“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 finally he let her go, he warned, “Keep your tongue in my presence, woman.”
“My husband’ll kill you,” she said. She knew nothing else to say.
“Will he?” Jackson answered, and laughed.
She did not tell Hadley.
She wondered instead what Eva Chisholm would have done, who’d fought wild Indians in the cabin that had been her home, loading rifles in the dark beside Hadley’s father. She wondered beyond that to a time when ancestors she knew only by name crossed over from Scotland to northern Ireland to fight against wolves, weather, and worse. Would Glynis Campbell have allowed an Irish widcairn to seize her bottom and hold her fast? She’d have brained him on the spot, no question of it.
Minerva had always thought of herself as a strong woman. Knew she was going to be big even when she was just coming along, always a head or two taller than any of the other girls her age. Jackson made her feel weak and puny, and she cursed him for that now, and cursed him, too, for the knowledge that the only way she could stop him from hurting her again was to stab him or shoot him. Wasn’t no other way to do it, had to handle him the way she would an animal in the woods coming at her and trying to hurt her. He was bigger than her by nature, that was the damn thing of it, that was the thing’d never change in a million years. Wasn’t no other way to protect herself against somebody his size except by hurting him back. He tried to come near her ever again, she’d kill him — and the Lord have mercy on her soul.
Before she went to sleep that night, she asked Will for the knife he’d brought home from Texas.
“What you need it for?” he asked.
“Lost my paring knife.”
“You going to be paring this time of night?”
“First thing in the morning,” she said.
“Well, I’ll give it to you in the morning then.”
“Give it to me now,” she said, “and be still.”
“It’s sharp as a razor, Ma,” he said, and handed her the knife.
“I’ll be careful,” she said.
She slept close beside Hadley that night, but she didn’t think that would stop a crazy man like Jimmy Jackson. Hadn’t been anything of desire or lust in the way he’d grabbed her; he’d wanted only to inflict pain. She held the knife clutched in her right hand. The slaves were singing. Their voices filled the night. From somewhere on the riverbank, the smell of fresh-cut grass wafted toward the barge. The man from the Shenandoah told his slaves to shut up, and the night was still except for the gentle slap of water against the wooden sides of the vessel, that and Hadley’s gentle snoring. She wondered if she should have told Hadley after all, let him and her sons handle the matter. She decided she was doing only what Eva Chisholm or Glynis Campbell might have done. She could not imagine either of those two women running to their menfolk for help.
Patiently, she waited.
He was suddenly there in the darkness, stretching out full length beside her. She could smell his sweat and the stench of his breath. He reached around from behind her and clutched her breast, squeezing it as fiercely as he had her buttock.
“Is she waiting?” he whispered.
“Aye,” she whispered back, and turned into his arms, and put the point of the knife against his belly. “Do you feel that?” she asked.
“Wh...?”
“It’s a knife. It’s my son’s knife he brought from Texas. It’s sharp as a razor.”
“Now... now what...?” He had already taken his hand from her breast.
“Keep away from me,” she whispered.
“I meant no...”
“Do you hear?”
“Yes, but..
“Now go.”
“Ma’m, I...”
“Go!” she said.
He went at once. He got to his feet and tripped, and then stumbled his way toward the stern.
In the darkness, she smiled.
There were thousands and thousands of pigeons in the air. White and brown and purple-gray, they filled the sky over Evansville with a fluttering whisper of sound.
Minerva caught her 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.