Caroline: Little House, Revisited(29)

She woke with Mary’s cold toes knuckled into the crook of her knees. On her other side Laura had screwed herself into a little knot.

Caroline sniffed the air. A dull, almost meaty smell tinged the wagon—the pile of damp harnesses. The storm’s temper had eased overnight, but the rain had not abated. Streams of it sluiced off the canvas, striking puddles in a way that made her bladder tingle. She had not emptied herself all night. Caroline looked toward the rear of the wagon. Charles and his narrow bed filled the path to the chamber pail.

Gripping against the downward press of her water, Caroline deliberately rustled the carpetbag as she dressed. The damp had reached into everything. Her dress and drawers were clammy and seemed to have thickened, like drippings in a cooled skillet. Even the good stockings she saved back for Sundays still held the shape of her feet. Nevertheless, the left one hugged her shin too tightly where the beginning of a bruise shined her skin. She put on her second-best navy wool with the black braid, never mind that there was no call for it. It would be at least as warm as her everyday, and she wanted to feel a touch of fineness.

The wagon’s pitch tugged insistently at her bladder, forcing her to draw her belly upward until she felt as though she stood on tiptoe. Caroline nudged a toe under Charles’s pillow and whispered his name. He opened one eye at a time and looked up at her. She nodded toward the tailgate.

Charles stood and they minced a half pirouette in the straw tick so that she could pass.

The rear of the wagon was in disarray—Charles’s poncho drooping over the churn dash, his shirt and trousers splayed nearby. Beside the chamber pail was the drying puddle where he had come in from the rain, its edges curling into brown scales. Caroline lifted his boots aside. A skin of mud ridged the floor where they had stood.

All of those things must wait until tomorrow.

She need attend only to herself and her little brood, Caroline thought as she held the washbasin out into the deluge. Runoff licked its way past her cuffs and into the crease of her elbows before she pulled her hands back under the canvas.

Behind her, Charles rolled up his bed and dressed in his second best—more because the clothes were dry than for Sunday’s sake, Caroline supposed—then went out over the tailgate with his shovel. The feedbox flapped open and the girls were awake. Almost immediately their tempers began to snarl. They quibbled over who had first rights to the chamber pail and then who should button up whom first, their voices sharpening so fast they nicked Caroline’s patience.

“Girls, please,” she said. It was more a request than a warning.

“I only have one button I can’t reach,” Mary said. “Laura always does mine first.”

“Mine’s all open and it’s too cold to wait,” Laura protested.

Caroline hesitated, the words poised at the tip of her tongue. She did not want to soil the air further with the sound of her own scolding, yet this time they must be told, not asked. She closed her mouth and leveled a silent eyebrow at them. Mary swiveled Laura by the shoulders and buttoned her up the back.

“The water’s cold, Ma,” Laura protested again as Caroline scoured behind her ears.

“It is the best we have,” Caroline said, “and we can be thankful it is not frozen.” Laura’s shoulders turtled up to her earlobes.

Mary joined in, “We’re all cold, even Ben and Beth, so you must not complain.” She fairly sizzled with superiority.

Mary turned to Caroline expectantly. Caroline did not praise her. Mary had said nothing wrong—Caroline could not help but recognize her own sentiments dressed in a smaller size—but it troubled her that Mary took such care to polish her tone to a gleaming point. Vanity again, buttered with virtue. Virtue is the purest kind of beauty. Hadn’t she always impressed that upon her daughters? Only just now, watching Mary, it did not feel true.

“Forty-three degrees,” Charles said as he came in, noting it in his weather journal. “And I’ll bet it’s not much warmer in here.”

Caroline wished he had not announced it. She herself was not cold enough to shiver, but the chill was so embedded in her clothes that her skin resisted touching the fabric. Pinning a number to the cold only made her more sensible of it.

“Everybody taken their turn?” Charles asked, hefting the chamber pail by the handle. He opened the rear of the wagon cover and flung the contents out into the rain. “Tried to dig a latrine pit under the tarpaulin but it’ll likely be full of water by the time anyone needs it,” he said as he swirled the pail full of rinse water and cast the swill out again. “It’s like digging at the bottom of a well out there. I left a bucket hanging below the feedbox to bail it out.”

Charles sat down on a crate and scrubbed his sides with his fists. “Sore,” he said. “Had to lean backward stiff as a rafter to hoist the tarpaulin onto the roof.”

“We’ll all rest ourselves today,” Caroline said, tying on her apron.

“Is it Sunday again, Ma?” Laura asked.

“It is,” Caroline answered. Laura knew better than to scowl, but the news swept down her face like a sadiron.

“Are you too tired to drive, Pa?”

“I am, Half-Pint,” Charles said, patting his knee for Laura to climb aboard. “And it’s a good thing, because Ben and Beth are too tired to pull.”

Laura wilted onto Charles’s shoulder and buckled her lips over a sigh. “Why doesn’t Sunday ever wait until I’m tired?” she lamented.