She listened to them now.
Though the mules had bolted three days ago, they were still arguing the matter, Lester maintaining flatly that oxen did not stampede as easily as mules. Will counterarguing that when oxen
did
stampede, they ran much wilder. Her father asked how Will happened to know, since there’d never been an ox in the Chisholm family from the time they’d moved down the Delaware to Virginia...
In a little while, she fell asleep.
In her dreams, Lester Hackett made passionate love to her.
Not the way Sean Cassada had, his hands alone inside her bodice or under her skirt, but instead a thorough consummation blazing fiercely hot as all the fires of hell. In her dreams, her lips were a thread of scarlet, her breasts young roes that were twins feeding among the lilies. In her dreams, Lester was a bundle of myrrh that lay betwixt her breasts, Lester was a cluster of camphire, Lester leaped upon the mountains and skipped upon the hills, Lester’s hands were as gold rings set with the beryl, his belly was as bright ivory overlaid with sapphires, his legs pillars of marble, his mouth most sweet — he was altogether lovely. She longed to go out early with him to the vineyards, to see whether the vines had flourished or the pomegranates budded forth. She longed for him to go down to his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens and to gather lilies.
I am my beloved’s,
she said in her dreams,
and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies
.
They came to within a half day’s journey of St. Louis by the nineteenth of May, which was a Sunday, and attended church services in a small clapboard building set on a grassy knoll. There was an organ inside the church. Fat sonorous notes floated out on the air as they came down the church steps and onto the sloping path to where they’d hitched the wagon.
“Nice sermon,” Lester said.
“Yes,” Bonnie Sue said.
“Your father seemed to enjoy it, too.”
“Nothin he likes better than a good one,” she said. “Nor worse than a bad one,” she added, and smiled.
“We’ll be parting company tomorrow,” he said. “I suppose you realize that.”
“Yes, Lester.”
“I feel I scarcely know you,” he said.
“I feel I know you well.”
“Do you now?”
“Yes, Lester.”
“And yet...” He hesitated. She waited. He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“What were you about to say?”
“I have no right; you’re still a child.”
“I’m a woman.”
“Then...”
“Yes?”
“When they’re asleep tonight — no, never mind.”
“Lester...”
He moved away from her suddenly, walking ahead of her to the wagon. Annabel came running up to clutch her hand.
“Bonnie Sue?” she said. “Do you like going west?”
“Yes,” Bonnie Sue said, staring off after Lester.
“You do?”
“What?” Bonnie Sue said. “I’m sorry.”
“I thought it’d be more exciting,” Annabel said.
At sunset, they pulled the wagon off the road and unhitched the mules, picketing them and the horses on good grazing ground. They built themselves a blazing fire then, and took their supper in the gathering dusk. There was a crescent moon showing even before the sky was black. Stars appeared.
Bonnie Sue lay awake in the darkness, her feet toward the fire, the blanket covering her to her chin. She had taken off her bodice, skirt and shoes, and wore only her petticoat and underdrawers. She’d not put on a pair of stockings since they’d disembarked at Evansville, her mother telling her the open road was no place for good cotton hose, especially with the weather so warm. That was before the rains hit them, though certainly enough the weather had turned fine again afterward. She listened to the sounds around her and judged everyone asleep, but she waited, not wanting to make a move that could be rightly read by anyone still awake. She hoped, she prayed that Lester alone was still awake, and still desiring her. She waited.
When she’d judged that fifteen minutes had passed — counting her own heartbeats sixty to the minute, nine hundred of them all told, nearly beginning to panic once when she lost the count and couldn’t remember for the briefest tick of time whether the heartbeat of that instant signaled
three
hundred and four or
two
hundred and four, settling on the higher figure in her eagerness for the time to pass swiftly — when she’d counted at last to nine hundred, she raised herself on one elbow and glanced from one huddled shape to another in the light of the blazing fire. Her father was asleep, sure enough, and her mother and her brother Will, too, who snored almost as loud as her father did. On the other side of the fire were Gideon and Bobbo — his mouth wide open to catch any passing varmint — both of them asleep. And there lay Annabel, also asleep —
We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: What shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?
