The Chisholms: A novel of the journey West

II Minerva

“You think I’m going down that river, you’re crazy,” she said.

They stood on the banks of the Ohio, just above the Falls, and watched the water crashing in waves ten feet high on the rocks below. It had taken them almost two weeks to get here. They had traveled through a countryside as civilized and as settled as any back home. The trail through the Gap and across Kentucky was trafficked with farmers and merchants coming and going with produce and goods to sell. The Chisholms drank fresh milk and ate fresh vegetables. At one farm along the way, they purchased a suckling pig and roasted it that night on the banks of a stream. Wherever there was a barn, they asked a farmer for permission to spend the night in it. Sometimes they were asked to pay a little something for the roof over their heads. More often than not, the people living along the road were generous and hospitable. Two weeks to get here, Minerva thought. That meant it’d take only two weeks to get right back where they belonged.

“Person’d drown out there in a minute,” she said.

“There’re channels go through,” Will said.

“I don’t see no channels,” she said, and took a step back from the edge, refusing to look again at the river below, boiling with logs and stumps and broken steamboat paddles.

“You son’s been here, he knows this damn river,” Hadley said.

“Cussin ain’t about to get me on no vessel intendin to come down that waterfall. Wild Indians couldn’t—”

“There’s chutes, Ma,” Will said. “You go through one of the chutes.”

“I don’t care if there’s chutes or channels or secret underwater passages known only to the men who founded this garboiling town. I want to go home, Hadley. First thing in the mornin, I want to turn around and go home.”

“First thing in the mornin, we’re going west,” Hadley said.

“You’re goin west maybe,” Minerva said.

“We’re all goin west,” Hadley said.

“You went over these falls, Will?”

“You don’t go over them, Ma. You go through them, sort of. I took a skiff downriver, and then got on a steamboat in Shippingport.”

“Then let’s us get on a steamboat downriver, too,” Minerva said.

“Cost too much,” Hadley said, and shook his head.

“How much?”

“Fourteen dollars apiece almost. Plus whatever they’d charge for the wagon and animals.”

“Doubt if they’d even take those aboard, Pa,” Will said. “Weren’t none on the steamboat to N’Orleans.”

“Hadley,” she said, “I’m goin home. If I got to hire out to a traveling circus...”

“Min...”

“As a trapeze artist or a bearded lady...”

“It ain’t really dangerous,” Will said. “The current’s fast, and the river changes width a lot....”

“I’m sure happy to hear that,” Minerva said.

“And there’s islands and rocks all along the way...

“Soundin better all the time.”

“But look down below there, Ma. Look at all them kinds of craft floatin on the river down there. Now they made it safe through the Falls, didn’t they? Ain’t no reason we can’t do the same.”

Below, there were flatboats and keelboats, galleys and barges; bateaux, pirogues, dugouts, and skiffs; scows and arks and rafts and canoes; steamboats and schooners and even brigs that had sailed from Europe. She could scarcely name a third of the vessels she saw down there on the river, but the very profusion of them filled her with a new dread. Even if they did make it safely over the Falls — or through them, as her son insisted — wouldn’t they then collide with one or another of the craft below, so clotted was the river?

“No,” she said, and shook her head.

“Let’s find a livery stable,” Hadley said, and sighed.

The city frightened her as much as had the river.

Back home, she knew what to expect, there were no surprises. You came into town on a wide dirt road lined with board-and-batten buildings. There were several smaller dirt roads branching off it on either side, likewise lined with wooden structures, some of them dating back to the time of the first settlement. The town proper started just beyond the branch to Bristol. The wide main street of the town was, in fact, the old Wilderness Road itself. They had followed it west when they left on the twenty-second — she would never forget that date — and it had taken them clear to the Cumberland Gap. There were four hundred some-odd people (“some of them mighty odd,” Hadley said) in the town Minerva called home. There were twenty thousand here in Louisville.

The noise alone was enough to make her ill.

She hurried her daughters along the sidewalks, clinging to their hands, one on either side of her, fearful they would all be trampled underfoot if they did not keep pace with a population that rushed and pushed and jostled shoulder to shoulder everywhere around them. The sidewalks were lined with lampposts. The streets were paved with limestone blocks. In the streets there were men riding horses, jackasses, and mules. Carriages and coaches clattered and rattled, carts and wagons rumbled by — it was worth a person’s life to try crossing to the other side! Here now came a burly black man pushing a wheelbarrow and shouting to another man lounging in the doorway of a saloon. The city was a blur of noise and motion, horses neighing and mules braying, peddlers shouting their wares to passers-by, delivery men banging crates on the sidewalk, even babies bawling louder than any Minerva had heard in her life. The din everywhere called to mind for sure the passage in Revelations, where John beheld a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his head, and his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did not cast them to the earth, and none of that could have made more commotion than was here in this noisy, noisome city of Louisville, Kentucky.

