The Chisholms: A novel of the journey West

I Hadley

They had put out whiskey and cakes, as was the custom, and had left the cabin door wide for mourners to come and go with their condolences. By a quarter past eleven, half a dozen of the men were drunk. The women sipped more politely, but the whiskey loosened their tongues as well, and their chatter in the cabin mingled with the laughter and the loud voices and the keening of the wind outside.

It was a blustery day, for all the sky’s brightness. In April, there was early morning fog here in the mountains, but it generally burned off an hour by sun; Hadley Chisholm had watched it from the cabin window, tearing away in tatters that drifted down the valley. By the bottomlands, there were cowslips in bloom. This was springtime. You didn’t think of dying and burying when the land was turning green all around you. But they had put Hadley’s mother to rest this morning in a rock-lined grave. He had knelt beside the open grave afterward. Reached down. Picked up a handful of earth. The soil was parched and pebbly. He let it trickle through his fingers onto the pine coffin below.

Benjamin Lowery was coming across the cabin toward him. He was carrying a pewter cup in his hand, drinking whiskey from it as he navigated his way past the table in the center of the room, weaving, stumbling into a split-bottomed chair. He giggled, caught the chair before it fell to the floor, and then reeled to where Hadley was standing by the fireplace. Throwing an arm around him, he said very seriously, “Hadley, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Hadley said.

“Hadley, I’m worried about you.”

“No, I’m fine.”

“You’re not drinking, Hadley. At a time like this, Hadley, a man’s mother passes away, it’s fitting for him to have a drop. Hadley, let me get you some whiskey.”

“Ben, you needn’t bother. I’m just fine.”

“Fine then,” Lowery said, and nodded, and then caught at Hadley for support. “Hadley,” he said, “what did you think of the new preacher?”

“I’ll tell you plain,” Hadley said.

“Yes, tell me.”

“He had no right talking of her like he’d known her.”

“Didn’t know her,” Lowery said.

“Didn’t know her a damn. Put together bits and pieces of her life, is what he done. Got it from neighbors along the ridges.”

“Is just what he done,” Lowery said, and suddenly sat on the puncheon bench against the fireplace wall. The cup fell from his hand. In an instant, he was asleep. Across the room, a cluster of men laughed at a joke the farmer Henry Soames had just told. Hadley longed for a drink. Thinking of the preacher had got him mad all over again, and a bit of corn liquor would... but no, he could not afford to get drunk. He had not yet told the family of his decision, and he didn’t want it spewing out in a cloud of alcohol fumes. He quenched his thirst with anger instead, thinking again of the damn fool preacher talking about his mother like she’d never had no more life in her than a rag doll.

Had all the facts, oh yes, dug them all up and recited them like his alphabet: A is for Antrim, the county whence Eva Chisholm had come in the year 1768, the bride of young William Allyn Chisholm. B is for Boston Harbor, to which Eva’s first son had fled two months after Hadley was born. C is for Chickasaw, who had slain Hadley’s father when Hadley was but fifteen; wonder the fool preacher hadn’t mentioned that William Allyn was drunk at the time and that he and the Indian had been fighting over a black wench on the Bailey plantation.

“Loved that woman like she was my own mother,” Minerva said. “Wasn’t a day went by she didn’t tell me how beautiful I was. Which I’m not, but it was nice her saying so.”

Ah, but you are, Hadley thought, and looked at his wife where she stood with the other women, and thought of that heart-stopping moment when first he laid eyes on her. He’d been over to Cedar Creek to deliver some whiskey, saw her walking a cow along the road, big stick in her hand, humming as she ambled along. Bright summer day, hair as golden as the sunshine. Dust rising on the road. Barefooted, she was.

“Hey,” he said. “What’s a little girl like you doing with such a big cow?”

“What’s it look like I’m doing?” she said.

“Well, I don’t rightly know,” Hadley said, and smiled.

“Anyways, I ain’t little.”

Nor was she. Tallest girl he ever did see; top of her head came almost level with his eyes. Blondest damn hair, sun glinting on it. In the tall grass, flies buzzing.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Nineteen,” she said.

“You want some whiskey?”

“Nope.”

“Made it myself.”

“So who don’t?” she said, shrugging.

“Never saw nobody with eyes so green,” Hadley said.

“Well, you’re seeing somebody now.”

“That I am,” he said. “Want me to come visitin sometime?”

“Nope.”

“Want to kiss me?”

“Hah!” Minerva snorted.

Hadley smiled with the memory. He would tell her his decision later, when all the well-wishers had gone home. Tell her and the family. He did not know what to expect from any of them. He went to Minerva and put his arm around her waist. She was in the middle of a sentence; she acknowledged his presence with a brief nod.

