Caroline: Little House, Revisited(98)
No. She did not want to take aim. She wanted only to fire, to feel the hard recoil of the stock against her shoulder as the anger and fear were propelled outward into the empty black air.
They sat up all that night without a word passing between them. When the first cry finally sounded, Caroline gasped, as if inhaling the sound. Carrie cried, too, and would not be soothed. The harsh union of Carrie’s shrieks with the Indians’ made Caroline tremble with the effort of holding her own voice at bay. She pressed her forehead into the heel of her hand and plunged her fingernails slowly into her scalp. The child was hungry, yet Caroline would sooner scream herself than unbutton her bodice. It was more than the habit of concealing the key while Indians were abroad. Even with the door latched and the curtains drawn, she still did not want to bring her bare breast out into the open. As though there were any real choice in the matter. The milk would come. Caroline felt the hot pricking, half pain and half pleasure, as it corkscrewed downward, and submitted.
They did not recognize when it was over. The fifth morning came and silence rang in Caroline’s ears. The sensation was oddly discomfiting. It was as though she could feel the space where the sound used to be—a space that now felt too large and open.
Caroline had been so intent on deciphering its meaning that she had lost sight of the one crucial piece of information the wailing-song had imparted: where the Indians were. Now, it seemed, they might be anywhere.
But they were not. For a day and a night she and Charles stood at the windows with weapons loaded and cocked, rebuking the children for the slightest whisper that might muffle an Indian footfall—and saw nothing. Jack paced and peered and sniffed, and did not find anything to growl at.
Near midday a quick burst of barking signaled the approach of something from the north, out of the creek bottoms. Caroline glanced first at the pistol, to be sure, yet again, that a bullet was in the chamber. She closed her eyes for an instant, peering inward for courage, before looking out.
A rider. A white handkerchief was tied to the muzzle of his rifle, which he waved in the air. Scruffy curls of golden-brown hair glinted in the sun.
Edwards. She and Charles recognized him at the same moment and flung open the door to meet him.
Edwards pulled his horse up inches from the threshold. “They’re gone,” he announced.
“Gone?” Charles and Caroline asked together.
“Packed up their camp and left. I went there, to see,” he said.
“Mr. Edwards!” Caroline exclaimed. “They might have—” Her tongue hovered half-curled, groping for the next word. Her mind seemed to have lost its footing. They might have enacted any number of the horrors she had envisioned these last several days and nights. Plainly, they had done none of it.
Edwards nodded. “I know. I couldn’t stand it any longer. Seemed like risking a look was better than sitting in my cabin, bracing for a tomahawk between the eyes every time a stick of kindling popped. I crawled on my elbows the last hundred yards,” he said, tilting a forearm. The dirt was rubbed so deeply into the fabric that it shone softly, like leather. “When I finally worked up the nerve to lift my head over the grass I never felt so foolish in my life. Hardly anything there but ashes and sunflower shells and gnawed-over buffalo bones.”
“Where are they now?” Caroline asked.
“South’s all I know,” Edwards said. “The tracks all pointed south. Winter camps, maybe, or the new reservation.”
Caroline stood in the white-gold afternoon sun. Gone. Day after day she had listened to the world being torn asunder, and it had not happened. Every blade of grass and every atom of the broad blue sky remained as she had left it. Nothing but the terror and the ire had been real, and all of it of her own making.
It was still there. Caroline could feel it within her, a thick, dark inner lining, suddenly stripped of its purpose. A tremor came over her, clutching her by the gut and radiating upward. Her breath tasted of acid. Her body, preparing to purge itself. Caroline walked to the necessary and emptied herself of it.
Twenty-Eight
“It has to snow,” Laura said. “It has to.”
Caroline had given up polishing the girls’ nose prints from the window panes. Their breath misted the glass until it ran in narrow streams that mirrored the rain falling just beyond their fingertips.
“Even if it does,” Mary asked, “how will Santa Claus find us, so far away in Indian Territory? Ma?”
Mary had used different words yesterday, and the day before, but it was the same question. Patience, Caroline told herself. They would never learn to have patience for others if she could not first be patient with them. “I don’t know,” she said. “I expect he’ll find a way. Santa Claus knew where to find my stocking when I moved from Brookfield to Concord,” she added.
“That was back East,” Laura said, as if it were another country. And so it was.
Caroline scrabbled for a reply. “Well, we are not the first family to move to the Indian Territory. You don’t suppose all those other pas and mas would stay where Santa Claus couldn’t bring presents to their little boys and girls?”
Caroline looked up from her work, ready to show them a buoyant smile. Two sets of narrowed blue eyes met hers. The difference amounted to the width of a blade of grass, but it was enough to put a twist in her conscience. Caroline squirmed. Her daughters had never looked at her that way. Was it any wonder, she asked herself, when all she gave them were answers that would not hold still?