A flutter of panic pierced Caroline’s belly. Could they see her hands trembling, how her jaw clenched as she struggled to answer? Silently, she uncoiled her fingers from the stock and flattened them against her thigh. Don’t frighten them, Caroline willed herself. She imagined the way her voice needed to sound before saying the words. Gentle enough to soothe. Firm enough to end Laura’s questions. “The wind is howling,” Caroline told her. “Now mind me, Laura.”
Laura inched back under the quilts, and Caroline refastened her gaze to the china shepherdess. She wanted to smile back at that serene china face and felt a strange urge to apologize for being unable to do it. Caroline looked and looked at the painted blue eyes, and tried to wonder what the shepherdess would see through them if she had the power of sight. The single room she faced, day and night, with only a glimpse through the open door now and then? Caroline winced at the idea. Perhaps her painted gaze would turn inward instead, to someplace entirely different and belonging only to herself. The faraway shelf she had occupied, in Detroit or Chicago, before Henry Quiner had chosen her to carry home to his not-quite-four-year-old daughter. Could the little china woman remember what Caroline herself could not—did she recall the moment Pa had placed her in Caroline’s hands?
Caroline nearly smiled then and began to sing softly. To herself, to the shepherdess, to the children, still wide awake behind their closed eyes.
There is a happy land, far, far away.
Where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as day.
The jolt against the door ought to have frightened her, rousing Caroline as it did from a fretful doze. But she recognized the sound as surely as if Charles had called out to her. The instant she heard it Caroline wondered how she could have taken the wind’s purposeless clattering for anything human.
“Didn’t you think I might have been an Indian, Mrs. Ingalls?” Charles’s voice scolded as she flung open the door.
He was teasing—she could hear the twinkle in his eyes even if it was too dark to see beneath the brim of his hat—but Caroline’s mouth dropped open at the thought of her own foolishness. “No,” she said just as suddenly, and bold as brass. “Jack wasn’t growling. He knew it was you, too.”
Charles grabbed her up in his arms and laughed. His coat was stiff with cold. Clumps of frozen mud dropped from his boots and iced her toes. She did not tell him she had been afraid; the half-cocked pistol lying on the seat of the rocker spoke more freely of that than she ever would.
Charles knew. He would not speak of it any more than she would, not with the children suddenly awake and eager to claim their places on his knees, but Caroline heard it in his cheerful boom as he told Mary and Laura about the wind and the rain and the freezing mud that had seized the wagon wheels and slowed Pet and Patty to a crawl. Everything is all right, his manner was saying, even as Caroline picked up the pistol and laid it on the mantel shelf without a word about it.
And it was so. The little house was full in every way it could be filled—with the scent of coffee bubbling on the hearth, the sound of her husband and daughters, the sight of all the provisions Charles piled on the table. Oh, those fat, heavy sacks. Cornmeal. Salt pork. Coffee and tea, flour and sugar, molasses and lard. Everything, down to tobacco and nails. Even, Caroline saw with a smirk and a shake of her head, a pound of sparkling white sugar, as if Charles could not help thumbing his nose at the prices in Independence. Caroline put her hands on each keg and sack and parcel, patting the way she patted Carrie’s little belly after a feed. With the milk and dried blackberries and the game, it would surely be enough see them through the winter.
Enough. Caroline had never yet tired of the word, perhaps never would. As a child, plenty had been too grandiose a term for anything but berrying time, but when Ma had had occasion to pronounce There will be enough, even when it was just barely true, that was a feeling ofttimes more delicious than the food itself.
“Open the square package,” Charles said over the girls’ heads.
It was wrapped so neatly, with its crisply folded corners and a knot of white string. Her first thought was of a book, or writing paper—extravagances that made no sense. She lifted it and the weight puzzled her. Even Charles’s big green book was not so heavy.
“Be careful,” he said. “Don’t drop it.”
A thrill went through her, of delight and dread as she understood. It could be only one thing. “Oh, Charles,” she gasped, aghast at the expense, “you didn’t.” She laid it back down on the table, fearful now of damaging what must be inside.
“Open it,” he insisted.
Caroline untied the string and folded back the paper. Eight panes of window glass.
She could not keep the figures from chalking themselves up in her mind. Eight panes of glass could not be less than twelve dollars back East. But here—a place where white sugar went for a dollar a pound? No, she assured herself. That was why Charles had driven forty miles to Oswego. That was why she and the girls had spent four days alone on the high prairie. He had saved the overland freight, at least. Still, the cost amounted to no less than the equivalent of nine and a half acres. The single square pane in her hands represented more land than it took to hold the house and stable and well. It was a foolish, frivolous thing to do with so much money.
But gracious, it was beautiful, that glass. Clear and cool and smooth, and ever so faintly blue, like ice. Caroline lifted the top pane to the firelight, and the edges seemed to glow. She put a hand to her chest, to keep from floating away. Four panes for the east, four for the west. He had bought her sunlight and moonlight, sunrises and sunsets. She would be able to see clear to the creek road and the bluffs beyond, all winter long. Come spring she could look out at her kitchen garden and see Charles working the fields of sod potatoes and corn.
He should not have done it. Every cent he had saved by going to Oswego had surely gone into this glass. Caroline could not get air enough into her to properly thank him.
Twenty-Six
Had she known how many Indians she would see through those window panes, Caroline thought as she glanced toward the Indian trail for the dozenth time that day, she might have quelled her delight. She tried to tell herself that it was only the novelty of looking through the glass that made her more aware of the passing barebacked riders, but that was as good as a lie. She told herself that the way they rode, without ever so much as glancing askance at the cabin, there was nothing to worry over. But that did not feel much like the truth, either. They might as well have turned their heads away entirely, they pointed their eyes so resolutely forward. I refuse to see you, that posture proclaimed.