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

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Thought Pa told you,” Bobbo said, and shrugged.

“You’re makin this up,” Minerva said.

“It’s the truth, Ma,” Bobbo said.

“Ma, there’s something you just got to recognize,” Will said. “If we try to touch an ear of corn we planted—”

“The feudin with the Cassadas’ll pass,” Minerva said. “A body waits long enough, everything on God’s earth’ll come to pass. Was Jeff Cassada’s mother served as granny woman when Gideon was born. I’m not forgettin that, Had.”

“That was more’n twenty years ago, Min! We’re talking about—”

“I’m saying we was fast friends then, and we’ll be friends again when the feudin is over and done with.”

“You don’t understand, Ma,” Gideon said. “The Cassadas are laying claim to that field; they’re sayin it’s theirs by deed.”

Gideon was twenty-three years old, the middle son, still as curly-haired and blond as he’d been when a baby, his mother’s legacy, wasted on his brothers. He’d been named after the Biblical son of Joash the Abiezrite because in Judges 6:15, he said to God, “Oh my Lord, wherewith shall I save Israel? behold, my family is poor in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father’s house.” Gideon was born in 1821 at the height of the Panic, Hadley believing after years of deprivation that his clan truly was the poorest in all this Godforsaken corner of Virginia. Moreover, his newborn son was surely the runt of any litter, blondy-haired and blue-eyed, skinny as a rake, truly the least in the family — so Gideon he’d been named. But he had grown to be six feet three inches tall, weighing sixteen stone, with a huge barrel chest, and muscles on his arms as hard as lightard knots. Gideon was Minerva’s favorite. She listened more closely to him now than she had her husband or her other sons.

“Ma,” he said, “I love this place as well as you, but I think Pa’s right, I think we ought to leave it. It ain’t worth spilling a drop of Bobbo’s blood nor anybody’s over even the richest land in all the valley. And, Ma, we ain’t got nothin but a mountaintop patch of dirt that was worth our lives to plant, and’ll be worth our lives to touch an ear of corn when it’s ready to pick. I say we go.”

“ Can we go, Ma?” Annabel asked.

“No,” Minerva said flatly.

“We’ve got kin out there, you know,” Bonnie Sue said.

“What kin? Who told you that?”

“Pa did. Man name of Jesse Chisholm. From Tennessee.”

“I never heard of no Jesse Chisholm. You made him up, Hadley.”

“No, he’s kin sure enough.”

“Where’s he at then?”

“Texas, I suppose,” Hadley said. “I wouldn’t know him if I fell over him. Anyway, that ain’t where I plan to take this family.”

“This family’s staying right here,” Minerva said. “Was my own brother waitin out west with open arms, I wouldn’t leave Virginia.” She lifted the sole remaining log and threw it into the fireplace. She did not know what she was going to cook for the midday meal. She was close to tears, but she would not show this either to Hadley or to her sons. To her daughters she said only, “We need more wood. Going to have bread, we’ll want a fire.”

The girls had changed out of their calicos and were wearing simple linen dresses that fell tentlike and loose about their bodies. Their legs and feet were bare; they stood just inside the doorway cut between the two rooms, Bonnie Sue womanly and round at the age of fifteen, Annabel two years younger and just beginning to show buttons of breasts, both girls blond and green-eyed like their mother.

“Fetch me some kindling,” Minerva said.

There would have to be bread. With whatever they ate, there would be bread. She would bake it in the Dutch oven after she’d heated the lid and the oven itself on the fireplace coals. The bread would be corn bread, of course. But they were insisting the land was dead. And the land to her was corn.

“Min,” Hadley said. He was standing very close to her; she did not turn to look at him. She busied herself with accepting the tinder the girls brought, and placing it under the single log. They had let the fire die. They had buried a woman she loved like her own mother and had let the fire die besides. “Min,” he said, “I asked the squire how much he’d be wantin for that blue wagon of his. Be a big enough wagon to make it across the country. He said ninety dollars. We’ve put enough by to pay for the wagon and the journey, too, and get us some land besides when we—”

“You’d spend what’s taken half our lives to save?”

“I’d spend it for the next half, Min. Damn it, I’m a farmer ain’t got nothin to farm! There’s land out west. It can be bought cheap, it can be planted. I want to go. Bailey says he’ll sell us the wagon. I want to buy it, Min.”

“Do what you like,” she said, and angrily struck flint into the tinder.

The snake was not as big as some Hadley had handled; he guessed it was maybe four, five feet long — he hadn’t measured the creature, nor didn’t plan to. In his time in these mountains, he had seen every kind of poisonous snake there was, from diamondbacks, like the one in the gunnysack, to copperheads, which if you cornered one hiding in the bushes, he’d shake his tail and make them bushes buzz to stop your heart. He’d even seen a cottonmouth or gapper or trapjaw or water moccasin, or whatever you wanted to call the damn thing, swimming in the Clinch like an eel and nearly scaring him half to death.

He’d been bit by a snake only once, and that one a rattler who’d struck first and only then given warning. Hadley’d gone back to the cabin and swallowed two whole cups of whiskey and then tied a rag tight around his arm between his heart and where the snake had bit him. He poured salt on the fang marks, where the arm was beginning to rise, and then he moved the rag a bit higher on his arm when the rising started to spread. He was alone in the cabin and beginning to get a bad headache and feeling somewhat dizzy and thinking maybe he shouldn’t have drunk the whiskey, though some people hereabouts said whiskey was the only sure cure for snakebite. It was then Will came in the house and saw Hadley standing with one hand against the wall, his head bent, and went over to him fast and caught him before he fell down.

Will cut through the fang marks with a knife he’d brought back with him from the fighting in Texas. The knife had a walnut handle inlaid with silver. He sucked out the venom, and spat it on the floor, and then washed out his mouth with whiskey. He gave Hadley more whiskey to drink after he’d bandaged the wound, and then both men sat drinking till sundown, when the rest of the family got home. Hadley was drunk by then and eager to tell them all about how he’d almost died from snakebite, weren’t for Will here with his Mexican knife. But they’d all been in town watching a man used to be with the Buckley & Weeks Circus, had himself a dancing bear now, and was selling a medicine supposed to be good for curing snakebite! Never did get to tell them what had happened. When Minerva in bed that night saw the bandage and asked him what was wrong with his arm, he said he’d got bit by a rattler while she was in town watching the dancing bear, and she said, “No, you didn’t, Hadley.”

That was the first and only time he’d been bit by a rattler or any other kind of snake. It was all in knowing what to expect from the creatures, and also in knowing how to handle them if you were of a mind to pick one up. Hadley picked up most any serpent he ever saw because the way he read the Bible, it said in John 3: “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Hadley believed in the Son of man and hoped for eternal life and felt that one way to guarantee life forever was to lift up the serpent in the wilderness.