Boone's Lick

by Larry McMurtry

  “We’ve got a little buttermilk to spare, Eddie, if you’d like some,” she said, as she opened the door.

  “I’ll take the buttermilk,” Sheriff Baldy said.

  He got off the dead horse and we all followed Ma through the door.

  2

  GRANPA Crackenthorpe got up from his pallet when we all trooped in. I think he was hoping for a dipper of buttermilk, but he didn’t get one. There was only one dipperful left in the crock—while the sheriff was enjoying it Granpa began to get annoyed.

  “I’m the oldest—that was my buttermilk,” Granpa said. “I was planning to have it later, with my mush.”

  “Hubert don’t like me—I’ve arrested him too often,” Sheriff Baldy remarked, wiping a little line of buttermilk off his upper lip.

  Granpa, who didn’t have much of a bladder left, had formed the awkward habit of pissing in public, if he happened to be in public when the need arose. Sometimes he made it into the saloon and peed in the spittoons, but sometimes he didn’t make it that far, and those were the times when Sheriff Baldy had felt it best to arrest him.

  “Hubert, we’ve got enough troubles in Boone’s Lick without having to tolerate public pissing,” the sheriff said. “If you’ve got a minute, Seth, I’ll explain why I took the mules.”

  “Fine, but if it’s not too much to ask, we need to borrow one of them back for a few minutes,” Uncle Seth said. “Otherwise we’ll have to butcher that roan horse practically in Mary Margaret’s front room, which is sure to bring flies. If we could borrow a mule back for half an hour we could drag the carcass over to the butchering tree.”

  “That’s fair—the boys just took them down to the livery stable,” the sheriff said. “If one of these young fellows can go fetch one, then when you’re done with your dragging I can ride the mule back to town.”

  “G.T., go,” Ma said, and G.T. went. Ma already had the whetstone out and was getting ready to sharpen a couple of butcher knives.

  “I’m the oldest but nobody’s listening to me,” Granpa Crackenthorpe said—a true statement. No one paid him the slightest mind.

  “It’s that gang over at Stumptown—the Millers,” Sheriff Baldy said. “The war’s been over nearly fourteen months but you couldn’t tell it if you happen to wander over to Stumptown. The Millers are robbing every traveler they can catch, and killing quite a few of them.”

  “I don’t doubt it—Jake Miller’s as mean as a pig, but what’s it got to do with our mules?” Uncle Seth inquired.

  “I’m going over there and clean out the Millers,” the sheriff said. “You know how poorly all the horseflesh is around here. The farmers all quit, because of the war. Mary Margaret just killed the only good horse in Boone’s Lick.”

  “I thought it was an elk,” Ma said firmly, as if that subject had been disposed of forever.

  The sheriff just sighed.

  “If the Millers see somebody passing through on a decent horse they kill the rider and take the horse,” the sheriff said.

  Right there I saw the sheriff’s point—he was right about the poor horseflesh around Boone’s Lick. But Pa and Uncle Seth were in the hauling business—they couldn’t afford sickly mules. Uncle Seth went up to Ioway himself and brought back fodder for our mules. There hadn’t been much fighting in Ioway; the farmers there were happy to sell what they had to Uncle Seth, the result being that our mules were the best-conditioned animals anywhere around Boone’s Lick. No wonder the sheriff wanted to borrow them, if he had a hard job to do.

  Ma was whetting her knives, which made such a racket that the rest of us went outside.

  “I guess I can’t blame you for wanting your posse to have decent mounts,” Uncle Seth said to Sheriff Baldy. “That’s correct thinking, as far as it goes, but it don’t go far enough.”

  Sheriff Baldy just looked at him. It might be that the shock of having his horse shot out from under him by a woman he had once courted had just hit him. His mouth hung open again, inviting flies and bugs.

  “Of course, I have no objection to you borrowing our mules for a patriotic expedition, provided the expedition is well planned,” Uncle Seth said. “How many posse men have you signed up so far?”

  “One, so far,” the sheriff admitted.

  “Uh-oh, there’s the incorrect part of your thinking,” Uncle Seth said. “There’s a passel of Millers, and Jake ain’t the only one that’s mean. If you go wandering over there with an inadequate force our mules will be at risk. Jake Miller can spot a valuable mule as quick as the next man.”

  “I know that,” Sheriff Baldy said. He looked a little discouraged.

  “I expect you were counting on our fine mules to attract a posse,” Uncle Seth said. “It might work, too. At least, it might if you’re offering cash payment too.”

  “I can offer five dollars a man, and fifty dollars to Wild Bill Hickok, if he’ll come,” the sheriff said.

  Something about that remark irked Uncle Seth, because the red vein popped out again on his nose. I don’t think the sheriff noticed.

  “You mean if I was to join your posse you’d offer me forty-five dollars less than you’re offering Bill Hickok to do the same job, even though the two of us were commanded by General Phil Sheridan and I was the sharpshooter and Bill just a common spy?” Uncle Seth inquired.

  It didn’t take the sheriff but a second to figure out what he had done wrong.

  “Why, Seth, I never supposed you’d want to join a posse,” he said.

