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.
10
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.
11
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 iamnrp.d.
"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.