Boone's Lick (23 page)

“I
didn't
allow it,” Uncle Seth said. “It happened despite me. I've done nothing but argue against it mile by mile, all the way from Boone's Lick, Missouri. But here we are.”

There was silence for a minute.

“It's my opinion that shooting Mary would have been the only way to stop her, and I wasn't up to shooting her,” Uncle Seth said.

Neva had no use for family arguments—anyway
she scarcely knew Pa, and she was eager for company, so she jumped off the wagon and marched right over to where the woodchoppers sat. In no time she had struck up a conversation with them.

“Seth's right,” Ma said. “He would have had to shoot me to stop me, and he wasn't up to shooting me. Would
you
have been up to shooting me, Dick?”

Although still plenty mad, Pa seemed a little off balance. Even though he was standing only a few feet from Ma and Uncle Seth—just far enough back that the new mule couldn't bite him—I think part of him still didn't believe his family had actually showed up in Wyoming. Some little part of him must have still thought it was a dream he ought to be waking up from, anytime. He looked at Uncle Seth again, and this time he didn't sound so fierce.

“There must be some way to stop a woman, rather than let her drag a wagon and a bunch of kids all this way,” he said. “You could have hog-tied her and left her in the cellar.”

“We don't have a cellar,” Ma reminded him.

“Well, then the stables or somewhere,” Pa said. He seemed confused—I think he was losing steam by the minute. I was even beginning to feel a little sorry for Pa—I don't know about G.T., who had got off on the wrong foot with Pa years before by losing a good pocketknife Pa had given him, which got him such a thrashing that he had been leery of Pa ever since.

With Uncle Seth watching, Ma climbed off the
wagon seat and marched over to Pa, looking him up and down from a short distance away. Something about her stance made Uncle Seth nervous.

“Maybe the children and I better go on into the fort and see if they can spare a little fodder for the livestock,” Uncle Seth said.

“You stay put,” Ma said.

“I was just thinking you might want privacy,” Uncle Seth said. He was getting more and more nervous—and so was I.

“Seth, shut up,” Ma said. “Don't talk and don't move. This will just take a minute.”

“A minute?” Uncle Seth said. “After traveling all these months?”

“Some things take months, and other things just take a minute,” Ma said.

She turned back to Pa.

“You're not making me feel welcome, Dick—although I'm your wife,” Ma said. “Am I welcome, or ain't I?”

“Did I ask you to come—no!” Pa said. “So you're not welcome. I expect you knew that before you left home, you independent hussy.”

“I
did
know it before I left home but I wanted to hear it from you,” Ma said.

“Why?”

“Because I'm not the sort of woman to quit a man through the mails,” Ma said. “I can only quit a man face-to-face, and right here and now I'm quitting you.”

Marcy woke from a nap. She didn't see Ma, so she raised a wail.

“Good Lord, you even brought the baby?” Pa said.

“Yes, the child you've never seen,” Ma said. “You understood me, didn't you, Dick? We're quits.”

Annoyed as he was with Ma, those words were not quite what Pa had been expecting.

“We're quits? That seems hasty, Mary Margaret,” he said.

That must have been the wrong thing to say, because Ma colored up and gave him a roundhouse slap that would have floored any man less tall and stout than Pa.

“Not hasty, tardy—tardy by sixteen years!” Ma said.

Then she got back in the wagon, took the reins from Uncle Seth, and drove us into Fort Phil Kearny, leaving Pa standing by himself, rubbing his sore jaw.

M
A
never explained why she did what she did that cold evening in Wyoming—for it was nearly dark when we reached the fort. The bright moon, not quite full, came up not much later.

To Ma, I guess, the matter spoke for itself. She had pulled us out of our lives and traveled hundreds of miles across the west, to tell Pa she was quitting him. She seemed to feel it was something she owed him. She did what she came to do, and that was that.

