Boone's Lick

"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.

3 ONcE 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 9

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 Cracken-thorpe 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, ski

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.

10

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 ski

"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.

11

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 iamnrp.d.