The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  As they were going off, Newt saw that the tail of Lippy’s old brown coat had gotten pinched in the wagon seat—which explained his not having jumped. The wagon tipped straight down, bounced once, and turned completely over just as it hit the water. The mules, still hitched to it, fell backwards on top of the mess. All four wagon wheels were spinning in the air when Newt and the Raineys jumped off their horses. The trouble was, they had no idea what to do next.

  Fortunately Augustus had seen the commotion and in a minute was in the water, on old Malaria. He threw a loop over one of the spinning wheels and spurred the big horse vigorously, pulling the wagon to a tilt on one edge.

  “Fish him out, boys, otherwise we’ll have to go all the way to Montana without no pianer player,” he said—though privately he doubted his efforts would do any good. The wagon had landed smack on top of Lippy. If he wasn’t drowned he probably had a broken neck.

  When the wagon tilted, Newt saw Lippy’s legs. He and the Raineys waded in and tried to get him loose, but the coat was still pinched in the seat. All they could do was get his head above water, though his head was so covered with mud that it was difficult at first to know if he was dead or alive. Fortunately Pea soon rode up and cut the coat loose with his bowie knife.

  “He’s a mudhead, ain’t he,” Pea said, carefully wiping his knife on his pants leg. “Now I guess he’ll be mad at me for ten years because I ruined his coat.”

  Lippy was limp as a rag and hadn’t moved a muscle. Newt felt sick to his stomach. Once more, on a perfectly nice day with everything going well, death had struck and taken another of his friends. Lippy had been part of his life since he could remember. When he was a child, Lippy had occasionally taken him into the saloon and let him bang on the piano. Now they would have to bury him as they had buried Sean.

  Strangely, neither Pea nor Mr. Gus was much concerned. The mules had regained their feet and stood in the shallow water, swishing their tails and looking sleepy. Call rode up about that time. He had been at the head of the herd, with Dish Boggett.

  “Ain’t nobody gonna unhitch them mules?” he asked. A big sack of flour had been thrown out of the wagon and lay in the river getting ruined. Newt had not noticed it until the Captain pointed at it.

  “Well, I ain’t,” Augustus said. “The boys can, their feet are already wet.”

  It seemed to Newt everyone was being mighty callous about Lippy, who lay on the riverbank. Then, to his surprise, Lippy, whose head was still covered with mud, rolled over and began to belch water. He belched and vomited for several minutes, making a horrible sound, but Newt’s relief that he was not dead was so great that he welcomed the sound and waded out to help the Raineys unhitch the mules.

  It soon became clear that the wagon bed had been damaged beyond repair in the accident. When it was righted, all the goods that had been in it floated in the shallow water.

  “What a place for a shipwreck,” Augustus said.

  “I never seen a wagon break in two before,” Pea said.

  The wagon bed, old and rotten, had burst upon impact. Several cowboys rode up and began to fish their bedrolls out of the muddy water.

  “What became of Bol?” Pea asked. “Wasn’t he driving the wagon?”

  Lippy was sitting up, wiping mud off his head. He ran one finger under his loose lip as if he expected to find a tadpole or a small fish, but all he found was mud. About that time the Spettle boys rode up, and crossed the horse herd.

  “Seen the cook?” Augustus asked.

  “Why, he’s walking along carrying his gun,” Bill Spettle said. “Them pigs are with him.”

  Bolivar soon came in sight a couple of hundred yards away, the blue pigs walking along beside him.

  “I heared a shot,” Lippy said. “About that time them mules took to running. I guess a bandit shot at us.”

  “No competent bandit would waste a bullet on you or Bol either,” Augustus said. “There ain’t no reward for either of you.”

  “It sounded like a shotgun,” Bill Spettle volunteered.

  “Bol might have been taking target practice,” Augustus said. “He might have fired at a cowpie.”

  “It don’t matter what it was,” Call said. “The damage is done.”