It shocked Pa, and it shocked Uncle Seth, who didn't seem to be particularly out of sorts with his brother—but Ma quitting Pa didn't really make much difference to the rest of the family. Marcy was too young to notice, Neva was trying to get the
woodchoppers to arrange a dance, or at least some fiddle music, and as soon as we got in the fort, Pa's Indian wife, who had two toddlers besides the one in her belly, presented G.T. with a little brown puppy, which started to lick his face. The puppy soon attached himself to G.T. like a leech. G.T. was too taken with the puppy to give much thought to what happened between Pa and Ma.

I think Pa's little Indian wife—he called her Sweetbreads—probably saw that we were tired and hungry and gave us the puppy to eat; but G.T. took to it so that after five minutes no one would have dared to try and eat it.

I was the only one, it seemed, who took much note of what had just happened between Pa and Ma. Had she really brought us all this way just to tell him she was quitting him?

I believe the same question occurred to Uncle Seth. As we were finding a spot to park our wagon, inside the stockade, he looked at Ma kind of funny.

“Did you really come all this way just to tell Dick you were quitting him?” he asked. “If that was all you had to tell him, you could have sent me with the news.”

Ma looked a little exasperated by that comment—she hadn't completely cooled down.

“No, Seth—I didn't send you because I'm
keeping
you!” she said. “Or would you rather just live out here and run wild, like your brother?”

“Not me,” Uncle Seth said at once. “Not me. I'm so used to you now I wouldn't know what to do without you.”

“That's right, you wouldn't!” Ma said sharply.

“I believe I will just go see Dick for a minute, though,” Uncle Seth said. “I'd like to find out if the business is prospering.”

“Go—Sherman can stable these mules,” Ma said.

I
did
stable the mules, with the help of G.T. and a couple of friendly young soldiers, who seemed fairly nervous—there had been rumors of an Indian attack, they said. Colonel Carrington, who was in charge of the fort, had never fought Indians in his life, which, in the soldiers' opinion, meant that he wasn't taking the threat seriously enough.

I knew nothing about the matter, of course—I wasn't too worried about Indians yet, probably because I still had the business of Pa and Ma on my mind. I was beginning to get the notion that Ma might even want to
marry
Uncle Seth. Could
that
be why she quit Pa? And if it wasn't
that
, could it be because of one of the little things, such as his two Indian families, or the fact that he only showed up in Missouri for a few days every year or two? I didn't know—I never
did
know—but I turned the whole business over in my mind many times. It was such unfamiliar territory that I could not even be sure I knew the difference between a big thing and a little thing, where Ma was concerned.

Though that moment—the moment when Ma slapped Pa, first with words and then with her hand—lodged in my mind for years, I didn't get to puzzle it over much at the time because we had
barely got the mules unhitched and settled for the night before Ma had a set-to with that rude Colonel Fetterman, whom we had met in Fort Laramie. The set-to occurred just as the flag was being lowered for the evening, and resulted in our getting expelled from the fort for the night.

I don't know how the quarrel started—by the time I heard voices rising and turned around to see Colonel Fetterman, in a pitch of rage, pointing his finger at Ma, the battle was on.

“Get out! Get out! Get this damn woman out of the fort!” he yelled, addressing himself to the little detail of soldiers who were lowering the flag.

The soldiers were stunned by this sudden command—they had been happy to see us. Stuck off as they were in a remote little fort, not too many new faces came their way. Neva had already made herself popular—though there was no fiddle in sight, one soldier had dug out a harmonica and was making music for her already.

“Colonel Fetterman, what is the problem?” one of the young lieutenants stammered out.

“You dare to talk to me like that! . . . Military matters!” Colonel Fetterman yelled. He was pointing his finger at Ma, despite the fact that he had on white gloves.

“Stop that, sir! Don't you know it's rude to point?” Ma said.

“I will not have a treasonous woman in this fort—get 'em out! Get 'em out!” Colonel Fetterman said. “We'll cage our Indians any way we want to, and your opinion be damned!”

Then he stomped off.

The young officer looked deeply embarrassed.

“I don't know what to say, ma'am,” he said. “I fear you'd best leave.”

“What? Is that fool the boss of this fort?” Ma asked.

“No—Colonel Carrington's in charge—I suppose you could appeal to him,” the young man said.

There was a silence.

