The Chisholms by Evan Hunter Page A

as bright ivory overlaid with sapphires, his legs pillars of marble, his mouth most sweet — he was altogether lovely. She longed to go out early with him to the vineyards, to see whether the vines had flourished or the pomegranates budded forth. She longed for him to go down to his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens and to gather lilies.
I am my beloved’s,
she said in her dreams,
and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies
.
     
    They came to within a half day’s journey of St. Louis by the nineteenth of May, which was a Sunday, and attended church services in a small clapboard building set on a grassy knoll. There was an organ inside the church. Fat sonorous notes floated out on the air as they came down the church steps and onto the sloping path to where they’d hitched the wagon.
    “Nice sermon,” Lester said.
    “Yes,” Bonnie Sue said.
    “Your father seemed to enjoy it, too.”
    “Nothin he likes better than a good one,” she said. “Nor worse than a bad one,” she added, and smiled.
    “We’ll be parting company tomorrow,” he said. “I suppose you realize that.”
    “Yes, Lester.”
    “I feel I scarcely know you,” he said.
    “I feel I know you well.”
    “Do you now?”
    “Yes, Lester.”
    “And yet...” He hesitated. She waited. He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
    “What were you about to say?”
    “I have no right; you’re still a child.”
    “I’m a woman.”
    “Then...”
    “Yes?”
    “When they’re asleep tonight — no, never mind.”
    “Lester...”
    He moved away from her suddenly, walking ahead of her to the wagon. Annabel came running up to clutch her hand.
    “Bonnie Sue?” she said. “Do you like going west?”
    “Yes,” Bonnie Sue said, staring off after Lester.
    “You do?”
    “What?” Bonnie Sue said. “I’m sorry.”
    “I thought it’d be more exciting,” Annabel said.
     
    At sunset, they pulled the wagon off the road and unhitched the mules, picketing them and the horses on good grazing ground. They built themselves a blazing fire then, and took their supper in the gathering dusk. There was a crescent moon showing even before the sky was black. Stars appeared.
    Bonnie Sue lay awake in the darkness, her feet toward the fire, the blanket covering her to her chin. She had taken off her bodice, skirt and shoes, and wore only her petticoat and underdrawers. She’d not put on a pair of stockings since they’d disembarked at Evansville, her mother telling her the open road was no place for good cotton hose, especially with the weather so warm. That was before the rains hit them, though certainly enough the weather had turned fine again afterward. She listened to the sounds around her and judged everyone asleep, but she waited, not wanting to make a move that could be rightly read by anyone still awake. She hoped, she prayed that Lester alone was still awake, and still desiring her. She waited.
    When she’d judged that fifteen minutes had passed — counting her own heartbeats sixty to the minute, nine hundred of them all told, nearly beginning to panic once when she lost the count and couldn’t remember for the briefest tick of time whether the heartbeat of that instant signaled
three
hundred and four or
two
hundred and four, settling on the higher figure in her eagerness for the time to pass swiftly — when she’d counted at last to nine hundred, she raised herself on one elbow and glanced from one huddled shape to another in the light of the blazing fire. Her father was asleep, sure enough, and her mother and her brother Will, too, who snored almost as loud as her father did. On the other side of the fire were Gideon and Bobbo — his mouth wide open to catch any passing varmint — both of them asleep. And there lay Annabel, also asleep —
We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: What shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?
— but some ten feet around the circumference