The Chisholms: A novel of the journey West

III Bonnie Sue

Illinois.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Those were terrible years,” Hadley said. “I never want to live through anything like that ever again.”

“That’s why my father left Boston,” Lester said. “His blacksmith shop went under; he figured there was nothing to do but try again someplace else.”

“Did he make a go of it?”

“Not in lead. Too many people trying to mine the earth there. But he started a furniture store and might have done well with it, his heart hadn’t stopped of a sudden one day.”

“Your mother still alive?” Hadley asked. “Yes, sir. Living in Carthage.”

“Buried mine just before we left Virginia, bless her heart. My pa’s been dead since eighteen aught three — got himself killed by an Indian.”

“I didn’t know there was still Indian trouble late as that,” Lester said.

“There wasn’t. Wars’d ended almost ten years before, in fact. Townspeople had already torn down the pickets around the old fort. My pa was drunk, is all,” Hadley said.

Inside the wagon, Bonnie Sue looked up. She could see Lester in profile in the puckered opening of the cover, the wet gray sky behind him. She had not known that her grandfather William Allyn Chisholm was drunk when the Chickasaw killed him. She had thought till this moment that he’d died a hero in one or another of the skirmishes with local Indians.

“Chickasaw was a no-good redskin used to hang about the livery stable. Him and my father got drunk one night, went down the plantation — that’s the Bailey plantation, owned by the man sold us this wagon.”

“It’s a good wagon,” Lester said.

“Cost ninety dollars.”

“That’s a fair price.”

“He’s got seventy-two slaves, Bailey has. They must be worth close to fifty thousand dollars, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not that much. You know the ones Jackson was carrying to New Orleans?”

“What about em?”

“He said the bucks’d fetch six hundred each, and the wenches somewhere in the neighborhood of three.”

“Then the squire ain’t as rich as I thought he was,” Hadley said. “Though he’s plenty rich enough, I guess. Lord knows how many slaves his father had in the old days. Bailey’s a man about my age, maybe a mite older. Sired hisself a little pickaninny by a nineteen-year-old house nigger he’s got. Likes women, the squire does. Specially colored ones.”

Bonnie Sue hadn’t known that either. She put down her blankbook.

“Anyway, my pa and this no-count Chickasaw got drunk together one night, and went down the Bailey plantation thinkin to sneak in the henhouse, you take my meanin. Was a wench from the Barbados there, white as you or me, must’ve had lots of Spanish blood in her. My pa and the Chickasaw got in a fight over who’d mount her first. Chickasaw stabbed him fourteen times in the chest, then raped the slave girl in the bargain. Was her who told who’d killed my pa, not because she liked him all that much, but only cause she wanted to get back at the Indian. Bastard had torn her insides all up.”

“They ever catch him?” Lester asked.

“Found him two weeks later in a Tennessee cave. You know where the Great War Path crosses the Gap?”

“I’m not familiar with it, no.”

“That’s where they caught him. Carried him back to Virginia and hanged him outside where the old fort used to be.” Hadley paused. “Funny thing,” he said. “I wouldn’t believe that story for the longest damn time. I was fifteen when my pa got killed; wasn’t till years later I’d believe what everybody in town was saying about him. Wasn’t till my first son was born, in fact. Will out there. My son Will. Named him after my pa.” Hadley was silent for several moments. The rain drilled the wagon cover. “Ha-yal” he shouted to the mules.

Lester had estimated the distance from Evansville to St. Louis at a hundred and fifty miles. The road was wide and well-traveled; they should have averaged close to twenty miles a day, even without pressing. But the rains slowed them considerably, and though they’d left Evansville on the seventh of May, they had by the fourteenth come only seventy-four miles, with almost half the journey still ahead of them. The clearing skies did nothing to dispel their gloom. To the south was the Ozark Plateau, a wilder place of river bluffs and verdant valleys, wooded hills where they might have felt a trifle more at home. But here there was only flatness.

“How do you spell ‘boring’?” Bonnie Sue asked.

Back home, it was never boring.

Wasn’t Bobbo getting shot at on his way to town with whiskey, it was something else. Always something. That day he ran home, Gideon was hitching one of the mules to the plow, tightening the cinches. Bonnie Sue was sitting in the doorway of the cabin, shelling peas. Saw Bobbo come running over the brow of the hill, up the rock-strewn path that led to their house. The cabin was on the high ground, where William Allyn had built it to be safe from Indians. Only once did he have to take his family down to the old fort, and that was when a thousand or more of them descended on the settlement from God only knew where. Chickasaw, Choctaw, Chickamauga, Cherokee, or Creek, it could have been any or all of them together; seemed every Indian in the world was burning and pillaging that night, leastways the way her pa told it.

