Somehow I think my words must have reached Caroline, for her hands went to her stomach and she stroked it before she closed her eyes again. I got some of the salve Caroline had made for our many cuts and scrapes when she first had come to the forty, and rubbed it over her legs. Caroline cringed, but I managed to cover her legs with the salve. Then I waited.
When Ma Jones arrived with Nathan, first thing she did was put her hand on Caroline’s stomach. She waited, and Nathan and I did too. Ma Jones nodded. “Good. Baby still kickin’.” She asked me what I had done for Caroline. I told her. She nodded, then she ordered Nathan and me to leave the cabin. “I’ll take care of her now,” she said.
Outside, Nathan and I sat on the stumps. Fortunately for us, the wind had died and the fire from the brush had burned itself out. “What ya think, Paul?” Nathan asked fearfully. “Caroline, she gonna be all right?”
I looked at him and tried to reassure him. “She’s strong,” I said. “She’ll be fine. She’s got to be.”
Ma Jones stayed on in that cabin day after day as Caroline fought back her pain, and all Nathan and I could do was keep on working and pray we didn’t lose Caroline as well as her baby. Tom Bee came, and Horace Avery, and we kept on cutting trees and praying. I saw Caroline each day before I set out to work at the dawn. I checked on her when I came from chopping, and each night before I went to the shed I looked in on her once more. But each time I did, she looked at me with glazed-over eyes without recognition. Each night when I settled upon my straw cot, I said a prayer for Caroline and her child, and she stayed on my mind until I fell asleep, then filled my dreams. Finally, one day, Ma Jones called me to the cabin and she said to me, “Look like she comin’ outa it.”
I went in, and Caroline turned her head to me. I went closer and knelt beside her bed. “Maybe you’ll listen to me now,” I said softly. “Told you a long time ago, Caroline Perry Thomas, to stop doing all this hard work. I won’t have you dying on me. I can’t hardly carry on for both you and Mitchell.”
Caroline’s eyes smiled at my chiding, and her lips did the same. Then she put out her hand and took mine.
It was more than a month before Caroline was up again. Her baby was expected in less than five weeks, but once she was able to walk, she insisted on being up and doing, even though we could tell she was still in pain. Ma Jones had sent her grand-daughter to stay with Caroline during her healing time, and once Caroline decided she was able to do for herself, she sent the girl home along with several bushels of corn and other vegetables from the garden, as well as two of our chickens. She didn’t ask my permission about sending any of the vegetables with the girl; she did ask, however, about the chickens. She’d planted and worked most of the garden herself, so I guess she figured the vegetables were hers to give; the chickens she must have figured belonged in part to me, since hers had bred with the ones I had bought. I was happy to give the girl the chickens. Fact, if Caroline had asked for them, I would have given the girl all the chickens.
September had come, and with Caroline doing better and the baby soon due, I looked forward to receiving my ownership papers on the forty from Filmore Granger, for all the trees I had agreed to cut had been run down the creek. As soon as I had title to the forty, I could get my money from John Lawes and seal my deal with J. T. Hollenbeck. In the meantime, Nathan and I had begun to pick the cotton. We had started picking in August, and I had sold a bale of the cotton along with the plow to pay the last monthly note. I intended to sell the rest as soon as I could. Whatever cotton was left unpicked, John Lawes had agreed to purchase. He had also agreed to purchase two of my mules, and I had found another buyer for the third mule I intended to sell. Soon I figured to have all the money I needed to own the land. We were within two weeks of seeing all our hard work pay off when Filmore Granger came to see me. I figured he had brought the papers to the forty.
I found out differently.
“Paul,” Filmore Granger said when he had dismounted, “I hear you trying to buy land J. T. Hollenbeck’s selling.”
I wasn’t sure where this was leading. “We have a contract,” I replied cautiously.
“J. T. Hollenbeck bought that land from my daddy, land my daddy had to sell for taxes after the war. Now you’re trying to buy it?”
I didn’t say anything. I just waited for him to get on with what was on his mind.
He looked around. “You’ve got yourself a lot of land cleared here. Sizeable amount of cotton planted.”
“As we agreed,” I said, taking note of Caroline, who had come from the garden and stopped near the cabin with a basket loaded with vegetables. “Any land I cleared, I could plant.”