“As to the ranch,” he said, “the boy could run it. He’s nearly grown.”
Augustus puzzled over that for a moment, as if it had never occurred to him. “Well, maybe so, Call,” he said. “I guess he could run it if he was a mind to, and if you would let him.”
“I don’t know why he wouldn’t be a mind to,” Call said, and walked over to the mare.
8.
BY THE MIDDLE of the afternoon it was so hot nobody could think. At least Newt couldn’t, and the other hands didn’t seem to be thinking very fast either. All they could find to argue about was whether it was hotter down in the well digging or up in the sun working the windlass. Down in the well they all worked so close together and sweated so much that it practically made a fog, while up in the sun fog was no problem. Being down in the well made Newt nervous, particularly if Pea was with him, because when Pea got to working the crowbar he didn’t always look where he was jabbing and once had almost jabbed it through Newt’s foot. From then on Newt worked spraddle-legged, so as to keep his feet out of the way.
They were going at it hard when the Captain came riding back, having lathered the mare good by loping her along the river for about twenty miles. He rode her right up to the well.
“Hello, boys,” he said. “Ain’t the water flowing yet?”
“It’s flowin’,” Dish said. “A gallon or two of it flowed outa me.”
“Be thankful you’re healthy,” Call said. “A man that couldn’t sweat would die in this heat.”
“I don’t suppose you’d trade for that mare,” Dish asked. “I like her looks.”
“You ain’t the first that’s liked them,” Call said. “I’ll keep her, I believe. But you boys can stop work now and catch a little rest. We have to go to Mexico tonight.”
They all went over and sat in the alleyway of the barn—it had a little shade in it. The minute they sat down Deets began to patch his pants. He kept a big needle and some heavy thread in a cigar box in the saddle shed—given any chance he would get out his needle and start patching. He was woolly-headed and his wool was just getting gray.
“If I was you I’d give up on them pants,” Dish said. “If you’ve got to wear quilts you best find a new one and start over.”
“No, sir,” Deets said genially. “These pants got to last.”
Newt was a little excited. The Captain hadn’t separated him off from the rest of the men when he told them to rest. It might mean he was going to get to go to Mexico at last. On the other hand, he had been down in the well, so the Captain might just have forgotten him.
“I do fancy that mare,” Dish said, watching the Captain unsaddle her.
“I don’t see why,” Pea said. “She near kilt the Captain just yesterday. Bit a hunk out of him the size of my foot.”
They all looked at Pea’s foot, which was about the size and shape of a scoop shovel.
“I’d say that passes belief,” Dish said. “Her whole head ain’t the size of your foot.”
“If that chunk had come out of you, you’d have thought it was big enough, I guess,” Pea said mildly.
After Dish had caught his breath he pulled his case knife out of his pocket and asked if anyone wanted a game of root-the-peg. Newt had a pocketknife too and was quick to take him up. The game involved flipping the knives in various ways and making them stick in the dirt. Dish won and Newt had to dig a peg out of the ground with his teeth. Dish drove the peg in so far that Newt had dirt up his nose before he finally got it out.
The sight amused Pea no end. “By gosh, Newt, if we break the crowbar you can finish digging the well with your nose,” he said.
While they were sitting around, idly experimenting with a few new knife throws, they heard the clop of horses and looked up to see two riders approaching from the east at an easy trot.
“Now who would that be?” Pea asked. “It’s an odd time of day to visit.”
“Well, if it ain’t old Juan Cortinas it’s probably just a couple of bank robbers,” Dish said, referring to a Mexican cattle thief who was hailed, south of the river, as a great hero due to the success of his raids against the Texans.
“No, it ain’t Cortinas,” Pea Eye said, squinting at the riders. “He always rides a gray.”
Dish could hardly believe anyone would be so dumb as to believe Juan Cortinas would just ride into Lonesome Dove with only one man.
The men stopped on the far side of the lots to read the sign Augustus had put up when the Hat Creek outfit had gone in business. All Call wanted on the sign was the simple words Hat Creek Livery Stable, but Augustus could not be persuaded to stop at a simple statement like that. It struck him that it would be best to put their rates on the sign. Call had been for tacking up one board with the name on it to let people know a livery stable was available, but Augustus thought that hopelessly unsophisticated; he bestirred himself and found an old plank door that had blown off somebody’s root cellar, perhaps by the same wind that had taken their roof. He nailed the door onto one corner of the corrals, facing the road, so that the first thing most travelers saw when entering the town was the sign. In the end he and Call argued so much about what was to go on the sign that Call got disgusted and washed his hands of the whole project.
That suited Augustus fine, since he considered that he was the only person in Lonesome Dove with enough literary talent to write a sign. When the weather was fair he would go sit in the shade the sign cast and think of ways to improve it; in the two or three years since they had put it up he had thought of so many additions to the original simple declaration that practically the whole door was covered.
At first he had started out spare and just put the name of the firm, “Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium,” but that caused controversy in itself. Call claimed nobody knew what an emporium was, including himself, and he still didn’t despite Augustus’s many longwinded attempts to explain it to him. All Call knew was that they didn’t run one, and he didn’t want one, whatever it was, and there was no way something like that could fit with a cattle company.
