Caroline: Little House, Revisited(91)

Caroline did not look at the gun. She did not need to. She went back to her rocker and laid it in her lap, half-cocked. Its barrel she pointed toward the fire. The weight of it seemed to draw her shoulders down where they belonged. At the same time her eyes lifted, found their way to the china shepherdess, and settled.

The fear was not gone. She had only made a place for it, invited it to sit alongside her. That was less wearying than refusing to acknowledge its presence. For a time she was aware of nothing but the gun in her lap and the shepherdess on the shelf. Both of them cool, still, and shining. Both of them a kind of assurance.

The wind wailed long and high, and Caroline rocked, letting the sound pass through her as though she were an instrument. She thought of how the fiddle screeched on those rare occasions when Charles struck a wrong note and wondered if it felt the way she did now.

Something gasped, something inside the house, and Caroline’s fingers were around the pistol’s stock, her thumb poised over the hammer.

It was Laura, sitting straight up in bed. Mary lay beside her, eyes wide open. Caroline froze. She had not meant for the children to see her with the gun in her lap. It would not be at all like the familiar sight of Charles with his rifle. She could see Laura’s eyes following the firelight up and down the pistol’s silver barrel. It was then that Caroline realized she had not frozen at all. The chair still rocked, as though it rocked itself.

Don’t be afraid.

Caroline could not say it, not when her only comfort had been to subsume her own fear.

“Lie down, Laura, and go to sleep,” she managed instead, with only a hint of a quaver.

“What’s that howling?”

A flutter of panic pierced Caroline’s belly. Could they see her hands trembling, how her jaw clenched as she struggled to answer? Silently, she uncoiled her fingers from the stock and flattened them against her thigh. Don’t frighten them, Caroline willed herself. She imagined the way her voice needed to sound before saying the words. Gentle enough to soothe. Firm enough to end Laura’s questions. “The wind is howling,” Caroline told her. “Now mind me, Laura.”

Laura inched back under the quilts, and Caroline refastened her gaze to the china shepherdess. She wanted to smile back at that serene china face and felt a strange urge to apologize for being unable to do it. Caroline looked and looked at the painted blue eyes, and tried to wonder what the shepherdess would see through them if she had the power of sight. The single room she faced, day and night, with only a glimpse through the open door now and then? Caroline winced at the idea. Perhaps her painted gaze would turn inward instead, to someplace entirely different and belonging only to herself. The faraway shelf she had occupied, in Detroit or Chicago, before Henry Quiner had chosen her to carry home to his not-quite-four-year-old daughter. Could the little china woman remember what Caroline herself could not—did she recall the moment Pa had placed her in Caroline’s hands?

Caroline nearly smiled then and began to sing softly. To herself, to the shepherdess, to the children, still wide awake behind their closed eyes.

There is a happy land, far, far away.

Where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as day.





The jolt against the door ought to have frightened her, rousing Caroline as it did from a fretful doze. But she recognized the sound as surely as if Charles had called out to her. The instant she heard it Caroline wondered how she could have taken the wind’s purposeless clattering for anything human.

“Didn’t you think I might have been an Indian, Mrs. Ingalls?” Charles’s voice scolded as she flung open the door.

He was teasing—she could hear the twinkle in his eyes even if it was too dark to see beneath the brim of his hat—but Caroline’s mouth dropped open at the thought of her own foolishness. “No,” she said just as suddenly, and bold as brass. “Jack wasn’t growling. He knew it was you, too.”

Charles grabbed her up in his arms and laughed. His coat was stiff with cold. Clumps of frozen mud dropped from his boots and iced her toes. She did not tell him she had been afraid; the half-cocked pistol lying on the seat of the rocker spoke more freely of that than she ever would.

Charles knew. He would not speak of it any more than she would, not with the children suddenly awake and eager to claim their places on his knees, but Caroline heard it in his cheerful boom as he told Mary and Laura about the wind and the rain and the freezing mud that had seized the wagon wheels and slowed Pet and Patty to a crawl. Everything is all right, his manner was saying, even as Caroline picked up the pistol and laid it on the mantel shelf without a word about it.

And it was so. The little house was full in every way it could be filled—with the scent of coffee bubbling on the hearth, the sound of her husband and daughters, the sight of all the provisions Charles piled on the table. Oh, those fat, heavy sacks. Cornmeal. Salt pork. Coffee and tea, flour and sugar, molasses and lard. Everything, down to tobacco and nails. Even, Caroline saw with a smirk and a shake of her head, a pound of sparkling white sugar, as if Charles could not help thumbing his nose at the prices in Independence. Caroline put her hands on each keg and sack and parcel, patting the way she patted Carrie’s little belly after a feed. With the milk and dried blackberries and the game, it would surely be enough see them through the winter.

Enough. Caroline had never yet tired of the word, perhaps never would. As a child, plenty had been too grandiose a term for anything but berrying time, but when Ma had had occasion to pronounce There will be enough, even when it was just barely true, that was a feeling ofttimes more delicious than the food itself.