“... said he was going to marry me. Well, Eva looked me up and down, head to toe, sitting in that rocker right there near the fire, didn’t say a word for the longest time. Then she said, ‘You’re Ian Campbell’s daughter, are ye not?’ I admitted as I was....”

Wore her hair long then, Hadley remembered, curled like a shell at the back of her neck. Hands folded in her lap, she’d nodded to his mother and said, “I’m Ian Campbell’s daughter, yes, ma’am.”

“Your father’s a scoundrel,” Eva said.

“I love him,” Minerva said.

“Aye, as a good daughter should,” Eva said. “Which makes him no less a scoundrel.” Eva smiled suddenly. “But that’s not to say I find his daughter disagreeable.”

Minerva was twenty by then. She’d returned Eva’s smile and the women had reached across to clasp hands as if they were helping each other to ford a stream. As she related the story now, tears formed in her eyes. Standing close beside her was Millie Bain, who lived not half a mile away on the ridge. She immediately put her arm around Minerva and patted her shoulder.

“Touches me every time I think of it,” Minerva said.

“Ain’t no sin to weep,” Millie said. “Thirty-some-odd years ago, and I can still remember it plain.”

“What about the time with the hoop snake?” Millie said, and laughed. She was four or five years younger than Minerva, forty-eight or — nine, Hadley didn’t know which. A short chubby woman with a dumpling face and merry blue eyes, the closest friend Minerva had in all the world. It was she had helped to deliver their first son, a breech birth it had been, Millie and Eva both struggling to bring the baby into the world. He’d been named William Allyn Chisholm in memory of the soft-spoken man who’d been Hadley’s father.

“You tell one more time about that hoop snake...” Hadley warned.

“Oh, just cause you know all about snakes,” Millie said, and laughing, shushed Hadley with one plump little hand. “It was when you was carrying Bobbo, do you recall?” she said.

“Here comes the damn hoop snake,” Hadley said, and rolled his eyes heavenward.

“Hush,” Millie said. “And we was walkin in the woods with Eva and little Gideon beside us in his pinafore. He musta been six or seven years old—”

“Five,” Minerva said, smiling.

“We was out there lookin for ratbane.”

“That’s right,” Minerva said. “Will was coughing up his innards, and we was wanting to brew him a little syrup.”

“Walking along in his pinafore, Gideon was.”

“I remember it clear.”

“Big old hoop snake came rolling across the path, Gideon hightailed it for the nearest tree.”

“Think I’ll hightail it for the nearest tree,” Hadley said.

“Now hush, Hadley,” Millie said. “Was Eva took after that snake with a grubbing hoe, yelling at Min not to even look at the ugly thing, lest the newborn babe be marked with a circle.”

“Didn’t look at it, neither,” Minerva said.

“People roundabouts claim a hoop snake can kill a full-grown tree just by sticking their tail spike in it,” Millie said.

“I don’t put much store in that,” Hadley said.

“Well, one thing you know is snakes, I guess,” Millie said.

“That’s for sure,” Hadley said, and suddenly wanted these people to be gone, friends though they were, wanted to be left alone with his family so that he could tell them the secret he had carried inside him for more than a month now. He could remember a time — but ah, the land was new then. When he was a boy, when his father was still alive and even afterward, in the years of his young manhood before he met Minerva, the land they owned on this Virginia mountaintop had been rich enough to provide them with all their needs. Not only corn, no, this had always been good corn-growing country. But beans, too, in the field the other side of the cabin, and pumpkins and pattypan squash, and peas, and watermelons on the hillside. And in the land they’d cleared of stumps and cane roots they planted flax, which later they rotted and dried and then crushed in the brake Hadley and his father had themselves built. They shook out the bits of bark they called the shoves, and then Hadley’s mother would get to work with the hackle, its iron teeth sticking out of the paddle-shaped board as she stroked and cleaned and separated the fibers into tow cloth, which was good for cleaning out rifle barrels and not much else. The finer fibers she used to spin the thread that went to make their fanciest garments. The seeds were used to make linseed oil; there wasn’t much lost in the flax plant, save for the shoves, and a field of it in flower was as breath-taking a sight as a cloudless blue sky.

Flax, aye, and corn enough to feed the squirrel, the crow, and the family besides, with bushels left over for baking bread and feeding the hogs and horses and distilling a little whiskey as well, though in those days Hadley’s father made whiskey only for the family and his still was small and hardly industrious. They grew she-corn for hominy, and sweet corn and popcorn, turnips and onions and cabbage and okra. His father even planted a small patch of tobacco, which he did not smoke, but bartered instead for things they could not grow or make. The yard in front of the cabin bustled with chickens and hogs, and there was a single milk cow, earmarked, branded, and belled; a goodly part of Hadley’s childhood was spent chasing animals out of the herbs and flowers his mother planted, shooing them away from the doorstep tansy or the lavender and chives. The land was dead now, as dead as the beloved woman they had put to rest on this nineteenth day of April.