However, Augustus had his way, and “Emporium” went on the sign. He mainly put it in because he wanted visitors to know there was at least one person in Lonesome Dove who knew how to spell important words.
Next he had put his name and Call’s, his first because he was two years older and felt seniority should be honored. Call didn’t care—his pride ran in other directions. Anyway he soon came to dislike the sign so much that he would just as soon not have had his name on it at all.
Pea Eye badly wanted his name on the sign, so one year Augustus lettered it in for him as a Christmas present. Pea, of course, couldn’t read, but he could look, and once he got his name located on the sign he was quick to point it out to anyone who happened to be interested. He had already pointed it out to Dish, who wasn’t interested particularly. Unfortunately it had been three decades since anyone had called Pea anything but Pea, and even Call, who had been the man to accept him into the Rangers, couldn’t remember his real first name, though he knew his last name was Parker.
Having no wish to embarrass the man, Augustus had written him in as “P. E. Parker, Wrangler.” He had wanted to list him as a blacksmith, since in truth Pea was a superior blacksmith and only an average wrangler, but Pea Eye thought he could sit a horse as well as anyone and didn’t wish to be associated publicly with a lower trade.
Newt recognized that he was rightly too young to have his name on the sign and never suggested the possibility to anyone, though it would have pleased him mightily if someone had suggested it for him. No one did, but then Deets had to wait nearly two years before his name appeared on the sign, and Newt resigned himself to waiting too.
Of course, it had not occurred to Augustus to put Deets’s name on, Deets being a black man. But when Pea’s name was added there was a lot of discussion about it, and around that time Deets developed a tremendous case of the sulks—unlike him and perplexing to Call. Deets had ridden with him for years, through
all weathers and all dangers, over country so barren they had more than once had to kill a horse to have meat, and in all those years Deets had given cheerful service. Then, all because of the sign, he went into a sulk and stayed in it until Augustus finally spotted him looking wistfully at it one day and figured it out. When Augustus told Call about his conclusion, Call was further outraged. “That damn sign’s ruint this outfit,” he said, and went into a sulk himself. He had known Augustus was vain but would never have suspected Deets or Pea of such a failing.
Of course Augustus was happy to add Deets’s name to the sign, although, as in the case of Pea, there was some trouble with the particulars. Simply writing “Deets” on the sign didn’t work. Deets couldn’t read either, but he could see that his name was far too short in comparison with the others. At least it was short in comparison with the other names on the sign, and Deets wanted to know why.
“Well, Deets, you just got one name,” Augustus said. “Most people got two. Maybe you’ve got two and just forgot one of them.”
Deets sat around thinking for a day or two, but he could not remember ever having another name, and Call’s recollection bore him out. At that point even Augustus began to think the sign was more trouble than it was worth, since it was turning out to be so hard to please everyone. The only solution was to think up another name to go with Deets, but while they were debating various possibilities, Deets’s memory suddenly cleared.
“Josh,” he said, one night after supper, to the surprise of everyone. “Why, I’m Josh. Can you write that, Mr. Gus?”
“Josh is short for Joshua,” Augustus said. “I can write either one of them. Joshua’s the longest.”
“Write the longest,” Deets said. “I’m too busy for a short name.”
That made no particular sense, nor were they ever able to get Deets to specify how he happened to remember that Josh was his other name. Augustus wrote him on the sign as “Deets, Joshua,” since he had already written the “Deets.” Fortunately Deets’s vanity did not extend to needing a title, although Augustus was tempted to write him in as a prophet—it would have gone with the “Joshua,” but Call had a fit when he mentioned it.
“You’ll have us the laughingstock of this whole county,” Call said. “Suppose somebody come up to Deets and asked him to prophesy?”
Deets himself thought that was an amusing prospect. “Why, I could do it, Captain,” he said. “I’d prophesy hot and I’d prophesy dry and I’d charge ’em a dime.”
Once the names were settled the rest of the sign was a simple matter. There were two categories, things for rent and things for sale. Horses and rigs were available for rental, or at least horses and one rig, a spring buggy with no springs that they had bought from Xavier Wanz after his wife, Therese, had got smashed by it. For sale Augustus listed cattle and horses. As an afterthought he added, “Goats and Donkey’s Neither Bought nor Sold,” since he had no patience with goats and Call even less with donkeys. Then, as another afterthought, he had added, “We Don’t Rent Pigs,” which occasioned yet another argument with Call.
“Why, they’ll think we’re crazy here when they see that,” he said. “Nobody in their right mind would want to rent a pig. What would you do with a pig once you rented it?”
“Why, there’s plenty of useful tasks pigs can do,” Augustus said. “They could clean the snakes out of a cellar, if a man had a cellar. Or they can soak up mud puddles. Stick a few pigs in a mud puddle and pretty soon the puddle’s gone.”
It was a burning day, and Call was sweated down. “If I could find anything as cool as a mud puddle I’d soak it up myself,” he said.
“Anyhow, Call, a sign’s a kind of a tease,” Augustus said. “It ought to make a man stop and consider just what it is he wants out of life in the next few days.”
