The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  Roscoe hardly knew what to think. He had never tried to pull up a stump in his life, and didn’t want to start. On the other hand, he didn’t want to sleep in the woods another night if he could help it.

  The woman was looking Memphis over while she caught her breath. “We might could hitch that horse to the team,” she said. “My mules ain’t particular.”

  “Why, this horse wouldn’t know what to do if it was hitched,” Roscoe said. “It’s a riding horse.”

  “Oh, I see,” the woman said. “You mean it’s dumb or too lazy to work.”

  It seemed the world was full of outspoken women. The woman farmer reminded Roscoe a little of Peach.

  Somewhat reluctantly he got down and tied Memphis to a bush at the edge of the field. The woman was waiting impatiently. She handed Roscoe an ax and he began to cut the thick, tough roots while the woman encouraged the team. The stump edged out of the ground a little farther, but it didn’t come loose. Roscoe hadn’t handled an ax much in the last few years and was awkward with it. Cutting roots was not like cutting firewood. The roots were so tough the ax tended to bounce unless the hit was perfect. Once he hit a root too close to the stump and the ax bounced out of his hand and nearly hit the woman on the foot.

  “Dern, I never meant to let it get loose from me,” Roscoe said.

  The woman looked disgusted. “If I had a piece of rawhide I’d tie it to your hand,” she said. “Then the two of you could flop around all you wanted to. What town hired you to be deputy sheriff anyway?”

  “Why, Fort Smith,” Roscoe said. “July Johnson’s the sheriff.”

  “I wish he’d been the one that showed up,” the woman said. “Maybe he’d know how to chop a root.”

  Then she began to pop the mules again and Roscoe continued to whack at the roots, squeezing the ax tightly so it wouldn’t slip loose again. In no time he was sweating worse than the woman, sweat dripping into his eyes and off his nose. It had been years since he had sweated much, and he didn’t enjoy the sensation.

  While he was half blinded by the sweat, the mules gave a big pull and one of the roots that he’d been about to cut suddenly slipped out of the ground, uncurled and lashed at him like a snake. The root hit him just above the knees and knocked him backward, causing him to drop the ax again. He tried to regain his balance but lost it and fell flat on his back. The root was still twitching and curling as if it had a life of its own.

  The woman didn’t even look around. The mules had the stump moving, and she kept at them, popping them with the reins and yelling at them as if they were deaf, while Roscoe lay there and watched the big stump slowly come out of the hole where it had been for so many years. A couple of small roots still held, but the mules kept going and the stump was soon free.

  Roscoe got slowly to his feet, only to realize that he could barely walk.

  The woman seemed to derive a certain amusement from the way he hobbled around trying to gain control of his limbs.

  “Who did they send you off to catch?” she asked. “Or did they just decide you wasn’t worth your salary and run you out of town?”

  Roscoe felt aggrieved. Even strangers didn’t seem to think he was worth his salary, and yet in his view he did a fine job of keeping the jail.

  “I’m after July Johnson,” he said. “His wife run off.”

  “I wish she’d run this way,” the woman said. “I’d put her to work helping me clear this field. It’s slow work, doing it alone.”

  And yet the woman had made progress. At the south edge of the field, where Memphis was tied, forty or fifty stumps were lined up.

  “Where’s your menfolks?” Roscoe asked.

  “Dead or gone,” the woman said. “I can’t find no husband that knows how to stay alive. My boys didn’t care for the work, so they left about the time of the war and didn’t come back. What’s your name, Deputy?”

  “Roscoe Brown,” Roscoe said.

  “I’m Louisa,” the woman said. “Louisa Brooks. I was born in Alabama and I wish I’d stayed. Got two husbands buried there and there’s another buried on this property here. Right back of the house, he’s buried, that was Jim,” she added. “He was fat and I couldn’t get him in the wagon so I dug the hole and there he lies.”

  “Well, that’s a shame,” Roscoe said.

  “No, we didn’t get on,” Louisa said. “He drank whiskey and talked the Bible too, and I like a man that does one thing or the other. I told him once he could fall dead for all I care, and it wasn’t three weeks before the fool just did it.”

