The Chisholms (19 page)

“Can I take a shot at them, Pa?” Bobbo yelled.

“No, leave them be,” Hadley yelled back.

“Raise the dead, way they’re yammering,” Bobbo said.

Standing just this side of the wagon, between it and the fire, Minerva was brushing her hair, counting the strokes.

“Drive a man crazy with that countin out loud,” Hadley said.

“Thirty-three-thirty-four, thirty-five...”

“You’ve had too much to drink, Min.”

“Thirty-six,
hush,
thirty-seven...”

The wolves were still howling.

“Let me take a shot at them, Pa,” Bobbo called.

“Leave em be, son,” Hadley said.

Bonnie Sue had already crawled under her blanket. “Does anyone in this family have any notion of sleeping tonight?” she asked.

Annabel giggled. She’d taken off her bodice and skirt, and was walking barefooted in her petticoat, toward the dark side of the wagon. “Whyn’t you let him shoot one of the critters?” she said. “Otherwise, they’ll be at it all night long.”

“Ain’t there
nobody
planning to sleep tonight?” Bonnie Sue asked.

Annabel giggled again.

“Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine,” Minerva said.

A little distance from the fire and the wagon both, not so far from either so that the wolves would get her, Annabel lifted her petticoat and let down her drawers and was preparing to pee when she heard what sounded like a whistle or a pipe, one of them wooden pipes the mountain people back home were all the time whittling. She peered into the darkness and could see nothing. It occured to her that not a moment before she’d seen the moving shadows of the wolves, had even been able to make out their eyes gleaming in the darkness. She couldn’t see nary a wolf now, nor did she hear them howling anymore.

“Bobbo?” she called.

“Yeah, Sis?”

“You hear something just—”

Somebody grabbed her from behind. She screamed, and urine ran down the inside of her leg and then stopped abruptly. He pulled her over by the hair, flat on her back, her underdrawers bunched around her ankles. She saw him only upside down. His face was painted with a grinning red mouth, feathers were in his hair. He had a tomahawk in his hand. She screamed again, and tried to scramble away, but he pinned her to the ground and straddled her as he would a pony, and then put the tomahawk down and reached for something at his belt.

She grabbed for the tomahawk at once.

Her fingers closed on the leather-encased haft and she swung the thing like the simple hatchet it was. His hand was coming up from his belt; there were leather thongs in it. He dropped the thongs and tried to protect his face, the fingers of his hand widespread. The sharp flint edge of the tomahawk cut through two fingers and struck him clean between the eyebrows, splitting open his forehead. Blood spurted out of him like a fountain. Annabel screamed and let go the hatchet.

She was still screaming when she came around the wagon tongue, pulling up her underdrawers. There were three more of them, one of them painted blood red like the one she’d just split open, another blue, the last a color seemed brown or black. Her father lay on the ground just near the back of the wagon, blood pouring from the side of his head. Bonnie Sue was on the bottom of an Indian straddling her same as she’d just been, only this one was wearing a beaded shirt. Bonnie Sue kicked and punched at him, but he had his forearm pressed hard against her throat and she was choking. Annabel ran to the fire, pulled a flaming stick from it, and ran back to where the Indian was on top of Bonnie Sue. He had a knife in his hand, he’d pulled a knife from his belt, Jesus, he was going to kill her!

She pushed the burning stick at his naked arm where the shirt ended, and the Indian let out a yell and jumped off Bonnie Sue. Annabel threw away the stick and started running. She could hear horses out there someplace; there’d be more Indians on them in a minute. The one she’d just poked with the stick grabbed her arm, swung her around, and punched her full in the face. She heard something snap inside her nose, and fell to her knees in pain, her hands covering her face. Blood was pouring from her nose. Where was the Indian, where’d he...? She turned, saw him running back to where he’d dropped his knife. He picked up the knife. It was a metal knife, the firelight glittered on its edge, he was coming back to where she sat with her petticoat tented over her knees.

Almost without looking at her, he stuck the knife in her and pulled it out again.

