Caroline: Little House, Revisited(22)
“All ready?”
Hands folded, she nodded pertly to Charles and ahead they rolled. Mary hiccoughed silently beside her. Each little spasm jabbed at Caroline’s conscience. She had been sure of herself when she spoke, but how could it be the right thing if it left the both of them stinging? Caroline gave her head the tiniest shake. She could not ask herself such things. A question like that had no serviceable answer. If she did not block its path, it would circle her mind, searching for one. So she began to sing:
We are waiting by the river,
We are watching on the shore,
Only waiting for the boatman,
Soon he’ll come to bear us o’er.
All of them perked up at that, even the impatient ferryman, and it cheered Caroline to see it. She matched her tempo to the sharp ringing of the horses’ hooves on the boards, and so she could not help slowing nearly to a stop as the ferryman motioned Charles to drive closer, closer, closer yet to the front of the raft. As the wagon began to tilt toward the center of the river Mary closed her eyes so tight the lashes all but disappeared.
Caroline resisted the urge to pull Mary onto her lap. She had promised the child she was safe where she sat and must not do anything to contradict that. Caroline made herself as still as she had told Mary to be, except for her toes, which slid forward to brace against the wagon box. Laura leaned back and gripped the edge of the spring seat and asked, “Why, Pa?”
“The logs at the ends of the ferry boat are cut at a slant like the blade of my ax,” Charles said. “That makes them fit snug to the riverbank’s slope under the water. The ferryman can’t move us unless we help tip the logs off the bank. Watch him, now.”
Behind them the young man—Mrs. Boston’s son, judging by the look of him—unfastened the mooring rope and sank a pole into the water between the raft and the bank. He pried upward against the hull until with a sandy scrape the ferry came loose. Then with a leisurely swoop he leapt aboard.
“Center them up now,” he instructed Charles.
Ben and Beth found level, and Caroline felt herself lift as though the water had unhitched her from her own weight. “Oh!” she said. Mary and Laura and Charles all looked at her. “It’s so light.” She did not know how else to explain. Her own bed was not half so yielding as this river. There on the hard spring seat her whole body felt as though it were suspended in that soft space between wakefulness and sleep. She leaned back and let the swaying, swishing current rise up through the logs, the wheels, and the boards to rock her.
This was altogether different from tiptoeing across the brittle Mississippi. This river was a living road. It opened itself for them, made room for them to settle into its waters, beckoned them with the tug of its current. This river would not crack behind them.
Just over halfway across the ferryman cranked the windlass and the ferry’s nose swung around to angle downstream. “Back them up a couple of yards now, if you please,” he said to Charles.
With his hand on the brake Charles persuaded the team backward. One step at a time the front of the raft began to edge out of the water. Mary’s breath hissed in and no further. She did not breathe, but she sat there with her hands folded just like Caroline’s, a perfect little statue of obedience and bravery. Pride buoyed Caroline up so light, she was still floating as the ferry docked and the wagon pulled off down the road.
Charles was jubilant. “Kansas!” he said, and that was all for nearly a mile, he was so lost in his own satisfaction. Then his toes began to bounce. Next thing Caroline knew he was whistling “The Campbells Are Coming,” and then he was grinning too broadly to whistle. He slapped his knee and chortled instead.
“Charles?” Caroline said. Her own voice curled toward laughter.
His eyes did not twinkle—they shone. Charles bellowed out:
The Ingalls are coming, hurrah, hurrah!
The Ingalls are coming, hurrah, hurrah!
The Ingalls are coming to Indian Territ’ry,
All the way ’cross the Missouri!
All the way ’cross the Missouri. Caroline traced the map in her mind as she figured the sum. Some four hundred twenty-five miles they had come. Four hundred twenty-five miles. With still two hundred more down into Montgomery County—Indian Territory. She did not like to call it that, but that is what it would be until the Indians moved on. It made her sort of flutter inside to imagine what this land might be holding in store for them. Caroline shivered a delicious little shiver. She had felt this eager, frightened tremor only twice before: stepping up to the justice of the peace with Charles on their wedding day and again five years later with the first tentative pangs of Mary’s birthing. Crossing the river Missouri was the same sort of threshold, Caroline realized. Like the other times she must go ahead, uncertain of whether the world was about to open or close around her.
Nine
“What would you say to stopping early, Caroline?” Charles asked.
“Now?” She did not know what else to say. It was only midafternoon; they were not ten miles inside the Kansas line.
Charles nodded. “I don’t like the look of that sky.”
Caroline turned westward. The horizon was like a pan of dishwater. A rumble, faint as a cat’s purr, ruffled the air. “Well, I’d be thankful for rain enough to fill the washtub and the time to use it before Sunday,” she said.