The Chisholms (30 page)

“Yes!”
Gideon said.

Schwarzenbacher ran out of the kitchen.

In the courtyard outside, Will was holding up a pair of dead rabbits to an Indian woman who sat cross-legged before a goat. The woman had milk and cheese to sell, and Sister was negotiating with her. The woman shook her head, said something to Sister, shook her head again. Her attention was suddenly captured elsewhere; they turned to follow her gaze. Schwarzenbacher was running wildly across the courtyard, Gideon limping along behind him.

“Will!” Schwarzenbacher shouted. “Where’s your mother?”

“What?” Will said.

“Your mother, your mother! She was here a minute ago. Where...?”

Bewildered, Will opened his hands, shook his head.

“Bonnie Sue’s having the baby!” Schwarzenbacher yelled, and seized Sister’s hand and pulled her toward the main gate.

There should have been a hut apart from the house; that was where the baby should have been born. Or lacking such a hut, there should have been a part of the house separate from the rest of it, with a screen of wood and hides constructed to protect the others from the glances of the woman giving birth. It was not permissible for men to be present in the hut or in the house, but here in the cabin were Will and his brother and the clerk from the fort. Sister would not permit it. She went to them at once, and pushed them out, and closed the door behind them.

On the bed against the eastern wall, Bonnie Sue lay on her back. This, too, was wrong. The proper position for a woman in labor was not flat on her back, where she could do nothing but writhe and squirm against the pains that rippled through her. She should have been kneeling instead, so that she could squeeze the infant from her loins. There should have been a rope attached to one of the ceiling beams, and she should have been holding tight to it, so as not to fall over. Or else there should have been a pair of stakes driven into the floor, one for each hand, to which she could have clung while squatting. But no, she lay on her back jerking with each new pain. Sister marveled at the stupidity of it. She went to her and held out her hand.

“What is it? What...?” Bonnie Sue said. “Oh,
Jesus!
” she screamed, and twisted again in pain.

“Up,” Sister said.

“What?”

“Up,” she said, and made a rising motion with her hands, lifting her palms toward the ceiling. “Come, up.”

“You want — ow!” she said, “Ow!” and squeezed her eyes shut.

“Come!” Sister said, and grabbed both her hands, and pulled her off the bed. Bonnie Sue clung to her, puzzled, and then realized the woman wanted her to squat, was gently easing her into a squatting position. Sobbing, her nose running, her hair wet with tears and perspiration, she knelt before her. Sister pulled on her hands, grunting, grimacing, trying to indicate what she must do to force the child out of her. Bonnie Sue said, “Jesus!” and then, “Oh, Christ!” and then, “Oh, sweet loving mother...” and Sister squeezed her hands hard and said,
“You!”

“What?” Bonnie Sue said, and looked up into her face. “Where’s my mama? Please get my — oh, Jesus!
Jesus!”

“You,”
Sister said again, and shook her head in anger and again tugged at Bonnie Sue’s hands, and at last Bonnie Sue pulled back against them. “Ah!” Sister said sharply, and “Ah!” again, and squinched her face and made the grunting sound again, and said, “You, you,” and now Bonnie Sue began to squeeze, screaming, “Jesus, Jesus,” pushing. “Ah,” Sister said, nodding encouragement, “Ah, ah,” and Bonnie Sue said, “Yes, please help me,” and pushed again, harder this time. Sister knelt before her, one hand extended to hold both of Bonnie Sue’s, the other beneath her to cradle the baby’s head as it began to slide from her womb. “You!” Sister shouted, and Bonnie Sue gave a fierce push below, fearing she would soil herself, embarrassed, sobbing, clinging tightly to Sister’s hand, and feeling the baby slipping from her loins, feeling suddenly exuberantly joyous, and hearing the baby’s triumphant squawl like a bugle on the air.

When Minerva got to the cabin, she found Bonnie Sue in bed with the baby on her belly. Will’s Indian woman handed her a rag upon which was the afterbirth, and Minerva immediately threw it into a slops bucket. The Indian woman shook her head violently.

Minerva didn’t know what she was trying to say. She knew only that Bonnie Sue and the baby both needed washing, and she began immediately to do that. The Indian woman stood by watching, seemingly appalled, shaking her head. Minerva took the bloodstained bedclothes from the bed and replaced them with clean ones. The woman scowled. Minerva wrapped the baby in a blanket and handed it to her. “Here,” she said, “hold the child,” and then helped Bonnie Sue into a clean nightgown, and combed her hair. She took the baby from the Indian woman, and put it into Bonnie Sue’s arms. Bonnie Sue smiled wearily.