Hadley’d been eight at the time. Grandma Chisholm had bundled him up and carried him down to the fort. Half the people in the settlement made it down there safe. The rest, except for a handful caught at milking, ran to the old Bailey plantation, which was big enough to be a forted station. In the morning, most of the settlement was a smoldering ruin, but William Allyn’s cabin on the mountaintop, and that of the Cassadas beside it, stood unharmed. This was nearly half a century before the feud between them started; both families had put out their latchstrings and offered food and drink to those less fortunate than themselves. Now here came Bobbo running up the road and yelling, “Where’s Pa? I just near got killed!”

“What happened?” Gideon said.

“Shot at me from the bushes!”

“Who did? Now settle down, you hear me?” Gideon said, and shook his younger brother. Bonnie Sue’d been shaken by Gideon only once in her life, when she was joshing him about Rachel Lowery. Like getting caught in a tornado, she supposed, Gideon picking her up and shaking her that way. He wasn’t shaking Bobbo quite that hard now — only hard enough to addle his brains. “Who shot at you?”

“The Cassadas.”

“Where?”

“On the way to town. You know where the old Settlement Road goes by the branch to Abingdon?”

“Yeah?”

“Where the woods are? On the north side of the road?”

“Yeah?”

“Shot at me from there. Pa’s going to throw a fit, Gideon. I dropped and broke two whole gallons of whiskey.”

“Did you see who done the shooting?”

“The Cassadas, I just told you.”

“Which one of them, Bobbo? There’s ten of them over there; which one was it shot at you?”

“Was two of them, Gid.”

“Which two?”

Don’t let it be Sean, Bonnie Sue thought, and split open a pod with her thumbnail, and watched the peas rolling into the colander, and held her breath.

“Phillip and Brian,” he said. “Or anyways Brian for sure, and I think Phillip. I only got a good look at Brian.”

“Let’s go on over there right this minute,” Gideon said. “I been wantin to bust Brian’s head for the longest time.”

Damn near did bust it, too. Both of them went over to the Cassadas without waiting for Will or Pa, could’ve got themselves killed that afternoon. They found Brian alone in the Cassada cabin, and dragged him outside and beat him to within an inch. Phillip came running up from where he’d been squatting in the woods; way Bobbo later told it, he hadn’t even got his pants pulled all the way up yet. They set upon him, too, knocking him to the ground and kicking him till he was black and blue. Never told Minerva a word about it. She’d been over to the church at a cake sale, came home to find Bobbo and Gideon sitting in front of the fire. Bobbo was whittling, Gideon reading out of the Bible to Annabel. Everybody in the family knew what’d happened that day, except Minerva. When later they were plowing the cornfield, she couldn’t understand why the Cassadas were suddenly so riled. Had to cover that field with rifles, three of them around Hadley behind the plow.

Never boring back home, that was for sure.

She must have dozed.

She heard what sounded like a gun going off, and her eyes popped open. She was alone in the wagon. She sat upright. Her journal was in her lap. Lightning flashed against the blackened sky. She blinked. The deep rumble of thunder again. Where...?

They had nooned in a grove alongside a church, white clapboard and brick. She could remember eating the sausages and bread they’d bought from the farmer ten miles back. Will standing in the rain haggling with the man. Had no eggs to sell, he’d told her brother. She’d helped her mother cook the noonday meal, climbed into the wagon afterward to write in her journal. The rain has stopped. There’s bloodroots blooming, and crinkleroots, and flowers I don’t know the name of. It’s going to be a nice day after all. Mighty fine writing, put her straightaway to sleep.

More lightning. Thunder again.

The mules brayed and bolted.

She fell back, and bounced hard on the wooden bed, and yelled, “Ow!” and went rolling toward the rear of the wagon. Great huge plops of rain more like melons hit the wagon cover and came in through the front end. The butter churn rolled toward where she lay on her back near the tailgate, and she tried to get up but was knocked flat again, slamming her shoulder against the bottom of the box. The mantel clock ripped loose from where it was tied to one of the hickory bows, smashing its glass front. One of Annabel’s rag dolls from when she was a toddler came sailing through the air for all the world like an aerial performer Bonnie Sue had seen one time in Bristol. Jars of preserves bounced all over the wagon like hoppy toads jumping across a road when it starts to raining hard, which it was doing now for sure. There was a sudden high wind, too, almost drowning out the panicky braying of the mules. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear her brothers yelling. She tried to grab hold of a wooden chest that came loose and fell on her ankle. A spider skillet came clanging down on the wagon bed, jumping up and down like it was alive. A keg crashed from one side of the wagon to the other, and finally burst wide open and sprayed cornmeal in the air like flying snow.

