by Sarah Miller
Mary tugged at Caroline’s cuff. “Where are we going to sleep?” she whispered. Caroline looked over Mary’s head. The spring seat and harnesses filled the girls’ bed space.
“I can double up the small tick, sleep in the aisle,” Charles rasped.
“I wish I could make you a mug of tea for that throat,” she said.
Charles waved a hand. “It’ll pass.”
Caroline brushed the crumbs from the plates with a damp dishcloth and fitted them back into the crate while the girls squatted in the aisle with the chamber pail. They brought Caroline their soiled rags and she rinsed them over a bucket with water from the keg. It seemed foolish, spending drinking water on such things with the heavens spilling down on them, but she dared not tussle with the wagon cover again until the wind calmed.
Charles walked the chamber pail back to the tailgate and sat down on the molasses keg while Caroline readied the girls for bed. She laid the pillows so the lean of the wagon would tug at their ankles rather than their ears, and tied their nightcaps close under their chins.
Perched on the edge of the tick, they watched Charles unfold a tarpaulin the length of the aisle and lace a slender rope through the line of metal rings that bordered its edge.
“What are you doing, Pa?” Laura asked.
“Got to be ready—” He cleared his throat and shook his head.
“Pa is preparing a shelter for Ben and Beth in case the rain doesn’t stop,” Caroline explained as she folded the girls’ dresses and petticoats and tucked them into the carpetbag.
“Oh, Pa, do you have to go out in the rain again?” Mary asked.
“The horses must stand in the weather until Pa can cover them,” Caroline said. “Ben and Beth have brought us this far, and we must take care of them.” She paused with Mary’s blue wool half-folded against her chest, thinking what it would mean if either of the horses took sick. “Now let Pa work so he can rest.”
When he was done Charles rolled the tarpaulin up like a rug and doubled it in the middle. He carried the bundle to the tailgate and propped it alongside the kitchen crates.
“It’s time little girls were asleep,” Caroline said when he lifted the lid from the chamber pail and began to unbutton. “Let me hear your prayers.”
Mary and Laura got to their knees at the head of the aisle and latched their folded hands under their chins. Their two voices chorused Now I lay me, drawing the day closed like two ends of ribbon weaving a bow.
“And God bless Ben and Beth,” Laura added as a little flourish. Caroline smiled. All finished, they scuttled under the quilts and reconciled themselves to sleep. Caroline salved her sore hands with the softness of their hair and kissed them both goodnight.
Charles did not undress. He laid the small tick down in the aisle and wedged himself into the narrow trough it made. His shoulders were straightjacketed by the sides of the ticking, and his calves extended beyond its edge.
“I should wake you if I hear the wind calm?” Caroline asked.
Charles nodded. She handed him a pair of quilts, and he closed his eyes without another word between them.
An unexpected sense of solitude descended around Caroline as she undressed herself and unpinned her hair. She sat in her shawl and nightdress at Mary’s and Laura’s feet, reluctant, somehow, to join them under the covers in spite of the mounting chill. The wind and rain had melded into a curtain of sound, and there was nothing she need do—indeed nothing she could do—without waking Charles and the girls. She had not found a moment such as this for herself since Wisconsin. The stillness within the wagon cocooned her thoughts from the weather and its consequences, and Caroline settled into the quiet space within her mind. Tomorrow would be the Sabbath, and they would not move, no matter the weather. The storm had granted her a complete respite, as though she’d been unharnessed after a month’s worth of relentless forward momentum. The feeling was akin to the exhale that accompanied the unfastening of her corset each night. And why, she wondered idly, was she always inclined first to empty her lungs in the moment her body was freest to expand? Tomorrow she would only be still, like the psalm said, Caroline thought as she edged in alongside Mary—Be still and know that I am God.
“Caroline?”
Caroline felt her eyelids rise, but not a particle of light met them. She rose up on an elbow. “What is it?”
