Caroline: Little House, Revisited(85)
Caroline leaned against the doorway, thankful for its support as she watched Mrs. Scott go. She raised an arm to bid a final goodbye, and her pulse guttered like a candle flame. She had made too much of a show that morning, making up the bed and laying the table and wiping the dishes to convince Mrs. Scott it was all right to go. The bed ought to have waited, Caroline silently admitted. She was not fully well, none of them were, but she was well enough to do the things that must be done. That much and no more, she reminded herself.
Caroline sat down on one of the crates beside the table and surveyed the cabin. The wash was ironed and folded, the milk strained and the pan scalded. Mrs. Scott had given the floor one final sweep before leaving. Carrie lay freshly diapered in the center of the big bed. Caroline pondered a moment over what day it was. Wednesday. Carrie was five weeks old, and it was mending day. Both thoughts overwhelmed her. She smiled weakly at the scrap bag as if in apology, dazed at the realization that even so much as threading a needle required a precise sort of energy and focus she had not yet regained.
“Will you set one of the crates by the fireplace, please, Charles?” she asked. Charles did and walked her to it. Then he tucked a pillow into the washtub and laid Carrie in it, so that Caroline need not move from the crate to reach her. And there Caroline sat all morning, tending the soup Mrs. Scott had put on the fire to simmer for their dinner and supper.
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, Caroline felt the slats of those crates pressing against her thighs whether she was sitting, standing, or lying down to sleep. Standing for any length of time brought on a queer fizzling sensation in her limbs, as though she could feel her strength being eaten away, so she sat to help the girls dress and undress, to mix the cornbread, to lay the table and wipe the dishes, to feed the baby and change her.
As Caroline’s daily doses of bitters decreased, Carrie conceded to nurse again. Each time Caroline put her to the breast, Carrie’s small black eyebrows furrowed with concentration, tasting before settling in to feed. Caroline could not begrudge Carrie her wariness. She had tasted her milk herself, and while it was not so bitter as she’d feared, there was an odd, metallic cast to the flavor. But the way the child shrieked and writhed when her feedings came too close upon the quinine, Caroline’s breasts might as well have been filled with kerosene. Try though she might to down the bitters when Carrie was least likely to notice them—as soon as the baby finished a feeding or laid down to nap—Carrie’s fickle appetite seemed to thwart Caroline’s efforts.
“You can’t be hungry now,” Caroline said, perilously close to a whimper herself, though it was plain from the shape of Carrie’s mouth and the tone of her cry that Carrie was. Caroline sighed. She could still taste the last dose of quinine, there at the back of her tongue where it was hardest to dislodge. She unbuttoned her bodice and resigned herself to the coming reaction.
Carrie squirmed. She scowled. She jabbed at Caroline with her small sharp fists, determined that the good milk she had found in the same place not an hour before must still be there. Such a flood of warm sympathy filled the space behind Caroline’s breasts at the sight of Carrie’s consternation as would have drenched the child, but Caroline could not communicate it, except perhaps through the milk Carrie would not take. Defeated, Carrie threw back her fists. Her face flushed and her chest spasmed with a silent scream. The tiny body in Caroline’s arms seemed to beg for movement, but every speck of Caroline’s energy was rationed, with none to spare to walk the floor with her daughter. Again Carrie cried and Caroline’s milk answered, wetting the both of them.
“It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow some good,” Charles called from the dooryard.
Her impulse was to hiss at him to hush, that Carrie was asleep, as anyone with the consideration to look before hollering out that way could see. Caroline looked up from her mixing bowl and saw him backing through the open door, carrying what seemed at first glance to be a strangely graceful armload of willow kindling. Charles stopped in the center of the room and put it down. “Didn’t have the strength to cut firewood, so I sat myself on a stump behind the woodpile and built this for you instead.”
A chair. A rocking chair.
Caroline could not speak. For a terrible instant, she thought she might burst into tears. She had never asked, never complained of leaving anything behind, yet he had known, and made her the thing she longed for most. And she had nearly scolded him for it. Now and again she had heard the sounds of his ax and hammer, and thought nothing of it.
“Should I show you how it works,” Charles teased, “or are you happy enough just looking at it?” She was, nearly. It was such a lithe-looking thing, its frame a single swooping curve, its back and seat good plain wickerwork. Caroline reached out to touch the narrow willow arm. No further. She would make herself feel as lovely as the chair itself before sitting in it, she decided.
First, she smoothed her hair and took off her apron, as though her momentary flicker of anger were a stain she could strip from herself. Then she went to her trunk and brought out her gold bar pin and fixed it to her collar. Charles put the pillows from Mary and Laura’s bed onto the chair, and draped the whole thing over with their small red and blue quilt. Then Charles took Caroline by the hand and led her to the chair with the girls prancing like puppies.
Through the pillows, the woven willow strips cradled her back. She tested the chair’s easy backward sway and thought of the cool willows swishing like hoop skirts along the creek. Caroline closed her eyes. “Oh, Charles, I haven’t been so comfortable since I don’t know when.”