She rolled over on her side, and crawled to the rear of the wagon on her hands and knees. Rain was coming in over the tailgate, turning the cornmeal to mush. Through the flapping open end where cover met tailgate, she could see a man riding after the wagon. She recognized the horse; it was Will’s raindrop gelding, an Appaloosa standing sixteen hands high, black leopard spots on a roan background, an altogether handsome animal with white-rimmed eyes and hoofs marked with black and white stripes.

The rider was Lester Hackett.

He scarcely glanced into the wagon as he came past the tailgate and then around the left-hand side. She turned to look through the front end, but all she could see was the sky ahead, as blue as a robin’s egg, while behind her it was still scowly and black, the rain pouring down to drown a person. Lester yelled, “Whoa, you ornery bastards!” and the wagon came to a jolting, bone-rattling stop. She was thrown again toward the tailgate, hitting her elbow hard against it. A chamber pot came flying down from where it had been tucked in among the patchwork quilts and pillows, smashing into a thousand pieces on the wagon bed, a good porcelain pot had come from England and was decorated with daisies and blue flowers. She lay against the rough wooden flooring, breathing harshly. The rain drummed steadily on the twill cover.

“Bonnie Sue? Are you all right?”

He climbed into the wagon. He was drenched through to the skin, his hair stringy and wet, his cheeks red with wind and water. He moved to her swiftly, and said again, “Are you all right?” and then he took her in his arms and rocked her as though she were an infant.

Her brothers were riding up.

“She’s unharmed,” Lester said, and in rising placed his hand upon her knee. He did not look back at her as he climbed out of the wagon.

Bonnie Sue’s heart was pounding.

The rain was behind them at last, the wagon moved again on a road negotiable and firm. Dutchman’s-breeches and dogtooth violets bloomed along the wayside. Above, the sky was bloated with clouds as white as her sunbonnet. She sat beside Lester on the wagon seat, her face in shade beneath the peak of the hat. Inside the wagon, her mother and father were sleeping. Annabel was riding with Will on his gelding, sitting sidesaddle just in front of him. She pointed to something on the horizon and Bonnie Sue turned to look, too. A flock of sheep, some goats, she couldn’t tell from this distance. There were flies on the backs of the mules, biting. Lester snapped the reins, and they buzzed angrily into the air.

“What’s that book I see you writing in all the time?” he asked.

“Just a journal,” she said, and shrugged.

“What’s it for?”

“So when we get to California, I can look back in the pages and remember it all clear.”

“Can’t you remember it without a diary?”

“It ain’t a diary, it’s a journal.”

“That’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

“A diary’s more personal,” she said.

“Oh, then your journal isn’t personal, is that it?” he asked, and smiled.

“Not as personal as a diary,” she said.

“Do you write about Virginia?” he asked.

“Not so much.”

“Don’t you miss home?”

“We’re going to a new home,” she said.

“Don’t you have friends in Virginia?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Don’t you miss them?”

“Just my girlfriend,” she said.

“Who’s that?”

“Rebecca Hanson.”

“Do you have a boyfriend, too?”

“No,” Bonnie Sue said.

“I’ll bet you have.”

“No, honest, I don’t.”

“Pretty girl like you,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Lovely girl like you,” he said.

In her journal, she wrote:

Back home, she’d go down to the Clinch, sit there with her reading books or her diary — which was a real diary and not a journal like what she wrote in here. The way she felt about it, a diary was something you had to devote a lot of time and thought to. You didn’t just jot down in it flowers you saw along the way, like she was doing here. Or about Ma having to pee all the time. In a diary, you wrote things important to you. That’s why she used to take it down to the river with her. Sit there and listen to the water. See a fish jump every now and then. Mallard come by, look her over, dig for a bug under his wing. Tall grass on the riverbank swaying in the wind.

She felt secret down there.

Felt she could write secret things.

In truth, there wasn’t much secret to write about except kissing Sean and letting him touch her breasts. She wrote that in code because if there was one thing Bonnie Sue had learned in her fifteen years, it was that you couldn’t trust nobody on earth, especially your little sister. She kept a bow around the diary, tied it different each night, just to make sure no little fingers opened it — nor no big clumsy ones either, belonging to her big oaf brothers who’d as soon bust Sean’s head as any of the other Cassadas’. Still and all, a bow was no protection if somebody took a notion to open the thing and read what was in it.