“If he thinks he wants to rent a pig he’s not a man I’d want for a customer,” Call said.
The caution about pigs ended the sign to Augustus’s satisfaction, at least for a while, but after a year or two had passed, he decided it would add dignity to it all if the sign ended with a Latin motto. He had an old Latin schoolbook that had belonged to his father; it was thoroughly battered from having been in his saddlebags for years. It had a few pages of mottoes in the back, and Augustus spent many happy hours poring over them, trying to decide which might look best at the bottom of the sign. Unfortunately the mottoes had not been translated, perhaps because by the time the students got to the back of the book they were supposed to be able to read Latin. Augustus had had only a fleeting contact with the language and had no real opportunity to improve his knowledge; once he had been caught in an ice storm on the plains and had torn out a number of pages of the grammar in order to get a fire started. He had kept himself from freezing, but at the cost of most of the grammar and vocabulary; what was left didn’t help him much with the mottoes at the end of the book. However, it was his view that Latin was mostly for looks anyway, and he devoted himself to the mottoes in order to find one with the best look. The one he settled on was Uva uvam vivendo varia fit, which seemed to him a beautiful motto, whatever it meant. One day when nobody was around he went out and lettered it onto the bottom of the sign, just below “We Don’t Rent Pigs.” Then he felt that his handiwork was complete. The whole sign read:
HAT CREEK CATTLE COMPANY
AND LIVERY EMPORIUM
CAPT. AUGUSTUS MC CRAE
PROPS.
CAPTAIN W. F. CALL
P. E. PARKER
WRANGLER
DEETS, JOSHUA
FOR RENT: HORSES AND RIGS
FOR SALE: CATTLE AND HORSES
GOATS AND DONKEY’S NEITHER BOUGHT NOR SOLD
WE DON’T RENT PIGS.
UVA UVAM VIVENDO VARIA FIT.
Augustus didn’t say a word about the motto, and it was a good two months before anybody even noticed it, which showed how unobservant the citizens of Lonesome Dove really were. It galled Augustus severely that no one appreciated the fact that he had thought to write a Latin motto on a sign that all visitors could see as they rode in, though in fact those riding in took as little note of it as those already in, perhaps because getting to Lonesome Dove was such a hot, exhausting business. The few people who accomplished it were in no mood to stop and study erudite signs.
More galling still was the fact that no member of his own firm had noticed the motto, not even Newt, from whom Augustus expected a certain alertness. Of course two members of the firm were totally illiterate—three, if he chose to count Bolivar—and wouldn’t have known Latin from Chinese. Still, the way they casually treated the sign as just part of the landscape caused Augustus to brood a good deal about the contempt that familiarity breeds.
Call did finally notice the motto one day, but only because his horse happened to throw a shoe across the road from the sign. When he got down to pick up the shoe he glanced over and noticed some curious writing below the part about pigs. He had a notion that the words were Latin but that didn’t explain what they were doing on the sign. Augustus was on the porch at the time, consulting his jug and keeping out of the way.
“What the hell did you do now?” Call asked. “Wasn’t the part about the pigs bad enough for you? What’s the last part say?”
“It says a little Latin,” Augustus said, undisturbed by his partner’s surly tone.
“Why Latin?” Call asked. “I thought it was Greek you knew.”
“I did know my letters once,” he said. He was fairly drunk, and feeling melancholy about all the sinking he had done in the world. Throughout the rough years the Greek alphabet had leaked out of his mind a letter at a time—in fact, the candle of knowledge he had set out with had burned down to a sorry stub.
“So what’s it say, that Latin?” Call asked.
“It’s a motto,” Augustus said. “It just says itself.” He was determined to conceal for as long as possible the fact that he didn’t know what the motto meant, which anyway was nobody’s business. He had written it on the sign—let ot
hers read it.
Call was quick to see the point. “You don’t know yourself,” he said. “It could say anything. For all you know it invites people to rob us.”
Augustus got a laugh out of that. “The first bandit that comes along who can read Latin is welcome to rob us, as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “I’d risk a few nags for the opportunity of shooting at an educated man for a change.”
After that, the argument about the motto, or the appropriateness of the sign as a whole, surfaced intermittently when there was nothing else to argue about around the place. Of the people who actually had to live closest to the sign, Deets liked it best, since in the afternoon the door it was written on afforded a modest spot of shade in which he could sit and let his sweat dry.
No one else got much use out of it, and it was unusual to see two horsemen on a hot afternoon stop and read the sign instead of loping on into Lonesome Dove to wet their dusty gullets.
“I guess they’re professors,” Dish said. “They sure like to read.”
Finally the men trotted on around to the barn. One was a stocky red-faced man of about the age of the Captain; the other was a tiny feist of a fellow with a pocked face and a big pistol strapped to his leg. The red-faced man was obviously the boss. His black horse was no doubt the envy of many a man. The little man rode a grulla that was practically swaybacked.
“Men, I’m Wilbarger,” the older man said. “That’s a damned amusing sign.”
“Well, Mr. Gus wrote it,” Newt said, trying to be friendly. It would certainly please Mr. Gus that somebody with a liking for signs had finally come along.
The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4) Page 135