  Though Roscoe had been hopeful of staying the night, he was beginning to lose his inclination. Louisa Brooks was almost as scary as wild pigs, in his view. The mules drug the stump over to where the others were and Roscoe walked over and helped Louisa untie it.

  “Roscoe, you’re invited to supper,” she said, before he could make up his mind to go. “I bet you can eat better than you chop.”

  “Oh, I ought to get on after July,” Roscoe said, halfheartedly. “His wife run off.”

  “I meant to run off, before Jim went and died,” Louisa said. “If I had, I wouldn’t have had to bury him. Jim was fat. I had to hitch a mule to him to drag him out of the house. Spent all day pulling up stumps and then had to work half the night planting a husband. How old are you getting to be?”

  “Why, forty-eight, I guess,” Roscoe said, surprised to be asked.

  Louisa took off her hat and fanned herself with it as they followed the mules down one edge of the field. Roscoe led his horse.

  “The skinny ones last longer than the fat ones,” Louisa said. “You’ll probably last till you’re about sixty.”

  “Or longer, I hope,” Roscoe said.

  “Can you cook?” Louisa asked. She was a fair-looking woman, though large.

  “No,” Roscoe admitted. “I generally eat at the saloon or else go home with July.”

  “I can’t neither,” Louisa said. “Never interested me. What I like is farming. I’d farm day and night if it didn’t take so much coal oil.”

  That seemed curious. Roscoe had never heard of a woman farmer, though plenty of black women picked cotton during the season. They came to a good-sized clearing without a stump in it. There was a large cabin and a rail corral. Louisa unharnessed the mules and put them in the pen.

  “I’d leave ’em out but they’d run off,” she said. “They don’t like farming as much as I do. I guess we’ll have corn bread for supper. It’s about all I eat.”

  “Why not bacon?” Roscoe asked. He was quite hungry and would have appreciated a good hunk of bacon or a chop of some kind. Several chickens were scratching around the cabin—any one of them would have made good eating but he didn’t feel he ought to mention it, since he was the guest.

  “I won’t have no pigs around,” Louisa said. “Too smart. I won’t bother with animals I have to outwit. I’d rather just farm.”

  True to her word, Louisa served up a meal of corn bread, washed down with well water. The cabin was roomy and clean, but there was not much food in it. Roscoe was puzzled as to how Louisa could keep going with nothing but corn bread in her. It occurred to him that he had not seen a milk cow anywhere, so evidently she had even dispensed with such amenities as milk and butter.

  She herself munched a plate of corn bread contentedly, now and then fanning herself. It was hot and still in the cabin.

  “I doubt you’ll catch that sheriff,” she said, looking Roscoe over.

  Roscoe doubted it too, but felt that he had to make a show of trying, at least. What was more likely was that if he rode around long enough July would eventually come and find him.

  “Well, he went to Texas,” he said. “Maybe I’ll strike someone that’s seen him.”

  “Yes, and maybe you’ll ride right into a big mess of Comanche Indians,” Louisa said. “You do that and you’ll never enjoy another good plate of corn bread.”

  Roscoe let the remark pass. The less said about Indians the better, in his view. He munched corn br
ead for a while, preferring not to think about any of the various things that might happen to him in Texas.

  “Was you ever married?” Louisa asked.

  “No, ma’am,” Roscoe said. “I was never even engaged.”

  “In other words you’ve went to waste,” Louisa said.

  “Well, I’ve been a deputy sheriff for a good spell,” Roscoe said. “I keep the jail.”

  Louisa was watching him closely in a way that made him a little uncomfortable. The only light in the cabin came from a small coal-oil lamp on the table. A few small bugs buzzed around the lamp, their movements casting shadows on the table. The corn bread was so dry that Roscoe kept having to dip dipperfuls of water to wash it down.

  “Roscoe, you’re in the wrong trade,” Louisa said. “If you could just learn to handle an ax you might make a good farmer.”

  Roscoe didn’t know what to say to that. Nothing was less likely than that he would make a farmer.

