Caroline: Little House, Revisited(50)

There was no time to ask what or why. A gush of water came splashing at the sideboards. It hit with a jolt that jostled Caroline’s jawbone, then pushed its way under and around the wagon box. The furrows around Pet’s and Patty’s necks melted away as the current scooped them up. The wagon gave a funny sort of dip and then they were floating, horses and all.

Instinctively Caroline scooted inward, lifting her feet from the floor, but no water breached the seams. Only the churning of the mustangs’ hooves reverberated through the water and up the wagon’s wooden tongue into the box. Caroline felt the faint echo of their chugging in her chest as though a steam locomotive were passing.

“Gee!” Charles called out, and Caroline’s attention expanded outward. He was half standing, leaning with the reins, trying to steer the mustangs toward the right.

Upstream. It felt immediately wrong. They always forded crosswise so that the horses could work with the current, not against it. Caroline searched the opposite bank for her bearings. Nothing aligned. No opposing set of ruts, nothing. It might have been a different creek altogether. Even the willow trees lining the shore hunched closer overhead, as though they had shrunk. No, Caroline realized, not shrunk. It was the creek itself that had risen, enough to catch hold of the willows by their lowermost leaves and slant the boughs downstream.

Caroline looked out beyond the horses’ heads. There was the ford, already some rods upstream from where it had been when they set out moments before. The surge had washed them past in a matter of seconds. Caroline watched with one hand over her mouth as the landing place began slipping out of sight altogether.

The wagon was a boat, with no rudder or oars but the two black ponies. Pet and Patty snorted and paddled mightily against the current, but it was all they could do to hold the wagon in place. Then for a moment they began to gain ground. The sound of the water striking the side of the wagon box stopped. Quiet opened up like a hole around them. Caroline did not like it. Her stomach plummeted just half an inch and stopped short.

They had fallen without falling, Caroline thought without fully understanding herself, plunged into a hollow whose depth she had no way of sounding. From under the surface came an almost imperceptible tremor, and Caroline knew her answer was on its way. The creek was marshaling itself. She felt it coming, a gathering rush from upstream.

Caroline spun in her seat. The water must not reach the girls. It would pull them downstream like the willow boughs. Mary was already crouched down on the straw tick, but Laura sat straight up, her blue eyes violet with excitement. Caroline’s mouth went dry in one breath. There was next to nothing she could shield them with.

“Lie down, girls,” she commanded. They dropped as though her voice had knocked them over. It was not enough. She whipped the gray blanket down over them. “Be still, just as you are. Don’t move!”

The current came at the wagon in a great, muscular arm, caught hold of the back of it and swung it like a pendulum. The shore went swinging with it, out of sight until there was nothing but water before them. Caroline flattened herself backward against the spring seat. The whole of the creek was coming at her as though it would leap straight into her lap. It crashed and foamed against the boards, inches from her knees. Dark drops of spray shot up and dotted her skirt.

The water reared the mustangs backward, straining the pole straps that bound them to the neck yoke. They snorted and kicked and pulled, their noses inching nearer and nearer the narrow pole that joined them to the tongue. Then with a whinny the creek forced them up again. Caroline gasped and gripped the seat as the front of the wagon tipped upward, pried by the tongue.

The leather straps and steel rings would likely hold, but the wooden yoke? Caroline flinched at the thought. With the weight of two horses yanking each of its ends backward even a good hickory pole might snap like a twig broken over a man’s knee. The long tongue was only a little less vulnerable. If either of them splintered, the mustangs would come crashing into the wagon box. They must keep fighting the current, Caroline realized, if only to keep the wagon intact. Swim, she willed them, swim. But Pet and Patty were as frightened as she was. The creek had them in a chokehold. Their necks straightened, their noses pointed to the sky. Caroline could see the whites of their eyes.

“Take them, Caroline!”

The reins were in her hands and Charles’s hat and boots on the floor before she understood what was happening. He stepped one stockinged foot up onto the corner of the wagon box and sprang from it into the creek. The wagon gave a terrible lurch behind him and—

Caroline’s breath, her blood, stopped cold. The image of him leaping held itself frozen before her. It was as though her senses refused to register anything further.

But she had seen what happened next. Already she could feel the print of it on her memory.

The water had closed over his head.

Instantly the creek sealed itself as though he had never been there at all. Every ripple that belonged to Charles was gone.

Caroline waited with the reins in her hands and his name in her throat. She must not scream, must not frighten the girls, must not frighten the horses. Everything in her had dropped with him. She pulled back against the feeling and the reins tightened with her. She would hold the whole wagon afloat this way until Charles surfaced if she had to. Her eyes looked nowhere but the place where he had disappeared.

But it was not the same place, she thought with a cold flash, nor the same water. All of it was moving—creek and wagon and horses, water and wheels and hooves. And somewhere, moving with it or through it or against it, her husband. The creek might take hold of him—might already have hold of him—and sweep him away without her ever seeing.