The Chisholms Read Free

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