Caroline: Little House, Revisited(33)
Caroline felt her gaze lift to the arch of the wagon bows framing her daughters’ heads. The rain still fell and somewhere beyond a creek still roared, but a warm shiver fanned across her back and down her arms.
“Do it again, Ma, please,” Laura begged.
Caroline blinked. Had the girls felt it, too? But Laura was looking only at the yarn. Caroline smiled and shook her head. To do it again would turn it into play. “But if you can tell me what is special about a manger,” she conceded, “I will show you how to make one from the cat’s cradle.”
“Bible-Mary laid her baby in the manger,” Mary piped.
“That’s my smart girl,” Caroline said.
They were taking turns with the yarn when Charles climbed inside and stood dripping in the space before the spring seat as though it were a porch. Water rained from his hem into a ring on the floor.
“Creek’s about half a mile from here,” he said. He took his hat by the crown and flapped it. An arc of droplets spattered the canvas wall. “Flooded so high I can’t even tell where the blasted banks ought to be.”
“Charles, please,” Caroline said, her hand at his elbow. She could not have his oath fraying the peace she had somehow spun out of this day.
“I know it. And I’m sorry, Caroline.” He dropped his hat onto the spring seat and flopped down beside it. “But we’re stuck here and that creek is only the half of it. There isn’t but a hand’s breadth of daylight between the mud and the front axle.” Great clods of mud rolled from his boots as he shucked them off. “Ben and Beth can’t hardly lift their own feet, much less pull. This ground’ll rust their shoes and rot their hooves if we leave them standing, even if we empty the whole straw tick under them.”
She looked at the limp socks slouching past the ends of his toes. “Are your feet dry?”
“I haven’t the foggiest. I’m too wet everywhere else to know the difference.” Beneath the poncho’s seams his shirt and pants were dyed dark with streaks of wet.
She pulled a pair of his winter socks from the carpetbag. “Here. They’re not clean, but they’re dry. For now, at least.” Charles took them without a word.
Though his mood was no brighter, all the sharpness had gone from it. He was only cold and wet and disappointed. Caroline watched him pull the socks from his wrinkled white toes, and all her sympathy reached for him. If her shawl were dry, she would have liked to drape it around his shoulders. The quilts would do just as well for warmth, but they would not enfold him in the same way. Instead she finger-combed the fringe of damp whiskers away from his neck.
“You were right, Caroline,” he said, shaking off a shiver. “I shouldn’t have gone out.”
“Just so you’re here, Charles,” she soothed, blotting his collar with a towel. “I only wish I could contrive a hot meal for you.” She gave a fleeting thought to heating a mug over the lantern for tea.
“I’ll warm soon enough, now that the rain can’t reach me.” He looked at the girls stringing yarn over their fingers and cocked an eyebrow at Caroline. She only smiled and nodded toward them. “Tell Pa what you learned from that yarn today.”
While Mary and Laura told Charles about the manger and the ladder, Caroline considered the provisions. Until the cornbread ran out it had not occurred to her that nearly every bit of food they carried, from the salt pork to the flour, was raw. Even with sixty-odd dollars lining the fiddle box, they could not afford to keep making whole meals of crackers, cheese, and dried apples. She had enough flour to fill a washbasin and more water than she could ask for, yet she could not bake so much as a crumb. As a child, she could not have imagined such a conundrum. There had been want back home—during the spare times in Concord there was many a day without anything better than breadcrumbs in maple sugar water—but never in her life had she gone without for need of a cookfire.
Caroline tied on her apron and waited as though the garment itself would tell her what to do. If such a thing could speak, it would surely be in her mother’s voice. She knew what her ma would think to see her standing stock-still among sacks of food and thinking she had nothing to eat. Ma, who had fed a whole litter of children, sometimes down to the last pinch of dust from the flour barrel. Her mother would have wept for joy to see crates half-filled with salt pork and bacon, and only four mouths to fill—just as she had wept at the stranger who gave her a barrel of flour on credit. Caroline no longer recollected his face, but that barrel stood like an altar in her memory. All of them had knelt down on the spot to thank Providence for it; she could still feel the kitchen floorboards under her knees.
Caroline grasped the knife and carved the cheese into chunks large enough to fill their hands. They would eat it in spite of the expense, and give thanks for their plenty.
The girls nudged closer as she lay down beside them, seeking her warmth. Their teeth had clinked like china as they shrugged out of their coats and hoods and into their cold nightgowns. The best she could say for the sheets was that they were no wetter than anything else by the time she tucked them back over the limp ticking.
Now Caroline felt a thin layer of herself rising through the quilts to shelter her girls, as she always did when they were so near. Even when they were not seeking protection, Caroline could not help making a shield of herself between them and the world.