The Chisholms (10 page)

“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.