Scott was pleasant enough, but he was not convivial like Mr. Edwards. After a polite “Morning, ma’am,” he hardly seemed to notice her, or the girls. He swore mildly but absently during his spells down in the shaft, and Caroline tried all day long to keep Laura from straying near enough to hear the short blasts of execration echoing up out of the dirt walls.
At night, Charles was tired. Work with Scott was ordinary work—the bite of the shovel and the crank of the windlass. Occasionally a bark of laughter, but no rhythm, no real harmony between them.
Still, she was thankful for his work. Thankful even before the morning Charles said, almost in passing as he headed out the door with his shovel, “Scott said he spoke to his wife and she’ll come for you. When it’s time.”
A flush crept up her neck to think of the men speaking together of such things.
“Did you thank him?”
Charles nodded.
Good then. It was done, however awkwardly. A space had cleared around her lungs, as though the news had loosened her corset strings.
Mrs. Scott would come. But now Caroline’s greedy mind wanted to know what Mrs. Scott’s voice sounded like, how many children she’d borne, whether her hands were large or small. Things Caroline did not know how to ask her own husband without betraying apprehensions that had no business intruding on such good news.
Mrs. Scott would come, Caroline repeated to herself. That alone told her something about the woman. If she could leave her own claim long enough to attend a lying-in, any children she had were weaned. There might be an older girl, big enough to keep up the housework and get the meals. She had volunteered to come, that much was almost certain. Caroline could picture Mr. Scott talking to his wife over supper, telling her about the Ingalls family from Wisconsin: a carpenter and his wife with two little girls, and the missus in the family way. A man who cursed the sun and wind—however mildly—in a woman’s presence might not be so reluctant to say it right out, Caroline reckoned.
“No other kin?” asked the imaginary Mrs. Scott.
Mr. Scott would shake his head. Would he know why she had asked?
“You may tell them I’ll come for her.”
Charles’s voice strayed into her imaginings. “Scott? Scott! Scott!” A pause. “Caroline, come quick!”
She might have scoffed at the words. Quick, indeed. Nothing she did felt quick these days. The sound of them was something else altogether. Caroline had never heard his voice like this. Dread billowed up around her so suddenly, everything else fell away—the sheets from her hands and the thoughts from her mind—and Caroline flew outside.
Charles was down on all fours beside the hole, peering into it. “Scott’s fainted or something down there,” he said. “I’ve got to go down after him.”
“Did you send down the candle?” Caroline asked.
“No. I thought he had. I asked him if it was all right, and he said it was.”
She had seen Mr. Scott shaking his head at the way Charles lowered a candle down the well to test the air each morning. Foolishness, he’d said. At once Caroline knew that blustering, impatient man had not done it. He had shimmied down the rope into who knows what kind of miasma while Charles finished his breakfast. She shaded her eyes and squinted into the hole. Not a glimmer of light, nor a glimpse of Mr. Scott’s sun-bleached hair.
What shall we do? The words never reached her lips. Caroline looked up to ask, and Charles was tying a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. “Got to get the rope around him or we can’t pull him out.”
No. Her whole body pulsed with the word. No, no, no. “Charles,” she said almost tentatively, as though her voice were backing away from the idea, “you can’t. You mustn’t.”
The triangle of handkerchief puffed out with each word. “Caroline, I’ve got to.”
The wide black throat of the well gaped silently at his knees. Cold tingled in Caroline’s belly at the thought of its depth. “You can’t. Oh, Charles, no!”
“I’ll make it all right,” he promised. “I won’t breathe till I get out.” Caroline stood so still, the world seemed to quiver around her. What made him think he could promise such a thing? He could not climb back up that rope quickly enough to guarantee his own safety without someone to crank the windlass and draw him out of the earth like a bucket. For weeks, Charles had not let her carry so much as a pail of water from the creek. Now he asked this of her. No, did not even ask. She was so big she could no longer lift Laura onto her lap, yet he never considered for an instant that she would do anything but leap to the crank to help him save a man she hardly knew.
“We can’t let him die down there,” Charles said.
“No,” Caroline declared. Better one man dead than both of them. There was no simpler arithmetic. “No, Charles!” she said again. Caroline watched, dumbstruck, as he sliced the top bucket free and tied the rope to the windlass as if she had not said a word. Her vow of obedience, broken, and it held no power over him. It did not matter whether she was willing to save Mr. Scott, Caroline realized in a dizzying rush, because once Charles stepped into that hole, there was not one fiber of her body that would refuse to strain at the crank to bring her husband back. He had not asked because she had no choice. Panic spurted into Caroline’s limbs, pooling hot and syrupy in the crook of her arms and behind her knees. “I can’t let you. Get on Patty and go for help,” she pleaded.
He shook his head. “There isn’t time.” He reached for the rope and leaned over the pit.
“Charles, if I can’t pull you up—if you keel over down there and I can’t pull you up—” The way he looked at her, so earnest and determined, cracked her voice.
“Caroline, I’ve got to.”
The ground swallowed him up, one silent gulp, and Caroline dropped to her knees. Above her the windlass squealed wildly, unspooling its last few feet, and thrummed to a sudden stop.
The rope trembled straight and taut, then went slack. He was at the bottom.
Oh, God, she prayed. Dear God. Her eyes reached and reached. There was nothing for them to fasten to but the moist brown walls of the pit. Sounds wafted up at her, sounds so muffled and magnified by their long ascent that she could not make them out.
Seven. Eight. Nine. If he did not shout, or tug at the rope within ten breaths . . . then what? Turn the crank? Run for help? Twelve. Thirteen. The rope jiggled and twitched. Caroline wrapped her fingers around it, felt the thin line of movement running through it. As long as it was moving, Caroline promised herself, Charles was alive. So long as it was moving, she would not let go of that rough jute, no matter how many breaths passed. Eighteen, nineteen.
Suddenly the rope twanged to the center of the well.