As each sip expanded her throat, Caroline became aware of Charles standing over her, silent but breathing quickly. He had seen her ill this way before, yet the pitch of his anxiousness was keen enough to draw the girls from the bedroom.
Caroline raised her eyes over the rim of the mug. All three of them stood poised before her, waiting, and suddenly she understood that without a word she could stall their going. A simple shake of her head would send Charles to unload the wagon. But it was not going she dreaded—only leaving. Waiting would wind the dread more tightly. Once the break was made she would be all right. She held them with her silence a moment longer before saying, “Thank you, Charles.” And then with a nod toward the bedroom doorway where Mary and Laura hovered, “Go on with the packing. I can manage breakfast with the girls’ help.”
While Mary and Laura wiped the breakfast dishes, Caroline packed the coffee mill and the tin dredging boxes of flour, salt, and pepper into an open crate with the iron spider and bake oven. “Put these where we can reach them easily,” she told Charles. “The skillets and other things may go anyplace you can fit them, but leave room for the dishpan.”
Caroline emptied the dishpan into the snow, then lined it with a towel and collected one tin plate and cup at a time from Mary and Laura. Through the window, they heard the jostle and clang of Charles fitting the crates into the wagon. They finished just as he returned. “This is the last,” Caroline said, untying her apron and folding it into the top of the dishpan. She held the door for him, then turned to face the naked room.
The bare hearth and table, the cooling cookstove—the bedstead, peeled of its mattress. They had not left, yet this place was no longer their own. Only the calico edging on the curtains and the coats and hoods on the line of pegs by the back door had the look of home about them. Without Charles’s fiddle box or her mending basket close by, even the chairs looked as though they might belong to anyone. There was more comfort in going than staying, now.
In the middle of it, the girls stood looking at her. Mary hitched Nettie up close to her cheek. Laura seemed stranded, as though she were understanding for the first time all that “going west” meant. A tumble of sympathy rolled across Caroline’s breast. Like her pa, all of Laura’s visions of the West had begun with the journey, not the departure.
Piecing together a smile, Caroline held out her hands for both Mary and Laura. “Come along, girls,” she said. “Pa and the horses will be waiting.” Laura took hold of her arm with both hands. Mary ducked beneath Caroline’s elbow and leaned her head into the cinnamon-colored folds of Caroline’s skirt. She felt a smudge of tears on Mary’s cheek, but did not scold. Her own eyes threatened to swim as she shepherded her girls past the empty cluster of chairs before the hearth.
Mary and Laura did not speak as they bundled each other into their coats and rabbit-skin hoods. Caroline’s fingers stumbled over her shawl pin until a little berry of blood ripened on her fingertip, bright as the girls’ red yarn mittens. She winced and licked it clean.
“I wish Nettie had a shawl, too, Ma,” Mary said.
“I am sure there is something in the scrap bag that will do,” Caroline said as she tucked Laura’s coat collar under her hood. “When we are all settled into the wagon, you may see. Hold Nettie close for now and she will not feel the cold.” Caroline herself would have liked to take both of the girls up and tuck them inside her wraps. The steadiness she held so firmly for the children’s sake was forming a brittle shell around her, and Caroline wished to temper it with their softness. Instead, she stepped back and looked them over. “You look very nice,” she said, and nodded toward the door.
The horses greeted Caroline and the girls with billowed breath as they rounded the corner of the cabin. Although her fingers knew each stitch of its skin and its ribs protected every portable scrap of their lives, the wagon did not beckon to Caroline as she had hoped. The sight of it, full and waiting, only made her sorry for the weight and space her own presence demanded—another burden added to the load. Immediately a ribbon of guilt ran down Caroline’s back as she imagined that thought rubbing against the bundle of living freight she herself carried.
Before she could reassure herself of the absurdity of such a notion, Caroline stopped short. Her trunk stood on the ground below the tailgate. All her best things, huddled in the snow, and the wagon crammed to the bows. The finger she’d pricked with her shawl pin throbbed. She dropped Mary’s and Laura’s hands, afraid that they might feel the selfish rush of her pulse.
“Charles?” she called.
What would she say if there were no room for it? Nothing less necessary could stay behind in its place, yet he might as well leave her as that trunk.
His boots sounded across the planks until he stood hunched, palms braced on his thighs, at the lip of the wagon box. Caroline watched the brim of his hat dip as he looked from her face to the trunk.
“Didn’t want to chance lifting it by myself,” he explained, vaulting himself down into the snow. “It’s the size, not the weight. If you can help me get it on board, I can slide it up the aisle all the way to the front, under the straw ticks.” Caroline closed her eyes, unable to hide her relief in any other way. Charles paused. “You didn’t think . . . ?”
A lie would have been simpler, but she could not make room for the weight of it. “I’m sorry, Charles,” she admitted. “I wasn’t thinking.”
With a nod, she was forgiven. Caroline wished now and again that he were not so quick at it; Charles’s good nature hardly left her time enough to reap the satisfaction of repentance.
As they bent to grip the leather handles, a chain of sleighs came hissing across the north field from Henry’s place. Spokes of light from their pierced tin lanterns sliced through the air. Mary and Laura clapped their mittens, prancing on tiptoe as they named one face after another: Grandpa and Grandma Ingalls with Aunt Ruby and Uncle George; Uncle Henry and Aunt Polly; Aunt Eliza and Uncle Peter, and every one of the cousins.
Caroline braced herself to greet them. She could not let them see how much she craved and dreaded this moment.
One by one, Charles’s and Caroline’s brothers and sisters lifted their little ones down into the snow. Caroline watched Peter hold his hands up for her sister Eliza, brimming with her fourth child, just as Charles always did for her. She loved to see the ways their families mirrored each other. With three marriages between them, the Ingallses and Quiners were interwoven close as tartan—first Caroline’s brother Henry had married Charles’s sister, and then Eliza had married one of his brothers. Their children were double cousins twice over.
“Morning,” Charles said to the whole company of them.
No one answered; they had not come to say hello.