The girls wanted to dawdle, oohing and ahhing over whatever caught their fancy in shopwindows along the way. But Minerva briskly pulled them along past silversmith and coppersmith, tailor shop and pharmacy, a saddlery selling fancy Spanish saddles for forty dollars each, a furniture store and three mercantile stores, one of them advertising dry goods from Boston and New York. They rushed past theaters and dining rooms, taverns and more saloons than a thirsty man could drink his way through in a year. When at last Minerva found a store selling the staples she needed to replenish their dwindling supplies, she threw open the door as though she and her daughters were being chased by highwaymen, and closed it immediately behind her.

Silence.

Blessed silence.

The proprietor was a ruddy-faced man with a bald head; he regarded the three of them with mild amusement, his eyes twinkling behind gold-rimmed spectacles, a faint smile on his mouth. Minerva suddenly saw herself through his eyes — she was scared of this city, and was certain her fear showed on her face. The man’s smile annoyed her because she felt it indicated ridicule or pity, and she could abide neither.

“What do you find so amusing?” she snapped.

“Ma’m?” he said, and his eyes popped open wide behind his glasses, and she knew she’d made an error in judgment, and blushed as she hadn’t since she was Bonnie Sue’s age. In apology, she told the truth. “The streets frighten us,” she said.

“Not me,” Annabel said.

“Hush,” Minerva said. “We’re far from home, and have never seen a city this size.”

“It’s a good city,” he said, “though the waters are stagnant and the inns infested with varmints. Will you be staying at one of the hotels?”

“No,” Minerva said, “but much obliged. Is that coffee I spy?”

“That’s coffee.”

“How much the pound?”

“Fifty cents.”

“Fifty cents!” she said.

“That’s not a bad price,” he said.

“It’s an outrageous price. Back home I can get it for thirty.”

“It’s been thirty-eight here, even before it got scarce.”

“I’ll need it anyway,” Minerva said. “But you couldn’t do better with a pistol and a mask on your face.”

The man laughed.

“We’re going west,” Annabel said.

“Are you now?” he said. “How many pounds will you be wanting, ma’m?”

“Make it two. But just,” she said. “We’re not going west, Annabel.”

“Sure we are,” Annabel said.

“Where west, young lady?”

“California,” Annabel said.

“Or Oregon,” Bonnie Sue said.

“‘We haven’t decided yet,” Annabel said.

“We’re going home, is where we’re going,” Minerva said.

“And wise you’d be. How are you for corn-meal, ma’m?”

“How do you mean wise?”

“You’d be foolhardy to attempt the trip this time of year.”

“The Falls, do you mean?”

“Well, the Falls aren’t so bad. I’m talking about running into snow in the mountains. Did you say meal?”

“Five pounds,” Minerva said. “What snow?”

“In the Rockies. You’re late starting. Were you hoping to meet a wagon train in Independence? Cause they’re all gone by now, you see, and there’s nothing would please the Indians more than to come across a lone wagon on the prairies. Those bloody savages’ll—”

“You needn’t worry,” Minerva said. “We’re going—”

“—scalp your menfolk, burn your wagon, steal your horses, take you and your daughters captive.... How are you for molasses?”

The saloon was a long narrow room with a bar along one side of it and a cluster of tables at the far end. A mounted elk’s head was hanging in the center of the far wall, and there were five or six men looked like tough customers sitting at the tables there drinking hard liquor. Gideon and Will stood at the bar, drinking beer, three or four other men ranged along the bar beside them. A mirror framed in dark wood hung behind the bar, together with some portraits of what looked like riverboat pilots. There was also a picture of a showboat called the Delta Maiden, with a black dwarf wearing a checked suit and a straw skimmer, standing on the dock alongside the paddle wheel.

“Man was all out of linchpins,” Will said, and shook his head.

“Kingbolts, too,” Gideon said.

“You’d think a town this size...”

“I just hope Pa had better luck finding a cover.”

“We could maybe still get the chain and rope we need.”

“We’d do better in Evansville, I’m thinkin.”

“Or maybe Independence.”

“We ever make it that far.”

The man standing at Gideon’s elbow suddenly turned to them and said, “Excuse me, gentlemen, but if you plan to stock a wagon, it’s Independence will be better.”

He looked to be about Gideon’s age, maybe a year or two older, handsome enough fellow with black hair partly hidden by the blue felt wide-brimmed hat he wore tilted over his forehead. His eyes were a brown the color of wild ginger, and he was smiling now and showing teeth that had never once been yellow.

“Cause Independence is the jumping-off place,” he said. “That is, if you was planning on going west.”

“We was,” Gideon said.

“My name’s Lester Hackett,” the man said, and extended his hand.

“Gideon Chisholm,” Gideon said, and shook hands briefly and cautiously. “My brother Will here.”

Will nodded.

