Caroline: Little House, Revisited(81)
Mary ran to soothe her rag doll from the noise. Caroline tugged at her open bodice, trying not to dislodge Carrie from her feeding. The calico made a poor shield. “Close the door, please, Laura,” she said.
“Aw, Ma!”
“You may stay outside if you keep well out of Pa’s way. Close the door behind you.”
Wishing again for her rocking chair, Caroline resettled herself onto the crate with her back against the wall and her ear cocked to the window. The wind seemed to blow the centers from the men’s words, so she could hear only where one ended and another began. The tempo of their conversation was absurdly clipped: three words from the stranger, one from Charles, another from the stranger, two more from Charles. Perhaps the man spoke no English, Caroline decided. She gave up making sense of it and returned to the task at hand.
The baby’s attention had drifted, too. Her eyes were closed and her tongue poked lazily at the nipple, sending a thread of warmth trailing below Caroline’s hips, to the place that belonged to begetting and birthing. Caroline tickled under Carrie’s chin to remind her, and the thin red lips resumed their muscular kneading. Neither of her older girls had taken to idling at the breast as this new baby did. She suckled in short spurts, tugging at the nipple half a dozen times, then slackening, content to make a meal of each swallow. It put Caroline in mind of the dainty way Mary sipped at the tin cup she shared with Laura, but it troubled her, too, that a child so new would be willing to make do with so little. “Take your fill, baby girl,” she coaxed.
She did not speak to the baby by name, as the others did. To Caroline, Carrie was a word whose meaning was still forming. The child herself had left her body, but was still so small and near as to seem a part of Caroline—a cutting grafted back into her side. Sharing her name with the baby only blurred the lines further.
Mary, being the first and only child in the house, had been Mary straightaway, though after the five years it had taken to become Ma, Caroline had loved even more to hear herself say the baby, my baby, our baby, as though saying it somehow made it truer than holding Mary in her arms. This child was spending her first days as Laura had—an anonymous little creature, barely beginning to peel away from the mold her sisters had left behind.
For now, Caroline contented herself with looking at the child and thinking Caroline Celestia, as though it were the Latinate name for spindly, black-haired baby girls native to the Kansas prairie. Even if such a taxonomy existed, she mused, it could tell her only so much, for although a seed called Ipomoea purpurea would always unfurl into a morning glory, it was anyone’s guess whether the blooms would be pink, purple, or blue.
Mary came to stand beside them and peeped over Caroline’s elbow. “Ma?” she said. Caroline knew what the question would be. She had promised Mary could mind the baby when she’d finished feeding. Minding meant little more than sitting on the big bed, watching her sister sleep, but Mary reveled in the responsibility.
“Is Baby Carrie full?” Mary asked. She said the name as though it were a single word: Baby-Carrie.
Caroline tried it for herself. “Baby Carrie is nearly finished.” She liked the bridge it made so well, she said it again to herself. Baby Carrie. “You may fetch a clean flannel and lay out a fresh diaper while you wait.”
Laura came scampering in with Jack trotting behind her. Charles followed. “He had a great big book, Ma,” she said, breathless with the news, “and he wrote my name in it, and asked me how old I am, and put that in, too. He’s going to send it all the way to Mr. Grant in Washington.”
“My goodness,” Caroline said to Laura. “That sounds very important. What is all this, Charles?”
“Census taker.” Charles fanned his forehead with his hat. “Amiable enough fellow,” he said, with a nod toward Laura. “Funny thing, though—he didn’t mark anything down for property value. Whole column’s left blank.”
Caroline raised Carrie to her shoulder and leaned her cheek against the top of the baby’s head. It fitted neatly as a teacup into a saucer. “We don’t own it, Charles,” she said gently.
“Not yet, but that doesn’t make it worthless.”
Twenty-Three
Caroline knew the moment the sickness touched her. It had been all around her—first Mary and Laura, then Charles, all within a single afternoon—but the moment it breached her own body was different.
“Oh,” she said, and sat down on the end of the bedstead. She was panting. Her nose tingled with something more than the smell of scalded broth, and her eyes were warm beneath their lids as they roved over the disheveled room.
The chamber pail needed emptying, the water bucket had to be filled, the soup pot must be emptied and scrubbed before she could begin supper again, and Caroline knew—knew with her whole body—that she could do precisely one more task. She pushed herself up, and her shoulders rattled with a chill. Sit, she told herself. Get a minute’s rest, then try. She had hardly sat for two days.
Charles had still not taken to his bed, but Caroline was not fooled. He had not so much as lifted his gun from its pegs. Not even in the depths of a Wisconsin winter had he huddled by the fire making bullets in the middle of the afternoon, much less for two days straight. She’d seen the sheen of cold sweat on his brow in the firelight and watched his hands tremble. It had been all he could do not to spill the molten lead onto the hearth. She did not know how he was managing to keep the stock fed and watered.