Engulfed in sound, Hadley looked about the cabin, searching for his loved ones. He located his three sons and two daughters, and studied their faces for answers to the question he hadn’t yet asked.

It was one in the afternoon.

The mourners were gone.

“There’s somethin I’ve got to tell you all,” he said. “I been thinkin this ever since my mother took sick a month ago. I knew she was going to die this time, knew there wasn’t nothin we could do to save her, she was an old lady heaven bound, God rest her soul. And I thought when she dies, we ought to leave this place. Well, now she’s dead, we buried her this morning, we said our prayers over her grave. There’s nothin here no more but land that’s as barren as the company of the godless. I want to leave this place.”

Minerva was standing at the fireplace, near the Dutch oven. She turned to look at her husband as though he had spoken blasphemy against the dead and the living both. He caught her glance and nodded — in affirmation, or in defiance.

“Where would you have us go, Pa?” Will asked.

Will was almost thirty-two, born on the eve of The War, in June of 1812. He keenly resembled his father, with the same tall, broad-shouldered, wiry physique, the same dark blue eyes and black hair — though Hadley at the age of fifty-six already had more than a sifting of snow on the roof.

“I thought west,” Hadley said.

“Where west?” Minerva said at once. “Kentucky, do you mean?”

“Ain’t no land to be had in Kentucky, nor anyplace east of the Mississippi,” Hadley said. “I’m thinkin of California. Or maybe Oregon.”

Minerva shook her head. “No,” she said.

“There’s nothin for us here no more,” Hadley said.

“There’s home,” Minerva said.

“It ain’t home,” Hadley said. “It’s the Cassadas going to kill us if the land don’t first.”

“Ain’t the Cassadas going to kill us nor the land neither,” Minerva said. “I been on this land since I was twenty and you brought me here from Cedar Creek to marry. I can remember when that quarter acre—”

“The land is dead,” Hadley said.

“—behind the cabin would yield twenty-five bushels at the least. And I can remember when times was bad, too, during the Panic, when I already had Will and was carrying Gideon, and we lived through that, too. There’s trouble now with the Cassadas, but there’s always been trouble one kind or another, and I don’t see as picking up and moving’s going to solve nothing. You want to go west, then you just git on your horse and go, Had. Ain’t a soul on earth can stop you from doing whatever it is you want to do.”

“Pa’s right,” Will said.

“Then you go with him, too,” Minerva said. “I’m staying right here.”

“I wanted to leave this place when Elizabeth passed on ten years ago,” Will said. “Wanted to pack up and go, felt there was nothing to keep me here no more.”

“Man’s wife dies, it’s natural for him—”

“It was more’n that, Ma. It’s like Pa says. You got to kill yourself here to wrest a turnip or an onion from ground resists you all the way. Hell, Ma, you saw what—”

“Don’t you cuss in this house!” Minerva snapped.

“You saw what happened when we planted that cornfield, didn’t you? Had to work inside a ring of rifles, keep the Cassadas from blowing our heads off—”

“Almost did blow mine off,” Bobbo said.

He was seventeen, the youngest of the boys, with his father’s black hair and blue eyes, his mother’s thin nose and jaw, her sensuous mouth. There were those who said there was French blood on Minerva’s side, a Campbell back before the Indian Wars taking for his bride the daughter of a trapper. The Cassadas rumored it about maliciously that Minerva had a bit of Cherokee in her as well, discounting as though blind the hair as yellow as corn silk, the eyes as green as grass.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Now hush about that,” Hadley said.

“What do you mean, Bobbo?”

“I was on my way to town with whiskey to sell—”

“She don’t want to hear it,” Hadley said.

“I want to hear it. What happened?”

“One of the Cassadas shot at me from in the bushes. Dropped two jugs full, broke em on the ground.”

“That was hard-earned cash soakin into the earth,” Hadley said.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Thought Pa told you,” Bobbo said, and shrugged.

“You’re makin this up,” Minerva said.

“It’s the truth, Ma,” Bobbo said.

“Ma, there’s something you just got to recognize,” Will said. “If we try to touch an ear of corn we planted—”

“The feudin with the Cassadas’ll pass,” Minerva said. “A body waits long enough, everything on God’s earth’ll come to pass. Was Jeff Cassada’s mother served as granny woman when Gideon was born. I’m not forgettin that, Had.”

“That was more’n twenty years ago, Min! We’re talking about—”

“I’m saying we was fast friends then, and we’ll be friends again when the feudin is over and done with.”

“You don’t understand, Ma,” Gideon said. “The Cassadas are laying claim to that field; they’re sayin it’s theirs by deed.”