— but some ten feet around the circumference of the circle, where Lester should have been, there were only his ground cloth and blanket.
Her heart lurched.
Rising, remembering to take her blanket with her, she ran barefooted toward a small stand of birch near where the mules and horses were picketed. She glanced back over her shoulder once before entering the woods. No one was stirring. She was certain Lester would be here waiting for her, so certain that she almost called his name. But the woods were empty, moonlight shone on pale gaunt trunks, and in the brush an insect clicked and then fell silent. She could hear the mules and horses in the field beyond. A log hissed and spat on the fire and then all was still again.
His arm came out of the darkness, circling her waist from behind. He pulled her in against him, and she felt immediately the stiffness of him inside his trousers and against her buttocks. Still behind her, he reached up with both hands now and clutched her breasts, and lowered the petticoat straps to free them. Holding them naked in his cupped hands, he bent his head to kiss the side of her neck. She was trembling violently. She turned to him and put both arms around him and squeezed him fiercely, as though she might stop the trembling that way. But what she’d earlier felt pressing the curve of her backside was now firm against the mound between her legs, and the hands that a moment before had held her naked breasts were now clutching her buttocks, the fingertips nudging her cleft from behind. She knew she would swoon. He bent slightly and put his left arm behind her knees, and with his right behind her back he lifted her from the ground and carried her through the stand of birch to where the woods became more dense.
It was almost pitch black here in the deeper woods. The fire was too distant even to be seen, and only dappled moonlight filtered through the heavily laced branches of the huge old trees. He carried her to a pale green glade, her head against his shoulder, and then lowered her gently to the ground. The ground was moist; she realized suddenly she had dropped the blanket somewhere back among the birches. She felt the wetness through the thin cotton petticoat, and on the backs of her naked legs when he raised the petticoat above her waist. She did not resist him when he lowered her drawers to her knees, and then eased them past her ankles and removed them entirely and put them on the ground beside her with a curious delicacy, as though he were placing an expensive timepiece on a polished fruitwood dresser top. He had not said a word thus far, and she wondered when he was going to say something,
Thou art beautiful, O my love as Tirzah,
something,
the joints of thy thighs are like jewels,
anything at all. But his hands were gently urging open those jewellike thighs, and she realized with a start, but without particular alarm, that he had unbuttoned the fly of his trousers.
“Open,” he said, which she supposed was somewhat poetic, but not quite so flowery as what she’d been expecting. He was pressing against her now, this very moment, trying to place his dove in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, and she felt an uncontrollable urge to giggle. And then, suddenly, there was an implosion of flesh, his and her own, her nether lips clinging resolutely and then receiving him all at once, so that his entrance seemed an unexpected surprise. She opened fully to him, legs apart, petticoat thrown wantonly back, arms flung wide like those of a crucified whore. His hands were under her, his fingers spread upon her buttocks, lifting her to him with each stroke until — learning the motion, discovering that even the slightest tilt against him caused her to quiver below — she cunningly initiated a responding thrust of her own and together they fell into a jagged tempo that was surely the beat of the devil’s own jig, played on a fiddle out of tune.
“Do you love me?” he whispered. “Tell me you love me, darlin girl,” the words rolling off his tongue as easy as Irish whiskey.
She whispered against his ear and into it, cautiously at first though her passion urged otherwise, “I love you.”
“Louder,” he said.
“I love you, yes.”
“Again.”
“I love you,” she said, boldly this time, “I love you, yes I love you,” she said, “oh Jesus,” she said, melting inexorably into her own cleft, climbing each relentless stroke, gliding to the root of him, grinding there, “oh Jesus,” she said, “oh Lester, I love, oh Jesus, oh yes, I love you, I love you.”
In the morning Lester was gone.
And with him Will’s horse.
