“And Mrs. Scott.”
He did not answer that. Likely he couldn’t, but Caroline knew. The way Mrs. Scott had spoken of the Indians before the fire left no room for doubt. For all her kindness to her neighbors, Mrs. Scott had seemed to savor the thought of what depredations Indians—any Indians—were capable of, as though it vindicated her hatred for them. Caroline could not say whether she herself hated them any less, but she found nothing to relish in it. Nor was it a conviction she cared to cultivate any more deeply.
She sat back on her heels to look at him, her hands submerged in the cold rinse water. “If I am to live here, Charles, it cannot be under the cloud of what the Indians might have done, or may do.” She said it without force. It was not a threat—only a fact. “I’ve seen enough that I can already imagine more than I care to.”
He understood. Or rather, he agreed. He did not understand. Charles would never share her sentiments toward the Indians. He could stand before an Indian man without feeling his viscera clench and his bowels shudder, without the fine hairs on every surface of his skin rising up in a feeble attempt at protection. Caroline’s body told her to be afraid, and she obeyed it; there need not be a reason. Charles’s did not.
Caroline could not change his response to the presence of the Osages any more than she could change her own. Yet Charles was willing to abide by her condition. He had agreed with only a moment’s consideration, without coaxing or scoffing. Warmth swarmed suddenly around her heart, and Caroline surprised them both with a smile. Charles smiled back without knowing why, happy, as always, to have pleased her. She would let that be enough. Caroline heard her thoughts and spared another smile, for her ma this time. More than enough.
“Come here, Caroline. And you, Mary and Laura.”
Something to see, Caroline guessed. Perhaps an animal, by the way Charles called out to them—low and slow, so as not to frighten whatever it was away. Unless there were a bison grazing in the yard, she could not think what would make him interrupt her work. Caroline gave a scolding smile to the crochet thread in her hands. It was not work, really. The mending was done, and the half-finished row of scalloped lace she had begun so long ago in Wisconsin had been so tempting, there at the bottom of the work basket. So she had let herself pretend it could be used to disguise the burned hem of her lavender calico, even though its pattern was far too elaborate for an everyday dress. Her hands delighted in the intricate movements, so unlike braining hides and wringing laundry that she was not vexed each time the thread snagged on the rough tips of her fingers. How long since she had made something beautiful for its own sake?
And now Charles’s voice was boring a hole through her concentration. With a sigh, she realized she had lost count of the stitches. She set the lacework back into the basket and stood, treating her back to a luxuriant stretch. “Let’s go see what Pa has to show us,” she said to Mary and Laura.
The girls ran outside ahead of her, scampering over the board Charles had propped across the doorway to keep Carrie indoors. In the weeks since the fire she had begun creeping across the floor, pulling with her hands and scooting her knees along behind. Soon she would be crawling. Now Carrie followed her sisters as far as she could, then gripped the board with hands and mouth. “We’ll have to ask your pa to tack a strip of canvas to that edge,” Caroline told the baby as she hitched up her skirt to step out. Otherwise the child would chew off a mouthful of splinters.
Caroline reached up to shade her eyes against the sun. When she could see, she stopped short. Her hand dropped to her chest. At once she understood why Charles had called her name first, before the girls. Never in her life had she seen so many Indians. Scores of them, mounted and on foot, with baskets and bundles, all pointed west.
“Oh, the pretty ponies! See the pretty ponies!” Laura cried, clapping her hands. “Look at the spotted one.”
It was plain from the way the ponies were packed that the Indians were leaving. Blankets, hoes, cookpots. They had left nothing behind. “Mercy,” Caroline heard herself say. She had not expected to watch them go—only to learn one day that their camps were empty, that they had fulfilled their agreement with the government and moved south of the Kansas line.
“Thank God,” Caroline said. She meant it, but she did not feel it. Not yet. Here before her eyes was an answered prayer, and she could neither rejoice nor reflect, only witness its happening. Now that it was happening, Caroline wondered what she had supposed she would feel. Glad, relieved? She felt so little, she could not put a name to it. The moment flowed by without seeming to leave a mark.
Near the head of the procession rode the Indian agent, a white man of about forty, with a dark beard and eyelids that sloped gently downward at the outer corners. A ghost of a memory grazed Caroline’s thoughts as he passed. Not so much a recollection, but a sensation, as though for a fleeting instant she inhabited the mind and body of a child who was accustomed to looking up into a face like that one.
Pa, she thought with a warm shiver, and her feet carried her to within a few yards of the procession. Not Papa Frederick, but her own father. In all the years he had been gone, she had never seen eyes so much like Pa’s. Her brothers had inherited fragments of his smile, his hands, even his voice, but not one of them had his eyes. Had she known the agent’s name, she would have called out to him, just to see those eyes looking down on her once more.
Instead the man rode on, and Caroline stood suspended in her memory as one Indian after another passed through the space he had occupied. For the first time Caroline felt safe enough in their presence to observe them with no other thought than to see what they looked like. The shape of their faces fascinated her. They were unmistakably different from her own. The planes were flatter, the lines straighter. Even the plumpest of cheeks appeared oblong instead of round. If their skin were white and their hair done up in curls, Caroline thought, she would still know the difference, just as she would know a spaniel from a bulldog.
It was Mary who recognized one of them. She gave a little gasp and took Caroline’s hand, hiding her face behind it as though she were a bashful toddler. Caroline saw the faded green calico shirt and a sizzle of fear crossed her own belly. That was the man who had flung the key to her trunk at them when it would not fit the lock of the provisions cabinet. She remembered the sound of it as it careened off the toe of Mary’s shoe and skittered across the floor.