The town was muted with snow. A steamy chill hung in the air, as though the drifts were exhaling. Charles drove past McInerney’s and the Prussian dry-goods shops to the Richardses’s storefront. “Always one of them willing to strike a bargain,” Charles said. Caroline did not answer. Her back was striped with aches. The wagon rolled to a stop, and her body swayed with it. All the seven miles down into town she had held herself taut against the slope of the land. Now the leveling of the road left her unmoored, as though the steadying pull of the little cabin could no longer reach her.
Caroline held Laura on her hip and Mary by the hand as Charles and the two younger Richards brothers piled provisions onto the counter. To the food Charles added painted canvas tarpaulins, a ten-gallon water keg, and a pair of collapsible gutta-percha buckets. “Need more powder and caps, and lead for shot, too,” he said.
“What kind of firearms you carrying?” Horace Richards asked.
“Rifle,” Charles answered.
“That old single-shot muzzle-loader?” Linus Richards said.
Charles bristled. “One shot’s always been plenty for me.”
Linus Richards chuckled and put up his hands. “I’ll be the last one to impugn your aim, Ingalls. Nobody trades more bear pelts here than you do.” He glanced at Caroline and the children and dropped his voice only low enough to make her cock her ear toward the men. “Stalking a wild animal’s one thing—a mounted brave with a full quiver and tomahawk besides is quite another. All I’m saying is, I wouldn’t take my little ones into the Indian Territory without a decent pistol to level the field.”
Caroline felt Mary’s grip tighten as Horace Richards pulled two snub-nosed guns from under the counter. “We’ve got Colt army-model percussion revolvers and one brand-new Smith and Wesson Model Three top-break cartridge revolver.”
Dry at the mouth, Caroline put Laura down and guided both girls toward the row of candy jars. “You may each choose a penny’s worth,” she said. The girls looked up at her, their astonished eyes like blue china buttons. “Go ahead. You’re big enough to choose for yourselves. Any one you like.”
From a neighboring shelf, Caroline gathered castor oil, ipecac, paregoric, rhubarb, and magnesia while the men haggled and the girls pored over the sweets. “Let’s get two different flavors,” she heard Mary tell Laura. “I’ll give you half of my stick, and you give me half of yours. Then we’ll both have two kinds of candy.”
Caroline smiled. “That’s my smart girl,” she said.
Elisha Richards stood at the till with his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his vest and his nails scratching beneath them as though he were tallying the Ingallses’s account against his flanks. With every undulation of his fingers, the sum mounted in Caroline’s mind, until her head seemed to teeter on her neck. The expense was well within their reach, yet she could not keep hold of the numbers any more than she could take her eyes from the storekeeper’s vest. It was cut from a rust-colored paisley that swirled her senses in a way she could not describe. Charles began to count one bill after another into Elisha Richards’s palm, peeling the wedge of cash like an onion, and the movement of gray-green against the paisley field made the room roll around her.
It struck her that her body was behaving as though she could taste that vest and feel the pattern augering into her stomach. Caroline balked at the senselessness of it; she would not let such a thing as a swath of cloth take command of her. She set her jaw, refusing to acknowledge the saliva pooling under her tongue, but the queasiness that had overcome her before the stove was already at her throat. Senseless or not, she must put something between her eyes and her stomach.
“Mary, Laura, it’s time for dinner.” They half turned, reluctant to obey. She knew they wanted to stand at the counter to see their two sticks of candy paid for, but that could not be helped. It did not matter now what she looked at. Another minute and she would be sick where she stood. She swept forward and took them by the wrists. “Come, girls. Pa will bring your sweets.”
Out in the wagon, she unwrapped the bundle of bread and plunged her teeth into a slice as the girls gawked at her. The first bite worked quick as a sponge. Her stomach grumbled for more. It was not garish smells or sights that set her senses raving, Caroline realized as she parceled out portions of bread and molasses to Mary and Laura, but hunger. She would have to guard against that on the road.
