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

She rolled back against him and eased herself upright so that she was riding as she might have sidesaddle. He must have thought she was preparing to leap from the horse; he immediately put his left arm around her, twisting his hand into the torn petticoat, his right hand clinging to the reins, the wolfskin on his shoulder stinking as bad as had the blanket. It was then that she clawed for his face, reaching for his eyes. He screamed aloud, the horse veering as he yanked at the reins. Her spread right hand found something soft and jellylike, her fingers were closing on his right eye, she would pluck the eyeball from its socket like a hard-boiled egg, in an instant she would blind him.

He threw her from the horse. He flung her away from him as though she were a curse. He did not look back. He kept galloping away from her while behind him she lay trembling on the ground with the thought of what she had almost done.

By their reckoning, they were still two hundred miles from Fort Laramie.

They feared Annabel would die before they got there. They had made poultices of spirit turpentine and sugar, and they applied one of these to the head wound, and wrapped it tight with a clean cotton petticoat torn into bandages. The second poultice was larger; they put it over the jagged gash in her side, but the blood wouldn’t stop, it kept seeping up through the poultice. They changed the poultice three, four times that night, and each time the blood worked its way through, and they didn’t know what else to do to get it to stop. They had no recourse to remedies they knew: chimney soot mixed with lard, pine resin. All they could do was change the poultice each time it got drenched again with blood.

They kept expecting the Indians to come back.

They figured the one who’d got away, the one wearing the wolfskin, would return with a passel of them this time, if only to retrieve the horses. There were angry black and blue marks on Minerva’s breasts where the Indian had struck her, and she ached with each breath she took. Hadley had pulled the stumps of her broken teeth, and she’d stuffed a rag into her mouth to stop the bleeding. But her jaw and lip were swollen, the lip split besides from the force of the Indian’s blow. She swore to Hadley she’d have blinded him like Samson given just another moment. He said, “No, you wouldn’t have, Min.”

The horses were fine animals, a stallion and a pair of mares, looked like the Chickasaw running woods horses they were familiar with back home, Spanish breeds crossed with those the colonists brought from England. Bobbo wanted to ride one of them ahead, try to catch up with the wagon train. If there was a doctor in the party...

“No,” Minerva said.

“Ma,” he said, “I could fetch him back with me.”

“I’d fear for your life,” Minerva said softly.

By morning, Annabel’s bleeding had stopped. They put a fresh poultice on the wound below, and bandaged it tightly, and changed, too, the poultice and bandage on her head. At six o’clock, they broke camp and began moving ing toward the South Fork of the Platte.

She was burning with fever when they crossed the river on the morning of the seventh. The weather had turned sticky and hot, adding to her discomfort. She lay on a quilt in the wagon bed, covered with a linen bed sheet had been part of Grandmother Chisholm’s dower. There had been little rain in this part of the country, and the river was low and the bottom firm. For this much they were grateful; they could not have coped with anything the likes of the Kansas.

“Have I been scalped, Pa?” she asked.

He smiled and patted her hand. “No, darlin,” he said. “You’ve still got all your beautiful hair on your head, where it’s sposed to be.”

“What happened to your ear that’s all bandaged?”

“An Injun figgered I’d look best with but a single ear.”

He’d seen the Indian an instant before the blow struck, saw the rounded stone head of the weapon in his hand and knew it was not a hatchet. There’d been the whistle first, and then the sound behind him, and he’d turned to see the Indian with his face painted blue, the same one Bobbo later stabbed, and the maul coming for the back of his head. He’d turned, trying to duck away, but the blow caught him full on the ear, and that was the last he knew of anything till he felt Minerva’s gentle hands upon him, washing away the blood and dressing the wound. He had a headache now the likes of which he’d never had in his life.

“Did he take it from your head then, Pa?” Annabel asked.

“No, darlin, it’s still there,” Hadley said, and they both laughed.

“Is my nose broke? It feels broke.”

“Yes, darlin,” he said.

He knew she was going to die.

The earliest they could hope to find a doctor was at Fort Laramie, unless there was one in the Oregon train ahead. But with Annabel sick this way, Hadley couldn’t push too hard, and their rest periods were longer and more frequent. He was afraid as well that too much jostling would start her wounds to bleeding more heavily. They were seeping blood again, and Minerva was worried they’d soon begin to fester. On the high plateau between the two forks, they found a pine forest and slashed the trees for resin and made poultices to keep in readiness should the bleeding get worse. When they moved out of the narrow crotch where the river forked, they could for miles still see both forks, the one to the south angling ever wider, the other constantly on their right. They stopped often to wet the cloths they put to Annabel’s burning forehead. Were they home, they’d have made snakeroot tea, or boiled wild ginger roots or penny-royal leaves to bring the fever down. But they were not home.

The pine forest was the last real timber they saw for several days. Here and there a solitary tree stood specterlike on the riverbank, but for the most part the plains were unwooded. The thick luxurious grass that had earlier covered the prairie was all but gone now. The animals seemed not to notice the difference, and ate the yellow grass as heartily. But to the family the entire countryside had of a sudden become barren and dry, and they began to think of this as the true landscape of the west, and wondered if it would remain this way till they reached the Rockies. Already the rock outcroppings seemed to promise distant mountains.

More and more often, they found discarded items from the party ahead. It was as though the parched and empty land discouraged the trappings of civilization, made butter churns and spinning wheels seem superfluous and perhaps foolish. There was no milk to churn or yarn to spin in this sandy land of limestone, granite, and marl. The discarded household items made the Oregon train more real, almost tangible. If only they could travel a mite faster, if only those ahead would rest a bit longer, why then they would meet. And, God willing, there’d be a doctor with the party who could minister to Annabel and relieve her pain and make her well and whole again.

The two Indian mares were tied to the wagon on short halters behind. On the wagon’s right, Bobbo rode the stallion; he’d washed the paint off it last time they’d stopped to water. He was having difficulty staying on the frame saddle, and swore at the animal as if it understood English. On the seat up front, Hadley clucked to the mules, and Minerva scanned the horizon for Indians. A rifle was on her lap. Inside the wagon, she heard Annabel ask again had she been scalped, heard Bonnie Sue answer, “No, you’ve still got your scalp right there where it should be.”

Minerva turned her face away from Hadley’s lest he see she was on the edge of tears.

The valley of the North Platte was ahead of them now.

This was the sixteenth day of July, and they hoped to reach Fort Laramie by the eighteenth or nineteenth. It no longer mattered whether or not they overtook the Oregon-bound wagon train. They had given up hope of doing so, as easily as a pauper gave up hope of one day becoming rich. Now Fort Laramie was their salvation; at Fort Laramie there would be a doctor; at Fort Laramie there would be medicine. The fort signified civilization; without whatever help awaited them there, they knew Annabel would die.