Caroline: Little House, Revisited(74)
“One little, two little, three little Indians,” Charles sang, pointing at Mary’s and Laura’s tanned faces, then wagging his finger in the air. “Nope, only two.”
“You make three,” Mary said. “You’re brown, too.”
Caroline had never cared for that song, but the pulse of the melody pleased her now. As long as she hummed, she did not have to remind herself to exhale.
“How would you girls like to go with me to see the Indian camp?” Charles asked. Laura danced up onto her toes, clapping. Even Mary dropped her dish towel and dashed to Charles’s knee.
Caroline went cold. “It’s so far, Charles,” she said, clambering for words that would not show her fear. “And Laura is so little. She can’t walk so far in this heat.”
Laura’s heels drooped to the floor.
“Then she shall ride Jack,” Charles said. The lift of his eyebrows begged her not to press further. “Camp’s been deserted for weeks,” he added. “Not a whiff for Jack to trouble himself over.”
Caroline nodded and turned back to the dishpan. There was nothing else for it; the girls must be away all day. She fetched the comb and sat down on the tallest of the crates with the small of her back pressed against the table. “Mary, Laura, you must be combed and braided. Indian camp or not, I won’t have you going out with your hair wild.”
The smooth strands coiling over and around her knuckles soothed her—such softness in contrast to what was happening within her body. While Laura stood between her knees, Caroline felt her belly go taut against the little girl’s back. Laura spun around, her eyes wide. “Do it again, Ma,” she asked.
“All done,” Caroline said, shooing her along. “Mary’s turn.”
She tied their sunbonnets under their chins and handed the girls off to Charles, all brightly framed in calico. Her breath hitched, she wanted so badly to draw them up into her lap until Mrs. Scott came, but she made herself cheerful and followed them to the door. Charles lifted Laura onto Jack’s back. Caroline smiled a little when the bulldog reached around to snuffle her bare toes.
“Now we’ll all be Indians together,” Charles said.
Mary turned in the dooryard. “Ma?” Her blue eyes looked like she very nearly understood.
Caroline softened her face as best she could and nodded toward the open prairie. “Go with your pa,” she said.
A tremor of panic climbed Caroline’s throat as the tall grass enveloped Charles and the girls. There was not a sound in all the world but the swishing of that grass and a rising whir of insects. She was alone, without even the bulldog. And this cabin was not fully home, despite the china shepherdess standing on the mantel. She laced her fingers beneath her belly and hugged herself. Her mother, widowed a month before Thomas’s birth, had not been so forsaken as this.
Caroline blinked away the memory. There was not time to think of such things. Not with Mrs. Scott on her way, and work yet to be done before she arrived.
Sweat simmered out of her as she rubbed her nightdress over the washboard. She could not help feeling misplaced; leaning over a wash bucket at this hour on mending day skewed the rhythm of the week. If she could not be near Eliza or Polly or Ma this day, Caroline wanted to be busy with her work basket as she knew they would be. But her soiled nightdress must be washed. It ought to have been done sooner if it were to dry in time, but she had not known how to explain the stain to the girls.
Much as she concentrated on her task, Caroline could not rinse nor wring the images of her kin from her mind. She paused to wipe a wet cuff along her hairline as a pang took hold. There was no sense in missing Eliza and Ma, she scolded herself as she squeezed the water from the nightdress. Neither of them had ever lived near enough to attend her deliveries. Yet with every stricture of her womb the stretch of the seven years since she had last seen her mother seemed to broaden. And Eliza. The thought of her sister nursing her own little one in the rocker they had left behind watered Caroline’s eyes.
The twisted nightdress creaked before she realized her elbows were trembling. Caroline shook the garment free of itself and stood a moment, letting the rising wind snap the last droplets from its hem. One still morning, Charles had pointed out the smoke from the Scotts’ cabin to Laura. Now the blowing grass leaned toward the neighbors’ claim, its thousands of bending fingers leading Caroline’s eye’s ever eastward. The air carried a hearth-like smell of hot clay and browning grain, but not a sign of habitation breached the horizon. Her low voice sidled shakily into the wind:
Come to that happy land, come, come away,
Why will ye doubting stand, why still delay?
Eyes combing the prairie, Caroline hummed through another spasm. The drone of the cicadas cut in and out of the melody. She scanned the blue-white edge of sky once more, then hurried inside to strip the good quilt and muslin sheets from the bedstead. The gray blanket and the old oilcloth must cover the straw tick, if only she could steal enough time between pains to manage them. First, she folded up the red-checked cloth and laid the table with everything Mrs. Scott would need: lard, linen and pins, clean rags, flannel swaddling, and the butcher knife.
All the while, the heat grew heavy and muscled as the spasms, which pulled against her back as if the child had rooted itself at the base of her spine. By the time the knock came to the door, each breath demanded Caroline’s full attention. Panting a little, she smoothed her hair and blotted her forehead with the hem of the gray blanket before turning to the open door.