Caroline: Little House, Revisited(43)
The further south they drove, the more the landscape opened, and the further it opened the more deeply Caroline pondered its possibilities. This was a place made for a man as versatile as Charles. Farmer, hunter, and trapper alike could make a living from the land alone. Carpenters would surely be in high demand before long. He could define himself any way he liked, or not at all, as he pleased. If he so chose he could devote himself to any business he had a mind for instead of cobbling together a livelihood piecemeal. Country like this lay as an invitation for Charles to reap as much as he could sow—whether from the land itself or from those who would settle it—with nothing to hamper his reach.
Charles knew it better than she, had likely reckoned it would be this way since before they crossed the Mississippi. He was so happy it was comical, very nearly indecent. Caroline had never seen him look at her so boldly—boldly enough to make her flush to the tips of her ears and turn her head so that her bonnet hid her face from him. Only the girls in the wagon box and the baby already in her womb kept his gleeful hands from straying from the reins to the delights of her body. After a mile she chanced a peek at him and noticed that whether he was looking at her or the prairie his expression did not change. Caroline sensed then that the two of them were curiously tied in his mind. He did not know how else to show his burgeoning love for Kansas, and so he wanted to do with her what he could not do with the land.
Caroline slid closer to him, so that their hips touched. She could give him that much, at least. Pleased, he shifted the reins to one hand and with a glance that said May I? laced an arm around her waist. His warm palm rested softly on her flank. Caroline laid a hand over his and wished again that the child would move, for both of them.
If she bore a son, she mused to herself, what a gift that would be to all of them in this vast place. A set of footsteps to follow Charles along any path he settled on, another pair of hands to share out the labor. And if it were a daughter, what then? Her mind flipped like a coin at that. It would be harder, without her brother Henry’s help, for Charles to manage a full quarter section alone, no matter how amenable the land.
Caroline blinked. She was thinking of this child as if it were a tool, an instrument to help them stake their claim. What of the child itself, the person it could become? Beyond the near certainty of blue eyes, she still could not make her mind form a picture of this baby, nor the life it might lead. Caroline felt her thoughts taking that peculiar shift backward as though she were trying to remember the child rather than imagine it. Back to the Big Woods and the familiar image of herself in her rocker before the fire, Black Susan purring at her feet.
None of it was right. This baby would be born not in winter, but on the coattails of summer. Not in the woods, but on the open plain. There would be no cat, no blazing winter hearth, no rocking chair. Caroline gazed out over the long clean grass, trying to picture instead the little house Charles had conjured before the campfire, with its blue and yellow calico curtains. How would it be inside that one room, with not two, but three little girls to bring up?
That was a different view altogether. All in one great swoop, the same vastness that held so much promise for Charles revealed to Caroline how small the places that could belong to her and the girls were by comparison. The square corners of the imagined house, the neatly turned edges of the garden, seemed sharper, narrower. Their little house in the Big Woods had rarely felt cramped, but now, without the great dark trees partitioning her view, Caroline understood just how insignificant it had been.
She turned backward to look at Mary and Laura, flushed and dozing on the straw tick. There was no place, yet, for her daughters to find room to expand in country like this—no churches, no schools, no community at all to speak of. Not even the narrow congregation of kin.
One day, if enough women came, the land would open itself to the cultivation of such places, to crops that fed more than the body. Until then, Mary’s and Laura’s minds would be confined to a vista no wider than their own sunbonnets. Both of them needed more. Caroline had only to look at them to know it. Mary was already too bright, and Laura too spirited to flourish without that promise. For their sake she could not root herself to a place without it.
Caroline said aloud, “The girls must have an education.”
“Hmm?” Charles said.
“The girls must have an education,” she said again.
He nodded without looking away from the horizon. “That’s so. Any time you judge them ready.”
“Mary is nearly ready now. I hate to make her wait.”
“Why wait?” And with a wink, “Seems to me you were a schoolteacher once.”
It was the wink that did it. Caroline saw no room for teasing in this; the breadth of their daughters’ learning could not ride on something so light as a wink. A wind rose up in her, strong enough to form a shout. For a moment Caroline could not think sensibly. It was all she could do to grip the rush of anger and rein it back. She would not let it go racing out at him. Her body went stock-still with the effort of speaking quietly. “Two terms, Charles. I taught just two terms and then I was married. That’s been better than ten years ago. Mary and Laura will have more capable instruction than that.”
She could hear the muscled quiver in her voice. It pulled Charles’s eyes from the scenery and his arm from her waist. She felt the hard set of her face as his eyes met hers, saw it bewilder him so rapidly that he nearly looked hurt. “I’ve never known you to be incapable of anything,” he said.