  “Why’d that sheriff’s wife run off?” Louisa asked.

  “She didn’t say,” Roscoe said. “Maybe she said to July but I doubt it, since he left before she did.”

  “Didn’t like Arkansas, I guess,” Louisa said. “He might just as well let her go, if that’s the case. I like it myself, though it ain’t no Alabama.”

  After that the conversation lagged. Roscoe kept wishing there was something to eat besides corn bread, but there wasn’t. Louisa continued to watch him from the other side of the table.

  “Roscoe, have you had any experience with women at all?” she asked, after a bit.

  To Roscoe it seemed a bold question, and he took his time answering it. Once about twenty years earlier he had fancied a girl named Betsie and had been thinking about asking her to take a walk with him some night. But he was shy, and while he was getting around to asking, Betsie died of smallpox. He had always regretted that they never got to take their walk, but after that he hadn’t tried to have much to do with women.

  “Well, not much,” he admitted, finally.

  “I got the solution to both our problems,” Louisa said. “You let that sheriff find his own wife and stay here and we’ll get married.”

  She said it in the same confident, slightly loud voice that she always seemed to use—after a day of yelling at mules it was probably hard to speak in a quiet voice.

  Despite the loudness, Roscoe assumed he had misunderstood her. A woman didn’t just out and ask a man to marry. He pondered what she had said a minute, trying to figure out where he might have missed her meaning. It stumped him, though, so he chewed slowly on his last bite of corn bread.

  “What was it you said?” he asked, finally.

  “I said we oughta get married,” Louisa said loudly. “What I like about you is you’re quiet. Jim talked every second that he didn’t have a whiskey bottle in his mouth. I got tired of listening. Also, you’re skinny. If you don’t last, you’ll be easy to bury. I’ve buried enough husbands to take such things into account. What do you say?”

  “I don’t want to,” Roscoe said. He was aware that it sounded impolite but was too startled to say otherwise.

  “Well, you ain’t had time to think about it,” Louisa said. “Give it some thought while you’re finishing the corn bread. Much as I hate burying husbands, I don’t want to live alone. Jim wasn’t much good but he was somebody in the bed, at least. I’ve had six boys in all but not a one of ’em stayed around. Had two girls but they both died. That’s eight children. I always meant to have ten but I’ve got two to go and time’s running out.”

  She munched her corn bread for a while. She seemed to be amused, though Roscoe couldn’t figure out what might be amusing.

  “How big was your family?” she asked.

  “There was just four of us boys,” Roscoe said. “Ma died young.”

  Louisa was watching him, which made him nervous. He remembered that he was supposed to be thinking about the prospect of marrying her while he finished the corn bread, but in fact his appetite was about gone anyway and he was having to choke it down. He began to feel more and more of a grievance against more and more people. The start of it all was Jake Spoon, who had no business coming to Fort Smith in the first place. It seemed to him that a chain of thoughtless actions, on the part of many people he knew, had resulted in his being stuck in a cabin in the wilderness with a difficult widow woman. Jake should have kept his pistol handier, and not resorted to a buffalo gun. Benny Johnson should have been paying attention to his dentistry and not walking around in the street in the middle of the day. July shouldn’t have married Elmira if she was going to run off, and of course Elmira certainly had no business geting on the whiskey boat.

  In all of it no one had given much consideration to him, least of all the townspeople of Fort Smith. Peach Johnson and Charlie Barnes, in particular, had done their best to see that he had to leave.

  But if the townspeople of Fort Smith had not considered him, the same couldn’t be said for Louisa Brooks, who was giving him a good deal more consideration than he was accustomed to.

  “I was never a big meat eater,” she said. “Living off corn bread keeps you feeling light on your feet.”

  Roscoe didn’t feel light on his feet, though. Both his legs pained him from where the root had struck them. He choked down the last of the corn bread and took another swallow or two of the cool well water.

  “You ain’t a bad-looking feller,” Louisa said. “Jim was prone to warts. Had ’em on his hands and on his neck both. So far as I can see you don’t have a wart on you.”

  “No, don’t believe so,” Roscoe admitted.

