Caroline: Little House, Revisited(61)

Poised on the threshold, she pressed her fingertips gently against the bare wood but did not step inside. A notion had taken hold of her, too foolish to speak aloud and too firm to brush aside. Not until we’ve properly introduced ourselves.



They ate around the fire, halfway between house and tent—a respectful sort of distance that made Caroline wonder if all of them secretly shared her inkling to let the house acquaint itself with them. Or perhaps it was only that they wanted to sit back and admire it.

Edwards lay stretched out on the ground, her dumplings plumping his narrow middle, while Charles played the fiddle for the girls. Soon Edwards was up and dancing, and Mary and Laura clapped their delight. Charles’s face gleamed behind the white flash of the bow, as though he were playing for a barn brimful of swirling couples.

Caroline sat back and smiled. This, she thought to herself. This was how it had felt to imagine themselves at home in Kansas. The particulars were different, with Edwards kicking up his heels and her own foot still too sore for tapping and the house only an outline behind them, but the glow of it, that was the same.

Caroline gazed beyond them, to the empty house with the pale ribs of its roof standing out against the sky. Tomorrow they would fill it.





Sixteen




Walls, straight up and down, and a ridgepole too high to touch. Caroline had not realized how much she missed the simple shape of a room. Her eyes could not get enough of the lovely squareness of the corners with their sturdy intersections. It did not matter that there was no door, no shutters, no curtains. Even with sunshine pouring through the chinks and the open roof Caroline felt sheltered, truly sheltered, for the first time in months. All this time she had held herself half-hunched against the elements, always ready to cock one shoulder against wind or rain or whatever else the sky might hurl at them. What a delight to turn her back almost defiantly to the sky as she swept the last of the chips from the floor.

Above her, Charles wrestled with the wind, stretching the canvas like a skin over the skeleton of roof poles. All those onerous yards of stitches had held so well that the wagon cover could serve as their roof until Charles raised a stable. That in itself was so immensely satisfying that the idea of a cloth roof did not dampen the pleasure Caroline took in the house. Already the space it enclosed belonged to her in a way the inside of the wagon never had, for the wagon never held the same space—it only flowed through a place, borrowing as it went.

A beguiling, radiant sort of shade fell over her. It was the canvas, suffusing the bright sunlight overhead. Caroline stilled the broom and pushed back her sunbonnet to watch Charles work. The wind was giving him fits, billowing and snapping the canvas and blowing his hair and whiskers every which way. He snorted and blustered so, she wanted to laugh at him. He would have that wagon cover lashed down in a jiffy. She knew it, even if he did not. Caroline pulled her bonnet into place and hurried to the bare tent poles to fold up the linens. The first thing she wanted to see inside the house were the straw ticks, all plumped up smooth.

“There!” Charles barked at the canvas. “Stay where you are and be—”

Caroline whirled, her arms full of quilts. “Charles!”

“—and be good.” He blinked sweetly down at her. “Why, Caroline, what did you think I was going to say?”

“Oh, Charles!” she cried. “You scalawag!”

He shimmied down the outer corner of the walls and scruffed up his hair until it looked like he’d crawled out from under a bramble bush.

The laugh she’d held back earlier tumbled out of her. Charles grabbed her up in his arms, triumphant. The rascal—no one else in the world could make her forget herself enough to shout and laugh like a schoolgirl.

“How’s that for a snug house?” Charles asked, pulling her close against his side so they could both look at it.

The square yellow logs, topped with pale, smooth canvas, looked nearly golden against the soft blue sky. She could not begin to tell him how fine it looked. “I’ll be thankful to get into it,” she said.

“We’re going to do well here, Caroline,” Charles said. All the teasing had slipped from his voice. “This is a great country. This is a country I’ll be contented to stay in the rest of my life.”

Caroline’s heart paused for an instant. There was a weight to those words she had not heard from him before, a fullness. “Even when it’s settled up?” she ventured, scarcely daring to tilt her bonnet brim to look at him.

He squeezed her in against his chest with each syllable. “Even when it’s settled up,” he promised, and leaned his cheek on top of her head. “No matter how thick and close the neighbors get, this country’ll never feel crowded. Look at that sky!”

It was so. Surveyors might come with their compasses and chains to mark the necessary range and township lines, but they would never square the curve from the sky.



Everything went where she wanted it—the broom in one corner, the churn in the other. Charles’s gun over the door, of course, and the beds against the back wall, leaving space between them for the fireplace. Every decision belonged to her. Charles and Mary and Laura would not put one thing down without looking first to her for approval, as though the map of the inside of the cabin existed in her mind alone.

So she pointed out places for pegs to hang their clothing, the dishpan and dish towel, and Charles drove them into the walls. He hewed out narrow slabs for shelves and wedged those in between the logs in the corner that she designated as the kitchen. Caroline could have spent the afternoon admiring those plain, serviceable shelves. No longer would she have to bend double for a scoop of flour or cornmeal from a sack on the ground. Nor would her neatly packed crates be jumbled and jostled into disarray. She had accommodated so many trifling inconveniences over such a long time that she had not felt their accumulating weight. Now, so many lifted all at once that it seemed she might rise from the floor. If not for the inevitability of cooking supper over the campfire, she might have.