“You’re startin a bit late, though,” Hackett said. He was leaning casually against the bar, one elbow on the polished mahogany top. The saloon was a drab and dreary place; he twinkled in it like a blue jay flashing through the tree-tops. Dressed in blue from tip to toe: the blue felt hat, and then a blue jacket with velvet collar and cuffs, blue string tie hanging over the front of his ruffled shirt — only thing wasn’t blue on him, that and the brown boots. “Trains start making up late April, early May.”

“That’s what this is,” Gideon said. “Early May.”

“May the third, you want to know,” Will said. He resented Hackett’s intrusion. Back in Virginia, strangers didn’t come breaking in on tavern talk unless they were politely wanting directions to Bristol or Fincastle or westward to the Gap.

“The third it is, right enough,” Hackett said, and nodded. “But in Evansville downriver, it’s already the sixth. And in Independence, which is clear the other side of Missouri, it’s now the middle of June.”

“I don’t follow you,” Will said.

“I’m telling you, sir, that with any luck you’ll reach St. Louis by the end of the month, and you’ve got to figure at least another two weeks on top of that for the trip to Independence. That’ll put you the second week in June. All the trains’ll have left a month or more before you get there.”

“There’s bound to be some late travelers,” Gideon said.

“Not likely,” Hackett said.

“We’ll find some.”

“There’ll be none left, Mr. Chisholm. You did say Chisholm?”

“I said Chisholm.”

“Gideon, was it?”

“Gideon.”

“Gideon, I’m telling you they’ll have gone long since. You’ll not find anyone foolish enough to risk snow in the Rockies. They’ve got to be well beyond them before the fall. You get snow sometimes early as the middle of September. You got any idea how many miles you’re talking about? Where do you plan on heading? Is it California or Oregon?”

“We ain’t decided yet,” Will said.

“Well, sir, when do you hope to make your decision, would you tell me? When the Indians have scalped all in your party and are dancing on your graves?”

“I don’t see as that’s any business of yours, sir.”

“Pardon me then,” Hackett said, and turned away.

“Besides, sir, how do you know so much about the journey west?”

“Let it pass,” Hackett said, his back still to them. “It’s no business of mine, you’re right, sir.”

“You’re the one as opened the discussion,” Gideon said.

“And I’m the one as now is closing it,” Hackett said, but turned to face them again. “Thank you, gentlemen, for passing the time of day with one who’s only been guiding parties west since the year 1837, and who’s familiar not only with Independence as a jumping-off place, but also with Westport and Fort Leavenworth, and St. Joe fifty-five miles to the northwest.”

“If you’re a guide,” Will said, “you’d best be hurrying, Mr. Hackett. It’s already the middle of June in Independence.”

“Well put, sir,” Hackett said, and began laughing. “Well put. I’ve already missed the wagons this year for sure. Believe me, were it not for business I’ve had here in Louisville, I’d have been somewhere on the Missouri border this very minute. This is when the trains are leaving, friends. You’ll be late by a month when you get there. Take the advice of a well-meaning stranger. Go back to where you’ve come from.” He lifted his whiskey glass, drank, smacked his lips, and then wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Where might that be? I’d guess someplace upriver if it wasn’t for the sound of your voices. That’s neither Ohio nor Pennsylvania I’m hearing.”

“It’s Virginia,” Gideon said.

“Then you’re less than two weeks from the Gap. Turn around. Go back.”

“We’ve come this far—”

“This far?” Hackett said. “Why, when you get to Independence, you’ll still have two thousand miles to travel before you reach the west coast, whether it’s Oregon or California you choose. Turn around now and save yourselves a lot of grief.”

“I think not,” Will said, and shook his head. “Then let me buy you both a drink,” Hackett said. “For you’re either heroes or madmen, and I’ve never before met either.”

It was late afternoon and the lamplighter was making his rounds. Behind the glass panels on top of each post, the lamps sputtered into light, flickered, and then began to glow more boldly, casting warm circles onto the sidewalk. The city seemed less frightening now. The crowds had thinned, there was less traffic and less noise.

The wooden sign outside the hotel creaked in a brisk breeze blowing in off the river. The grocer had warned Minerva that the hotels in Louisville were bug-infested, but she didn’t plan to sleep here, and besides, the sign told her that a woman was the proprietor. Laden with groceries, she marched her daughters through the lobby to the front desk. A clerk there was writing something into a leather-bound book. She waited till he was finished.

“I’m lookin for Alice Pierson,” she said.

“Yes?” the clerk said.

“Yes. Is there an Alice Pierson here?”

A woman in her sixties, sitting and reading a newspaper in a chair near the desk, looked up sharply and said, “I’m Mrs. Pierson. What is it?”

“Are you the one whose name is on the sign outside?”

“That’s me,” the woman said. She had not risen from the chair. Her hair was white, and she wore a long black dress, four strands of pearls draped over her bosom. She looked up at Minerva and the girls along the length of a nose too long for her face.

“Is it you that’s proprietress of this place?” Minerva asked.

“It is,” Mrs. Pierson said.

“Then my daughters and I are wantin baths.”

