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

“Five,” Minerva said, smiling.

“We was out there lookin for ratbane.”

“That’s right,” Minerva said. “Will was coughing up his innards, and we was wanting to brew him a little syrup.”

“Walking along in his pinafore, Gideon was.”

“I remember it clear.”

“Big old hoop snake came rolling across the path, Gideon hightailed it for the nearest tree.”

“Think I’ll hightail it for the nearest tree,” Hadley said.

“Now hush, Hadley,” Millie said. “Was Eva took after that snake with a grubbing hoe, yelling at Min not to even look at the ugly thing, lest the newborn babe be marked with a circle.”

“Didn’t look at it, neither,” Minerva said.

“People roundabouts claim a hoop snake can kill a full-grown tree just by sticking their tail spike in it,” Millie said.

“I don’t put much store in that,” Hadley said.

“Well, one thing you know is snakes, I guess,” Millie said.

“That’s for sure,” Hadley said, and suddenly wanted these people to be gone, friends though they were, wanted to be left alone with his family so that he could tell them the secret he had carried inside him for more than a month now. He could remember a time — but ah, the land was new then. When he was a boy, when his father was still alive and even afterward, in the years of his young manhood before he met Minerva, the land they owned on this Virginia mountaintop had been rich enough to provide them with all their needs. Not only corn, no, this had always been good corn-growing country. But beans, too, in the field the other side of the cabin, and pumpkins and pattypan squash, and peas, and watermelons on the hillside. And in the land they’d cleared of stumps and cane roots they planted flax, which later they rotted and dried and then crushed in the brake Hadley and his father had themselves built. They shook out the bits of bark they called the shoves, and then Hadley’s mother would get to work with the hackle, its iron teeth sticking out of the paddle-shaped board as she stroked and cleaned and separated the fibers into tow cloth, which was good for cleaning out rifle barrels and not much else. The finer fibers she used to spin the thread that went to make their fanciest garments. The seeds were used to make linseed oil; there wasn’t much lost in the flax plant, save for the shoves, and a field of it in flower was as breath-taking a sight as a cloudless blue sky.

Flax, aye, and corn enough to feed the squirrel, the crow, and the family besides, with bushels left over for baking bread and feeding the hogs and horses and distilling a little whiskey as well, though in those days Hadley’s father made whiskey only for the family and his still was small and hardly industrious. They grew she-corn for hominy, and sweet corn and popcorn, turnips and onions and cabbage and okra. His father even planted a small patch of tobacco, which he did not smoke, but bartered instead for things they could not grow or make. The yard in front of the cabin bustled with chickens and hogs, and there was a single milk cow, earmarked, branded, and belled; a goodly part of Hadley’s childhood was spent chasing animals out of the herbs and flowers his mother planted, shooing them away from the doorstep tansy or the lavender and chives. The land was dead now, as dead as the beloved woman they had put to rest on this nineteenth day of April.

Engulfed in sound, Hadley looked about the cabin, searching for his loved ones. He located his three sons and two daughters, and studied their faces for answers to the question he hadn’t yet asked.

It was one in the afternoon.

The mourners were gone.

“There’s somethin I’ve got to tell you all,” he said. “I been thinkin this ever since my mother took sick a month ago. I knew she was going to die this time, knew there wasn’t nothin we could do to save her, she was an old lady heaven bound, God rest her soul. And I thought when she dies, we ought to leave this place. Well, now she’s dead, we buried her this morning, we said our prayers over her grave. There’s nothin here no more but land that’s as barren as the company of the godless. I want to leave this place.”

Minerva was standing at the fireplace, near the Dutch oven. She turned to look at her husband as though he had spoken blasphemy against the dead and the living both. He caught her glance and nodded — in affirmation, or in defiance.

“Where would you have us go, Pa?” Will asked.

Will was almost thirty-two, born on the eve of The War, in June of 1812. He keenly resembled his father, with the same tall, broad-shouldered, wiry physique, the same dark blue eyes and black hair — though Hadley at the age of fifty-six already had more than a sifting of snow on the roof.

“I thought west,” Hadley said.

“Where west?” Minerva said at once. “Kentucky, do you mean?”

“Ain’t no land to be had in Kentucky, nor anyplace east of the Mississippi,” Hadley said. “I’m thinkin of California. Or maybe Oregon.”

Minerva shook her head. “No,” she said.

“There’s nothin for us here no more,” Hadley said.

“There’s home,” Minerva said.

“It ain’t home,” Hadley said. “It’s the Cassadas going to kill us if the land don’t first.”

“Ain’t the Cassadas going to kill us nor the land neither,” Minerva said. “I been on this land since I was twenty and you brought me here from Cedar Creek to marry. I can remember when that quarter acre—”

“The land is dead,” Hadley said.

“—behind the cabin would yield twenty-five bushels at the least. And I can remember when times was bad, too, during the Panic, when I already had Will and was carrying Gideon, and we lived through that, too. There’s trouble now with the Cassadas, but there’s always been trouble one kind or another, and I don’t see as picking up and moving’s going to solve nothing. You want to go west, then you just git on your horse and go, Had. Ain’t a soul on earth can stop you from doing whatever it is you want to do.”

“Pa’s right,” Will said.

“Then you go with him, too,” Minerva said. “I’m staying right here.”

“I wanted to leave this place when Elizabeth passed on ten years ago,” Will said. “Wanted to pack up and go, felt there was nothing to keep me here no more.”

“Man’s wife dies, it’s natural for him—”

“It was more’n that, Ma. It’s like Pa says. You got to kill yourself here to wrest a turnip or an onion from ground resists you all the way. Hell, Ma, you saw what—”

“Don’t you cuss in this house!” Minerva snapped.

“You saw what happened when we planted that cornfield, didn’t you? Had to work inside a ring of rifles, keep the Cassadas from blowing our heads off—”

“Almost did blow mine off,” Bobbo said.

He was seventeen, the youngest of the boys, with his father’s black hair and blue eyes, his mother’s thin nose and jaw, her sensuous mouth. There were those who said there was French blood on Minerva’s side, a Campbell back before the Indian Wars taking for his bride the daughter of a trapper. The Cassadas rumored it about maliciously that Minerva had a bit of Cherokee in her as well, discounting as though blind the hair as yellow as corn silk, the eyes as green as grass.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Now hush about that,” Hadley said.

“What do you mean, Bobbo?”

“I was on my way to town with whiskey to sell—”

“She don’t want to hear it,” Hadley said.

“I want to hear it. What happened?”

“One of the Cassadas shot at me from in the bushes. Dropped two jugs full, broke em on the ground.”

“That was hard-earned cash soakin into the earth,” Hadley said.