The Chisholms: A novel of the journey West Read online

  “What kin? Who told you that?”

  “Pa did. Man name of Jesse Chisholm. From Tennessee.”

  “I never heard of no Jesse Chisholm. You made him up, Hadley.”

  “No, he’s kin sure enough.”

  “Where’s he at then?”

  “Texas, I suppose,” Hadley said. “I wouldn’t know him if I fell over him. Anyway, that ain’t where I plan to take this family.”

  “This family’s staying right here,” Minerva said. “Was my own brother waitin out west with open arms, I wouldn’t leave Virginia.” She lifted the sole remaining log and threw it into the fireplace. She did not know what she was going to cook for the midday meal. She was close to tears, but she would not show this either to Hadley or to her sons. To her daughters she said only, “We need more wood. Going to have bread, we’ll want a fire.”

  The girls had changed out of their calicos and were wearing simple linen dresses that fell tentlike and loose about their bodies. Their legs and feet were bare; they stood just inside the doorway cut between the two rooms, Bonnie Sue womanly and round at the age of fifteen, Annabel two years younger and just beginning to show buttons of breasts, both girls blond and green-eyed like their mother.

  “Fetch me some kindling,” Minerva said.

  There would have to be bread. With whatever they ate, there would be bread. She would bake it in the Dutch oven after she’d heated the lid and the oven itself on the fireplace coals. The bread would be corn bread, of course. But they were insisting the land was dead. And the land to her was corn.

  “Min,” Hadley said. He was standing very close to her; she did not turn to look at him. She busied herself with accepting the tinder the girls brought, and placing it under the single log. They had let the fire die. They had buried a woman she loved like her own mother and had let the fire die besides. “Min,” he said, “I asked the squire how much he’d be wantin for that blue wagon of his. Be a big enough wagon to make it across the country. He said ninety dollars. We’ve put enough by to pay for the wagon and the journey, too, and get us some land besides when we—”

  “You’d spend what’s taken half our lives to save?”

  “I’d spend it for the next half, Min. Damn it, I’m a farmer ain’t got nothin to farm! There’s land out west. It can be bought cheap, it can be planted. I want to go. Bailey says he’ll sell us the wagon. I want to buy it, Min.”

  “Do what you like,” she said, and angrily struck flint into the tinder.

  The snake was not as big as some Hadley had handled; he guessed it was maybe four, five feet long — he hadn’t measured the creature, nor didn’t plan to. In his time in these mountains, he had seen every kind of poisonous snake there was, from diamondbacks, like the one in the gunnysack, to copperheads, which if you cornered one hiding in the bushes, he’d shake his tail and make them bushes buzz to stop your heart. He’d even seen a cottonmouth or gapper or trapjaw or water moccasin, or whatever you wanted to call the damn thing, swimming in the Clinch like an eel and nearly scaring him half to death.

  He’d been bit by a snake only once, and that one a rattler who’d struck first and only then given warning. Hadley’d gone back to the cabin and swallowed two whole cups of whiskey and then tied a rag tight around his arm between his heart and where the snake had bit him. He poured salt on the fang marks, where the arm was beginning to rise, and then he moved the rag a bit higher on his arm when the rising started to spread. He was alone in the cabin and beginning to get a bad headache and feeling somewhat dizzy and thinking maybe he shouldn’t have drunk the whiskey, though some people hereabouts said whiskey was the only sure cure for snakebite. It was then Will came in the house and saw Hadley standing with one hand against the wall, his head bent, and went over to him fast and caught him before he fell down.

