The Chisholms (8 page)

Lester turned toward where Jackson stood at the rudder, the woolen cap pulled over one eye, the golden earring glinting in the sun. “Hey, captain!” he shouted. “Can we have a fistful of those beans you’re carrying?”

“For what purpose?” Jackson shouted back.

“To use for money.”

“Be a trick I’d like to see,” Jackson said. “Help yourself, but don’t go spilling them all over my deck.”

“Let’s find a spot in the sun,” Lester said, and the men rose, and Minerva rose with them. Hadley took her aside.

“What is it, Min?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Is something ailing you?”

“No,” she said.

“Then what is it? You’re clinging to me like...”

“It’s the farms and all.”

“The farms?”

“Seeing them along the river.”

“Well, Min, we’re about to play some cards here.”

“I know that.”

“There’s apt to be talk I wouldn’t want you hearin.”

“Ain’t no talk in the world I haven’t heard. Could give you some talk of my own would blister your eyeballs.”

“That’s the truth,” he said, and smiled. “But I know you don’t like cussin, Min, and there might be some if the cards run wrong one way or another.”

“I don’t mind cussin,” she said.

“That’s news,” he said.

“I suppose it is.”

“But
I
mind your hearin it. Now you set yourself down right here, and leave us play the game in peace. Be enough trouble us trying to learn it without havin to worry over every word we say.”

“Hadley...”

“Yes, Min?”

“Nothing.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” she said.

She watched them as they walked to where the beans were stored up forward in hempen sacks. Lester scooped up a hatful of them and the men went to sit in the sun on the starboard side of the boat. She was coming around the side of the cabin, thinking to find her daughters and sit with them, when Jackson stepped suddenly into her path. He was grinning wide, tobacco-stained teeth showing in the black beard, brown eyes glinting under the woolen cap tilted onto his forehead. She noticed at once that the earring was missing from his ear. He held out his clenched fist, and then opened it. The golden circlet caught the afternoon sun, glowed as though alive on his palm.

“Does she want it?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“She’ll take it,” he said, “want it or not,” and moved swiftly to where she was standing. Holding the earring between thumb and forefinger, he dropped it into her bodice. She felt it moving over her breasts, sliding down inside her petticoat. In a moment, it fell from the bottom of her skirt and clattered onto the deck.

“Ah, and I thought she might catch it between her legs,” he said, and threw back his head and laughed.

“Leave me alone,” she said.

“I think not,” Jackson said, and was moving toward her when Annabel came around the corner of the cabin.

“Ma!” she shouted. “Come look! There’s a ferry crossing the river, all red, yellow, and blue!”

“Coming,” Minerva said, and picked up the earring and threw it overboard.

On a rusted iron stove in the cabin, Minerva cooked their supper and brewed a pot of coffee from the precious two pounds she’d bought in Louisville. This was the night of the sixth; they would be in Evansville tomorrow morning. The air was almost balmy, more like August than May. On the deck outside, the men were talking with the Shenandoah farmer. Their voices drifted out over the water. From the banks of the river Minerva could hear the lowing of a solitary cow. Lifting the coffeepot from the stove, she listened, transfixed, the sound of the cow calling to mind sharply and vividly the cow Bonnie Sue had made her pet years back. Couldn’t slaughter the animal to eat when times got bad because Bonnie Sue fussed and cried at the very mention of it. Finally had to sell her for less than what they’d—

“Is she pouring?”

She whirled from the stove. Jackson was standing in the open doorway of the cabin. The deck outside was dark, the cabin itself was dark except for the cherry-red glow of the iron stove.

“I’ll have some, thank you,” he said, and went immediately toward the stove. From a shelf on the cabin wall he took down a tin cup the size of a tankard. On the side of the cup, painted in blue, were the initials J. J.

“Put the pot down,” he said.

She would not let go of the pot. The coffee had cost her fifty cents a pound, and whereas Minerva was a generation or more removed from ancestors who kept their siller in a kitchen kist, there was much of Scotland still in her blood.

