Boone's Lick (11 page)

G.T. was a late sleeper, and Neva too. Sometimes I'd get to sit alone with Ma for a minute, before the day got started.

Unless the weather was wet Uncle Seth slept outside, in a little camp he had made not far from the cabin. He had spent so much time on the open prairies, with the stars to look at, that he could no longer tolerate the confinements of a roof.

“I'd like to spend as many nights as possible looking straight up at heaven,” he said.

“Looking is all you'll get to do,” Ma said. “You're too bad a sinner to expect to get any closer.”

I didn't understand that, since about the most sinful thing Uncle Seth did was get drunk—since he was sleeping outdoors anyway, his getting drunk didn't bother anybody. Ma wasn't churchly, anyway—maybe her calling him a sinner was just a joke between them.

This morning, though, I got a kind of lonely feeling as I was walking down to the lots. The lonely feeling stayed with me all through my chores, although it was a lovely morning. I saw several skeins of Canada geese flying north, above the river, in the direction we would soon be going ourselves, the whole bunch of us, from baby Marcy to Granpa Crackenthorpe, piled in our wagon, on top of the sacks. Uncle Seth had arranged for a flatboat to take us all the way to Omaha, which was way upriver, I guess.

“After that, it'll be chancy travel,” Uncle Seth informed us all. “I may not be able to find a boat
willing to haul four mules and a bunch of crazy people into the Sioux country.”

The geese soon circled around and landed on the river—it was the wrong time of year for them to be going very far north. But thinking about the north just fit in with my lonely feeling. I had never lived anyplace but our cabin. I knew every tree and bush for a mile or two around, knew the way to Boone's Lick, knew most of the folks who worked in the stores. I knew the river, too—in the summer I could even figure out where the big catfish fed.

Now we were leaving the only place G.T. and Neva and I had ever lived. The fact of it almost made me queasy, for a while, though part of me was excited at the thought of traveling up the river and over the plains, into the country where the wild Indians lived, where there were elk and grizzly bears and lots of buffalo. It would be a big adventure—maybe Ma would find Pa and satisfy her feelings about his behavior—that was a part of it I just didn't understand, since there was no sign that Pa was behaving any differently than he had ever done.

Still, I was leaving my
home
—the big adventure was still just thoughts in my head, but our home was our place. The river, the town, the mules, the stables, the cabin, Uncle Seth's little camp under the stars, the wolf's den G.T. and I found, the geese overhead, the ducks that paddled around in big clusters along the shallows of the river, even the crawdads that G.T. trapped or the turtles that sank down, missing their heads, after Uncle Seth shot
them—the white frost in the fall and the sun swelling up from beyond the edge of the world: all that, we were leaving, and a sadness got mixed in with the thought of the big adventure we would have. All around Boone's Lick there were cabins that people had just left and never came back to—many had emptied out because of the war. Once the people left, the woods and the weeds, the snakes and the spiders just seemed to take the cabins back. Pretty soon a few logs would roll down, and the roof would cave in. Within a year or two even a sturdy cabin would begin to look like a place nobody was ever going to come back to, or live in again.

The thought that
our
cabin might cave in, become a place of snakes and spiders, owls and rats, made me feel lonely inside, because it had been such a cheerful place. It
had
been, despite the babies dying and Granma dying and Ma's sister Polly dying. Though I was there when the dyings happened I didn't remember them clearly; what I remembered was Granpa playing the fiddle and Ma singing, and her and Uncle Seth dancing around the table, on nights when Uncle Seth was in a dancing mood, which he seemed to get in at least once a week. G.T. fancied that he could play the Jew's harp, so he would join in, wailing, when Granpa played his fiddle.

“I won't live in a downcast house,” Ma said to us, more than once. “It's not fair to the young ones.”

Even so I felt downcast when I looked at the
wagon full of sacks and boxes and realized we were really leaving. Our cabin would soon be just another abandoned place—if we didn't find Pa and get back to Boone's Lick soon, it would begin to fall down and cave in, like all the other abandoned cabins people had left.

