Caroline: Little House, Revisited(113)
Mary sat on a quilt spread over the grass, minding Carrie and sorting out remnants of calico from the scrap bag to sew her own nine-patch quilt. Caroline shook her head fondly, watching Mary arrange her favorites into pretty patterns. Five going on twenty-five, that child.
A gleeful squeal came out from under the sun canopy Caroline had contrived out of a pillowcase draped across two crates. The string of Indian beads dangled from one of the wooden slats, and Carrie lay in the shade, jabbering at the brightly colored beads. Caroline considered the three rows of plants still waiting for water. They would not wilt in five minutes’ time. She sidled down on the edge of the quilt and propped herself on an elbow at Carrie’s feet. The hair that had been fine and black as soot had given over to a warm golden brown. Her knobby little knees and elbows were rosying up like crabapples. A smile ripened Caroline’s cheeks to see it. Caroline reached up to tinkle the beads with a fingertip. Carrie flapped her arms at the air and squealed. Caroline put her hand to the baby’s belly. Its warm curve reached up to fill her palm.
“Letter for you, Ingalls,” Mr. Edwards’s voice called.
Caroline bounded up from the quilt, lightened with hopes for the circulator. “Mind the baby, Mary,” she said as she smoothed her hair and strode out to the edge of the field where Charles and Edwards were meeting. “It’s good of you to remember us at the post office, Mr. Edwards,” she said.
“Just got back from Independence last night,” he replied, handing Charles the envelope. “News should be pretty fresh. The clerk there at the post office said it hadn’t been sitting but a week or two yet.”
It was addressed only to Charles, in a hand she did not recognize. Caroline felt fidgety as a child while she and Charles and Edwards exchanged pleasantries: news from town, an invitation to supper, a polite refusal. Edwards had hardly turned his back to head home before Caroline was holding out a hairpin for Charles to slit open the envelope. “Who is it from, Charles?”
“Couldn’t be anybody but Gustafson.”
A single sheet of paper. He read it once, then Caroline saw his eyes return to the top of the page and begin again. He said nothing.
“Does he send any news of Henry and Polly?”
Charles turned the letter over, then looked inside the envelope. “I don’t know.”
“Charles?”
Charles licked his lips. “He’s reneged. Can’t make the payments, so he’s moving out—moving on. That twenty dollars he sent last summer is the last money we’ll see from him. The property defaults to us.”
No more payments. Caroline’s mouth went dry. Every dollar and a quarter the Swede did not send was an acre lost. “How much is left in the fiddle box?”
“Not quite twenty-five acres’ worth. Thirty-one dollars and twenty cents.” He turned to the plow and slapped it gently with the letter. “Could have had forty acres for what this cost. Don’t that beat all. Traded fifty dollars in furs for a steel plow and the only land I can afford to till is seven hundred miles away.”
“The land office wouldn’t have traded furs for acreage,” Caroline said gently.
Charles whipped his hat down onto the freshly turned furrow. “Damn it all.”
Caroline winced at the strike of his words. She glanced back at the girls. They were watching. Not scared yet, but alert that something was happening. Caroline moved so that they could not see Charles’s face and lowered her voice. “If we raise a crop—”
“This ground won’t raise anything but sod potatoes and sod corn until the grass roots have rotted out.” Charles pronounced sod as though it were a vulgarity. “We can’t raise anything of value in time to make payment.”
“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.