Boone's Lick (10 page)

“I try to limit myself to a glass a day, but sometimes I slip a little,” she said, handing me a glass. “Don't gulp it down now—just take a sip.”

But I was nervous—despite Aunt Rosie's warning I took a full gulp of the whiskey. It felt like
scalding lye had just gone down my throat. The heat of it brought tears to my eyes—Aunt Rosie had to pound me on the back so I wouldn't choke.

“That wasn't exactly a sip,” she said. “But it was a start.”

A little later I felt a heat in my stomach, as if someone had shoveled a few coals inside me. I sipped a little more whiskey, and a little more still, and soon ceased to feel my legs. It was as if my body ended at my belly. Aunt Rosie sat on one end of the settee, and I sat on the other. She drank and I drank but our glasses never seemed to quite get empty. Somehow Aunt Rosie managed to refill them without my noticing. At one point I noticed that the bottle was empty, but when I looked again it was full.

“It ain't often I get this full of family feeling,” Aunt Rosie said. “I want you to throw a bottle for me. Seth don't like to admit it but I can shoot as well as he can. Come on—I'll show you.”

By then it was nearly sundown. Aunt Rosie took a rifle out of the closet behind her bed. She gave me an empty whiskey bottle and we went out on the little landing behind her room. I threw the bottle as high as I could. Aunt Rosie shot, there was a crack, and little pieces of glass rained into a kind of weedy lot behind the saloon. I looked down and saw Wild Bill Hickok standing below, watching us.

“How's that, Mr. Sureshot?” Aunt Rosie cried out. Mr. Hickok made no comment, or none that I can remember.

Aunt Rosie helped me down the stairs, giggling
at how clumsy I had become. On the way home my feet kept wanting to get tangled up with one another. I tried to walk normally but my left foot kept trying to cross over to where my right foot ought to be. My left foot was the bad foot—I got so annoyed with it that I wanted to shoot it off. At one point I found myself thirty yards off the trail, in some bushes, though I knew the way home perfectly well.

When I finally got to our cabin I tried to walk through the door but missed and bumped my head on the doorsill. Ma and Neva were at the kitchen table, peeling spuds. I had to make three runs at it before I finally got through the door. Ma and Neva just sat there looking at me, as if I were someone they didn't know.

“What's wrong with him—the oaf!” Neva said.

“Oh, nothing—he's probably just been drinking whiskey with his Aunt Rosie,” Ma said.

Then she stood up and ruffled my hair a little, like she had done when I was younger. For some reason I felt like crying, but Ma seemed to think it was all funny. She laughed, but Neva didn't.

I was up vomiting most of the night.

There was no sign of Uncle Seth.

T
HREE
days after I got drunk that first time Uncle Seth showed up at the cabin again. He walked in with a lordly air—it was his usual air—but he looked as if he'd spent his time in a pigsty. His clothes were filthy and one of his ears was red.

If Ma was put out by his absence she didn't show it, which didn't mean she was prepared to accept his appearance. G.T. had managed to get in a fight somewhere, that afternoon. He looked as bunged up as Uncle Seth. The sight of them set Granpa Crackenthorpe cackling.

“Here's two fellows who got themselves whipped,” he said.

“You shut up or I'll stab you in the leg again,” G.T. said.

Granpa started looking for his cap-and-ball pistol, but before he found it Ma gave the two of them some soap and told them to go to the creek and get clean. By the time they came back, considerably cleaner, Granpa had found his pistol, but Ma took it away from him and didn't give it back until he had cooled down considerably.

“I may have to put you on the street yet,” she informed Granpa—it was a threat that took the fight out of Granpa real quick.

“She'd let an old man starve,” he said, to the cabin at large, but no one paid him the slightest mind.

For the last three days Ma had been stuffing things in sacks and boxes—potatoes, onions, clothes, pots, tools—anything that she thought might be useful on a trip across the prairies. No sooner would one of us get through with one chore than she would drag up another sack and tell us to put it in the wagon.

At first I didn't really believe we were going to look for Pa. It just seemed like one of the notions Ma sometimes got in her head. Once she had a notion that we ought to raise turkeys, but the coyotes and foxes and bobcats soon got all the turkeys.

Besides, why would we need to drag a wagon off across the plains to look for Pa, when he always showed up in Boone's Lick of his own accord once every year or two? He'd come and stay two or three days and then go. Usually, a month or so after one of Pa's visits, Ma's belly would begin to swell, and eventually there'd be another baby.

That had always seemed to be Pa and Ma's way—of course, when Pa wasn't around, Uncle
Seth looked after us pretty well. Why go bother Pa if he didn't want to be bothered?

G.T. and I thought Uncle Seth would finally talk her out of the move, but Neva didn't agree.

“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. asked 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.

T
HE
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.