The Chisholms: A novel of the journey West

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They had put out whiskey and cakes, as was the custom, and had left the cabin door wide for mourners to come and go with their condolences. By a quarter past eleven, half a dozen of the men were drunk. The women sipped more politely, but the whiskey loosened their tongues as well, and their chatter in the cabin mingled with the laughter and the loud voices and the keening of the wind outside.

It was a blustery day, for all the sky’s brightness. In April, there was early morning fog here in the mountains, but it generally burned off an hour by sun; Hadley Chisholm had watched it from the cabin window, tearing away in tatters that drifted down the valley. By the bottomlands, there were cowslips in bloom. This was springtime. You didn’t think of dying and burying when the land was turning green all around you. But they had put Hadley’s mother to rest this morning in a rock-lined grave. He had knelt beside the open grave afterward. Reached down. Picked up a handful of earth. The soil was parched and pebbly. He let it trickle through his fingers onto the pine coffin below.

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