“Put it down, I say,” he told her, and caught her by the wrist, moving her hand back to the stove and forcing her to put the pot down on the glowing lid. “Thank you,” he said, and poured his cup full to the brim. “Is there no sugar?” he asked.

“That coffee’s fifty cents a pound,” she said.

“Aye, coffee’s dear,” he said, drinking.

“The way you’re swilling it—”

“Shut up,” he said, and threw his arm suddenly sideward, splashing the contents of the cup onto the rough wooden wall of the cabin. “There’s for your shitty coffee,” he said. She moved around him swiftly, making for the cabin door, but he seized her from behind, and turned her to face him, and then pulled her in tight against him. His right hand closed on her buttock, fingers and thumb tightening on her flesh. He would not release her. He kept squeezing till she thought she would swoon. And when finally he let her go, he warned, “Keep your tongue in my presence, woman.”

“My husband’ll kill you,” she said. She knew nothing else to say.

“Will he?” Jackson answered, and laughed.

She did not tell Hadley.

She wondered instead what Eva Chisholm would have done, who’d fought wild Indians in the cabin that had been her home, loading rifles in the dark beside Hadley’s father. She wondered beyond that to a time when ancestors she knew only by name crossed over from Scotland to northern Ireland to fight against wolves, weather, and worse. Would Glynis Campbell have allowed an Irish widcairn to seize her bottom and hold her fast? She’d have brained him on the spot, no question of it.

Minerva had always thought of herself as a strong woman. Knew she was going to be big even when she was just coming along, always a head or two taller than any of the other girls her age. Jackson made her feel weak and puny, and she cursed him for that now, and cursed him, too, for the knowledge that the only way she could stop him from hurting her again was to stab him or shoot him. Wasn’t no other way to do it, had to handle him the way she would an animal in the woods coming at her and trying to hurt her. He was bigger than her by nature, that was the damn thing of it, that was the thing’d never change in a million years. Wasn’t no other way to protect herself against somebody his size except by hurting him back. He tried to come near her ever again, she’d
kill
him — and the Lord have mercy on her soul.

Before she went to sleep that night, she asked Will for the knife he’d brought home from Texas.

“What you need it for?” he asked.

“Lost my paring knife.”

“You going to be paring this time of night?”

“First thing in the morning,” she said.

“Well, I’ll give it to you in the morning then.”

“Give it to me now,” she said, “and be still.”

“It’s sharp as a razor, Ma,” he said, and handed her the knife.

“I’ll be careful,” she said.

She slept close beside Hadley that night, but she didn’t think that would stop a crazy man like Jimmy Jackson. Hadn’t been anything of desire or lust in the way he’d grabbed her; he’d wanted only to inflict pain. She held the knife clutched in her right hand. The slaves were singing. Their voices filled the night. From somewhere on the riverbank, the smell of fresh-cut grass wafted toward the barge. The man from the Shenandoah told his slaves to shut up, and the night was still except for the gentle slap of water against the wooden sides of the vessel, that and Hadley’s gentle snoring. She wondered if she should have told Hadley after all, let him and her sons handle the matter. She decided she was doing only what Eva Chisholm or Glynis Campbell might have done. She could not imagine either of those two women running to their menfolk for help.

Patiently, she waited.

He was suddenly there in the darkness, stretching out full length beside her. She could smell his sweat and the stench of his breath. He reached around from behind her and clutched her breast, squeezing it as fiercely as he had her buttock.

“Is she waiting?” he whispered.

“Aye,” she whispered back, and turned into his arms, and put the point of the knife against his belly. “Do you feel that?” she asked.

“Wh...?”

“It’s a knife. It’s my son’s knife he brought from Texas. It’s sharp as a razor.”

“Now... now what...?” He had already taken his hand from her breast.

“Keep away from me,” she whispered.

“I meant no...”

“Do you hear?”

“Yes, but..

“Now go.”

“Ma’m, I...”

“Go!”
she said.

He went at once. He got to his feet and tripped, and then stumbled his way toward the stern.

In the darkness, she smiled.

There were thousands and thousands of pigeons in the air. White and brown and purple-gray, they filled the sky over Evansville with a fluttering whisper of sound.

