Boone's Lick (14 page)

At first I
didn't
see the ripple. The surface of the river was never steady for long: there would always be little waves, or a fish would jump and go back down with a splash, or a waterbird would skim the surface and disturb the water. We had already seen several muskrats, but it didn't take a critter the size of a muskrat to disturb the water. Even a water bug could do it, skipping along. But, by looking close, I finally
did
see the ripple Charlie was talking about, just a little
V
where the water edged around something hidden just underneath it. Sure enough, when Charlie probed underneath it with his paddle, he struck a snag. I soon got so I could spot the ripples myself—I wasn't as expert at it as Charlie, of course, but I was sharp-eyed enough that I could save the boat from getting stuck, most times.

Sandbars were harder to spot, because the river just surged right over them, with no change the eye could spot.

“I keep a watch for cranes and herons,” Charlie said. “They like to set down where the water is shallow.”

On the west side of the river there would now and then be a good break in the trees—I could see stretches of brown prairie and was hoping any
minute to spot my first buffalo, but when I asked Charlie about buffalo he shook his head.

“We will be lucky if we see buffalo,” he said.

I was shocked. Pa and Uncle Seth had always talked about the great herds of buffalo that covered the prairies. They claimed a hunter could just stand at the edge of the herd and shoot as many as he wanted, and they bragged about how good buffalo liver tasted, and buffalo tongue. Uncle Seth even explained how he liked to sprinkle a little bile out of the spleen, to give the meat more flavor.

“But I thought there were millions of them,” I said.

“Not along the Holy Road—not now,” Charlie said. “Animals won't stay in places where too many people shoot at them.”

When we got back to the boat I took the matter up with Uncle Seth, who looked a little hangdog.

“Charlie's right—they're scarce now—too many immigrants,” he said. “I expect we'll scare up a few when we get to Wyoming, if that's where we're going.”

Ma was washing clothes. One day on the river and she already felt the need of a big wash. The wet clothes were spread out on the roof of the little shed, drying. The boatmen, though they lived on the water, could not be described as clean and tidy. They looked at Ma as if she were crazy. Aunt Rosie was dozing in a little spot of shade, and Neva and G.T. were playing a dice game with the priest, using borrowed dice.

When Uncle Seth raised the question of where we were going, Ma sort of cocked her head.

“Where else would we be going, if not Wyoming?” she asked. “That's where they're building the new forts—where would Dick be, if not in Wyoming?”

Uncle Seth shrugged. “This west is a big place,” he said. “Ideal for a wandering man. It's a long sail up to Fort Union—Dick could be anyplace.”

“Fort Union, that's too north,” Granpa said. “You're apt to need snowshoes, when you're that far north.”

For some reason Ma wasn't satisfied with Uncle Seth's answer, though it seemed reasonable to me. Pa went where he wanted to—he had no fondness for carpentry and might shy away from fort building if he got the chance. Uncle Seth was right about one thing: the west was big. Already the sky looked bigger than the sky over Boone's Lick—and we hadn't even been going upriver a whole day.

Ma had a different reasoning process than most people. Answers that sounded fine to me or G.T. or even Neva didn't satisfy Ma.

“You know more than you're telling, don't you, Seth?” Ma said, staring at him. “You're Dick's partner—I expect you know where he is.”

“Why would I? It's been fourteen months since I set eyes on Dick Cecil,” Uncle Seth said. The red vein popped out on his nose, a sign that he was nervous, or might be getting mad.

Ma didn't press him—not in words—but it was plain that she had a suspicion. Uncle Seth stood up, had a stretch, and went over and began a conversation with Charlie Seven Days.

That was the end of the talk about Wyoming for that day.

T
HE
boatmen were afraid to travel on the river after dark. Even Charlie Seven Days couldn't spot snags in the dark. So when evening came the boatmen tied up on the bank. We stopped about an hour before dark, to give our hunters—Uncle Seth and Charlie—a chance to rustle up some game. Uncle Seth saddled Sally and headed due west, while Charlie strolled off toward a little grove of trees a mile or two from the riverbank. G.T. was annoyed, because he wasn't allowed to hunt.

“Fish, if you want to do something useful,” Ma told him.

