The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  The soldiers laughed at his plight and pitched him on Memphis as if he were a sack of potatoes.

  “It’s a good thing you run into us, Deputy,” one soldier said. “If you’d kept on going west into the Territory, the dern Indians would have got you and et your testicles off.”

  “Et my what?” Roscoe asked, appalled at the casual way the soldier dropped such a terrible remark.

  “I’ve heard that’s what occurs if you let ’em catch you alive,” the soldier said.

  “Well, what’s the Indian situation in Texas then?” Roscoe asked. The soldiers seemed completely uninformed on the subject. They were from Missouri. All they knew about Indians was that they liked to do bad things to white captives. One mentioned that a soldier he knew had been shot with an arrow at such close range that the arrow went in one ear and the point came out the other side of the soldier’s head.

  The soldiers seemed to enjoy telling such stories, but Roscoe couldn’t share their enthusiasm. He lay awake most of the night, thinking about testicles and arrows in the head.

  The next afternoon the soldiers turned west, assuring him that he only had to hold a course southwest and he would eventually hit San Antonio. Though recovered from his drunk, he didn’t feel very vigorous—lack of proper sleeping conditions was slowly breaking down his health, it seemed.

  That evening, as dusk was falling, he was about to reconcile himself to another night spent propped against a tree. He didn’t like sleeping sitting up, but it meant he could be up and running quicker, if the need arose. But before he could select a tree to lean against he spotted a cabin a little distance ahead.

  When he approached, he saw an old man with a tobacco-stained beard sitting on a stump skinning a small animal—a possum, as it turned out. Roscoe felt encouraged. The old man was the first person he had seen in Texas, and perhaps would be a source of accurate information about the road.

  “Howdy,” he said loudly, for the old man had not looked up from his skinning and Roscoe considered it dangerous to take people by surprise.

  The old man didn’t look up, but a form appeared in the doorway of the cabin—a girl, Roscoe thought, though in the dusk he couldn’t be sure.

  “Mind if I stop for the night?” Roscoe asked, dismounting.

  The old man squinted at him briefly. “If you want supper you’ll have to kill your own varmint,” he said. “And leave the gal alone, she’s mine, bought and paid for.”

  That struck Roscoe as strange. The old man’s manner was anything but friendly. “Well, it’s a little too late to go possum-huntin’,” Roscoe said, trying to make light talk. “I’ve got a biscuit I can eat.”

  “Leave the gal alone,” the old man said again.

  The old man, a hard-looking customer, didn’t look up again until he had finished skinning the possum. All Roscoe could do was stand around uneasily. The silence was heavy. Roscoe almost wished he had ridden on and spent the night sitting up against a tree. The level of civilization in Texas definitely wasn’t very high if the old man was an example of it.

  “Come get the varmint,” the old man said to the girl.

  She slipped out and took the bloody carcass without a word. In the dusk it was hard to make out much about her except that she was thin. She was barefoot and had on a dress that looked like it was made from part of a cotton sack.

  “I gave twenty-eight skunk hides for her,” the old man said suddenly. “You got any whiskey?”

  In fact, Roscoe did have a bottle that he had bought off the soldiers. He could already smell frying meat—the possum, no doubt—and his appetite came back. He had nothing in his stomach and could think of little he would rather eat than a nice piece of fried possum. Around Fort Smith the Negroes kept the possums thinned out; they were seldom available on the tables of white folks.

  “I got a bottle in my bag,” Roscoe said. “You’re welcome to share it.”

  He assumed that such an offer would assure him a place at the table, but the assumption was wrong. The old man took the whiskey bottle when he offered it, and then sat right on the stump and drank nearly all of it. Then he got up without a word and disappeared into the dark cabin. He did not reappear. Roscoe sat on the stump—the only place there was to sit—and the darkness got deeper and deeper until he could barely see the cabin fifteen feet away. Evidently the old man and the girl had no light, for the cabin was pitch-dark.

  When it became plain he was not going to be invited for supper, Roscoe ate the two biscuits he had saved. He felt badly treated, but there was little he could do about it. When he finished the biscuits he pitched his bedroll up against the side of the cabin. As soon as he stretched out, the moon came up and lit the little clearing so brightly it made it hard to sleep.

  Then he heard the old man say, “Fix the pallet.” The cabin was crudely built, with cracks between the logs big enough for a possum to crawl through, it seemed to Roscoe. He heard the old man stumbling around. “Goddamn you, come here,” the old man said. Roscoe began to feel unhappy that he had stopped at the cabin. Then he heard a whack, as if the old man had hit the girl with a belt or a razor strap or something. There was a scuffle which he couldn’t help but hear, and the strap landed a couple more times. Then the girl began to whimper.