  Augustus was enjoying the little break the accident produced. Walking along all day beside a cow herd was already proving monotonous—any steady work had always struck him as monotonous. It was mainly accidents of one kind and another that kept life interesting, in his view, the days otherwise being mainly repetitious things, livened up mostly by the occasional card game.

  It was made even more interesting a few minutes later when Bolivar walked up and handed in his resignation. He didn’t even look at the smashed wagon.

  “I don’t want to go this way,” he said, addressing himself to the Captain. “I am going back.”

  “Why, Bol, you won’t stand a chance,” Augustus said. “A renowned criminal like you. Some young sheriff out to make a reputation will hang you before you get halfway to the border.”

  “I don’t care,” Bol said. “I am going back.”

  In fact, he expected to be fired anyway. He had been dozing on the wagon seat, dreaming about his daughters, and had accidentally fired off the ten-gauge. The recoil had knocked him off the wagon, but even so it had been hard to get free of the dream. It turned into a dream in which his wife was angry, even as he awoke and saw the mules dashing away. The pigs were rooting in a rat’s nest, under a big cactus. Bol was so enraged by the mules’ behavior that he would have shot one of them, only they were already well out of range.

  He had not seen the wagon go off the creek bank, but he was not surprised that it was broken. The mules were fast. He would probably not have been able to hit one of them even with a rifle, distracted as he was by the dream.

  The fall convinced him he had lived long enough with Americans. They were not his compañeros. Most of his compañeros were dead, but his country wasn’t dead, and in his village there were a few men who liked to talk about the old days when they had spent all their time stealing Texas cattle. In those years his wife had not been so angry. As he walked toward the busted wagon and the little group of men, he decided to go back. He was tired of seeing his family only in dreams. Perhaps this time when he walked in, his wife would be glad to see him.

  At any rate, the Americanos were going too far north. He had not really believed Augustus when he said they would ride north for several months. Most of what Augustus said was merely wind. He supposed they would ride for a few days and then sell the cattle, or else start a ranch. He himself had never been more than two days’ hard ride from the border in his life. Now a week had passed and the Americanos showed no sign of stopping. Already he was far from the river. He missed his family. Enough was enough.

  Call was not especially surprised. “All right, Bol, do you want a horse?” he asked. The old man had cooked for them for ten years. He deserved a mount.

  “Sí,” Bol said, remembering that it was a long walk back to the river, and then three days more to his village.

  Call caught the old man a gentle gelding. “I’ve got no saddle to give you,” he said, when he presented Bol with the horse.

  Bol just shrugged. He had an extra serape and soon turned it into a saddle blanket. Apart from the gun, it was his only possession. In a moment he was ready to start home.

  “Well, Bol, if you change your mind, you can find us in Montana,” Augustus said. “It may be that your wife’s too rusty for you now. You may want to come back and cook up a few more goats and snakes.”

  “Gracias, Capitán,” Bol said, when Call handed him the reins to the gelding. Then he rode off, without another word to anybody. It didn’t surprise Augustus, since Bol had worked for them all those years without saying a word to anybody unless directly goaded into it—usually by Augustus.

  But his departure surprised and saddened Newt. It spoiled his relief that Lippy was alive—after all, he had lost another friend, Bol instead of Lipp
y. Newt didn’t say so, but he would rather have lost Lippy. He didn’t want Lippy to die, of course, but he wouldn’t have minded if he had decided to return to Lonesome Dove.

  But Bol rode away from them, his old gun resting across the horse’s withers. For a moment Newt felt so sad that he almost embarrassed himself by crying. He felt his eyes fill up. How could Bol just go? He had always been the cook, and yet in five minutes he was as lost to them as if he had died. Newt turned and made a show of spreading out the bedrolls, but it was mainly to conceal the fact that he felt sad. If people kept leaving, they’d be down to nobody before they even got north of Texas.

