Caroline: Little House, Revisited(67)
Caroline pulled Mary to the hearth and yanked the lid from the bake oven. “It’s done,” she announced. The Indians turned. Caroline thrust a finger toward the pale loaves and stepped back. The hot iron lid in her fist dared them to frighten Laura again.
The two men squatted low on the hearth, their legs bent like hairpins. Silently, each ate an entire loaf of the half-baked bread, pinching every damp crumb from the floorboards. By the time they finished, Mary’s tears had warmed her sleeve.
The Indians stood. The shorter of the two pointed his chin at Mary and said, “Mi’-na.” The other man smirked and nodded. Not a shred of malice slanted their expressions. Instead they looked amused, as though they had recognized something so plain they expected Caroline to see and join her smile with theirs.
She would do no such thing. Caroline shifted sideways, slicing through their view with her body. The lid to the bake oven was still in her hand.
The planes of the men’s faces leveled. Without a word, they turned their backs and went out. The lid dropped from Caroline’s fist and rolled on its edge to the stack of slabs.
Laura came running.
Caroline sat down hard on the straw tick, nearly pulling the girls with her. Relief corkscrewed through her.
“Do you feel sick, Ma?” Mary asked.
“No,” she managed. Tremors welled in every joint; even her jaw quivered. “I’m just thankful they’re gone.”
“We thought they would hurt you,” Mary said.
“We left Jack and came to help,” Laura interrupted.
Caroline cupped their cheeks with her palms and cradled their heads against her shoulders. “My brave little girls,” she said. Overwhelmed by their nearness, her breasts prickled, weeping warm flecks of foremilk into her chemise.
The table was set and a fresh mixing of cornmeal in the bowl when Charles came whistling through the grass. A jackrabbit dangled by its hocks at his belt, and he swung two headless prairie hens in one fist. The girls nearly toppled over each other in their scramble to tell him the news. Caroline was glad for their zeal. She did not want to recollect the Indians’ visit any more than she must.
“Did Indians come into the house, Caroline?”
She held her voice even as a line of print as she told him about the tobacco and how much cornbread the two men had eaten. “They took the meal straight from the crate with me standing there. The way they pointed, I didn’t dare refuse.” The memory swelled her mind. “Oh, Charles! I was afraid!” Her chest constricted; she had not meant to tell him that part of it. Nor the girls, for that matter.
He assured her she had done right, that it was better to sacrifice a few provisions than make an enemy of any Osage, but she was not comforted. “The cornmeal was already running short,” she added. It was petty; she had seen their ribs.
“One baking of cornbread won’t break us.” Charles lifted his fistful of game. The prairie hens’ blunted necks wagged at her. “No man can starve in a country like this. Don’t worry, Caroline.”
She did not know what she had wanted him to say, but it was not this. He had not even looked at the sack of meal. Nor was he the one who would have to make it stretch. Her chin stabbed out like a child’s. “If that’s so, I don’t know why they can’t make do without our cornmeal. And all of your tobacco,” she added, hoping to pry something more out of him.
Charles waved a hand. “Never mind. I’ll get along without tobacco until I can make that trip to Independence.”
Independence. The irony needled her. Two days she and the girls would be stranded on the high prairie while he went to town to replace what the Indians had taken. Maybe three. Three days with those men free to wander in and demand whatever else they liked of her.
“Main thing is to keep on good terms with them,” Charles went on blithely.
Indignation burned through her like spilled kerosene. She could not hear a word he was saying until “band of the screeching dev—”
Her head snapped up. Caroline pressed her lips together and jerked her chin at him. The straighter she tried to hold herself, the harder she trembled.
“Come on, Mary and Laura!” Charles said. His voice was so bright, it sounded as if the words had been whitewashed. “We’ll skin that rabbit and dress the prairie hens while that cornbread bakes. Hurry! I’m hungry as a wolf!”
Caroline sank down on a crate. There was nothing to do but collect herself. With the heels of her hands she slicked the perspiration from her temples into her hair. She heard Charles peg the rabbit’s leg to the wall, then begin peeling the skin from the flesh while Mary and Laura pelted him with chatter about the Indians’ visit.
Her ears followed only the ripples of their talk, until Charles’s voice came down like the ax. “Did you girls even think of turning Jack loose?” Each syllable struck the same low note.
A spike of fear fell straight to Caroline’s heels. What might she have done, had Jack come raging into the cabin? Likely stand by and watch the Indians kill the dog. That or shoot Jack herself.
Until this moment she had not thought about the revolver. What would the Osage men have done, as she drew the pistol and cocked it? Caroline began to tremble again. There was nothing she could use to protect herself or her daughters without inviting attack.
“There would have been trouble,” Charles was saying. “Bad trouble.”