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

The walls were covered with wallpaper the color of brick, a complicated design of birds and boughs and leaves upon it, red against a deeper red. There was a fireplace of intricately carved marble, and the chairs around the table were the finest Hadley had ever seen. In the corner, on a cherrywood lowboy, he recognized a napkin press. The squire was dining on what looked to be plates of real London pewter, not the newfangled lead stuff, and there was a sparkling white linen napkin tucked under his jowly chin. As they watched, a slender black woman poured wine from a decanter into the squire’s long-stemmed glass goblet.

The clouds shifted, the moon broke through. Hadley and Will moved swiftly away from the house, heading below and to the south where Gideon was waiting with mules and horses, close by the Squire’s stable. A man named Alexander Buchanan was sitting on a puncheon bench in front of the unlocked stable door, his rifle resting against the wall. He was whistling a tune Will had first heard in Texas, when he was riding with Lamar against the Mexicans. The tune had been sung by a lanky Texan astride a horse without a saddle, said he’d learned to ride that way from the Kiowa. Fellow said the tune was called “Zip Coon,” but Will had heard it again a year or two later, same tune called “Turkey in the Straw” this time around. He sometimes wondered about things like that; like if a fellow made up a tune, could just anybody go around singing it and changing the name of it however he liked? Seemed akin to horse-stealing somehow.

Alexander Buchanan was whistling “Zip Coon” or “Turkey in the Straw,” or whatever a body chose to call it, as Will came around the side of the stable, his father behind him. He had seen Buchanan often enough in town, had once bloodied his nose for him when the man boasted in the tavern (and in his cups) about having been abed with Rachel Lowery; Will hated livery-stable talk, specially when it moved from the stable to the tavern. It was no doubt true about Rachel; Will in fact knew that his own brother Gideon had sampled her quim. But talking about her that way was another thing. You enjoyed yourself with a woman, why then you shut up about it; you savored the pleasure, you anticipated it again, you didn’t go spoiling it by sullying it.

He was glad it was Alexander Buchanan sitting here in front of the squire’s unlocked stable door. No need for a lock on it, Will surmised, since anybody all up and down the Clinch’d have to be clear out of his mind to even attempt stealing a blade of grass from the Bailey plantation, what with Stokes and his armed patrol roaming the night. Alexander Buchanan was the squire’s lock, sitting here on a puncheon bench and whistling a tune to the night. Will smiled, and put his knife to Buchanan’s throat. The whistling stopped abruptly. Buchanan knew what the blade of a knife felt like, though he’d never had one pressed up against his throat before. The blade was laying flat just below his Adam’s apple, but all a person had to do was turn the knife and there’d be a nice sharp cutting edge against his skin. He swallowed his whistling and sat there very still on the bench, backing away from the knife, trying to melt right into the silvered pine siding on the wall of the stable.

“That’s a good boy,” Will said, and stepped around Buchanan, turning the knife so that now the tip of the blade was against his throat. Buchanan peered at him in the darkness, moving only his eyes, his head still, his hands still, even his heart seemingly stopped.

“Is that you, Will Chisholm?” he asked.

“That’s me, friend,” Will said.

“What you want here?”

“We come for our wagon.”

“You ain’t got no wagon here.”

“Don’t argue with the man,” Hadley said, coming around the side of the stable. “Just slit his throat and toss him over there in the bushes.”

Buchanan’s heart lurched, causing his Adam’s apple to bob, scaring him half witless when he realized he might easily have been the cause of his own death, allowing it to bob up that way against the tip of the knife blade. Were they really here to take a wagon they somehow thought was theirs? Were they really going to slit his throat and toss him in the bushes?

“Your pa’s kiddin, now ain’t he?” Buchanan said.

“That’s right. I ain’t going to slit your throat,” Will said. He paused and then said. “What I’m going to do is cut off your balls.”

“Now come on, Will,” Buchanan said, and swallowed, and again his Adam’s apple bobbed up against the tip of the knife blade.

“Toss your balls over in the bushes,” Will said. “Squire’s hogs’ll find them in the morning. Big balls like these have got to be Buchanan balls, the hogs’ll say. Must be this Buchanan’s a real lover-man. Must be he boasts around town bout lifting a girl’s skirts.”

“Now come on, Will,” Buchanan said.

Hadley had opened the stable doors and was hauling out the squire’s blue wagon. He glanced at Buchanan and said, “Ain’t you slit his throat yet?” and Will said, “I was thinkin of cuttin off his balls, Pa,” and Hadley said, “He ain’t got none, Will.”

He hung something on the door hasp then, little leather pouch with leather drawstrings, and came back to where Buchanan was sitting motionless, the knife still at his throat.

“I thought I told you t’slit the man’s throat,” he said to Will.

Buchanan was sure they were joking now.

He guessed.

But he was enormously relieved when they tied him hand and foot and stuck a piece of tow cloth in his mouth and wrapped a rag around that, and left him propped against the stable wall then hauled the wagon downhill.

Sean Cassada had crept through the cornfield and lay hidden now in the staghorn bushes east of the Chisholm cabin, watching the family pack the wagon. They had unhitched the mules the moment they rode into the front yard; mules were cantankerous and unpredictable, as likely to bolt as bray, and Sean surmised they wished no mishap while they were loading. They moved in and out of the cabin like a line of ants, male and female alike carrying what appeared to be all their worldly possessions and putting them into the wagon willy-nilly; or at least if there was rhyme or reason to how they loaded it, Sean could fathom none. Tinware platters, plates and mugs, candle molds and chamber pots, rifles and hunting knives all went into the wagon, each Chisholm carrying something out of the cabin, and going back into it empty-handed to return a moment later with yet another load. Wool sack coats and cotton dresses, pantaloons and buckskin pants, butcher knife and — Ah, Bonnie Sue, carrying tight against her sweet bosom a mantel clock; how often had he unfastened her bodice and reached inside to touch those tender breasts?

Will Chisholm, who had threatened to strangle him one morning outside church, was loading into the jockey box at the front of the wagon all the family’s smaller tools — axes and mallets, jack plane and adze, gimlet and augur, level and square. Gideon was lashing the family plow to one side of the wagon, Bobbo carrying shovel and spade to the opposite side. There now came Bonnie Sue from the cabin again, this time carrying three, nay, four grubbing hoes, which she handed to her brother Bobbo. She looked directly into the bushes then, and Sean was certain she’d seen him, and yet the night was so dark; had she heard the pounding of his heart? Were the Chisholms truly leaving? Sean could not believe this, and yet the evidence was there before his eyes to see: tonight he was losing his Bonnie Sue, whose breasts he had kissed, and once tickled the nipples of with a blade of grass, her skirt and petticoats up around her knees, naked beneath she was but would not let him higher than where her drawers might have reached had she been wearing any.