Gideon was twenty-three years old, the middle son, still as curly-haired and blond as he’d been when a baby, his mother’s legacy, wasted on his brothers. He’d been named after the Biblical son of Joash the Abiezrite because in Judges 6:15, he said to God, “Oh my Lord, wherewith shall I save Israel? behold, my family is poor in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father’s house.” Gideon was born in 1821 at the height of the Panic, Hadley believing after years of deprivation that his clan truly was the poorest in all this Godforsaken corner of Virginia. Moreover, his newborn son was surely the runt of any litter, blondy-haired and blue-eyed, skinny as a rake, truly the least in the family — so Gideon he’d been named. But he had grown to be six feet three inches tall, weighing sixteen stone, with a huge barrel chest, and muscles on his arms as hard as lightard knots. Gideon was Minerva’s favorite. She listened more closely to him now than she had her husband or her other sons.

“Ma,” he said, “I love this place as well as you, but I think Pa’s right, I think we ought to leave it. It ain’t worth spilling a drop of Bobbo’s blood nor anybody’s over even the richest land in all the valley. And, Ma, we ain’t got nothin but a mountaintop patch of dirt that was worth our lives to plant, and’ll be worth our lives to touch an ear of corn when it’s ready to pick. I say we go.”

“Can we go, Ma?” Annabel asked.

“No,” Minerva said flatly.

“We’ve got kin out there, you know,” Bonnie Sue said.

“What kin? Who told you that?”

“Pa did. Man name of Jesse Chisholm. From Tennessee.”

“I never heard of no Jesse Chisholm. You made him up, Hadley.”

“No, he’s kin sure enough.”

“Where’s he at then?”

“Texas, I suppose,” Hadley said. “I wouldn’t know him if I fell over him. Anyway, that ain’t where I plan to take this family.”

“This family’s staying right here,” Minerva said. “Was my own brother waitin out west with open arms, I wouldn’t leave Virginia.” She lifted the sole remaining log and threw it into the fireplace. She did not know what she was going to cook for the midday meal. She was close to tears, but she would not show this either to Hadley or to her sons. To her daughters she said only, “We need more wood. Going to have bread, we’ll want a fire.”

The girls had changed out of their calicos and were wearing simple linen dresses that fell tentlike and loose about their bodies. Their legs and feet were bare; they stood just inside the doorway cut between the two rooms, Bonnie Sue womanly and round at the age of fifteen, Annabel two years younger and just beginning to show buttons of breasts, both girls blond and green-eyed like their mother.

“Fetch me some kindling,” Minerva said.

There would have to be bread. With whatever they ate, there would be bread. She would bake it in the Dutch oven after she’d heated the lid and the oven itself on the fireplace coals. The bread would be corn bread, of course. But they were insisting the land was dead. And the land to her was corn.

“Min,” Hadley said. He was standing very close to her; she did not turn to look at him. She busied herself with accepting the tinder the girls brought, and placing it under the single log. They had let the fire die. They had buried a woman she loved like her own mother and had let the fire die besides. “Min,” he said, “I asked the squire how much he’d be wantin for that blue wagon of his. Be a big enough wagon to make it across the country. He said ninety dollars. We’ve put enough by to pay for the wagon and the journey, too, and get us some land besides when we—”

“You’d spend what’s taken half our lives to save?”

“I’d spend it for the next half, Min. Damn it, I’m a farmer ain’t got nothin to farm! There’s land out west. It can be bought cheap, it can be planted. I want to go. Bailey says he’ll sell us the wagon. I want to buy it, Min.”

“Do what you like,” she said, and angrily struck flint into the tinder.

The snake was not as big as some Hadley had handled; he guessed it was maybe four, five feet long — he hadn’t measured the creature, nor didn’t plan to. In his time in these mountains, he had seen every kind of poisonous snake there was, from diamondbacks, like the one in the gunnysack, to copperheads, which if you cornered one hiding in the bushes, he’d shake his tail and make them bushes buzz to stop your heart. He’d even seen a cottonmouth or gapper or trapjaw or water moccasin, or whatever you wanted to call the damn thing, swimming in the Clinch like an eel and nearly scaring him half to death.

He’d been bit by a snake only once, and that one a rattler who’d struck first and only then given warning. Hadley’d gone back to the cabin and swallowed two whole cups of whiskey and then tied a rag tight around his arm between his heart and where the snake had bit him. He poured salt on the fang marks, where the arm was beginning to rise, and then he moved the rag a bit higher on his arm when the rising started to spread. He was alone in the cabin and beginning to get a bad headache and feeling somewhat dizzy and thinking maybe he shouldn’t have drunk the whiskey, though some people hereabouts said whiskey was the only sure cure for snakebite. It was then Will came in the house and saw Hadley standing with one hand against the wall, his head bent, and went over to him fast and caught him before he fell down.