“Put your parcels down,” Mrs. Pierson said, getting out of the chair. “We’ll find you some tubs and hot water.”

“How much will it be for each of us?”

“Fifteen cents for a bath and clean rinse.”

“Does soap come with it?”

“How else would you get the grime of travel off you?”

“Ah, is it that plain then?” Minerva said.

“Where are you coming from?”

“Virginia. And headin back in the morning.”

“Take your bath first,” Mrs. Pierson said.

In three wooden tubs, they soaked luxuriantly, washing their hair with scented soap, pouring buckets of hot water over their slippery bodies, watching the suds cascade away as frothily as had the Falls of Ohio. To think of even attempting those Falls! No, she was armed with knowledge now; the storekeeper had given her priceless information. Hadley might be stubborn sometimes, but he was never foolhardy or wasteful. It would be senseless to continue on to Independence with no hope of finding a wagon train when they got there. What was the point of risking the Falls and then trekking clear across the state of Illinois, only to reach a town on the edge of nowhere, with nowhere to go from it? Be like getting to a party a day late. Hadley would see the foolishness of it, she was certain of that.

She would talk to him when she got back to the livery stable. He’d made arrangements to spend the night there. Wouldn’t be nothing like sleeping in a fine hotel, but at least it was a roof over their heads, and besides, who but a rich man could afford the prices in this city? She’d seen a sign in the window of an inn, said breakfast, dinner, or supper could be had for twenty-five cents. But it was costing them forty cents to corn and hay each of the animals! Shouldn’t complain, she supposed, since the family would be sleeping there as well, free of charge. Man said it’d be all right to cook their supper in the yard outside, too. Be good to get back home again. Cook inside her own house, take a bath in front of her own fire, have a cup of hot sassafras tea afterward, crawl into bed under quilts Eva Chisholm had made, bless her heart.

The clock on the wall read ten minutes past four; they would have to be hurrying back. Minerva got out of the tub and began drying herself with one of the towels Mrs. Pierson had provided. Bonnie Sue was lying back in her own tub, her knees islands in the water, eyes closed, hair trailing over the tub’s wooden sides.

“Bonnie Sue?” Minerva said. “Got to go now.”

“Mmm,” Bonnie Sue said.

“Come on now, honey.”

Across the room, Annabel had already dried herself and was putting on her underdrawers.

“Bonnie Sue?”

“I could stay in this tub forever.”

“You can take baths aplenty when we get home.”

“Are we really goin home, Ma?”

“You heard that man, didn’t you? Indians’d eat us alive, we got out west there.”

“Mmm,” Bonnie Sue said.

“Out of that tub — come on now.”

From across the room, Annabel said, “Mama, there’s blood in my drawers.”

“Let me see,” Minerva said. She put down the towel, pulled her petticoat over her head, and then walked barefooted to where her daughter was scrutinizing the underdrawers. Minerva took them from her.

“Is it the pip coming?” Annabel asked.

“Looks like the start of it, sure enough,” Minerva said.

“Whooooop-eeeee!” Annabel shouted, and began dancing around the room naked, twirling her towel over her head, and setting the oil lamps to shaking.

“Ain’t nothin but a lifelong chore,” Bonnie Sue said from her tub. “I got mine when I was twelve.”

“It’s nothin to grieve about,” Minerva said, “nor nothin to rejoice in neither.”

“Just a lifelong chore,” Bonnie Sue repeated.

“Get on out of that tub. I’ll find somethin for you to bind yourself, Annabel. You’d best wear the stained drawers till we get back to the livery stable.”

Annabel danced around her sister as she got out of the tub. Then suddenly, she stopped dead still, and looked at her mother, and asked, “Can I have babies now?”

“You ain’t careful,” Minerva said.

“I’ve been guiding parties west for seven years now,” Lester Hackett said. “Made the trip to the coast and back a total of five times. It’s not difficult, if you do it right. You’re planning to do it wrong, lads.”

They’d been drinking steadily for the past hour or more. There was a glazed expression on Gideon’s face, but he still seemed to be listening intently to every word Hackett uttered. Will had lost interest long ago. Across the room, a painted whore had taken a seat with three tough-looking men appeared to be desperadoes. Every now and again, a garter flashed. Made Will wonder when it was he’d last had a woman.

“Are you Irish?” Hackett asked.

“Who?” Gideon said.

“You,” Hackett said.

“Are you?”

“Isn’t everybody?” Hackett said, and laughed.

“By way of Scotland,” Gideon said. “Scotch-Irish.”

“That’s decent, too. Long as you’re not Dutch. Let me buy you another drink. Whereabouts in Ireland?”

“County Antrim.”

Six graves on that ridge now, Will thought. Grandma Chisholm from County Antrim, alongside her husband William Allyn; my two brothers born after me who never saw the light of day; and my wife and baby.

“Would you like to know how I happened to miss the wagon trains west?” Hackett asked.

“How?” Gideon said.

