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

The rain riddled the wagon cover; she looked up apprehensively at a widening wet spot. Monotonously, the wagon rolled, jostling into each pothole, ridge, and rut. Annabel’s needle slipped. She pricked herself muttered, “Damn,” and glanced immediately at her mother, whose eyes were still closed. There was a drop of blood on her forefinger. She sucked at it, scowling. Up front, through the open puckered wagon cover, Bonnie Sue could hear the lulling voices of Lester and her father, melting into the steady rattle of the rain.

“... Galena in 1822,” Lester said, “when I was eight.”

“Still the west in those days,” Hadley said.

“My daddy went there hoping to make a fortune mining lead. Indians’d been stripping it from the limestone there for as long as anybody could remember. Used to pull it to the surface in deerskin bags. I can recall them still doing it that way when I was a boy. The Panic wasn’t yet over...”

“Those were terrible years,” Hadley said. “I never want to live through anything like that ever again.”

“That’s why my father left Boston,” Lester said. “His blacksmith shop went under; he figured there was nothing to do but try again someplace else.”

“Did he make a go of it?”

“Not in lead. Too many people trying to mine the earth there. But he started a furniture store and might have done well with it, his heart hadn’t stopped of a sudden one day.”

“Your mother still alive?” Hadley asked. “Yes, sir. Living in Carthage.”

“Buried mine just before we left Virginia, bless her heart. My pa’s been dead since eighteen aught three — got himself killed by an Indian.”

“I didn’t know there was still Indian trouble late as that,” Lester said.

“There wasn’t. Wars’d ended almost ten years before, in fact. Townspeople had already torn down the pickets around the old fort. My pa was drunk, is all,” Hadley said.

Inside the wagon, Bonnie Sue looked up. She could see Lester in profile in the puckered opening of the cover, the wet gray sky behind him. She had not known that her grandfather William Allyn Chisholm was drunk when the Chickasaw killed him. She had thought till this moment that he’d died a hero in one or another of the skirmishes with local Indians.

“Chickasaw was a no-good redskin used to hang about the livery stable. Him and my father got drunk one night, went down the plantation — that’s the Bailey plantation, owned by the man sold us this wagon.”

“It’s a good wagon,” Lester said.

“Cost ninety dollars.”

“That’s a fair price.”

“He’s got seventy-two slaves, Bailey has. They must be worth close to fifty thousand dollars, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not that much. You know the ones Jackson was carrying to New Orleans?”

“What about em?”

“He said the bucks’d fetch six hundred each, and the wenches somewhere in the neighborhood of three.”

“Then the squire ain’t as rich as I thought he was,” Hadley said. “Though he’s plenty rich enough, I guess. Lord knows how many slaves his father had in the old days. Bailey’s a man about my age, maybe a mite older. Sired hisself a little pickaninny by a nineteen-year-old house nigger he’s got. Likes women, the squire does. Specially colored ones.”

Bonnie Sue hadn’t known that either. She put down her blankbook.

“Anyway, my pa and this no-count Chickasaw got drunk together one night, and went down the Bailey plantation thinkin to sneak in the henhouse, you take my meanin. Was a wench from the Barbados there, white as you or me, must’ve had lots of Spanish blood in her. My pa and the Chickasaw got in a fight over who’d mount her first. Chickasaw stabbed him fourteen times in the chest, then raped the slave girl in the bargain. Was her who told who’d killed my pa, not because she liked him all that much, but only cause she wanted to get back at the Indian. Bastard had torn her insides all up.”

“They ever catch him?” Lester asked.

“Found him two weeks later in a Tennessee cave. You know where the Great War Path crosses the Gap?”

“I’m not familiar with it, no.”

“That’s where they caught him. Carried him back to Virginia and hanged him outside where the old fort used to be.” Hadley paused. “Funny thing,” he said. “I wouldn’t believe that story for the longest damn time. I was fifteen when my pa got killed; wasn’t till years later I’d believe what everybody in town was saying about him. Wasn’t till my first son was born, in fact. Will out there. My son Will. Named him after my pa.” Hadley was silent for several moments. The rain drilled the wagon cover. “Ha-yal” he shouted to the mules.

Lester had estimated the distance from Evansville to St. Louis at a hundred and fifty miles. The road was wide and well-traveled; they should have averaged close to twenty miles a day, even without pressing. But the rains slowed them considerably, and though they’d left Evansville on the seventh of May, they had by the fourteenth come only seventy-four miles, with almost half the journey still ahead of them. The clearing skies did nothing to dispel their gloom. To the south was the Ozark Plateau, a wilder place of river bluffs and verdant valleys, wooded hills where they might have felt a trifle more at home. But here there was only flatness.

“How do you spell ‘boring’?” Bonnie Sue asked.

Back home, it was never boring.

Wasn’t Bobbo getting shot at on his way to town with whiskey, it was something else. Always something. That day he ran home, Gideon was hitching one of the mules to the plow, tightening the cinches. Bonnie Sue was sitting in the doorway of the cabin, shelling peas. Saw Bobbo come running over the brow of the hill, up the rock-strewn path that led to their house. The cabin was on the high ground, where William Allyn had built it to be safe from Indians. Only once did he have to take his family down to the old fort, and that was when a thousand or more of them descended on the settlement from God only knew where. Chickasaw, Choctaw, Chickamauga, Cherokee, or Creek, it could have been any or all of them together; seemed every Indian in the world was burning and pillaging that night, leastways the way her pa told it.

Hadley’d been eight at the time. Grandma Chisholm had bundled him up and carried him down to the fort. Half the people in the settlement made it down there safe. The rest, except for a handful caught at milking, ran to the old Bailey plantation, which was big enough to be a forted station. In the morning, most of the settlement was a smoldering ruin, but William Allyn’s cabin on the mountaintop, and that of the Cassadas beside it, stood unharmed. This was nearly half a century before the feud between them started; both families had put out their latchstrings and offered food and drink to those less fortunate than themselves. Now here came Bobbo running up the road and yelling, “Where’s Pa? I just near got killed!”

“What happened?” Gideon said.

“Shot at me from the bushes!”

“ Who did? Now settle down, you hear me?” Gideon said, and shook his younger brother. Bonnie Sue’d been shaken by Gideon only once in her life, when she was joshing him about Rachel Lowery. Like getting caught in a tornado, she supposed, Gideon picking her up and shaking her that way. He wasn’t shaking Bobbo quite that hard now — only hard enough to addle his brains. “ Who shot at you?”

“The Cassadas.”

“Where?”

“On the way to town. You know where the old Settlement Road goes by the branch to Abingdon?”

“Yeah?”

“Where the woods are? On the north side of the road?”

“Yeah?”

“Shot at me from there. Pa’s going to throw a fit, Gideon. I dropped and broke two whole gallons of whiskey.”