  “What’s that?” Roscoe said, thinking that if he spoke up the old man might let her be. But it didn’t work. The scuffling continued and the girl kept whimpering. Then it seemed they fell against the cabin, not a foot from Roscoe’s head. “If you don’t lay still I’ll whup you tomorrow till you’ll wisht you had,” the old man said. He sounded out of breath. Roscoe tried to think of what July would do in such a situation. July had always cautioned him about interfering in family disputes—the most dangerous form of law work, July claimed. July had once tried to stop a woman who was going after her husband with a pitchfork and had been wounded in the leg as a result.

  In this case, Roscoe didn’t know if it was even a family dispute that he was hearing. The old man had just said he bought the girl, though of course slavery had been over for years, and in any case the girl was white. The girl seemed to be putting up a good fight, despite her whimpering, for the old man was breathing hard and cursing her when he could get his breath. Roscoe wished more than ever that he had never spotted the cabin. The old man was a sorry customer, and the girl could only be having a miserable life with him.

  The old man soon got done with the girl, but she whimpered for a long time—an unconscious whimpering, such as a dog makes when it is having a bad dream. It disturbed Roscoe’s mind. She seemed too young a girl to have gotten herself into such a rough situation, though he knew that in the hungry years after the war many poor people with large families had given children to practically anyone who would take them, once they got of an age to do useful work.

  Roscoe woke up soaked, though not from rain. He had rolled off his blanket in the night and been soaked by the heavy dew. As the sun rose, water sparkled on the grass blades near his eyes. In the cabin he could hear the old man snoring loudly. There was no sound from the girl.

  Since there was no likelihood he would be offered breakfast, Roscoe mounted and rode off, feeling pretty sorry for the girl. The old man was a rascal who had not even thanked him for the whiskey. If Texans were all going to be like him, it could only be a sorry trip.

  A mile or two along in the day, Memphis began to grow restive, flicking his ears and looking around. Roscoe looked, but saw nothing. The country was pretty heavily wooded. Roscoe thought maybe a wolf was following them, or possibly some wild pigs, but he could spot nothing. They covered five or six miles at a leisurely pace.

  Roscoe was half asleep in the saddle when a bad thing happened. Memphis brushed against a tree limb that had a wasp’s nest on it. The nest broke loose from the limb and fell right in Roscoe’s lap. It soon rolled off the saddle, but not before twenty or thirty wasps buzzed up. When Roscoe awoke, all he could see was wasps. He was stung twice on the neck, twice on the face, and once on the hand as
he was battling them.

  It was a rude awakening. He put Memphis into a lope and soon outran the wasps, but two had got down his shirt, and these stung him several more times before he could crush them to death against his body. He quickly got down from his horse and took off his shirt to make sure no more wasps were in it.

  While he was standing there, smarting from yellow-jacket stings, he saw the girl—the same skinny girl who had been in the cabin, wearing the same cotton-sack dress. She tried to duck behind a bush but Roscoe happened to look up just at the right second and see her. Roscoe hastily put his shirt back on, though the wasp stings were stinging like fire and he would have liked to spit on them at least. But a man couldn’t be rubbing spit on himself with a girl watching.

  “Well, come on out, since you’re here,” Roscoe said, thinking it interesting that the girl had easily kept up with Memphis for six miles. For all he knew the old man had sent her to request more whiskey, or something.

  The girl came slowly to him, shy as a rabbit. She was still barefoot and her legs were scratched from all the rough country. She stopped twenty feet away, as if not sure how close she was supposed to come. She was rather a pretty girl, Roscoe thought, although her brown hair was dirty and she had bruises on her thin arms from the old man’s rough treatment.

  “How come you to follow?” Roscoe asked. It was the first good look he had had at her—she seemed not more than fourteen or fifteen.

  The girl just stood, too shy to talk.

  “I didn’t get your name,” Roscoe said, trying to be polite.

  “Ma called me her Janey,” the girl said. “I run off from old Sam.”

  “Oh,” Roscoe said, wishing that the wasps had picked another time to sting him, and also that the girl named Janey had picked another time to run off.

  “I near kilt him this morning,” the girl said. “He used me bad and I ain’t really his anyway, it’s just he give Bill some skunk pelts for me. I was gonna take the ax and kill him but then you come by and I run off to go with you.”

  The girl had a low husky voice, lower than a boy’s, and once over her first moment of shyness wasn’t loath to talk.

  “I seen you get stung,” she said. “There’s a creek just along there. Mud poultices are the best for them yellow-jacket stings. You mix ’em with spit and it helps.”

  That of course was common knowledge, though it was thoughtful of the girl to mention it. The running-away business he thought he better deal with at once.

  “I’m a deputy sheriff,” Roscoe said. “I’m headed down to Texas to find a man. I must travel fast, and I’ve got but one horse.”

  He stopped, feeling sure the girl would take the hint. Instead, something like a smile crossed her face for an instant.

  “You call this fast travelin’?” she asked. “I could have been two miles ahead of you just running on foot. I done already walked all the way here from San Antone, and I guess I can keep up with you unless you lope.”

