To Henry and Polly she described the lay of the land, its prospects for crops and husbandry, and its yield of game, as though her words might lay a path for them to follow. She wished she could put to paper the queer thrill of driving headlong into spring instead of waiting by the fireside for winter to melt and trickle away from them. The weeks seemed to warp and ripple beneath the wagon wheels. It made for such a pleasant sort of bewilderment.
For Ma and Papa Frederick she saved the news of their smaller travails, for her mother would neither believe nor enjoy a letter without some trouble in it. Things like the pheasant that somehow eluded Charles’s good aim, the quick spattering of hail that woke them their first night inside the Iowa line. She left out the occasional roadside grave markers, only hinting at them by mention of the picked-over piles of iron hardware showing the places where abandoned wagons had rotted down to metal skeletons. They passed by enough ox bones leftover from the gold rush days, she mused, to fashion a bushel basket full of crochet hooks, buttons, and the like.
The truest of them went to Eliza. To Eliza she could confess how keenly she felt the want of walls and doors—something solid to partition themselves from the space around them. The arc of canvas left her always penetrable, never fully sheltered from wind, or sun, or temperature. Caroline did not know whether Eliza would understand that, but there was no one else she wanted to try to explain it to. Perhaps Eliza would not even fully understand the elation she had felt over the first good dinner she had fixed. Caroline doubted she could adequately convey it without sounding like a hedonist.
They had camped late that Saturday night along a riverbed, in the shelter of a clump of shagbark hickory. The campsite alone was enough to make her half-giddy: good hardwood and good water in plenty, both within easy reach.
When Caroline went to start breakfast Sunday morning, there was a string of small catfish dangling from the tailgate, and Charles, grinning by the fire. They were lovely little fish, with spotless white bellies, and their pewter backs lustrous in the sunlight. Caroline traced her finger along one smooth whisker.
“Went out before daybreak,” Charles said. “I know I shouldn’t have, not on the Sabbath, but I tell you Caroline, it didn’t feel a bit like work.”
Caroline laughed out loud. She could not help it, had not even felt it coming. It was the way those eyes of his twinkled. He looked as though catching those fish had already done him as much good as a full day’s rest. They gleamed brighter yet at the quick chime of her laughter. “Sounds like we’ve both got something to repent for now,” he teased.
A blush rouged her cheeks. She felt a girlish impulse to bat playfully at his arm, but they had played too much already. There would be even more to answer for if Mary and Laura caught them behaving this way on a Sunday morning. “Charles Ingalls, you’ll be the death of me,” she whispered. She lowered her eyes before he could give her that look again, for the one that followed it—the one where his smile crinkled into his whiskers—she never could resist.
At noontime the good hickory coals glowed bright and steady. Outside the campfire ring the temperature hovered on the fringes of fifty degrees. Now and then a bit of breeze, but nothing strong enough to tussle with the fire. Caroline dredged the dozen delicate fillets with white flour and fried them up crisp and golden brown. In a little kettle beside the skillet she stewed some dried apples with brown sugar and cinnamon. The familiar way the fish snapped in the hot lard while the apples bubbled made it nearly like cooking at her own stove again.
No milk or butter, no light bread, pickles, or preserves, and yet the meal had the flavor of a true Sunday dinner. The fish’s thin skin crackled and its moist white flesh flaked apart on her tongue. Caroline ate until her belly was more than filled, and still her mouth wanted to keep hold of that fish. Sinfully good, Charles had said with a wink.
If she wrote it all down and sealed it in an envelope, Caroline wondered, would the humor keep fresh long enough to reach her sister? She liked to think their heartstrings were so closely interwoven that they might still share such moments in spite of the distance. And yet she could not blot out the worry that the months between the happening and the reading would only stale the story and leave Eliza too shocked to laugh.
How many miles had they come? Less than halfway, and already Caroline had the sense that a separation such as this could put more than miles between folks, could right this minute be working changes she might not be entirely conscious of and might never realize at all unless she and Eliza saw each other again.
Caroline gave her chin a little shake and smoothed her hands into her lap. Such far-off things did not bear worrying about. Not when there was one fact this journey did not change, one fact that did deserve more than idle concern. But those uneasy thoughts Caroline could imagine committing to paper for no one, not even herself.
When she tried to think of the coming baby, the pictures formed in the back of her mind instead of stretching out before her. She could see herself only in the rocker where she had nursed Mary and Laura, with a hazy-faced bundle in her arms and Black Susan purring at her feet. Out on this widening land there was no frame to hold new scenes of rocking and feeding. Was that the reason the child had still not quickened—because her mind had not made it properly welcome? Or had her body already communicated to her brain that there was no need to imagine such things for this baby? If there were no life in it, Caroline tried to reassure herself, her body would have expelled it by now. Wouldn’t it? That was such cold comfort, it made her shudder. The days were so full of jostles and bumps, she told herself, how could anything so small possibly make itself felt? But she had felt both Mary and Laura when they were smaller yet.
Only a little more pressing was the matter of who would help her when it came time to bear this child. Even a stillborn babe must have hands to catch it. At home she never needed to explain. She had only to ask Charles to run for Polly, and he understood.
Always it had been Polly at the foot of the bed, Polly, with her face so stolid that Caroline could hardly consider quailing at the pain. That was the one thing she could not bring herself to try imagining: a different face looking up from between her knees, different hands reaching where none but Polly’s had reached before. Worse yet was the thought of no one at all.
Caroline knew what Charles would look for in land: good running water, timber, and plenty of game. Not one of those daily necessities could be sacrificed for the momentary need of a claim alongside a neighbor with a wife, and so she kept these thoughts to herself as each day made another small stitch in the long gap between them and Kansas.
Nights, she and Charles took to sitting before the fire, talking. Or rather, Charles talked while Caroline concentrated herself on the mending.
“What’s that?” Charles asked.