Cold stiffened the molasses so that it clung to their teeth in thin strands. Laura slipped a fingernail underneath a brown festoon and tried to pry it loose from her slice.
“Laura,” Mary said with a shake of her head.
“It looks like lace,” Laura protested. “It’s too pretty to eat.”
Laura’s scolding melted on Caroline’s tongue. They had never noticed before the care she took drizzling the molasses. Perhaps for a treat she would try spelling out their names. She imagined her wrist guiding the graceful flow of the syrup, the smiles of her daughters as they watched their names drawn out in curls of sweetness. It was the kind of frivolity her own mother could never spare time nor money for, yet practical, too—it was high time both of them began learning their letters.
“Ma,” Mary insisted, pointing at Laura. “Look.”
Caroline’s hand blanketed Mary’s. “It’s very rude to point,” she reminded. “Now finish your dinner nicely, girls, so you may have your candy,” she said.
The back of the wagon jolted under a hundredweight of flour. “All stocked up and cash to spare,” Charles announced. “Where are all those empty sacks, Caroline?” he asked, shifting through the crates and bundles.
“Leave that to me, Charles,” Caroline said. “You must have something to eat before loading all those provisions.”
Too eager to sit, Charles leaned over the front of the wagon box, joking with the girls while Caroline unrolled the sacks and threaded her stoutest needle. She slit open the unbolted flour, cornmeal, beans, and brown sugar and filled a ten pound sack from each to round out her crate of daily supplies.
When the corners were sewn shut again she held the canvas mouths of the biggest sacks wide for Charles to lower the dry goods in, then quickly folded the edges together and basted each one shut. Mary and Laura knelt backward on the spring seat, watching as they sucked their sticks of candy. Their curled fists were like bright berries in their red yarn mittens.
“Did you get the pepper and saleratus?” Caroline asked.
“In my pockets,” Charles said. “Bought myself a gutta-percha poncho,” he added as he heaved one hundredweight and then another of cornmeal. “There’s bound to be rain somewhere between here and Kansas.” Caroline nodded. “And the Colt revolver.”
Her mind veered around this news, as though she might avoid the logical progression of thoughts: The pistol could not have cost under fifteen dollars. Charles would not have spent such a sum without a reason.
“Caroline?”
“Whatever you think is necessary, Charles.”
Charles cinched the wagon cover down in back, leaving only a peephole against the cold.
“Have all you need, Ingalls?” Elisha Richards asked, stepping out to the hitching post to help unbuckle the horses’ nose bags.
“And some to spare,” Charles answered. “Anything else, Caroline?” She shook her head. The wagon box was packed tight as brown sugar. Anything else would have to ride in their laps.
“Good luck to you, then. It’s been my pleasure trading with you.” Caroline ventured a glance at the storekeeper’s vest as the two men shook hands. Her eyes still had no appetite for it, but the garment claimed no sway over the rest of her. Richards nodded at Caroline as Charles swung himself up over the wheel. “Take care of yourselves and those fine girls.”
The compliment touched Caroline squarely at the base of her throat. A small rush of pride ironed out her shoulders and trickled down her core. She bowled her hands together in her lap, as though they might catch the runoff. Behind them, a whorl of warmth embraced her womb—not the child, but the space it occupied suddenly making itself known. It was enough to remind her that she was more than a passenger.
“Thank you, Mr. Richards,” she said.
The road ran straight out onto the lake, narrowing between a pair of slump-shouldered snowdrifts. Away from the plowed track, the ice looked tired, blotched here and there with a sweaty sheen where snow had melted.
“Charles?” Caroline asked, laying a hand on his wrist.
He stayed the team. “Pay no mind to the snowmelt,” he said. “Ice’ll be at its thickest here, where the snow’s been plowed, so long as they’ve kept it bare all winter.” Charles stood up to survey the track. The hills two miles distant seemed no more than waist high. “Looks clear as far as I can see.” He gave the reins a gentle slap, and the wagon dipped from the creaking snow.
