Caroline: Little House, Revisited(66)
Every slab, every peg and nail inched them closer to owning the place. By the time the government opened a land office and offered the land, they would be firmly settled, and as settlers they would have first right to file a preemption on the quarter section they occupied. That was the law. The speculators and railroads must stand aside for the people who lived and worked on the land. The more she and Charles improved the land in the meantime, the more solid their claim, for the law had declared that a man’s sweat contained as much worth as his pocketbook—more, even. Caroline looked out at the roll of prairie sloping off toward the creek. This time next year there would be a field of sod potatoes and another of corn taking root. Right beneath the window, a garden green with unfurling sprouts. This time next year, there would be a child clinging to her hip, sucking its fist and fussy with teething.
Outside, Jack growled. Caroline turned toward the open door. “My goodness!”
Two Osages stood in the doorway, their tufted scalp locks brushing the lintel. A narrow belt of colored wool held up their breechclouts. Above that, their lower ribs pressed faintly against their skin. Caroline flushed at the sight of so much bareness.
At each hip hung a knife and a hatchet. Her muscles tensed, as though she might spring at them if they came toward her, but she knew she could not move. A horse hair roach, black at the tips, made a ridge from their scalp locks down the back of their shining skulls. The broad base was a color so vivid Caroline had no name for it—neither red, nor pink, nor purple.
One of them went straight to the crate of provisions. The other looked at her so steadily in the face, it felt indecent. Caroline folded her hands tight against the crest of her belly, hugging her sides with her elbows. She prayed they would see and leave her be.
Outside, Jack’s chain rattled and snapped against its iron ring. Caroline had never heard him so savage.
All at once the air seemed to shatter. She could not hear Mary and Laura—had not heard them since before the Indians came into the house. Alarm sluiced past her elbows and knees.
She could not look out the window without turning her back to the Indians. If anything had happened to her girls, Caroline told herself, she should have heard them scream. But she had not made a sound herself. She could not even call their names with her heart drumming at the base of her throat.
The first man set the sack of cornmeal on the checked tablecloth between them. Then patted it. Caroline shied from the sound. The Indian spoke—a low ripple of syllables. Caroline shook her head. She could not hear where one word ended and another began. The other man held out the sack, pointing it at her, then the hearth.
She understood, but she would not take the meal from his hand. Caroline forced herself to nod and point to the table.
Her mind pivoted back to Brookfield while her hands measured and mixed the cornbread of their own accord. She had been wearing her blue-sprigged calico the day the Potawatomi man walked into their house and took the peacock feathers from the vase beside the looking glass. Caroline could see him still, strolling away with those shimmering plumes gazing back at her from his hair. More vibrant than the feathered eyes was the memory of her ma’s groan when they realized little Thomas had disappeared with the Indian.
The same sound was rising in her now, grating against the back of her breastbone as her whole body strained with the effort of listening for Mary and Laura. She started to press her palms into the top of the loaves, then jerked back. Her pulse stormed in her fingertips. She would not give these men the sweetening of the prints of her hands. That belonged only to Charles. Caroline wiped the grains of meal briskly on her apron and dropped the naked loaves into the bake oven. The iron cover rattled into place.
They looked at everything. Caroline watched the loops of beaded silver wire sway from their long earlobes as they probed through the cabin. Charles’s tobacco pouch disappeared into one brown fist as though she had no more presence than the china shepherdess. They might take anything and she would not move, if only they had left her daughters untouched.
The Potawatomis had stolen only feathers, she reminded herself, not her baby brother. While the rest of the family watched the Indian decorate his hair with their peacock plumes, the little boy had toddled out of sight into the corn patch. She prayed these Osages might be as vain, that Mary and Laura were sheltered by Providence as Thomas had been.
But this was not Brookfield with its woods and corn patches. Through the window she could see clear to the willows along the creek—clear to the bluffs beyond—but she could not see her daughters. If she called their names, the fear in her voice would point the Indians straight to them. The baby thrashed against her bladder. Caroline’s jaw clenched with the strain.
Suddenly Jack erupted into such a fury the Indians went to the window. Caroline could hear the bulldog lunging against the chain, scrabbling at the dirt. With each charge the metal links clattered and thrummed.
In a flash of calico the girls darted into the house. Caroline’s relief frothed up like saleratus. Laura ducked behind the slabs Charles had left propped in the corner for the bedstead. Mary skittered barefoot across the length of the house and clung to Caroline’s sleeve. The instant she felt Mary’s hands around her wrist, Caroline closed her eyes and offered her thanks heavenward. Now she only wanted Laura’s tangled brown hair under her fingers.
The Indians’ eyes traced her gaze across the cabin, where half of Laura’s face peeped from behind the slabs. They peered at her, bending down so that their hatchets dangled from their hips. One man spoke, and the other said, “Hah!” Laura jolted, cowering tight against the wood with nothing but her little white fingertips showing.