She felt only pain like she’d been burned, and then saw blood spreading into the white petticoat, and clutched for the wound. Blood welled up between her fingers. He pulled her hair away from her face, and brought the knife to her forehead. She thought:
Please,
no, and tried to scream but could not find the strength, and could not raise her hand to stop him. He slit the flesh across her forehead, just below the hairline, and was beginning to peel back her scalp when Bobbo shot him in the back. Feathers and beads exploded between his shoulder blades. He fell forward onto Annabel, his hand releasing the knife, the blade still caught between the scalp he’d been lifting and the skull beneath it.

The other two Indians had hold of Minerva, the one of them wearing the wolfskin and the other with his face painted entirely blue. Bobbo couldn’t reload, they gave him no time “to reload. He ran to where his mother was trying to fight them off, and swung the stock of his rifle at the back of the one with the wolfskin, but the Indian was strong and fierce and shrugged off the blows like they were flies annoying him. Minerva was holding to the wagon wheel with one hand, and with the other she was hitting them with her hairbrush. The Indians kept talking to themselves all the while they tried to pry her loose from the wagon wheel, and finally the one with the wolfskin began punching her repeatedly in the chest, and the one with the blue face turned on Bobbo with a knife and came at him with the blade extended toward his gut.

Bobbo reached for the Indian’s thrusting hand instinctively, ignoring for the moment the knife that was clutched in it, grabbing for the wrist the way he’d grabbed for Will’s or Gideon’s when they were rassling, pulling the Indian toward him, using the force of his own momentum, and at the same time bringing his knee up into the Indian’s groin. The Indian’s eyes opened wide in the painted face. Bobbo saw the face an instant before he dropped the knife. As Bobbo stooped to pick it up, he thought:
He’s no older’n me
. His hand closed around the bone handle.
Maybe younger,
he thought. The Indian was doubled in pain on the ground, his hands clutching his balls. Bobbo plunged the knife blade deep into his chest. He raised the knife and plunged it again. And then another time. Then he turned away and vomited into his hands.

Behind him, the Indian with the wolfskin pulled Minerva off the wagon wheel, looped one arm around her waist, and began dragging her toward where she could hear horses whinnying and pawing the earth. They had torn her petticoat up the front during the struggle and her breasts were exposed; she was embarrassed that her son would see her this way. Oddly, she felt neither fear nor anger. She knew only that this Indian painted red was trying to take her someplace she didn’t want to go. Stubbornly, she resisted. Kicking, striking with her closed fists wherever she could reach him, she resisted with every ounce of strength she possessed. She could still feel the pain where he had struck her between the breasts, but she struggled fiercely until he hit her again full in the mouth, splitting her lip and causing it to bleed, knocking loose two teeth, which she spat with blood into her hand. He knocked her hand away from her mouth, and the teeth went flying. He caught hold of her wrist, dragged her into the darkness. She could see four painted horses. He unhobbled one of them and threw her over a blanket stinking of sweat and piss, and then swung himself up over the horse’s back and made a clucking sound to the animal. She knew then that unless she did something at once, unless she found the will and the strength to stop him, he would take her wherever he wished. She thought suddenly of the patroon Jimmy Jackson. The horse was in motion.

She rolled back against him and eased herself upright so that she was riding as she might have sidesaddle. He must have thought she was preparing to leap from the horse; he immediately put his left arm around her, twisting his hand into the torn petticoat, his right hand clinging to the reins, the wolfskin on his shoulder stinking as bad as had the blanket. It was then that she clawed for his face, reaching for his eyes. He screamed aloud, the horse veering as he yanked at the reins. Her spread right hand found something soft and jellylike, her fingers were closing on his right eye, she would pluck the eyeball from its socket like a hard-boiled egg, in an instant she would blind him.

He threw her from the horse. He flung her away from him as though she were a curse. He did not look back. He kept galloping away from her while behind him she lay trembling on the ground with the thought of what she had almost done.

By their reckoning, they were still two hundred miles from Fort Laramie.

They feared Annabel would die before they got there. They had made poultices of spirit turpentine and sugar, and they applied one of these to the head wound, and wrapped it tight with a clean cotton petticoat torn into bandages. The second poultice was larger; they put it over the jagged gash in her side, but the blood wouldn’t stop, it kept seeping up through the poultice. They changed the poultice three, four times that night, and each time the blood worked its way through, and they didn’t know what else to do to get it to stop. They had no recourse to remedies they knew: chimney soot mixed with lard, pine resin. All they could do was change the poultice each time it got drenched again with blood.

