Caroline: Little House, Revisited(118)

“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.

“I’ll leave word tomorrow when we pass through Independence. Someone will have to take a team and go out after them.”

They spoke no more of it. Charles drove until the mustangs’ lengthening shadows leaned eastward. They had come seven or eight miles all told when he turned the wagon from the road to an overgrown trail. “I think this is the place,” he said. “Doesn’t look quite right, though. There’s a good well a little ways off the road,” he explained as the horses nosed through the brush. “A young bachelor from Iowa staked his claim right near here, if I’m not mistaken. I made his acquaintance on my first trip to Oswego.” Charles cocked his head as he tried to align his memories with the landscape. “He’d just finished the well and was eager to show it off, so I humored him and stopped to water the horses. Nice enough fellow, talked a blue streak. Lonely, probably. He told me three or four times I was welcome to rest my team on his land any time.”

A quarter mile down the trail, Caroline spotted a chimney. “There?” she asked.

“Must be,” Charles said, “though I would have sworn the chimney was on the other side of the house.”

The jagged outline of a burned claim shanty emerged around it as they approached, blackened and spindly against the sky.

Charles whistled a low note of astonishment. “Fellow said he was headed back East in the spring to fetch his sweetheart. Next time I passed by he was gone, but the house still stood. Shall we make camp here, or . . . ?”

Caroline considered. The ruined shanty lent the place a hollow feeling that did not invite attachment. That suited her. She made an attempt at cheerfulness. “We don’t know where we’ll next find good water.”

Mary and Laura circled the shanty, collecting fragments from the tumbledown walls that would burn, while Caroline mixed cornmeal with the sweet, cool water and endeavored to keep from thinking about what might have happened to the people who had once lived here.

If she wanted to, Caroline could have made herself believe they were headed in, not out. Everything was the same. The unruly little cookfire hissing in the wind, the sinking sun setting the surface of her dishwater aflame with pink and gold, tucking the girls into their little bed in the wagon box. Everything down to the homeward pull of her heart was the same. Only the direction of that pull had changed.

Before returning to the fire she paused over the crate of tin dishes to stroke the leaves of the sweet potato seedling. What if, she thought, wrapping her fingers around the mug of sandy soil, everything that feels like home is contained in this single tin cup?

Home is where the heart is. That was what the samplers said, spelled out in small, neatly crossed threads. But her heart no longer knew where to roost. It was as though it had moved into the wrong side of her chest.

“Do you know, Caroline,” Charles said as she sat down on the wagon seat, “I’ve been thinking what fun the rabbits will have, eating that garden we planted.”

The pain was quick and deep and entirely without malice. He had not taken aim; he had taken a stab at fooling himself into cheerfulness and pierced her most tender spot instead. And he had done it with an echo of her own well-worn adage: There is no loss without some small gain. Caroline waited for the throb to subside, then said gently, “Don’t, Charles.”

He was quiet a moment, looking into the fire with a brittle smile. He did not seem to sense her hurt, only that his own had not dwindled as he had hoped. Then his mouth curled mischievously. “Anyway, we’re taking more out of Indian Territory than we took in.”

Caroline detected the sly undertone of a joke, but lacked the energy to guess where it was headed. “I don’t know what.”