Caroline: Little House, Revisited(71)
A long, high wolf’s howl melded with the wail of the note rising from the pit, and Caroline found herself awake. Another dream, she soothed herself as she twined her ankles together and tugged her hem back into place. Her nightdress had hitched itself halfway over her belly. Only another dream.
But the feel of it lingered. The sense of being tethered to that dreadful pit coiled around her in the dark. And the nakedness, calling her shame back to the very surface of her skin. What spiteful logic dreams dealt in: she would have been less ashamed to show her bare flesh than let Mary and Laura and Charles see the way she had abandoned herself to wailing and sobbing the moment all danger had passed. Worst of all was Mary offering her own dry hankie in place of Caroline’s sodden apron. Fresh twists of shame wriggled through her at the memory, at the tentative pity on her five-year-old daughter’s upturned face.
Caroline considered whether to close her eyes again. In daylight she could raise a bucket from the well and her mind strayed to nothing more troubling than keeping the water from splashing her shoes. Nights, though, she’d lived that dreadful morning over a dozen different ways, each bent into something more grotesque than the reality.
What was hidden between the folds of her brain that would not be content with the awful memories themselves, Caroline wondered, but insisted on conjuring them into such unearthly images?
The child shifted, as if it, too, were discomfited by such thoughts. Caroline fitted her hands around the mound of her belly and pressed, hugging inward with her palms. Poor thing. Not yet born, and already it had shared in each of her most fearful moments. What must it have felt when the dread and terror went coursing through her—did the same chilling-hot currents flood its budding limbs? Caroline winced at the thought.
No more, she promised it. No more. A promise she could not hope to keep. She had no power to seal herself off from fear any more than she could conjure tides of happiness. If nothing else, Caroline suddenly chided herself, she might resolve to stop her mind from fondling the worst of her memories night after night. Her lip trembled at the thought of allowing herself to touch the store of fine things she’d locked in her heart the moment she’d begun packing her trunk in Pepin.
Caroline closed her eyes and imagined her rocking chair. The swish-swish of the runners across the floor, the gentle curve of the slats against her back. Her shoulders felt the soft embrace of her red shawl, its ends tucked around a swaddled bundle. The child’s face still would not form in her mind’s eye, but her arms summoned up its weight, its warmth against her body. Past and future, twined together.
In her mind Caroline fashioned a snug little haven for herself, entering it each night to call up the dearest of her memories for the child to feed on. The taste of her mother’s blueberry cake and cottage cheese pie. The springtime riot of pinks in the sailor’s garden up the road, all the way back in Brookfield. Her first week’s pay as a schoolteacher, two dollar bills and two shining quarters. The cornhusking dances in Concord—the rich green swirl of her delaine skirt, the sound of Charles’s fiddle, the feel of his hands on her waist as they danced. Their first night together in their own little house in Pepin. Eliza. Henry. Polly. Ma and Papa Frederick. These memories ached, but softly, so that the ache itself became a pleasure. The ache hurt less than the blank places she had carved out by trying not to remember.
Nights passed, and Caroline found she did not need to reach so far back to find a memory that would unfurl into something so bright and warming that she thought surely the child must be sharing in her contentment. The child, after all, had been there, floating in the center of her every moment: Their first piping hot meal after the miring storm. The sky reflected in Laura’s eyes the night she said the stars were singing. Supper with Edwards, with the newly built house outlined against that same starry sky. These recollections were not edged with wistfulness. They burned cheerfully, leaving no dim corners for darker thoughts of the creek, the Osages, or the well to congregate.
Then came the night after Charles finished the bedstead, when she could not think of one thing more comforting than the feel of that bed against her back. If she had not filled it with her own hands, Caroline would not have believed she lay on the same straw tick. The prairie grass beneath her was finer than straw, with a warm, golden-green smell somewhere between hot bread and fresh herbs, and it enveloped her like broth welcoming a soup bone. Her hips and shoulder blades, which always seemed to sink straight to the floor, floated above the rope Charles had strung between the framing slabs. She shifted deeper, and the rope sighed and the grass whispered. “I declare, I’m so comfortable it’s almost sinful!” she said and closed her eyes, the better to savor every inch of the sheets cradling her body.
Twenty
At the sight of Charles and two cowboys leading a cow and calf up out of the creek bottoms, Caroline thought she must be back in her soft bed, dreaming. She had sat down on the end of the bed by the window with the mending, waiting for the fire to slack enough to put the cornbread on to bake, and the midsummer heat had lulled her to sleep. Caroline blinked, trying to sift the few fragments of reality from what she saw. It was already a stretch to make herself believe that a herd truly had chanced to pass by their claim, that the men driving it offered Charles a day’s work keeping the longhorns out of the ravines instead of Edwards or Scott or anyone else in Montgomery County. Absurd as it was, that was real, and that itself—a day’s work in exchange for a piece of fresh beef—had felt like a dream even as Caroline clasped her hands for delight. Now she closed her eyes and stretched her shoulders, waiting for the image to scatter and refashion into the familiar lines of the roof and walls.