“I shan’t pretend.” Her voice shook, and she took a moment to compose herself. “And if it means having you rescue me, I’ll never go anywhere alone again.” Trembling, from Michael more than Smith, she turned on her heel and fled back to the fire and fiddle music.
Martha saw her expression and moved over, patting a spot on the splintery bench.
16
“What IS that?” Caroline skidded to a stop on the sun-baked earth.
The rust-colored rock formation rose out of the flat landscape like a giant warning finger, the only item on the horizon. It was as unexpected as a seagull in this wasteland.
Jenny reined up beside her. “Michael says it’s called Chimney Rock. Big, ain’t it?”
“Big” didn’t describe the monument. Jenny grinned down at her, just as impressed as Caroline.
A dark sky with even darker clouds pressed down around the formation. It had rained for days, and the damp air promised more. Caroline had exchanged her wet clothes for the cleanest of her dirty clothes, and now they, too, clung to her in the heavy air. Come on, rain. Or–or do something. Let us know what we have to deal with.
“Folks call it ‘Chimney Rock’ on account of it reminds them of a fact’ry chimney,” Ben Harkness said as he helped her unhitch the team.
Caroline lifted the doubletree off Patches and Fred. It got heavier every day—and night. “Wish it was a real chimney. Then we could get warm. Ben, how many miles did we make today?”
His dark brows drew together. “Not enough,” he said before leading the oxen away to graze on the short prairie grass.
Caroline’s clothes stuck to her. Even her feet were damp from where she’d had to lead the team across a washout—mercifully not as deep or as wild as the one they’d lost Samuel in—but just as wet. Her feet felt chilled inside her wet socks and thick boots. She loathed wet feet above anything else, because they made the rest of her even colder. Daniel used to put hot bricks in their bed at night, hot bricks in the sleigh, and sometimes he’d even rub her feet before the fire.
Daniel.
The matches were dry in their tin box. One less thing to deal with. The buffalo chips she’d scavenged at the last site were dry, too. She tried to build a fire, lighting three of her precious matches and blowing on it until her lungs hurt. Come on. Weak tears filled her eyes, from weariness or smoke? She didn’t care.
Her fire smoked and sputtered. Better hurry, it wouldn’t last long. A few potatoes, sliced very thin, went nicely in the spider. She could wrap some of the smoked buffalo meat in cornhusks, heat the packets in the ashes, and reheat coffee from lunch. It would have to do.
The sky seemed to close in around them. Was that thunder? Yes. And a few raindrops sizzled their way on to her skillet.
Chimney Rock. They might as well be on the moon. The trail bore as little resemblance to life in Summer Pasture, Ohio as Summer Pasture, with its unpaved street and wooden sidewalks, bore to Salem, Massachusetts.
Though Ina and Lily still gossiped and shared quilt patterns, life as they all knew it was eroding. The children did run wild, farm and city kids mingling on the adventure of their lives.
Caroline hadn’t resumed classes after Samuel’s death. It was enough for all of them just to get through the day. The remaining Harkness kids were readers, though, and she made do with that, feeding them books, and sometimes reading aloud with them before a campfire. Rose read when she rocked Hannah to sleep, Rachel and Esther read when they walked beside the wagon. Even Martha had relaxed her standards by this point. To have any kind of formal lessons was like trying to bottle smoke.
Except for Loretta, who huddled with her for a half-hour every afternoon, putting letters together to make words and then sentences, pushing herself in the sliver of time they had during Lyman’s nap.
The other older girls, with Rose in the lead, helped with some of Loretta’s chores. Caroline could never resist a student, and Loretta had become one.
Michael and Jenny came around the side of the wagon. They were laughing about something, and they were even wetter than Caroline. Their denim pants clung to their long legs. What a pretty pair they’d make, Jenny so tall and golden, Michael such a brilliant example of Black Irish. But Michael never looked at Jenny the way he…best not to dwell on that.
“This is the best I could do.” She willed her voice to steadiness.
“‘Tis good,” Michael said, not even glancing at the plate she handed him. “But it’ll rain again, and that soon. We’ll have to eat in our wagons.” He brushed a black curl off his forehead. “Pace is back at our rig. I can bring something down to him and stop at the Potters’ on the way.”
