Caroline: Little House, Revisited(111)

Near the head of the procession rode the Indian agent, a white man of about forty, with a dark beard and eyelids that sloped gently downward at the outer corners. A ghost of a memory grazed Caroline’s thoughts as he passed. Not so much a recollection, but a sensation, as though for a fleeting instant she inhabited the mind and body of a child who was accustomed to looking up into a face like that one.

Pa, she thought with a warm shiver, and her feet carried her to within a few yards of the procession. Not Papa Frederick, but her own father. In all the years he had been gone, she had never seen eyes so much like Pa’s. Her brothers had inherited fragments of his smile, his hands, even his voice, but not one of them had his eyes. Had she known the agent’s name, she would have called out to him, just to see those eyes looking down on her once more.

Instead the man rode on, and Caroline stood suspended in her memory as one Indian after another passed through the space he had occupied. For the first time Caroline felt safe enough in their presence to observe them with no other thought than to see what they looked like. The shape of their faces fascinated her. They were unmistakably different from her own. The planes were flatter, the lines straighter. Even the plumpest of cheeks appeared oblong instead of round. If their skin were white and their hair done up in curls, Caroline thought, she would still know the difference, just as she would know a spaniel from a bulldog.

It was Mary who recognized one of them. She gave a little gasp and took Caroline’s hand, hiding her face behind it as though she were a bashful toddler. Caroline saw the faded green calico shirt and a sizzle of fear crossed her own belly. That was the man who had flung the key to her trunk at them when it would not fit the lock of the provisions cabinet. She remembered the sound of it as it careened off the toe of Mary’s shoe and skittered across the floor.

At his knee he wore beautiful fringed garters, woven in bold zigzags of green, blue, and black. Had he been wearing them that day in the cabin? Caroline could not recall anything beyond his glare and the movements of his hands.

He did not acknowledge them now, did not so much as look in their direction. Caroline straightened her back and thrust out her chin, determined that he should notice them. He would look her in the eye and see that she was not afraid now. But he did not. He rode by, gesturing with his free hand as he talked with the man riding alongside him. Caroline felt as though she’d been slighted. Was it possible that what had happened inside their cabin did not hold enough significance to stand out in his memory?

She scanned the line of Indians, looking to see whether the first two men to frighten her were here, too—the ones who had come asking for food before Carrie was born. Caroline could recall nothing of them but swaying silver earrings and prominent rib bones. A dozen of the men riding past might fit that description. Some of them looked toward her. Others did not. Caroline recognized none of them.

She turned her attention to the women. Nothing the men had done had frightened her so much as the sounds the Osage women had made last autumn in the early hours before dawn. Those endless, wailing notes had come from their throats. Their voices were so quiet now, it did not seem possible. Each one that passed carved a hollow feeling deeper into Caroline’s center. In all this time, as Caroline longed for her sisters and her mother, Mrs. Scott had been the only woman she’d seen. Now, dozens. Sisters, daughters, mothers, grandmothers, none of them with the slightest link to her.

No, Caroline realized, that was not so. Some of them must be wives or mothers of the men who had come into the cabin. Was there one among them who had received a loaf of cornbread, tied up in a towel with a pine tree embroidered at the corner? Perhaps that towel was folded carefully into one of the bundles tied to the horses, or incorporated into a garment. Caroline studied the women individually as they passed. Their hair, so smooth at the parting it looked wet, was so enticing that Caroline put her hands into her pockets to keep her fingers from fidgeting over the imagined strands. Their clothing was an assemblage of deerskin and calico, in vibrant hues she had not worn since she was a child. Rich yellows, reds, and violets, decorated with beads, fringe, and ribbon work. Through the fabric Caroline could see the shape of their uncorseted breasts against their chests and the way they puddled on the women’s laps. One woman, a little older than herself, lifted her blouse to nurse an infant, and Caroline could not avert her eyes from that bare brown breast. She had never seen a nipple so dark.

What did Charles think, looking at such women? Was he imagining running a hand over that sleek black hair, as Caroline herself was?

“Pa,” Laura said, “get me that little Indian baby.” Caroline turned in surprise. She had never heard such a tone from her daughter. Laura was not asking, she was commanding. Beneath the firmness, her small voice quivered with desire. Coming from a man’s mouth, that timbre would mean avarice, or lust.

“Hush, Laura,” Charles said.

She only spoke faster, her voice rising, “Oh, I want it! I want it! It wants to stay with me. Please, Pa, please!”

Laura did not look at Charles as she begged. Her eyes were fixed on what she wanted. Caroline traced Laura’s gaze and saw an infant tucked into a basket that hung over the flank of a piebald pony. There was nothing to set it apart from the other Osage children, except that it seemed to be looking squarely back at Laura. “I declare, I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Caroline said.

“Hush, Laura,” Charles said again. “The Indian woman wants to keep her baby.”