“The wind’s died down enough, I think I can rig something like an awning to shelter Ben and Beth,” Charles said. Caroline broadened her attention to the sounds outside the wagon. The sky still wrung itself overhead, but she could hear a difference in the way the rain struck the canvas. The drops fell freely now, no longer flung sidelong against the wagon’s western flank. “Is the poncho dry?” Charles asked.
She sat up and leaned across Mary and Laura to pat her hand over it. “Nearly.”
He beckoned for it, and his boots. She lifted the garments gingerly over the girls. Dirt crusted the soles of the boots. “Do you need help?” she asked, reaching for her shawl.
Charles shook his head. “You stay in with the girls. The noise is likely to wake them.” He shouldered the rolled-up tarpaulin. A rope dangled from either end.
Caroline followed him down the cockeyed aisle, hearing more than seeing him secure one of the ropes to the tailgate latch, then loosen the cover and lean out to boost the rolled-up tarpaulin onto the roof. It landed with a thump, sagging the canvas and jostling the hickory bows. He hesitated. “I may need you to open the front of the wagon cover so I can tie a rope inside.”
Caroline tested her fists. The palms were tender yet, but so long as the wind did not wrestle with her as it had before she would manage.
“All right, Charles.”
The girls stirred as Charles threaded himself through the opening and into the rain. All Caroline could see of him were the toes of his boots as he strained to push the tarpaulin farther across the roof. In a moment a whiplike crack snapped overhead—the other end of the rope, landing halfway across the roof. Then it hissed against the canvas as Charles reeled it back for another throw.
Mary bolted up on her hands and knees before Caroline knew she was awake. “Ma?”
Caroline waded back through Charles’s bedding to reach her. “It’s only Pa, making a tent for the horses.”
Mary crawled into her lap and augered herself close against the soft new curve of Caroline’s belly. “I don’t like it here,” she said in a pouting tone Caroline would have corrected under any other circumstances. “Where are we?”
“We are in Kansas,” Caroline said.
“I don’t like Kansas,” Mary declared.
Again the crack came, this time farther toward the front of the roof. There was a little lift of the wagon as Charles jumped to the ground. A few heartbeats passed, then the front of the wagon dipped with his footsteps as he mounted the falling tongue then passed from singletree to doubletree to sideboard.
“That’s Pa again, pulling the tarpaulin across the roof,” Caroline said. It blundered up the wagon’s spine, bumping its way from one bow to the next.
“Lie back down with Laura,” Caroline told Mary when the tarpaulin flattened the canvas above them. “Be a good big sister and settle her if she wakes. Pa needs my help now.”
Once again Caroline climbed over the spring seat, the boards damp against her stockings where the poncho had lain. She had lost count of how many times she had hoisted her legs over that hateful backboard this day.
Caroline found the horse collars and crouched to untwist the ropes that held the mouth of the wagon cover shut. Without the wind driving them, they were staid as apron strings. Charles pulled the tarpaulin line taut and leaned in to secure it to the nearest bow.
“There,” he said. “Close up the cover and go on back to bed, Caroline. I can manage from here.”
Back Caroline went, over the spring seat and under the quilts, where she was informed that Laura did not like Kansas, either.
“Hush now,” she said. “We should all be asl
eep.” They heard nothing at all over the rain, and felt no movement for long enough that the stillness became conspicuous. The girls did not speak, but Caroline sensed their rising apprehension as the silence lengthened. No harm could have come to Charles, but surely something should have happened by now. It was as though he were standing stock-still in the rain. The raindrops ticked against the canvas like a clock until it seemed something must be wrong. His name sat waiting in her mouth, but she did not know whether she might alarm the girls more by calling out to him or by leaving the silence to deepen. And then Charles’s voice pricked the sidewall, so near to her pillow that Caroline’s shoulders flinched at the sound.
“Caroline?”
She closed her eyes. “Yes, Charles.”
“Lean up close to the sideboards and talk to the team,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s going to startle them something awful when I unroll the tarpaulin.”
