Caroline: Little House, Revisited(18)
Caroline’s breath hissed out in a pale cloud as she laced her corset. It was likely only her imagination, but it seemed she could feel the frigid lines of the steels through the heavy cotton drill. Her body warmed her dress, and not the other way around—that she did not imagine. She gathered Mary’s and Laura’s clothes and put them under her quilts. Perhaps the little heat she had left behind would warm them.
A rind of ice topped the water in the washbasin. Caroline broke it with the handle of her toothbrush. Charles came in just then with a pail of water steaming softly in his hand.
“Morning,” he said, and, “here,” as he poured the warm water into the basin. Caroline stood over it, not moving. The moist steam on her cheeks was heavenly.
“Are you all right?” Charles asked.
Caroline’s toothbrush quivered with one last shiver as she nodded.
“Are you sure?”
Her reflection in the water showed a nose already pinking from the chill—as though she’d been crying. Caroline smiled and dabbed it with her handkerchief. “It’s only the cold.”
He did not believe it was only the cold when she fled from the pan full of bacon to retch into the snow. But it was. Nearly. If she had not been so hungry for warmth, she might have realized the fire was too hot, that their breakfast was indeed burning. Never mind that she had been too—what? Stubborn? Proud?—to heed the better judgment of her own body.
Her nose had caught the first whiff of something barely beginning to scorch, and quicker than quick she flipped the meat. Every strip turned up pink as Laura’s hair ribbons against the black iron. Caroline stood over the pan with the fork in her hand, scoffing at her overactive senses. Why it was that a child in the belly turned a woman’s nose into a veritable magnifying glass, she would never understand. They that dance must pay the fiddler, she reminded herself.
That was all the time it took for the drippings beneath a twist of bacon to singe in earnest. Caroline’s nostrils flared in warning at the rising scent, but it was too late. All at once her gut rippled and her jaw watered, and still she held her ground. She would not be sick, she insisted to herself, any more than she would serve Charles and the girls two poor meals in succession. Caroline thrust the bacon to the edges of the iron spider and tried to whisk the burnt drippings apart with the tines of the fork until a wave of heaves bent her double. By the time she finished, the pan was smoking.
“It was the cold,” she made excuse before Charles could ask. “I might have noticed in time if not for the cold.”
Even through her watery eyes she could see the dubious cast of his face, but Charles did not argue. He handed her his handkerchief and leafed backward through his weather journal. “Another week or two at most and these temperatures’ll be behind us,” he promised.
Seven
A week, Caroline soon concluded, is too cumbersome a thing to count—or to be counted on. Even an hour was a deceitful measure. An hour might thin itself over three or four miles of level roads or be filled to bulging by one scant mile of sandy incline. An elusive ford or a single mudhole placed just so could swallow a whole string of hours right from the middle of a day. Time, Caroline decided, could be trusted to measure the distance between meals, and nothing else. But a mile was always a mile, no matter how long it took to traverse. Days spent on the road were best measured in miles.
Eighteen one day, just over twenty the next. Now and then a good long stretch of twenty-four, twenty-five miles. On the road a week became plain arithmetic: a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty miles, or maybe only ninety-five.
No cycle of washing, mending, and baking marked one day out as distinct from another. Each day formed the same narrow circle; six of them stacked together earned a Sunday. Only the Sabbath, immune to the tally of miles, managed to keep its identity.
Three things governed their moods: the quality of the road, the disposition of the weather, and the supply of fuel and water. Any one out of balance, whether leaning toward good or ill, left a mark in her memory.
First was the morning when the washbasin did not freeze. Her mind preserved other, earlier days, but that morning always stood out of its proper order. The water had been cold enough to sting her teeth, but it was not frozen. Close beside it was the night the knot in the wagon cover came loose, when the girls woke to find their noses and eyelashes sugared with snow.
Most of the meals she made were not worth the space it took to recall them: salt pork in the spider, cornbread in the bake oven. Now and then bacon, a bit of game. Ordinary mainstays that ought to have been simple to prepare. More often, cooking became a standoff between herself and the fire.
One could learn the temperament of a stove or a chimney, with patience and diligence master their most fractious moods. In the open, each new cookfire announced itself a stranger, and it was a rare one that did not require cajoling or pampering. Rain meant rigging up tarps and the delay of searching for wood dry enough to burn. High winds necessitated laying the fire in a hole and hunching over the pans. When there was nothing better to burn than weeds, she surrendered the fight and poured a quick batch of pancakes into the iron spider, hiding her frustration under a layer of Mother Ingalls’s maple syrup.
Her triumphs were lackluster; nothing, down to the coffee and tea, tasted quite like her own cooking. The water in each new place imposed its own flavors: swampy, sudsy, sulphured, greasy. Anything that did not fall from the sky carried the faint too-clean tinge of the powdered alum she used to clarify each day’s supply of drinking water. Some bucketfuls held stubbornly to their dust no matter how carefully she skimmed the sediment. Dusty water did not matter so much to the cornbread, but parboiling the salt pork from such a bucket left a fine dredging of grit behind to grind between their teeth. More than once Caroline thought it would be worth backtrailing to Minnesota’s frozen woodlands to fill the ten-gallon keg with pure clean snow, but even that would be seasoned with brass and rubber by the time it found its way out of the spigot. At least—the very least—she did not have to trifle with stove black or empty an ashpan on top of her other struggles.