“We’ve lived here a year without paying.” Caroline trailed off, unsure where that feeble thought was headed.
He spoke fast, already impatient with the figures—figures she knew just as well as she did. “Government allows thirty-three months from the time we settle to make proof. That leaves less than two years to raise two hundred dollars beyond what we need to live. Plus two dollars just to file our intent to preempt. I don’t see how we can do it. Thirty-one dollars isn’t even enough to see us home, much less through two more years.”
Home. The word sent a sort of tremor through her, as though a stout bone, long ago broken and mended, suddenly began to bend.
Charles was still talking. “I’ll have to find work along the way. Someone between here and Wisconsin’s bound to need a carpenter or a field hand.”
Caroline’s head spun like a weathervane slapped by a sudden gust of wind. All year long she had faced herself firmly in one direction. Now a single sheet of paper demanded she turn completely around. Charles sneered at the envelope in his hand. “Takes six weeks or better to get word of anything. If I’d known sooner—” Caroline heard the brittle quiver in his voice and knew the moment for words had passed. If she spoke, even to comfort him, he would snap.
She looked at the cabin. Her eyes lingered on the half-watered kitchen garden, the open door, the low fire in the hearth, but her mind had not the strength to take hold of any of it. A hungry spot that did not want for food had opened itself at the parting of her ribs. Caroline pressed the heel of her hand into it. It was soft, yet unsatisfied, as though she had tried to slake herself with cotton bolls. She left Charles and walked toward the cabin, approaching it as if it were a structure out of a dream she might wake from before crossing the threshold. Caroline stopped in the middle of the single room, slack of thought. When the log had fallen on her foot, there had been a moment like this. The pain existed—she could feel its presence encircling the wound—but the weight of the news blocked the sensation from reaching her. There was no safe place to look: the glass windows with their curtains trimmed in red calico, the fireplace built of creek stones. And beside it, the willow-bough rocking chair. Her hands rose up in surrender and she sank down into the chair. She rocked herself, eyes closed.
Outside, Carrie sputtered. Caroline heard Mary’s voice and Laura’s, trying to hush her. “Carrie, see the beads? The pretty-pretty beads, Carrie?” Then a catlike whine as Carrie protested. They were trying to jolly her with tones so fawning they made Caroline’s jaw tighten. The baby was having none of it.
“Bring her here, Mary,” she said.
Mary and Laura crept across the threshold together. Carrie was pushing her hands into Mary’s shoulder and her knees into her sister’s belly. She rarely consented to be carried now that she could crawl. Caroline took her long enough to kiss her, then set the baby down on hands and knees so that Carrie could move freely. Caroline closed her eyes and resumed her rocking.
“Ma?” Mary asked.
Caroline opened her eyes. “We’re going home.”
The girls looked at her, at the china shepherdess on the mantel, the rifle over the door, and finally at each other. Caroline understood without their asking. The meaning of the word had shifted for her, too. Like theirs, her mind no longer reached backward at the thought of home. “Back to Wisconsin,” Caroline said. One dry, soundless sob clutched her throat, and then another. Caroline turned her face and drew her emotions inward, to the very center of herself. She exhaled, slowly, until her face relaxed. “Everything is all right,” she told Mary and Laura. It was the falsest truth she had ever spoken.
Charles lay in the bed beside her, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. He had spoken only two and three words at a time since coming in for supper. Through the window, Caroline could see the plow where he had left it standing in the field. The gentle swoop of its blade shone out white in the starlight.
“Charles,” she whispered. She touched his whiskers. He was mute. Likely fearing what might come out of him if he tried to speak, Caroline thought. So in need of comfort, and utterly unable to ask for it.
She could grant him his silence. Words could not be relied upon to soothe him. But she would not leave him embedded in his own grief.
Caroline turned to face him and drew her long brown braid across her body, stroking the thick length of it as he so loved to do. With its tip, she brushed his hand. He did not reach for her. His eyes continued to move up and down the ceiling, as though he were counting and recounting the beams and nails it had taken to fashion the roof.
I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone, Caroline recited to herself. I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer.
She slid a hand beneath his nightshirt. She caressed the narrow seam of soft hair up the center of his belly, ran her fingernails along the crease of his thighs. His body had no choice but to respond. She heard a small, defeated groan, and felt the sheet inch back ever so slightly as it began to tent below his navel.
He rolled sideways, meeting her in the middle of the bed. Their foreheads touched, but his eyes would not rise above her collarbone. As though what had happened to them today were something to be ashamed of.
She took him in, hooking her heel into the crook of his knee and pulling him close. His belly touched hers and she drew him closer yet, until she could feel his heartbeat against her ribs. His embrace was wooden, as though he dared not let himself feel anything at all. Caroline closed her eyes. The only thing she would deny him was a place for his shame to roost.
She held him as she rocked him with her hips, coaxing and coaxing until she felt his body begin to yield up its burden of sadness. She felt it break, as though it were a solid thing, felt his body clutching at itself as he resisted letting the pieces go. Caroline pulled him deeper, whispering, “I remember how you looked at me, driving into our first Kansas sunset.” His muscles clenched and shuddered and his breath went ragged. He could not cry, but his movements became a sort of sobbing. Caroline rocked and rocked, milking the sorrow from his flesh.
He gave a muffled cry and she paused with her belly pressed to his, holding herself open for him while he spasmed.
If there were a child to come of this, Caroline wondered, would it bear a trace of the sorrow that had made it? Her heart throbbed softly at the thought of a small woebegone creature—a boy, perhaps, with Charles’s blue eyes and long fingers. She surfaced from her thoughts and Charles was looking at her with those very eyes. The shadows at his mouth remained, shallower now.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
It pained her to smile. “So am I,” she answered.
He brushed the edge of her face with his knuckles slowly back and forth until they slept, joined.