“That will be fine.” Her hands shook. Was it from the need for speed or Michael’s nearness? She scooped food into pie tins and covered them with other tins, and handed them to him without looking up. Since the argument after the buffalo kill, they had only spoken when necessary. But sometimes, more often than not, she’d found him looking at her, gauging her. It was a different look from the casual lust some men displayed when they thought she wasn’t looking, and it frightened her far more.
She and Jenny took their lukewarm plates inside their wagon. Caroline sat cross-legged, her skirts modestly arranged. Jenny’s long legs stuck out in front of her, and she cut her food into small bits, chewing each piece well.
“You have excellent table manners,” Caroline blurted, and wondered why she should be surprised.
If they had only had a table.
Jenny swallowed before answering. “Thanks. My ma was a stickler. Didn’t matter that we lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere. She couldn’t even read, but she must of picked up the rules somewhere. And Mr. Nelson, the owner of the Bonhomie, gave us lessons. He gave us all kinds of lessons—how to talk, how to dress, how to set a table. He ran a high-class outfit. Said we was gonna be cour-te-sans.” She pronounced the word with exaggerated care.
Caroline wiped her mouth on a ragged towel. “What was it like at the Bonhomie?” she asked, hating her curiosity but unable to stop.
Jenny shrugged and took a sip of her now-cold coffee. “It was all right. It was a job. Better’n some places I worked. Mr. Nelson, the boss, really liked me. If you know what I mean. He said he was savin’ me for himself. He said he was gonna take me upstairs soon’s I turned eighteen.”
“How–how old are you?” This was worse than Caroline had thought.
“Seventeen and eight months. But I had the chance to get out, an’ I took it. Don’t guess I’ll be doing that anymore.” Under their thick, dark lashes, her blue eyes were guileless. Guiltless. How could she? Or, how could she not?
“How did you get the job?”‘ If Mother could hear her now.
Jenny laughed shortly. “You mean, how did I get into the life?” She put down her tin fork. “My folks died, and my brother sold the farm out from under us. Weren’t a whole lot of ways to make a living for a fourteen-year-old, and the one I found first wasn’t much better. I was a hired girl at the Pearsons’, and Mr. Pearson kept trying to get under my skirt. I figured this way I’d wear pretty clothes and make a little money. I done what I had to do.”
Caroline knew she’d gone too far. Her own training in manners would have stopped her anywhere else. But this wasn’t anywhere else. “Did you like it?” she asked softly.
Jenny looked at her for a long moment. “What do you think?” she said at last. Even you can’t be that stupid, her tone implied. “I got men pawing my body every night of my life, some of them smell, and some of ‘em wanted me to go upstairs. I didn’t, Mr. Nelson said I was worth more getting men to drink, but I could have done it. Some of them were into rough stuff. Not at the Bonhomie, Mr. Nelson said we was an investment and he didn’t want us knocked around much, but I got scars from before there. And women like you crossed the street when they saw me coming. Wasn’t a whole lot of fun, Miz O’Leary.”
Jenny had been a girl one time, a fourteen-year-old girl, the age of Caroline’s oldest students
. She had giggled with friends, shared treats from her lunch pail, stood to recite in class. Her mother had plaited her long, blonde hair every morning. And someone had loved her. Fiercely. The way Martha loved what was left of her brood. Caroline closed her eyes and saw that blonde child weeping. “Jenny, do you know that Jesus loves you?” she ventured. “And He can forgive what you did, what you were.”
Jenny chewed on a piece of dried buffalo meat while those wide blue eyes took Caroline’s measure. When she spoke, her words were deliberate. “Sorry, Miz O’Leary. Last person I had talk to me about God was my ma. He ain’t for me. He’s,”—she searched for a word—“He ain’t my God. Guess I better get ready for bed.” She stripped, far less modestly than Caroline would have, and tossed her damp clothes in a corner. Shrugging into the white nightgown, she crawled into her bedroll and turned her face away, to where the wall would have been if they’d had a wall.
That was that. Caroline prayed as she gathered up the dishes. Oh, Lord, she’s so lost. Please show me the way to get around…whatever they did to her. Because they weren’t really all that different.
