Caroline: Little House, Revisited(119)

“There’s the mule colt. And Carrie.”

Caroline’s burst of laughter took them both by surprise, it was so out of proportion to the remark. He grinned at her, eyebrows cocked wonderingly. Caroline covered her mouth and shook her head. She could not explain. Only a man could miss the absurdity of such a notion. He had not felt the weight of a half-formed child sloshing in his belly as the wagon clattered over every rut and stone in seven hundred miles, nor vomited his breakfast into the ditches of five states.

Caroline wiped her eyes and found that he was gazing at her, his fist propped against his temple. The laughter had scoured her almost clean, and a soft, deep ache filled the space where the pain had been.

Charles leaned down and slid the fiddle box from under the wagon seat. He plucked the strings, coaxing the four familiar notes to their round, sweet centers, and Caroline shivered with a tremor of emotion too rich to name.

In that sound was the feel of her green delaine, whirling about her waist at the cornhusking dance; the scent of rosemary and pipe smoke and the shine of a crochet hook, flashing before a fire of stout Wisconsin hardwood. And now it was imbued with the first flutterings of a black-haired baby girl, and the unexpected delight of Edwards, dancing and whooping in the starlight. Caroline ached for all of it at once. The fiddle sang out high and sweet, as though it were pulling the notes from her chest, and Caroline remembered: It had been the sound of the fiddle that first awakened her heart to this country.

Now her heart seemed to spread, to peel itself open so that it could span the full breadth of the memories contained in those sounds, and Caroline marveled that her body could hold them all, side by side.

Her left hand slipped around her waist, her right settled over her breast.

Here, she thought. Home.