Caroline: Little House, Revisited(93)
So she picked up the plate and a fork and strode to the fire. One by one she laid the raw pieces of rabbit into the hot fat. Everyone watched. They listened to the frying meat bubble and snap. They watched her turn each piece up golden brown and dish a helping onto five plates. She gave one to Charles and one to the Indian. She handed Mary and Laura their portions, as though they ate dinner on their bed every day of the week. Then Caroline picked up Carrie from the big bed and held the baby in her lap while she ate one-handed at the table. No one spoke.
When Charles finished eating, he slowly unkinked his legs and took his pipe and a new paper of tobacco down from the mantel shelf. He filled his pipe and offered the packet to the Indian, who did the same. Thin tendrils of smoke rose up from their two pipes. Caroline wished the smoke might spell out the men’s thoughts. They puffed at the tobacco until the rafters were hazy and their pipes were empty. Then the Indian spoke.
Caroline tilted her head in surprise. He sounded nothing like the two men who had come into the house before. These sounds were so smooth and languorous, they seemed a single long word. French? she wondered.
Charles shook his head. “No speak,” he replied.
The Indian lifted a hand in acknowledgment, and no more was said. After a moment, he stood and walked out the door. Jack pulled against the belt that held him to the bedpost, straining forward with his nose and teeth, but he did not growl.
“My goodness gracious,” Caroline said. She stroked Carrie’s back again and again, as though it were the baby who wanted comforting.
“That Indian was no common trash,” Charles remarked.
Caroline looked around the cabin. Her dredging boxes of flour and salt and pepper all sat on the table in plain sight. The door to the provisions cupboard stood partway open, revealing its cache of bulging sacks and crates. The Indian had not peered inside, but Caroline had no reason to suppose he had not seen them. “Let Indians keep themselves to themselves,” she said, “and we will do the same.”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Charles said. “That Indian was perfectly friendly. And their camps down in the bluffs are peaceable enough. If we treat them well and watch Jack, we won’t have any trouble.”
Caroline agreed, but she did not say so. She did not know how to explain to Charles how she could be thankful they were friendly and still not want them inside her house. It did not seem a thing that should need explaining.
“Ma, Baby Carrie’s hungry.”
Caroline did not argue. Mary knew. She had set to learning her baby sister’s signals by rote and could decipher them nearly as well as if Carrie were her own. This once, Caroline was grateful for the interruption. Her fingertips ached from pushing the needle through the rabbit skins. Mary and Laura could hardly wait for their caps to be finished. Each time Caroline laid aside her sewing, they came to kneel beside the work basket and stroke the fur. She herself favored the beaver pelts. Their rich brown underfur was deeper than the lushest velvet; you might sink a finger to the first knuckle into its improbable softness. But those pelts, along with the mink and wolf, they could not afford to keep—not if they were to have a plow and seeds for planting.
Charles had done well, so early in the season. The stack of pelts reached nearly to Laura’s knees. If Charles’s traps kept yielding this way, all the cash in the fiddle case might go toward proving up on the claim.
Caroline stood and stretched and went to stand a minute in the doorway. The air was pleasantly brisk, yet lacked the familiar scent of leaves bronzing in the sun. Autumn here had a golden, grassy smell, dry and soft, like a haymow. She reached for her shawl—its red the color of a sugar maple at full blaze—and pulled it comfortably about her shoulders. This was the welcome stretch of weather that turned the fireplace into a boon companion. Soon enough it would become a ravenous mouth to feed. For now, though, it demanded little in return for the comfort it gave.
Behind her, the baby fussed. Caroline let her. Carrie had nearly grown out of her newborn cry, and Caroline enjoyed listening for the little voice that was beginning to emerge between the growls and shrills. Next autumn there would be no leisure, not with corn and sod potatoes to pick, and Carrie to mind. Next autumn, Carrie would be walking.
Caroline tucked her pinky into the corner of Carrie’s mouth and gently broke the baby’s grip on her nipple. The little mouth yawned as Caroline eased her from the crook of one elbow to another.
At the sound of footsteps Caroline looked up, expecting Charles, anticipating his smile at the sight of her in her rocking chair, the way his eyes would sweep across her face, down her neck and open bodice, to Carrie.
“Gracious!” she cried.
Two brown men stood in the doorway. They headed straight toward the locked cupboard as though the smell of flour and lard had lured them in off the prairie. Quickly Caroline buttoned up. Her fingers fumbled, mismatching the holes. They must not see the key on its string.
The baby was only half-fed. She whimpered and squirmed. This day of all days, her appetite chose to be impatient. Caroline put her finger in Carrie’s mouth. Carrie sucked and bawled, and Caroline felt the prickle of her milk letting down. Her cheeks flared as the stain warmed the calico of her bodice. Furious with shame, she slipped an arm between herself and the baby, clamping the heel of her hand against her breast to hold the leak steady.
The injustice of it was scathing—that she must withhold food from one child to protect the provisions for the others.