Evan Hunter: The Chisholms: A novel of the journey West

She would talk to him when she got back to the livery stable. He’d made arrangements to spend the night there. Wouldn’t be nothing like sleeping in a fine hotel, but at least it was a roof over their heads, and besides, who but a rich man could afford the prices in this city? She’d seen a sign in the window of an inn, said breakfast, dinner, or supper could be had for twenty-five cents. But it was costing them forty cents to corn and hay each of the animals! Shouldn’t complain, she supposed, since the family would be sleeping there as well, free of charge. Man said it’d be all right to cook their supper in the yard outside, too. Be good to get back home again. Cook inside her own house, take a bath in front of her own fire, have a cup of hot sassafras tea afterward, crawl into bed under quilts Eva Chisholm had made, bless her heart.

The clock on the wall read ten minutes past four; they would have to be hurrying back. Minerva got out of the tub and began drying herself with one of the towels Mrs. Pierson had provided. Bonnie Sue was lying back in her own tub, her knees islands in the water, eyes closed, hair trailing over the tub’s wooden sides.

“Bonnie Sue?” Minerva said. “Got to go now.”

“Mmm,” Bonnie Sue said.

“Come on now, honey.”

Across the room, Annabel had already dried herself and was putting on her underdrawers.

“Bonnie Sue?”

“I could stay in this tub forever.”

“You can take baths aplenty when we get home.”

“Are we really goin home, Ma?”

“You heard that man, didn’t you? Indians’d eat us alive, we got out west there.”

“Mmm,” Bonnie Sue said.

“Out of that tub — come on now.”

From across the room, Annabel said, “Mama, there’s blood in my drawers.”

“Let me see,” Minerva said. She put down the towel, pulled her petticoat over her head, and then walked barefooted to where her daughter was scrutinizing the underdrawers. Minerva took them from her.

“Is it the pip coming?” Annabel asked.

“Looks like the start of it, sure enough,” Minerva said.

“Whooooop-eeeee!” Annabel shouted, and began dancing around the room naked, twirling her towel over her head, and setting the oil lamps to shaking.

“Ain’t nothin but a lifelong chore,” Bonnie Sue said from her tub. “I got mine when I was twelve.”

“It’s nothin to grieve about,” Minerva said, “nor nothin to rejoice in neither.”

“Just a lifelong chore,” Bonnie Sue repeated.

“Get on out of that tub. I’ll find somethin for you to bind yourself, Annabel. You’d best wear the stained drawers till we get back to the livery stable.”

Annabel danced around her sister as she got out of the tub. Then suddenly, she stopped dead still, and looked at her mother, and asked, “Can I have babies now?”

“You ain’t careful,” Minerva said.

“I’ve been guiding parties west for seven years now,” Lester Hackett said. “Made the trip to the coast and back a total of five times. It’s not difficult, if you do it right. You’re planning to do it wrong, lads.”

They’d been drinking steadily for the past hour or more. There was a glazed expression on Gideon’s face, but he still seemed to be listening intently to every word Hackett uttered. Will had lost interest long ago. Across the room, a painted whore had taken a seat with three tough-looking men appeared to be desperadoes. Every now and again, a garter flashed. Made Will wonder when it was he’d last had a woman.

“Are you Irish?” Hackett asked.

“Who?” Gideon said.

“You,” Hackett said.

“Are you?”

“Isn’t everybody?” Hackett said, and laughed.

“By way of Scotland,” Gideon said. “Scotch-Irish.”

“That’s decent, too. Long as you’re not Dutch. Let me buy you another drink. Whereabouts in Ireland?”

“County Antrim.”

Six graves on that ridge now, Will thought. Grandma Chisholm from County Antrim, alongside her husband William Allyn; my two brothers born after me who never saw the light of day; and my wife and baby.

“Would you like to know how I happened to miss the wagon trains west?” Hackett asked.

“How?” Gideon said.

“I came to Louisville in pursuit of a poker game heading downriver on a steamboat out of Cincinnati. Came from Carthage with four hundred dollars in cash, hoping to build it into a small fortune I might invest in California. Lost all of it save thirty dollars. Would’ve lost the thirty, too, hadn’t had it tucked in a pocket I rarely use.”

“That’s a lot of money,” Gideon said.

“Lost my pocket watch besides, and a ring my daddy willed to me, not to mention a horse and saddle, a fine Kentucky rifle with brass and silver inlays, and a pair of Spanish pistols.”

“That’s a lot of money,” Gideon said again, as though he’d completely missed Hackett’s listing of all the other things he’d lost.

“I’ve got three dollars and fifty cents to my name,” Hackett said. “Do you know what I plan to do with it?”

“What?” Gideon asked.

“Drink it away in this fine saloon with you two Irish gents from Virginia.”

“ Scotch -Irish,” Gideon said.

“Aye, after which I’ll wander down to the Falls and throw myself in the river.”

“No, you won’t,” Gideon said, and grinned.

“Yes, I will,” Hackett said, and grinned back at him.

Died when she was eighteen, Will thought, her and his newborn daughter both, the baby gasping out her final breath scarce before she’d taken her first, Elizabeth suddenly raising her head from the pillow to search the room for him, seeing him, reaching out her hand to him — and then falling back again on the pillow, dead. He’d gone to stand alone behind the cabin, shouted his rage to the universe, and then wept in the night till his father came up beside him and, weeping too, put his arm around him, and led him inside, and put him to bed.

“Here’s what I’ll do for you,” Hackett said. “Drink up,” Gideon said.

“Cheers,” Hackett said. “If you’re mad enough or courageous enough to want to continue west after all I’ve told you—”

“Ma wants to go home,” Gideon said.

“And right she is. But what does Pa say? Is there a father with you here in Louisville?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. Hadley Chisholm himself.”

“Here’s to Hadley Chisholm then.”

“Here’s to him then,” Gideon said.

“What does he say?”

“About what?”

The question took Hackett aback. He stared at Gideon. Gideon stared back at him. “About what?” Hackett said.

“That’s right,” Gideon said, and drank.

In the middle of a chore, he’d remember something he wanted to ask Elizabeth. He’d start back for the cabin thinking to find her there, and remember suddenly that she was dead and gone, he could no more talk to her again than he could move mountains. And he’d start to crying. His hand on the plow or the ax, he’d cry. Annabel was but three years old then; she came up to him in the field one day, blond little thing in a pinafore had been her sister’s.

“Will,” she said, “you has got to stop.” Sobbing, he said, “I know, darlin.”

And she said, “Cause my heart is broke when I hear you weep.”

The whore cut loose with a laugh deep from her belly. Frizzy-haired brunette, he could smell her perfumed tits clear across the saloon. One of the men at the table had his hand on her leg, just below the garter, squeezing her white-powdered thigh. She laughed again, and Will thought suddenly of all the whores he’d fucked from Texas clear back to Virginia when he’d finished fighting with Lamar. Gone there to forget Elizabeth, something he never could have done in a million years anyway. Rode through the Gap and across Kentucky to right here in Louisville, this was in April of ’36 — he’d left home soon as news of the Alamo massacre reached Virginia. Down the Ohio to where it joined the Mississippi, and then on to New Orleans. Caught up with the Texas cavalry on the nineteenth, rode two days with them to the San Jacinto ferry, where Houston was waiting to ambush the Mexicans.