“I came to Louisville in pursuit of a poker game heading downriver on a steamboat out of Cincinnati. Came from Carthage with four hundred dollars in cash, hoping to build it into a small fortune I might invest in California. Lost all of it save thirty dollars. Would’ve lost the thirty, too, hadn’t had it tucked in a pocket I rarely use.”

“That’s a lot of money,” Gideon said.

“Lost my pocket watch besides, and a ring my daddy willed to me, not to mention a horse and saddle, a fine Kentucky rifle with brass and silver inlays, and a pair of Spanish pistols.”

“That’s a lot of money,” Gideon said again, as though he’d completely missed Hackett’s listing of all the other things he’d lost.

“I’ve got three dollars and fifty cents to my name,” Hackett said. “Do you know what I plan to do with it?”

“What?” Gideon asked.

“Drink it away in this fine saloon with you two Irish gents from Virginia.”

“Scotch-Irish,” Gideon said.

“Aye, after which I’ll wander down to the Falls and throw myself in the river.”

“No, you won’t,” Gideon said, and grinned.

“Yes, I will,” Hackett said, and grinned back at him.

Died when she was eighteen, Will thought, her and his newborn daughter both, the baby gasping out her final breath scarce before she’d taken her first, Elizabeth suddenly raising her head from the pillow to search the room for him, seeing him, reaching out her hand to him — and then falling back again on the pillow, dead. He’d gone to stand alone behind the cabin, shouted his rage to the universe, and then wept in the night till his father came up beside him and, weeping too, put his arm around him, and led him inside, and put him to bed.

“Here’s what I’ll do for you,” Hackett said. “Drink up,” Gideon said.

“Cheers,” Hackett said. “If you’re mad enough or courageous enough to want to continue west after all I’ve told you—”

“Ma wants to go home,” Gideon said.

“And right she is. But what does Pa say? Is there a father with you here in Louisville?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. Hadley Chisholm himself.”

“Here’s to Hadley Chisholm then.”

“Here’s to him then,” Gideon said.

“What does he say?”

“About what?”

The question took Hackett aback. He stared at Gideon. Gideon stared back at him. “About what?” Hackett said.

“That’s right,” Gideon said, and drank.

In the middle of a chore, he’d remember something he wanted to ask Elizabeth. He’d start back for the cabin thinking to find her there, and remember suddenly that she was dead and gone, he could no more talk to her again than he could move mountains. And he’d start to crying. His hand on the plow or the ax, he’d cry. Annabel was but three years old then; she came up to him in the field one day, blond little thing in a pinafore had been her sister’s.

“Will,” she said, “you has got to stop.” Sobbing, he said, “I know, darlin.”

And she said, “Cause my heart is broke when I hear you weep.”

The whore cut loose with a laugh deep from her belly. Frizzy-haired brunette, he could smell her perfumed tits clear across the saloon. One of the men at the table had his hand on her leg, just below the garter, squeezing her white-powdered thigh. She laughed again, and Will thought suddenly of all the whores he’d fucked from Texas clear back to Virginia when he’d finished fighting with Lamar. Gone there to forget Elizabeth, something he never could have done in a million years anyway. Rode through the Gap and across Kentucky to right here in Louisville, this was in April of ’36 — he’d left home soon as news of the Alamo massacre reached Virginia. Down the Ohio to where it joined the Mississippi, and then on to New Orleans. Caught up with the Texas cavalry on the nineteenth, rode two days with them to the San Jacinto ferry, where Houston was waiting to ambush the Mexicans.

A Georgian was commanding the cavalry. Will almost laughed out loud when he heard the man’s name — Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar. In the grove of oak trees there was the low whinny of horses, the pawing of hoofs, and then a sudden hush. Will heard someone whisper, “There they are,” and then Lamar gave the order to charge. Saw more damn blood that day. Fucked his way back to Virginia. Fucked every whore he ever met on the way back. Couldn’t forget Elizabeth and neither could he forget ten thousand men yelling, “Remember the Alamo!” Sabers slashing. Blood on the neck of his raindrop gelding. Fucked every whore.

“Does your Pa want to continue on west?”

“Oh, yes,” Gideon said.

“Then here’s my proposition,” Hackett said. “I’ll guide you to St. Louis. How’s that sound?”

“Sounds good,” Gideon said.

“No charge,” Hackett said. “Free of charge. Just tuck me in the wagon someplace, and give me a little bit to eat every now and then. How’s that sound?”

“Sounds very good,” Gideon said. “How’s that sound, Will?”

“I’m sorry,” Will said. “I wasn’t listenin.”

“Help you find a vessel to take you down the Ohio, and then guide you to St. Louis,” Hackett said. “I’ve got friends there’ll get me a job. Once I earn myself the price of a good horse, which I figure to be about a hundred fifty dollars including a bridle and saddle—”

“That’s a bit high,” Gideon said. “High by twenty dollars, I’d say.”

“No, that’s the price in St. Louis.”