  Will cut through the fang marks with a knife he’d brought back with him from the fighting in Texas. The knife had a walnut handle inlaid with silver. He sucked out the venom, and spat it on the floor, and then washed out his mouth with whiskey. He gave Hadley more whiskey to drink after he’d bandaged the wound, and then both men sat drinking till sundown, when the rest of the family got home. Hadley was drunk by then and eager to tell them all about how he’d almost died from snakebite, weren’t for Will here with his Mexican knife. But they’d all been in town watching a man used to be with the Buckley & Weeks Circus, had himself a dancing bear now, and was selling a medicine supposed to be good for curing snakebite! Never did get to tell them what had happened. When Minerva in bed that night saw the bandage and asked him what was wrong with his arm, he said he’d got bit by a rattler while she was in town watching the dancing bear, and she said, “No, you didn’t, Hadley.”

  That was the first and only time he’d been bit by a rattler or any other kind of snake. It was all in knowing what to expect from the creatures, and also in knowing how to handle them if you were of a mind to pick one up. Hadley picked up most any serpent he ever saw because the way he read the Bible, it said in John 3: “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Hadley believed in the Son of man and hoped for eternal life and felt that one way to guarantee life forever was to lift up the serpent in the wilderness.

  Besides, he enjoyed snakes.

  Liked them better than birds, you wanted to know. All birds did was make an infernal racket in the morning when a man was trying to sleep. Messed up the front porch, too. Snakes were clean and polite, and even the poisonous ones wouldn’t strike at you less you stepped on them by accident or poked at them with a stick. The way he looked at it, snakes were the most misunderstood creatures on all God’s earth. Person saw a snake on the ground, whap, he’d hit him with a rake sure enough. Poor thing was just slithering along, trying to make a living same as anybody else. But whap came the rake, woman standing on the porch screaming with her skirts up around her knees. Afraid that old snake was going to crawl up there and get between her legs, that was the thing of it. Wasn’t no man on earth had to be fearful of reptiles, though, less his own pecker was tiny as a worm and could be put to shame by the littlest garden snake.

  The bell in the rotting church steeple was tolling as the Chisholms rode into town that Sunday morning. Hadley stopped the mules in front of the open doors to let Minerva and the girls out of the cart. By the time he’d taken mules and cart around back to hitch them to the rail there, his sons had dismounted and were coming across the field, raising a cloud of dust behind them. It had not rained hereabouts for more than two weeks, but the Clinch was running swiftly nonetheless; Hadley could hear the water below, out of sight beyond the knoll. The moment his sons disappeared around the corner of the church, he lifted the gunnysack from inside the toolbox.

  Three rows ahead of where Hadley took a seat inside the church, he could see his son Gideon looking across the aisle to where Rachel Lowery was sitting. Benjamin Lowery had come to Hadley one time last year and asked him what his son’s intentions were. Hadley had said, “Which son?”

  “Why, Gideon,” Lowery said.

  “His intentions toward what?” Hadley said.

  “Toward my daughter Rachel,” Lowery said.

  Hadley was no fool, he knew what had been transpiring between his son and Rachel for the longest time. But it was rumored at the livery stable — where admittedly the talk was sometimes inaccurate — that Rachel had been fornicating with half the young men in town since she’d turned fourteen, the wonder being she hadn’t borne a bastard before now and been publicly whipped for it.

  “I know of no intentions he has toward your daughter,” Hadley said, and that had been that.

  Yet there was Gideon staring across the aisle at her now, his intentions plain as the nose on his face. Though here in church he surely was, it was another temple he longed to enter. God forgive me, Hadley thought, and turned his attention to what the fool preacher was saying. It took him only a moment to realize young Harlow Cooper was reading from the epistle of James.

  “ ‘... is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that makes peace.’ ” Cooper cleared his throat. “ ‘From whence comes wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts. Ye adulterers and adulteresses’!” Cooper said, and closed the Bible as though he were slamming a door on an intruder. “That was from the epistle of James,” he said, as though he were riding into town with fresh news. His eyes were roaming the church. Hadley remembered those eyes watering on the wind-swept ridge two days ago, when they’d buried his mother. He was surprised to find them coming to rest on him now.

