, widening with each long note. Coaxed by the fiddle, she was opening herself to this place, for Charles’s songs were not strutting out at marching tempo. They ambled and danced, not reaching beyond the horizon, but wheeling upward within it.
At last, then, he was settling. Caroline’s throat swelled so fast the gladness nearly choked her. She pulled in a cool thin breath and held it. The song and the night air swirled through her, indistinguishable from one another. Nothing but the fiddle had spoken to her, and she was overcome. And Charles? He had eyes only for the strings, rocking so gently in time with the music that his contentment was unmistakable. Did he choose such melodies deliberately to match his spirits, Caroline wondered, or were his hands so connected to his heart that his mind did not enter into it at all? She watched his hands, now. The lightness of his fingers on the strings sent little tendrils of warmth through her. There was nothing in the world he touched more delicately, not even her own face.
All around them the blue-black bowl of sky throbbed with stars. The bow caressed the strings so softly they seemed to whisper, and Charles’s voice, deep and mellow, melded with them:
None knew thee but to love thee,
Thou dear one of my heart . . .
Caroline lifted her eyes from his hands and found him gazing at her in the same way he had gazed at the fiddle strings. Delight bloomed all through her. She had no strength for modesty when he made his feelings so plain. She might hold her pleasure within herself, but she could not keep the effort from showing. The spread of her lips and the rounding of her cheeks gave her entirely away. And anyway, who was there to see? To have such a man, as content to hold her in his sight as in his arms, and never indulge him—well, that would be a waste. Selfish, even. Let him look as long as he liked, then, Caroline decided, and this once let him savor her pleasure, too.
Laura gasped and their eyes flickered toward the sound, breaking the spell. Caroline swayed to her feet and went to kneel beside her daughters. The girls had both slipped from the wagon tongue into tired little heaps of calico in the grass. “What is it, Laura?”
Her blue eyes were wide, full of the sky. “The stars were singing,” Laura whispered.