  Riding away, Bolivar too felt very sad. Now that he was going, he was not sure why he had decided to go. Perhaps it was because he didn’t want to face embarrassment. After all, he had fired the shot that caused the mules to run. Also, he didn’t want to get so far north that he couldn’t find his way back to the river. As he rode away he decided he had made another stupid choice. So far, in his opinion, almost every decision of his life had been stupid. He didn’t miss his wife that much—they had lost the habit of one another and might not be able to reacquire it. He felt a little bitter as he rode away. The Capitán should not have let him go. After all, he was the only man among them who could cook. He didn’t really like the Americanos, but he was used to them. It was too bad they had suddenly decided to get so many cattle and go north. Life in Lonesome Dove had been easy. Goats were plentiful and easy to catch, and his wife was the right distance away. When he grew bored, he could beat the dinner bell with the broken crowbar. For some reason it gave him great satisfaction to beat the dinner bell. It had little to do with dinner, or anything. It was just something he liked to do. When he stopped he could hear the echoes of his work fading into Mexico.

  He decided that, since he was in no hurry, he would stop in Lonesome Dove and beat the bell a few more times. He could say it was the Capitán’s orders. The thought was comforting. It made up for the fact that most of his decisions had been stupid. He rode south without looking back.

  42.

  “WELL, IF WE WASN’T DOOMED to begin with, we’re doomed now,” Augustus said, watching Bolivar ride away. He enjoyed every opportunity for pronouncing doom, and the loss of a cook was a good one.

  “I expect we’ll poison ourselves before we get much farther, with no regular cook,” he said. “I just hope Jasper gets poisoned first.”

  “I never liked that old man’s cooking anyway,” Jasper said.

  “You’ll remember it fondly, once you’re poisoned,” Augustus said.

  Call felt depressed by the morning’s events. He did not particularly lament the loss of the wagon—an old wired-together wreck at best—but he did lament the loss of Bol. Once he formed a unit of men he didn’t like to lose one of them, for any reason. Someone would have to assume extra work, which seldom sat well with whoever had to do it. Bolivar had been with them ten years and it was trying to lose him suddenly, although Call had not really expected him to come when he first announced the trip. Bolivar was a Mexican. If he didn’t miss his family, he’d miss his country, as the Irishman did. Every night now, Allen O’Brien sang his homesick songs to the cattle. It soothed the cattle but not the men—the songs were too sorrowful.

  Augustus noticed Call standing off to one side, looking blue. Once in a while Call would fall into blue spells—times when he seemed almost paralyzed by doubts he never voiced. The blue spells never came at a time of real crisis. Call thrived on crisis. They were brought on by little accidents, like the wagon breaking.

  “Maybe Lippy can cook,” Augustus suggested, to see if that would register with Call.

  Lippy had found an old piece of sacking and was wiping the mud off his head. “No, I never learned to cook, I just learned to eat,” Lippy said.

  Call got on his horse, hoping to shake off the low feeling that had settled over him. After all, nobody was hurt, the herd was moving well, and Bol was no great loss. But the low feeling stayed. It was as if he had lead in his legs.

  “You might try to load that gear on them mules,” he said to Pea.

  “Maybe we can make a two-wheel cart,” Pea said. “There ain’t much wrong with the front of the wagon. It’s the back end that’s busted up.”

  “Dern, Pea, you’re a genius for figuring that out,” Augustus said.

  “I guess I’ll go into San Antonio,” Call said. “Maybe I can hire a cook and buy a new wagon.”

  “Fine, I’ll join you,” Augustus said.

  “Why?” Call asked.

  “To help judge the new chef,” Augustus said. “You’d eat a fried stove lid if you was hungry. I’m interested in the finer points of cooking, myself. I’d like to give the man a tryout before we hire him.”

  “I don’t see why. He won’t have nothing much tenderer than a stove lid to cook around this outfit anyway,” Jasper said. He had been very disappointed in the level of the grub.

  “Just don’t get nobody who cooks snakes,” he warned. “If I have to eat any more snakes I’m apt to give notice.”

  “That’s an idle threat, Jasper,” Augustus said. “You wouldn’t know where to go if you was to quit. For one thing, you’d be skeert to cross a river.”