So all the stuff about Sean was written in code. When he touched her breast that first time, she wrote in her diary

which looked a lot like the Egyptian hieroglyphics she’d seen in a picture in the Bible, but which only meant “Sean feeled me.” The key to the code was hidden in a candy tin she kept other secret little things in. She figured anybody putting the two together would have to be curious enough to open the diary and the candy tin — which she wouldn’t put past Annabel, but which she hoped her sister wouldn’t do.

The rest of her diary, the parts that were sort of secret, but not terribly secret, she wrote in straightforward English. She went to school only on and off because it was hard to keep schoolmarms in the mountains back home, especially in the wintertime. Mostly, you got your teachers in the fall and in the spring, when the mountains were lovely. Minute it got to be close on November, the teachers’d disappear like the leaves on the trees, wouldn’t see hide nor hair of them again till the Clinch was running free of ice. One of the teachers said she wrote real fine, but had to improve on her spelling. Seemed to Bonnie Sue everybody spelled just as bad or as good as she did, and she couldn’t understand why it mattered so much. Long as a body made her meaning clear, that was enough.

She sat by the Clinch sometimes and thought she might become a writer. Trouble was, she couldn’t think of any stories to write.

Oh, she could sure enough set down things that had actually happened, but that wasn’t making up stories, that was just setting things down. Time Gideon picked up the hog and carried it in the house. Had a bet with Bobbo he could pick up that old hog and carry it. clear inside the house. Ma was standing there setting the clock, she turned and saw Gideon staggering through the door with the hog in his arms. She picked up the broom and started swatting him with it, and Gideon dropped the hog and went out the front door, and the hog went running over every piece of furniture in the cabin till Minerva finally got him outside. Wouldn’t let Gideon sit at table that night. Said he’d have to eat out back with the friend he’d had in the house that afternoon.

But that was real.

“Good morning,” Lester said.

She was washing her hair in a shallow sparkling stream, using soap they’d made themselves back home, wearing only a petticoat and expecting no company. It was still but morngloam; she had awakened before the rest of them. She threw her soapy tresses back and squinted up at him. There was early morning sunlight behind him. He was smiling.

“Did I startle you?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “It’s only...”

“You’re not dressed for visitors.”

“Well...” she said, and paused. “There’s nothing you can see, I suppose.” She wrung out her hair. Suds washed away in the stream.

“Is there something I might see otherwise?” he asked.

She did not answer. She busied herself with rinsing her hair. Then she piled it on top of her head, and holding it massed there, wrapped a towel around it, rose, and began walking up the bank toward the wagon. In the distance she could see her brother Will in his underwear, stretching his arms over his head.

“No, wait,” Lester said.

She turned.

“Do you know how old I am?” he asked.

“Aye.”

“Almost thirty. I’ll be thirty come September.”

“Aye.”

“You’re but fifteen.”

“I’ll be sixteen in July,” she said.

“Even so.” He hesitated. “Bonnie Sue...”

She waited.

“Give it no thought,” he said, and turned, starting up the bank ahead of her. She looked up at him as he went, then sighed, lifted the hem of her petticoat so that the early morning dew would not wet it, and climbed the bank to where they all were stirring now.

“What day is it?” Annabel asked, and yawned.

Back home, there was an outhouse you could go to, wipe yourself afterward with pages from the Bristol paper. Here you went in the woods, wiped yourself with leaves less you’d remembered to pick up the local paper in whatever town you’d gone through. The towns all looked alike, the farms, too. She sometimes walked alongside the wagon because she got sick to her stomach inside there with the thing rocking back and forth and the wheels squeaking no matter how much grease was put on them. Didn’t know how Annabel could stand it, working on her sampler in there, hot as blazes under that cover, air as still as death, flies buzzing.

You walked alongside, you had to keep up with the mules, but they weren’t about to race their way to California now that they’d already bolted once. Walking along, she kept thinking of Lester putting his hand on her knee. Thought maybe she’d imagined it. Mules plodding. Will and Gideon on horseback, roaming wider than the road out of sheer boredom. Bobbo out hunting quail or rabbit. Up ahead, her Ma and Pa on the wagon seat. “Ha-ya!” he yelled to the mules. Paid him no mind. Just kept plodding along. Inside, Annabel had stitched her way clear through April 22, and was working now on 1844.

