Boone's Lick (3 page)

“If I had you and Hickok and the two boys and myself, I don't suppose I'd need much more of a posse,” he finally said.

“That's right, you wouldn't,” Uncle Seth said. “Here comes G.T., leading Old Sam. Old Sam could pull a house up a hill, if somebody hitched him to it.”

Sheriff Baldy still looked worried.

“There's two problems, Seth,” he said.

Before Uncle Seth could ask what they were Ma came outside and stuck little Marcy in his arms again.

“You keep running off and leaving this baby,” she said. “I can't have a baby around when I'm sharpening knives.”

Little Marcy was still in a perfectly good humor.
She began to wave her arms and kick her feet.

“What were the two problems, Baldy?” Uncle Seth said. He looked a little put upon.

“A hundred dollars is a lot to pay for a posse,” the sheriff said. “We could build a new city hall for a hundred dollars.”

“Yes, but once you got it built you'd still have the Millers to worry with,” Uncle Seth pointed out. “What's problem number two?”

“I haven't asked Hickok yet,” the sheriff admitted. “That's problem number two.”

“Then go ask him,” Uncle Seth advised. He strolled over my way, meaning to stick me with Marcy, but I sidestepped him. Marcy didn't like me near as much as she liked Uncle Seth. If I took her she would be bawling within a minute, which would make it hard to listen to the conversation.

“I'm scared to ask him, Seth,” the sheriff said. “I ain't a bit scared of Jake Miller but the mere sight of Billy Hickok makes me quake in my boots.”

G.T. arrived with Old Sam and I helped him tie on to the dead horse, after which Old Sam dragged the big roan gelding over to the butchering tree, freeing the sheriff's saddle in the process.

“Would you mind asking him for me, Seth, since the two of you are old friends?” the sheriff said.

“‘Old friends' might be putting it a little too strongly, but I don't mind asking him to help out,” Uncle Seth said. “I'll do it as soon as I can get shut of this baby girl, which might not be until tomorrow, the way things are looking.”

“Tomorrow would be fine,” Sheriff Baldy said.

O
NCE
we got the carcass of the big roan hitched up to a good stout limb of the butchering tree, Sheriff Baldy threw his saddle on Old Sam and rode back down to Boone's Lick.

“Please don't forget about Bill Hickok, Seth,” he said, before he left. “The Millers ain't getting nicer, they're getting meaner.”

Uncle Seth just waved. I don't think he was too pleased about his commission, but I had no time to dwell on the matter. The horse had just seemed to be a horse when Old Sam was dragging his carcass off, but by the time we had been butchering for thirty minutes it felt like we had a dead elephant on our hands. Ma worked neat, but G.T. had never known neat from dirty. By the time he got the
horse's leg unjointed he was so bloody that Ma tried to get him to take his clothes off and work naked, a suggestion that shocked him.

The sight of G.T. shocked Granpa Crackenthorpe too, when he tottered out to give us a few instructions. Granpa Crackenthorpe liked to comment that he had long since forgotten more useful things than most people would ever know. He claimed to be expert at butchering horseflesh, but the sight of G.T., bloody from head to foot, shocked him so that he completely lost track of whatever instructions he had meant to give us.

“I was in the battle of the Bad Axe River,” he remarked. “That was when we killed off most of the Sauk Indians and quite a few of the Fox Indians too. The Mississippi River was red as a ribbon that day, from all the Indian blood in it, but it wasn't no redder than G.T. here.”

“That's right,” Ma said. “He's ruined a perfectly good shirt. I tried to get him to undress before he started hacking, but I guess he's too modest to think about saving his clothes.”

“Ma!” G.T. said—he could not accept the thought of nakedness.

I was put in charge of the gut tubs. It was plain that Ma didn't intend to waste an ounce of that horse—she even cracked the bones and scraped out the marrow. Of course, it had been a hungry month—Ma hadn't even allowed us to kill a chicken.

“A chicken is just an egg-laying machine,” she pointed out. “We can live on eggs if we have to, although I'd rather not.”

Uncle Seth didn't help us with the butchering, not one bit. He rarely turned his hand to mundane labor—this irritated G.T. but didn't seem to bother Ma.