They kept expecting the Indians to come back.

They figured the one who’d got away, the one wearing the wolfskin, would return with a passel of them this time, if only to retrieve the horses. There were angry black and blue marks on Minerva’s breasts where the Indian had struck her, and she ached with each breath she took. Hadley had pulled the stumps of her broken teeth, and she’d stuffed a rag into her mouth to stop the bleeding. But her jaw and lip were swollen, the lip split besides from the force of the Indian’s blow. She swore to Hadley she’d have blinded him like Samson given just another moment. He said, “No, you wouldn’t have, Min.”

The horses were fine animals, a stallion and a pair of mares, looked like the Chickasaw running woods horses they were familiar with back home, Spanish breeds crossed with those the colonists brought from England. Bobbo wanted to ride one of them ahead, try to catch up with the wagon train. If there was a doctor in the party...

“No,” Minerva said.

“Ma,” he said, “I could fetch him back with me.”

“I’d fear for your life,” Minerva said softly.

By morning, Annabel’s bleeding had stopped. They put a fresh poultice on the wound below, and bandaged it tightly, and changed, too, the poultice and bandage on her head. At six o’clock, they broke camp and began moving ing toward the South Fork of the Platte.

She was burning with fever when they crossed the river on the morning of the seventh. The weather had turned sticky and hot, adding to her discomfort. She lay on a quilt in the wagon bed, covered with a linen bed sheet had been part of Grandmother Chisholm’s dower. There had been little rain in this part of the country, and the river was low and the bottom firm. For this much they were grateful; they could not have coped with anything the likes of the Kansas.

“Have I been scalped, Pa?” she asked.

He smiled and patted her hand. “No, darlin,” he said. “You’ve still got all your beautiful hair on your head, where it’s sposed to be.”

“What happened to your ear that’s all bandaged?”

“An Injun figgered I’d look best with but a single ear.”

He’d seen the Indian an instant before the blow struck, saw the rounded stone head of the weapon in his hand and knew it was not a hatchet. There’d been the whistle first, and then the sound behind him, and he’d turned to see the Indian with his face painted blue, the same one Bobbo later stabbed, and the maul coming for the back of his head. He’d turned, trying to duck away, but the blow caught him full on the ear, and that was the last he knew of anything till he felt Minerva’s gentle hands upon him, washing away the blood and dressing the wound. He had a headache now the likes of which he’d never had in his life.

“Did he take it from your head then, Pa?” Annabel asked.

“No, darlin, it’s still there,” Hadley said, and they both laughed.

“Is my nose broke? It feels broke.”

“Yes, darlin,” he said.

He knew she was going to die.

The earliest they could hope to find a doctor was at Fort Laramie, unless there was one in the Oregon train ahead. But with Annabel sick this way, Hadley couldn’t push too hard, and their rest periods were longer and more frequent. He was afraid as well that too much jostling would start her wounds to bleeding more heavily. They were seeping blood again, and Minerva was worried they’d soon begin to fester. On the high plateau between the two forks, they found a pine forest and slashed the trees for resin and made poultices to keep in readiness should the bleeding get worse. When they moved out of the narrow crotch where the river forked, they could for miles still see both forks, the one to the south angling ever wider, the other constantly on their right. They stopped often to wet the cloths they put to Annabel’s burning forehead. Were they home, they’d have made snakeroot tea, or boiled wild ginger roots or penny-royal leaves to bring the fever down. But they were not home.

The pine forest was the last real timber they saw for several days. Here and there a solitary tree stood specterlike on the riverbank, but for the most part the plains were unwooded. The thick luxurious grass that had earlier covered the prairie was all but gone now. The animals seemed not to notice the difference, and ate the yellow grass as heartily. But to the family the entire countryside had of a sudden become barren and dry, and they began to think of this as the true landscape of the west, and wondered if it would remain this way till they reached the Rockies. Already the rock outcroppings seemed to promise distant mountains.