Lester suddenly came up beside her. She’d thought he was with Bobbo, she’d thought... but no, there were only three horses. She didn’t know what she’d thought; he was there beside her now, matching his stride to hers.

“Penny for your thoughts,” he said.

“Ahhh,” she said, and smiled.

“Private thoughts, secret thoughts?”

“Silly thoughts.”

“Like what?”

“Like those a fifteen-year-old girl might think,” she said, and glanced at him sidelong.

“Almost sixteen,” he reminded her.

“Aye, almost.”

“Have you been wondering where I was?”

“No.”

“I was dozing in the wagon.”

“Has she come through 1844 yet?”

“I don’t follow,” Lester said.

“My sister. Her sampler.”

“Ah. I didn’t notice.”

They walked along in silence. She stooped to pick a wildflower, brought it to her nose. There was no scent. “Is it true all the things Bobbo’s told me about you?” she asked.

“I don’t know what he’s told you.”

“That you’re a big riverboat gambler—”

“Hah!” Lester said.

“And a sharpshooter had himself a Kentucky rifle and two Spanish pistols.”

“I had the guns, true enough,” Lester said, “but I couldn’t hit the side of a barn with them.”

“Went off to fight in the Black Hawk War...”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“What war was that?” Bonnie Sue asked.

“Why, the war against Black Hawk,” he said, and smiled.

“An Indian?”

“An Indian.”

“I never heard of him,” she said.

“You weren’t more than a toddler. I was only seventeen myself,” Lester said.

“Did you kill anyone?”

“I killed my share.”

“How many?”

“Three braves and a woman.”

She turned to look at him.

“She was an Indian same as the others,” Lester said flatly. “When I shot her she was about to stab a soldier on the ground.”

Bonnie Sue said nothing. They stood in the road, she looked up into his face. In the tall grass a cricket chirped. Ahead, the wagon creaked and rocked and the mules’ hoofs pounded a steady rhythm on the hard-packed dirt. A cloud passed over the sun. They were suddenly in shadow.

He kissed her. She clung to him an instant, and then pulled away. “No, please,” she said, but threw herself into his arms again at once and again kissed him. And looked swiftly toward the wagon ahead. And scanned the horizon for any sign of her brothers on horseback. And kissed him again, fiercely.

When it rained the women slept inside the wagon, and the men slept under it on ground cloths, with blankets hanging from the sides to keep out wind and water. The wagon was long enough and wide enough to accommodate four men beneath it. Two would lie side by side, fully covered by the wagon bed above them. Another two would lie with their heads against the feet of the first pair, their own legs jutting out beyond the tailgate. There were five men counting Lester; when it rained they drew straws to see who would have to build a sapling lean-to under which to sleep.

When the weather was good, all of them — men and women alike — slept on the ground around a fire, radiating from it like the spokes of a wheel from its hub. They fed the fire to blazing before they retired, and it was either dead ashes or scarcely smoldering embers by morning. The women usually went to bed first. For all the men’s grumbling about saddle sores and rein blisters, the women were most tired by day’s end. Usually, the men sat around the fire an hour or more after the women were asleep.

She lay beneath her blanket, listening for Lester’s voice.

In the cabin back home, you could hear every sound. There were two rooms and a sleeping loft. Her mother and father slept in the bigger room, and she and Annabel slept in the room next door. Her three brothers shared the loft. At night, you heard whispers. Noises. Someone getting up to use the chamber pot. Beds creaking. When Elizabeth was alive, she and Will used to use the underbed in the bigger room. Pull it out each night, drag it across the cabin to the other side of the room, near where Minerva’s good dresser stood against the wall. Part of her dower, only sawed-lumber piece of furniture in the house, eight slats of thick cherry-wood with the hinges hidden on the underside of the cover.

Used to moan a lot, Elizabeth. Bonnie Sue was just a little girl, thought her sister-in-law was sick first time she heard her moaning in the night. When she died in childbirth, Will went back to sleeping in the loft again. Three beds up there, all of them sitting right on the floor without a headboard or footboard, but comfortable anyway. At night, she’d hear her brothers talking up there before they fell asleep. One time, Gideon and Will were teasing Bobbo about taking him to meet some woman. Said they’d arranged with Squire Bailey to go downriver with him next time he traveled to New Orleans. Told him the squire knew a nice little redhead would teach Bobbo all there was to know. Aw, come on, Bobbo said. Or he knows some nice blondes, too, Gideon said. Aw, come on, Bobbo said.

She listened to them now.

