Charles stood beside the newly fashioned doorway, grinning. The house was just as he had said, just as she had pictured it: a little more than twelve feet square, with windows east and west and space for a fireplace at one end.
But looking at it did not feel the same as imagining it, not even with the homey smell of a company supper wafting in. Her mind had limned the image with warmth and softness, as though it would become home the moment it existed. The reality was simply a house—fresh and welcoming, yet surreal in its blankness.
She had felt something very like this before, Caroline remembered, the first time Polly put Mary into her arms. All those months waiting for their baby, their child, their son or daughter—and what arrived was an infant. Bewilderment still overpowered every sensation of that moment. An infant in her arms, astoundingly complete and tangible, and as wholly unfamiliar as though Polly had lifted Mary out of a satchel instead of Caroline’s own body.
Shyly, Caroline reached out and touched the slab that formed the doorway, then looked inside. She would sweep this space every day, sleep in it, wake in it. Bathe and dress in it. Come time, she would bear a child within these walls, and likely one day conceive the next. In the midst of it all, Caroline knew, the place would shift from house to home without her ever being able to pinpoint the moment of its happening.
Poised on the threshold, she pressed her fingertips gently against the bare wood but did not step inside. A notion had taken hold of her, too foolish to speak aloud and too firm to brush aside. Not until we’ve properly introduced ourselves.
They ate around the fire, halfway between house and tent—a respectful sort of distance that made Caroline wonder if all of them secretly shared her inkling to let the house acquaint itself with them. Or perhaps it was only that they wanted to sit back and admire it.
Edwards lay stretched out on the ground, her dumplings plumping his narrow middle, while Charles played the fiddle for the girls. Soon Edwards was up and dancing, and Mary and Laura clapped their delight. Charles’s face gleamed behind the white flash of the bow, as though he were playing for a barn brimful of swirling couples.
Caroline sat back and smiled. This, she thought to herself. This was how it had felt to imagine themselves at home in Kansas. The particulars were different, with Edwards kicking up his heels and her own foot still too sore for tapping and the house only an outline behind them, but the glow of it, that was the same.
Caroline gazed beyond them, to the empty house with the pale ribs of its roof standing out against the sky. Tomorrow they would fill it.
Sixteen
Walls, straight up and down, and a ridgepole too high to touch. Caroline had not realized how much she missed the simple shape of a room. Her eyes could not get enough of the lovely squareness of the corners with their sturdy intersections. It did not matter that there was no door, no shutters, no curtains. Even with sunshine pouring through the chinks and the open roof Caroline felt sheltered, truly sheltered, for the first time in months. All this time she had held herself half-hunched against the elements, always ready to cock one shoulder against wind or rain or whatever else the sky might hurl at them. What a delight to turn her back almost defiantly to the sky as she swept the last of the chips from the floor.
Above her, Charles wrestled with the wind, stretching the canvas like a skin over the skeleton of roof poles. All those onerous yards of stitches had held so well that the wagon cover could serve as their roof until Charles raised a stable. That in itself was so immensely satisfying that the idea of a cloth roof did not dampen the pleasure Caroline took in the house. Already the space it enclosed belonged to her in a way the inside of the wagon never had, for the wagon never held the same space—it only flowed through a place, borrowing as it went.
A beguiling, radiant sort of shade fell over her. It was the canvas, suffusing the bright sunlight overhead. Caroline stilled the broom and pushed back her sunbonnet to watch Charles work. The wind was giving him fits, billowing and snapping the canvas and blowing his hair and whiskers every which way. He snorted and blustered so, she wanted to laugh at him. He would have that wagon cover lashed down in a jiffy. She knew it, even if he did not. Caroline pulled her bonnet into place and hurried to the bare tent poles to fold up the linens. The first thing she wanted to see inside the house were the straw ticks, all plumped up smooth.
“There!” Charles barked at the canvas. “Stay where you are and be—”
Caroline whirled, her arms full of quilts. “Charles!”
“—and be good.” He blinked sweetly down at her. “Why, Caroline, what did you think I was going to say?”
“Oh, Charles!” she cried. “You scalawag!”
He shimmied down the outer corner of the walls and scruffed up his hair until it looked like he’d crawled out from under a bramble bush.
The laugh she’d held back earlier tumbled out of her. Charles grabbed her up in his arms, triumphant. The rascal—no one else in the world could make her forget herself enough to shout and laugh like a schoolgirl.
“How’s that for a snug house?” Charles asked, pulling her close against his side so they could both look at it.
The square yellow logs, topped with pale, smooth canvas, looked nearly golden against the soft blue sky. She could not begin to tell him how fine it looked. “I’ll be thankful to get into it,” she said.
“We’re going to do well here, Caroline,” Charles said. All the teasing had slipped from his voice. “This is a great country. This is a country I’ll be contented to stay in the rest of my life.”
Caroline’s heart paused for an instant. There was a weight to those words she had not heard from him before, a fullness. “Even when it’s settled up?” she ventured, scarcely daring to tilt her bonnet brim to look at him.
He squeezed her in against his chest with each syllable. “Even when it’s settled up,” he promised, and leaned his cheek on top of her head. “No matter how thick and close the neighbors get, this country’ll never feel crowded. Look at that sky!”
It was so. Surveyors might come with their compasses and chains to mark the necessary range and township lines, but they would never square the curve from the sky.