“Back in Virginia—”

“Well, maybe a hundred forty.”

“A hundred thirty, Lester.”

It seemed to Will that time was their chiefest enemy. He did not want to go back to Virginia; there was nothing for him there but painful memories and tavern whores. But neither did he want to cross Indian territory alone. If the wagon trains had already left or were leaving, then the best they could hope for was to catch up somewhere along the trail beyond Independence. If Hackett could help them save time, then he’d be worth all the food he could eat between here and St. Louis.

“About your proposition,” Will said.

“What proposition is that, Will?”

“The one you just put to us. About—”

“Whatever it was, I’ve got a better one,” Hackett said. “Now you may have noticed that sweet young lady across the room, who happens to have a dozen or more sisters down the line. Why don’t we ask her to take us three little darlins home?”

“Sounds good, Lester,” Gideon said, and clapped him on the back. “Let’s go get some women, Will.”

“Let’s go get some coffee,” Will said.

Last thing on earth she wanted was a fight with her son.

She’d convinced Hadley, told him everything the storekeeper had told her, and of course he’d seen the sense of it, and had agreed to turn back. Now here was Will with a stranger who’d offered to guide them to St. Louis.

Supper was cooking in the yard outside the stable, the rich aroma of frying pork blowing in to mingle with the stench of horses, mules, hay, and manure. It was cold in the stable, but they kept the doors cracked a bit anyway; the stink would have been intolerable otherwise. Lester Hackett was smoking a long cigar, his booted feet up on the watering trough, his hat tilted back on his head.

“What I can get you is a broadhorn,” he said. “Now what she is, she’s similar to a flat-boat, but not quite so crude. She’s got a deck, and a cabin for the ladies to set in, but she’s only got two men handling the long oars — that’s where she gets her name — and the patroon at the rudder in back, and that’s it. The patroon I have in mind is a man named Jimmy Jackson, no relation to the former president. Patroons is what they call these riverboat captains. He owes me a favor; I think I can get him to take the wagon and the entire party for an even twenty dollars. That’s inexpensive, if you know riverboat prices.”

“Would that be all the way to Evansville?” Will asked.

“Yes,” Lester said. “I’ve not talked to him, yet, mind you, but I’m sure that’ll be the destination and the price.”

“That’s very nice, Mr. Hackett,” Hadley said, “but it happens we ain’t goin to Evansville. Where we’re goin is back to Virginia.”

“Now who in hell decided that?” Will said.

“You cuss one more time in this house—”

“It ain’t but a stable, Ma,” Will said. “Who went and decided we’re turnin around?”

“I did,” Hadley said. “I’m still head of this family, son, and I ain’t about to lead it into danger. Now I know it cost us a penny to get here, but what I plan to do is sell the whiskey we brung with us, make up the loss that way. You know what kind of prices they’re getting here?”

“Pa, I found us a man can get us to St. Louis in no more’n ten days,” Will said. “Ain’t that right, Lester?”

“That’s right.”

“And if we travel fast when we leave Independence—”

“Wagon trains’ve already left Independence,” Minerva said.

“I know that, Ma. But we can catch up with them, ain’t that right, Lester?”

“It can be done, yes,” Lester said.

“Common rum’s selling for four dollars a gallon here,” Hadley said. “Brandy’s fetchin six. I want to sell my whiskey high, and head back home fore the Cassadas take over my still. That’s what I want to do,” Hadley said.

“Aye,” Minerva said, and nodded.

“Let’s put it to a vote,” Will said.

“We don’t need no vote. I already decided,” Hadley said.

“There’s others in this family,” Will said.

Hadley looked at his son.

“Yes, Pa,” Will said. “I got a life, too. I want to go west. I want to start livin my life, Pa.”

Hadley looked at him a moment longer. Then he turned away and said, “Go on and vote then.”

“Pa?”

“I said go on and vote.”

“What’s your say?”

“You know my say. I want to go home.”

“Ma?”

“Aye. Home.”

“Gideon?”

Gideon looked into his father’s eyes.

“West,” he said.

“Bobbo?”

“West.”

“Bonnie Sue?”

“West.”

“Annabel?”

“West.”

“I vote west, too,” Will said, and paused. “Pa?” he said.

“I heard it,” Hadley said, and walked suddenly to the wagon and pulled his gunnysack from the toolbox. Moving to where Lester was standing all fine and fancy in his frills, Hadley said, “You’ve been west and back a dozen times, is that it?”

“Five times, sir,” Lester said.

Minerva watched. She knew what was in the gunnysack. She suspected that Lester knew as well, though there was no sound from inside the sack, nothing to betray the coiled cool secret within. She’d heard that some men could smell the presence of danger, and she watched Lester’s eyes now and saw something other than intelligence sparking them, saw too the slight flaring of his nostrils. He either knew there was a rattlesnake inside that sack, or else he was reacting to Hadley’s stance and manner. Whatever was in that sack, Lester was sniffing hostility in the air, over and above the strong stench of horse sweat and mule dung.