  “I chose this passage,” Cooper said, “because Friday morning I commended to God a woman who lived her whole life through in peace with her neighbors. I chose this passage because there has been strife in this town, neighbor against neighbor, Christians behaving toward each other in ways that are neither peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated, nor full of good fruits. I chose this passage—”

  Hadley rose.

  “Your Worship,” he said, using a term the congregation supposed was common currency among Papists, and causing them to snicker at once, “I wonder why you pick your Scriptures the way you do. Is it cause you’re ignorant of the word?”

  “Sir,” Cooper said, “I—”

/>   “Your Worship,” Hadley said, “I’m thinkin of what you said over my mother’s grave this Friday past. Now those words weren’t fit for the burial of a woman who—”

  “Mr. Chisholm,” Cooper said, “I’m sorry if my choice of—”

  “Those were words of celebration,” Hadley said, “and here in these mountains we don’t celebrate at graveside. We mourn those who’ve passed on, sir, and we were there last Friday to mourn a fine and decent—”

  “I assure you, Mr. Chisholm—”

  “A fine and decent woman,” Hadley said. “You should have quoted not from Psalms, but instead from Proverbs 31, where it’s written, ‘Her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her,’ and so on down to ‘She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness....’ ”

  “Yes, yes,” Cooper said, and smiled out at the congregation for approval. “ ‘Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her....’ ”

  “You know it well enough now,” Hadley said, “but where was it last Friday? Does it take a poor farmer to poke and prod you into recollection?”

  “I assure you, sir,” Cooper said, and saw that Hadley was reaching into his gunnysack. He could not imagine what was in the sack. He had seen a rattler only once, and that one a pygmy he’d almost tripped over in the woods. But yes, Hadley Chisholm was pulling a rattlesnake out of that sack, his right hand clutched behind the head, his left arm cradling the hidden body of the snake, his thumb on one side of the jaws, the forefinger on the opposite side, the remaining fingers tight around the... neck? Did snakes have necks or did their heads suddenly become their bodies? Cooper saw the snake’s mouth opening and the fangs springing down from the upper jaw into striking position. He heard what he thought to be the sound of ominous rattling coming from inside the sack and realized in the next instant that it was only Hadley Chisholm chuckling.

  “ ‘Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made,’ ” Hadley quoted. “Where in the Bible is it written?”

  “Genesis 3,” Cooper said.

  Hadley was standing just before the pulpit now, his eyes on the preacher, whose eyes were on the snake. “That’s very good, Your Worship,” he said. “Let’s see what else you can remember with a little poking and prodding.” As he said the word “poking,” he thrust the head of the snake toward Cooper, who backed away. “ ‘Their poison is like the poison of a serpent,’ ” Hadley quoted; “ ‘they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth...’ ”

  “That’s — from...”

  “Yes, Your Worship? ‘That stoppeth her ear; which will not harken to the voice of charmers...’ ”

  “Psalms 58,” Cooper said.

  “Psalms is correct; you know your Psalms well. It was Psalms you quoted Friday; are you nothing but a psalm singer?” Hadley said, and climbed up onto the small raised platform to stand directly alongside Cooper. The snake was rattling ferociously from within the gunnysack; Hadley’s hand still clutched firmly behind the open jaws. “Fear not the reptile,” he said, and laughed. “He’ll bite only a man who cannot tell his Scriptures. So then... ‘There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air...’ ”

  “ ‘The way of a serpent upon the rock,’ ” Cooper said at once. “Proverbs 30.”

  “Excellent, sir!” Hadley said. “ ‘For they cast down every man his rod...’ ”

  “ ‘And they became serpents!’ ” Cooper said triumphantly, and looked at the open jaws of the snake and quickly added, “Exodus 8.”

  “Exodus 7!” Hadley corrected.

  “Exodus 7, just so, yes,” Cooper said. “Exodus 7.”

  “It gets more difficult,” Hadley said, and brought the snake up level with Cooper’s face. “Look into them beady eyes, Your Worship. He’s waitin to bite you should you slip on the word. Now then, are you ready?”

