The Chisholms Read Free Page B

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.
    “ ‘... is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that makes peace.’ ” Cooper cleared his throat. “ ‘From whence comes wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts. Ye adulterers and adulteresses’!” Cooper said, and closed the Bible as though he were slamming a door on an intruder. “That was from the epistle of James,” he said, as though he were riding into town with fresh news. His eyes were roaming the church. Hadley remembered those eyes watering on the wind-swept ridge two days ago, when they’d buried his mother. He was surprised to find them coming to rest on him now.
    “I chose this passage,” Cooper said, “because Friday morning I commended to God a woman who lived her whole life through in peace with her neighbors. I chose this passage because there has been strife in this town, neighbor against neighbor, Christians behaving toward each other in ways that are neither peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated, nor full of good fruits. I chose this passage—”
    Hadley rose.
    “Your Worship,” he said,