Caroline: Little House, Revisited(73)
Breakfast wore thin as the sun climbed the sky, yet Caroline did not indulge herself with mouthfuls of berries as the girls did. Hunger made a welcome pocket in her middle, and she did not hurry to fill it. As a child she would not have thought it possible that the empty rumble could be pleasurable, but now, brimming as she was, the feel of that space as it opened was a momentary luxury. Now and then she found a blackberry that was almost hot to the touch, and those went into her mouth.
If there had been this many blackberries in the thickets along the banks of the Oconomowoc, Caroline mused to herself, she and her brothers and sisters would never have feared winter’s coming. Berry picking had been as much a necessity as a treat in those days.
With a smile she remembered little Thomas, silently scooping blackberries from Martha’s bucket with a serving spoon he’d smuggled from the house, and how he had lied when Martha finally realized why she could not manage to fill her pail. “Honest, Martha,” he said, clean palms upturned for her to inspect. “My fingers’d be all juicy if I stole your berries,” he reasoned with big solemn eyes, not knowing that his purple tongue contradicted his every word. Martha was mad enough to whip him and sly enough not to bother. Thomas’s comeuppance lasted all night long, running back and forth to the necessary. It had doubled them all over with laughter then, but now, watching how her own daughters filled their mouths casually, almost indifferently, Caroline’s smile slumped. If Thomas had not spent a winter making do with bread crumbled into maple sugar water, perhaps he would not have gorged himself. It wasn’t fair, she thought fiercely now, to shame a child for greed when he had no memory of plenty. One could not exist without the other. Children as small as Mary and Laura ought never to feel their bellies gnawing at nothing.
“My pail is full, Ma,” Mary said. “Can I go back home? Please?” Her voice peaked into a whine.
“May I,” Caroline reminded her.
“May I, Ma?” Strings of Mary’s straw-colored hair trailed through the sweat along the rim of her sunbonnet. Her face glowed pink and cross. Had they been in Pepin, Caroline would not have hesitated. It was less than a quarter mile back to the cabin. Mary could not possibly lose her way from the path through the tall prairie grass. But Caroline did not answer. She looked toward the east, toward the Indian camp. It was not that she did not believe what Charles had told her. If he said the camp was empty, it was empty. It was that he could not be sure where the Indians had gone, nor for how long.
“You may help Laura finish her pail,” Caroline said, “and then we will all go home together.”
The next day Caroline laid a tarpaulin full of blackberries out in the sun beside the cabin and let Mary stay behind to guard it from birds and insects while Charles built a paddock for the stock. The drying fruit seemed to draw the mosquitoes up out of the creek bottoms and across the prairie. Long after the berries were picked and put up for winter, the insects lingered, indifferent to the smudges of damp grass Charles lit to smoke them from the house and barn. No amount of coal tar oil and pennyroyal rubbed into the skin discouraged the mosquitoes from biting. All day long the crock of apple cider vinegar stood open on the table, so they might dab each new pink welt the moment it began to itch.
Caroline could not say by any stretch that she was thankful for the mosquitoes. She could not be thankful for a pestilence that found its way under the sheets to prickle her unreachable feet with bites while she slept. Though she could not speak of it, there was a measure of reassurance in their nettlesome clouds. The land had become so bountiful she was almost wary of it. Here at last was proof that it was not too good to be true.
Twenty-One
It started low, and early. The cabin was still dim when Caroline woke to the warming ache behind her bladder. She levered herself from the bedstead and went to the door. The sun was not up, yet already the breath of the wind warmed her face. She stepped barefoot into the hazy predawn. Jack followed, perturbed.
Her waters broke just outside the necessary.
For a moment Caroline stood dripping on the path, thankful it hadn’t happened in the new bedstead. The sight of the fluid soaking into the earth put a queer thrill high in her belly, at the spread of her ribs. This was something altogether different from emptying the family chamber pail along the roads of Iowa and Missouri. Had she been a papist, she might have crossed herself. Jack crept forward to sniff at the puddle and seemed satisfied. That was all the reverence Caroline needed, and she went about her business.
Charles met her at the cabin door.
“Caroline?”
She knew how she must look—barefoot, with her hair unpinned and the back of her gown wet and likely stained. “You’d best go ask for Mrs. Scott to come today. I should think before noon I will have need of her.”
A shimmer of fear and excitement lit his eyes. “It’s sooner than you expected. Isn’t it?”
She tried to smile. “Only by two weeks. Maybe three.” Perhaps even four.
“If I leave now, Scott’ll be up for chores by the time I get there.”
“And the girls?”
He nodded, shrugging into his suspenders. “I’ll think of something to keep them busy.”
All through the morning, the pain stretched steadily upward, tightening the hammock of her belly. By the time she’d cleared the breakfast dishes, it was cresting beneath her ribs. Under the waves flowed a tension that never eased. The dull heat of it rose upward until her throat was rigid from cinching back the sounds of her discomfort. Determined not to groan or whimper in front of the girls, she tried humming a little over the dishwater and found a sort of harmony in letting her voice drift above the drone of clenching muscle.