“Somebody's got to watch Marcy, and Neva ain't here to do it,” Ma said, when G.T. complained about Uncle Seth not helping.

I will say that Uncle Seth was good with babies. Marcy never so much as whimpered, the whole afternoon. Once Ma had the meat cut into strips for smoking she stopped long enough to nurse Marcy. Uncle Seth seemed to be lost in thought—he often got his lost-in-thought look when he was afraid somebody was going to ask him to do something he didn't want to do. When Ma finished nursing she handed the baby back to him and took up her butcher knife again. She didn't say a word.

All afternoon, while Ma and G.T. and I worked, skinning that horse, stripping the guts, cutting up what Ma meant to cook right away, and salting down the rest, I kept having the feeling that I was putting off thinking about something. If I hadn't had such a bunch of work to do I would have been lost in thought myself, like Uncle Seth.

What I was putting off thinking about was Ma's plain statement that she thought the horse was an elk. Up to that point in life I had thought my mother was a truthful woman. So far as I knew she was the most truthful person on earth, and the most perfect. Pa didn't really even try to be truthful, and though Uncle Seth may have tried to be truthful from time to time, we all knew he couldn't
really manage it. He favored a good story over a dull truth anytime, and everybody knew it.

Ma, though, was different. She always told the truth, whether it was pleasant or unpleasant—and it was pretty unpleasant a lot of the time. An example of the unpleasant side was the day when she told Granpa that if he didn't stop walking around with his pants down in front of Neva she was going to take him to Boone's Lick and leave him to beg for a living: and Granpa was her own father!

“You can cover yourself or you can leave,” she told him—and after that Granpa took care to cover himself.

But now I had, with my own ears, just heard Ma say that she had thought a horse was an elk. How could a person with two good eyes think a horse was an elk? Did Ma consider that we were so desperate for vittles that she had to lie—or, when she looked out the door, did her eyes really turn a horse into an elk, in her sight? Was my Ma a liar, or was she crazy? And if she had gone crazy, where did that leave me and G.T. and baby Marcy and Granpa and Uncle Seth? All of us depended on Ma. If she was crazy, what would we do?

As the afternoon went on and the butchering slowly got done, I began to wonder if the reason Uncle Seth seemed so lost in thought was because he was asking himself the same question. If Ma was crazy, what would we all do?

Not that Ma
seemed crazy
—not a bit of it. Once the butchering was finished for the day—there was still sausage making to think about—Ma cooked
up a bunch of horse meat cutlets and we had all the meat we wanted for the first time since the war ended; meat just seemed to get real scarce in Missouri, about the time the war ended.

“Have you ever eaten a mule, Seth?” Ma asked, while we were all tying into the cutlets.

“No—never been quite that desperate,” Uncle Seth said. “I suppose a fat mule would probably be about as tasty as a skinny horse, though.”

“Maybe,” Ma said, and then she suddenly looked around the table and realized Neva was missing.

“Where's Neva?” she asked. “I've been so busy cutting up Eddie's horse that I forget about my own daughter. I sent her to fetch you, Seth. Where'd she go?”

Then her eyes began to rake back and forth, from G.T. to me and back.

“I thought I trained you boys to look after your little sister better than this,” Ma said.

“Oh, she went trotting off to Boone's Lick,” Uncle Seth said. “I got so busy tending to this baby that I forgot about her.”

There was a silence—not a nice silence, though.

“She probably found a little girlfriend and is skipping rope or rolling a hoop or something,” Uncle Seth suggested.

Ma looked at me and snapped her fingers. “Shay, go,” she said.

I got up immediately and G.T. did too, but Ma snapped her fingers again and G.T. sat back down—not that he was happy about it.

“Why can't I go?” he asked, a question that Ma ignored.

“I'll stroll along with the boy,” Uncle Seth said, getting up from the table. “I need to see Bill Hickok about something anyway.”

Ma didn't look happy to hear that.

“I thought he left,” she said.

“Not as of today, according to the sheriff,” Uncle Seth said.

“Then that explains where Neva is, doesn't it?” Ma said.

Her tone of voice upset Granpa Crackenthorpe so much that he got his big cap-and-ball pistol and wandered off out the door.

