Caroline climbed up and took her place on the wagon seat. Charles handed Carrie up to her.
Edwards, she thought. Mrs. Scott. The smell of the grass on the wind, and the everlasting blue vault of the sky.
Her heart was full and heavy behind her ribs, like a breast in need of suckling. She pressed Carrie close, trying to suffuse its deep beats as Charles boosted Mary and Laura onto the straw tick.
Another moment and Charles was beside her, the reins in his hands.
“Ready?”
No, she thought. Never. And yes. Quickly, before it breaks me. “Let’s go,” she said.
“Pa, I want to see out.” Laura’s voice. “Please, Pa, make it so I can see the house again.”
Caroline looked straight ahead, wishing he wouldn’t and sure that he would.
The wagon lurched as Charles jumped down, then shuddered with the loosening of the rope at the back so that Laura and Mary could peep out through the wagon cover. For a long moment it was still. Then Caroline heard Charles’s footsteps, receding instead of approaching. She did not trust herself to look forward again if she looked back, but she turned. Laura and Mary crowded the small keyhole Charles had made in the canvas. Past their heads, a narrow swath of the cabin was visible.
Charles stood in the doorway. Or rather, at its edge. He did not step inside, but stood with one hand on the lintel, the other on the latch. In her mind she could see all the things he would be looking at. The empty mantle. The place beside the hearth where her willow-bough rocker had stood. The glass windows.
Caroline could not watch any longer. She put her cheek to Carrie’s head and closed her eyes. She inhaled deeply, drawing the smell of the baby’s hair through the clean cotton bonnet. When she felt the wagon lurch again with Charles’s weight, she lifted her head. A small dark circle dampened the pink calico.
“Left the latch string out,” Charles said. “Someone might need shelter.”
Caroline nodded, grateful for the bonnet brim that hid her wet cheeks from him.
He chirruped to the horses. Caroline angled her face into the warm prairie wind. Before the first mile had passed, it would dry her tears.
It was to be a piecemeal farewell to Kansas itself, Caroline realized as they drove northeast. That was a mercy. Mile after mile, the grass still rippled and the sky extended beyond the reach of her eyes. Tomorrow they would drive into the sunrise, across the same hills that a year ago had beckoned them west. The symmetry of it pleased Caroline in a way she could not account for.
“Something’s wrong there.”
Mary and Laura stood up on the straw tick and grasped the back of the wagon seat to balance themselves while they looked. “Where, Pa?”
“There,” Charles said again, pointing with the reins. “Look right between Patty’s ears. See it?”
It was a fleck. A pale, still fleck in a sea of swaying grass, perhaps a mile off. Caroline narrowed her focus and the shape became a wagon. A wagon, motionless by the side of the road in midday. No smoke meant no cookfire.
“Sickness?” Caroline guessed, keeping her voice low. Or worse.
A smaller, darker smudge gradually appeared at the stilled wagon’s front as the distance closed between them. Where horses should be, yet too small to be horses. People. They were as motionless as the wagon.
Charles guided the mustangs off the road, approaching cautiously.
A man and a woman sat on the wagon tongue. They were young. Little more than twenty, the woman, perhaps less. Caroline could not see past the woman’s bonnet brim to her face, but her milk-white hands were so profusely freckled, they could belong only to a redhead. Her dusty hem did not obscure the fact that the dress was new. It was an everyday work dress, but the sleeves were shaped in a fashion that Caroline had not seen before, and every line of the paisley pattern stood out crisp. A few months in the Kansas sun and the sage-green print would hardly be distinguishable from the fawn-colored ground. Both of them looked so morose that Caroline began planning what she might cook for their supper while Charles helped the man dig a grave.
“What’s wrong?” Charles asked. “Where are your horses?”
“I don’t know,” the man said. “I tied them to the wagon last night, and this morning they were gone.”
Stranded. A subtle wave of nausea trickled through Caroline’s stomach, cold as well water.
“What about your dog?” said Charles.
“Haven’t got a dog,” the man said. He sounded like a child. A shamed child, angry and embarrassed at not having known better.
“Well, your horses are gone,” Charles said, as though the man had not fully realized it. “You’ll never see them again. Hanging’s too good for horse thieves.”
“Yes,” the man agreed.
Charles inclined his head toward her. Caroline knew his question as plainly as he knew what her answer would be. She nodded.
“Come ride with us to Independence,” he offered.
“No,” said the man. “All we’ve got is in this wagon. We won’t leave it.”
Charles’s breath came out like a punch to the air. “Why, man! What will you do?” he blurted. “There may be nobody along here for days. Weeks. You can’t stay here.”
“I don’t know,” the man said.
“We’ll stay with our wagon,” the woman declared. Caroline turned back the brim of her own bonnet to look at her more closely. Was that small hump of calico behind the woman’s folded hands the beginnings of a child? Or was it only her slumped posture?
“Better come,” Charles insisted. “You can come back for your wagon.”
“No,” the woman said. Her tone signaled an end to the conversation.
Charles’s lips worked silently, flummoxed. Caroline touched her fingers to his thigh. “Let’s go, Charles,” she said. “Leave them be.”
“Tenderfeet!” Charles marveled under his breath as they rattled back onto the road. “Everything they own, and no dog to watch it. Didn’t keep watch himself. And tied his horses with ropes!” Charles shook his head. “Tenderfeet!” he said again. “Shouldn’t be allowed loose west of the Mississippi!”
It stung to hear him speak so harshly, as though they had done him some personal offense. In a way, they had. He, who had done everything right, must leave the land he so loved, while they had shackled themselves to it out of pure foolishness. “Charles,” Caroline said. Tenderly, as though they were lying side by side on the straw tick. He sighed and leaned back a little. “Whatever will become of them?” she ventured.