Head bent against the rain, she stacked the plates by the wagon wheel for a morning’s quick rinse. She was about to climb back inside.
The thump of running footsteps and Michael came into view. A bolt of lightning illuminated him—the damp clothing, the tousled black hair, the set of his jaw—as if it were daylight.
“Mrs. O’Leary, you’ve got to come. Sarah Potter is in labor.”
Clinging to the wagon wheel, she stared up at him. “I’m not a midwife,” she shouted over the crack of thunder.
“I know. She knows. Mrs. Harkness is with her. But she asked for you.”
“I can’t,” Caroline argued, even as they raced through the sheets of rain.
The camp was deserted. Everyone huddled inside their wagons, their miserable attempts at campfires black and dead by now.
“Sure and you can.” Michael stopped, so sharply that she almost ran into him, and looked down at her. “Because—and I want to be wrong—but I’m thinkin’ it won’t be easy. Mrs. Harkness says it’s far too early.”
Sarah’s screams preceded them, and Caroline could have found her way to the Potter wagon even if she were blind.
Tom Potter had rigged a makeshift shelter outside his wagon, stretching a tarp from the wagon roof to two stacked barrels. He and Ben Harkness huddled under it. Ben, who did not smoke, whittled fiercely, the shavings falling into the mud. Tommy held a corncob pipe, but he wasn’t smoking. He stared at his pipe as though it would explode, and the white clouds of smoke dissipated into the wet dark.
Caroline nodded to them, tucked her skirts around her, and climbed into the wagon. She hadn’t seen Sarah since the buffalo kill. Tom had met her outside the wagon morning, noon, and night, gratefully taking the full plates and returning the empty ones. When had Sarah gotten so big?
The girl, a woman now, lay on a straw tick, with her brown hair in tangles across a limp-looking pillow. Her belly dwarfed everything in the compact space. The cabin smelled of sweat, mold, and unwashed clothing.
Sarah’s eyes rolled back until only the whites showed. She panted, a hoarse, animal sound.
“Push, Sarah,” Martha was urging. “Your baby wants to come out.”
Sweat streaked the girl’s cheeks. “Can’t. Too hard.”
“I know, honey. I done it seven times.” A shadow crossed Martha’s face. “Pull on the rope. Only way this baby’s gonna come out is if you work with it.”
Caroline knelt beside Martha. “What can I do?”
“Hold her hand,” Martha said without looking up. “That’s better than a pulling rope any day.”
Caroline took the girl’s small, cold hand. Sarah’s fingernails, grown long in these weeks without work, dug into the softness of her palm.
It wasn’t fair. Sarah Potter—especially sixteen-year-old Sarah Potter—should have her mother with her at a time like this. Yes, and a gaggle of sisters and aunts.
“Has she been in labor long?”
“Most of the day. But she didn’t know what it was. She went straight from back labor to this.” Martha’s lips were a straight line as she pushed the girl’s hair back from her forehead.
Caroline had learned to read Martha’s face. This wasn’t good. She gripped the girl’s hand harder, ignoring her own pain.
On her knees, Martha moved to the end of the pallet. “It’s crowning,” she said, reverence coloring her voice. “Sarah, honey. Push. Oh, it has red hair. Push!”
Sarah Potter tensed, her small body arching. With one more animal grunt, she delivered her child, a blood-soaked bundle the size of a doll. Too spent for tears, she flopped back on her pallet.
Martha cut the cord and wrapped the infant in a heated towel. “Oh, Sarah. You have a little girl,” she crooned.
The girl’s eyes were still squeezed shut. “Tommy?” Her voice was like a thread.
“We’ll clean you up and clean the baby. He’ll be in here soon enough. Right after’s no place for a man.” She passed the baby to Caroline, continued her flood of relieved chatter.
“Sometimes you don’t have a choice. My Esther was born in a blizzard, and Ben had to bring her. He learned some things fast. He thought we delivered same as the stock. He learned there’s a little more to it than that.” She brushed back one of her own dark curls and wiped her hands on her apron. “Sarah, you did real well for a first time. Push, honey. Here comes the afterbirth, and then you’re all done.”
