Boone's Lick (26 page)

I've pondered the matter for many years, but I confess I still can't phrase it out tidily, like you need to do with cases in the courts of law.

Ma took us all that way, through storms and past bears and Indians, just to tell Pa to his face that
she meant to quit him. And there's Uncle Seth, who stayed devoted to Mary Margaret Cecil his whole life, although she was never his wife—Ma
quit
Pa but she never went to the trouble to divorce him. Then there was Pa, a sprightly man who survived a hundred Indian scares just to get his head cut off by a snapping blade in his own sawmill, and was buried by his rich daughter, the author, in a fine grave beside the Columbia River Gorge. I remember them all as they were that last night, standing on the parapets of Fort Phil Kearny, all three holding rifles, while that great power moon, like a white sun, shone on the living and the dead.