“Why? I'm a poor fisherman and you know it,” G.T. said, in a sassy tone. Two minutes later he landed a twenty-pound catfish.

“I guess it's a good thing you're a poor fisherman,”
Ma said. “If you were a good fisherman you might have caught one so big it would tip the boat.”

G.T. just stared at the fish, as if he could hardly believe he'd caught it.

It turned out to be a lucky day for hunters
and
fishermen. Uncle Seth came back in half an hour with a fat little doe across his Sally's rump, and Charlie walked in a few minutes later with two wild turkeys.

Father Villy turned out to be a big help with the cooking. Ma wouldn't usually allow anyone to interfere with her when she was cooking, but she made an exception for Father Villy and he concocted a kind of sweetbreads stew which we all thought was tasty.

“I cooked for the garrison up at Fort Pierre,” he said. “The real cook died of jaundice. I have never seen a human being turn so yellow.”

“He must have overdone the rum—it'll turn a person yellow,” Uncle Seth volunteered.

“No, I'm afraid it was witchcraft,” the priest said. “There was an Arapaho medicine man who took against him and made a spell that turned him yellow.”

“I know that medicine man,” Charlie said. “He calls himself the Man of the Morning.”

“That's him, the rascal,” Father Villy said.

“Why, I believe I've seen him too,” Uncle Seth said. “He was around Fort Laramie for a while—Dick and I even gave him a ride once or twice. I've heard he poisons people with cactus buds.”

Uncle Seth and Father Villy went on talking about the bad medicine man who turned people yellow, but Charlie took his plate and went over to the edge of the boat to eat. He was a man who seemed to live in his own space—sometimes he would invite you into it, but sometimes not. When he finished his sweetbreads he washed his plate in the river.

Ma was sitting outside the little shed, nursing Marcy and thinking her own thoughts, the way she did. It was not smart to barge into Ma's space, either, when she was thinking her own thoughts—she was like Charlie in that way.

What got me was how the priest and Uncle Seth and Charlie Seven Days seemed to know just about everybody there was to know, up and down the plains. From what I had heard, the west was such a huge place that you'd be lucky to meet ten people a month, but Uncle Seth and the priest and Charlie soon discovered that they had several acquaintances in common—for all the big space, there were just so many forts, where the old-timers and the newcomers mixed and mingled.

I was anxious to get to one of the forts myself. I wanted to meet some of the famous mountain men—Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, and the like: the men Uncle Seth was always telling stories about.

That night I had a dream about Henry Clay, our mule that the Millers and the Tebbits had skinned and eaten. I was riding Henry Clay along at a brisk clip, and we seemed to be going to a fair or something, because I could hear music in the distance,
but we never quite got to the fair. Somehow we missed it and ended up back in our old freight yard—already half the pens had been knocked down, and the cabin had begun to sag in.

I was dozing on deck when I had this dream—the next thing I knew, Ma had hold of me and was trying to drag me under the shed. A wild storm had come up—the river was pitching the boat around like a chip. Lightning flashed like white fire and in the flash I saw Little Nicky, the mule, get thrown clear over the edge into the river. For a while the lightning was so bad that I kept my eyes squeezed shut, to protect my eyeballs. Uncle Seth and Charlie Seven Days were struggling to keep any more of the animals from pitching overboard. While they were hanging on to the livestock the little shed blew clean away, into the river somewhere behind us. There was nothing we could do except huddle together and wait out the storm. At one point the boat gave such a lurch that baby Marcy popped out of Ma's arms—luckily Aunt Rosie caught her. Of course, Marcy was screaming her lungs out, but we could only hear her for a second, between thunderclaps. In my mind I was still half in my dream, but the rest of me was wet as a dog, and cold.

It must have been nearly dawn when the storm struck, because lightning was still flashing to the east when the sky began to get red with the sunrise. For a few minutes clouds and thunder and sun all mixed together, but then the thunder became only a faint rumble, off in the distance, and the sun came up, round and warm.

“Count up,” Ma said. “Some of us might be missing.”

“I don't see Seth,” Aunt Rosie said. “I don't see that skinny boatman, or Mr. Seven Days either.”

“If we've lost Seth we're in for it,” Ma said.