  “Well, that’s all the supper,” Louisa said. “What about my proposition?”

  “I can’t,” Roscoe said, putting it as politely as he knew how. “If I don’t keep on till I find July I might lose my job.”

  Louisa looked exasperated. “You’re a fine guest,” she said. “I tell you what, let’s give it a tryout. You ain’t had enough experience of women to know whether you like the married life or not. It might suit you to a T. If it did, you wouldn’t have to do risky work like being a deputy.”

  It was true that being a deputy had become almost intolerably risky—Roscoe had to grant that. But judging from July’s experience, marriage had its risks too.

  “I don’t favor mustaches much,” Louisa said. “But then life’s a matter of give-and-take.”

  They had eaten the corn bread right out of the pan, so there were no dishes to wash. Louisa got up and threw a few crumbs out the door to her chickens, who rushed at them greedily, two of them coming right into the cabin.

  “Don’t you eat them chickens?” Roscoe asked, thinking how much better the corn bread would have tasted if there had been a chicken to go with it.

  “No, I just keep ’em to control the bugs,” Louisa said. “I ate enough chicken in Alabama to last me a lifetime.”

  Roscoe felt plenty nervous. The question of sleeping arrangements could not be postponed much longer. He had looked forward briefly to sleeping in the cabin, where he would feel secure from snakes and wild pigs, but that hope was dashed. He hadn’t spent a night alone with a woman in his whole life and didn’t plan to start with Louisa, who stood in the doorway drinking a dipper of water. She squished a swallow or two around in her mouth and spat it out the door. Then she put the dipper back in the bucket and leaned over Roscoe, so close he nearly tipped over backward in his chair out of surprise.

  “Roscoe, you’ve went to waste long enough,” she said. “Let’s give it a tryout.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know how to try,” Roscoe said. “I’ve been a bachelor all my life.”

  Louisa straightened up. “Men are about as worthless a race of people as I’ve ever encountered,” she said. “Look at the situation a minute. You’re running off to catch a sheriff you probably can’t find, who’s in the most dangerous state in the union, and if you do find him he’ll just go off and try to find a wife that don’t want to live with him anyway. You’ll probably get
scalped before it’s all over, or hung, or a Mexican will get you with a pigsticker. And it’ll all be to try and mend something that won’t mend anyway. Now I own a section of land here and I’m a healthy woman. I’m willing to take you, although you’ve got no experience either at farming or matrimony. You’d be useful to me, whereas you won’t be a bit of use to that sheriff or that town you work for either. I’ll teach you how to handle an ax and a mule team, and guarantee you all the corn bread you can eat. We might even have some peas to go with it later in the year. I can cook peas. Plus I’ve got one of the few feather mattresses in this part of the country, so it’d be easy sleeping. And now you’re scared to try. If that ain’t cowardice, I don’t know what is.”

  Roscoe had never expected to hear such a speech, and he had no idea how to reply to it. Louisa’s approach to marriage didn’t seem to resemble any that he had observed, though it was true he had not spent much time studying the approaches to matrimony. Still, he had only ridden into Louisa’s field an hour before sundown, and it was not yet much more than an hour after dark. Her proposal seemed hasty to him by any standards.

  “Well, we ain’t much acquainted,” he said. “How do you know we’d get along?”

  “I don’t,” Louisa said. “That’s why I offered just to give it a tryout. If you don’t like it you can leave, and if I can’t put up with you I expect I could soon run you off. But you ain’t even got the gumption to try. I’d say you’re scared of women.”

  Roscoe had to admit that was true, except for a whore now and then. But he only admitted it to himself, not to Louisa. After some reflection he decided it was best to leave her charge unanswered.

  “I guess I’ll bed down out back,” he said.

  “Well, fine,” Louisa said. “Just watch out for Ed.”

  That was a surprise. “Who’s Ed?” he asked.

  “Ed’s a snake,” Louisa said. “Big rattler. I named him after my uncle, because they’re both lazy. I let Ed stay around because he holds down the rodents. He don’t bother me and I don’t bother him. But he hangs out around to the back, so watch out where you throw down your blanket.”