“I believe there's a panther around—I better take care of it,” he said. That was always Granpa's excuse, when things got tense at the table. I had never seen a panther in my whole life and neither had G.T. But the notion that a panther was about to get the mules was the method Granpa used when he wanted to stand clear of trouble.

Ma paid him no mind. Now it seemed to be her turn to be lost in thought.

“Now, Mary Margaret, you don't need to be worrying about Neva,” Uncle Seth said. “If she should happen to be with Bill Hickok then she's as safe as if she was in jail. Bill is a perfect gentleman where young ladies are concerned.”

Ma didn't answer him. She got up and followed us to the door, but she didn't come outside.

“Hurry back,” she said, as we started down the road.

O
NCE
we started on the road to town I couldn't hold back my question.

“That was a horse we butchered,” I said. “It wasn't an elk.”

“Well, I didn't do any of the butchering but it did seem to have the appearance of a horse,” Uncle Seth agreed.

“Besides that, Sheriff Baldy was sitting on the horse,” I reminded him. “Even if Ma thought a horse looked like an elk, there was the sheriff on top of it. A sheriff wouldn't ride an elk.”

“It would be unlikely, particularly if it was Baldy,” Uncle Seth agreed.

To my disappointment, he didn't seem to want to talk about the fact that Ma had confused a horse with an elk—or had claimed to, at least. Maybe it
was because he was thinking about Wild Bill Hickok, the famous
pistolero
we were going to see. I had heard him talk about Wild Bill once or twice, so I knew the two men knew one another—but that was all I knew. Uncle Seth had picked up his rifle as we left the house—it was still in its oilcloth sheath. I don't think he brought it along because he was worried about panthers, either. I didn't know what he might be worried about. Uncle Seth gambled a lot—he might owe Mr. Hickok money, for all I knew. It could even be money he didn't have. Or Hickok might owe
him
money, in which case getting him to pay might not be easy.

I had no idea what Uncle Seth might be thinking, but then, suddenly, he told me.

“I like the Cheyenne,” he said. You never knew when Uncle Seth would change the subject.

I had never met a Cheyenne, so had no opinion to give.

“I would trust a Cheyenne over a Frenchman, most days,” he went on. “The Cheyenne rarely cheat you more than you can afford to be cheated. That's why I like to trade with them.”

I didn't say anything. I knew Uncle Seth would get around to telling me what he wanted to tell me if I could be patient and hold my tongue.

I think he was about ready to come out with it when we saw somebody come slipping up the road—the somebody was Neva.

“Hello,” Uncle Seth said. “It's nice to see you're well.”

He could see her clearly, because the clouds had
finally blown away and there was a big bright moon.

“Hello,” Neva said, and that was all she said. She went right on past us, toward the freight yard. If she had any adventures in Boone's Lick she didn't share them with us.

“Say, look out for Granpa,” Uncle Seth called after her. “He's out with his old cap-and-ball again, looking for panthers. Don't yowl or he might shoot you.”

“I don't never yowl,” Neva said. “Anyway, I don't think that old pistol of his will even shoot.”

Then she was gone.

“Besides being hardheaded, the womenfolk in this family are closemouthed, too,” he said. “The only way you're going to know what one of them does is if you catch her at it.”

Then he didn't say anything for a while, and we were nearly to town.

“What was that you were saying about the Cheyenne Indians?” I asked. I was determined to find out
something
, even if it wasn't anything I particularly wanted to know.

“Oh, I was thinking about that elk Mary Margaret claims she saw,” Uncle Seth said. “The Cheyenne explanation would be that there was an elk somewhere who realized that us Cecils were getting poorly from being so underfed. The elk might have been an old elk, who had been thinking about dying anyway. So the elk decided to give it up, so we could have some proper vittles for a while. Baldy Stone came along and the elk put his spirit
into the horse Baldy was riding. It looked like a horse but Mary Margaret seen deeper and realized it was an elk. So she shot it, just like she said. If you ask her thirty years from now what she shot that day Baldy and his deputies requisitioned the mules, she'd still say she shot an elk. And if you believe like the Cheyenne believe, then she was right.”