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leaving.
    He wanted to step out from the bushes and stand on Chisholm land like the man he was and yell for them to leave Bonnie Sue behind. Yell that he loved her. But if he done that, why then Will would just turn his big old gelding around and come riding up to where Sean stood like a damn fool with tears in his eyes, and he’d as soon strangle Sean as spit on him. Else Gideon would raise his old rifle and take careful steady aim in his easy slow way and blow Sean’s brains to hell and gone.
    He lay in the bushes instead and tried to get a glimpse of Bonnie Sue, but she was looking ahead, toward the front of the wagon, she was looking west. He knew he would never again see her as long as he lived, and he told himself it was important that he remember this departure, remember it as the night Bonnie Sue moved out of his life. His eyes were accustomed to the darkness now, he could see as sharply as a cat.
    Minerva Chisholm turned her head for a look at the cabin. And brought her hand to her mouth. And held it there an instant, the fingertips gently touching her parted lips.
    It was this Sean would remember.

II
Minerva
    “You think I’m going down that river, you’re crazy,” she said.
    They stood on the banks of the Ohio, just above the Falls, and watched the water crashing in waves ten feet high on the rocks below. It had taken them almost two weeks to get here. They had traveled through a countryside as civilized and as settled as any back home. The trail through the Gap and across Kentucky was trafficked with farmers and merchants coming and going with produce and goods to sell. The Chisholms drank fresh milk and ate fresh vegetables. At one farm along the way, they purchased a suckling pig and roasted it that night on the banks of a stream. Wherever there was a barn, they asked a farmer for permission to spend the night in it. Sometimes they were asked to pay a little something for the roof over their heads. More often than not, the people living along the road were generous and hospitable. Two weeks to get here, Minerva thought. That meant it’d take only two weeks to get right back where they belonged.
    “Person’d drown out there in a minute,” she said.
    “There’re channels go through,” Will said.
    “I don’t see no channels,” she said, and took a step back from the edge, refusing to look again at the river below, boiling with logs and stumps and broken steamboat paddles.
    “You son’s been here, he knows this damn river,” Hadley said.
    “Cussin ain’t about to get me on no vessel intendin to come down that waterfall. Wild Indians couldn’t—”
    “There’s chutes, Ma,” Will said. “You go through one of the chutes.”
    “I don’t care if there’s chutes or channels or secret underwater passages known only to the men who founded this garboiling town. I want to go home, Hadley. First thing in the mornin, I want to turn around and go home.”
    “First thing in the mornin, we’re going west,” Hadley said.
    “
You’re
goin west maybe,” Minerva said.
    “We’re
all
goin west,” Hadley said.
    “You went over these falls, Will?”
    “You don’t go
over
them, Ma. You go
through
them, sort of. I took a skiff downriver, and then got on a steamboat in Shippingport.”
    “Then let’s us get on a steamboat downriver, too,” Minerva said.
    “Cost too much,” Hadley said, and shook his head.
    “How much?”
    “Fourteen dollars apiece almost. Plus whatever they’d charge for the wagon and animals.”
    “Doubt if they’d even take those aboard, Pa,” Will said. “Weren’t none on the steamboat to N’Orleans.”
    “Hadley,” she said, “I’m goin home. If I got to hire out to a traveling circus...”
    “Min...”
    “As a trapeze artist or a bearded lady...”
    “It ain’t really dangerous,” Will said. “The current’s fast, and the river changes width a lot....”
    “I’m sure happy to hear that,” Minerva said.
    “And there’s islands and rocks all along