She thought at first the commotion had to do with someone having seen her and Lester in the woods the night before. When she heard the angry voices, she was sure that her brothers had dragged Lester out from under his blanket and were now going to skin him alive. It was first light; the fire had turned to ashes blowing off fine in a thin wind from the east. She squinted through the veil of ashes to where her brothers were standing near the horses and the mules, and looked for Lester because she thought they’d have him by the throat or the scruff of the neck, but Lester was nowhere in sight. That was when she got the gist of what they were saying.
Lester had run off in the night.
Lester had stolen Will’s raindrop gelding.
“Didn’t trust him from the minute I laid eyes on him,” Hadley said.
“What do you make of these tracks?”
“They ain’t heading west, that’s for Sure.”
“For
all
his knowing snakes,” Hadley said, and spat on the ground.
“How long you think he’s been gone?”
“No way of telling.”
“Anybody hear anything during the night?”
“Heard some thrashing out there in the woods,” Bobbo said, “but I figured it to be some critter.”
Bonnie Sue got to her feet and smoothed her petticoat. Her sister Annabel was watching her shrewdly, or seemed to be. Had she, too, heard thrashing in the woods, and had she gone to investigate? They’d been out there half the night, Lester holding her in his arms till he was ready again to claim what she’d already declared was his. Now he was gone. And they were calling him a horse thief. Quickly, she dressed.
“Ought to string him up,” Hadley said.
“Got to catch him first, Pa.”
“He
knows
we’re late, figures we can’t spare no time chasin him.”
“That’s a fine horse he stole.”
“We go after him, we won’t make Independence till Independence
Day.
I say we forget the bastard.”
“And forget my horse, too? Worth a hundred fifty dollars or more, that horse.”
“Those tracks are plain enough headin north,” Bobbo said.
“To Carthage, more’n likely,” Gideon said. “His mother’s there in Carthage, didn’t he say?”
“How far’s Carthage from where we’re at now?”
“A hundred miles or thereabouts,” Will said.
“It’s more’n that,” Hadley said. “A good hun’ twenty at the least.”
“I can travel that in four, five days,” Will said.
“That’s
if’n
he’s headed for Carthage, which ain’t likely. Man tells you his ma’s a certain place, he ain’t about to steal no horse and head straight
for
that place.”
“Nobody says a horse thief’s got to be smart, Pa.”
“Nor necessarily dumb, neither. Lester didn’t strike me as no fool.”
“Either way, I’d have a fair chance of over-takin you in Independence.”
“How do you figure, son?”
“I’d be travelin faster, just me on horseback.”
“Still be a hard pull.”
“I’d like to go after him, Pa.”
“What’ll you do if you catch him?”
“Take him to the law.”
“Where?”
“In Carthage, if that’s where I find him.”
“Suppose you find him in the woods someplace, cookin his supper or skinnin a cat?”
“I’ll ride him to the nearest place there
is
law.”
“I don’t like you goin out alone after no horse thief.”
“I’ll go with him,” Gideon said.
“Leave me alone with Bobbo and the mules, huh? I’ll tell you, boys, I don’t like the whole idea. If there’s wagons still in Independence, we’ll have to leave when they do. And if there
ain’t,
we’ll have to move out straightway and try catchin up with them’s already gone. Suppose you ain’t there yet?”
“Then you just go ahead without us,” Will said. “We’ll catch up wherever.”
“I don’t know,” Hadley said, and shook his head.
“Man stole my horse,” Will said.
“I
know
what he done, damn it!”
Bonnie Sue wished they’d ride out after Lester and bring him right back here, where she’d declare her love for him and save his life. At the same time, she wished they’d ride out after him and hang him on the spot instead, in punishment not for having stolen Will’s horse but only for having deserted her. Her cheeks still burned with the memory of their ardor, burned with anger, too, and with what she supposed was shame — was she only imagining Annabel’s intense scrutiny? Or was her fornication as evident as the mist on the meadow beyond, where the picketed mules and horses stood sniffing the morning air and pawing the ground?