Once more Caroline peeled herself from her covers to creep down the small hill of the straw tick, clucking her tongue. “Here, Ben; here, Beth,” she crooned, “poor wet things. Steady now. Easy.” Mary and Laura inched up on their bellies to whisper sweetly to the team. There was a snuffle and a nudge at the canvas. Laura flattened her palm against it.
“Ben’s nose,” she said. “I can feel him breathing.”
“How can you tell it’s Ben?” Mary whispered.
With a flap like a clothesline full of sheets, the tarpaulin unfurled down the side of the wagon. The horses’ chains hummed tight, jerking the wagon bed upward as Ben and Beth tried to rear back from the crashing canvas. Laura snatched her hand away, tumbling backward in her surprise.
Caroline listened to the chain links clinking, the horses’ heavy breath steaming from their nostrils. “Steady,” said Charles’s voice, “steady now,” and Caroline felt her own breath slowing at his words, whooshing softly over her upper lip.
Charles reached in over the tailgate and clattered through his toolbox. Caroline heard him lever out the iron stakes that held her pots over the campfire, and then he was gone. In a moment the clang of his hammer rang out shrill in the dark as he pounded the stakes into the ground.
As she settled Mary and Laura back to bed, Charles tugged the tarpaulin’s corners down to the stakes, gently rocking the wagon. The girls were asleep again by the time he came in over the tailgate and stood, arms half lifted to hold the drenched wings of his poncho away from his body.
“They’ll stand the weather all right for now,” he said.
Caroline nodded. Like a piece of dough laid into a pan, Charles always seemed to expand to fit whatever shape a task demanded of him. There was no need to thank him for such a thing, yet she felt so rounded with thankfulness that she did not move until a shiver shook him by the scruff of his neck.
Caroline handed him his nightshirt and a towel. “Drape your wet things over the crates,” she whispered. “I’ll see to them in the morning.”
She did not mean to watch. From her bed there was only his outline as he stripped off his rain gear and then his clothes, threads of glimpses like a spiderweb in sunlight. Charles pared off his shirt, and the movement silvered his wet shoulders and glinted along his spine. As he stepped from his trousers the loosed metal tongue of his belt buckle tinked a bright note in the darkness and Charles paused, turning half-toward the front of the wagon.
Could he see her, running her fingers down her braid the way he did when he was hungry for her? That was not what she wanted now, and so Caroline muted her palms against the straw tick. She wanted only to admire him as he stood, so bare and capable in the faint dusting of light.
Why a man of such breadth had chosen her, why he seemed to delight in her very narrowness, Caroline could not fathom. When she had consented to be his wife, his first indulgence had not been a kiss. He had instead reached out to place one hand and then another around her waist. His thumbs met at her navel, and Caroline watched the pleasure spread across his face. “A perfect fit,” he’d said as the warmth of his palms breached her skin and trickled through the deepest recesses of her body. Even now she wondered when he might have decided to kiss her, had she not risen up on tiptoe and offered her lips to him.
Now Charles straightened his back, his elbows windmilling upward, and Caroline heard the sound of his fingernails combing through his scalp. She smiled to herself. The one thing Charles could never do was tame that hair of his. With a shrug, his nightshirt snuffed out his nakedness and Caroline closed her eyes, penciling the shape of him onto her dreams.
She woke with Mary’s cold toes knuckled into the crook of her knees. On her other side Laura had screwed herself into a little knot.
Caroline sniffed the air. A dull, almost meaty smell tinged the wagon—the pile of damp harnesses. The storm’s temper had eased overnight, but the rain had not abated. Streams of it sluiced off the canvas, striking puddles in a way that made her bladder tingle. She had not emptied herself all night. Caroline looked toward the rear of the wagon. Charles and his narrow bed filled the path to the chamber pail.
Gripping against the downward press of her water, Caroline deliberately rustled the carpetbag as she dressed. The damp had reached into everything. Her dress and drawers were clammy and seemed to have thickened, like drippings in a cooled skillet. Even the good stockings she saved back for Sundays still held the shape of her feet. Nevertheless, the left one hugged her shin too tightly where the beginning of a bruise shined her skin. She put on her second-best navy wool with the black braid, never mind that there was no call for it. It would be at least as warm as her everyday, and she wanted to feel a touch of fineness.
