“You oafs, we’re going next week,” Neva claimed. She had been calling us oafs for the past few weeks—once Neva found a word she liked she tended to work it hard, until she found a new word she liked better.
It was beginning to look as if Neva was right. Our wagon was nearly full of sacks and boxes, and it still had to hold all of us, including Granpa. The cabin looked so bare, from all the stuff we’d moved out, that the sight of it seemed to help Uncle Seth recover his sense of humor.
“We’re down to the dirt floors, here,” he said to Ma. “There’s plenty of places outdoors that look more comfortable than this.”
“We won’t have to be uncomfortable long,” Ma informed him. “Come Monday morning early I’d like to be on the move.”
“Good Lord, that’s just two days, Mary Margaret,” Uncle Seth said. “I’ll be hard pressed to get my affairs settled up in just two days.”
Ma didn’t seem concerned.
“What you can’t settle you’ll just have to leave,” she told him.
“Mary Margaret, we’ve lived here for sixteen years,” he reminded her. “That’s a long time.”
“It is, but it’ll be over in two days,” Ma said. “And the only people I’ll miss are those in the graveyard: my mother and my sister and my boys.”
When Ma mentioned the graveyard even Uncle Seth knew it was no time for jokes.
“I trust you’ve found us a boat,” Ma said. “I would like to make some of this trip by boat—I fear it would be too much wear and tear on the wagons to do it all overland.”
“Not to mention the wear and tear on the mules and the people,” Uncle Seth said.
Just then, through the door, we heard the click of buggy wheels, coming up the trail. Ma’s first thought was of Uncle Seth.
“Are you in trouble, Seth?” she asked. “Did you kill somebody in your brawl?”
Neva, who was curious about everything, had already run out the door.
“It’s Aunt Rosie!” she yelled.
Ma was closest to the door. “She’s hurt—go see to her, Seth,” Ma said.
There was such alarm in her voice that we all ran outside. Aunt Rosie was stretched across the seat of the buggy in a bloody dress. She was so beat up I hardly recognized her—both eyes were swollen shut. The blood was from a split lip. The old buggy man who met the trains and riverboats was driving. When Uncle Seth tried to ease Aunt Rosie out of the buggy she gave a sharp cry.
“Ribs,” she said.
“Shay, go to the creek and get a bucket of water,” Ma said.
“I’ll kill whoever done this,” Uncle Seth said.
“No you won’t—the sheriff done it,” Rosie said. “Joe Tate. He’s not like Sheriff Baldy.”
“Hurry, Shay—mind me,” Ma said. “We need the water.”
By the time I got back with the bucket of water Ma had made Aunt Rosie a comfortable pallet by the fireplace. She soon had water heated and it wasn’t long before she had cleaned the blood off her sister.
“I can’t do much about the ribs,” Ma said.
“I’ll go fetch the doctor, then,” Uncle Seth said.
He was standing over Rosie with a dark look on his face.
“Don’t let him go, Mary,” Rosie said at once. “Send Sherman.”
“I suppose I’m free to go to town if I want to,” Uncle Seth said, but both women shook their heads. Even Neva shook her head, though I don’t know what Neva thought she knew about it.
“No you ain’t—not when you’re this mad,” Ma said.
They stared at one another, over Aunt Rosie: Ma and Uncle Seth. I could see he was strongly inclined to go out the door. I didn’t know why a sheriff would want to beat up Aunt Rosie, but I agreed with Uncle Seth that he deserved to be killed for it.
“Seth, you just calm down,” Rosie said—her voice wasn’t very strong. It reminded me of Sheriff Baldy’s voice, just before he fainted.
“Calm down, with you half dead?” Uncle Seth said. “I guess I won’t—not until Joe Tate’s answered for this deed.”
“That new preacher stirred him up—it’s happened before,” Aunt Rosie said. “New preachers always think they have to start preaching against whores.”
“I suppose it helps them at the collection plate,” Ma said.
“Preachers . . . they should shut their damn traps!” Uncle Seth said. “But a preacher couldn’t stir up a sheriff to do such as this unless the sheriff was mean to begin with. Joe Tate’s just a damn bully.”