But we hadn't lost him—he had floundered ashore somehow and came walking along the riverbank, leading Little Nicky by his lead rope. We hadn't lost Joe, the skinny boatman, or Charlie Seven Days either—they had just gone off to fix a line to the little shed before it floated all the way down to the Mississippi. Uncle Seth finally had to unload all the mules and hitch them to that shed, in order to get it back upstream to the boat—it was then that I realized how powerful a river can be, when it's got something in its channel.

“These are just the pleasures of travel, I guess,” Uncle Seth said, when he climbed back on deck. We were all still soaking wet.

“If you think this is pleasure, then I'd say you're a fool,” Ma said. Sometimes she liked Uncle Seth's little jokes, and sometimes she didn't.

“But where is your old one?” Charlie asked, once he had his canoe safely back in place. “I don't see him.”

Father Villy had been in the water, pulling with the mules, but he jumped back on deck quick enough, when he discovered we couldn't locate Granpa.

The fact was, Granpa Crackenthorpe was gone. There was not a trace of him to be seen.

“I should have tied him to something—I was so
scared for Marcy that I forgot him,” Ma said, when it was clear that Granpa was gone. G.T. and Neva, neither of whom had ever liked Granpa, were bawling their heads off anyway.

“No, you don't want to tie somebody to a boat that's pitching,” Uncle Seth said. He tried to put his arm around Ma but she shook him off. “A pitching boat can flip over, and then whoever's tied to it will be drownt for sure.”

Ma didn't bother to answer him.

Of course, a storm that could pitch a full-grown mule overboard would have no trouble tossing a skinny old man.

Uncle Seth got back on Sally, and Charlie Seven Days untied his canoe. Father Villy walked down one bank of the river crying, “Hubert! Hubert!” at the top of his lungs, and then swam across and did the same on the other bank, all to no avail. No trace of Granpa was found.

I couldn't hold back the tears myself. Granpa Crackenthorpe had lived with us every day of my life. He wasn't especially agreeable, but on the other hand, there was no reason to stab him with a pocketknife, as G.T. had once done.

Uncle Seth and Charlie and Father Villy searched the river nearly all that day. Ma didn't help and didn't look—she sat at the stern of the boat, dry-eyed, leaving Marcy to Aunt Rosie's care, except when she needed to nurse.

The boatmen grew impatient. Once they got their flimsy shed nailed back on they wanted to be on their way upriver, but Uncle Seth insisted we wait.

“If Hubert managed to get loose from that big pistol of his, then he would have been light as a leaf,” Uncle Seth said. “He could be ten miles downstream, wandering around in the mud, cussing us all.”

Ma didn't answer. None of us were hungry that night. The boatmen ate most of what was left of the turkeys and the deer.

W
E
searched downriver—all of us—for another whole day, but we didn't find Granpa. The boatmen grew so surly that Uncle Seth raised a temper and threatened to shoot all of them.

“Learn a little patience!” he said, with the vein popping on his nose.

“I fault myself for this,” Ma said. “I should have left the bunch of you in Boone's Lick and gone looking for Dick myself.”

“Mary, you've got a nursing baby,” Uncle Seth reminded her. “You can't just go off and leave a nursing baby.”

“I could—she's had about enough of the teat,” Ma said. “Besides, there are nanny goats. Their milk is richer than mine.”

Father Villy, like Ma, was cast into sadness by the loss of Granpa Crackenthorpe.

“Hubert survived the battle of the Bad Axe, which was so terrible that the Mississippi River ran red,” Father Villy said. “Then a little freshet blew him away.”

We were all willing to keep looking, but Ma shook her head.

“Time to give it up,” she said—then she sat all day in the stern of the boat, alone with her thoughts.

The next morning the surface of the river was as smooth as if wind had never ruffled it. There was frost on the ropes we used to tie up the boat, and little crinkles of ice in the shallows along the shore. All day ducks came slanting in—sometimes there were a thousand or more of them on the river at once; their gabbling kept me awake and fear of storms kept G.T. awake. He had stopped worrying about bears and started worrying about dangerous clouds. Despite what Uncle Seth said about boats flipping over, G.T. tied himself to the railing every night, in a fearful mood.