The Chisholms (12 page)

“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.

He had to find his father.

This damn Independence wasn’t so big that a man couldn’t locate another man when he needed to tell him something. Had to find him fast, too, before the opportunity drifted away like early morning mist back home. Pretty much like home, this town was. Bigger and more sprawling, no mountains, of course, but the same easy mix of houses and business establishments, same grid pattern of streets and cross streets. There were sturdy brick buildings everywhere Bobbo walked, chimneys smokeless now in June, steeples and steps, doorways arched in stonework — a right proper town except that just outside its doorstep was the wilderness. What all the charts called Indian Territory. Or unorganized Territory. Meaning there was nothing between here and the Pacific Ocean but a few trading posts and lots of—

“You’ve killed my snake, y’bloody bastard!”

The voice was his father’s, and it was coming from inside a saloon dark as a dungeon. Bobbo pushed open the doors to the place and saw first his father standing at the long bar, and then the bartender with a bloodstained meat cleaver in his fist. Hadley’s rattlesnake was wiggling on the bartop, its body in three separate pieces.

“Come bringin no damn poison snake in
here
,” the bartender said. He was a squat solid man in striped shirtsleeves and apron, a thick handlebar mustache under his nose and curling downward over his mouth. “Now pick up that shitty quiverin thing,” he said, “and get it the hell out of here.”

On the bartop, the snake’s head lay motionless, but the other two severed parts were still wiggling and jumping. Hadley looked down at all three parts, and then reached across the bar and seized the bartender by the front of his shirt. The bartender’s apron was flecked with the rattler’s blood, the bloodstained cleaver was still in his hand. As Bobbo moved quickly forward, the bartender raised the cleaver over his head, and Bobbo’s heart lurched into his throat.

Hadley said,
“What!”

There was indignation enough in his voice to have stopped a stampeding herd of cattle, no less a mere barkeep with a cleaver in his fist Bobbo knew that voice well. It had dogged him all the years of his youth; he had heard it razoring across mountaintops and meadows, gullies and gulches. It was the voice of Hadley Chisholm himself, whose ancestors had fought widcairns in Ireland, that could cut you dead to the ground with the icy edge of it, sharper than the blade on the cleaver in the bartender’s hand. That cleaver hesitated somewhere behind the man’s ear now. His eyes went wide, the brows shooting up in arcs that echoed the arc of his handlebar mustache.

“You
dare
to raise a weapon?” Hadley asked.

The cleaver still hung there undecided. The bartender felt he’d rightly and justly slain a wild creature placed on his bartop for no reason he could fathom. He’d reflexively reached under the bar for the cleaver and
snick-snack
, there went the head, and there went the body neatly cut in two. He wasn’t in the habit of having his shirt front gathered in a stranger’s hand. He was, in fact, widely reputed for his vile disposition and the meanness with which he wielded the cleaver he kept under the bar. But he held back the cleaver now, and stared into Hadley’s indignant blue eyes, and hesitated. He wasn’t afraid of the man, he certainly wasn’t afraid of him — but there was something told him to belay separating his head from his body as he’d done the snake’s.

“Put that cleaver down,” Hadley said. “Do it now.”

Across the room came another one, broader and taller but unmistakably kin, with the same blue eyes and fierce look could cut a man down like a scythe through wheat. The bartender decided to drop the cleaver after all. He let it fall from his hand to the floor behind him, and immediately wondered who was going to clean up the mess on his goddamn bar.

“You all right, Pa?” Bobbo asked.

“Aye,” Hadley said. “Join me, son. This man here was about to set out whiskey for us.” He looked into the bartender’s face, and then released his shirt front. A round of applause went up from the gathered customers, initiated by a man sitting at a table against the wall. There was a framed portrait of President Tyler over the table. Two small United States flags were crossed over it.

“Pa,” Bobbo said, “I met some men while I was getting my hair cut, they told me...”

His father wasn’t listening. He was staring instead at the man who sat under the portrait of President Tyler. The man was still applauding though everyone else in the bar had already stopped. He wore a flat black hat and wire-rimmed spectacles. His beard was the color of rust on a rain barrel’s rim, big red bushy thing that sprang from his cheeks and his chin and seemed to grow wild into his eyebrows. Sitting at the table with him was an Indian woman. Still clapping, the man got up and walked to where Hadley was waiting for the whiskey to be set out. Applauding him face to face, grinning in his beard, he said. “Bravo, sir, well done,” and extended his hand. “Timothy Oates,” he said.

“Hadley Chisholm,” Hadley said, and took the offered hand.

“Bobbo Chisholm,” Bobbo said and also shook hands with the man.

“Have a drink with us, won’t you?” Hadley said, and poured whiskey from the bottle the bartender had set on the bartop. The bartender was scowling. “I was fixin to turn the critter loose,” Hadley told him. “You had no cause to cut him up that way.”

“You
did
turn him loose,” the bartender said.

“He got out the sack, that wasn’t no fault of mine.”

“Carryin a damn poison snake in a bar,” the bartender said.

“Have a drink with us,” Hadley said, and grinned.

“Who’s paying for this?” the bartender asked, pouring himself a whiskey glass full.

“You ruined a perfectly good snake, didn’t you?” Hadley said.

“What’s that mean?” the bartender asked. “Ain’t a snake on earth worth a pile of rabbit shit.”

“This one was a pet,” Hadley said, and winked at his son.

“Well, you can find yourself another pet just beyond town. Hundreds of them out there. Sometimes they come wiggling right up the street.”

