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.
2
THE 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 Crackent
horpe 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.
3
WE 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.
After the fat doe, the turkeys, and the big catfish we all had high expectations for the hunt, but they were soon disappointed. Uncle Seth hunted much of the day, and Charlie Seven Days did too, but they brought home nothing. Charlie finally managed to snare a goose, but one goose didn’t go far on a boat full of hungry people. Uncle Seth and Aunt Rosie went ashore in Westport and came back drunk, but Uncle Seth had managed to secure a ten-gauge shotgun and some duck shot. After that he and Charlie would float off into the mists that covered the river just before dawn. Sometimes they would catch a raft of ducks dozing together and kill thirty or forty of them with a single shot. We ate duck until we all got tired of the rubbery taste.
Once I did persuade G.T. to go for a hunt with me on the Kansas bank. Almost at once we spotted something that looked like a buffalo, far off in the grass.
“We’ll be heroes if we kill it,” G.T. said. We stalked that buffalo for over an hour, without getting much closer to it—our eyes weren’t accustomed to the distances you found on the Kansas plains. The prairies looked flat, but had a slow roll to them, a kind of grassy wave.
Then the buffalo turned out to be nothing but a stray milk cow, a development that made G.T. furious.
“Let’s kill it anyway,” he said—of course I wouldn’t let him.
“Heroes don’t kill milk cows,” I pointed out.
At close range the milk cow, which was brindle, looked more like a mule than a buffalo.
I turned around and started tramping back to the river, only to discover that G.T. thought the river was in the opposite direction.
“The river’s this way,” he insisted, pointing.
“You fool, it’s this way, of course,” I said.
The fact was, neither of us knew where the river was. The sun was hidden by some clouds as thick and gray as the grass we were walking on. There was not a single tree in sight, and no way to tell one direction from another. The harder we tried to choose a direction, the more confused we became. Instead of buffalo killers and heroes we were two lost hunters, with no idea how to get back to our boat.
“If the Blackfeet Indians show up they can scalp us pretty quick, I guess,” G.T. said. The remark showed how little attention G.T. paid to what Uncle Seth said.
“The Blackfeet Indians live in Montana,” I reminded him. “This is Kansas we’re lost in.”
“Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t,” G.T. said. He would never admit to being wrong.
“The boat’s probably a hundred miles away by now,” he said. “They’ll never find us. We’ll starve.”
When G.T.’s spirits started to slide they usually slid a long way quick.
What saved us was that Ma had a cowbell. She thought we might acquire a milk cow, somewhere on our travels, so she packed our old cowbell. When she decided we were lost she began to ring it, and we could just hear that bell, ringing far to the east. It gave us a direction, and we started walking toward it. If Ma hadn’t kept ringing the bell we would have probably drifted off line and been lost all night, but she kept ringing. Then Charlie Seven Days came walking out of the dusk and led us home.
“I guess we’ll have to hobble you boys, if you can’t manage your directions,” Uncle Seth said.
That night I finally worked up to asking Charlie a question I had been wanting to ask him since he decided to travel with us: it was about Ma mistaking a horse for an elk. I explained what Uncle Seth told me the Cheyenne would think, that the elk had been ready to die and just turned himself into a horse to help us out.
“Your uncle must think the Cheyenne are a foolish people,” Charlie said. “What I think is that your mother needed to feed her family, and knew there was a lot of meat on that big horse.”
“Then you don’t think she really thought the horse was an elk?” I asked.
“A horse is not an elk,” Charlie said. It was his final comment—I guess it might be that my mother was a liar after all.
4
AS soon as Aunt Rosie got over her beating she began to pine for her old life. Her bruises cleared up and her split lip healed. Her ribs mended more slowly, but by the time we had edged upriver past St. Joseph and were close to White Cloud, she was well enough to bend over and lift a bucket of water out of the river.
It got colder as we traveled on into October. The ducks and geese were so noisy that sometimes we all wished Ma would unload the wagon and take us overland.
The day we were due to strike the Platte River Aunt Rosie came over to Ma and told her she wanted to get off and try life again on her own.
“I believe I’ll try my luck in Council Bluffs,” she said. “I’ve heard Iowa’s nice.”
“I don’t agree with your decision,” Ma said. She didn’t say it angrily—she said it sadly.
“I got used to having my sister around again,” she said.
Aunt Rosie looked sad herself, when Ma took that tone.
“I know, Mary Margaret,” she said. “I’ve got used to having you, too. I’ve even got used to Seth, and he’s a lot to get used to.”
Uncle Seth didn’t answer. He knew Rosie was just joshing.
“I need a town, Mary,” Aunt Rosie said. “I’m no river girl and no country girl, either. I like a saloon with a piano—and maybe a few gentlemen callers.”
“It was a gentleman caller who nearly beat you to death,” Ma reminded her.
“No, that wasn’t a gentleman caller—that was a sheriff,” Rosie said. “Sheriffs are a hazard, particularly if there’s
a new preacher in town. But blizzards and wild Indians are hazards too.”
“We didn’t take you prisoner,” Ma said. “We’ll all miss your company, but you can go whenever you want.”
We all felt sad, when we heard Ma’s decision. We all loved Aunt Rosie, though we hadn’t had her in our lives very long.
“Seth, what kind of town is Omaha?” Ma asked.
“Hilly,” Uncle Seth said.
“I didn’t mean that,” Ma said. “You do irritate me sometimes, Seth.”
“She means is there a sheriff there who is likely to beat me up?” Rosie said.
“I have not been there lately,” Uncle Seth said. “It’s just a town, filled with good men and bad, I expect. You might ask Villy—he’s thoroughly informed.”
Aunt Rosie walked off to quiz the priest. We all sat around, gloomy.
“I wish we’d never left home,” Neva said.
“If we was home I’d probably catch a fine mess of crawdads, since it’s fall,” G.T. said, not that the comment made sense.
Before we could get even gloomier a fracas broke out among the boatmen. We all took Aunt Rosie’s decision hard, but Joel, the shortest and skinniest of the boatmen, went wild when he heard she was leaving. Several of the boatmen were in love with Rosie, but Joel was so violently afflicted with love sentiments that he began to butt his head against the side of the boiler. We thought he’d surely stop, after two or three butts, but Joel didn’t stop. Uncle Seth finally grew alarmed enough to intervene.
“Here now, son, don’t do that,” he said.
“I will do it!” Joel said. “I want to crack my head! I can’t live without Rosie!”
We were all riveted by his effort to crack his skull against the boiler. Already his head was pretty bloody.
“Stop him, Seth!” Ma commanded.
It took Uncle Seth and Father Villy both to pull Joel away from the boiler, and then the minute they turned him loose he went racing right off the boat into the Missouri River.