  “You know, do you not,” Cooper said, “that you are blaspheming in the house of—”

  “ ‘For behold,’ ” Hadley said, “ ‘I will send serpents, cockatrices, among you,’ ” and thrust the snake forward and immediately pulled it back and said, “ The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat,’ ” and again the snake’s head came toward Cooper, who was about to say, “Jeremiah,” its jaws opening, its fangs slanting down — he swore he could see droplets of venom on them. Hadley was now quoting from Matthew, yes, the passage about “I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” The eyes of the snake glared at Cooper malevolently. He backed away, Hadley and the snake following, the snake seeming much more interested in what was happening now, possessed of a will of its own. Hadley shouted, “ ‘Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?’ ” and the snake hissed and rattled, and Cooper turned and ran from the pulpit and the platform, toward the door on the back wall of the church. He grasped for the knob, his hand slippery and wet as he tried to twist it, certain the snake and Hadley were behind him, equally certain the snake would bite him on the seat of his indignity. He somehow managed to open the door and flee. Behind him, he heard the congregation laughing. Hadley thrust the snake triumphantly into the gunny-sack and threw his head back and laughed, too.

  Squire Bailey was wearing a coat of the finest blue cloth, a darker blue velvet on the lapels, opening in a V over a waistcoat of cream-colored cashmere. The collar of his linen shirt showed above the white-cascade necktie crossed over his chest and held in place with an amethyst stickpin. His trousers were full at the hips, narrow from knee to ankle, the instep cut to accommodate his highly polished boots. In his left hand he was holding a palm-leaf hat made on the island of Cuba. All in all, he looked the way his grandfather must have looked two generations back when the settlement was new and the term “squire” meant country gentleman and something more, a learned man of humor, intelligence, and charm.

  He came down the church steps with a bull of a man named Jeremy Stokes, hired some three years back to oversee his sprawling plantation. Stokes had fought side by side with Andrew Jackson in the battle of New Orleans, or so it was rumored in the town, and the scar across the bridge of his nose had allegedly been put there by a British bayonet. He was decked out as splendidly as was his employer on this sunny April morning. Looking at them both as they sauntered down the church steps, Hadley could imagine them emerging from a fancy whorehouse after an hour or more of houghmagandy. Nor was the notion far-fetched; everyone in town knew that Horace Bailey’s single failing — or at least the one failing to which he openly admitted — was women. There were people in town who “Squired” him to death, bowing and scraping not in respect for his wisdom and wit, which were nonexistent, but only for the wealth he’d inherited along with his title. Hadley was not one of them.

  “Good morning, Bailey,” he said.

  “Good morning, Chisholm.”

  Hadley took a small leather pouch from the pocket of his coat. “Here’s the ninety dollars,” he said, and jingled the coins in the pouch.

  “What ninety dollars?” the squire said.

  “For the wagon.”

  “And what wagon is that?”

  “The wagon you agreed to sell me,” Hadley said. “For the journey west.”

  “I think I’d prefer keeping that wagon,” the squire said. “Mind you, I have no objections to you leaving these parts. I’m merely suggesting you do so in your own—”

  “Bailey, let’s stop the horseshittin,” Hadley said. “You promised to Bell me your wagon, and I’m here to pay for it.”

  “I recollect no such promise.”

  “Now come on, Bailey, we talked about it last Wednesday night.”

  “I recall no such conversation.”

  “I rode over to the plantation, the wagon was tied to a post just this side of the barn. We agreed to ninety dollars for it. That was the price and here’s the ninety,” Hadley said, and lifted the pouch again, and again jingled the coins in it. “We’ve got a verbal contract, Bailey. We agreed on a—”

  “I had a verbal contract with that young preacher Harlow Cooper, too. I promised him he’d find a God-fearing people in this town, and not the kind who’d come in the Lord’s house throwing snakes at a man. I reckon if one contract can be broken, then another can be broken just as easy. Wouldn’t you say so, Stokes?”