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

She saw the paint on his arm, black paint like a long glove covering the man’s hand and wrist and coming clear up to the forearm. In the instant he looped his arm around her neck, she knew she would have to kill him, and reached behind her at once with her right hand, and groped at his belt above the hanging breechclout and found the bone handle of his knife and yanked it free. He did not even know it was in her hand till she plunged it into the arm encircling her neck, plunged it again and again until, screaming in pain, he released her. He was reaching with his right hand for his tomahawk when she shoved the blade into his throat. His left arm hung in tatters; he toppled toward her with blood gushing from the open slash in his neck where she had twisted the knife and pulled it loose. Sister backed away from him and was again running for the fort when she saw Will approaching from the opposite side.

He had no rifle; they were not in the habit of carrying weapons here in the vicinity of the fort. She recognized the Indians now as Dakota, whom she hated and feared. Across the enclosure, one of them threw an elkhorn saddle onto the back of a mare, and swiftly mounted the animal. Another opened the gate. They all rode out then, save the one with the wolfskin, who was still trying to loop a thong bridle over the stallion’s jaw. The horse wheeled about, reared, pawed the air. Will grabbed the man by the shoulder. He whirled suddenly and hit Will with his closed fist, knocking him to the ground.

Sister ran to the fence and leaped it.

The Dakota was swinging his tomahawk downward at Will’s head when she stuck the knife into his back and ripped the blade down toward his waist. She stabbed with the knife again, this time cutting through his leather shirt as he turned. His face was painted with a wide vermilion band across the forehead; she could smell the medicine mixed in with the grease. The thongs of his war whistle were threaded through the nostrils of the wolf’s nose, the whistle was of eagle bone, it swung across his glistening chest as he swung the tomahawk at her. She screamed and drew back her hand, and then stared in horror at her wrist gushing blood. She heard Will shout, “Sister, oh my God!” and the Dakota struck her again, splitting her cheek with the sharp blade of the hatchet, and then again, bringing it down upon her shoulder, cracking her collarbone and opening a wedge three inches deep. He pulled the tomahawk free and was preparing to strike her again when Will seized him by the throat.

She fell to the ground, bleeding. They struggled above her as if she no longer existed, and perhaps she did not. She knew she was dying. She could hear the stallion whinnying his fright, could see the sky above, a startling blue with black clouds of smoke drifting across it, rising, drifting. One of the men stepped on her face, she did not know which of them it was. His foot slid away into the dust; she choked on the dust, rising. Her head fell limply to the side, and she could see her own severed right hand on the ground, lifeless, the fingers curled against the palm. She wanted to vomit; she felt the blood gushing steadily from her open wrist, drifting. The two men moved like shadows. She could hear them above her, struggling, grunting, the lazy hum of her blood, drifting. Within minutes, she no longer knew which of the men was white and which was Indian. Minutes after that, she was dead.

They stood about the open grave on the field they had cleared and grubbed free of stumps. Hadley spoke the words. His voice was faint, almost a whisper. He said he had searched in his memory and searched in the Holy Book for the right words to say over this woman they’d scarcely known, and had felt forsaken of the Lord, not being able to find what he’d been looking for though he’d stayed awake all night. And then he’d realized the Lord was only asking him to find for himself what was in his own head and in his own heart.

So he’d tried to do that, tried to summon up words that would express his sorrow at yet another death, searched in his heart for that, and searched in his head for the sense of it — but could find only the sorrow and not the sense. He knew it was written that all things are full of weariness and that a man cannot utter it, and that the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. And he knew, too, that what has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done. He doubted none of this, all of this was written, as were the words “There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.” But it grieved him to believe that this woman they were burying today might be forgotten as if she’d never been. If that happened, then it would be true what was written about there being no remembrance of former things, which he wasn’t doubting, but only hoping to understand a bit more fully...

His voice trailed.

He seemed to have lost for a moment what it was he wanted to say. He looked into the grave. He shook his head, and put his arm around Will and very softly said, “Lord, please bless this good woman, and give us the strength and courage to continue.” He nodded as if to say he’d made his thoughts plain at last, and then gently hugged his weeping son to him, and said, “Amen,” and brushed the tears from his own eyes.

“Amen,” they said.

It was only after they had covered her over with earth that Gracieuse took her husband aside and reminded him in halting French that the Indian custom was to place the body of the deceased on a raised scaffold or in the branches of a tree. Sister might have preferred this to burial, she said, since interring a body made it impossible for the spirit to pass to the other world.

Orliac did not bother translating this for the others.

The Chisholms left Fort Laramie on the sixteenth day of June, in the company of twenty other wagons heading west. The road veered sharply away from the riverbank upon which sat the charred ruins of the cabin. Gideon rode out front on the stallion they’d taken from the Indians almost a year before. Hadley and Minerva were on the seat of the wagon, and Will sat on the tailgate with Catherine. Immediately behind was the wagon belonging to Franz and Bonnie Sue. Bobbo rode with them. Little Eva Schwarzenbacher, wearing a sunbonnet that shaded her blue eyes, sat on her mother’s lap and looked off into the distance.

“See?” Bonnie Sue said, pointing vaguely west. “That’s California there.”

EVAN HUNTER was raised in New York, spent two years in the Navy and a short time teaching high school. Since those days he has been writing constantly, his first success being the result of his teaching experience, The Blackboard Jungle. He is also the author of Strangers When We Meet, Last Summer and the script for Hitchcock’s celebrated horror film, The Birds. Under the pseudonym of Ed McBain, Mr. Hunter is the author of the 87th Precinct thrillers, which currently have over 53 million copies in print around the world. Evan Hunter lives with his wife, Mary Vann, and their daughter, Amanda Finley. They divide their time between Connecticut and points south.