Caroline: Little House, Revisited(59)

No crack came. Only the steady weight of the log on her foot, and, smothered somewhere beneath that, pain. She was not sensible of the pain itself, only a strange sensation pushing hard against the log, impatient to be felt.

“Caroline!” Charles was beside her, and Laura.

“I’m all right.” Her voice was a gasp, the words nearly a lie. She was hurt, that was certain. How badly she could not tell. But she would mend or manage without; Caroline knew that already. Nothing vital in her had broken.

Charles lifted the log free. Pain bulged up into the space it left behind, so large for an instant she feared her shoe might burst. Caroline pulled herself tight. If she could hold her body tightly enough, she thought, she could shrink the pain down small enough to fit back inside her.

“Move your arms,” Charles demanded. “Is your back hurt? Can you turn your head?”

Caroline did not want to move anything. Simply exhaling sent flames of hot and cold racing through her ankle. But she had never seen such a look on Charles’s face. Not even with the creek rising nearly to his ears had he looked so horrified—white and trembling, and hardly an inch from tears. Gingerly she moved and turned. He looked to her middle, too frightened to ask aloud.

Caroline pulled all the awareness she could muster away from her throbbing foot. If anything had gone wrong with the child she could not feel it. The log had struck nothing else. That she was sure of. The rest amounted to no more than a stumble. Caroline tried to smile for him and managed mostly to wince.

“Thank God,” Charles said. He cradled one arm behind her shoulders and another across her belly and helped her sit up. He looked at her, and his face seemed to shimmer with the effort of holding his relief in check.

Caroline laid a hand on his arm. “I’m all right, Charles,” she said again, her voice far from steady. “It’s just my foot.”

With shaking fingers he stripped off her shoe and stocking and pressed into the raging flesh to feel the length of every slim bone and work each joint. “Does it hurt much?”

“Not much.” A bald-faced lie, and no compunctions. Anything to make him stop.

“No bones broken,” he said. “Only a bad sprain.” The prodding stopped, but his eyes did not leave her foot. He stared at it, puffed and purpling in his palm—for once in his life overcome by what might have been. He ran his other hand over his forehead and up through his hair. His breath was shallow through his nose and open mouth.

“Well, a sprain’s soon mended. Don’t be so upset, Charles.”

“I blame myself. Should have used skids.” He still held her heel in one hand, his head in the other.

She could not sit on the ground any longer, or Charles would be the one to break. That was something Laura must never see. Caroline put her palms to the ground and pushed. Without a word between them Charles’s arms were right where she needed them to be. Caroline felt him bracing for her weight and knew he would carry her, but she did not need Laura to see that, either. She pressed herself forward until his arms began to lift with her. Only a little wobble and she was upright on her good foot. Caroline stood still a moment, panting. Then she bent her grimace to resemble a smile and said, “Please bring my shoe and stocking, Laura.”





Fifteen




There is nothing in the world but the weight—pulling, tugging, dragging down. Not a log in her hands, but her own belly, too heavy to hold. If she lets go, it will break free, tearing her dress, her corset strings, her very skin. Barefoot, she roams the prairie for help. In one cabin, only men. In the next, Indians. Her arms ache; her breasts weigh like sacks of coffee. Her knuckles begin slipping past one another. Then the sound of ripping—fibers of cloth or flesh?

Caroline blinked. Nothing had split apart but her eyelids. The weight was only Charles’s arm, hugged down into the dwindling valley between her belly and breasts. Caroline lay awake, feeling the throb of her pulse against the rags bound about her ankle. Her mind throbbed, too, making pictures in the dark: Charles pinned under the fallen log instead. The dreadful creek she must cross to reach help in Independence. Caroline pinched her eyes shut. The pictures changed but did not dim. She saw her own high belly, and the empty foot of a bedstead looming from between her drawn-up knees. The place where Polly should be. “Oh, Polly,” she whispered.

Caroline pulled as deep a breath as she could wedge under Charles’s arm and willed herself to relax. That she could not manage. Her foot hurt, and the straw tick no longer smelled of home. It was thinner, and prickly in places with the new straw Jacobs had given them. Caroline tried to shift herself without rousing Charles and the child moved. A jerky little movement, as though she’d startled it.

She was caught between them. Sandwiched queerly from without and within. Resigned, she laid her arm over his, her palm brushing across the soft curling hairs that belied the firm muscles beneath. How different it must feel to be a man: built solid through, with everything beneath the skin belonging solely to yourself. Did he ever envy what she could take into herself, how much she could contain? Could he comprehend all it meant for a woman to hold herself open for her husband, her children? For all it demanded of her Caroline knew she would not trade the depth of those open spaces, those currents of life passing through her. No man could encompass another life so fully as a woman, except perhaps in his mind. Perhaps that was what made Charles clutch her so close now as he slept. He had felt her slip through his fingers this afternoon. It was providential, he had said, that her foot had not been crushed. She had not told him that the same hollow that saved her foot had caused the fall.