From beneath the flour sack Charles drew an oblong package, wrapped in paper and tied with white string. He dropped it onto the table with a soft slap and raised his eyebrows at her. It could only be fabric—enough for a new spring dress. Caroline pinched her lip between her teeth as she untied the wrapping. Charles had only once come close to choosing a calico she did not like, but his indifference toward the proprieties of fashion always carried a certain amount of risk. He would have bought yards and yards of brilliant Turkey red, if he thought she possessed the gumption to wear it.
Caroline exhaled at the sight of it. The softest lavender ground, like lilacs, with a spray of feathery gray fern leaves. In the center lay a fat coil of narrow gray braid to trim the hem. Had there been a woman at the store to help him coordinate the goods? she wondered. They complemented each other perfectly: the trim, a few shades darker than the gray in the fabric, serving to accentuate the delicate pattern. The calico was Charles’s doing, that was sure. Lavender was not a color she would have thought to choose for herself. It was a demure shade, fit for a little girl’s Sunday best, and entirely impractical for an everyday dress.
Caroline loved it. Under the hot Kansas sun it would be gentle to the skin and refreshing to the eye. Already she could imagine how Charles would look at her when she wore it. He loved to see her wreathed in color.
“It’s too much,” she told him, as she always did.
His face told her it wasn’t nearly enough, as it always did.
For the girls there were cunning little black rubber hair combs that fit like bandeaus, with a star shape cut out from the center and backed with ribbon. Blue satin for Mary and red satin for Laura, just as if Caroline had picked them out herself. The girls were enraptured. They gazed at each other, then swapped combs so they could see their own. Laura put hers on Jack and squealed with laughter at his dubious face, crowned by such finery.
“Charles, you didn’t get yourself a thing,” Caroline said. His eyes twinkled at her. Both of them knew that was not true.
Thirty
Caroline stirred one more half spoonful of sugar into the pot of stewed dried blackberries, smiling to herself. Charles would not expect a treat at noon, in the middle of the week. She could hear him calling to the mustangs: Gee up now, Pet. Come on, girls! Straight and true, straight and true. Below his voice, the blade of the plow went sighing through the earth. Caroline smiled inwardly. Charles handled that plow as though it were another wife, as though he had never owned such a thing. She suspected he had named it. In a minute she would send Laura out to wave him in for dinner. Mary was laying the table, and the cornbread needed only to brown.
Caroline watched Carrie kicking her feet in and out of a sunbeam. She was so different than her sisters had been at this age, with their dimpled knees and deep creases of fat like furrows encircling their wrists and ankles. Carrie was lean and narrow, a little jackrabbit of a baby. Yet Caroline could not look at her puncturing the air with her small sharp heels and think that she was not beginning to thrive in her own hardy way.
The sunlight dimmed between kicks. Carrie lay poised, her feet ready to strike. Slowly her kinked legs sank toward her belly as she bored with waiting. Caroline lifted her eyebrows and made an O of her mouth, in hopes the baby would mirror her surprise rather than be vexed. Carrie gurgled in agreement. The sunbeam had played a fine trick, melting into the air. The firelight seemed to brighten by contrast while Caroline stirred the pot of blackberries, until it might have been dawn instead of noon.
“I do believe it’s going to storm,” she said to the girls. But the light was wrong. Rather than clouding, it had shrunken somehow, turned down like the wick in a lamp. Yet through the west window, the sky was clear. A dissonant twang sounded in her mind. Caroline put down the spoon and went out to look. Halfway across the room, she saw. To the south, the sky was black.
The smell reached the cabin at the same moment as Charles’s shout: “Prairie fire!”
For one crystalline moment, it was beautiful. Like silk, like water. Orange and yellow, a perfect saturation of color writhing over the prairie. The great curve of flame caressed the earth, its long arms slowly undulating outward. The fire itself did not appear to move forward at all. The black spume of smoke billowed so high and wide, it seemed instead as if the landscape were surging forward, passing into it.
Her eyes feasted on the blaze, unable to deny its splendor, but Caroline’s mind made no concession. The radiant vista before her did not simply burn; it consumed. It fed on all that was put before it with the indifference of a threshing machine. If they themselves passed through it, there would be nothing left on the other side but the empty chaff of their bodies.
Caroline ran.
Bucket after bucket of water. Up from the well, into the washtub. Burlap sacks snatched from the stable, pressed down into the tub. The burlap would not take the water fast enough. It bubbled up around her hands, tried to float, even as the water beaded over the coarse fabric. All manner of creatures fled past her as she struggled. Rabbits, prairie chickens, snakes, and mice, dashing toward the creek. From them rose a nameless sound, a frantic rush of panting and scurrying.
“Hurry, Caroline!” Charles cried. He was tying the team to the stable, plow and all. “That fire’s coming faster than a horse can run.”
Caroline opened the mouth of one sack and dragged it through the tub like a dipper, scooping the water into it. Then Charles was beside her, taking up one handle of the washtub. Together they staggered toward the fire line. Faster! urged her legs. Mustn’t spill, warned her brain. Everything in the world moved in the opposite direction, even the fire itself. A jackrabbit leapt over the tub right between them, fearless in its panic.
A crooked gash in the earth framed the house and yard. Two slashes slanting south from the half-plowed field and a third joining them east to west. “I couldn’t plow but one furrow; there isn’t time,” Charles panted, and dashed back to the house.
One furrow. Fifteen inches of bare dirt to wall them off from the fire. The torn sod lay belly up, the exposed roots splayed in every direction. Those fine white threads would burn quick as hair, Caroline thought. She stood before the advancing curtain of smoke and flame, aware now of its warmth against her skin. Its roar was such that there was no other sound, almost no sound at all—only the faintest of crackling as it licked and chewed its way over the grass. One furrow, and one tub of water.