“Five times or six, there’s small difference,” Hadley said. “What I’m driving at is I’m sure you’re a man skilled in the ways of the trail.”

“That I am, sir,” Lester said. His eyes were still on the sack.

“And being skilled in the ways of the trail, I’m sure you’ve many times seen what I’ve got right here in this old sack.” Hadley opened the sack, and reached into it, and came out with his hand clutched behind the rattler’s head. He squeezed gently and the jaws gaped wide.

Lester looked at the snake. “Yes, sir,” he said, “but of the western variety.”

“A brother or a cousin, aye,” Hadley said.

“It might be put that way.”

“Have a closer look at him,” Hadley said, and put the snake down on the hay-strewn floor, directly at Lester’s feet. The moment he released his grip, the snake began rattling and hissing.

Lester took a step to the right just as the snake struck, its fangs sinking into the leather of his left boot. The snake withdrew, was slithering into an S as Lester moved swiftly behind it and reached down and grabbed it back of the head, just as Hadley had done when pulling it from the sack not two minutes before. Lester was smiling. He lifted the snake up close to his face, the jaws gaping wide, venom dripping from the fangs. Looking into the snake’s mouth, he said, “Shall I break his back, sir, or did you still want him for a pet?”

The barge — for such she was, there was no disguising her name or her plainness — was carrying downriver a full load of flour and hemp, feathers, and soap, pork in bulk, dried beans, ginseng and Seneca oil, seven score chickens in cages, and a dozen slaves in chains. The slaves huddled near the stern, peering at the churning river below, wailing and moaning in despair — or else praying; Minerva couldn’t tell which. The Ohio was full; it had been raining on and off in Louisville for the past two weeks. Otherwise they could not have come through the chute on the Kentucky side, impassable when the river was low. The current was swift, too, the water choked with floating debris, jutting logs, pieces of timber buried in the silt below. Another barge had broken up on the rock ledge stretching across the river, and the sight of it did little to calm Minerva’s fears. She squeezed her eyes shut as they approached it, and then opened them again immediately when she heard Jimmy Jackson’s voice over the noise of the Falls.

“Is she afraid of the river?” he shouted.

“Mind your steering!” she shouted back.

“I’ve made this trip a thousand times before! I can do it blindfolded!”

“Do it in silence, would you please!”

“The drop’s but twenty-two feet—”

“Look out!” she yelled.

The barge veered sharply away from an island midriver. Jackson laughed. Behind them, the Falls pounded and roared. The slaves were moaning in unison now, a dirge that drowned out the cackling of the chickens in their cages. Over the moaning and the clucking and the braying and the pawing, Minerva could hear the patroon still laughing.

Then suddenly, all was still.

They had come through the passage alive; miraculously, it seemed to her. She looked ahead to where one of the slaves, a buxom girl in a hempen dress, was staring out over the river. The moaning had ceased now. The slaves were as silent as the water through which the boat moved.

“See those steamboats ahead?” Will said.

“Aye,” Minerva said.

“That’s Shippingport.”

“Is she still frightened?” Jackson yelled.

“What’s wrong with him?” Hadley asked. “Is the man daft?”

“It would seem so,” Minerva said, puzzled.

She had never met a man the likes of Jimmy Jackson.

He was six feet four inches tall, and weighed two hundred and eighty pounds. As bearded and as shaggy as a grizzly, he made even huge Gideon seem small beside him. He wore a shirt with the sleeves cut off so that his massive arms were free to tug and pull at the rudder. His trousers were too small for his enormous bulk; they stretched tight across his thighs and groin and were short by at least four inches, his thick hairy shins showing between the trouser bottoms and the high tops of his shoes. He stood grinning out over the water, his face and his beard wet, a soggy woolen cap pulled down over his forehead, a small gold earring in the lobe of his right ear.

Minerva suspected he’d been flirting with her on the trip through the Falls, suspected she’d been flirting back a bit — but only the way she did when there was a barn-raising or a baptism, and everyone was feeling gaysome. Even then, it was “Jeremy, that’s the brightest cravat I ever did see. Was you plannin to start a fire?” Bantering more than flirting. On the ridges where she’d lived all her life, a man’s wife was respected by the men who were his neighbors, and passing strangers were careful not to cast glances that might be taken wrong. Minerva was fifty-three years old, and the banter she enjoyed was no more akin to darting eyes and flashing ankles than was a possum to a skunk. Liked sassing a man, liked to hear him sass her back. The tone she’d used with the patroon was the same she’d have used with Benjamin Lowery in his mercantile store if he’d tried to charge two dollars a yard for calico instead of a dollar seventy-five. Her best friend, Millie Bain, was the biggest flirt she knew, carried on with the greengrocer like it was a royal romance, batting her lashes over the peaches and pears, enough to make Minerva blush clear across the shop. Harmless, though. There wasn’t a woman on the ridges had ever...