Though the mules had bolted three days ago, they were still arguing the matter, Lester maintaining flatly that oxen did not stampede as easily as mules. Will counterarguing that when oxen did stampede, they ran much wilder. Her father asked how Will happened to know, since there’d never been an ox in the Chisholm family from the time they’d moved down the Delaware to Virginia...

In a little while, she fell asleep.

In her dreams, Lester Hackett made passionate love to her.

Not the way Sean Cassada had, his hands alone inside her bodice or under her skirt, but instead a thorough consummation blazing fiercely hot as all the fires of hell. In her dreams, her lips were a thread of scarlet, her breasts young roes that were twins feeding among the lilies. In her dreams, Lester was a bundle of myrrh that lay betwixt her breasts, Lester was a cluster of camphire, Lester leaped upon the mountains and skipped upon the hills, Lester’s hands were as gold rings set with the beryl, his belly was as bright ivory overlaid with sapphires, his legs pillars of marble, his mouth most sweet — he was altogether lovely. She longed to go out early with him to the vineyards, to see whether the vines had flourished or the pomegranates budded forth. She longed for him to go down to his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens and to gather lilies. I am my beloved’s, she said in her dreams, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.

They came to within a half day’s journey of St. Louis by the nineteenth of May, which was a Sunday, and attended church services in a small clapboard building set on a grassy knoll. There was an organ inside the church. Fat sonorous notes floated out on the air as they came down the church steps and onto the sloping path to where they’d hitched the wagon.

“Nice sermon,” Lester said.

“Yes,” Bonnie Sue said.

“Your father seemed to enjoy it, too.”

“Nothin he likes better than a good one,” she said. “Nor worse than a bad one,” she added, and smiled.

“We’ll be parting company tomorrow,” he said. “I suppose you realize that.”

“Yes, Lester.”

“I feel I scarcely know you,” he said.

“I feel I know you well.”

“Do you now?”

“Yes, Lester.”

“And yet...” He hesitated. She waited. He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“What were you about to say?”

“I have no right; you’re still a child.”

“I’m a woman.”

“Then...”

“Yes?”

“When they’re asleep tonight — no, never mind.”

“Lester...”

He moved away from her suddenly, walking ahead of her to the wagon. Annabel came running up to clutch her hand.

“Bonnie Sue?” she said. “Do you like going west?”

“Yes,” Bonnie Sue said, staring off after Lester.

“You do?”

“What?” Bonnie Sue said. “I’m sorry.”

“I thought it’d be more exciting,” Annabel said.

At sunset, they pulled the wagon off the road and unhitched the mules, picketing them and the horses on good grazing ground. They built themselves a blazing fire then, and took their supper in the gathering dusk. There was a crescent moon showing even before the sky was black. Stars appeared.

Bonnie Sue lay awake in the darkness, her feet toward the fire, the blanket covering her to her chin. She had taken off her bodice, skirt and shoes, and wore only her petticoat and underdrawers. She’d not put on a pair of stockings since they’d disembarked at Evansville, her mother telling her the open road was no place for good cotton hose, especially with the weather so warm. That was before the rains hit them, though certainly enough the weather had turned fine again afterward. She listened to the sounds around her and judged everyone asleep, but she waited, not wanting to make a move that could be rightly read by anyone still awake. She hoped, she prayed that Lester alone was still awake, and still desiring her. She waited.

When she’d judged that fifteen minutes had passed — counting her own heartbeats sixty to the minute, nine hundred of them all told, nearly beginning to panic once when she lost the count and couldn’t remember for the briefest tick of time whether the heartbeat of that instant signaled three hundred and four or two hundred and four, settling on the higher figure in her eagerness for the time to pass swiftly — when she’d counted at last to nine hundred, she raised herself on one elbow and glanced from one huddled shape to another in the light of the blazing fire. Her father was asleep, sure enough, and her mother and her brother Will, too, who snored almost as loud as her father did. On the other side of the fire were Gideon and Bobbo — his mouth wide open to catch any passing varmint — both of them asleep. And there lay Annabel, also asleep — We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: What shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for? — but some ten feet around the circumference of the circle, where Lester should have been, there were only his ground cloth and blanket.

Her heart lurched.

Rising, remembering to take her blanket with her, she ran barefooted toward a small stand of birch near where the mules and horses were picketed. She glanced back over her shoulder once before entering the woods. No one was stirring. She was certain Lester would be here waiting for her, so certain that she almost called his name. But the woods were empty, moonlight shone on pale gaunt trunks, and in the brush an insect clicked and then fell silent. She could hear the mules and horses in the field beyond. A log hissed and spat on the fire and then all was still again.

