Caroline: Little House, Revisited(10)
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.”
Caroline held her fast. “Nettie is as safe as we are,” she said, but she heard no comfort in her words. Loosening her grip, Caroline shifted Mary across her lap and motioned Laura in. She wanted them near, but not so close against her that her own unease would touch them. She threaded her arms loosely around their waists, ready to snatch them close if need be, and let her nervous hands smooth their wraps. “Now let’s all be still so Pa can drive.”
Charles’s mouth was folded so deeply with consternation that the whiskers beneath his lower lip bristled outward. He slackened the horses’ lines so that all their effort would travel straight into the singletree. The strain stood out on the animals’ necks as their legs slanted under them. Watching them, Caroline felt her own sides clench.
“What’s wrong with the horses?” Laura asked. “Is the wagon too full?”
“Ben and Beth are strong enough to pull us across,” Caroline assured her, “once they find their footing.” It was the strength of the ice that worried her, with the two horses prying forward like great muscled levers. Beth snorted and stamped a hoof. Caroline winced at the impact. They were a mile from either shore.
No matter how strong the road might be, the ice would be at its thinnest here in the middle of the lake. It was one thing to pass steadily across the surface—quite another to linger prodding at this frailest point. Could not a deft stroke, like the blows she delivered to the rain barrel’s thick winter skin, open a split down the center?
Caroline looked over the girls in their hoods and mittens and flannels. Together they were lighter than a single sack of flour, but the drag of so much sodden clothing would carry them straight under if the wagon broke through. Her eyes traced the cinched canvas brow overhead. They were hardly better off than kittens in a gunny sack.
If the wagon did not budge in the time it took to pray Psalm 121, Caroline decided, she would lift the girls down and lead them across on foot. Even if she had to carry Laura, the three of them could slip over the mile of ice light as mayflies, leaving the team’s burden nearly two hundred pounds the lighter.