Well, yes, Charity Lewis, who’d come from England three years before, and who’d lived up to her name when it came to bestowing favors. Andy Lewis never did know what was going on till he came back home one day and found six brawny young men sitting on the front step of his cabin. Wanted to know what was going on here. Fellows didn’t know this was Charity’s husband. They’d rode over from Damascus, where the news had already spread there was a lady doing things up there on the ridges. Came clear from just this side the Tennessee line, across Copper River and over Copper Ridge. Andy Lewis stood there asking them what this was all about, six hulking fellows sitting on his step. One of them told Andy they were waiting their turn with the English lady. Said Andy should take a seat like the rest of them. Andy went to get his rifle from the wagon. He stormed into the cabin and shot at the one on top of Charity, who scarcely missed a beat, or so the ladies on the ridges said while quilting. The six outside ran for their lives, Andy Lewis chasing them, and firing as fast as he could reload. He later divorced her, first divorce Minerva ever could recall on the ridges, though there’d been several in town. Charity went back to London to live with her father, who was an ironmonger there.

So yes, there was banter and there was also flirting, and here and there a pat or two (she’d seen Hadley with his hand on Fanny Carter’s behind one time, asked him in bed that night did he enjoy feeling Fanny’s fanny?), but none of it serious — except when you got somebody crazy like Charity Lewis, who was after all a foreigner. These were God-fearing people who’d no more dream of coveting their neighbor’s wife than coveting his ox.

She knew at once, however, that Jimmy Jackson was not the sort of man you’d joke with about the moth-eaten woolen cap he kept pulled down over his forehead, or the single gold earring in his right ear. There was a fierceness in his eyes and a lunacy in his laughter. What she had thought to be banter, she suspected he considered brazenness.

She decided to stay far away from him on the journey downriver.

“Is she lonesome?” he asked.

He sidled up beside her as stealthily as a cat, startling her. She was looking out over the side at the farms lining the riverbanks. The sight of women bustling about their yards filled her with a longing for her home in Virginia. Jackson had almost reckoned her mood correctly; she wasn’t feeling lonesome, but she was feeling homesick, and the two were akin.

“Good day,” she said. There was only one way to discourse with this man, and that was on the plainest level. Give him a hint of humor, and he’d take it wrong. She glanced up forward to where Hadley was in conversation with the man who owned the slaves. “Where are they bound?” she asked Jackson.

“Is she interested in slaves then?” Jackson asked. “New Orleans,” he said. “The man talking with your good husband there is breaking up his farm in the Shenadoah. Moving north, bought himself a mill there. Carried the niggers by wagon to Louisville.”

“Will he sell them in New Orleans?”

“That’s his plan. He’d damn well better sell them,” Jackson said, and burst out laughing. “He’s paying me five dollars a head for transporting them, which is more’n I’m getting for you and your entire load. Offered to hire me his strongest bucks for two dollars apiece on the trip downriver, told him I already had two in crew, didn’t need any damn niggers underfoot. What d’you think of the shape on the wench there?”

“Pardon?” Minerva said.

“Teats on her like a brood mare,” Jackson said. “Like to hire her for two...”

But Minerva had already walked away.

He referred to her constantly as “she,” as though he were talking about a person other than Minerva herself.

“Does she see the sawmills?” he asked when they passed New Albany. “Are there any like that in Virginia?”

“There’s sawed lumber aplenty back home,” she snapped, and realized at once that he’d been teasing and had elicited from her the angry response he’d expected. She paused a moment, and then continued in a calmer tone, as if she were talking to a reasonable man and not someone crazy. “When I was a girl,” she said, “you couldn’t get sawed lumber for less than five or six dollars a hundred feet, depending on how far it’d traveled down the Clinch.”

“But now there’s fine and fancy furniture in her house, ain’t that so?”

“Our house back home was plain but cheery,” she said calmly.

“Was it bigger than the cabin there in the middle of the boat?”

“Quite,” Minerva said.

“With all in it homemade save for the cherrywood dresser she’s carrying west.”

“How’d you...?”

“I spied it through the open cover,” Jackson said, and laughed. “There’s enough in that wagon to furnish the governor’s mansion! Pewter plates and wooden bowls, shot bags and—”

“You didn’t spy all that through the cover,” Minerva said. “Have you been inside our wagon?”

“Only to sniff at her pillow,” Jackson said.

“Would you like to be sniffing it through a bloodied nose?” she asked, and moved away from him at once.

But she was trembling.

On the third day out, she stayed close by Hadley and her sons, keeping Jackson constantly in sight, making certain she was never alone in the cabin or by its exterior sides sheltered from view. But along about three that afternoon, Lester asked the men if they wanted to play some poker.

“Don’t know the game,” Hadley said.

“Be happy to teach you, sir,” Lester said, and Hadley burst out laughing.

“You’re a sharper for sure,” he said. “Do you plan to win from us all you lost on the steamboat?”

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.