My paternal grandfather, William Jefferson McMurtry, an American Scot with a fine mustache and an inquisitive mind, liked to whittle his own toothpicks. Whatever stories she and the old skunk woman had were not of the sort to be shared with little boys. Older cousins remember her as lively I just remember her as scary. But Louisa Francis had raised 12 children on a stark frontier, with a husband who was at times erratic (that is, drunk) by the time I came along her interest in children was understandably slight - and that’s putting it mildly. Her silence had a quality of implacability which I have never forgotten - it made me want to go live in the barn. Now and then I heard my grandmother talking to my father - her favorite of 12 children - but although she lived with us until her death (when I was 8), I cannot recall her ever addressing a single syllable to me.
She was through with talk, one thing she had in common with Louisa Francis McMurtry, my paternal grandmother, who was also through with talk, at least conditionally.
I rode to town with the old woman - once worth more than fifty skunk hides - many times but I never heard her speak a single word. This passer-by was often my father, though sometimes it was the school bus I rode in. When, as an old woman, she would occasionally need to go to town for some reason, she simply walked out to the nearest dirt road and stood, in silence, until some passer-by picked her up and took her where she was going. The traveler took the hides and left the girl, who lived to bear the trapper many children she stayed down near West Fork for the rest of her life. The man who had her (by what right I don’t know) stopped to spend the night in the camp of a skunk trapper, who immediately took a fancy to the girl - such a fancy, indeed, that he offered his winter’s catch for her.
In a tent (later a shack) not far south of our ranch house, in post oak scrub near the West Fork of the Trinity River, lived a woman who had (reportedly) been traded for a whole winter’s catch of skunk hides, the exchange occurring when she was about 13.
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