There is nothing in the world but the weight—pulling, tugging, dragging down. Not a log in her hands, but her own belly, too heavy to hold. If she lets go, it will break free, tearing her dress, her corset strings, her very skin. Barefoot, she roams the prairie for help. In one cabin, only men. In the next, Indians. Her arms ache; her breasts weigh like sacks of coffee. Her knuckles begin slipping past one another. Then the sound of ripping—fibers of cloth or flesh?
Caroline blinked. Nothing had split apart but her eyelids. The weight was only Charles’s arm, hugged down into the dwindling valley between her belly and breasts. Caroline lay awake, feeling the throb of her pulse against the rags bound about her ankle. Her mind throbbed, too, making pictures in the dark: Charles pinned under the fallen log instead. The dreadful creek she must cross to reach help in Independence. Caroline pinched her eyes shut. The pictures changed but did not dim. She saw her own high belly, and the empty foot of a bedstead looming from between her drawn-up knees. The place where Polly should be. “Oh, Polly,” she whispered.
Caroline pulled as deep a breath as she could wedge under Charles’s arm and willed herself to relax. That she could not manage. Her foot hurt, and the straw tick no longer smelled of home. It was thinner, and prickly in places with the new straw Jacobs had given them. Caroline tried to shift herself without rousing Charles and the child moved. A jerky little movement, as though she’d startled it.
She was caught between them. Sandwiched queerly from without and within. Resigned, she laid her arm over his, her palm brushing across the soft curling hairs that belied the firm muscles beneath. How different it must feel to be a man: built solid through, with everything beneath the skin belonging solely to yourself. Did he ever envy what she could take into herself, how much she could contain? Could he comprehend all it meant for a woman to hold herself open for her husband, her children? For all it demanded of her Caroline knew she would not trade the depth of those open spaces, those currents of life passing through her. No man could encompass another life so fully as a woman, except perhaps in his mind. Perhaps that was what made Charles clutch her so close now as he slept. He had felt her slip through his fingers this afternoon. It was providential, he had said, that her foot had not been crushed. She had not told him that the same hollow that saved her foot had caused the fall.
Caroline lost count of how many days passed before she could wear her shoe again, never mind lace it. Her instep swelled until the skin shone taut and yellow. Beneath the joint itself the side of her foot looked as though it were pooling with ink; a streak of black and blue and purple marked a line along the sole of her foot. Bands of greenish-purple ringed the base of her toes. The deep rosy smudges running up her calf seemed almost pretty in comparison. The smooth white fibers that joined muscle to bone in the stringy drumsticks of rabbits and fowl, these she could feel now in her own leg, and it was there that the pain lingered most stubbornly.
In the meantime she hobbled, and the house waited. Charles hewed out skids, and they leaned against the unfinished walls like a pair of crutches until the day he came up from the creek bottom calling, “Good news!”
An upward rush of hope surged through her and then leveled. He had not been to town—it would not be a letter or a paper.
“A neighbor,” Charles said. “Just two miles over the creek. Fellow’s a bachelor. Says he can get along without a house better than you and the girls, so he’ll help me build first. Then soon as he’s got his logs ready, I’ll help him. How do you like that, Caroline?”
It was a trifle ridiculous that he should bring them seven hundred miles to be so tickled by the discovery of a neighbor. She smiled, almost without meaning to, and Charles was pleased. It was fine news, nonetheless.
He was there before the breakfast dishes were wiped—tall and scruffy, a weed of a man. His manners were quicker even than Charles’s. “The name’s Edwards, ma’am,” he said without waiting to be introduced, and bowed so low that the tail of his coonskin cap brushed the ground. He looked at her almost in the way a woman would look—taking her in all at once, somehow acknowledging the evidence of her pregnancy without lingering on it or shying from it. Perhaps Charles had told him. Perhaps that was why he had come so willingly to help.
From the moment he bent down on one knee to shake her hand, Laura could not take her eyes from Mr. Edwards. “I’m a wildcat from Tennessee,” he told her, and she was charmed. Mary liked him, too, but seemed to think she shouldn’t. Caroline saw the way she looked at his ragged jumper and watched her eyes widen with a mixture of awe and disgust when he spit a stream of tobacco juice from the corner of the house to the wagon tongue.
Caroline had to admit, if only to herself, that she had never seen a man spit so purposefully. With most of them it was like emptying a dishpan, the careless brown stream splashing forth just inches from their boots. Edwards took aim every time he pursed his lips and sent a neat line arcing straight toward his target.
Mary’s instinct was to tame Edwards, to mend his jumper and perhaps ask Santa Claus to bring him a pretty brass spittoon for Christmas. Laura wanted to be Edwards, to climb the walls and sing and swing an ax until the chips flew faster than the music.
Charles and Edwards worked together like brothers, so fast and sure that it was bewildering to see. Caroline watched them singing and joking, riding the rising walls together and felt envy seeping into her gratitude. It had not mattered so very much yesterday when Charles had said their neighbor was a bachelor, but now Caroline longed for a Mrs. Edwards. Her girls helped, and eagerly, but it was not the same as working companionably alongside another woman.
And Edwards, who was he accustomed to working beside, back home in Tennessee? The way his movements harmonized with Charles’s made it plain that he was used to being part of a team, and a good one, too. She and Charles could never have raised the walls in a single day. For that matter, neither could Charles and Henry, back home.
They would have dumplings with the stewed jackrabbit for their supper, Caroline decided. Never mind that there was no milk, no egg, no butter. White flour would show Edwards what his day’s work meant to her. She dipped up a small cupful of broth and mixed it with bacon drippings, salt, and sugar. Then the soft, snowy flour, a full pint of it. She had not even opened the bag since . . . Christmas? Her eyes smarted at that, and Caroline shrugged one shoulder up to swipe her cheek. No use in summoning up thoughts of Christmas with Eliza and Peter.