“Better not come in here,” Hadley said. “There’s a man in here’ll chop em up like green beans.”

The bartender smiled through his scowl.

“Drink hearty,” Hadley said, and raised his glass.

“Pa,” Bobbo said, “these men I talked to are fixin—”

“You live hereabouts?” Hadley asked the bearded man, and Bobbo sighed. There were times he wanted to yell his father down, same way he would anybody
else
was irritating him. Wouldn’t, of course; had too much respect for him. But here he was busting to tell what he’d learned, and he had to keep quiet instead till the head of the family ran out of steam. Times like this, when his father treated him like he was still in rompers, he felt like a big awkward dummy. Everybody always thought of him as dumb anyway. Was being seventeen did it Having pimples.

His father and Timothy Oates had told each other where they were from, and now they were telling each other where they were bound. Bobbo waited patiently for a break in the conversation, but it didn’t look like one’d be coming before Christmas.

“... have already left, you know,” Timothy said. “Most of them anyway. There’re some strays like yourself still coming in, though, and I’m hoping to join up with whatever kind of train can be put together.”

“Then you’re bound for California, too.”

“Not so far as that,” Timothy said. “I’m going only to the Coast of Nebraska, to take my wife home before her heart breaks.” He gestured with his head toward where the Indian woman sat under the portrait of President Tyler. “She’s Pawnee,” he said, “and far from home.”

Bobbo looked across the room.

The woman’s face was large and massive, thick black hair pulled tightly to the back of her head and braided there on either side. She was wearing a worn and greasy two-piece garment, skirt and cape of elkskin hide ornamented with porcupine quills, many of which had fallen loose. Hadley was looking at her, too, over the top of his glass. Bobbo leaped into the momentary silence.

“I’ve found some others as well,” he said in a rush. “Two families headin west, Pa. A carpenter from Baltimore with his wife and three children, and a man from—”

“We don’t need young’uns underfoot, thank you,” Hadley said.

“The sons are thirteen and fourteen; they can pull their own weight.”

“Which means the third one’s a daughter, eh?”

“Well...”

“Ain’t she?”

“She’s an infant in her mother’s arms,” Bobbo admitted. “But, Pa—”

“Just what we need’s an infant.”

“The sons can handle guns as good as you or me,” Bobbo said. “The wagon’s ox-drawn, and they’re traveling with four good horses besides. Mr. Comyns said he’d allow one of us to ride that extra horse, was we of a mind to. That’s his name, Pa, the carpenter. Jonah Comyns.”

“Has an extra horse, eh?”

“Yes, Pa.”

“Mm,” Hadley said. “And the other family?”

“Does it sound interesting, Pa?”

“You said there were two families.”

“Aye. The other’s a man named Willoughby and his two daughters. He’s a widower, Pa, decided to move from Pennsylvania when his wife passed on.”

“How old are the daughters?”

“One’s just Annabel’s age. Be somebody for her to play with, Pa. She’s been hurtin for company.”

“And the other one?”

“A toddler two or three years old.”

“With no mother to take care of her.”

“Most well-behaved little child I ever did see,” Bobbo said. “Sat on a bench along the wall all the time her pa was gettin shaved, never made so much as a peep.”

“Mm,” Hadley said.

“There’s that extra horse to think about Pa. Mean less of a load in the wagon; mules’d have an easier time of it.”

“Mules made it all the way here from Virginia, I reckon they can make it beyond as well. ’Sides, your brothers ain’t here yet.”

So
that
was it.

“Pa,” Bobbo said, “we told them—”

“I don’t want to leave without em,” Hadley said.

“We said we’d wait only till we found some wagons going out. Either that or—”

“They’ll be here any day now,” Hadley said.

“Pa, we don’t know
when
they’ll be here — that’s the plain truth of it. I found us two wagons we can join up with—”

“Three, if you’ll include me and mine,” Timothy said. “I’ve got but a small one drawn by a pair of mules, and no horse to contribute. But I’m a good shot, and I own a Hall percussion carbine. I know Indians well, sir, the good ones and the bad. I’ve been to the Rockies and back as many times as I’ve got fingers and thumbs. I know the terrain, and I know what—”

“We met a fellow in Louisville, had no horse neither,” Hadley said. “He’s got one now.”

“Eh?” Timothy said.

“How far’d you say you were going?” Bobbo asked.

“The Coast of Nebraska.”

“Where’s that?”

“This side of the Platte.”

“Pa?” Bobbo said.

Hadley knew the mileage from Carthage by heart — Gideon and Will should’ve been here by now. This was the ninth of June; they’d parted company outside St. Louis on the twentieth of May. His every instinct told him to wait here for his boys, but he knew he couldn’t delay the rest of the family any longer. Bobbo was right, this was a fine opportunity. Counting Oates here, there’d be four wagons, which maybe wasn’t a proper train, but enough of them to form some kind of circle at night, keep from getting scalped. Didn’t much like the idea of an Indian right in their midst, woman or not, but Oates seemed a decent enough fellow, and Hadley supposed you couldn’t go around blaming every redskin in the world for something had happened to your father forty-one years ago. Besides, it wouldn’t be charitable to let a man struggle across the plains all by himself, just him and his wife in a little old wagon. He sure wished Gideon and Will were here. Seemed like all he had to do anymore was make decisions all the time, each one harder than the one before. Back home, a man woke up of a morning, why the day just seemed to unfold of its own accord, and you didn’t have to go making up your mind every time you took a breath.