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

“I guess that’s the nature of it, though,” Minerva said. “Worrying over your children even when they’re all growed up.”

“Oh, yes,” Sarah said.

Minerva decided she was a twit.

When they stopped for their nooning that day, it seemed a break in the routine, though it was itself a part of it. The sky had been blown flawlessly clear by the storm the night before; they could see everywhere around them for miles and miles. A stream surprised the landscape here. They watered the animals and drank themselves, and then filled the barrels and kegs. Bobbo and the Comyns boys started the cooking fires, and the women fried the meat and boiled the vegetables they’d bought in Independence. There was the smell of coffee and of warmed corn bread. After the noonday meal, they dozed. The voices of Annabel and Willoughby’s eldest girl broke the golden stillness.

“Do you get it now?”

“No, I don’t.”

She had stringy brown hair and eyes like a cat’s, yellow with flecks of green. Must’ve been her mother’s eyes; Willoughby’s were as brown as Christmas pudding. Her name was Julia.

“It’s a cipher, is all,” Annabel said.

“But what use is it?”

“Say I want to send you a letter in Lancaster—”

“I don’t live in Lancaster no more.”

“Just say. And I wanted to tell you something secret.”

“What would you want to tell me?”

“Well... I don’t know,” Annabel said. “Say I wanted to cuss or somethin.”

“Would you?”

“Course not, we’re just sayin. So I’d whip out the cipher here and write it all in code, and nobody but you or me’d be able to read it.”

“Let me see it again,” Julia said.

Annabel showed her the scrap of paper.

“Say you wanted to make an A,” Annabel said.

“Yeah, how’d you do it?”

“You see those lines around the A there?”

“What lines?”

“The one under it, and the one comin down to meet it. You just draw them two lines instead of the A,” Annabel said. “Them two lines take the place of the A — you get it?”

Julia studied the cipher again. “But then it’d be the same for J, wouldn’t it?”

“No, the J’s got a dot.”

“Oh,” Julia said. “Yeah.”

“You get it now?”

“Yeah,” Julia said, nodding.

“It’s good, ain’t it?”

“It’s real good,” Julia said. “Where’d you learn it?”

“Everybody back home knows it,” Annabel said.

What had appeared dull in southern Illinois seemed exciting now in retrospect. There, at least, a ridge, a knoll, a hillock rose occasionally to startle the unexpecting eye. Here, there was a wide road trodden level, the land on either side of it as flat as the road itself, stretching toward a horizon visible wherever one turned.

The effect was stultifying.

The wagons moved at the center of a perfect circle, the circle unchanging, the landscape eternally the same, the mules and the oxen and the horses plodding ahead but succeeding only in moving the circle intact, center and circumference, so that there was a sense of standing still rather than progressing.

They came fourteen miles that second day. The day before, they’d come sixteen by the chart. They were bone-weary when they formed the circle again at sunset. They made their fires, they posted their guards. They ate. They slept. In the morning, they moved on again.

They were emigrants, they supposed.

You look forward to nooning, Bobbo thought.

Damnedest thing ever.

Get off your horse, stretch your bones, eat some good hot food. Sit around afterward doing nothing. Just looking all around. Dozing. Looking again. Over there in the back of the Oates cart was Timothy’s Indian wife. Never budged out of that cart. Sat there day and night, you’d think her backside was glued to it. Appeared every bit as sorrowful as the widower, staring out over the prairie. Always looked west. Bobbo followed her gaze one time. Thought maybe she was seeing something he couldn’t make out. Wasn’t nothing out there. Not a damn thing.

Timothy’d brought her some food, and now he was taking his sketch pad and a boxful of pencils from the cart. Way he talked about painting and drawing made it sound like it was work. Like plowing a field or shoeing a horse. Bobbo couldn’t understand that. Friend of his, Roger Colby back home, was always drawing pictures, too, some of them pretty enough to frame. Bobbo himself couldn’t draw a straight line, but he admired people who could do that sort of thing. Draw pictures, a dogwood tree or something. But work? Hell, it wasn’t work. Still hadn’t seen any of Timothy’s pictures, didn’t know whether the man could really draw or was just wasting his own good time and God’s, too. He was sitting on a big rock now, watching every move the carpenter made. Trying to get a likeness, Bobbo supposed.

There was the widower Willoughby, sorrowful as could be. Never knew when he wa9 going to break into tears. Last night just before supper, Annabel said something about the nice stitching on the pinafore his toddler was wearing. Willoughby put his face in his hands and started crying. Must’ve been his wife had made the pinafore. Went back to his wagon, climbed up on the seat, sat there with his face in his hands, weeping. Wouldn’t touch a bite of food. His daughter Julia went over to him and touched him on the shoulder.

“Pa?” she said.

“Yes, darlin.”

“Pa?”

“Yes, darlin, that’s all right, darlin.”

Timothy was still trying to draw a picture of the carpenter. Be a miracle if he got anything at all down on paper, way Comyns ran around like a man half his age. Maybe had to move fast to keep that titty young wife of his happy on her back. Bobbo got up from where he was sitting, and wandered over to Timothy. His head bent over his pad, he kept scribbling away with the pencil. Bobbo stood directly in front of him, trying to sneak a look around the edge of the pad. Didn’t want the man to think he was nosy.

“How many miles you expect we’ll cover today?” he asked.

“Oh, fourteen, fifteen,” Timothy said, without looking up.

“Has Willoughby talked to you about maybe turning back?”

“He has.”

“Do you think he will?”

“I’m hoping not,” Timothy said.

“Seems a man talking about it so much is a man going to do it. Don’t it appear that way to you?”

“Maybe,” Timothy said. “What do you think of this?” he asked suddenly, and turned the pad so Bobbo could see it.

Jonah Comyns was there on paper exactly.

Quick sure pencil strokes delineated the long angular body with its massive chest and shoulders, the oversize hands and thick fingers. A thatch of hair sprouted from the head of the drawn image as wildly and as randomly as did Comyns’s real hair. Here, too, were the quirky eyebrows and fiercely burning eyes, the nose that could split a log, the thickish lips, and something more — Timothy had captured on paper the restless energy of the man. Looking at the pencil sketch, Bobbo was certain it would leap off the page at any moment, run scurrying to tend to the animals or the fire, shout an order to a son.

He did not know he could be so moved by pencil marks on paper. Speechlessly, he stared at the drawing, and realized that Timothy was waiting for his reaction.

“It’s the most beautiful thing I ever seen,” Bobbo said.

There was an instant’s silence. Timothy looked up sharply into Bobbo’s face, searching it for insincerity. Then, so softly Bobbo almost couldn’t hear him, he said, “Thank you.”