The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  He had arrested plenty of people who misbehaved, yet he could not bring himself to say a word to his wife about her own unusual behavior.

  Joe didn’t share July’s discomfort with the fact that his mother seldom came to the table. When she did come it was usually to scold him, and he got scolded enough as it was—besides, he liked eating with July, or doing anything else with July. So far as he was concerned, marrying July was the best thing his mother had ever done. She scolded July as freely as she scolded him, which didn’t seem right to Joe. But then July accepted it and never scolded back, so perhaps that was the way of the world: women scolded, and men kept quiet and stayed out of the way as much as possible.

  “Want some buttermilk?” July asked, going to the crock.

  “No, sir,” Joe said. He hated buttermilk, but July loved it so that he always asked anyway.

  “You ask him that every night,” Elmira said from the edge of the loft. It irritated her that July came home and did exactly the same things day after day.

  “Stop asking him,” she said sharply. “Let him get his own buttermilk if he wants any. It’s been four months now and he ain’t drunk a drop—looks like you’d let it go.”

  She spoke with a heat that surprised July. Elmira could get angry about almost anything, it seemed. Why would it matter if he invited the boy to have a drink of buttermilk? All he had to do was say no, which he had.

  “Well, it’s good,” he said quietly.

  Joe almost wished he had taken a glass, since it would have kept July out of trouble. But it was too late.

  After that one remark the meal went smoothly, mainly because no one said another word. Joe and July ate their corn bread and bacon, and Elmira hung her feet in the air.

  “You take that medicine,” she said to July, as soon as he had finished. “If you don’t, I guess you’ll be yellow the rest of your life.”

  “He ain’t as yellow as he was,” Joe said, feeling that it was incumbent on him to take up for July a little bit, since July would never take up for himself. He had no real fear of his mother—she whipped him plenty, but her anger never lasted long, and if she was really mad he could always outrun her.

  “He’s too yellow for me,” Elmira said. “If I’d wanted a yellow husband I’d have married a Chinaman.”

  “What’s a Chinaman?” Joe asked.

  “Go get a bucket of water,” Elmira said.

  July sat at the table, feeling a little sad, while the boy drew a bucket of water. At least they had a well—the river was nearly a mile away, which would have been a long carry.

  Joe brought the bucket in and went back outside. It was stuffy in the small cabin. There were a lot of fireflies out. For amusement he caught a few and let them flicker in his hand.

  “Want a bath?” July asked his wife. “I’ll fetch some more water if you do.”

  Elmira didn’t answer because she didn’t really hear him. It was peculiar, but July almost never said anything that she did hear anymore. It seemed to her that the last thing she heard were their marriage vows. After that, though she heard his voice, she didn’t really hear his words. Certainly he was nothing like Dee Boot when it came to conversation. Dee could talk all week and never say the same thing twice, whereas it seemed to her July had never said anything different since they’d married.

  That in itself didn’t bother her, though. If there was one thing she didn’t need to do, it was to talk to a man.

  “I been thinking I might better go on and catch Jake Spoon,” July said. He said everything in the same tone of voice, making it doubly difficult to pay attention to him, but Elmira caught his meaning.

  “Do what?” she asked.

  “Go get Jake Spoon,” July said. “I’m over my jaundice enough to ride.”

  “Let him go,” Elmira said. “Who wants him, anyway?”

  July was not about to tell her Peach wanted him. “Well, he killed Benny,” he said.

  “I say let him go,” Elmira said. “That was an accident.”

  She came downstairs and dipped her face in the cool water, then wiped it on an old piece of sacking they used for a towel.

  “He shouldn’t have run,” July said. “He might have got off.”

  “No, Peach would have shot him,” Elmira said. “She’s the one don’t care about the law.”

  That was a possibility. Peach had an uncontrollable temper.

  “Well, I’ve got to catch him—it’s my job,” he said.

  Elmira felt like laughing. July was flattering himself if he thought he could catch a man like Jake Spoon. But then, if she laughed she would be giving herself away. July had no idea that she knew Jake Spoon, but she had known Jake even before she knew Dee. He and Dee had been buddies up in Kansas. Jake even asked her to marry him once, in a joking way—for Jake was not the marrying kind and she hadn’t been then, either. He had always kidded her, in the days when she was a sporting girl in Dodge, that she would end up respectable, though even he couldn’t have guessed that she’d marry a sheriff. It amused him no end when he found out. She had seen him twice in the street after he came to Fort Smith, and she could tell by the way he grinned and tipped his hat to her that he thought it one of the world’s finest jokes. If he had ever come to the cabin and seen that it had a dirt floor, he would have realized it was one of those jokes that aren’t funny.

  And yet she had not hesitated when July proposed, though she had only known him three days. It was the buffalo hunters who convinced her she had better change her way of life. One had taken a fancy to her, a man so big and rough that she feared to refuse him, though she should have—in all her days she had never been used so hard. And the buffalo hunters were numerous. Had it not been for Dee, they might have finished her. But Dee had always been partial to her and loaned her enough money to make a start in a town where she had no reputation: St. Jo, Missouri, which was where July came to testify. She met him in court, for she had no job at the time and was watching the trial to pass the hours.

