Longing
1902-1903
As spring became summer, Caroline grew more used to the presence of Joe and Magpie and the other Ponca women, who were Joe’s mother White Cloud and widowed sister, Annie. She did not call upon them again, but Corin warned her that it was traditional for Indian womenfolk to drop in on one another, and to exchange gifts, and she received several such visits before the Ponca seemed to lose interest. Caroline dreaded seeing the trio approach the house, and she sat awkwardly through their visits, crippled by nerves, unsure of how to speak to them, or what to give in return for their gifts of honey, mittens and an elegantly carved wooden ladle. In the end she usually gave them money, which White Cloud accepted with a closed expression on her face. Caroline made them tea and longed for them to leave, but when their visits ceased she could not help but feel that she had failed in some way. And she watched Joe from the window as he went about the ranch, her eyes ever curious for the alien oddity of his features, his black mane of hair. He wore a long knife in a tooled leather sheath on his hip, and each time she saw it a cold shiver scurried down her spine.
She did not get used to the heat, which increased with each passing day. By noon the sun was a flat, white disc that seemed to press like a giant hand on her head whenever she stepped outside, pushing her down, making her heavy and half-blind. When the wind blew it seemed as hot as the blast from an oven. Accustomed all her life to rising at ten in the morning, Caroline now took to getting up with Corin, at first light, in order to have some time to exist, some time to live before the heat became unbearable. At that hour the sky in the east was violet and azure, pricked by faint, glimmering stars that winked out of existence as the day broadened. Corin drove her back to Woodward to order fabric for curtains, and rugs, and a large mirror to hang above the mantel, and he paid for all of these things with a slightly bemused expression. Caroline chafed with impatience in the intervening weeks it took for the goods to come by train from Kansas City, and she clapped her hands with excitement when they arrived. Gradually, she dragged the furniture in the house into a better arrangement, and she swept and swept to keep the sand out on windy days, until her hands blistered and she gave up in frustration, stopping up whatever gaps she could find around the windows and doors with rags.
It was even harder for her to get used to the work required, on a daily basis, just to keep the household up and running. She knew that as Corin’s wife she should make his coffee and breakfast in the morning before he set out onto the ranch, but by the time she had put up her hair and washed her face and laced herself into her corsets, he had provided for himself and gone out to work.
“Why do you take such time with your hair, love? There’s nobody here that’s going to think badly of you if you just pin it back in a simple fashion,” Corin pointed out gently, scooping her hair from her damp neck and running his thumb across the fine strands.
“I would think badly of it,” Caroline replied. “A lady can’t go around with her hair unbound. It’s just not decent.” But she took what she thought to be his meaning and began to rise even earlier in order to make herself presentable and still have time to cook breakfast.
When the cistern was dry, water had to be drawn from the well at the top of a rise to the north of the house; a well Corin was quick to point out was nothing short of a miracle, since most of the county’s groundwater was tainted with gypsum that rotted the guts and tasted foul.
“Not even the finest house in Woodward has a supply of water this close and this sweet. They’re still hauling it in from the south by wagon!” he told her proudly.
It took a long time to boil water on the stove and, since timber was so scarce, more often than not the cow chips Caroline had encountered in Hutch’s camp fire were the only fuel. Upon finding out what these were-chunks of dried-out cattle manure-Caroline promptly refused to collect them, and could only be induced to use them by poking them into the stove with iron tongs. Not far away from the ranch was a shallow stream that the ranchers referred to as Toad Creek, along the banks of which grew a thin line of straggly cottonwoods, sand plums and walnut trees, giving the ranch a welcome dash of foliage.
“Why can’t we just cut timber from the creek?” Caroline asked, wrinkling her nose as Hutch, a little disgruntled at the task, delivered a basket of cow chips to the door.
“Well, ma’am, we could. But only for a couple of months and then we’d be back to the chips and without any trees to pretty up the view,” Hutch told her, drily.
And each morning there was the water to bring in, the stove to sweep out and re-lay, breakfast to make and then pots to clean, laundry to wash-Caroline was used to dirty clothes being taken away and then returned to her two days later, clean, pressed and neatly folded; she was astonished to discover how much work went into those intervening two days-and then the endless battle with the sand in the house and on the porch. She had also to tend to her wilting, stunted vegetable garden. Corin had presented her with the seeds proudly, having traded them with a neighbor. Watermelons and marrows, peas and beans. He also bought her two tiny cherry trees, which she watered with great care and attention, fretting when the wind buffeted them. They struggled in the red soil, and did not flourish no matter how she cosseted them. Then there was lunch to prepare, clothes to be mended and then dinner. Caroline was not a good cook. She scorched the eggs and forgot to salt the beef. Vegetables went soft, meat went tough and stringy. Her beans had hard, gritty centers. Her coffee was weak, and her bread refused to rise, emerging from the oven solid and chewy. Each time she apologized, Corin reassured her.
“You’ve not been brought up to do it, that’s all. You’ll get the hang of it,” he smiled, manfully swallowing down whatever she put in front of him. Every time her hands got grimy she washed them at once, hating the feel of dirt on her skin, the dark crescent of earth and smuts beneath each nail. She scrubbed her hands so many times in a day that the skin grew red and angry and began to crack, and she sat mourning their lost softness, cradling them in her lap at the end of the day.
Hot baths could only be had by laboriously filling a large copper drum and lighting the fire beneath it, and then filling the tin tub by the bucketful, behind a wooden screen that Caroline had ordered for the express purpose of private bathing. Corin chafed at such wanton use of precious water, but at the end of her day’s labor, with her movements hampered by her corsets, Caroline’s body ached from fingertips to toes. She could feel each knobbly protrusion of her spine as it uncurled against the back of the tub, feel a tender crease between every single rib. Her hands, as she wrung out her washing cloth, trembled with fatigue. In the yellow glow of the kerosene lamps, she examined her broken nails and the tan color of her arms where she had taken to pushing up her sleeves in the heat. She rubbed her thumb over her calluses now, massaging rose-scented vanishing cream into them to soften them, as lonely coyote song filled the darkness outside.
She did not complain of the work, not even to herself. Whenever she caught herself flagging, she pictured Bathilda, smiling in mocking triumph; or she thought of Corin, so full of admiration, calling her brave and beautiful, and how she would hate to prove him wrong. But on the occasions that her spirits did begin to sink, Corin seemed to sense it. He brushed the sand from her hair at the end of the day, singing softly as he pulled the bristles through in long, smooth strokes; or telling her tall stories to make her laugh: about the super-smart cow that drank beer and had learnt to count, or the impatient settler who’d painted himself all over with the wet red mud of Woodward County to pass himself off as Indian and settle on their lands. Or, as she lay in the tub and rubbed her calluses, he would appear around the bath screen and work his fingers into the tight muscles of her neck and shoulders until she was all but drowsing in his hands; then he would gather her up and carry her, dripping wet, to the bed. In the consuming, blinding joy of his lovemaking, she forgot all other aches.