“That was the hardest thing I ever done in my life,” she said.

“And me not here to help,” Minerva said, and clucked her tongue.

“I sure did wonder where you were,” Bonnie Sue said.

“Took it in my head to stroll up the long way. Came over the hill past where the river—”

“Ma,” Bonnie Sue said. “Is the baby...?”

“Sound as can be, child.”

“Thank God,” Bonnie Sue said, and turned to look at Sister. “Thank you,” she said. Sister looked at her blankly. “Thank you for what you done,” Bonnie Sue said.

Minerva went to the door and opened it. Schwarzenbacher looked scared to death. Gideon and Will stood with their hands in their pockets.

“It’s a baby girl,” Minerva said.

Schwarzenbacher nodded. “Is Bonnie Sue...?”

“She’s fine,” Minerva said. “Come in.”

Will hung back.

“Come in,” she said, and took his hand. “You must help me thank Sister — is that her name, is that what you call her?”

“Yes, Ma,” Will said.

“Come in, son, please,” she said.

He went into the cabin and his mother hugged him to her.

Schwarzenbacher was back the very next day.

Bonnie Sue sat up in bed, the baby in her arms. Sunlight streamed through the window, touching her golden hair with a paler wintry light. She asked whether he thought the child was beautiful and he said indeed he thought so. She asked if he thought the child favored her, being quick to add she was not seeking flattery, but thinking only of the fair hair and blue eyes; her own eyes had been blue at birth. He said he thought the child did indeed favor her, in coloring
and
in beauty, and then asked her what she thought to name her.

She said, “What do
you
think?”

He said, “I thought after your sister, unless that would cause the family pain.”

“I’ll ask them,” she said.

They talked of the weather then, of how mild it was for the last week in February. He told her he’d seen wildflowers blooming in the snow by the river, and ventured the opinion that spring would come early this year.

“Bonnie Sue,” he said at last, “have you given any further thought...?”

“I don’t yet know your name,” she said.

“What?” he said.

“Your Christian name.”

“Ah,” he said.

“What is it then?”

“Franz.”

“Franz,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Franz Schwarzenbacher,” she said.

“Even so.”

For some reason they both laughed. And then fell silent.

“Further thought...” she said.

“Yes, I wondered...”

“To what?” she said.

“To what was discussed at Christmastime.”

“Ah,” she said. “That.”

She was silent for a time. She touched the baby where it lay sleeping against her breast. Then she said, “The child’s not yours. I don’t see how you can...”

“I
can
,” he said firmly.

“Won’t it trouble you?”

“It will,” he said. “It troubles me even now that there’s been someone before. And I’ll tell you, Bonnie Sue, should there be anyone
after,
I’ll kill him and you besides. But I love you, and I’d have you if there’d been an army, that’s the truth. Now what do you say? I’ve asked you once, and I’m asking you again. If you refuse me this time...” He hesitated. Then he said, “I’ll ask you again next week,” and smiled so suddenly and so boyishly that he captured her heart in that instant. “Will you marry me?” he said.

“I think I shall,” she said.

The way they kept reading from their charts, it sounded almost religious to Hadley. Like in Genesis, where all the descendants of this one or that one were listed. His sons weren’t calling off any Schechems or Shobals, though; they were instead naming places and distances from place to place, as if by dividing the trip into segments it would become shorter than it was.

It was thirteen hundred miles, that’s what it was.

You couldn’t change that by breaking it in half or in quarters or in little bitty inches. It was
still
thirteen hundred miles to California, and that was twice again what they’d already traveled from Independence to here. So when he heard Gideon saying it was only a hun’ thirty, a hun’ forty miles to the North Fork of the Platte, and Bobbo saying they could make it to the upper crossing in ten days or a bit more, he found himself thinking:
That still leaves more’n eleven hundred miles to go, lads.
And when they talked about Independence Rock being a scant fifty miles beyond the river, and South Pass but a hundred after that, he realized that in their minds they were already
through
the pass and traversing the three hundred and more miles to Fort Hall, and were past that to Raft River and Goose Creek, and Mary’s River — and that was where it began sounding Biblical to Hadley.

