Miller - Caroline Little House, revisited

None knew thee but to love thee,

Thou dear one of my heart,

Oh, thy memory is ever fresh and green.

Daisy Deane

Carolines wrist turned and flicked as the steel tongue of her crochet hook dipped in and out, mirroring the movement of the fiddles bow. With each note, the white thread licked a warm line across her finger. Her pattern had just begun to repeat, chorus-like, as the tune ended. She smoothed the frilled cluster of scallops against her cuff and smiled. So long as she could keep ahead of the mending, a pair of lace wrists would freshen her second-best blue wool before snowmelt. There would be no time for a collaronce the trees began to bud, she must turn her hands to the tedious seams of a new set of diapers, bonnets, and gowns.

Charles rested the fiddle on his knees and primed himself with a breath.

What is it, Charles? Caroline asked, plucking a slouching festoon of thread into place.

Ive had an offer for this place, he said.

Carolines hook stilled. An offer?

Gustafsons agreed to pay one thousand twelve dollars and fifty cents for our half of this quarter section.

The sum swept her mind clean as a gust of wind. My goodness, she said. One thousand twelve dollars. And the delightful absurdity of fifty cents besides, like a sprinkling of sugar. They could use it to buy a weeks worth of satin hair ribbons for Mary and Laura. Oh, Charles. Caroline clasped her hands before her lips to hide their eager trembling. And the same for Henry and Pollys half?

Charles grimaced. Gustafson can only afford eighty acres. Your brother isnt going.

Going. The image her mind had already begun to embroider unraveled. Such foolish greed; she had let herself imagine that money as though it were sitting in her lap, beneath this very roofnot as the lever that would pry her loose of it.

She need not ask where they would go. All winter long Charles had talked of Kansas, its free, level land and bountiful game. Even Mary and little Laura could repeat his reveries of the mighty jackrabbits and treeless acreage as easily as the words of The Gypsy King. The West was a song Charles wanted a hand in composing.

A subtle tightening, as though she were taking hold of the cabin and everything in it, passed over her. To move westward was nothing new, but always, she had traveled from the sanctuary of one family to another: from Ma and Papa Fredericks house in Concord to Father and Mother Ingallss farm, and from there to this quarter section they had bought together with Henry and Polly, just seven miles east of the Mississippi.

And yet beneath that apprehension, a twinkle of excitement. Caroline remembered the thrill, after three years of married life spent under others roofs, of buying this place and making of it a home all their own. Within six months she had been pregnant. How might it feel to do the same on land that bore no mark of another family? Such a place would belong more thoroughly to them than anything had before.

We stake our claim, make improvements on the land while Gustafson makes his payments, and by the time the Indians move on we can clear the mortgage on this place and preempt a full one hundred sixty acres with upward of five hundred dollars left to spare, Charles went on, pulling a blue handbill from his pocket. The settlers put up such a fuss that the governments finally reneged on the railroad interests. The Indian Territory is there for the takinga dollar and a quarter an acre. We only have to be there when the land opens up. The sooner we arrive, the sooner weve put in our fourteen months residency. He leaned forward for her reply.

The arithmetic alone spoke for itself: twice the acreage, none of the debt. Cash in hand, where before they had banked with pelts and crops. She should not hesitate at such a gain. Yet how to weigh that against losses that could not be measured? Departing before the Mississippi thawed would not leave time enough to bid her own mother goodbye. She did not answer yes or no. We will have an increase in the family well before then, she said instead.

Caroline tucked her lips together. She had not intended to tell him for another month yet, not until she was certain the child was safely rooted. But Charles looked at her as though it were the first time, and she went rosy in the glow of his happiness. When? he asked.

Before harvest.

He combed his fingers through his whiskers. Should we wait?

Her conscience rippled. She could say yes, and he would give her the year at least, restaking himself to this land without question or complaint. Another year with her sisters and brother, with Mother and Father Ingalls, with plenty of time to visit Ma and Papa Frederick one more time. One final time. Were she to answer on behalf of the coming child, it might even be an unselfish thing to ask. Yet shed had no sense of its presenceonly the absence of her monthly courses coupled with an unaccountable warmth in her hands and feetnothing to signal it as separate from herself.

Carolines eyes roved over the place where her china shepherdess stood gazing down from the mantel. The silken glaze of her painted dress and body seemed at once so hard and smooth as to render the little woman untouchable. If she indulged herself by claiming this time, Caroline thought, Charles would treat her with almost unbearable awe and deference. No matter that carrying a child made her feel no more fragile than a churn full of cream. Staying would only make for a year shadowed with lastsone vast goodbye shattered over innumerable small moments. Better to travel now, she decided. It will only be harder if we wait.

He leaned back, grinning, until the chair was on tiptoe. Her news had dyed the fabric of the coming year twice as brightly for Charles. He took up the fiddle and played softly, so as not to wake the girls.

Theres a land that is fairer than day,

And by faith we can see it afar.

For the Father waits over the way,

To prepare us a dwelling place there.

Caroline laid her morsel of lace aside and rocked herself deeply into the long notes.

Long as those hickory bows are curing, I might as well make a trip into town, Charles said, shrugging into his overcoat. We still need oakum to caulk the wagon box and canvas for a cover.

Get a good heavy needle and plenty of stout linen thread, Caroline reminded him. And check the post office, she added, silly as it was. The letter shed sent into town with Henry the week before could hardly have reached her mother in Concord by now. Charles winked and shut the door, whistling.

Caroline stood in the middle of the big room with a burst of breath puffing out her cheeks. Charles always saw the beginning of a new start, never the loose ends of the old one that must be fastened off.

The cabin had not seemed overlarge before, but it was more than would fit in a wagon boxthe straw ticks alone would fill a third of it. Every object she laid eyes on suddenly demanded a decision of her. To look at it all at once made her mind swarm. One thing at a time, Caroline told herself. She pulled the red-checked cloth from the table, and the shepherdess from the mantel. Some few things, at least, there was no question about.

In the bedroom, Caroline opened her trunk and lifted the upper tray out onto the bed. In one of its shallow compartments lay the glass ambrotype portraits from their courting and marriage, and her three schoolbooks. She opened the reader. Its cardboard cover shielded her certificate of good behavior and the little handwritten booklet of poems shed sewn together as a youth. She slipped a fingernail between its leaves and parted the pages. Blue Juniata stood out in Charless writing. She smiled, remembering the cornhusking dance where she had first heard Charles play the tune. He had not sung the words correctly, and she had been so bold as to tell him so. Thats the way we Ingallses sang it back East, hed said, and his eyes twinkled at her. Theyd twinkled again when she asked him to inscribe his version in her booklet. Now no matter which way I sing it, itll be by the book, hed teased.