“Mr. Edwards!” Caroline exclaimed. “They might have—” Her tongue hovered half-curled, groping for the next word. Her mind seemed to have lost its footing. They might have enacted any number of the horrors she had envisioned these last several days and nights. Plainly, they had done none of it.
Edwards nodded. “I know. I couldn’t stand it any longer. Seemed like risking a look was better than sitting in my cabin, bracing for a tomahawk between the eyes every time a stick of kindling popped. I crawled on my elbows the last hundred yards,” he said, tilting a forearm. The dirt was rubbed so deeply into the fabric that it shone softly, like leather. “When I finally worked up the nerve to lift my head over the grass I never felt so foolish in my life. Hardly anything there but ashes and sunflower shells and gnawed-over buffalo bones.”
“Where are they now?” Caroline asked.
“South’s all I know,” Edwards said. “The tracks all pointed south. Winter camps, maybe, or the new reservation.”
Caroline stood in the white-gold afternoon sun. Gone. Day after day she had listened to the world being torn asunder, and it had not happened. Every blade of grass and every atom of the broad blue sky remained as she had left it. Nothing but the terror and the ire had been real, and all of it of her own making.
It was still there. Caroline could feel it within her, a thick, dark inner lining, suddenly stripped of its purpose. A tremor came over her, clutching her by the gut and radiating upward. Her breath tasted of acid. Her body, preparing to purge itself. Caroline walked to the necessary and emptied herself of it.
Twenty-Eight
“It has to snow,” Laura said. “It has to.”
Caroline had given up polishing the girls’ nose prints from the window panes. Their breath misted the glass until it ran in narrow streams that mirrored the rain falling just beyond their fingertips.
“Even if it does,” Mary asked, “how will Santa Claus find us, so far away in Indian Territory? Ma?”
Mary had used different words yesterday, and the day before, but it was the same question. Patience, Caroline told herself. They would never learn to have patience for others if she could not first be patient with them. “I don’t know,” she said. “I expect he’ll find a way. Santa Claus knew where to find my stocking when I moved from Brookfield to Concord,” she added.
“That was back East,” Laura said, as if it were another country. And so it was.
Caroline scrabbled for a reply. “Well, we are not the first family to move to the Indian Territory. You don’t suppose all those other pas and mas would stay where Santa Claus couldn’t bring presents to their little boys and girls?”
Caroline looked up from her work, ready to show them a buoyant smile. Two sets of narrowed blue eyes met hers. The difference amounted to the width of a blade of grass, but it was enough to put a twist in her conscience. Caroline squirmed. Her daughters had never looked at her that way. Was it any wonder, she asked herself, when all she gave them were answers that would not hold still?
Perhaps they would find some contentment if she said no, Santa Claus would not come this year. He would go to the Big Woods and find them gone, and bring all their presents to Kansas next year. But Edwards. Caroline could not discount the slim possibility of Mr. Edwards. He still had the nickel Charles had given him over a month ago to buy Christmas candy for the girls in Independence. What he did not have was a horse.
“You’ll tell us if you run short of anything,” Charles had said when Edwards came to warn them to lock their stable. Edwards had not even heard the horse thieves. He could not say whether they might be Indians or white men, though his missing saddle pointed away from Indians.
“Anything we have, you’re welcome to,” Caroline added.
“I’m well provisioned,” Edwards assured them. “And I can still get to town so long as my boots hold out,” he’d said, knocking one heel against a fencepost. None of them had given a thought to anything so trifling as Christmas candy.
Now, though, she and Charles had room in their minds for nothing else. Caroline gazed out over the girls’ heads at the blurry gray morning. She longed for snow almost as much as Laura; there had never been a Christmas Eve so leaden. If the rain did not let up, it would not matter whether Edwards had fetched the girls’ Christmas treats from town. Twice this week Charles had tried to reach Edwards’s claim, and the rising creek had held him back.
The rain stopped as if by magic. Mary and Laura bit their lips and grinned at each other. Then Caroline opened the door to the sunlight, and their faces fell. The wild whoosh and tumble of the flooded creek, inaudible over the rain, now filled the room. They had not considered the creek a barrier. Of course they hadn’t. Winters in Pepin, the frozen Mississippi River became the smoothest road in the county.
When Charles came in bearing a great wild turkey, Caroline looked past it to his pockets, searching for a telltale bulge.
“If it weighs less than twenty pounds I’ll eat it, feathers and all,” he announced.
The false boom in his voice was unmistakable. Caroline knew there was no bag of candy hidden in his coat. “My goodness, it is heavy,” she said, trying to be cheerful over the turkey. Its oil-colored feathers still glistened with rain. The girls watched, disinterested, as a puddle of rainwater formed on the floor beneath the bird’s dangling wattle.
“Is the creek going down?” Mary asked.
With a little sigh, Charles abandoned the charade. “It’s still rising,” he answered.
The news sank hard and fast. No Christmas for Mary and Laura. No company to share their turkey. Caroline blinked back the memory of how Edwards had been too pleased to smile when she asked him to dinner. “I hate to think of him eating his bachelor cooking all alone on Christmas Day.”
Charles shook his head. “A man would risk his neck trying to cross that creek now.”
With their chins in their hands, Mary and Laura watched her pluck and dress the turkey. Caroline wished they would go back to fogging up the windows. Their eyes had gone flat. At least with their fingers smudging the glass, they had been hopeful.
“You are lucky little girls,” she said as she trussed up the bird and rubbed it with lard, “to have a good house to live in, and a warm fire to sit by, and such a turkey for your Christmas dinner.” She looked up, smiling. The girls had wilted further yet.
Caroline’s smile went slack. The words might have come out of her own mother’s mouth. True though they were, it was she who ought to have been grateful—grateful that her children had grown up without want, that they had never felt the sort of cold and hunger that made it impossible to take food and warmth and shelter for granted. Instead she had as good as rubbed her daughters’ noses in their disappointment. Caroline did not know how to make them understand, short of telling them things she hoped never to speak of, stories that began After my pa died . . .
The fire popped and hissed into the stillness. The girls lay in their bed with their eyes to the rafters, obediently waiting for the day to end.