His arm came out of the darkness, circling her waist from behind. He pulled her in against him, and she felt immediately the stiffness of him inside his trousers and against her buttocks. Still behind her, he reached up with both hands now and clutched her breasts, and lowered the petticoat straps to free them. Holding them naked in his cupped hands, he bent his head to kiss the side of her neck. She was trembling violently. She turned to him and put both arms around him and squeezed him fiercely, as though she might stop the trembling that way. But what she’d earlier felt pressing the curve of her backside was now firm against the mound between her legs, and the hands that a moment before had held her naked breasts were now clutching her buttocks, the fingertips nudging her cleft from behind. She knew she would swoon. He bent slightly and put his left arm behind her knees, and with his right behind her back he lifted her from the ground and carried her through the stand of birch to where the woods became more dense.

It was almost pitch black here in the deeper woods. The fire was too distant even to be seen, and only dappled moonlight filtered through the heavily laced branches of the huge old trees. He carried her to a pale green glade, her head against his shoulder, and then lowered her gently to the ground. The ground was moist; she realized suddenly she had dropped the blanket somewhere back among the birches. She felt the wetness through the thin cotton petticoat, and on the backs of her naked legs when he raised the petticoat above her waist. She did not resist him when he lowered her drawers to her knees, and then eased them past her ankles and removed them entirely and put them on the ground beside her with a curious delicacy, as though he were placing an expensive timepiece on a polished fruitwood dresser top. He had not said a word thus far, and she wondered when he was going to say something, Thou art beautiful, O my love as Tirzah, something, the joints of thy thighs are like jewels, anything at all. But his hands were gently urging open those jewellike thighs, and she realized with a start, but without particular alarm, that he had unbuttoned the fly of his trousers.

“Open,” he said, which she supposed was somewhat poetic, but not quite so flowery as what she’d been expecting. He was pressing against her now, this very moment, trying to place his dove in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, and she felt an uncontrollable urge to giggle. And then, suddenly, there was an implosion of flesh, his and her own, her nether lips clinging resolutely and then receiving him all at once, so that his entrance seemed an unexpected surprise. She opened fully to him, legs apart, petticoat thrown wantonly back, arms flung wide like those of a crucified whore. His hands were under her, his fingers spread upon her buttocks, lifting her to him with each stroke until — learning the motion, discovering that even the slightest tilt against him caused her to quiver below — she cunningly initiated a responding thrust of her own and together they fell into a jagged tempo that was surely the beat of the devil’s own jig, played on a fiddle out of tune.

“Do you love me?” he whispered. “Tell me you love me, darlin girl,” the words rolling off his tongue as easy as Irish whiskey.

She whispered against his ear and into it, cautiously at first though her passion urged otherwise, “I love you.”

“Louder,” he said.

“I love you, yes.”

“Again.”

“I love you,” she said, boldly this time, “I love you, yes I love you,” she said, “oh Jesus,” she said, melting inexorably into her own cleft, climbing each relentless stroke, gliding to the root of him, grinding there, “oh Jesus,” she said, “oh Lester, I love, oh Jesus, oh yes, I love you, I love you.”

In the morning Lester was gone.

And with him Will’s horse.

She thought at first the commotion had to do with someone having seen her and Lester in the woods the night before. When she heard the angry voices, she was sure that her brothers had dragged Lester out from under his blanket and were now going to skin him alive. It was first light; the fire had turned to ashes blowing off fine in a thin wind from the east. She squinted through the veil of ashes to where her brothers were standing near the horses and the mules, and looked for Lester because she thought they’d have him by the throat or the scruff of the neck, but Lester was nowhere in sight. That was when she got the gist of what they were saying.

Lester had run off in the night.

Lester had stolen Will’s raindrop gelding.

“Didn’t trust him from the minute I laid eyes on him,” Hadley said.

“What do you make of these tracks?”

“They ain’t heading west, that’s for Sure.”

“For all his knowing snakes,” Hadley said, and spat on the ground.

“How long you think he’s been gone?”

“No way of telling.”

“Anybody hear anything during the night?”

“Heard some thrashing out there in the woods,” Bobbo said, “but I figured it to be some critter.”

Bonnie Sue got to her feet and smoothed her petticoat. Her sister Annabel was watching her shrewdly, or seemed to be. Had she, too, heard thrashing in the woods, and had she gone to investigate? They’d been out there half the night, Lester holding her in his arms till he was ready again to claim what she’d already declared was his. Now he was gone. And they were calling him a horse thief. Quickly, she dressed.

