Free The Chisholms by Evan Hunter

Min?”
    “Nothing.”
    “What is it?”
    “Nothing,” she said.
    She watched them as they walked to where the beans were stored up forward in hempen sacks. Lester scooped up a hatful of them and the men went to sit in the sun on the starboard side of the boat. She was coming around the side of the cabin, thinking to find her daughters and sit with them, when Jackson stepped suddenly into her path. He was grinning wide, tobacco-stained teeth showing in the black beard, brown eyes glinting under the woolen cap tilted onto his forehead. She noticed at once that the earring was missing from his ear. He held out his clenched fist, and then opened it. The golden circlet caught the afternoon sun, glowed as though alive on his palm.
    “Does she want it?” he asked.
    She shook her head.
    “She’ll take it,” he said, “want it or not,” and moved swiftly to where she was standing. Holding the earring between thumb and forefinger, he dropped it into her bodice. She felt it moving over her breasts, sliding down inside her petticoat. In a moment, it fell from the bottom of her skirt and clattered onto the deck.
    “Ah, and I thought she might catch it between her legs,” he said, and threw back his head and laughed.
    “Leave me alone,” she said.
    “I think not,” Jackson said, and was moving toward her when Annabel came around the corner of the cabin.
    “Ma!” she shouted. “Come look! There’s a ferry crossing the river, all red, yellow, and blue!”
    “Coming,” Minerva said, and picked up the earring and threw it overboard.
     
    On a rusted iron stove in the cabin, Minerva cooked their supper and brewed a pot of coffee from the precious two pounds she’d bought in Louisville. This was the night of the sixth; they would be in Evansville tomorrow morning. The air was almost balmy, more like August than May. On the deck outside, the men were talking with the Shenandoah farmer. Their voices drifted out over the water. From the banks of the river Minerva could hear the lowing of a solitary cow. Lifting the coffeepot from the stove, she listened, transfixed, the sound of the cow calling to mind sharply and vividly the cow Bonnie Sue had made her pet years back. Couldn’t slaughter the animal to eat when times got bad because Bonnie Sue fussed and cried at the very mention of it. Finally had to sell her for less than what they’d—
    “Is she pouring?”
    She whirled from the stove. Jackson was standing in the open doorway of the cabin. The deck outside was dark, the cabin itself was dark except for the cherry-red glow of the iron stove.
    “I’ll have some, thank you,” he said, and went immediately toward the stove. From a shelf on the cabin wall he took down a tin cup the size of a tankard. On the side of the cup, painted in blue, were the initials J. J.
    “Put the pot down,” he said.
    She would not let go of the pot. The coffee had cost her fifty cents a pound, and whereas Minerva was a generation or more removed from ancestors who kept their siller in a kitchen kist, there was much of Scotland still in her blood.
    “Put it down, I say,” he told her, and caught her by the wrist, moving her hand back to the stove and forcing her to put the pot down on the glowing lid. “Thank you,” he said, and poured his cup full to the brim. “Is there no sugar?” he asked.
    “That coffee’s fifty cents a pound,” she said.
    “Aye, coffee’s dear,” he said, drinking.
    “The way you’re swilling it—”
    “Shut up,” he said, and threw his arm suddenly sideward, splashing the contents of the cup onto the rough wooden wall of the cabin. “There’s for your shitty coffee,” he said. She moved around him swiftly, making for the cabin door, but he seized her from behind, and turned her to face him, and then pulled her in tight against him. His right hand closed on her buttock, fingers and thumb tightening on her flesh. He would not release her. He kept squeezing till she thought she would swoon. And when