Our cabin wasn't far from the river. Pa and Uncle Seth had been raised on the Mississippi River, in the loway country; both of them lived by rivers until their hauling business forced them out onto the plains from time to time. Despite his gimpy knee Uncle Seth was only a step behind me when we 4
came around the chicken yard. There was no sign of Ma, and no sign of our mules, either, but there was plenty of sign of Sheriff Baldy Stone, a short man who had grown very round in the course of his life. Sheriff Baldy was trying to unsaddle his dead horse, a large roan animal who had fallen about twenty steps from our cabin door. It was a big horse. The sheriff had the girth unbuckled but when he tried to pull the cinch out from under the horse it wouldn't budge.
G.T., who had beat us home by a good margin, was standing nearby, but he didn't offer to help. After tugging at the cinch several times without having any effect, Sheriff Baldy abruptly gave up and sat down on the corpse of his horse to take a breather. He was almost as out of breath as Neva had been when she showed up down by the river.
After resting for a minute, the sheriff looked up at Uncle Seth and gave a little wave--or it may have been a salute. The sheriff had only been a corporal in the war, whereas Uncle Seth had been a captain.
"Well, Seth, she shot my horse and here I sit," Sheriff Baldy said. "Do you realize I courted Mary Margaret once, when things were different?"
"I've heard that rumor--I expect she still has a sweet spot for you, Baldy," Uncle Seth said.
"A sweet spot? I don't think so," the sheriff said.
"It would explain why she shot the horse and not you," Uncle Seth pointed out.
The remark struck G.T. as funny. He began to cackle, which drew a frown from the sheriff. Just then Ma came out the door, with the baby in her arms. The baby, a girl named Marcy, was cooing and blowing little spit bubbles. Ma handed her right over to Uncle Seth, at which point Marcy began to coo even louder. Pa was so busy upriver that he hadn't even been home to see the baby yet--for all little Marcy knew, Uncle Seth was her pa, if she even knew what a pa was, at that age.
"Now, Mary Margaret," Uncle Seth said, "you oughtn't to have handed me this child. There might be gunplay to come, depending on how mad Baldy is and what he's done with our mules."
"No gunplay, no gunplay," Sheriff Baldy said. "Getting my horse shot out from under me is violence enough for one afternoon. You can hold ten babies if you want to, Seth."
Ma walked around the dead horse, looking down at it thoughtfully. She didn't say a word, either kind or unkind, to Sheriff Baldy. When she got round to the rump of the horse she leaned over and tested it with her fingers, to see if it might have a little fat on it, rather than just being all muscular and stringy. "Why, it is a horse. That's a surprise,"
Ma said lightly.
"Of course it's a horse, thoroughly dead!" the sheriff said. "You shot it out from under me before I could even open my mouth to ask for the loan of your mules. What did you think it was, if not a horse?"
"An elk," Ma said, with a kind of faraway look in her eye. "I thought it was a big fat elk, walking right up to my door."
5
She paused. She had lost flesh in the years of the war--everybody had.
"I thought, no more mush, we're going to be eating elk," she said.
"Granpa can stop complaining and I can be making a little richer milk for this baby--she's not as chubby as my other babies have been."
Sheriff Baldy sat there on the dead horse with his mouth open--a bug could have flown right into his mouth, if one had been nearby.
"You mean you didn't shoot it because we were borrowing the mules?" he asked. "I was going to explain why we needed the mules, but you didn't give me time. You stepped out the door and the next thing I knew this horse was dead."
Ma made no reply--she just tested the rump in another place with her fingers. Baby Marcy was still bubbling and cooing.
"Well, I swear, Mary Margaret,"
Sheriff Baldy said. "This was a big roan horse. How could you get it in your head that it was an elk?"
Ma still had the faraway look in her eye. It worried me when she got that look, though I couldn't really have said what it was I was worried about.
I think it must have worried the sheriff too.
"I guess I was just too hungry to see straight, Eddie," she said, calling Sheriff Baldy by his first name. At least I guess it was his first name.
I had never heard anyone use it before.
"I'm hungry and my family's hungry," Ma went on. "Horse meat's not as tasty as elk, but it will do. Whatever I owe you we can put toward the rent of the mules."
She started for the house, but the look on the sheriff's face must have made her feel a little sorry for him, because she turned at the cabin door and looked back at him for a moment.
"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.