I guess everyone must have felt a little bit like I was feeling, that day. There was usually a lot of talk going on in our family—joshing, bickering, fussing—but everyone kind of kept quiet that last day—kept to themselves. Ma had an absent look in her eye, as if she had already left and was just waiting for the day and the night to pass, so we could load ourselves in the wagon and head for the boat. Aunt Rosie had made good friends with baby Marcy—they were so thick already that Marcy could hardly even tolerate Uncle Seth, a fact that irked him a little. The day seemed a lot longer than most days—it passed with everybody mostly being quiet. Aunt Rosie's bruises had all turned purple, and she had to move carefully when she stood up.

“This baby thinks I'm a clown, with purple eyes,” Aunt Rosie said. “I expect that's why she likes me.”

“She used to like me, before you turned her head,” Uncle Seth said.

There was a full moon that night. G.T. wanted to go coon hunting, but I wasn't in the mood. Ma spent most of the night in the graveyard, sitting on her bench—Aunt Rosie came out and sat with her for a while. She brought Marcy, who made quite a bit of progress with her crawling—she was soon
crawling around amid the little gravestones. Uncle Seth was restless—he didn't approve of Marcy being allowed to crawl wherever she wanted to go.

“You ought to keep better watch—she could get on a snake,” I heard him say—but the two women paid him no mind. Marcy kept crawling and Uncle Seth finally walked down to Boone's Lick, to visit the saloons.

I
T
takes just a short minute to leave a place, even though you've lived there for years. Ma fed us each a bowl of mush and told us to get in the wagon. G.T. and I helped Aunt Rosie climb up—she was mighty sore. Ma handed her baby Marcy. Granpa had strapped on his pistol, in order to be prepared for attack, but once in the wagon he didn't say much. Since we were just going down to the docks to locate our boat, Neva and G.T. and I walked. Sometimes we'd visit the docks two or three times a day, just to see what was going on. Usually somebody would have caught a big fish, or a paddle steamer would have blown its boiler, or some soldiers would be standing around, waiting for a boat to take them to one of the forts upriver, or some men would be gambling
with dice—something worth watching would usually be happening at the docks.

Ma shut the door to the cabin and that was that—she didn't look back.

“Scoot over,” she told Uncle Seth, who had climbed up on the wagon seat. He had been waiting, holding the reins to the team. We had sold two mules to get traveling money, but we still had Nicky and Old Sam and Ben and Montgomery, which was more mule power than it really took to pull one wagon. Ma said it was better to have too many rather than not enough.

Uncle Seth had not been talking much—if he had had a long night in the saloon, his tongue didn't begin to get loose until around noon—but he was taken by surprise when Ma told him to scoot over.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because I'm driving the team,” Ma said.

“Why?” Uncle Seth asked again. “What do you know about handling mules?”

“Enough,” Ma said.

Aunt Rosie thought that was funny—she laughed—but it seemed to make Granpa Crackenthorpe a little anxious. He began to work his gums.

“It's a wonder he don't take a bed slat to you,” he said.

Once he saw that Ma was determined to drive, Uncle Seth scooted over and handed her the reins.

“I didn't raise her up to be that sassy,” Granpa assured Uncle Seth.

“I guess it must just be a natural talent, then,” Uncle Seth said.

Ma gave no sign of having heard either comment. She clucked at the mules and we left our home. Ma set a brisk pace too—even Neva, a fast walker, had to trot to keep up with the wagon as we went spinning down to Boone's Lick and right on through it. Newt and Percy Tebbit were sitting in front of the jail. They both looked surprised to see us go whistling by. Percy was so surprised he dropped the plug of tobacco he had been about to stick in his mouth. Uncle Seth didn't say a word to the Tebbits and they didn't say a word to him. Sally, Uncle Seth's gray mare, who was tied to the back of the wagon, whinnied when we passed the jail, and a horse that was hitched outside the saloon whinnied back.

“That's Bill Hickok's nag—I guess he's having himself a toddy,” Uncle Seth said.

“I don't see the boat,” Ma said. “I see a canoe, but we can't get this wagon in a canoe. Where's our boat, Seth?”

We could all see that there was no flatboat waiting for us.

