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

Back home, she’d go down to the Clinch, sit there with her reading books or her diary — which was a real diary and not a journal like what she wrote in here. The way she felt about it, a diary was something you had to devote a lot of time and thought to. You didn’t just jot down in it flowers you saw along the way, like she was doing here. Or about Ma having to pee all the time. In a diary, you wrote things important to you. That’s why she used to take it down to the river with her. Sit there and listen to the water. See a fish jump every now and then. Mallard come by, look her over, dig for a bug under his wing. Tall grass on the riverbank swaying in the wind.

She felt secret down there.

Felt she could write secret things.

In truth, there wasn’t much secret to write about except kissing Sean and letting him touch her breasts. She wrote that in code because if there was one thing Bonnie Sue had learned in her fifteen years, it was that you couldn’t trust nobody on earth, especially your little sister. She kept a bow around the diary, tied it different each night, just to make sure no little fingers opened it — nor no big clumsy ones either, belonging to her big oaf brothers who’d as soon bust Sean’s head as any of the other Cassadas’. Still and all, a bow was no protection if somebody took a notion to open the thing and read what was in it.

So all the stuff about Sean was written in code. When he touched her breast that first time, she wrote in her diary

which looked a lot like the Egyptian hieroglyphics she’d seen in a picture in the Bible, but which only meant “Sean feeled me.” The key to the code was hidden in a candy tin she kept other secret little things in. She figured anybody putting the two together would have to be curious enough to open the diary and the candy tin — which she wouldn’t put past Annabel, but which she hoped her sister wouldn’t do.

The rest of her diary, the parts that were sort of secret, but not terribly secret, she wrote in straightforward English. She went to school only on and off because it was hard to keep schoolmarms in the mountains back home, especially in the wintertime. Mostly, you got your teachers in the fall and in the spring, when the mountains were lovely. Minute it got to be close on November, the teachers’d disappear like the leaves on the trees, wouldn’t see hide nor hair of them again till the Clinch was running free of ice. One of the teachers said she wrote real fine, but had to improve on her spelling. Seemed to Bonnie Sue everybody spelled just as bad or as good as she did, and she couldn’t understand why it mattered so much. Long as a body made her meaning clear, that was enough.

She sat by the Clinch sometimes and thought she might become a writer. Trouble was, she couldn’t think of any stories to write.

Oh, she could sure enough set down things that had actually happened, but that wasn’t making up stories, that was just setting things down. Time Gideon picked up the hog and carried it in the house. Had a bet with Bobbo he could pick up that old hog and carry it. clear inside the house. Ma was standing there setting the clock, she turned and saw Gideon staggering through the door with the hog in his arms. She picked up the broom and started swatting him with it, and Gideon dropped the hog and went out the front door, and the hog went running over every piece of furniture in the cabin till Minerva finally got him outside. Wouldn’t let Gideon sit at table that night. Said he’d have to eat out back with the friend he’d had in the house that afternoon.

But that was real.

“Good morning,” Lester said.

She was washing her hair in a shallow sparkling stream, using soap they’d made themselves back home, wearing only a petticoat and expecting no company. It was still but morngloam; she had awakened before the rest of them. She threw her soapy tresses back and squinted up at him. There was early morning sunlight behind him. He was smiling.

“Did I startle you?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “It’s only...”

“You’re not dressed for visitors.”

“Well...” she said, and paused. “There’s nothing you can see, I suppose.” She wrung out her hair. Suds washed away in the stream.

“Is there something I might see otherwise?” he asked.

She did not answer. She busied herself with rinsing her hair. Then she piled it on top of her head, and holding it massed there, wrapped a towel around it, rose, and began walking up the bank toward the wagon. In the distance she could see her brother Will in his underwear, stretching his arms over his head.

“No, wait,” Lester said.

She turned.

“Do you know how old I am?” he asked.

“Aye.”

“Almost thirty. I’ll be thirty come September.”

“Aye.”

“You’re but fifteen.”

“I’ll be sixteen in July,” she said.

“Even so.” He hesitated. “Bonnie Sue...”

She waited.

“Give it no thought,” he said, and turned, starting up the bank ahead of her. She looked up at him as he went, then sighed, lifted the hem of her petticoat so that the early morning dew would not wet it, and climbed the bank to where they all were stirring now.

“What day is it?” Annabel asked, and yawned.

Back home, there was an outhouse you could go to, wipe yourself afterward with pages from the Bristol paper. Here you went in the woods, wiped yourself with leaves less you’d remembered to pick up the local paper in whatever town you’d gone through. The towns all looked alike, the farms, too. She sometimes walked alongside the wagon because she got sick to her stomach inside there with the thing rocking back and forth and the wheels squeaking no matter how much grease was put on them. Didn’t know how Annabel could stand it, working on her sampler in there, hot as blazes under that cover, air as still as death, flies buzzing.

You walked alongside, you had to keep up with the mules, but they weren’t about to race their way to California now that they’d already bolted once. Walking along, she kept thinking of Lester putting his hand on her knee. Thought maybe she’d imagined it. Mules plodding. Will and Gideon on horseback, roaming wider than the road out of sheer boredom. Bobbo out hunting quail or rabbit. Up ahead, her Ma and Pa on the wagon seat. “Ha-ya!” he yelled to the mules. Paid him no mind. Just kept plodding along. Inside, Annabel had stitched her way clear through April 22, and was working now on 1844.

Lester suddenly came up beside her. She’d thought he was with Bobbo, she’d thought... but no, there were only three horses. She didn’t know what she’d thought; he was there beside her now, matching his stride to hers.

“Penny for your thoughts,” he said.

“Ahhh,” she said, and smiled.

“Private thoughts, secret thoughts?”

“Silly thoughts.”

“Like what?”

“Like those a fifteen-year-old girl might think,” she said, and glanced at him sidelong.

“Almost sixteen,” he reminded her.

“Aye, almost.”

“Have you been wondering where I was?”

“No.”

“I was dozing in the wagon.”

“Has she come through 1844 yet?”

“I don’t follow,” Lester said.

“My sister. Her sampler.”

“Ah. I didn’t notice.”

They walked along in silence. She stooped to pick a wildflower, brought it to her nose. There was no scent. “Is it true all the things Bobbo’s told me about you?” she asked.