Caroline: Little House, Revisited(42)
Charles laughed.
Caroline blushed. Perhaps she had spoken the thought aloud. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” Charles said. “I just feel like laughing. Maybe it’s the horses.”
“They are lovely to watch,” she mused.
“It’s something more than that. Feel them,” he said, handing her the reins.
She took the lines firmly in her hands. In only a few steps the team’s eager rhythm loosened her wrists, traveling past her elbows and into her shoulders. It was like dancing, with the leather straps a line of music running from the horses into her palms. Caroline’s breath lifted, light and airy, into two soft notes of laughter.
Charles grinned. “Feel it?”
Caroline nodded.
“I don’t know when I’ve run across a finer matched pair than these,” Charles said. “Tell you the truth, I don’t know how we’ll tell them apart after the one foals.”
Caroline studied the rounded sides of the mare in front of her—the one Mary named Pet. “She can carry that colt, and the wagon, too?” she asked.
He raised an eyebrow at her.
She flushed more deeply and gave him half a smile in return. “I’m not pulling the wagon, Charles.”
He laughed again and took the reins.
Eleven
Kansas.
The land seemed to move, to breathe all around them.
It was not empty, not void of trees, as Caroline had assumed from the grand boasts of Charles’s handbill. But the scattered stands of timber did not define the landscape as they did in Wisconsin and Minnesota. They did not even hem the edges of the roads and fields as they had throughout Iowa and Missouri. Here on the prairie they gathered modestly in low-lying areas along creek beds and riverbanks to mark the places where water flowed, fringing Caroline’s view with hints of green.
Just gazing across the prairie made her eyes feel somehow larger, fuller. Caroline had not known they could hold so much space at once. Without trees acting as walls there was not even a ceiling, nothing to fool her eyes into halting at some arbitrary height. It was as though a lid had suddenly lifted from the world. Caroline knew she was not seeing more, not really, but the sensation of it was so very different from taking in a view made up of separate pieces all vying for her attention. Clearer, invigorating. The world ceased to be an assemblage and became one thing, one simple thing.
It sounded different, as well. Always the sounds of the wind had come from above, rustling the leaves and tousling the evergreens. Here it whispered beneath her, so that its voice seemed to rise up from the ground. She could hear great sweeps of it passing across the prairie, lifting and falling like living breath. Here the very shape of the wind was visible. The tall swaying grass made it so, and by looking closely Caroline saw that the wind was not composed of one single movement—it fanned with hundreds of fingers through the tall blades all at once, stroking ruffled, swirling patterns all over the prairie.
Charles was smitten. She had not seen his face so soft with wonder since the day Laura was born, had never in her life seen him so at ease. The constant rushes of motion around them worked a kind of magic on him, appeasing the restlessness he’d always battled. Caroline herself was not sure whether he was driving more leisurely, or if the way the grass seemed to dash alongside the wagon had altered her own sense of speed.
They breasted a roll of prairie, spring green and golden. The sky was sudsy with clouds. Before them, the sun was sinking between the hills like a coin tucked into a pocket. Light melted into the hollows and dales. From where she sat high on the spring seat, Caroline fancied she could feel the very curve of the earth.
This was to be home, she told herself. This was where her child would be born. She hugged her folded hands around the small hill that was her belly. Her own roundness mirrored the abundant swells before her, making her welcome.
All her life she had been accustomed to making do with little if any to spare. We must cut the coat to fit the cloth, her mother had so often said, and by mimicking the careful movements of Ma’s broad hands Caroline had learned well how to stretch every thin scrap of food or fabric or fuel she was given.
On this wide teeming land life could be different. She could smell it in the moist soil, feel it in the way the waving tufts of grass seemed to brush at her heart. Caroline looked again at Charles. He was aglow. Simply aglow. You could not sit beside him without feeling it. But it was in her, too. Seeing the spread of this country opened her somehow, broadened her so that it seemed her expectations stretched out not just before her, but all around her in a way she had never felt before nor could quite describe. Perhaps, she thought, this was what Charles had felt all the time back home, this boundless outward reaching. No wonder his fiddle so often sang of lively marches without horizons. The music was the only part of him that could not be constricted by walls and fences and trees.
Belated sympathy for him saturated Caroline’s chest. So much of what she had fallen in love with—what she had taken for vibrancy and zest—had in truth been frustration. Ten years, and she’d only now begun to understand. Perhaps if she were a different kind of woman, one that looked outward more often than inward, she might have recognized it sooner. Were she not carrying this child, this fleck of him inside her, she wondered, would she have been able to grasp it at all? Caroline tucked her bonnet brim aside to study him. Charles was already a fine man, and this land could only change him for the better. Almost against her will, that thought rippled into another: Could he change so fully that she would no longer recognize him? No, she assured herself, that was not possible. This place would not alter him, but give him room to fully unfold himself. Suddenly it dazzled her to imagine how much more of a husband and father he might become, now that he would not always be butting up against the edges of his world like the honeybees that buzzed into their cabin only to be confounded into exhaustion by trying to fly back out through the windowpanes.