Under her skirts and steels, the still and silent baby seemed to twirl like a key turning, as if it had been waiting, all this time, for this night and those words. A deep pulse of thankfulness radiated through her body before her mind could form the words. Caroline blinked tears from her lashes as she said to Laura, “You’ve been asleep. It is only the fiddle. And it’s time little girls were in bed.”
The firelight shone in their sleepy eyes and blushed all the round and dimpled places on their bare skins as they crawled into their nightdresses. Such plump and sturdy little girls. Anyone could see they had never known a moment’s want, never dreaded the bottom of the flour barrel as she once had. Perhaps in a place like this they never would. Caroline tucked them into the wagon, leaving the canvas open so they might see the stars as they drifted off, and returned to the fire. She sat down close beside Charles, too full for words, and looked out into the wide open night. It was not hard to imagine that darkness stretching all the way back across the long way they had come. And the fiddle sang, low and rich now, its melodies swaying in an easy back-and-forth rhythm until the home they had left and the home they would make seemed within reach of each other.
Neither of them tied down the wagon cover. There was no need. The night was pleasantly cool even as they undressed, and Caroline had no desire to separate herself from it.
Nor did Charles. He lay down beside her and unfastened the yoke of her nightdress, tucking it back so her bare shoulder stood out white in the moonlight.
“Charles,” she warned.
“Shhh,” he said. “Just this.” His hand traveled across her skin, stirring the downy hair along the peak of her shoulder. The inside of his wrist came to rest along the slope of her breast, and his warm pulse reached inward to meet her own.
Only his thumb moved now, so lightly Caroline felt as though she were rising like cream through milk. She opened her mouth to quiet her breathing and closed her eyes. Her fingers found a soft little gully between the corded muscles of his neck. With her thumb she stroked the whiskers along his jaw. “Caroline,” he whispered, and she felt the word with her fingers. There was no need to answer.
Fourteen
Once more into the wagon, with the sun just peeking over the rim of the earth. All of them looked ahead now—not just Charles—watching as if the land that was to be theirs would be waiting to greet them. Charles whistled one tune after another as Pet and Patty strolled briskly through the swishing yellow grass. Away from the road it was tall enough to brush their bellies.
Caroline hummed along, her heart fluttering. Today was different. Each one of them down to the horses knew it. No road stretched before them, demanding that they strive ahead. They had been harnessed to that endless brown line, Caroline thought, just as surely as Pet and Patty were harnessed to the wagon. Without it the drudgery of trudging ever forward had lifted, and she felt such a lightness. Nothing pressed them—not the weather nor the time of day nor the distance—nothing but their own eagerness. They hurried, but only a little, only for the joy of it.
Before their breakfast had begun to wear off, Charles pulled back on the reins. “Here we are, Caroline. Right here we’ll build our house.”
Here. Caroline blinked at the suddenness of it. So many long weeks and miles, ended in a single syllable.
The others felt no such jar. Down Mary and Laura went, their bare toes curling over the spokes of the wheels. “Ready?” Charles held up his hands for her, as he always did. Caroline leaned down into them as though it were the first time. The house was not even paced off, yet she had the unmistakable sense of crossing its threshold as Charles put his hands to her waist and swung her to the ground.
No matter where the wagon stopped these last few days, there was always the feeling of being at the very center of the world. And now this would be their center, their world. It was beautiful, this pale, bright country with its blue-white sky, as beautiful as anything they had seen along the way.
Caroline turned slowly, looking all around her for something to mark this plot of ground off from the boundless land around it—something to fix in her memory and recognize as their own if she ever needed to find this place again, as the two big oaks and the sumac along the fence back home had done.
Here there were no marks upon the land itself. No fence or road, no hedge or furrow. Only bluffs rising to the north, an endless span of grass unrolling to the south. Between them, the rumpled line of a creek. Even the path the wagon had made through the grass was already melding back together.
For a moment she was adrift in the sameness of it all. There was nothing but the wagon to fasten to, and a wagon could never be trusted for such a task. Caroline swept her eyes across the breadth of the horizon. East to west, west to east, and back again. The more she looked, the more she steadied. No one thing had grasped her sight. It was everything at once, the whole contour of the view—the particular curve of the creek, the rougher edge of the bluffs against the sky—and the emerging knowledge that none of it could look quite the same from anywhere else. She could learn to recognize those lines the same way she recognized a familiar line of handwriting. It would only take time.
They unloaded the wagon right then and there, everything onto the ground with the canvas to spread over it. Then the wagon box itself came off the running gear and rested beside its freight. Goodness, it was small out in the open, all bare and swept and only a little more than knee-high in the tall grass.
Then, perched on the running gear, Charles rattled away toward the creek bottoms with his ax.
For most of the next two weeks there was little but the sound of that ax. Felling, chopping, hewing. The creak and tear of the bark and sapwood splitting away from the pale yellow heart of each log as he squared them off. They were lovely to look at, all neatly stacked and waiting to be joined together. The sun warmed the freshly hewn logs and every day Caroline could smell the smell of the house they would become, imagining it all around her. But she did not wait for the house to begin feeling at home. Each day the sun rose and set on the same sides of her bed. Good oak kindling piled up by the hour, and every bucket of water came from the same clean, sweet creek. And there was the unutterable luxury of a necessary, built of poles with a door and a plank seat.