Boone's Lick by Larry McMurtry Page B

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.
    â€œAfter that, it’ll be chancy travel,” Uncle Seth informed us all. “I may not be able to find a boatwilling 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 shotthem—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.
    â€œI 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 thewagon 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