“You don't seem to think I
should
appeal to Carrington, though,” Ma said. “Is that correct?”

“Colonel Carrington dislikes trouble of any kind,” the young soldier said. “In fact, he dislikes being disturbed at all, when it's this late in the evening.”

“Does he dislike Colonel Fetterman?” Ma asked.

The young lieutenant looked even more embarrassed.

“Now you've put me on the spot, ma'am,” he said.

The string bean of a corporal who was folding up the flag wasn't as timid as the lieutenant.

“No, Carrington don't like Fetterman—nobody likes Fetterman. He has abused me more than once,” the corporal said. “But if I were you I'd just go camp outside tonight—the air's fresher, anyway. There's a passel of smelly old people in this fort, I can tell you.”

“Good advice—get the mules, Sherman,” Ma said. “G.T., give Marcy that puppy and help your brother pack up. I believe I'd feel cramped in here
anyway, just from knowing Colonel Fetterman is around.”

Luckily we hadn't unpacked much gear. The soldiers, all of them disappointed that we were leaving so soon, were quick to help rehitch the mules.

When we rolled out of the stockade Pa and Uncle Seth were sitting on the back end of one of the wagons, talking. If Pa was still disturbed by what had occurred, he didn't show it.

“Hell, you just went in and now you're coming out,” Pa said, hopping off the wagon. “Didn't you like our nice little fort?”

“Yes, but it's too small for Colonel Fetterman and me both,” Ma said.

“Oh, that goddamn whippersnapper,” Pa said, as if the mere mention of Colonel Fetterman explained everything.

Pa seemed friendly—so friendly I was hoping he would come over and camp with us. Being the oldest, I had spent more time with Pa than the other children—I suspect I missed him most. I would have liked to hear about some of his adventures, out in the west.

But he didn't camp with us. When full dark came he went inside the fort, to his Indian wife Sweetbreads and his two button-eyed toddlers. One of the cooks had pressed some porridge on Ma, while we were in the fort, so we ate porridge, with a little molasses the cook had given her. I guess that molasses was the sweetest thing Marcy had ever tasted. I believe she would have drunk a quart of it, if we'd had it.

“What did you say to set the colonel off?” Uncle Seth inquired.

“I complained about the way the army caged that old Indian, back at the last fort,” Ma said.

The only one missing was Neva, who probably danced all night with the soldiers. G.T. and his puppy had a tug-of-war with a sock. Ma and Uncle Seth sat up late, talking. It felt odd to be camping so close to Pa—I couldn't get him off my mind, couldn't sleep, and sat up and watched the bright moon until it was almost dawn.

T
HE
next morning the smell of bacon brought me out of a deep drowse. It had snowed a little during the night, not much—just enough that we had to be careful to shake out our blankets. While I was warming my hands around a coffee cup Pa came driving his wagon our way, with five or six wood wagons behind him. He stopped the team for a minute and came tramping over, through the light snow.

“Morning, travelers,” he said. “What's your plans?”

“Why would you need to know?” Ma asked.

“I want to borrow our whelps, for a day, that's why,” Pa said. “I'll take them out with the wood train and see how they perform with a saw and an axe. A good day's work won't hurt 'em—they might even like it.”

“You can come too, Seth, if you're a mind,” Pa said.

“No, Dick—I prefer to avoid the saw and the axe,” Uncle Seth said. “Besides, it wouldn't do to leave Colonel Fetterman unguarded, while Mary Margaret is around. If he was to cross her I expect she'd tear his throat out.”

“Just so it's
his
throat, not mine,” Pa said.

Ma was watching Pa—I couldn't tell what her attitude was.

“I believe I done you a favor by quitting you, Dick,” she said. “Now you won't have to drag yourself all the way down to Missouri, every year or two, to make me a baby. You can make a passel of them right here in Wyoming, without the expense of travel.”

Pa had a pleasant expression on his face, and it didn't change. He just pretended Ma hadn't said anything. When he did speak it was only about the weather.

“The fort Indians say there's a blizzard coming,” he said. “They know their business, when it comes to weather. It might be best if you stayed near the fort for a day or two, before you go traipsing back across the baldies.”