Too eager to sit, Charles leaned over the front of the wagon box, joking with the girls while Caroline unrolled the sacks and threaded her stoutest needle. She slit open the unbolted flour, cornmeal, beans, and brown sugar and filled a ten pound sack from each to round out her crate of daily supplies.
When the corners were sewn shut again she held the canvas mouths of the biggest sacks wide for Charles to lower the dry goods in, then quickly folded the edges together and basted each one shut. Mary and Laura knelt backward on the spring seat, watching as they sucked their sticks of candy. Their curled fists were like bright berries in their red yarn mittens.
“Did you get the pepper and saleratus?” Caroline asked.
“In my pockets,” Charles said. “Bought myself a gutta-percha poncho,” he added as he heaved one hundredweight and then another of cornmeal. “There’s bound to be rain somewhere between here and Kansas.” Caroline nodded. “And the Colt revolver.”
Her mind veered around this news, as though she might avoid the logical progression of thoughts: The pistol could not have cost under fifteen dollars. Charles would not have spent such a sum without a reason.
“Caroline?”
“Whatever you think is necessary, Charles.”
Charles cinched the wagon cover down in back, leaving only a peephole against the cold.
“Have all you need, Ingalls?” Elisha Richards asked, stepping out to the hitching post to help unbuckle the horses’ nose bags.
“And some to spare,” Charles answered. “Anything else, Caroline?” She shook her head. The wagon box was packed tight as brown sugar. Anything else would have to ride in their laps.
“Good luck to you, then. It’s been my pleasure trading with you.” Caroline ventured a glance at the storekeeper’s vest as the two men shook hands. Her eyes still had no appetite for it, but the garment claimed no sway over the rest of her. Richards nodded at Caroline as Charles swung himself up over the wheel. “Take care of yourselves and those fine girls.”
The compliment touched Caroline squarely at the base of her throat. A small rush of pride ironed out her shoulders and trickled down her core. She bowled her hands together in her lap, as though they might catch the runoff. Behind them, a whorl of warmth embraced her womb—not the child, but the space it occupied suddenly making itself known. It was enough to remind her that she was more than a passenger.
“Thank you, Mr. Richards,” she said.
The road ran straight out onto the lake, narrowing between a pair of slump-shouldered snowdrifts. Away from the plowed track, the ice looked tired, blotched here and there with a sweaty sheen where snow had melted.
“Charles?” Caroline asked, laying a hand on his wrist.
He stayed the team. “Pay no mind to the snowmelt,” he said. “Ice’ll be at its thickest here, where the snow’s been plowed, so long as they’ve kept it bare all winter.” Charles stood up to survey the track. The hills two miles distant seemed no more than waist high. “Looks clear as far as I can see.” He gave the reins a gentle slap, and the wagon dipped from the creaking snow.
The horses’ shoes struck the ice road as though it were the skin of a drum, and their ears pricked at the sudden sharpness. Through the plank of the spring seat, Caroline felt the wheels grind like sugar under a rolling pin. The sound made her shoulder blades twitch. She turned her attention to the rhythm of the team’s gait. They had not sped up, but they raised their feet more quickly, as though they too mistrusted the sensation of metal meeting ice.
The flash of their shoes lifted a memory in Caroline’s mind of the circus that had once passed along the road by the Quiners’ door back home in Concord. Caroline smiled to think how she and her sister Martha had laughed at the great gray elephant delicately putting one foot and then another on the first log of the corduroy bridge spanning the marsh.
For all its bulk, that timid elephant must have been on firmer footing than this wagon and the supplies newly added, Caroline realized: hundredweights of cornmeal, unbolted flour, salt pork, bacon, beans, and brown sugar; fifty pounds of white flour; ten of salt; fifteen pounds of coffee and five of tea; the feedbox brimming with corn. Better than three thousand pounds of horseflesh pulling it all. Surely that corduroy bridge had been thicker than a plate of ice nearing the edge of spring.
Suddenly Caroline did not want her girls boxed in like cargo behind her. “Mary, Laura, come here and see the lake,” she said, beckoning them over the spring seat. Mary settled onto Caroline’s lap, big girl though she was, while Laura stood solemnly at her pa’s elbow.
Charles halted the team. The lake lay like a mile of muslin, seamed by the ice road with the sheared hilltops of the Minnesota shore binding the distance. Sounds from Pepin’s banks seemed to bob in the air alongside them, small and clear as a music box.
“See that, Half-Pint?” Charles asked. “That’s Minnesota.”
“All of it?” Laura asked, poking her mitten toward the opposing shore.
“All of it,” he answered. “Wisconsin’s already a mile behind us now.”
Mary huffed at Laura’s pointing, but Caroline had no voice to settle her. It was too much to hold in her mind all that was behind them, beneath them, and before them. A lump thin as a sparrow’s egg blocked her throat; if she so much as swallowed, its shell would shatter.
The waiting horses fidgeted. Their scraping hooves sent unwelcome tingles through Caroline’s underbelly and the backs of her thighs as though she were poised at the edge of a precipice. Her breath was coming too quickly, as it had at her parting from Eliza. If they did not move forward, the surge of emotions would overtake her from all sides.
Caroline turned her cheek to her daughter’s fur hood. Mary’s candied breath pricked her nose with sharp, sweet notes. It was a summer scent, thick as the last sip from a pitcher of lemonade. First her mouth and then her eyes watered with the memory of that taste.
If Charles saw her striving to keep hold of herself, she did not know it. She only heard him chirrup to the team and felt the horses leaning into the harnesses.
The wheels grated, then skidded in place. Caroline jerked her head up in time to see Laura grab hold of Charles’s shoulder to keep from pitching to the floor.
“Sit down, Laura,” Charles said, and snapped the reins. The traces went rigid, but the horses’ energy seemed to reach no further than the wagon tongue.
“Calkins must not be sharp enough,” he muttered as their hooves licked at the ice. “Didn’t expect we’d need to stud their shoes for one crossing.”
Mary twisted around. “Nettie’s all alone.”