Not because of Mary’s River, which he didn’t think had been named after the Virgin Mother, but only because the names and the distances tumbled one after the other like all the sons of Jacob and Leah: fifty miles to the Truckee, and then across the Forty-Mile Desert, through Dog Valley, Bear Valley, Emigrant Gap, the Sacramento Valley, Sutter’s Fort... ah, there was the end of it, praise the Lord. But here they went at it again, this time naming the Indians they might meet along the way, Sioux and Snake in the desert beyond Big Sandy, hostile Bannocks beyond Fort Hall, Shoshones on the way to Mary’s River, Paiutes beyond that, and afterward only the devil knew what!

It was Gideon alone planning to go at first, and then Schwarzenbacher told them all (as if they didn’t know it was coming to pass anyway) that he and Bonnie Sue would be getting married and moving west, and then Bobbo mentioned that he might go along, too. By the second week in March, they were all four of them reciting the route and the distances on each segment, and the names of the Indians, and Hadley said to Minerva he wished to hell they’d hurry up and get
going
.

“No, you don’t,” she told him.

In the woods, the snow began to melt. Patches of earth appeared, spreading like stains. The ice on the river broke away in chunks that rushed downstream on waters running swift and black and icy cold. In the winter, you could plainly see the cottonwood from which Lester Hackett had been hanged, but the trees around it now were in bright green leaf, and it blended with the rest of the forest, and was invisible.

She walked Hadley down by the river.

She said, “Had, I keep worryin if I done the right thing about the baby’s name. I keep thinkin I’m doing all the
wrong
things lately. I’m worried to death I maybe hurt Bonnie Sue’s feelings. I tried to explain, but I’m not sure I... Had, I
couldn’t
let her name the baby Annabel.”

“I think she understood.”

“You think so? She talked it over with Franz... can you get used to callin him that?”

“It’s hard,” Hadley said, and smiled.

“Aye, it is. Franz,” she said, shaking her head. “I think namin the baby for your mother’s a better idea, don’t you?”

“Yes, Min.”

“But I keep thinkin I hurt her feelings. I told her I wouldn’t hurt her for nothin in the world, but I wished she wouldn’t name the child for her sister cause... Hadley, my grief’s still... Had, I can’t think of her yet without wantin to weep.”

They walked silently by the river.

Mallows were growing along the banks, scarlet and pink, purple and white. There were wood sorrels yellow as Eva’s fine hair, hyacinths as blue as her eyes. Birdcalls carried liquidly on the soft new wind.

“I wish they wouldn’t go,” Minerva said. “I have the feeling I’ll never see any of them again.” She turned and looked directly into his eyes. “Had,” she said, “do you think we might go with them?”

“West?” he said, surprised. “West, Min?”

“Aye. I’m thinkin you were maybe right. I’m thinkin that’s where the dream is, west. Are we yet too old to chase it, Had?”

“I sometimes feel a hundred,” he said.

“I know the field’s waitin to be plowed...”

“It is,” he said.

“And I know you’re anxious to start growin things again...”

“I am.”

“But, Hadley, I’d like to go with them. I’d like to move on again.”

“I’m thinkin it’s time myself,” he said, and nodded.

They came now with buffalo robes to barter.

They came by the hundreds, on horseback or on foot, the hills alive with them. They came noisily, entire families of them, villages of them, braves and their painted squaws, young children, old men, stray horses and colts, dogs and puppies, descending to the river on the opposite shore, and then crossing close by the Chisholm cabin, pointing their fingers, turning their heads — the cabin had not been here the year before. Seasoned lodge poles trailed behind the horses, robes stacked high on woven baskets hanging between them. The river was running swiftly and children tumbled from their perches atop pyramids of robes, to be rescued by mothers or aunts or scolding older sisters. Yapping dogs reached the shore on which the Chisholm cabin stood, pissed against trees and shrubs, ran barking down to the water’s edge again to await the rest of the caravan. The Indians buzzed through the woods like a swarm of bees, their sound moving farther and farther away till they emerged — still noisy, but seemingly silent from a distance — upon the plain behind the fort. The tipis went up, lodge poles first, three of them to form a tripod, the others placed in a circle against the supporting triangle, a dozen or more cut fresh in the forest. Buffalo hides were lifted into place over the skeletons, woven mats scattered, fires started, kettles put to boil. Where an hour before there had been an empty plain, there was now a village bustling with life.