Will cut through the fang marks with a knife he’d brought back with him from the fighting in Texas. The knife had a walnut handle inlaid with silver. He sucked out the venom, and spat it on the floor, and then washed out his mouth with whiskey. He gave Hadley more whiskey to drink after he’d bandaged the wound, and then both men sat drinking till sundown, when the rest of the family got home. Hadley was drunk by then and eager to tell them all about how he’d almost died from snakebite, weren’t for Will here with his Mexican knife. But they’d all been in town watching a man used to be with the Buckley & Weeks Circus, had himself a dancing bear now, and was selling a medicine supposed to be good for curing snakebite! Never did get to tell them what had happened. When Minerva in bed that night saw the bandage and asked him what was wrong with his arm, he said he’d got bit by a rattler while she was in town watching the dancing bear, and she said, “No, you didn’t, Hadley.”

That was the first and only time he’d been bit by a rattler or any other kind of snake. It was all in knowing what to expect from the creatures, and also in knowing how to handle them if you were of a mind to pick one up. Hadley picked up most any serpent he ever saw because the way he read the Bible, it said in John 3: “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Hadley believed in the Son of man and hoped for eternal life and felt that one way to guarantee life forever was to lift up the serpent in the wilderness.

Besides, he enjoyed snakes.

Liked them better than birds, you wanted to know. All birds did was make an infernal racket in the morning when a man was trying to sleep. Messed up the front porch, too. Snakes were clean and polite, and even the poisonous ones wouldn’t strike at you less you stepped on them by accident or poked at them with a stick. The way he looked at it, snakes were the most misunderstood creatures on all God’s earth. Person saw a snake on the ground, whap, he’d hit him with a rake sure enough. Poor thing was just slithering along, trying to make a living same as anybody else. But whap came the rake, woman standing on the porch screaming with her skirts up around her knees. Afraid that old snake was going to crawl up there and get between her legs, that was the thing of it. Wasn’t no man on earth had to be fearful of reptiles, though, less his own pecker was tiny as a worm and could be put to shame by the littlest garden snake.

The bell in the rotting church steeple was tolling as the Chisholms rode into town that Sunday morning. Hadley stopped the mules in front of the open doors to let Minerva and the girls out of the cart. By the time he’d taken mules and cart around back to hitch them to the rail there, his sons had dismounted and were coming across the field, raising a cloud of dust behind them. It had not rained hereabouts for more than two weeks, but the Clinch was running swiftly nonetheless; Hadley could hear the water below, out of sight beyond the knoll. The moment his sons disappeared around the corner of the church, he lifted the gunnysack from inside the toolbox.

Three rows ahead of where Hadley took a seat inside the church, he could see his son Gideon looking across the aisle to where Rachel Lowery was sitting. Benjamin Lowery had come to Hadley one time last year and asked him what his son’s intentions were. Hadley had said, “Which son?”

“Why, Gideon,” Lowery said.

“His intentions toward what?” Hadley said.

“Toward my daughter Rachel,” Lowery said.

Hadley was no fool, he knew what had been transpiring between his son and Rachel for the longest time. But it was rumored at the livery stable — where admittedly the talk was sometimes inaccurate — that Rachel had been fornicating with half the young men in town since she’d turned fourteen, the wonder being she hadn’t borne a bastard before now and been publicly whipped for it.

“I know of no intentions he has toward your daughter,” Hadley said, and that had been that.

Yet there was Gideon staring across the aisle at her now, his intentions plain as the nose on his face. Though here in church he surely was, it was another temple he longed to enter. God forgive me, Hadley thought, and turned his attention to what the fool preacher was saying. It took him only a moment to realize young Harlow Cooper was reading from the epistle of James.

“ ‘... is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that makes peace.’ ” Cooper cleared his throat. “ ‘From whence comes wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts. Ye adulterers and adulteresses’!” Cooper said, and closed the Bible as though he were slamming a door on an intruder. “That was from the epistle of James,” he said, as though he were riding into town with fresh news. His eyes were roaming the church. Hadley remembered those eyes watering on the wind-swept ridge two days ago, when they’d buried his mother. He was surprised to find them coming to rest on him now.

“I chose this passage,” Cooper said, “because Friday morning I commended to God a woman who lived her whole life through in peace with her neighbors. I chose this passage because there has been strife in this town, neighbor against neighbor, Christians behaving toward each other in ways that are neither peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated, nor full of good fruits. I chose this passage—”

Hadley rose.

“Your Worship,” he said, using a term the congregation supposed was common currency among Papists, and causing them to snicker at once, “I wonder why you pick your Scriptures the way you do. Is it cause you’re ignorant of the word?”

