“Where would you have us go, Pa?” Will asked.
Will was almost thirty-two, born on the eve of The War, in June of 1812. He keenly resembled his father, with the same tall, broad-shouldered, wiry physique, the same dark blue eyes and black hair — though Hadley at the age of fifty-six already had more than a sifting of snow on the roof.
“I thought west,” Hadley said.
“Where west?” Minerva said at once. “Kentucky, do you mean?”
“Ain’t no land to be had in Kentucky, nor anyplace east of the Mississippi,” Hadley said. “I’m thinkin of California. Or maybe Oregon.”
Minerva shook her head. “No,” she said.
“There’s nothin for us here no more,” Hadley said.
“There’s home,” Minerva said.
“It ain’t home,” Hadley said. “It’s the Cassadas going to kill us if the land don’t first.”
“Ain’t the Cassadas going to kill us nor the land neither,” Minerva said. “I been on this land since I was twenty and you brought me here from Cedar Creek to marry. I can remember when that quarter acre—”
“The land is dead,” Hadley said.
“—behind the cabin would yield twenty-five bushels at the least. And I can remember when times was bad, too, during the Panic, when I already had Will and was carrying Gideon, and we lived through that, too. There’s trouble now with the Cassadas, but there’s always been trouble one kind or another, and I don’t see as picking up and moving’s going to solve nothing. You want to go west, then you just git on your horse and go, Had. Ain’t a soul on earth can stop you from doing whatever it is you want to do.”
“Pa’s right,” Will said.
“Then you go with him, too,” Minerva said. “I’m staying right here.”
“I wanted to leave this place when Elizabeth passed on ten years ago,” Will said. “Wanted to pack up and go, felt there was nothing to keep me here no more.”
“Man’s wife dies, it’s natural for him—”
“It was more’n that, Ma. It’s like Pa says. You got to kill yourself here to wrest a turnip or an onion from ground resists you all the way. Hell, Ma, you saw what—”
“Don’t you cuss in this house!” Minerva snapped.
“You saw what happened when we planted that cornfield, didn’t you? Had to work inside a ring of rifles, keep the Cassadas from blowing our heads off—”
“Almost did blow mine off,” Bobbo said.
He was seventeen, the youngest of the boys, with his father’s black hair and blue eyes, his mother’s thin nose and jaw, her sensuous mouth. There were those who said there was French blood on Minerva’s side, a Campbell back before the Indian Wars taking for his bride the daughter of a trapper. The Cassadas rumored it about maliciously that Minerva had a bit of Cherokee in her as well, discounting as though blind the hair as yellow as corn silk, the eyes as green as grass.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Now hush about that,” Hadley said.
“What do you mean, Bobbo?”
“I was on my way to town with whiskey to sell—”
“She don’t want to hear it,” Hadley said.
“I want to hear it. What happened?”
“One of the Cassadas shot at me from in the bushes. Dropped two jugs full, broke em on the ground.”
“That was hard-earned cash soakin into the earth,” Hadley said.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“Thought Pa told you,” Bobbo said, and shrugged.
“You’re makin this up,” Minerva said.
“It’s the truth, Ma,” Bobbo said.
“Ma, there’s something you just got to recognize,” Will said. “If we try to touch an ear of corn we planted—”
“The feudin with the Cassadas’ll pass,” Minerva said. “A body waits long enough, everything on God’s earth’ll come to pass. Was Jeff Cassada’s mother served as granny woman when Gideon was born. I’m not forgettin that, Had.”
“That was more’n twenty years ago, Min! We’re talking about—”
“I’m saying we was fast friends then, and we’ll be friends again when the feudin is over and done with.”
“You don’t understand, Ma,” Gideon said. “The Cassadas are laying claim to that field; they’re sayin it’s theirs by deed.”
Gideon was twenty-three years old, the middle son, still as curly-haired and blond as he’d been when a baby, his mother’s legacy, wasted on his brothers. He’d been named after the Biblical son of Joash the Abiezrite because in Judges 6:15, he said to God, “Oh my Lord, wherewith shall I save Israel? behold, my family is poor in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father’s house.” Gideon was born in 1821 at the height of the Panic, Hadley believing after years of deprivation that his clan truly
was
the poorest in all this Godforsaken corner of Virginia. Moreover, his newborn son was surely the runt of any litter, blondy-haired and blue-eyed, skinny as a rake, truly the least in the family — so Gideon he’d been named. But he had grown to be six feet three inches tall, weighing sixteen stone, with a huge barrel chest, and muscles on his arms as hard as lightard knots. Gideon was Minerva’s favorite. She listened more closely to him now than she had her husband or her other sons.
“Ma,” he said, “I love this place as well as you, but I think Pa’s right, I think we ought to leave it. It ain’t worth spilling a drop of Bobbo’s blood nor anybody’s over even the richest land in all the valley. And, Ma, we ain’t got nothin but a mountaintop patch of dirt that was worth our lives to plant, and’ll be worth our lives to touch an ear of corn when it’s ready to pick. I say we go.”
“
Can we go,
Ma?” Annabel asked.
“No,” Minerva said flatly.
“We’ve got kin out there, you know,” Bonnie Sue said.
“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.