It started low, and early. The cabin was still dim when Caroline woke to the warming ache behind her bladder. She levered herself from the bedstead and went to the door. The sun was not up, yet already the breath of the wind warmed her face. She stepped barefoot into the hazy predawn. Jack followed, perturbed.
Her waters broke just outside the necessary.
For a moment Caroline stood dripping on the path, thankful it hadn’t happened in the new bedstead. The sight of the fluid soaking into the earth put a queer thrill high in her belly, at the spread of her ribs. This was something altogether different from emptying the family chamber pail along the roads of Iowa and Missouri. Had she been a papist, she might have crossed herself. Jack crept forward to sniff at the puddle and seemed satisfied. That was all the reverence Caroline needed, and she went about her business.
Charles met her at the cabin door.
“Caroline?”
She knew how she must look—barefoot, with her hair unpinned and the back of her gown wet and likely stained. “You’d best go ask for Mrs. Scott to come today. I should think before noon I will have need of her.”
A shimmer of fear and excitement lit his eyes. “It’s sooner than you expected. Isn’t it?”
She tried to smile. “Only by two weeks. Maybe three.” Perhaps even four.
“If I leave now, Scott’ll be up for chores by the time I get there.”
“And the girls?”
He nodded, shrugging into his suspenders. “I’ll think of something to keep them busy.”
All through the morning, the pain stretched steadily upward, tightening the hammock of her belly. By the time she’d cleared the breakfast dishes, it was cresting beneath her ribs. Under the waves flowed a tension that never eased. The dull heat of it rose upward until her throat was rigid from cinching back the sounds of her discomfort. Determined not to groan or whimper in front of the girls, she tried humming a little over the dishwater and found a sort of harmony in letting her voice drift above the drone of clenching muscle.
“One little, two little, three little Indians,” Charles sang, pointing at Mary’s and Laura’s tanned faces, then wagging his finger in the air. “Nope, only two.”
“You make three,” Mary said. “You’re brown, too.”
Caroline had never cared for that song, but the pulse of the melody pleased her now. As long as she hummed, she did not have to remind herself to exhale.
“How would you girls like to go with me to see the Indian camp?” Charles asked. Laura danced up onto her toes, clapping. Even Mary dropped her dish towel and dashed to Charles’s knee.
Caroline went cold. “It’s so far, Charles,” she said, clambering for words that would not show her fear. “And Laura is so little. She can’t walk so far in this heat.”
Laura’s heels drooped to the floor.
“Then she shall ride Jack,” Charles said. The lift of his eyebrows begged her not to press further. “Camp’s been deserted for weeks,” he added. “Not a whiff for Jack to trouble himself over.”
Caroline nodded and turned back to the dishpan. There was nothing else for it; the girls must be away all day. She fetched the comb and sat down on the tallest of the crates with the small of her back pressed against the table. “Mary, Laura, you must be combed and braided. Indian camp or not, I won’t have you going out with your hair wild.”
The smooth strands coiling over and around her knuckles soothed her—such softness in contrast to what was happening within her body. While Laura stood between her knees, Caroline felt her belly go taut against the little girl’s back. Laura spun around, her eyes wide. “Do it again, Ma,” she asked.
“All done,” Caroline said, shooing her along. “Mary’s turn.”
She tied their sunbonnets under their chins and handed the girls off to Charles, all brightly framed in calico. Her breath hitched, she wanted so badly to draw them up into her lap until Mrs. Scott came, but she made herself cheerful and followed them to the door. Charles lifted Laura onto Jack’s back. Caroline smiled a little when the bulldog reached around to snuffle her bare toes.
“Now we’ll all be Indians together,” Charles said.
Mary turned in the dooryard. “Ma?” Her blue eyes looked like she very nearly understood.
Caroline softened her face as best she could and nodded toward the open prairie. “Go with your pa,” she said.
A tremor of panic climbed Caroline’s throat as the tall grass enveloped Charles and the girls. There was not a sound in all the world but the swishing of that grass and a rising whir of insects. She was alone, without even the bulldog. And this cabin was not fully home, despite the china shepherdess standing on the mantel. She laced her fingers beneath her belly and hugged herself. Her mother, widowed a month before Thomas’s birth, had not been so forsaken as this.
Caroline blinked away the memory. There was not time to think of such things. Not with Mrs. Scott on her way, and work yet to be done before she arrived.
Sweat simmered out of her as she rubbed her nightdress over the washboard. She could not help feeling misplaced; leaning over a wash bucket at this hour on mending day skewed the rhythm of the week. If she could not be near Eliza or Polly or Ma this day, Caroline wanted to be busy with her work basket as she knew they would be. But her soiled nightdress must be washed. It ought to have been done sooner if it were to dry in time, but she had not known how to explain the stain to the girls.
Much as she concentrated on her task, Caroline could not rinse nor wring the images of her kin from her mind. She paused to wipe a wet cuff along her hairline as a pang took hold. There was no sense in missing Eliza and Ma, she scolded herself as she squeezed the water from the nightdress. Neither of them had ever lived near enough to attend her deliveries. Yet with every stricture of her womb the stretch of the seven years since she had last seen her mother seemed to broaden. And Eliza. The thought of her sister nursing her own little one in the rocker they had left behind watered Caroline’s eyes.
The twisted nightdress creaked before she realized her elbows were trembling. Caroline shook the garment free of itself and stood a moment, letting the rising wind snap the last droplets from its hem. One still morning, Charles had pointed out the smoke from the Scotts’ cabin to Laura. Now the blowing grass leaned toward the neighbors’ claim, its thousands of bending fingers leading Caroline’s eye’s ever eastward. The air carried a hearth-like smell of hot clay and browning grain, but not a sign of habitation breached the horizon. Her low voice sidled shakily into the wind:
Come to that happy land, come, come away,
Why will ye doubting stand, why still delay?