Caroline: Little House, Revisited(21)
Real or imagined, she needed some mark to aim toward, and what better place than a house? A home. She wanted to be able to see it in her mind, to picture herself inside it as she had not dared to do since Charles informed her they would be leaving the furniture behind. If she could do that, Charles might stop the wagon anywhere he pleased, and she could pin that vision of home to the map.
Caroline’s hands toyed with her thread as though it were a latch string. It was risky, fashioning another such reverie with no firm promise that the reality would match. She looked again to Charles. The image he’d built was still before him, solid as though he’d made it out of boards. Perhaps yoking her vision to his would secure it somehow. Caroline gripped the leather latch string in her mind, and pulled.
The room that opened before her was so new she could smell the freshly hewn logs, yet immediately familiar: a straw tick snugged into each of the corners beside the hearth, her trunk beneath one window, the red-checked cloth on the table and the bright quilts on the beds. Without looking she knew Charles’s rifle hung over the door. Even the curtains she recognized—their calico trim from a little blue and yellow dress of Mary’s that Caroline had loved too much to tear into rags.
The whole house might as well have been standing there finished.
“Will that suit you?” Charles asked. His voice was so near, it was as though he were standing beside her in the imagined doorway.
Caroline whispered, “Yes, Charles.”
Eight
Caroline held the vision before her all the way to the very rim of Kansas—the Missouri River.
It bore little resemblance to the map. On paper it was a thick line squiggling between Missouri and Kansas as though it were caught in a crimping iron. Creeks and streams veined the map with blue.
This river was less than half a mile across and so yellowed with mud, it looked as though it had been dredged with mustard powder. The opaque water did not seem to flow, but to roll. It carved steadily at its own banks, paring away great slices of earth that crumbled, brown sugar–like, into the water.
They waited almost three hours to cross at Boston Ferry and gave up four dollars from the fiddle box for the privilege. Ferries farther downstream in St. Joseph were apt to charge as much or more, Mrs. Boston said, and their lines were sure to be longer. “Why, by the time you get there you might not even cross today, and those that run their boats on the Sabbath aren’t the sort I’d trust with all my worldly goods.”
That settled that. Charles could not keep himself confined to the wagon long enough for dinner much less another full day, not with Kansas in plain sight. He stood poised along the bank, hardly remembering to eat the wedge of cornbread and molasses Caroline put in his hand. Caroline considered the opposite shore. No pattern, texture, or color marked the Kansas side as distinct from Missouri. Yet there Charles stood, looking as though he were about to step from burlap to brocade. That land called to him, and he could scarcely wait to answer.
Mary did not like it, not from the moment she spotted the ferryman opening up a hatch to shovel water from the hull. She spent the last half hour before their turn to cross scooted in close to Caroline, with Nettie clamped under one arm and her fingers woven into Caroline’s shawl, while Laura asked Charles a dozen questions. What’s this do, Pa? and What’s that? What makes it go, Pa? and Why does it go sideways? Charles named the stob and pulleys and cables for her, and tried to explain how the ferryman slanted the oar board against the current to trick the water into pushing the raft across instead of downstream, but it was more than either of the girls could grasp. For Laura it was enough that her pa understood how it worked. Mary was not comforted.
Caroline ran her hand over Mary’s hair as Mary struggled to make sense of it. Barbs of chapped skin snagged the fine golden strands. On either side of the part, Caroline could see the lines the comb had scored that morning. All of them needed a good soak in the washtub. At home their hair would have been glossy by week’s end. Now it was only dusty and lusterless, the part faintly gray instead of white.
The wagon gave a little jolt and Mary startled. The ferryman was signaling Charles onto the raft. “I don’t want to see anymore,” Mary said. “I want to go back on the straw tick.”
Caroline put her hand to Mary’s knee. “Stay here where I can reach you until we reach the other side.”
“I don’t want to.” She was beginning to flutter with panic as the raft loomed nearer. Caroline pressed more firmly. “Ma? I don’t want to.”
Charles heard and slowed the team. The ferryman waved again. “Move ahead!” he called out.
The wagon stayed in place. Caroline could feel both Charles and the ferryman turn toward her. She must appease the child or scold her, and fast. The quickest would be to let Mary go and burrow under the gray blanket. But this was no two-mile ice crossing. The child had watched the ferry shuttle more than half a dozen wagons safely from shore to shore. She could not let Mary’s fear keep cutting itself larger and larger patterns.
Caroline spoke low and swift. “Mary, we must all learn to do things we don’t want to do. You may be afraid, but you may not let your fear chase you away from what must be done. This is a good sturdy raft, and it will see us to the other side if we all sit still and let the ferryman do his job. Be a brave girl, now, and don’t keep the ferryman waiting.” She gave Mary her handkerchief and faced herself forward.