“You can’t be hungry now,” Caroline said, perilously close to a whimper herself, though it was plain from the shape of Carrie’s mouth and the tone of her cry that Carrie was. Caroline sighed. She could still taste the last dose of quinine, there at the back of her tongue where it was hardest to dislodge. She unbuttoned her bodice and resigned herself to the coming reaction.
Carrie squirmed. She scowled. She jabbed at Caroline with her small sharp fists, determined that the good milk she had found in the same place not an hour before must still be there. Such a flood of warm sympathy filled the space behind Caroline’s breasts at the sight of Carrie’s consternation as would have drenched the child, but Caroline could not communicate it, except perhaps through the milk Carrie would not take. Defeated, Carrie threw back her fists. Her face flushed and her chest spasmed with a silent scream. The tiny body in Caroline’s arms seemed to beg for movement, but every speck of Caroline’s energy was rationed, with none to spare to walk the floor with her daughter. Again Carrie cried and Caroline’s milk answered, wetting the both of them.
“It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow some good,” Charles called from the dooryard.
Her impulse was to hiss at him to hush, that Carrie was asleep, as anyone with the consideration to look before hollering out that way could see. Caroline looked up from her mixing bowl and saw him backing through the open door, carrying what seemed at first glance to be a strangely graceful armload of willow kindling. Charles stopped in the center of the room and put it down. “Didn’t have the strength to cut firewood, so I sat myself on a stump behind the woodpile and built this for you instead.”
A chair. A rocking chair.
Caroline could not speak. For a terrible instant, she thought she might burst into tears. She had never asked, never complained of leaving anything behind, yet he had known, and made her the thing she longed for most. And she had nearly scolded him for it. Now and again she had heard the sounds of his ax and hammer, and thought nothing of it.
“Should I show you how it works,” Charles teased, “or are you happy enough just looking at it?” She was, nearly. It was such a lithe-looking thing, its frame a single swooping curve, its back and seat good plain wickerwork. Caroline reached out to touch the narrow willow arm. No further. She would make herself feel as lovely as the chair itself before sitting in it, she decided.
First, she smoothed her hair and took off her apron, as though her momentary flicker of anger were a stain she could strip from herself. Then she went to her trunk and brought out her gold bar pin and fixed it to her collar. Charles put the pillows from Mary and Laura’s bed onto the chair, and draped the whole thing over with their small red and blue quilt. Then Charles took Caroline by the hand and led her to the chair with the girls prancing like puppies.
Through the pillows, the woven willow strips cradled her back. She tested the chair’s easy backward sway and thought of the cool willows swishing like hoop skirts along the creek. Caroline closed her eyes. “Oh, Charles, I haven’t been so comfortable since I don’t know when.”
How well he knew her, shape and size. When she rested her elbows on the rocker’s arms, they did not pry her shoulders upward. The seat’s depth precisely matched the span between the small of her back and the bend of her knees. Beneath her the floor seemed to rise to meet her feet at each forward swoop. Even the Big Woods rocker she had mourned all this time had not fit so well.
That chair Charles had fashioned as much out of awe as wood, honing and polishing until he had created a frame worthy of the image he carried in his mind of his wife and child-to-be. Empty, it had been a beautiful thing to look at.
This chair was another kind of gift. Five years had passed, and Caroline knew he had never stopped looking at her. Indeed, he had only looked more closely. He had seen—and remembered—how she rocked on tiptoe, the way she sometimes slipped her elbows from its arms to rest her shoulders as she nursed or sewed. From those memories he had woven a chair that held her as effortlessly as a pitcher holds water. And he had done it by measuring with nothing more than his gaze.
Charles lifted Carrie from the bed. Caroline reached for the baby, hands already curving to her shape, softening in welcome. When their skins touched, it was like a kiss.
As she leaned back Caroline’s elbows settled into the curling arms of the chair. All the crosspieces of her body seemed to loosen. With a sigh she looked at Carrie, and the child smiled up at her. Caroline’s breath hitched. Carrie’s eyes were still so big in her peaked little face, but her cheeks had shown a flicker of roundness. A feeling like a spreading of wings brushed Caroline’s womb and she pulled Carrie closer, rocking deeply now, as if the motion might keep all that she felt from spilling over.
With a thud, the floorboard bounced beneath her feet. Caroline nearly spilled the dishpan. She whirled toward the sound and saw a watermelon rolling just inside the doorway. Charles sank down beside it.
“Charles! Are you all right?”
“Thought I’d never get it here,” he said, slapping the melon. “It must weigh forty pounds, and I’m as weak as water.”
A strange mixture of dread and desire fluttered Caroline’s stomach. “Charles,” she warned, “you mustn’t. Mrs. Scott said—”
He only laughed. “That’s not reasonable. I haven’t tasted a good slice of watermelon since Hector was a pup. It wasn’t a melon that made us sick. Fever and ague comes from breathing the night air. Anyone knows that.”
Caroline tucked her fingers into her palms. They itched to spank that fat melon as Charles had, to hear its delicious green thump. In her mind she could already taste watermelon rind pickles, with lemon, vinegar, and sugar; cinnamon, allspice, and clove. Her thoughts seemed to cartwheel over each other, she was so eager to talk herself into it. She only half believed Mrs. Scott’s proclamations about watermelons and ague, and Charles’s logic could not be denied. None of them had so much as laid eyes on a melon since Wisconsin. Caroline glanced at the girls, and all her eagerness fell flat. The very fact that they were playing quietly indoors on a day such as this reminded her of all the ague had cost them already. The consequences were more than Caroline dared chance. “This watermelon grew in the night air,” she countered, then bit her lip. The argument was so weak, it had the ring of a joke.
“Nonsense,” Charles said. “I’d eat this melon if I knew it would give me chills and fever.”
Caroline knew that tone. There would be no persuading him. “I do believe you would,” she said.
He heaved the watermelon up onto the table and sank the butcher knife to the handle into its deep green skin. He steadied it with one hand and levered the knife downward until his knuckles brushed the oilcloth. The melon creaked apart and lay rocking on the table, red and sparkling. The broken edges of its flesh looked crinkled with frost. With his jack knife, Charles prized a perfect little pyramid from the center and offered it to her.
Caroline shook her head. “No, thank you, Charles. And none for the girls, either,” she said.