“Sir,” Cooper said, “I—”

“Your Worship,” Hadley said, “I’m thinkin of what you said over my mother’s grave this Friday past. Now those words weren’t fit for the burial of a woman who—”

“Mr. Chisholm,” Cooper said, “I’m sorry if my choice of—”

“Those were words of celebration,” Hadley said, “and here in these mountains we don’t celebrate at graveside. We mourn those who’ve passed on, sir, and we were there last Friday to mourn a fine and decent—”

“I assure you, Mr. Chisholm—”

“A fine and decent woman,” Hadley said. “You should have quoted not from Psalms, but instead from Proverbs 31, where it’s written, ‘Her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her,’ and so on down to ‘She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness....’ ”

“Yes, yes,” Cooper said, and smiled out at the congregation for approval. “ ‘Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her....’ ”

“You know it well enough now,” Hadley said, “but where was it last Friday? Does it take a poor farmer to poke and prod you into recollection?”

“I assure you, sir,” Cooper said, and saw that Hadley was reaching into his gunnysack. He could not imagine what was in the sack. He had seen a rattler only once, and that one a pygmy he’d almost tripped over in the woods. But yes, Hadley Chisholm was pulling a rattlesnake out of that sack, his right hand clutched behind the head, his left arm cradling the hidden body of the snake, his thumb on one side of the jaws, the forefinger on the opposite side, the remaining fingers tight around the... neck? Did snakes have necks or did their heads suddenly become their bodies? Cooper saw the snake’s mouth opening and the fangs springing down from the upper jaw into striking position. He heard what he thought to be the sound of ominous rattling coming from inside the sack and realized in the next instant that it was only Hadley Chisholm chuckling.

“ ‘Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made,’ ” Hadley quoted. “Where in the Bible is it written?”

“Genesis 3,” Cooper said.

Hadley was standing just before the pulpit now, his eyes on the preacher, whose eyes were on the snake. “That’s very good, Your Worship,” he said. “Let’s see what else you can remember with a little poking and prodding.” As he said the word “poking,” he thrust the head of the snake toward Cooper, who backed away. “ ‘Their poison is like the poison of a serpent,’ ” Hadley quoted; “ ‘they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth...’ ”

“That’s — from...”

“Yes, Your Worship? ‘That stoppeth her ear; which will not harken to the voice of charmers...’ ”

“Psalms 58,” Cooper said.

“Psalms is correct; you know your Psalms well. It was Psalms you quoted Friday; are you nothing but a psalm singer?” Hadley said, and climbed up onto the small raised platform to stand directly alongside Cooper. The snake was rattling ferociously from within the gunnysack; Hadley’s hand still clutched firmly behind the open jaws. “Fear not the reptile,” he said, and laughed. “He’ll bite only a man who cannot tell his Scriptures. So then... ‘There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air...’ ”

“ ‘The way of a serpent upon the rock,’ ” Cooper said at once. “Proverbs 30.”

“Excellent, sir!” Hadley said. “ ‘For they cast down every man his rod...’ ”

“ ‘And they became serpents!’ ” Cooper said triumphantly, and looked at the open jaws of the snake and quickly added, “Exodus 8.”

“Exodus 7!” Hadley corrected.

“Exodus 7, just so, yes,” Cooper said. “Exodus 7.”

“It gets more difficult,” Hadley said, and brought the snake up level with Cooper’s face. “Look into them beady eyes, Your Worship. He’s waitin to bite you should you slip on the word. Now then, are you ready?”

“You know, do you not,” Cooper said, “that you are blaspheming in the house of—”

“ ‘For behold,’ ” Hadley said, “ ‘I will send serpents, cockatrices, among you,’ ” and thrust the snake forward and immediately pulled it back and said, “ The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat,’ ” and again the snake’s head came toward Cooper, who was about to say, “Jeremiah,” its jaws opening, its fangs slanting down — he swore he could see droplets of venom on them. Hadley was now quoting from Matthew, yes, the passage about “I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” The eyes of the snake glared at Cooper malevolently. He backed away, Hadley and the snake following, the snake seeming much more interested in what was happening now, possessed of a will of its own. Hadley shouted, “ ‘Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?’ ” and the snake hissed and rattled, and Cooper turned and ran from the pulpit and the platform, toward the door on the back wall of the church. He grasped for the knob, his hand slippery and wet as he tried to twist it, certain the snake and Hadley were behind him, equally certain the snake would bite him on the seat of his indignity. He somehow managed to open the door and flee. Behind him, he heard the congregation laughing. Hadley thrust the snake triumphantly into the gunny-sack and threw his head back and laughed, too.