  She just had a dusty little room in a boardinghouse in St. Jo, and the boy a cubbyhole in the attic. Dee snuck in twice, in the dead of night, so as not to tarnish her reputation. He liked Joe, too, and had the notion that he ought to grow up to be something. It was the last time she saw Dee that they had worked out the smallpox story.

  “I’m going north, Ellie—I’m tired of sweating,” he said. “You go south and you’ll be fine. If anybody asks say your husband died of smallpox—you can get to be a widow without ever having been married. I might get the smallpox anyway, unless I’m lucky.”

  “I’d go north with you, Dee,” she said quietly, not putting much weight on it. Dee didn’t care to have much weight put on things.

  But Dee just grinned and pulled at his little blond mustache.

  “Nope,” he said. “You got to go respectable. I bet you make a schoolmarm yet.”

  Then he had given her a sweet kiss, told her to look after his boy, and left her with ten dollars and the memory of their reckless years together in Abilene and Dodge. She had known he wouldn’t take her north—Dee traveled alone. It was only when he settled in a town to gamble that he liked a woman. But he had offered to go shoot the buffalo hunter who had used her so hard. She had pretended she didn’t know the man’s name. Dee wasn’t a hard man, certainly not as hard as the buffalo hunter. He would have been the one to end up dead.

  As for July, it had been no trick to marry him. He was like some of the young cowboys who had never touched a woman or even spoken to one. In two days he was hers. She soon knew that he made no impression on her. His habits never varied. He did the same things in the same way every day. Nine days out of ten he even forgot to wipe the buttermilk off his upper lip. But he wasn’t hard like the buffalo hunters. With him she was safe from that kind of treatment, at least.

  When she heard Jake was in town she thought she might just run away with him, though she knew he was even less dependable than Dee. But once he shot Benny she had to give up that little dream,
the only little dream she had.

  Since then, life had been very boring. She spent most of her days sitting in the loft, letting her feet dangle, remembering the old days with Dee and Jake.

  July was sitting in the dark, buttermilk on his lip, looking at her as patiently as if he were a calf. The very look of him, so patient, made her want to torment him any way she could.

  July knew that for some reason he irritated Elmira—she reacted crossly to almost everything he said or suggested. Sometimes he wondered if all men only made their wives look hostile and sullen. If it wasn’t the case, then he wondered what made the difference.

  He had always taken pains to be as nice as possible, sharing all the chores with little Joe and sparing her inconveniences whenever he could. Yet it seemed the more polite he tried to be, the more he stumbled or said the wrong thing or generally upset her. At night it had gotten so he could hardly put a hand on her, she looked at him so coldly. She could lie a foot from him and make him feel that he was miles away. It all made him feel terrible, for he had come to love her more than anything.

  “Wipe your lip, July,” she said. “I wish you’d ever learn, or else stop drinking that buttermilk.”

  Embarrassed, he wiped it. When Elmira was annoyed she made him so nervous that he couldn’t really remember whether he had eaten, or what.

  “You ain’t sick, are you?” he asked. There were fevers going around, and if she had one it would explain why she felt so testy.

  “I ain’t sick,” she said.

  Since he had started the business about Jake, he thought he might as well finish it. She was mad anyway.

  “If I start after Spoon now, I expect I could be back in a month,” he said.

  Ellie just looked at him. It was all right with her if he was gone for a year. The only reason she objected to his going was that she knew Peach was behind it; if somebody was going to tell the man what to do, it ought to be her, not Peach.

  “Take Joe with you,” she said.

  Such a thought had never occurred to July, though it had crossed his mind that he might take Roscoe.

  “Why, you’ll need him,” July said. “You’ve got the chores.”

  Elmira shrugged. “I can milk that old cow,” she said. “The chores ain’t hard. We ain’t raising cotton, you know. I want you to take Joe. He needs to see the world.”

  It was true the boy might be useful on a long trip. There would be someone to help him watch the prisoner, once there was a prisoner. But it meant leaving Ellie alone, which he didn’t like.

  As if reading his mind, she sat down at the table and looked at him.

  “I been alone before, July,” she said. “It ain’t gonna hurt me. Roscoe can help if I need something I can’t carry.”

  That was true, of course—not that Roscoe would be particularly obliging about it. Roscoe claimed to have a bad back and would complain for days if forced to do anything resembling manual labor.

  “There could be a fight,” July said, remembering that Jake Spoon was said to have difficult friends. “I don’t expect it, but you never know with a gambler.”

  “I don’t reckon they’d shoot a boy,” Elmira said. “You take Joe. He’s got to grow up sometime.”

  Then, to escape the stuffy cabin, she went outside and sat on a stump for a while. The night was thick with fireflies. In a little while she heard July come out. He didn’t say anything. He just sat.