  “You ought to let him be about that,” Call said, when they had ridden out of earshot. Jasper’s fear of water was nothing to joke about. Call had seen grown men get so scared of crossing rivers that it was practically necessary to knock them out at every crossing—and a shaky man was apt to panic and spook the herd. Under normal circumstances, Jasper Fant was a good hand, and there was nothing to be gained by riding him about his fear of water.

  On the way to San Antonio they passed two settlements—nothing more than a church house and a few little stores, but settlements anyway, and not ten miles apart.

  “Now look at that,” Augustus said. “The dern people are making towns everywhere. It’s our fault, you know.”

  “It ain’t our fault and it ain’t our business, either,” Call said. “People can do what they want.”

  “Why, naturally, since we chased out the Indians and hung all the good bandits,” Augustus said. “Does it ever occur to you that everything we done was probably a mistake? Just look at it from a nature standpoint. If you’ve got enough snakes around the place you won’t be overrun with rats or varmints. The way I see it, the Indians and the bandits have the same job to do. Leave ’em be and you won’t constantly be having to ride around these dern settlements.”

  “You don’t have to ride around them,” Call said. “What harm do they do?”

  “If I’d have wanted civilization I’d have stayed in Tennessee and wrote poetry for a living,” Augustus said. “Me and you done our work too well. We killed off most of the people that made this country interesting to begin with.”

  Call didn’t answer. It was one of Gus’s favorite themes, and if given a chance he would expound it for hours. Of course it was nonsense. Nobody in their right mind would want the Indians back, or the bandits either. Whether Gus had ever been in his right mind was an open question.

  “Call, you ought to have married and had six or eight kids,” Augustus remarked. If he couldn’t get anywhere with one subject he liked to move on to another. Call’s spirits hadn’t improved much. When he was low it was hard to get him to talk.

  “I can’t imagine why you think so,” Call said. “I wonder what’s become of Jake?”

  “Why, Jake’s moseying along—starved for a card game, probably,” Augustus said.

  “He ought to leave that girl and throw in with us,” Call said.

  “You ain’t listening,” Augustus said. “I was trying to explain why you ought to marry. If you had a passel of kids, then you’d always have a troop to boss when you felt like bossing. It would occupy your brain and you wouldn’t get gloomy as often.”

  “I doubt that marriage could be worse than having to listen to you,” Call said, “but that ain’t much of a testimonial for it.”

  They r
eached San Antonio late in the day, passing near one of the old missions. A Mexican boy in a brown shirt was bringing in a small herd of goats.

  “Maybe we ought to take a few goats to Montana,” Augustus said. “Goats can be melodious, more so than your cattle. They could accompany the Irishman and we’d have more of a singsong.”

  “I’ll settle for more of a wagon,” Call said.

  Fortunately they were able to buy one almost at once from a big livery stable north of the river. It was necessary to buy two more mules to pull the wagon back to the herd. Fortunately the mules were cheap, twenty dollars a head, and the big German who ran the livery stable threw in the harness.

  Augustus volunteered to drive the wagon back to the herd on condition he could have a drink and a meal first. He hadn’t been to San Antonio in years and he marveled at the new establishments that had sprung up.

  “Why, this place’ll catch New Orleans if it don’t stop growing,” he said. “If we’d put in a barbershop ten years ago we’d be rich now.”

  There was a big saloon on the main street that they’d frequented a lot in their rangering days. It was called the Buckhorn, because of the owner’s penchant for using deer horns for coat and hat racks. His name was Willie Montgomery, and he had been a big crony of Augustus’s at one time. Call suspected him of being a card sharp, but if so he was a careful card sharp.

  “I guess Willie will be so glad to see us he’ll offer us a free dinner, at least,” Augustus said, as they trotted over to the saloon. “Maybe a free whore, too, if he’s prospering.”

  But when they strode in, there was no sign of Willie or anyone they recognized. A young bartender with slick hair and a string tie gave them a look when they stepped to the bar, but seemed as if he could scarcely be troubled to serve them. He was wiping out glasses with a little white towel and setting each one carefully on a shelf. The saloon was mostly empty, just a few cardplayers at a table in the back.