Caroline: Little House, Revisited

With the head of a dulled hoe, Charles scraped the moisture from the brained hides until they were barely damp. Jack sat beside him, waiting to lick up the accumulated scum of liquid rawhide that Charles wiped from the blade every so often. Finally he wrapped the hides around the bedpost and worked them back and forth—as though polishing the toe of a shoe—to turn them smooth and supple.

All winter long, the house smelled of brains and skins and sweat. Caroline took to looking out the east window as she worked. There would be her kitchen garden. She could see it as clearly as Charles could see his fields of corn and sod potatoes: cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions, squash and carrots and beans, all drenched in the morning sun. In the afternoon, the cabin would shade the plants from the harshest heat. She would plant them as she always had, so that the rows of colors would meld from one to the next in a living rainbow. All those seeds had come from home. Wisconsin seeds bred in Kansas ground. Like Carrie, Caroline thought, and smiled. Alongside Polly’s cucumbers there would be sweet potatoes, from Mr. Edwards, for she had saved one back from Christmas dinner. As soon as the ground softened and the sunlight grew less watery, she would bring in a few spadefuls of earth and start the sweet potato in a flat before the window. Perhaps when Charles went to Oswego for the plow, she could busy herself and the girls for an afternoon with that small task.



They were both of them giddy the day Charles set out for Oswego. Giddy and giggly, for Caroline had a case of hiccoughs that interrupted every attempt Charles made to kiss her goodbye. Carrie squawked in surprise with every spasm that jostled her. Caroline laughed herself breathless. Finally Charles kissed Mary and Laura all over their faces and said, “Give that to your ma!” They just about knocked her down with kissing her.

The next days were chill and muddy, but Caroline could feel a change in the cold, as though a warm breath had been exhaled into it. Each evening before supper the girls came in rosy-cheeked, a faint halo of sweat dampening the hair beneath their woolen wraps. In the morning, the lines of the hopscotch squares Caroline had traced in the yard for them the day before were crystalized with frost.

The first three days passed easily. On the fourth, the girls ticked like pocket watches, conscious of every minute. “Last time it was only four days,” Laura complained on the fifth morning.

“Pa came home so late on the fourth night, it might as well have been five,” Caroline reminded her.

Laura frowned as though she’d been tricked. “Today is five. That means Pa has to come home today.” she declared. Caroline made no attempt to dissuade her. Charles would be home or he wouldn’t; nothing she said would soften Laura’s disappointment if he did not arrive on time.

Neither could she pretend that her own anticipation was not buoyed higher and higher as the day passed. Every few minutes she glanced up from plucking the prairie chicken Mr. Edwards had brought the day before to glance down the creek road. The wagon would be brimful. Not only with the new steel plow and the seeds, but fresh sacks of flour, sugar, and cornmeal. Caroline thought of salt pork, fried until the fat had crisped, and licked her lips. That would be a treat to savor after so much lean winter game. She had not asked for anything for herself. There was nothing she particularly wanted, except perhaps a letter. With the expense of the plow, there might not be enough to spare for extras, though she hoped for Mary’s and Laura’s sakes that there would be. Surely a stick of penny candy, at least. Charles never forgot his girls.

As she admired the pictures in her mind, Caroline found herself humming without regard for where the tune had come from. When she realized, she swallowed and stood still, listening, to be sure.

Indians.

It could not be. Their camps had been empty since before Christmas. But it was. There was no mistaking that sound. She let go of the fistful of feathers and wiped the sweat from her palms. Was that why Edwards had come calling the day before? She had been so pleased by the prairie chicken, she suspected nothing but neighborliness.

Caroline felt as she had the night on the prairie when they had lost Jack and Charles had nearly shot the bulldog by mistake as he approached the campfire. Her body had poised itself on the edge of fear, but her mind was not yet fully afraid. Her mind wanted to know more. She went to the window and listened again.

It was music, at least. The melody was unlike any song she had ever sung, but Caroline could find the pattern in it. The beat was choppy, like the sound of the girls jumping in and out of their hopscotch squares. Perhaps that was why she had not recognized its source sooner. This song was the opposite in every way of the sounds they had heard in the fall. Even as she cautioned herself that she could not be sure, Caroline ascribed joyfulness to it.

What sort of song would they sing after killing a man?

Caroline stepped back, bewildered. That thought had come from her, as if her mind had no concern for the consequences of its thoughts. “Stop that,” she said, as though one of the children had talked back to her. It had no business asking such questions of its own accord, questions she did not want asked, much less answered.



A little more than two hours after that, Charles was home. Laura yelped and Jack whined, but Caroline did not let them outside to greet him. She went alone to help him unload. Together they hefted the new plow into the stable. Charles locked the door.

The Indians were still singing.

“I thought they’d gone,” Caroline said.

Charles sighed. He had expected this, though Caroline could not tell whether his reaction was composed of relief or dread. “So did I. Word in town is they’ve come back from the winter camps one last time,” he said. “The Indian agent will lead them south to the new reservation in a few weeks.”

She felt herself calculating the time as if it were an absolute measure—as Laura had calculated Charles’s absence. Not a couple, not several. A few. Three weeks, then. Twenty-one days. She would allow them that much without complaint. Every day of it, she would pray morning and night for their departure.

Inside the cabin all was smiles and jollity. Charles had traded well. Everything they needed and more was piled on the table, down to coffee and seed potatoes. Instead of white sugar he had bought all manner of treats. Out of a paper sack came a packet of crackers and a jar of cucumber pickles. Caroline’s mouth and eyes both watered at the sight of those little green gherkins bobbing in their brine. It had been nearly a year since she had asked him to look for pickles at the store in Independence, and all that time he had not forgotten.

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