Caroline: Little House, Revisited

No more, she promised it. No more. A promise she could not hope to keep. She had no power to seal herself off from fear any more than she could conjure tides of happiness. If nothing else, Caroline suddenly chided herself, she might resolve to stop her mind from fondling the worst of her memories night after night. Her lip trembled at the thought of allowing herself to touch the store of fine things she’d locked in her heart the moment she’d begun packing her trunk in Pepin.

Caroline closed her eyes and imagined her rocking chair. The swish-swish of the runners across the floor, the gentle curve of the slats against her back. Her shoulders felt the soft embrace of her red shawl, its ends tucked around a swaddled bundle. The child’s face still would not form in her mind’s eye, but her arms summoned up its weight, its warmth against her body. Past and future, twined together.



In her mind Caroline fashioned a snug little haven for herself, entering it each night to call up the dearest of her memories for the child to feed on. The taste of her mother’s blueberry cake and cottage cheese pie. The springtime riot of pinks in the sailor’s garden up the road, all the way back in Brookfield. Her first week’s pay as a schoolteacher, two dollar bills and two shining quarters. The cornhusking dances in Concord—the rich green swirl of her delaine skirt, the sound of Charles’s fiddle, the feel of his hands on her waist as they danced. Their first night together in their own little house in Pepin. Eliza. Henry. Polly. Ma and Papa Frederick. These memories ached, but softly, so that the ache itself became a pleasure. The ache hurt less than the blank places she had carved out by trying not to remember.

Nights passed, and Caroline found she did not need to reach so far back to find a memory that would unfurl into something so bright and warming that she thought surely the child must be sharing in her contentment. The child, after all, had been there, floating in the center of her every moment: Their first piping hot meal after the miring storm. The sky reflected in Laura’s eyes the night she said the stars were singing. Supper with Edwards, with the newly built house outlined against that same starry sky. These recollections were not edged with wistfulness. They burned cheerfully, leaving no dim corners for darker thoughts of the creek, the Osages, or the well to congregate.

Then came the night after Charles finished the bedstead, when she could not think of one thing more comforting than the feel of that bed against her back. If she had not filled it with her own hands, Caroline would not have believed she lay on the same straw tick. The prairie grass beneath her was finer than straw, with a warm, golden-green smell somewhere between hot bread and fresh herbs, and it enveloped her like broth welcoming a soup bone. Her hips and shoulder blades, which always seemed to sink straight to the floor, floated above the rope Charles had strung between the framing slabs. She shifted deeper, and the rope sighed and the grass whispered. “I declare, I’m so comfortable it’s almost sinful!” she said and closed her eyes, the better to savor every inch of the sheets cradling her body.





Twenty




At the sight of Charles and two cowboys leading a cow and calf up out of the creek bottoms, Caroline thought she must be back in her soft bed, dreaming. She had sat down on the end of the bed by the window with the mending, waiting for the fire to slack enough to put the cornbread on to bake, and the midsummer heat had lulled her to sleep. Caroline blinked, trying to sift the few fragments of reality from what she saw. It was already a stretch to make herself believe that a herd truly had chanced to pass by their claim, that the men driving it offered Charles a day’s work keeping the longhorns out of the ravines instead of Edwards or Scott or anyone else in Montgomery County. Absurd as it was, that was real, and that itself—a day’s work in exchange for a piece of fresh beef—had felt like a dream even as Caroline clasped her hands for delight. Now she closed her eyes and stretched her shoulders, waiting for the image to scatter and refashion into the familiar lines of the roof and walls.

Caroline opened her eyes and instead there was Charles, tying the animals to the corner of the stable and shaking hands with the two cowboys. “Well, Caroline?” he called through the window. When she did not answer he untied a fat packet from his saddle horn and held it up. The beef. If that beef was real, Caroline thought. Her mouth fell open. She felt a laugh go tumbling out of her, heard it meet with Charles’s great rumbling peals, and knew it was not a dream at all.

Of course it was providential. It could be nothing else. But a slab of beef, a cow, and a calf was too extravagant, even for Providence. A cow. And a calf. She could not help repeating it to herself. There had never been a word so impossibly big as that and. A cow and a calf. Both rangy and unruly but goodness, milk and butter. Perhaps, Caroline thought, the hand of Providence had only been passing over them, on its way elsewhere with these fine gifts, and had somehow dropped them.



But the land continued to burgeon with gifts for them. Yellow-orange plums small enough to scoop up with a spoon. Walnuts, pecans, and hickory nuts still in their green husks, plumping for autumn. A queer purple flower with a turnip-like root that Edwards called Indian breadroot; Caroline could not get enough of its crisp, white flesh.

“Close your eyes,” Charles said as he came through the door. It had become a game with him, bringing home little surprises to plop into their open palms. If not something to eat, then something to marvel at—a kernel of blue corn, a speckled green prairie chicken egg. “Now open your mouth.”

Caroline hesitated. Last time it had been a sunflower seed, from the Indian camp. Charles had cut one of the great yellow flowers from its stalk and pegged it up on the side of the chimney to dry. She did not like to wonder what the Osages would think to see it dangling there, no matter how many times Charles told her the camp surrounding the crops was deserted. The idea of the Indians leaving their corn and beans and sunflowers to the mercy of weather and wild animals was nonsensical.

She could feel Charles waiting, daring her not to trust him. Caroline opened her mouth.

She smelled the juice on his fingers before it touched her tongue. A blackberry, hot and sweet from the sun. Caroline sighed as she crushed it against the roof of her mouth. The rapture of its smoothness, the burst of flavor like a pinch to her tongue. Nothing had tasted so bright since last summer’s tart cherries.

“All along the creek,” Charles said. “The fruit just about brushes the ground, the brambles are so heavy. You couldn’t pick them all in a week.”

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