“Ought to string him up,” Hadley said.

“Got to catch him first, Pa.”

“He knows we’re late, figures we can’t spare no time chasin him.”

“That’s a fine horse he stole.”

“We go after him, we won’t make Independence till Independence Day. I say we forget the bastard.”

“And forget my horse, too? Worth a hundred fifty dollars or more, that horse.”

“Those tracks are plain enough headin north,” Bobbo said.

“To Carthage, more’n likely,” Gideon said. “His mother’s there in Carthage, didn’t he say?”

“How far’s Carthage from where we’re at now?”

“A hundred miles or thereabouts,” Will said.

“It’s more’n that,” Hadley said. “A good hun’ twenty at the least.”

“I can travel that in four, five days,” Will said.

“That’s if’n he’s headed for Carthage, which ain’t likely. Man tells you his ma’s a certain place, he ain’t about to steal no horse and head straight for that place.”

“Nobody says a horse thief’s got to be smart, Pa.”

“Nor necessarily dumb, neither. Lester didn’t strike me as no fool.”

“Either way, I’d have a fair chance of over-takin you in Independence.”

“How do you figure, son?”

“I’d be travelin faster, just me on horseback.”

“Still be a hard pull.”

“I’d like to go after him, Pa.”

“What’ll you do if you catch him?”

“Take him to the law.”

“Where?”

“In Carthage, if that’s where I find him.”

“Suppose you find him in the woods someplace, cookin his supper or skinnin a cat?”

“I’ll ride him to the nearest place there is law.”

“I don’t like you goin out alone after no horse thief.”

“I’ll go with him,” Gideon said.

“Leave me alone with Bobbo and the mules, huh? I’ll tell you, boys, I don’t like the whole idea. If there’s wagons still in Independence, we’ll have to leave when they do. And if there ain’t, we’ll have to move out straightway and try catchin up with them’s already gone. Suppose you ain’t there yet?”

“Then you just go ahead without us,” Will said. “We’ll catch up wherever.”

“I don’t know,” Hadley said, and shook his head.

“Man stole my horse,” Will said.

“I know what he done, damn it!”

Bonnie Sue wished they’d ride out after Lester and bring him right back here, where she’d declare her love for him and save his life. At the same time, she wished they’d ride out after him and hang him on the spot instead, in punishment not for having stolen Will’s horse but only for having deserted her. Her cheeks still burned with the memory of their ardor, burned with anger, too, and with what she supposed was shame — was she only imagining Annabel’s intense scrutiny? Or was her fornication as evident as the mist on the meadow beyond, where the picketed mules and horses stood sniffing the morning air and pawing the ground?

“Pa?” Will said.

Hadley nodded.

“We can go?” Gideon said.

“I reckon,” Hadley said, but he looked troubled.

Minerva hugged her sons close.

“Be careful,” she said.

“He ain’t even armed, Ma,” Gideon said. “Lost all his hardware in that poker game.”

“So he said. But it’s my experience a horse thief’ll lie about anything, includin his own name. You don’t know for sure he ain’t got one of them little pistols tucked in his boot.”

“We’ll watch out for one of them little pistols,” Will said, and grinned.

“Don’t be so smart,” Minerva said.

“Ma, you needn’t worry. There’s two of us.”

“Just be careful,” she said, and kissed them both, and then climbed up onto the wagon seat Only thing that worried her was Lester. She knew her sons could take care of themselves anywhere, and Illinois was as civilized a place as anyone had a right to expect. It was Lester bothered her. Will’s raindrop gelding was branded and earmarked both; there was no way Lester could disprove their claim to the animal once they caught him. He was a man threatened with the noose, and that made him dangerous. She watched silently as her sons studied the tracks again, and mounted their horses. Will waved to her and turned the horse he was riding, Bobbo’s black mare. From astride his piebald, Gideon called, “See you in Independence!” and then the two rode off toward the north. She watched them through the dust raised by the horses’ hoofs, watched till she could no longer see anything but dust, and then not even that.

From inside the wagon, Bobbo said, “One of the rifles is gone, too, Pa.”

“He’s armed then,” Minerva said, almost to herself.

Sitting beside her on the wagon seat, Bonnie Sue burst into tears. Minerva looked at her in surprise, and then put her arm around her and hugged her close. In a little while, Hadley cracked his whip over the backs of the mules, and yelled “Ha-ya!” and the wagon lurched forward with a jolt toward St. Louis in the distance, and Independence far beyond.

Bonnie Sue was still crying.