Caroline: Little House, Revisited(99)
Perhaps they would find some contentment if she said no, Santa Claus would not come this year. He would go to the Big Woods and find them gone, and bring all their presents to Kansas next year. But Edwards. Caroline could not discount the slim possibility of Mr. Edwards. He still had the nickel Charles had given him over a month ago to buy Christmas candy for the girls in Independence. What he did not have was a horse.
“You’ll tell us if you run short of anything,” Charles had said when Edwards came to warn them to lock their stable. Edwards had not even heard the horse thieves. He could not say whether they might be Indians or white men, though his missing saddle pointed away from Indians.
“Anything we have, you’re welcome to,” Caroline added.
“I’m well provisioned,” Edwards assured them. “And I can still get to town so long as my boots hold out,” he’d said, knocking one heel against a fencepost. None of them had given a thought to anything so trifling as Christmas candy.
Now, though, she and Charles had room in their minds for nothing else. Caroline gazed out over the girls’ heads at the blurry gray morning. She longed for snow almost as much as Laura; there had never been a Christmas Eve so leaden. If the rain did not let up, it would not matter whether Edwards had fetched the girls’ Christmas treats from town. Twice this week Charles had tried to reach Edwards’s claim, and the rising creek had held him back.
The rain stopped as if by magic. Mary and Laura bit their lips and grinned at each other. Then Caroline opened the door to the sunlight, and their faces fell. The wild whoosh and tumble of the flooded creek, inaudible over the rain, now filled the room. They had not considered the creek a barrier. Of course they hadn’t. Winters in Pepin, the frozen Mississippi River became the smoothest road in the county.
When Charles came in bearing a great wild turkey, Caroline looked past it to his pockets, searching for a telltale bulge.
“If it weighs less than twenty pounds I’ll eat it, feathers and all,” he announced.
The false boom in his voice was unmistakable. Caroline knew there was no bag of candy hidden in his coat. “My goodness, it is heavy,” she said, trying to be cheerful over the turkey. Its oil-colored feathers still glistened with rain. The girls watched, disinterested, as a puddle of rainwater formed on the floor beneath the bird’s dangling wattle.
“Is the creek going down?” Mary asked.
With a little sigh, Charles abandoned the charade. “It’s still rising,” he answered.
The news sank hard and fast. No Christmas for Mary and Laura. No company to share their turkey. Caroline blinked back the memory of how Edwards had been too pleased to smile when she asked him to dinner. “I hate to think of him eating his bachelor cooking all alone on Christmas Day.”
Charles shook his head. “A man would risk his neck trying to cross that creek now.”
With their chins in their hands, Mary and Laura watched her pluck and dress the turkey. Caroline wished they would go back to fogging up the windows. Their eyes had gone flat. At least with their fingers smudging the glass, they had been hopeful.
“You are lucky little girls,” she said as she trussed up the bird and rubbed it with lard, “to have a good house to live in, and a warm fire to sit by, and such a turkey for your Christmas dinner.” She looked up, smiling. The girls had wilted further yet.
Caroline’s smile went slack. The words might have come out of her own mother’s mouth. True though they were, it was she who ought to have been grateful—grateful that her children had grown up without want, that they had never felt the sort of cold and hunger that made it impossible to take food and warmth and shelter for granted. Instead she had as good as rubbed her daughters’ noses in their disappointment. Caroline did not know how to make them understand, short of telling them things she hoped never to speak of, stories that began After my pa died . . .
The fire popped and hissed into the stillness. The girls lay in their bed with their eyes to the rafters, obediently waiting for the day to end.
“Why don’t you play the fiddle, Charles?”
He looked into the fireplace. “I don’t seem to have the heart to, Caroline.” His words might have been made of water, he was so sodden with disappointment.
Caroline could not stand it. “I’m going to hang up your stockings, girls,” she declared. “Maybe something will happen.” They looked at her with such wonder, Caroline’s heart did not know whether to break or swell. She strode to the mantel and hung their two limp stockings beneath the china shepherdess. It was thanks to Edwards that she could do even this much, Caroline thought as she threaded the wool over the borrowed nails. Silently she wished him a happy Christmas. “Now go to sleep,” she said to Mary and Laura. “Morning will come quicker if you’re asleep.” Eager now, they squinched their eyes shut and tunneled deeper into the quilts. Caroline lingered there with her fingertips still on the mantel. Her thumb brushed the head of one nail as she looked down on her daughters. It was so easy to forget, now that there was Carrie, how little Mary and Laura still were. Quickly she bent and kissed them good night a second time and returned to her chair.
Caroline heard herself humming faintly as she rocked. She gave no thought to the tune. Her mind scoured the cabin, pondering what sort of Christmas she might patch together. It must be something new and fresh, or Mary and Laura would not be fooled. Nothing from the scrap bag or the button box. Paper dolls might lift a rainy afternoon, but she could not expect them to bear the weight of Christmas morning. There could be no molasses candy without snow, nor vanity cakes without eggs.