Caroline: Little House, Revisited(4)
“Ready?” Charles asked.
Caroline nodded. Together they leaned over the sideboards of the wagon and took the corners of the folded sheet of canvas from Mary’s and Laura’s outstretched hands, pulling it square over the hickory bows.
“Best-looking wagon cover in Wisconsin,” Charles proclaimed. He tossed Laura and then Mary up over the tailgate and cinched the rear flaps down so tightly they could barely peek through. “There we are—snug as a tent!”
Caroline could not deny it was handsome, all clean and close-fitting as a new bodice. It was easily the largest thing she had ever sewn. And yet it looked to have shrunk. All that canvas, which inside the cabin had seemed vast enough to set a schooner afloat, now enclosed an area barely the size of the pigpen. “I declare, I still don’t know how it’s all going to fit,” Caroline said as the girls ran whooping up and down the length of the wagon box.
“I’m whittling a pair of hooks for my gun. Tell me how many you need, and I’ll make you enough to hang anything you like from the bows.”
“That will do for the carpetbags, but we can’t hang the bedstead and straw ticks.”
“I’ll lay a few boards across the wagon box to make a loft for the straw ticks right behind the spring seat,” Charles said. “The girls and the fiddle can ride there, with the extra provisions stowed underneath.”
But there was still the medicine box of camphor, castor oil, laudanum, and bitter herbs. The willow-bough broom, sewing basket, scrap bag, sadirons, soap and starch; the kerosene, candles, tinderbox, and lamps; the chamber pail. The whole of the pantry must go into the wagon, from the salt and pepper to the churn and dishpan. Always there was something small and essential turning up that must be wedged into a box—packets of seeds, scraps of leather and balls of twine, the little box that held Mary’s rag doll and paper ladies, the matches screwed tightly into a cobalt blue medicine bottle. And yet there must be room for Charles’s things: chains and ropes and picket pins, the metal tools and traps, his lead and patch box and bullet mold. It was a mercy the buckets and washtub could hang outside the wagon.
“Don’t worry about the furniture,” Charles added. “We’ll leave all that. Once we get settled I can make more.”
Caroline pulled her shawl to her chin, stricken. Over and over again she had imagined her things arranged in the new place Charles would build, until the picture felt familiar, almost beckoning. All at once there was no place to spread the red-checked tablecloth, nowhere to prop the pillows in their embroidered shams. Even her cozy vantage point—her rocker before the hearth—now vanished from the image. “That will help,” she said weakly.
Charles loosened the rope and stuck his head inside the wagon. “Any Indians in here?” he called to Mary and Laura. Caroline measured the wagon one last time with her eyes, then left Charles and the girls to their play.
The cabin still smelled of the linseed oil she’d used to cure the canvas. Boxes, crates, and bundles leaned in the corners, encroaching on her sense of order no matter how neatly she stacked them. Turning her back to the disarray, Caroline went to the hearth and lowered herself into the embrace of the rocking chair, listening for the accustomed sigh of the runners across the floorboards. Charles had fashioned this chair for her of sugar maple just before Mary was born. In the last days before the birth, its sway had soothed her nerves as much as it soothed the baby afterward. Beside it sat Charles’s own straight-backed chair and Mary’s and Laura’s little stools, like a wooden family. Charles had built them all, and he would build more. Caroline stroked the arms of her rocker. Her fingers knew the grain of their curves as well as they knew the coiled knot of her own hair. The work of Charles’s hands might make a new chair familiar to her touch, but it would not be the same.
Three
In the grainy dark before dawn, Caroline woke to the pull of her stomach drawing itself taut. Before opening her eyes she resigned herself to it; better to let her muscles express her dread of this day than give voice to it.
Already the room had changed. Neither Charles’s clothes nor his nightshirt hung on the nail beside her own, though the usual sounds of him putting on his boots and taking up the water pail came from the back door. She lay still a moment more after the door shut, letting herself collect the feel of the roof and walls around her one last time before kneeling alongside the trundle bed to pray.
As she fastened her corset, Caroline marked the faint rise of her waist, like the dome of a layer cake peeking over the pan. The quickening would follow before long. She was more impatient for it this time than she had been even with Mary. After spending weeks packing boxes and crates, it was disquieting not to have felt her own body’s cargo. Caroline flattened her palms below her ribs and drew a breath. Not a flicker, yet the steady press of the steels along her core eased the quiver of her nerves. With each successive breath she stretched her lungs deeper still, until she was nearly within reach of her accustomed cadence.
Caroline took her dress down from its nail and the bedroom turned gaunt—stripped and scoured down to the last bare inch. Vinegar still stung the air, sharpened by the cold. It crowded out the familiar traces of Charles’s shaving lather and rosemary-scented bear grease. Caroline washed her face, then with her damp palms smoothed the length of her braid before pinning it carefully up. Last of all she dipped the comb into the basin of cold water and slicked down the loose strands between her forehead and the nape of her neck.