  “For fifty dollars I’ll join it and enlist Shay and G.T. too,” Uncle Seth said. “The boys will work for nothing, of course.”

  That remark startled me so that if I had been sitting on a fence I expect I would have fallen off. Ma wouldn’t hear of our fighting in the war, though plenty of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds did fight in it; and now Uncle Seth, with no discussion, was offering to trot us off to Stumptown to take on the notorious Miller gang, an outfit filled with celebrated killers: Cut-Nose Jones, Little Billy Perkins, and the four violent Millers themselves.

  The sheriff didn’t immediately respond to Uncle Seth’s offer, but he didn’t immediately reject it, either.

  “If I had you and Hickok and the two boys and myself, I don’t suppose I’d need much more of a posse,” he finally said.

  “That’s right, you wouldn’t,” Uncle Seth said. “Here comes G.T., leading Old Sam. Old Sam could pull a house up a hill, if somebody hitched him to it.”

  Sheriff Baldy still looked worried.

  “There’s two problems, Seth,” he said.

  Before Uncle Seth could ask what they were Ma came outside and stuck little Marcy in his arms again.

  “You keep running off and leaving this baby,” she said. “I can’t have a baby around when I’m sharpening knives.”

  Little Marcy was still in a perfectly good humor. She began to wave her arms and kick her feet.

  “What were the two problems, Baldy?” Uncle Seth said. He looked a little put upon.

  “A hundred dollars is a lot to pay for a posse,” the sheriff said. “We could build a new city hall for a hundred dollars.”

  “Yes, but once you got it built you’d still have the Millers to worry with,” Uncle Seth pointed out. “What’s problem number two?”

  “I haven’t asked Hickok yet,” the sheriff admitted. “That’s problem number two.”

  “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.

  “Wo
uld 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 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 Crackenthorpe 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, skinning that horse, stripping the guts, cutting up what Ma meant to cook right away, and salting down the rest, I kept having the feeling that I was putting off thinking about something. If I hadn’t had such a bunch of work to do I would have been lost in thought myself, like Uncle Seth.

  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.

  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 skinny horse, though.”

  “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.

  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 ignored.

  “I’ll stroll along with the boy,” Uncle Seth said, getting up from the table. “I need to see Bill Hickok about something anyway.”

  Ma didn’t look happy to hear that.

  “I thought he left,” she said.

  “Not as of today, according to the sheriff,” Uncle Seth said.

  “Then that explains where Neva is, doesn’t it?” Ma said.

  Her tone of voice upset Granpa Crackenthorpe so much that he got his big cap-and-ball pistol and wandered off out the door.

  “I believe there’s a panther around—I better take care of it,” he said. That was always Granpa’s excuse, when things got tense at the table. I had never seen a panther in my whole life and neither had G.T. But the notion that a panther was about to get the mules was the method Granpa used when he wanted to stand clear of trouble.

  Ma paid him no mind. Now it seemed to be her turn to be lost in thought.

  “Now, Mary Margaret, you don’t need to be worrying about Neva,” Uncle Seth said. “If she should happen to be with Bill Hickok then she’s as safe as if she was in jail. Bill is a perfect gentleman where young ladies are concerned.”

  M
a didn’t answer him. She got up and followed us to the door, but she didn’t come outside.

  “Hurry back,” she said, as we started down the road.

  4

  ONCE we started on the road to town I couldn’t hold back my question.

  “That was a horse we butchered,” I said. “It wasn’t an elk.”

  “Well, I didn’t do any of the butchering but it did seem to have the appearance of a horse,” Uncle Seth agreed.

  “Besides that, Sheriff Baldy was sitting on the horse,” I reminded him. “Even if Ma thought a horse looked like an elk, there was the sheriff on top of it. A sheriff wouldn’t ride an elk.”

  “It would be unlikely, particularly if it was Baldy,” Uncle Seth agreed.

  To my disappointment, he didn’t seem to want to talk about the fact that Ma had confused a horse with an elk—or had claimed to, at least. Maybe it was because he was thinking about Wild Bill Hickok, the famous pistolero we were going to see. I had heard him talk about Wild Bill once or twice, so I knew the two men knew one another—but that was all I knew. Uncle Seth had picked up his rifle as we left the house—it was still in its oilcloth sheath. I don’t think he brought it along because he was worried about panthers, either. I didn’t know what he might be worried about. Uncle Seth gambled a lot—he might owe Mr. Hickok money, for all I knew. It could even be money he didn’t have. Or Hickok might owe him money, in which case getting him to pay might not be easy.

  I had no idea what Uncle Seth might be thinking, but then, suddenly, he told me.

  “I like the Cheyenne,” he said. You never knew when Uncle Seth would change the subject.

  I had never met a Cheyenne, so had no opinion to give.

  “I would trust a Cheyenne over a Frenchman, most days,” he went on. “The Cheyenne rarely cheat you more than you can afford to be cheated. That’s why I like to trade with them.”

  I didn’t say anything. I knew Uncle Seth would get around to telling me what he wanted to tell me if I could be patient and hold my tongue.