Squire Bailey was wearing a coat of the finest blue cloth, a darker blue velvet on the lapels, opening in a V over a waistcoat of cream-colored cashmere. The collar of his linen shirt showed above the white-cascade necktie crossed over his chest and held in place with an amethyst stickpin. His trousers were full at the hips, narrow from knee to ankle, the instep cut to accommodate his highly polished boots. In his left hand he was holding a palm-leaf hat made on the island of Cuba. All in all, he looked the way his grandfather must have looked two generations back when the settlement was new and the term “squire” meant country gentleman and something more, a learned man of humor, intelligence, and charm.

He came down the church steps with a bull of a man named Jeremy Stokes, hired some three years back to oversee his sprawling plantation. Stokes had fought side by side with Andrew Jackson in the battle of New Orleans, or so it was rumored in the town, and the scar across the bridge of his nose had allegedly been put there by a British bayonet. He was decked out as splendidly as was his employer on this sunny April morning. Looking at them both as they sauntered down the church steps, Hadley could imagine them emerging from a fancy whorehouse after an hour or more of houghmagandy. Nor was the notion far-fetched; everyone in town knew that Horace Bailey’s single failing — or at least the one failing to which he openly admitted — was women. There were people in town who “Squired” him to death, bowing and scraping not in respect for his wisdom and wit, which were nonexistent, but only for the wealth he’d inherited along with his title. Hadley was not one of them.

“Good morning, Bailey,” he said.

“Good morning, Chisholm.”

Hadley took a small leather pouch from the pocket of his coat. “Here’s the ninety dollars,” he said, and jingled the coins in the pouch.

“What ninety dollars?” the squire said.

“For the wagon.”

“And what wagon is that?”

“The wagon you agreed to sell me,” Hadley said. “For the journey west.”

“I think I’d prefer keeping that wagon,” the squire said. “Mind you, I have no objections to you leaving these parts. I’m merely suggesting you do so in your own—”

“Bailey, let’s stop the horseshittin,” Hadley said. “You promised to Bell me your wagon, and I’m here to pay for it.”

“I recollect no such promise.”

“Now come on, Bailey, we talked about it last Wednesday night.”

“I recall no such conversation.”

“I rode over to the plantation, the wagon was tied to a post just this side of the barn. We agreed to ninety dollars for it. That was the price and here’s the ninety,” Hadley said, and lifted the pouch again, and again jingled the coins in it. “We’ve got a verbal contract, Bailey. We agreed on a—”

“I had a verbal contract with that young preacher Harlow Cooper, too. I promised him he’d find a God-fearing people in this town, and not the kind who’d come in the Lord’s house throwing snakes at a man. I reckon if one contract can be broken, then another can be broken just as easy. Wouldn’t you say so, Stokes?”

“I would say so, Squire.”

“In which case, good day, Chisholm.” Hadley stepped into the squire’s path, his choices multiplying like the fishes and the loaves. He could punch the squire in the nose and cause him to bleed all over his cream-colored waistcoat and fancy white tie. Or he could drag the man squealing and bawling down to the Clinch, where he would baptize him proper. Or he could...

“A contract is a contract,” he said simply.

“Go to law if you like,” the squire said, and Hadley stepped aside and allowed them both to pass.

The law he went to was the Bible.

And in the Bible, in Galatians, he found the words: “Brethren, I speak after the manner of men; Though it be but a man’s covenant, yet if it be confirmed, no man disannulleth, or addeth thereto.” The way Hadley looked at it, he’d made a covenant with Horace Bailey, and now the squire was trying to annul it. Not only was that unlawful in the manner of men, it was also in direct conflict with what was written in the Bible, which was the law of God Almighty.

The Bailey plantation was laid out so that the main house was on high ground overlooking the fields and the slave quarters to the north, the barns and stables to the south, more fields to the east. Behind the house, the ground sloped sharply to the river below; the land here was rock-strewn and scrubby, unfit for planting. But fish could be seined from the river for yet another crop, and in the wintertime ice could be cut from it and stored in one of the plantation’s three icehouses. The cotton hadn’t yet been planted; it was still a bit early. Next week sometime, or perhaps the week after, the slaves would begin putting in seeds mixed with ashes to soften the hulls and help in the growing. Everyone in these parts knew when the squire was planting his cotton. The voices of the slaves singing could be heard all up and down the valley. The fields to the east were left to wild rye for pasture; the squire owned forty-one mules and horses, three hundred sheep, and seventy-four cows. He also owned one hundred twenty-two hogs and more chickens than anyone had ever bothered to count.

