Caroline: Little House, Revisited(72)
Caroline opened her eyes and instead there was Charles, tying the animals to the corner of the stable and shaking hands with the two cowboys. “Well, Caroline?” he called through the window. When she did not answer he untied a fat packet from his saddle horn and held it up. The beef. If that beef was real, Caroline thought. Her mouth fell open. She felt a laugh go tumbling out of her, heard it meet with Charles’s great rumbling peals, and knew it was not a dream at all.
Of course it was providential. It could be nothing else. But a slab of beef, a cow, and a calf was too extravagant, even for Providence. A cow. And a calf. She could not help repeating it to herself. There had never been a word so impossibly big as that and. A cow and a calf. Both rangy and unruly but goodness, milk and butter. Perhaps, Caroline thought, the hand of Providence had only been passing over them, on its way elsewhere with these fine gifts, and had somehow dropped them.
But the land continued to burgeon with gifts for them. Yellow-orange plums small enough to scoop up with a spoon. Walnuts, pecans, and hickory nuts still in their green husks, plumping for autumn. A queer purple flower with a turnip-like root that Edwards called Indian breadroot; Caroline could not get enough of its crisp, white flesh.
“Close your eyes,” Charles said as he came through the door. It had become a game with him, bringing home little surprises to plop into their open palms. If not something to eat, then something to marvel at—a kernel of blue corn, a speckled green prairie chicken egg. “Now open your mouth.”
Caroline hesitated. Last time it had been a sunflower seed, from the Indian camp. Charles had cut one of the great yellow flowers from its stalk and pegged it up on the side of the chimney to dry. She did not like to wonder what the Osages would think to see it dangling there, no matter how many times Charles told her the camp surrounding the crops was deserted. The idea of the Indians leaving their corn and beans and sunflowers to the mercy of weather and wild animals was nonsensical.
She could feel Charles waiting, daring her not to trust him. Caroline opened her mouth.
She smelled the juice on his fingers before it touched her tongue. A blackberry, hot and sweet from the sun. Caroline sighed as she crushed it against the roof of her mouth. The rapture of its smoothness, the burst of flavor like a pinch to her tongue. Nothing had tasted so bright since last summer’s tart cherries.
“All along the creek,” Charles said. “The fruit just about brushes the ground, the brambles are so heavy. You couldn’t pick them all in a week.”
Caroline salivated anew at the wealth of things she could do with them. Blackberry pie. Blackberries and cream. Blackberry jam. Dried blackberries, stirred into pancake batter and hasty pudding, or stewing over the fire. If she gathered them quickly, if the baking-hot sunshine held long enough to dry them, their rich, syrupy smell would brighten the cabin all winter long. And if Charles could find more prairie chicken eggs, Caroline thought, she could try blackberries in Ma’s blueberry cake recipe. She would send one to Mr. Edwards, and to Mrs. Scott if it came out well, she decided. Just to be neighborly again, for its own sake. That would be as sweet as the fruit itself.
The next morning she dressed Mary and Laura in their oldest calicos and handed them each a pail. They gamboled around her, chasing rabbits and dickcissels all the way down to the creek. Caroline did not try to keep up. The hot wind made her skin feel dry and taut, as if moving too suddenly might split it open. Although there were only a few dwindling inches of lacing to spare along the sides of her maternity corset, she had not been so conscious of her increasing size lately. The child was not so much growing as ripening, so that most of what she felt now was the accumulating weight, and the straining of her body to contain it. And with better than a month yet to wait, Caroline calculated, panting a little. These last weeks she would spend both thickening and thinning, expanding outwardly while her own flesh stretched and narrowed itself to make room from within. The sensation made her thankful for her corset’s firm embrace.
“Look, Ma!”
Charles had not exaggerated. A bounty of great, fat berries shone purple-black in the sun.
As Caroline and the girls clustered close to a tangle of brambles, swarms of mosquitoes billowed up then settled down to crouch on the fruit and pierce the skins with their needle-shaped tongues.
“Now watch.” She showed Mary and Laura how to tease the darkest berries from their spongy white cores without bursting the tender black globes. “Put them gently into the pail,” Caroline said, reaching all the way to the bottom before opening her hand. “The red and purple berries are not ripe enough to pull free.”
Caroline watched them a moment. Mary picked just as Caroline had shown her, but Laura’s pail would have to be made into preserves, or put into a pie. In her eagerness, Laura pinched the berries, then let them bounce by the handful onto the bottom of her pail. Caroline smiled in spite of herself. She ought to teach Laura how to keep from crushing the fruit, but Laura was having such fun. Already her short fingers were stained purple to the cuticles. There was little that pleased her more than helping, and blackberry jam was no less valuable than blackberries dried whole.
Caroline turned her attention to her own two pails and began to pick. It was lazy work, barely work at all with so many berries at hand, and heady with heat and the murmur of insect wings. Her belly snagged against the briars as she leaned to reach another cluster of fruit. A cloud of mosquitoes rose up sullenly at her approach, then crowded back in. They buzzed drunkenly, hardly aware of her fingers. Determined to pluck every berry within reach, Caroline stood in one place so long that her dress made a tent of heat around her. Sweat glossed the skin at her temples, dribbled between her breasts and down the backs of her knees. The key to the provisions cabinet clung to her damp skin, so warm that she could smell the tang of the hot brass. Mosquitoes pricked the back of her neck, her wrists, and even her ears. Purple smears streaked the girls’ legs and ankles, marking the places they had swatted.