Caroline: Little House, Revisited(26)
To distract herself from useless wanting, Caroline fanned a handful of apple quarters like a flower on Mary’s and Laura’s plates. She planed long yellow strips from the wheel of cheese and layered them in between the apple petals. A few crumbles of cheese brightened the center of each plate, and a white ring of crackers framed it all. For Charles she made no such dainties, only neat stacks of apples and crackers, with a cut of cheese thick enough to make her wince as the knife’s handle pressed into her rope-roughened palms.
“What happened to your hands?” Charles said as she passed him his plate and a mug of water. He was hoarse from shouting.
Pink welts striped them from side to side. “Only a bit of rope burn,” she said. “Nothing that won’t mend.”
Charles put down his supper and reached for her wrist. “Let me see.”
He would blame himself if he saw them—no matter that he was not the one who had coiled the ties around her hands. “It’s all right, Charles,” she insisted. “I can manage.”
A sigh hissed between his teeth.
“Your cornbread won’t be any less sweet for it,” she ventured to tease. I never ask any other sweetening, he’d said since that first supper in Pepin, when you put the prints of your hands on the loaves.
A short snuffle—almost a laugh—escaped his nostrils. “All right, Caroline,” he said.
She saw from the way his movements loosened when he bowed his head to pray that it had been levity enough to oil his hinges. He cleared his throat for the blessing and winced.
“Rest your voice, Charles,” Caroline said. “I think Mary is old enough to say grace for us. ‘For what we are about to receive,’” she prompted.
Mary straightened up and refolded her hands primly. “For what we are about to receive,” she repeated and then took a careful breath, “. . . may the Lord make us . . . ,” another breath, “. . . truly thankful.” Her eyes popped open, looking to see if she had done right.
“Very nice,” Caroline praised her. Mary puffed up like a vanity cake, muddling Caroline’s pride. Had she sown the wrong kind of modesty in that child? From the day Mary was born, Caroline had known that warding off vanity promised to be the greatest task in raising her. She had felt it welling in herself as she gazed on those delicate blue eyes and stroked the first golden wisps of Mary’s hair. How, she wondered then and ever after, had she made anything so beautiful?
Laura sat in awe of her sister. Caroline watched her fork a crumb of cheese from the center of her plate and taste it carefully, as though the food might be sauced with a new flavor after being blessed by Mary’s voice. Caroline sat down beside Laura and smoothed her little brown braids. They were so waxed with the week’s dust and oil, they would likely hold their shape without ribbons.
Once again there would be no Saturday bath, Caroline realized, just as there were no fresh loaves of light bread. At this hour the inside of their cabin would be fleecy with yeast and the breath of bathwater—unless Mrs. Gustafson, being a Swede, did her baking and bathing by a different timetable. Caroline scanned the dim expanse of the wagon. She thought of how the girls’ small white backs glistened in the yellow firelight as she poured warm snowmelt over them, and the feathery feel of their clean toweled hair. Buttoned into fresh flannel nightgowns, they would stand at her knees to have their hair braided tight and damp to make it wavy for Sunday. The little house glowed orange in Caroline’s memory.
She nibbled steadily at her dinner while the thunder numbed their ears, determined to enjoy the fruit and cheese before her rather than pine for what was behind her. But Caroline could not keep her thoughts confined within the wagon. Often Saturday nights she found time to read or crochet by the fire while her own bathwater heated in pots and kettles on the stove, easing herself into Sunday with the sound of Charles’s fiddle or his whittling knife. Tonight there was little to do but wipe the dishes and go to bed, and she said as much as she collected their plates.
Mary tugged at Caroline’s cuff. “Where are we going to sleep?” she whispered. Caroline looked over Mary’s head. The spring seat and harnesses filled the girls’ bed space.
“I can double up the small tick, sleep in the aisle,” Charles rasped.
“I wish I could make you a mug of tea for that throat,” she said.
Charles waved a hand. “It’ll pass.”
Caroline brushed the crumbs from the plates with a damp dishcloth and fitted them back into the crate while the girls squatted in the aisle with the chamber pail. They brought Caroline their soiled rags and she rinsed them over a bucket with water from the keg. It seemed foolish, spending drinking water on such things with the heavens spilling down on them, but she dared not tussle with the wagon cover again until the wind calmed.
Charles walked the chamber pail back to the tailgate and sat down on the molasses keg while Caroline readied the girls for bed. She laid the pillows so the lean of the wagon would tug at their ankles rather than their ears, and tied their nightcaps close under their chins.
Perched on the edge of the tick, they watched Charles unfold a tarpaulin the length of the aisle and lace a slender rope through the line of metal rings that bordered its edge.
“What are you doing, Pa?” Laura asked.
“Got to be ready—” He cleared his throat and shook his head.
“Pa is preparing a shelter for Ben and Beth in case the rain doesn’t stop,” Caroline explained as she folded the girls’ dresses and petticoats and tucked them into the carpetbag.