At the main house, Hadley and Will peeked through guillotine windows into the room beyond, lighted with fourteen blazing tapers in a hanging brass chandelier. The squire was dining. The Chisholms had taken their supper before sundown, but neither did they have a pair of house niggers to serve them. A wainscot of what appeared to be pine stained a darker hue ran around the entire room to a height of some four feet from the pegged wooden floor. Across the room were two windows identical to the one through which they spied goggle-eyed upon the squire, each window hung with what was either calico or printed linen, they could not tell.

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.

She did not come out of the cabin again for the longest time. Sean lay there crouched in the bushes, wondering what she could be doing inside there, and then realizing when he saw her in the door with a broom that she was sweeping the place out before they left it. He recognized with a sickening lurch that the time of departure was nigh; they were truly leaving this place behind, and with it Sean Cassada’s broken heart. He could smell the choking dust from where he lay in the bushes. It rose from the wooden cabin floor in a smothering cloud; a lot of good a proper floor did except to keep out snakes, and even that not so well. Bonnie Sue stood in the doorway with the broom in her hands, and looked again into the bushes, and this time Sean opened his eyes wide to show the whites, and she nodded briefly, and he knew for certain she had seen him.

Gideon, the biggest of the lot, was leading the mules toward the wagon now. The wagon was painted a blue the color of chicory in bloom. Sean had never seen such a wagon before, a good four feet wide and half again as long, or maybe more, ten or twelve feet, he guessed, with iron tires on the wheels, and wooden bows above for a cover, but none in place now. A grease bucket was hanging from the rear axle, and Bobbo was filling it now with pine tar and pork fat; he could smell the tar clear over here in the bushes. Annabel Chisholm, who looked so much like Bonnie Sue that Sean could hardly wait for her to grow up, was climbing up into the wagon over the lowered tailgate and plopping down on the pile of quilts and pillows stacked inside near the butter churn. Old Hadley Chisholm came out of the cabin and tested the lashing on the plow and the other tools, and lifted the lid on the jockey box and looked on in there, and then tested the harness on the mules. Sean heard Gideon ask, “All right, Pa?” and Hadley nodded and went back in the cabin. When he came out again he was carrying four gallons of whiskey hugged against his chest, and he went in the cabin three more times and came out with another dozen gallons that he packed in the wagon.

Sean knew she was behind him there in the sumac even before she rested her hand on his shoulder. “Shhh,” she said, and lay down beside him, and moved into his open arms. His hands went at once to the cotton bodice she wore, his fingers unbuttoned it, he reached inside and cupped her right breast in his hand, and kissed her on the lips. His heart was beating wildly, he frantically clutched her to him and kissed her entire face, her cheeks, her nose, her closed eyes, fearful he was making too much noise, terrified Will would come thrashing into the bushes to separate them, but knowing she was leaving, and wanting to kiss her, to touch her, to hold her. He released her breast and then grabbed for it again and released it at once and lowered his hand to where the hem of her cotton skirt had climbed to her shin, and lifted skirt and petticoat both and slid his hand up over her legs. She would stop him at any minute, her brother would find them any minute, God would strike him dead with a lightning bolt, something would happen before he touched the silken softness of — he could not believe his hand was, he could not believe she had allowed, he felt a wild excitement he had never before known, and he rolled, he tried to roll her over onto her back, but she sat up instead, abruptly and swiftly, her hand clamping onto his wrist. Moving his hand from between her legs, she lowered skirt and petticoat, and then leaned into him to kiss him on the mouth. He brought his hand to the back of her head, and felt her long hair cascading over his fingers, and then her lips were on his for what he knew was the last time, she was rising, she was standing, she was smoothing her dress, she whispered, “Never forget me, Sean,” and was gone.

He lay there watching.

Hadley Chisholm sat on the wagon seat with Minerva beside him. Both girls were inside the wagon now, Bonnie Sue looking out at the bushes behind which he was hiding. On horseback out in front of the wagon were Gideon, Will, and Bobbo.

Sean thought: They’re going. She’s really leaving.

He wanted to step out from the bushes and stand on Chisholm land like the man he was and yell for them to leave Bonnie Sue behind. Yell that he loved her. But if he done that, why then Will would just turn his big old gelding around and come riding up to where Sean stood like a damn fool with tears in his eyes, and he’d as soon strangle Sean as spit on him. Else Gideon would raise his old rifle and take careful steady aim in his easy slow way and blow Sean’s brains to hell and gone.

He lay in the bushes instead and tried to get a glimpse of Bonnie Sue, but she was looking ahead, toward the front of the wagon, she was looking west. He knew he would never again see her as long as he lived, and he told himself it was important that he remember this departure, remember it as the night Bonnie Sue moved out of his life. His eyes were accustomed to the darkness now, he could see as sharply as a cat.

Minerva Chisholm turned her head for a look at the cabin. And brought her hand to her mouth. And held it there an instant, the fingertips gently touching her parted lips.

It was this Sean would remember.