  Despite his politeness and constant kindness, Elmira felt a bitterness toward him. The thing he didn’t know was that she was with child. He wouldn’t know it, either, if she could help it. She had just married out of fright—she didn’t want him or the child either. And yet she was scared to try and stop the child—in Abilene she had known a girl who bled to death from trying to stop a baby. She had died on the stairs outside Elmira’s room on a bitter cold night; blood had run all the way down the stairs and frozen in the night into red ice. The girl, whose name was Jenny, had stuck to the stairs. They had had to heat water in order to get her loose.

  The sight had been enough to discourage her from trying to stop a baby. Yet the thought that she had one made her bitter. She didn’t want to go through it all again, and she didn’t want to live with July Johnson. It was just that the buffalo hunter had been so rough; it had scared her into thinking she had to find a different life.

  Life in Fort Smith was different, too—so dull that she found little reason to raise herself from her quilts, most days. The women of the town, though they had no reason to suspect her, suspected her anyway and let her alone. Often she was tempted just to walk into a saloon where there was a girl or two she could might have talked to, but instead she had given way to apathy, spending whole days sitting on the edge of her sleeping loft, doing nothing.

  Watching the fireflies sparkle in the woods behind the cabin, Elmira waited, listening. Sure enough, in a few minutes, she heard the little metallic clicks, as July slowly rotated the chambers in his pistol before going back to town to make his rounds. It set her teeth on edge that he would do it every night.

  “Guess I’ll go have a look,” he said. “Won’t be long.”

  It was what he said every night. It was true, too. Unless the rivermen were fighting, he was never long. Mainly he hoped that when he came to bed she’d want him. But she didn’t want him. She had kept him at a distance since she was sure about the baby. It hurt his feelings, but she didn’t care.

  As she heard him walk off through the darkness, her spirits sank even lower. It seemed there was no winning in life. She wanted July and Joe to be gone, suddenly, so she would not have to deal with them every day. Their needs were modest enough, but she no longer wanted to face them. She had reached a point where doing anything for anyone was a strain. It was like heavy work, it was so hard.

  It came to her more strongly every day how much she missed Dee Boot. He was the exact opposite of July Johnson. July could be predicted down to the least gesture, whereas Dee was always doing what a person least expected. Once, in Abilene, to get revenge on a madam he hadn’t liked, he had pretended to bring her a nice pie from the bakery, and indeed he had got the baker to produce what looked like a perfect piecrust—but he had gone over to the livery stable and filled the piecrust with fresh horse turds. The madam, a big, mean woman named Sal, had actually cut into it before she sensed the joke.

  Elmira smiled to herself, remembering some of the funny things Dee did. They had known one another for nearly fifteen years, since she had found herself stranded, as a girl, way up in Kansas. It hadn’t been all Dee, of course; there had been plenty of others. Some had lasted only a few minutes, some a week or two or a month, but somehow she and Dee always found themselves back together. It irritated her that he had been content just to pull his mustache and head for the north without her. He seemed to think it would be easy for her to be respectable. Of course, it was her fault for picking July. She hadn’t expected his politeness to irritate her so much.

  After the night deepened, the moon came out and rose above the pines. Elmira sat on the stump and watched it, glad to be alone. The thought that July and Joe would be going off caused her spirits to lift—it occurred to her that once they left there would be nothing to stop her from leaving too. Boats went up the Arkansas nearly every week. It might be that Dee Boot was missing her as much as she missed him. He wouldn’t mind that she was with child—such things he took lightly.

  It made her smile to think of finding Dee. While July tracked one gambler, she would track another, in the opposite direction. When July got back, with or without Jake, and discovered that his wife was gone, it might surprise him so much he would even forget to drink his buttermilk.

  28.

  THE NEXT MORNING, an hour before dawn, July and Joe left the cabin and caught their horses. Joe was almost stunned with excitement at getting to go with July. His friend Roscoe Brown had been stunned, too, when July went by the jail and told Roscoe they were going.

  “You’ll get that boy kilt before I eve
n teach him all my domino tricks,” Roscoe said. It puzzled him that July would do such a thing.

  Joe was not tempted to question the miracle. The main thing that bothered him was that he lacked a saddle, but July took care of that by borrowing an old singletree from Peach Johnson. She was so pleased July was finally going after her husband’s killer that she would have given them the saddle—rats had eaten most of it, anyway.

  Elmira got up and cooked them breakfast, but the food did nothing to ease the heaviness of heart which July felt. All night he had hoped she might turn to him, it being his last night at home for a while—but she hadn’t. Once he had accidentally touched her, turning on the pallet they slept on, and she had stiffened. It was clear to July that she wasn’t going to miss him, though he was certainly going to miss her. It was peculiar, but she showed no sign of being sorry to see Joe go, either. Yet Joe was her son and he was her husband—if she didn’t love her husband and her son, who did she love? For all she knew they would be gone for months, and yet she was just as brisk with them as if it was an ordinary day. She saw to it that Joe drew another bucket of water before he left, and then jumped on July for nearly forgetting his jaundice medicine.

  Yet, for all her bad temper, it was no relief to leave. He felt apprehension so strongly that at one point it seemed to tighten his throat and nearly caused him to choke on a bite of corn bread. He felt he was being carried along through his life as a river might carry a chip. There seemed to be no way he could stop anything that was happening, although it all felt wrong.