The wagon’s pitch tugged insistently at her bladder, forcing her to draw her belly upward until she felt as though she stood on tiptoe. Caroline nudged a toe under Charles’s pillow and whispered his name. He opened one eye at a time and looked up at her. She nodded toward the tailgate.
Charles stood and they minced a half pirouette in the straw tick so that she could pass.
The rear of the wagon was in disarray—Charles’s poncho drooping over the churn dash, his shirt and trousers splayed nearby. Beside the chamber pail was the drying puddle where he had come in from the rain, its edges curling into brown scales. Caroline lifted his boots aside. A skin of mud ridged the floor where they had stood.
All of those things must wait until tomorrow.
She need attend only to herself and her little brood, Caroline thought as she held the washbasin out into the deluge. Runoff licked its way past her cuffs and into the crease of her elbows before she pulled her hands back under the canvas.
Behind her, Charles rolled up his bed and dressed in his second best—more because the clothes were dry than for Sunday’s sake, Caroline supposed—then went out over the tailgate with his shovel. The feedbox flapped open and the girls were awake. Almost immediately their tempers began to snarl. They quibbled over who had first rights to the chamber pail and then who should button up whom first, their voices sharpening so fast they nicked Caroline’s patience.
“Girls, please,” she said. It was more a request than a warning.
“I only have one button I can’t reach,” Mary said. “Laura always does mine first.”
“Mine’s all open and it’s too cold to wait,” Laura protested.
Caroline hesitated, the words poised at the tip of her tongue. She did not want to soil the air further with the sound of her own scolding, yet this time they must be told, not asked. She closed her mouth and leveled a silent eyebrow at them. Mary swiveled Laura by the shoulders and buttoned her up the back.
“The water’s cold, Ma,” Laura protested again as Caroline scoured behind her ears.
“It is the best we have,” Caroline said, “and we can be thankful it is not frozen.” Laura’s shoulders turtled up to her earlobes.
Mary joined in, “We’re all cold, even Ben and Beth, so you must not complain.” She fairly sizzled with superiority.
Mary turned to Caroline expectantly. Caroline did not pra
ise her. Mary had said nothing wrong—Caroline could not help but recognize her own sentiments dressed in a smaller size—but it troubled her that Mary took such care to polish her tone to a gleaming point. Vanity again, buttered with virtue. Virtue is the purest kind of beauty. Hadn’t she always impressed that upon her daughters? Only just now, watching Mary, it did not feel true.
“Forty-three degrees,” Charles said as he came in, noting it in his weather journal. “And I’ll bet it’s not much warmer in here.”
Caroline wished he had not announced it. She herself was not cold enough to shiver, but the chill was so embedded in her clothes that her skin resisted touching the fabric. Pinning a number to the cold only made her more sensible of it.
“Everybody taken their turn?” Charles asked, hefting the chamber pail by the handle. He opened the rear of the wagon cover and flung the contents out into the rain. “Tried to dig a latrine pit under the tarpaulin but it’ll likely be full of water by the time anyone needs it,” he said as he swirled the pail full of rinse water and cast the swill out again. “It’s like digging at the bottom of a well out there. I left a bucket hanging below the feedbox to bail it out.”
Charles sat down on a crate and scrubbed his sides with his fists. “Sore,” he said. “Had to lean backward stiff as a rafter to hoist the tarpaulin onto the roof.”
“We’ll all rest ourselves today,” Caroline said, tying on her apron.
“Is it Sunday again, Ma?” Laura asked.
“It is,” Caroline answered. Laura knew better than to scowl, but the news swept down her face like a sadiron.
“Are you too tired to drive, Pa?”
“I am, Half-Pint,” Charles said, patting his knee for Laura to climb aboard. “And it’s a good thing, because Ben and Beth are too tired to pull.”
