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

“The twentieth of May,” Minerva said.

“It’s my hope they’ve done what they had to do, and are already on their way here,” Hadley said.

“Just the two of them alone?” Duggan asked.

“Yes.”

“Well,” Duggan said, “the Pawnee’ve got troubles of their own right now; maybe your sons won’t be bothered.”

Orliac glanced swiftly at Minerva and immediately said, “Major Duggan, the Chisholm family has recently—”

“Let me tell you what you’ll find west of here,” Duggan said, and lifted his glass and drank, and smacked his lips. In what sounded like surprise, he said, “Very nice, Orliac,” and then wiped the back of his hand across the wine-stained white mustache and turned to Hadley. “What you’ll find — beside Indians, that is—”

“Cheyenne, Sioux, and Gros Ventres,” Duggan’s aide said. He was a man named Howard Kelsey, a captain. Very thin, with pale white skin, delicate as a woman’s. Had a mustache, too, but his was narrow and black. He offered the information about the Indians as if Duggan had called for it. Duggan acknowledged it with a tap of his forefinger on the air.

“Right,” he said, and tap went the forefinger. “Roaming out there in parties a thousand strong, some of them.”

“Major Duggan,” Orliac said, “I feel I should tell you—”

“ Four thousand, one party,” Kelsey said.

“Right,” Duggan said, and tapped the air. “You ever see four thousand Sioux or Dakota or whatever they choose to call themselves—”

“Dakota,” Kelsey said.

“—riding across the prairie in war paint?”

“Scary,” Kelsey said.

“But that’s not all you’ve got to worry about, Chisholm. There hasn’t been rain out there for the past two months—”

“Serious drought,” Kelsey said.

“Indians cutting down cottonwood boughs to feed their horses.”

“No grass at all.”

“Or burned yellow where you find a patch of it.”

“Plague of grasshoppers, too,” Kelsey said.

“What the drought didn’t finish off, the grasshoppers did,” Duggan said, and laughed and poured himself another glass of wine. “Orliac,” he said, “this is really very nice wine.”

“Comment?” Gracieuse asked.

“ Le vin. Il trouve bon, le vin. She speaks no English,” he said. He seemed to be explaining this more to himself than to anyone sitting at the table.

“No water, no grass,” Kelsey said.

“And no game,” Duggan said. “The Indians are eating their own horses out there. That’s what’s out there, Chisholm,” he said, and nodded for emphasis.

“Were you thinking of heading for Fort Hall?” Kelsey asked.

“Fort Hall’s five hundred miles from here,” Duggan said.

“You couldn’t get much beyond there,” Kelsey said. “There’d be snow in the Rockies.”

“You’d be stuck at Fort Hall for the winter,” Duggan said.

“Some picnic, that,” Kelsey said, and rolled his eyes. “It’s a smaller trading post than this, you know.”

“You want wilderness,” Duggan said, “that’s wilderness.”

“Snow-filled Rockies ahead of you.”

“Behind you hostile Indians.”

“That’s wilderness,” Kelsey said.

Duggan tapped the air.

“What do you say, Bobby?” Orliac asked. “You want to be in the fur business? We expect to trade this year alone more than fifty thousand robes. I have room for another clerk here, eh?”

“I don’t think so,” Bobbo said.

The robes were piled high in the center of the courtyard, the fur on them thick and black. They all looked alike to Bobbo, but Orliac was sorting them for quality. Everywhere around them, there was teeming activity. Women bickering and children scampering, babies shrieking. Company men bawling orders in French. Trappers striding through the fort in leggings and leathers. Through the main gate, Bobbo could see tipis being taken down, travois being packed with goods acquired in trade. In the distance, more Indians moved slowly toward the fort, laden with robes to barter. Like the robes, the Indians all looked the same to him.

“Do you know how they treat these hides?” Orliac asked.

“No, sir.”

Whenever he thought of his sister, whenever he tried to remember her as she’d been, he could only visualize the Indian with the blue face, and the Indian writhing in pain as Bobbo plunged the knife again and again and...

“They take the brains of the animal, eh? And they mix it with ashes. That’s after the hide is scraped clean of flesh. The women do the work. It’s why they have so many wives. A man can shoot a dozen buffalo in as many minutes, eh? But to dress the hides? That is quite another matter. It takes all spring and half the summer.” He lowered his voice. “I have heard of a tribe that dresses the hides with piss. Piss! Do you think that’s true?”

“I’m sorry,” Bobbo said. “What did you say?”

He had been thinking again of Annabel.

And had seen again the Indian with the blue face.

The river here was cold and clear and running swift. It reminded Bonnie Sue of the Clinch back home. Except that in Virginia, she had gone to the river to write in her diary or to try to think of stories. Here, she came to the river to cry.

She cried for Annabel, and she cried for herself.

She cried for her baby sister because she could remember her when she was still in her wooden cradle with her eyes searching all over and her thumb in her mouth and her pillow wet with drool. You leaned over the cradle and a toothless smile came on that round little face, made you want to bust out laughing. She could remember holding Annabel’s plump sticky hand and taking her for walks in the woods, showing her where there was a rabbit hole and here was a wasps’ nest, and little Annabel nodding like she knew just what was being said about this or that, but probably not understanding a thing. Looked so cute that Bonnie Sue would just scoop her up in her arms and hug her to death. She could remember Annabel being a pest, too, asking questions all the time about what was it made a cat meow and a pig oink and a dog bark instead of talking like people did. Or wanting to know how you danced a jig, or knitted and purled, or baked cookies, or wrote the letter M, which she always had trouble with, making it look more like an N all the time. Bonnie Sue kept telling her to just add another loop, and whenever Annabel did, it came out looking like a worm crawling along, loop after loop after loop.

She loved that child.

Alone by the river, she cried for her.

And knew — ah, God — knew that if her sister hadn’t come at that Indian with a burning stick in her hand, poked it at his arm and made him jump off Bonnie Sue, where he was straddling her and choking her...

She squeezed her eyes shut.

She could hear the river rushing swiftly.

She could feel the beat of her own pulse.

She began to cry again. For her sister, for herself.

On the twenty-seventh of July, a week after the Chisholms arrived at the fort, the family from the Oregon-bound train emerged at last from the absent factor’s apartment. There were six of them. A man and woman who looked to be about Hadley’s age, three daughters in their teens, and a strapping son who reminded Minerva of Gideon. Pale and thin, blinking at the sun, they came down the gallery stairs. A gaggle of squalling Indian brats followed them across the courtyard to where Minerva and Bonnie Sue were sitting on robes against the wall. The wall, and the wagon close by it, had become their home. The robes were their beds and their coverlets, the wall was their protection from whatever dangers lay outside the fort, the wagon contained the clothing, the tools and utensils they needed to get through the day and then the day following it. Minerva watched as the woman turned abruptly and flapped her hands at the Indian children, who scurried away laughing. She came to Minerva then and extended her hand.