Caroline: Little House, Revisited(32)

“You must not complain,” Caroline retorted. Vinegar flavored her voice, and she knew by Mary’s sour look that she had tasted it, too. Caroline pulled another cooling breath across her tongue. If she were going to let her vexation flare outward, she would have done better to put her foot down with Charles than singe the girls. Then at least it would have served some purpose. Nor could she simply swallow her ire and leave the child beneath her apron to pickle in such brine. She had charge over their moods, and she would not squander it.

Caroline tuned herself to the rumble of sounds from outside and began to understand why Charles had been so insistent on examining the landscape.

“That is not thunder,” she explained. “There is likely a creek nearby. I shouldn’t wonder if the rain has flooded it.”

Indifferent to this news, they lay down with their heads propped at her hips. Mary picked at the row of jet buttons running down Caroline’s basque while she told them the story of Noah’s ark.

“Two by two by two,” Laura droned. “Pa and Ma, and Ben and Beth, and Mary and me.”

“One of us ought to be a boy, to make it right.”

“You,” Laura said.

Mary lifted her head and glared at Laura. “I don’t want to be the boy.”

“You came first, like Adam, so you have to.”

Mary sulked.

Caroline closed her eyes. Everything pressed on her—the wet canvas overhead, the girls leaning on either side, and the ripening child motionless as a stone in her belly. If she did not get out from under it, even for a moment, she would vanish under the weight of it all.

“I am going outside for my necessaries,” she said, drawing her shawl over her head. She paused reluctantly before going over the spring seat. It would be foolish not to ask. “Do either of you need to come?”

Laura shook her head. Mary seemed to consider. Please, no, Caroline silently implored. “Mary?”

“Not now, Ma,” Mary decided.

“Very well then. Sit nicely here until I come in.”

Caroline fetched her rag from the handle of the chamber pail and hunched out into the weather. The rain fell straight as threads from the sky. Crouched on the falling tongue, she lowered one foot as though she were testing a tub of bathwater. The mud enveloped it like a stocking. Step by step, she toed her way through the ooze and ducked under the tarpaulin.

The latrine was a round depression, less than knee deep. With her skirts clutched in one fist, she bailed a bucketful of rainwater from it, then straddled the hole.

Ben and Beth eyed her. Their fetlocks were curled and pointed with mud. She was near enough to Ben to touch the steam from his nostrils. It did not seem fair that she should foul the horses’ ground, but that could not be helped. Caroline turned her head and let go her water. It made no sound over the unfaltering beat of rain.

The moment she sat down on the spring seat the girls peeped around the gray blanket and watched her peel off her shoes. Her stockings had kept dry, but her shoelaces were so caked they must be put to soak before they stiffened into twigs. There was nothing to do for the shoes themselves but wait for them to dry enough to scrape clean.

“Your shawl’s dripping, Ma,” Mary said.

“I shouldn’t wonder,” Caroline answered. She swung herself out from under it. An arc of brown droplets struck the floor. More mud. At least she had kept her second-best skirt clean, Caroline thought as she flopped the muddied fringe out into the rain to rinse, then strung the shawl across Charles’s gun hooks to drip dry.

Colder now than she had been before, Caroline sat down on the straw tick and pulled a quilt over her shoulders. Again the girls served her those expectant looks. This time Caroline refused to meet their gaze, looking instead to the diamond-patterned mesh of the shawl hanging behind their heads.

It shamed her to realize that the rain had not put out that spark of selfish ire. In her own way she was no less impatient than Charles—only better able to hold herself outwardly still. How childish, to think herself above him rather than admit her envy that he could escape. Caroline let her eyes rest on Mary and Laura. Of the four of them, only the girls had acted their age, bearing the day’s trials with as much grace as could be expected from such young children. They deserved something of a treat.

Caroline reached for the work basket and cut a length of red worsted. She tied its ends together and strung the yarn over her hands.

“Oh, Ma!” Laura clapped. “Can we play cat’s cradle on Sunday?”

“May we, Laura. And no, you may not. But watch, girls, and listen.” Her fingers dipped in and out of the loops, playing over the strings like a silent fiddle. It had been years since she made the figure, but the pattern was familiar as a childhood tune.

As she wove the string, she told them the story of Jacob, who slept with a rock for his pillow, and dreamed of a ladder filled with angels ascending and descending from heaven.

“Cat’s whiskers,” Mary said when Caroline reached the middle of the yarn sequence.

“You must not interrupt, Mary.”

With a flourish Caroline twisted her wrists and Jacob’s ladder appeared in a mosaic of red triangles between her hands. The girls’ mouths popped open in delight.

Into their moment of wonder Caroline recited, “‘And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.’ And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.’” Her heart beat faster as she said the words. Surely.