Caroline held the baby girl to her chest. Poor little mite, born in the wilderness to parents who had nothing but each other. Each other.
She was tiny, not much bigger than Caroline’s forearm, a true, seven-months child. Caroline waited for the miniscule mouth to open in a yawn or wail. The eyes would be blue, she knew that much. She looked for a doll-sized flailing hand. “I’ll clean her up as soon as she’s warm, and put her in her gown,” she murmured. In order to better see the tiny infant, she peeled back a tiny corner of the towel Martha had kept warm with a brick from the spent cook fire. But the baby’s chest did not rise or fall. She was a weight in Caroline’s arms. And in the faint light from the oil lamp, her skin looked blue. “Martha.” It came out as a strangled croak. “You’ve got to take her.”
Martha looked up from fussing over Sarah. She brushed the same wisp of hair back from her own face. “Can you finish the washing-up first? And I’ve got to do the afterbirth—”
Her tone changed when she saw Caroline’s face, and she got up swiftly. “Give her to me.”
Keeping her back to Sarah, Martha bent over the child. She put her lips to the tiny rosebud mouth, shut her own eyes, and breathed. But the little form remained still. Still and perfect. Martha took a deep breath of her own, tried it again. “No,” Martha whispered.
“I want to see my baby.” Sarah struggled to sit up, balanced herself on one arm. “Is she pretty? Does she look like Tommy?”
Martha turned slowly. Her round face was lined, and she looked suddenly older. She placed the infant in the crook of her mother’s arm.
And Sarah knew at a glance.
Martha wept as she knelt beside the pallet. “I’m sorry, Sarah. Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry.”
“No!”
Two screams rent the night air, and only one of them was Sarah’s.
Caroline scrambled to her feet. Pushing the older woman aside, she clambered down from the wagon.
Michael waited with Ben and Tommy, under the improvised canopy. Tommy’s pipe glowed, the only warmth or light this night would ever offer. But Michael threw his pipe down when he saw her, and two swift strides brought him to her. “What is it? How is she? Caroline, are you—”
His hand clenched over her arm, but she pulled away. She was running, running for all she was worth, across the flattened prairie grass, not caring when the lightning crackled across the sky and made it almost as bright as day. She didn’t need to see where she was going; everything out
here was the same anyway. The rain soaked through her thin dress again, through the sensible boots and socks. She didn’t hear him coming. For a big man, Michael had always been light on his feet, his hunting and tracking skills legendary in Summer Pasture. But she knew whose strong arms clamped on her from behind. She knew whose touch she struggled against. She knew, of all people, whom she didn’t want to see.
“Caroline.” Frustration sharpened his voice. “Tom’s gone in to her now. She’ll be all right, she’s young. But you shouldn’t be out here. What ails you?”
“Nothing.” She stiffened in his grasp. The sheets of rain fell between them, matting Michael’s dark hair to his head. Nice if the rain would hide her tears.
But Michael ran his thumb down her cheek, along the pattern of those tears. His voice was soft. Too soft. “Acushla, why are you crying?”
“Sarah. She—”
“‘Tisn’t just Sarah. You’ve seen births before, and deaths, too. Tell me.”
Though his voice was gentle, those arms held her without compromise. She stared up at him as another bolt of lightning split the sky. “I had a baby. My baby died, just like Sarah’s.” No sense fighting him anymore. What was done was done. “I lost my baby, Michael. Do you understand that? Do you understand what it’s like to lose someone?”
But Michael’s grasp tightened on her. “Daniel’s baby? It was Daniel’s, wasn’t it?”
She was too tired for pretense. “No, Michael. If you’d been there and done the ciphering, you’d have known it was yours.”
He shook her until the last of her hairpins fell out and her hair streamed across her shoulders. “You’re lying.”
She was weeping again, her tears mixing with the rain. “It’s true. I never lied to you then, and I won’t lie to you now. He was yours, Michael, and Daniel married me to keep me from that shame, too.”
“Did ye know that when I left?” He bit out the words.
“I suspected. I didn’t feel well, and I had missed one monthly.” Still in his grasp, she shrugged. “It wouldn’t have mattered. My reputation was already ruined.”
Westward Hope Page 10
