Caroline held a yard of the fabric up before her. Some days before a set of threadbare pillowcases had caught her eye in the scrap bag. In spare moments she had split their side seams and joined them into one long stretch. “A curtain,” she answered. “To go under the loft.”
“Looks fine. I’ll help you hang it in the morning.”
Caroline smoothed it thoughtfully across her knees. “I thought I’d blanket stitch the hem in red first.”
Charles smiled and gave his head half a shake. “Here,” he said. He handed her his mittens. The tops of them hinged backward to uncover a row of finger gussets; when she put them on, only the tips of her fingers were left exposed. He watched her adorn a few inches, then said, “Wherever we are, you’ll always contrive to make it look like home.”
Caroline’s breath caught. For a moment she thought the baby had given a little flutter, but it was only a quick beat of delight at his compliment.
“Thank you, Charles,” she said.
He balled his fists into his pockets and tipped his head back to look at the sky. “If I could build a roof so fine and high as that, I’d never want to move again.”
Caroline watched the firelight stroke his whiskers. He was a man in love with space. Every mile they traveled seemed to loosen him. How, she wondered, could she learn to find such ease in being wholly untethered?
“Charles, tell me how it will be in Kansas.” Like a child asking for a bedtime story. “Not the giant jackrabbits and horizons. Tell me how we’ll live this first year.”
“Well, I figure we ought to save all the money we can toward preempting our claim. For a quarter section at $1.25 an acre we’ll need $200 plus filing fees, and the land office won’t take pay in pelts. So I’ll hunt and trap this winter and trade furs for a plow and supplies enough to last until Gustafson’s payments arrive. Should be plenty of game to see us through until spring. Then I’ll plow up a plot for sod potatoes and another for corn. Land won’t raise more than that the first season. The next year we’ll sow fields of wheat and oats and anything else we want.”
“I’ve brought seeds from our garden,” Caroline said, “and Polly’s. She sent me with the best from her pickling cucumbers.” Those cucumbers would be like a little taste of Polly herself—crisp and sharp with vinegar.
What, Caroline wondered, would make the home folks think of her? When they wanted for music, even the music of laughter, they would pine for Charles, of course. What taste, what sound might make their hearts whisper: “Caroline?” Perhaps no more than a fragment of red cloth in their scrap bags.
Caroline swallowed hard. Forward, she coaxed herself. Not back. “And the house?”
“The turf’s so thick out there, some of the emigrants carve up the sod and use it for bricks. Makes walls a foot thick, easy. Keeps them cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and there’s no end of supply.”
“Oh, Charles! Not a soddie?” A house of dirt, the walls crumbly and hairy with roots. She shuddered as though one of them had reached out to brush her back.
A glint of consternation, then, “I’ll build anything you say.”
Caroline regretted the sound of her words as soon as she’d heard them. She gave a half-wincing smile and spoke more carefully this time. “I hadn’t thought of anything but good clean wood.”
“Then that’s what we’ll have,” he said, good-naturedly as ever. “I expect the timber won’t be so big as we’re used to, so it’ll have to start small.” She could see his mind pacing the place out in the space beyond the campfire. “One room, say twelve by fourteen, with a fireplace at one end, and windows east and west. Puncheon floor. A good slab roof will do as well as tar paper and shingles, and cheaper, too.” His voice slowed to a leisurely sway as he plotted out the details. Caroline’s needle stilled to listen to him. “Dunno if there’ll be enough fieldstone for a chimney in those parts. I halfway hope there isn’t—I’d rather patch a stick and daub chimney now and then than spend the next thirty years plowing stones out of my fields.”
His eyes had focused on a spot just outside the firelight. The depth of his concentration made it seem as though the darkness were no more than a doorway into something real and solid. Caroline fancied she could reach through it and touch her hand to the latch string. She joined her gaze to that spot, testing the feel of it. Her heartbeat quickened. Suddenly she craved a destination as much as she craved the taste of Polly’s pickles. Kansas was too vast a thing to pin herself to, and Montgomery County only an empty square on Charles’s map, without a single dot of a town. Caroline could not conceive of the infinitely smaller speck she herself would make on that map.
Real or imagined, she needed some mark to aim toward, and what better place than a house? A home. She wanted to be able to see it in her mind, to picture herself inside it as she had not dared to do since Charles informed her they would be leaving the furniture behind. If she could do that, Charles might stop the wagon anywhere he pleased, and she could pin that vision of home to the map.
Caroline’s hands toyed with her thread as though it were a latch string. It was risky, fashioning another such reverie with no firm promise that the reality would match. She looked again to Charles. The image he’d built was still before him, solid as though he’d made it out of boards. Perhaps yoking her vision to his would secure it somehow. Caroline gripped the leather latch string in her mind, and pulled.
The room that opened before her was so new she could smell the freshly hewn logs, yet immediately familiar: a straw tick snugged into each of the corners beside the hearth, her trunk beneath one window, the red-checked cloth on the table and the bright quilts on the beds. Without looking she knew Charles’s rifle hung over the door. Even the curtains she recognized—their calico trim from a little blue and yellow dress of Mary’s that Caroline had loved too much to tear into rags.
The whole house might as well have been standing there finished.
“Will that suit you?” Charles asked. His voice was so near, it was as though he were standing beside her in the imagined doorway.
Caroline whispered, “Yes, Charles.”
Eight
Caroline held the vision before her all the way to the very rim of Kansas—the Missouri River.
It bore little resemblance to the map. On paper it was a thick line squiggling between Missouri and Kansas as though it were caught in a crimping iron. Creeks and streams veined the map with blue.
This river was less than half a mile across and so yellowed with mud, it looked as though it had been dredged with mustard powder. The opaque water did not seem to flow, but to roll. It carved steadily at its own banks, paring away great slices of earth that crumbled, brown sugar–like, into the water.