Uncle Seth was as startled as anyone to discover that our boat was missing. There were usually several boats in sight, going upstream and downstream, big boats and small, barges and steamers of various kinds. Sometimes Neva and I would sit on the dock most of the day, just watching boats. If they were going downstream they were bound for St. Louis, where Neva and I planned to go someday—that would have to be when we were grown.

This morning, though, there were no boats on
the river at all. A canoe with a few blankets in it was pulled up onshore and an Indian in an old hat, wearing leggings and a thin shirt, stood by it, untangling a fishing line.

From the docks we could see a long distance, up-and downriver, but no boats were in sight.

“This is a vexation for sure,” Ma said to Uncle Seth. “You told me they'd be here.”

“Well, they're late, the scamps,” Uncle Seth said, with an embarrassed look. Here we were ready to travel hundreds of miles and find our pa—only there was no boat, or even anyone to ask about the boat except the one Indian man.

“Ask him if he's seen our boat, Seth,” Ma said.

“Why would he be able to see something that we can't see?” Uncle Seth inquired. I thought it was a good point. There was just no boat in sight—the Indian couldn't change that.

Four mules, a gray mare, and a wagon full of people make a certain amount of noise, and the Indian naturally heard it. He turned and looked at us—his look was not unfriendly, nor was it friendly, either. He was more interested in getting his fishing line untangled than he was in us—I suppose that was normal, since he'd never met us.

“If you don't ask him I will,” Ma said. “Here we are ready to go and our boat's lost.”

“People who work on water don't keep time as well as people who work on land,” Uncle Seth explained.

“Well, they should!” Ma said. She stared down the river, as if she could make the boat appear just by staring—only she was wrong.

“I expect they're just stuck on a sandbar, around the curve, and will be here as soon as they get unstuck,” Uncle Seth said. He knew how impatient Ma was, and how vexed she got when events didn't go off on time. It even happened with baby Marcy, who had been in no hurry to be born. Ma finally got tired of waiting and went off in the woods to the cabin of an old medicine woman—Choctaw, Uncle Seth said. She must have been good at her medicine because Ma took a potion of some kind and delivered baby Marcy that night.

Of course, baby Marcy was already
there
—she just happened to be inside rather than outside. The boat was different: it
wasn't
there.

“I expect it'll show up within the next few minutes,” Uncle Seth said, uneasily.

“He's a cheerful one, ain't he?” Aunt Rosie said. “My bet would be that it never shows up.”

“Of course it will—I paid our passage,” Uncle Seth said.

“All of it?” Ma asked.

“No—I ain't a fool. Half of it,” he said.

“Neva, go ask the Indian gentleman if he's seen a boat,” Ma said.

“A flatboat,” Uncle Seth said. “It had a fence around the deck to keep the animals from jumping off.”

I was shy around strangers, and Neva wasn't, which is why Ma asked her to go quiz the Indian. Even so, my feelings were hurt—I
was
the oldest, and it should have been my job. But Neva trotted right down to the Indian, a medium-sized man.
Probably it was his canoe pulled up on the bank. Neva asked her question and the man, who had finally got his line untangled, listened to her patiently. When Neva came back he followed, a step or two behind her.

“It burnt—that's that,” Neva said. “I guess we'll have to go back home.”

“I thought Seth was being too cheerful,” Aunt Rosie said.

Sally, Uncle Seth's mare, whinnied again, and Mr. Hickok came loping up.

“Here's Bill—I guess he finished his toddy,” Uncle Seth said.

“Why hello, Charlie, hoping for a perch for breakfast?” Mr. Hickok said, speaking to the Indian man. He tipped his hat to Ma and Aunt Rosie.

“I may find a fish a little later,” the man said. “Right now I was going to explain to these people that the boat they were expecting burned last night. I think all the people on it made it to shore. I was passing and helped two of them who were tired of swimming.”

“Damn the luck!” Ma said. I had never heard her curse before.

“Yes, it was bad luck,” the Indian said politely.

“You could introduce us, Bill, since it seems this gentleman and you are friends,” Uncle Seth said, in an amiable tone. I believe, with Ma so angry, he was glad of the company.

“Oh, ain't you met?” Mr. Hickok said. “This is Charlie Seven Days, of the Lemhi people, from up
near the Snake River, I believe—Charlie's a far piece from home.”