The horses’ shoes struck the ice road as though it were the skin of a drum, and their ears pricked at the sudden sharpness. Through the plank of the spring seat, Caroline felt the wheels grind like sugar under a rolling pin. The sound made her shoulder blades twitch. She turned her attention to the rhythm of the team’s gait. They had not sped up, but they raised their feet more quickly, as though they too mistrusted the sensation of metal meeting ice.
The flash of their shoes lifted a memory in Caroline’s mind of the circus that had once passed along the road by the Quiners’ door back home in Concord. Caroline smiled to think how she and her sister Martha had laughed at the great gray elephant delicately putting one foot and then another on the first log of the corduroy bridge spanning the marsh.
For all its bulk, that timid elephant must have been on firmer footing than this wagon and the supplies newly added, Caroline realized: hundredweights of cornmeal, unbolted flour, salt pork, bacon, beans, and brown sugar; fifty pounds of white flour; ten of salt; fifteen pounds of coffee and five of tea; the feedbox brimming with corn. Better than three thousand pounds of horseflesh pulling it all. Surely that corduroy bridge had been thicker than a plate of ice nearing the edge of spring.
Suddenly Caroline did not want her girls boxed in like cargo behind her. “Mary, Laura, come here and see the lake,” she said, beckoning them over the spring seat. Mary settled onto Caroline’s lap, big girl though she was, while Laura stood solemnly at her pa’s elbow.
Charles halted the team. The lake lay like a mile of muslin, seamed by the ice road with the sheared hilltops of the Minnesota shore binding the distance. Sounds from Pepin’s banks seemed to bob in the air alongside them, small and clear as a music box.
“See that, Half-Pint?” Charles asked. “That’s Minnesota.”
“All of it?” Laura asked, poking her mitten toward the opposing shore.
“All of it,” he answered. “Wisconsin’s already a mile behind us now.”
Mary huffed at Laura’s pointing, but Caroline had no voice to settle her. It was too much to hold in her mind all that was behind them, beneath them, and before them. A lump thin as a sparrow’s egg blocked her throat; if she so much as swallowed, its shell would shatter.
The waiting horses fidgeted. Their scraping hooves sent unwelcome tingles through Caroline’s underbelly and the backs of her thighs as though she were poised at the edge of a precipice. Her breath was coming too quickly, as it had at her parting from Eliza. If they did not move forward, the surge of emotions would overtake her from all sides.
Caroline turned her cheek to her daughter’s fur hood. Mary’s candied breath pricked her nose with sharp, sweet notes. It was a summer scent, thick as the last sip from a pitcher of lemonade. First her mouth and then her eyes watered with the memory of that taste.
If Charles saw her striving to keep hold of herself, she did not know it. She only heard him chirrup to the team and felt the horses leaning into the harnesses.
The wheels grated, then skidded in place. Caroline jerked her head up in time to see Laura grab hold of Charles’s shoulder to keep from pitching to the floor.
“Sit down, Laura,” Charles said, and snapped the reins. The traces went rigid, but the horses’ energy seemed to reach no further than the wagon tongue.
“Calkins must not be sharp enough,” he muttered as their hooves licked at the ice. “Didn’t expect we’d need to stud their shoes for one crossing.”
Mary twisted around. “Nettie’s all alone.”
Caroline held her fast. “Nettie is as safe as we are,” she said, but she heard no comfort in her words. Loosening her grip, Caroline shifted Mary across her lap and motioned Laura in. She wanted them near, but not so close against her that her own unease would touch them. She threaded her arms loosely around their waists, ready to snatch them close if need be, and let her nervous hands smooth their wraps. “Now let’s all be still so Pa can drive.”
Charles’s mouth was folded so deeply with consternation that the whiskers beneath his lower lip bristled outward. He slackened the horses’ lines so that all their effort would travel straight into the singletree. The strain stood out on the animals’ necks as their legs slanted under them. Watching them, Caroline felt her own sides clench.