Minerva caught her breath.

“There’re more pigeons in Indiana than there are people,” Lester said. “I’ve seen them roosting in trees, the branches’ll break from their weight. Sometimes, the sky’s so full of them, you’d think it was clouds passing overhead. And when they go by, there’s a whirring of wind you can feel on the ground, and the leaves in the trees’ll shake like the rattler your husband’s got in that sack of his.”

“They’re beautiful,” Minerva said.

“Great Pigeon Creek, it’s called.”

“What’s them other birds?” Annabel asked.

“Turkey buzzards.”

“So why ain’t it called Turkey Buzzard Creek?”

Minerva kept watching the pigeons as Jackson and his crew maneuvered the broadhorn in toward the dock. Beside her, Hadley said, “You never saw nothin like that to home, did you?”

“No,” she admitted.

She watched as Hadley and the boys took the wagon and the animals ashore. The town beyond seemed a good-sized one. She was ravenously hungry and would ask if they might not take their noonday meal at an inn. As she stepped onto the makeshift gangway, Jimmy Jackson pulled his woolen cap from his head and said without a trace of irony, “Pleasure having you aboard, ma’m. Real pleasure.”

The pigeons overhead seemed wheeling in celebration.

Illinois.

Mules plodding along.
Ca-chok, ca-chok,
ca-
chok, ca-chok.
Breakfast, nooning, supper, and bed. Travelling through a countryside not so much different from the one back home where it came to houses and farms and towns you went through. Food to buy along the way, or shoot in the woods. Mostly rabbit. Hated rabbit even back home. It was, she thought, a lot like going to visit one of the neighbors a mile or so down the ridge. Except that you did it forever. And there was rain. The rain began the moment they left Evansville. It plopped on the new canvas cover, and soaked it nearly through, despite its protective coat of linseed oil. It mired the mules and the wagon wheels. It coyered the countryside with a uniform grayness that was as flat as the terrain itself.

There were three horses. Bobbo, Gideon, and Will rode them alongside the wagon. The rain was relentless. They wore their hats pulled down over their eyes, rode slumped in their saddles, swore whenever a horse lost its footing in the slime. On the wagon seat up front, Hadley and Lester sat side by side. “Ha-ya!” Hadley yelled from time to time, and the mules plodded through the mud, ears twitching. Inside the wagon, Minerva dozed. Beside her, Annabel was working on a sampler she had started before leaving home. It depicted a log cabin on a grassy knoll. There were flowers in front of the cabin door. A single fat white cloud floated in the sky above the cabin. To the left of the cabin were the words “Home Sweet Home.” To the right, Annabel had penciled in the date they’d left Virginia: April 22, 1844. In bright red thread, she was now stitching the A in April.

Leaning back against the side of the wagon, Bonnie Sue propped her journal against her knees and tried to think of something to write in it. She had bought the blankbook in Evansville, thinking maybe there’d be Indians or something in Illinois, and she could set down what they looked like and what kind of things they ate and all that. But her father showed her on the chart where there wouldn’t be Indians till they got past Independence, which was clear the other side of Missouri. First you had to go through Illinois. And Illinois was nothing but rain and a landscape as flat as the backside of a barn.

The rain riddled the wagon cover; she looked up apprehensively at a widening wet spot. Monotonously, the wagon rolled, jostling into each pothole, ridge, and rut. Annabel’s needle slipped. She pricked herself muttered, “Damn,” and glanced immediately at her mother, whose eyes were still closed. There was a drop of blood on her forefinger. She sucked at it, scowling. Up front, through the open puckered wagon cover, Bonnie Sue could hear the lulling voices of Lester and her father, melting into the steady rattle of the rain.

“... Galena in 1822,” Lester said, “when I was eight.”

“Still the west in those days,” Hadley said.

“My daddy went there hoping to make a fortune mining lead. Indians’d been stripping it from the limestone there for as long as anybody could remember. Used to pull it to the surface in deerskin bags. I can recall them still doing it that way when I was a boy. The Panic wasn’t yet over...”