“Listen to me, Seth,” Ma said. “We’re leaving this place in two days. It may be that we’ll never be back. We have a long trip to make and we’ll need your help. I can’t allow you to march off and shoot the sheriff, or pistol-whip him, or whatever you have in mind.”
“Plenty, that’s what I have in mind,” Uncle Seth said. He cast his eyes down, so as not to have to face Ma, and started for the door.
“Seth!” Ma said—Ma could speak stern when she needed to, but I had never heard her speak quite this stern.
Uncle Seth stopped, but he didn’t turn around.
“If you walk out that door I’m through with you,” Ma said. “I wash my hands of you. I swear I’ll take these younguns and go find Dick myself, and if we all get scalped, so be it.”
Uncle Seth stood where he was for a minute, stiff and annoyed.
“Mary, are you teasing?” he asked, finally.
“What do you think, Rosie?” Ma asked. “Am I teasing?”
“She’s not teasing, Seth,” Rosie said.
Then she laughed a funny little laugh that must have caused her ribs to twinge, because she coughed in pain at the end of the laugh.
“Mary Margaret’s not much of a teaser,” she said.
“Oh, she can tease with the best of them, when the mood’s on her,” Uncle Seth said.
“Leave Joe Tate alone!” Ma said. “We don’t need worse trouble than we’ve got.”
“I’ve never been much of a hand for taking orders from females,” Uncle Seth said.
There was a silence that wasn’t comfortable—such a tense silence that even Neva shut up, for once.
Then Uncle Seth turned from the door as if he had never intended to go out it. He made as if he felt light as a feather, all of a sudden—though none of us believed that. Still, we were all glad when the silence ended.
“There’s Rosie McGee,” he said, in a softer tone. “What do we do with her, when we start this big trip you’re determined to go on?”
“Why, take her with us, of course,” Ma said. “Did you suppose I planned to leave my sister in a place like this?”
That surprised us all—and pleased me, I must say. I wouldn’t be having to leave Aunt Rosie so quickly.
That seemed to ease Uncle Seth’s mind.
“All right, Mary Margaret,” he said. “But Joe Tate don’t know how lucky he is.”
“Go on—get the doctor, Shay,” Ma said, and I went.
I ran all the way down the hill but then had to look in three saloons before I found Doc, who was a little tipsy. When I mentioned that it was Rosie who was hurt he got right up and came with me, but he had such trouble hitching his nag to the buggy that I finally did it for him.
“Let’s hurry, Rosie’s a prize,” he said, offering me the reins. Twice more, on the way, he mentioned that Aunt Rosie was a prize. He doctored her cuts pretty well but shook his head over the matter of the ribs.
“They’ll just have to mend in their own time, Rosie,” he said.
The next night, while making his midnight rounds, Sheriff Joe Tate got trampled by a runaway horse. The horse came bearing down on him in a dark alley and knocked him winding—one hip was broken, plus his collarbone and several ribs; besides that, he was unconscious for several hours and could make no report on the horse or the rider, if there had been a rider.
I don’t know what Ma or Aunt Rosie thought about the matter, but G.T. and I suspected Uncle Seth, who had gone to the saloon as usual, that night. When G.T. aske
d him about it, Uncle Seth just looked bored.
“He should have carried a lantern,” Uncle Seth said. “Any fool who wanders the streets at midnight without a lantern ought to expect to get trampled by a horse, I don’t care if he is a lawman. It’s only common sense to carry a light.”
He never changed his story, either. To this day I don’t know if Uncle Seth was on the horse that trampled Sheriff Joe Tate.
15
THE morning before we left I went down to the lots alone about sunrise, to feed the mules—I always liked being out early, if I was awake. The world just seemed so fresh, in the first hour of the day. The river, usually, would be white with mist—then the big red sun would swell up over the world’s edge and the light would touch the church spire and the few roofs of Boone’s Lick. All the roosters in town would be crowing, and our three roosters too. The mules seemed glad to see me, though I imagine they would have been glad to see anyone who fed them. In the wintertime the frost would sparkle on the ground and on the trees. Sometimes, when I got back to the cabin, Ma would allow me a cup of coffee, once she was satisfied that I had finished my chores.
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.
16
IT 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?”