Boone's Lick Page 20

  “Does a chicken have loyalty?” he asked. “Does a lawyer?”

  Lawyers weren’t as thick on the ground then as they are now—I not only became a judge, I became the top judge in the whole Missouri judiciary. Luckily Uncle Seth was never in legal trouble, but several of Neva’s children took trouble for a middle name. It was just luck that none of them showed up in my courtroom.

  You don’t have to be long on the bench to realize that family cases are the hardest to settle. Give me murderers and bank robbers any day, over a family that’s got crosswise. It’s deuced hard to know where a family story starts, and no cinch to figure out where one stops, either. If family cases started with a wedding and ended with a funeral, judges wouldn’t dread them so much—but it’s rarely that way.

  Look at our family, the Cecils. You could argue that the main story started the day Ma shot Sheriff Baldy Stone’s horse, under the mistaken impression that it was an elk—but that was just a point on the map of our life as a family. Did Ma always prefer Uncle Seth to Pa? Did Pa wander the west for years, hoping his brother would relieve him of his outspoken wife? Did Uncle Seth mean from the first to steal his brother’s wife? Did they all three know what they were doing, or half know, or just blunder on?

  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.