“What’s wrong with the horses?” Laura asked. “Is the wagon too full?”
“Ben and Beth are strong enough to pull us across,” Caroline assured her, “once they find their footing.” It was the strength of the ice that worried her, with the two horses prying forward like great muscled levers. Beth snorted and stamped a hoof. Caroline winced at the impact. They were a mile from either shore.
No matter how strong the road might be, the ice would be at its thinnest here in the middle of the lake. It was one thing to pass steadily across the surface—quite another to linger prodding at this frailest point. Could not a deft stroke, like the blows she delivered to the rain barrel’s thick winter skin, open a split down the center?
Caroline looked over the girls in their hoods and mittens and flannels. Together they were lighter than a single sack of flour, but the drag of so much sodden clothing would carry them straight under if the wagon broke through. Her eyes traced the cinched canvas brow overhead. They were hardly better off than kittens in a gunny sack.
If the wagon did not budge in the time it took to pray Psalm 121, Caroline decided, she would lift the girls down and lead them across on foot. Even if she had to carry Laura, the three of them could slip over the mile of ice light as mayflies, leaving the team’s burden nearly two hundred pounds the lighter.
Caroline prayed, and still the wheels had not moved. Nor could she. The psalm had given her imagination time to extend beyond the relief of reaching solid ground—to turning, safely hand in hand, to face Charles stranded on the lake behind them. What could she do for him or their daughters, clutching their small mittens on the opposite bank of the Mississippi, if the wagon rolled forward and the ice opened—
With a rasp, one metal horseshoe bit into the surface. Caroline held her breath for the collapse. Instead, a muscled jolt inched the wagon ahead. She felt herself leaning toward the team, as if her own scant momentum could coax them forward.
Once more the iron tires crackled over the ice, this time the sound as welcome as the snap of a tinderbox. Laura clapped her hands and cheered the horses until the wagon slanted up onto the Minnesota bank. Mary slipped out of Caroline’s lap and burrowed under the spring seat to scoop up Nettie. “I won’t leave you alone again,” Caroline heard her promise the doll.
“Those horseshoes make pretty good ice skates,” Charles proclaimed, “but I don’t believe I’d like to have a pair nailed to my feet.” Mary and Laura giggled. They could not hear the chagrin behind the boom in his voice. He would not say it had been his fault for stopping the wagon, but Caroline knew he would not be dousing such a situation with a joke unless he’d felt a scorch of responsibility.
“Go on with Mary,” Caroline said, nudging Laura over the seat. Cold air rushed silently in and out of her chest. She was shaking, now that it was over. Relief saturated her, yet there was no lightness in it. Instead she was salted down with regret that she should be so thankful to put Wisconsin behind them.
“Good thing Ben and Beth pulled through,” Charles said, cheerful again. Caroline had not gained enough control over her breath to groan at his pun. “Would have been a job to portage all this equipment across on foot.”
Something in his voice slipped between her tremors and turned her head. “Charles?” she asked.
He cocked a smile at her, mouth half–turned up.
One look at him and Caroline did not need to ask whether he’d thought about the ice. Not a wisp of fear so much as brushed his whiskers.
Perhaps the threat she’d felt had only been another queer spell, like she’d had in the store. It was as though a single droplet of any one sensation had the power to soak her through. The notion left her lightheaded, as if she had no traction on the world. Caroline pulled her shawl across the points of her shoulders and elbows, wishing for a sturdier veneer.
Charles’s brow had begun to furrow. He was still waiting for her to speak. “We should make camp soon,” she said, “if supper is to be ready before dark.”
“The Richardses said there’d be a place along the shore just north of the crossing,” he said. “Little spot the lumber men use in season. It’s out of the way a mile or so, but I figure you and the girls would rather spend our first night out under a roof instead of around a campfire.”
A house. The very thought lifted Caroline’s cheeks and smoothed her forehead. “Yes, Charles,” she said. “In weather like this it will be a mercy to have one more night of shelter.”