Free The Chisholms by Evan Hunter Page B

breath.
    “There’re more pigeons in Indiana than there are people,” Lester said. “I’ve seen them roosting in trees, the branches’ll break from their weight. Sometimes, the sky’s so full of them, you’d think it was clouds passing overhead. And when they go by, there’s a whirring of wind you can feel on the ground, and the leaves in the trees’ll shake like the rattler your husband’s got in that sack of his.”
    “They’re beautiful,” Minerva said.
    “Great Pigeon Creek, it’s called.”
    “What’s them other birds?” Annabel asked.
    “Turkey buzzards.”
    “So why ain’t it called Turkey Buzzard Creek?”
    Minerva kept watching the pigeons as Jackson and his crew maneuvered the broadhorn in toward the dock. Beside her, Hadley said, “You never saw nothin like that to home, did you?”
    “No,” she admitted.
    She watched as Hadley and the boys took the wagon and the animals ashore. The town beyond seemed a good-sized one. She was ravenously hungry and would ask if they might not take their noonday meal at an inn. As she stepped onto the makeshift gangway, Jimmy Jackson pulled his woolen cap from his head and said without a trace of irony, “Pleasure having you aboard, ma’m. Real pleasure.”
    The pigeons overhead seemed wheeling in celebration.

III
Bonnie Sue
    Illinois.
    Mules plodding along.
Ca-chok, ca-chok,
ca-
chok, ca-chok.
Breakfast, nooning, supper, and bed. Travelling through a countryside not so much different from the one back home where it came to houses and farms and towns you went through. Food to buy along the way, or shoot in the woods. Mostly rabbit. Hated rabbit even back home. It was, she thought, a lot like going to visit one of the neighbors a mile or so down the ridge. Except that you did it forever. And there was rain. The rain began the moment they left Evansville. It plopped on the new canvas cover, and soaked it nearly through, despite its protective coat of linseed oil. It mired the mules and the wagon wheels. It coyered the countryside with a uniform grayness that was as flat as the terrain itself.
    There were three horses. Bobbo, Gideon, and Will rode them alongside the wagon. The rain was relentless. They wore their hats pulled down over their eyes, rode slumped in their saddles, swore whenever a horse lost its footing in the slime. On the wagon seat up front, Hadley and Lester sat side by side. “Ha-ya!” Hadley yelled from time to time, and the mules plodded through the mud, ears twitching. Inside the wagon, Minerva dozed. Beside her, Annabel was working on a sampler she had started before leaving home. It depicted a log cabin on a grassy knoll. There were flowers in front of the cabin door. A single fat white cloud floated in the sky above the cabin. To the left of the cabin were the words “Home Sweet Home.” To the right, Annabel had penciled in the date they’d left Virginia: April 22, 1844. In bright red thread, she was now stitching the A in April.
    Leaning back against the side of the wagon, Bonnie Sue propped her journal against her knees and tried to think of something to write in it. She had bought the blankbook in Evansville, thinking maybe there’d be Indians or something in Illinois, and she could set down what they looked like and what kind of things they ate and all that. But her father showed her on the chart where there wouldn’t be Indians till they got past Independence, which was clear the other side of Missouri. First you had to go through Illinois. And Illinois was nothing but rain and a landscape as flat as the backside of a barn.
    The rain riddled the wagon cover; she looked up apprehensively at a widening wet spot. Monotonously, the wagon rolled, jostling into each pothole, ridge, and rut. Annabel’s needle slipped. She pricked herself muttered, “Damn,” and glanced immediately at her mother, whose eyes were still closed. There was a drop of blood on her forefinger. She sucked at it, scowling. Up front, through the open