The chamber pail needed emptying, the water bucket had to be filled, the soup pot must be emptied and scrubbed before she could begin supper again, and Caroline knew—knew with her whole body—that she could do precisely one more task. She pushed herself up, and her shoulders rattled with a chill. Sit, she told herself. Get a minute’s rest, then try. She had hardly sat for two days.
Charles had still not taken to his bed, but Caroline was not fooled. He had not so much as lifted his gun from its pegs. Not even in the depths of a Wisconsin winter had he huddled by the fire making bullets in the middle of the afternoon, much less for two days straight. She’d seen the sheen of cold sweat on his brow in the firelight and watched his hands tremble. It had been all he could do not to spill the molten lead onto the hearth. She did not know how he was managing to keep the stock fed and watered.
Caroline looked again at their own water pail. From where she sat, she could not see past the brim to gauge what little was left. They must have more. To drink, to make more broth, to sponge the perspiration from Mary’s and Laura’s fevered limbs, to rinse the baby’s diapers and her own flannel pads. Just the sight of the pail waiting there by the door made her skin prickle with unease. Charles had not taken it out to fill when he left for the stable, as he always did. That alone told her he was not well. She did not know if she could ask him to go out again, with the chores already taking him so long.
Caroline stopped to think. How long had he been gone? The girls had been so fretful in the meantime, she could not begin to guess. Their fevers and chills never coincided. One was hot and the other cold. She had finally made each half of their small bed with a separate quilt, so that they might stop pulling and kicking at the one they shared. That, at last, had soothed them enough so they could sleep—Laura muffled in her quilt and Mary cringing away from the slightest touch of a sheet. Charles had not been in the house during any of it, or he would have saved the broth from scalding.
In her nest of pillows in the middle of the big bed, Carrie began to snuffle and kick at the air.
“Oh no,” Caroline begged. “Please don’t wake yours sisters. Here.” She opened her bodice, but the fastenings on the flap of her nursing corset would not yield. Her fingertips felt . . . the word would not come to her. Dumbed, she thought, but that was not right. Her mind worked slowly as her hands, fumbling for something she could brush against but not quite grasp.
Caroline leaned down onto one elbow and stretched herself toward the baby, her other hand still working at the stubborn fastenings. “Shh-shh-shh,” she insisted. “I’m coming. Ma’s coming.” The flap had moved only partway. Carrie was on the verge of a squall. Caroline could see her color rising, and all the points of her little face sharpening. She would have to manage. Caroline lay down alongside the baby, letting as much of herself spill through the gap as possible. It was enough.
The steels pinned awkwardly under her body prodded at her, but Caroline did not try to move. Carrie was feeding. Carrie was feeding and the girls were asleep, and all was quiet. There was so much that needed tending to, before the girls woke again and needed her most of all. Rest, she told herself. Rest until Charles comes back from the stable.
Darkness, wavering like a dream all around her. Hot hands, hot fingertips tingling. Hot breath curling over her lips from nostrils like stove holes. She’d never felt such heat—heat that made her skin crackle and shiver. The soles of her feet were papery, as though they’d been peeled down to dry bone. The darkness advanced and receded, expanded and contracted, as though the thick black air meant to crush her, or inhale her. Caroline closed her eyes and the world went mercifully, mercifully still.
A sliver of gray light. Twilight or dawn, Caroline wondered muzzily. The air around her had thinned and cooled, stopped its pulsating, but her limbs, her head, her very eyelids might have been filled with sand for all that Caroline could move them. She felt a scrabbling between her body and her arm, and knew it was Carrie who had woken her. Caroline turned her head to look. The effort made her gasp, made the room reel. Her breast still protruded from the half-opened corset flap, but sometime in the fevered night she had shifted, and Carrie could not reach. The baby had fastened herself to a button on Caroline’s open bodice and sucked until she’d pulled the calico into a pointed wet teat. Carrie tugged and batted at it, confounded.
Tears blurred Caroline’s eyes. “Carrie,” she said, but there was no sound. Her throat was like bark. Caroline prized a quivering hand from the straw tick and managed to loosen the hard twist of fabric from Carrie’s mouth. Carrie instantly raged. Caroline whimpered at the shock of the sound striking her ears and at their own mingled frustration. She gripped the side of the bedstead and pulled. A chill shook her so fiercely, her joints rattled. She pulled again, and her body spasmed. The momentum of it rolled her sideways to meet Carrie, and there Caroline lay, gasping on her side, while Carrie took her fill.
She woke to the smell of filth rising up from the straw tick beneath Carrie. The cow bawled in the stable, and the sound and the smell whirled together. Pain buzzed under her corset, taut and swollen. A wasp sting? Carrie’s lips gave a little pull, and the throbbing doubled. Caroline groaned at the realization. Pinned between herself and the oak slab, Carrie could nurse only from the left breast, while the right slowly filled, caged beneath the steels. The weight of it burned so that Caroline yearned to roll onto her back, but she did not trust her strength to pull the baby with her if she turned over. She could only grip the side of the bedstead to keep herself within Carrie’s reach.
A wail rose up from somewhere beyond the bed. “I want a drink of water, I want a drink of water.”
Mary. Her patient Mary, begging. Caroline’s eyes smarted, but no tears came. Her body had no moisture to spare for anything so frivolous as tears. She felt a bump and a shudder against the board under her hand, and understood that Charles was on the floor beside the bed, trying to rise. His movements sent a cascade of aches through her body. Even the soft knot of her hair probed painfully into her neck. Caroline closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. She would bear it, if it meant he could manage to get up and tend to Mary. But the bed did not move again. Jack pawed, whined, howled. Then all was still—all but Mary’s voice ebbing into sobs so dry, Caroline could hear the thirst scraping at Mary’s throat. Hot needles of milk dampened the right side of her corset.
Caroline levered her head up, just enough to see over the slab. Her arm shook, and her heart seemed to flicker instead of beat. Laura was awake. Her face was dry and yellow, a tired corn husk of a face, but Laura was awake and looking back at her. “Laura,” Caroline whispered, “can you?”
“Yes, Ma,” Laura said.
Caroline dropped down beside the baby. Sounds moved back and forth across the cabin. Jack’s nails on the floor. Dragging, dragging, dragging. A rattle and splash. Then nothing. She could not tell whether Laura had done it, or collapsed trying—only that Mary stopped crying.
Twenty-Four