  The remark almost swayed Roscoe in the girl’s favor. If she had been to San Antonio, she might know how to get back. He himself had been plagued from the start by a sense of hopelessness about finding his way, and would have welcomed a guide.

  But a runaway girl was not the sort of guide he had in mind. After all, the only reason he was looking for July was to report on a runaway woman. How would it look if he showed up with another? July would think it highly irregular, and if the folks back in Fort Smith got wind of it it could easily be made to look bad. After all, old Sam hadn’t kept her around just because she could fry a possum in the dark.

  The memory of the frying possum crossed his mind, reminding him that he was very hungry. What with the wasp stings on top of the hunger, it was difficult to express himself clearly, or even to think clearly, for that matter.

  As if reading his hunger from his expression, the girl quickly moved to strengthen her case. “I can catch varmints,” she said. “Bill taught me the trick. Mostly I can outrun ’em. I can fish if you’ve got a hook.”

  “Oh,” Roscoe said, “I guess you caught that possum then.”

  The girl shrugged. “I can walk faster than possums can run,” she said. “If we can get to the creek I’ll fix them stings.”

  The stings were burning like fire. Roscoe decided there would be no impropriety in letting the girl go as far as the creek. He considered offering to let her ride double, but before he could mention it she ran on ahead. Not only could she walk faster than a possum could run, she could walk faster than Memphis could walk. He had to put the horse into a trot to keep up with her. By the time they got to the creek, Roscoe felt lightheaded from the combination of hunger and wasp stings. His vision was swimming again, as it had when he was drunk. A wasp had got him close to one eye; soon the eye swelled shut. His head felt larger than it usually did. It was a very inconvenient life, and, as usual when traveling got bad, he felt resentful of July for having married a woman who would run off.

  The girl beat him to the creek and began making mud poultices and spitting in them. She immediately dismantled a couple of crawdad houses to get the kind of mud she required. Fortunately the creek had a high bank, which cast a little shade. Roscoe sat in the shade and allowed the girl to pack the mud poultices over the stings on his face. She even managed to get one on the swelling near his eye.

  “You get that shirt off,” she said, startling Roscoe so that he obeyed. The mud felt cool.

  “Old Sam et crawdads,” she said, as she sat back to survey her handiwork. “He can’t shoot worth a dern so he had to live off the varmints I could catch.”

  “Well, I wish you could catch a fat rabbit,” Roscoe said. “I’m plumb starved.”

  The next moment the girl was gone. She disappeared over the bank. Roscoe felt silly, for of course he had not really meant for her to go catch a rabbit. She might be fast, but rabbits were surely faster.

  His feeling of light-headedness came back and he lay down in the cool shade, thinking a little nap wouldn’t hurt. He shut his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them he saw a surprising sight—or two sights, really. One was a dead cottontail lying near him. The other was the girl, who was wading down the edge of the creek, a short stick in her hands. Suddenly a big bullfrog jumped off the bank. While the frog was in the air, the girl hit it with the stick and knocked it far up the bank. She scrambled up after it, and Roscoe stood up to watch, although he had only one eye to watch with. She had knocked the frog into some weeds, which slowed its hopping some. The frog cleared the weeds once, but it couldn’t jump far, and the girl was soon on it with her stick. A moment later she came down the bank holding the squashed frog by the legs. Its pink tongue was hanging out.

  “Got a rabbit and a frog,” she said. “You want ’em fried up?”

  “I never et no frog,” Roscoe said. “Who eats frogs?”

  “You just eat the legs,” the girl said. “Gimme your knife.”

  Roscoe handed it over. The girl rapidly skinned the cottontail, which was indeed plump. Then she whacked the knife into the frog, threw the top half into the creek and peeled the skin off the legs with her teeth. Roscoe had a few simple utensils in his saddlebag, which she got without a word from him. Roscoe assumed the stings must be affecting him because he felt like he was in a dream. He wasn’t asleep, but he felt no inclination to move. The top half of the frog, its dangling guts pale in the water, drifted over to shore. Two gray turtles surfaced and began to nibble at the guts. Roscoe mainly watched the turtles while the girl made a little fire and cooked the rabbit and the frog legs. To his surprise, the frog legs kept hopping out of the pan as if the frog was still alive.

  However, when she got them cooked, he ate one and was very pleased with the taste. Then he and the girl divided the rabbit and ate it to the last bite, throwing the bones into the creek. The combination of rabbit and frog innards had caused quite a congregation of turtles to collect.

  “Niggers eat turtles,” the girl said, cracking a rabbit bone between her teeth.


  “They eat most anything,” Roscoe said. “I guess they can’t be choosy.”

  After the meal, Roscoe felt less light-headed. The girl sat a few feet away, staring into the waters of the creek. She seemed just a child. Her legs were muddy from wading in the creek, her arms still bruised from her troubles with old Sam. Some of the bruises were blue, others had faded to yellow. The cotton-sack dress was torn in several places.

  The problem of what to do about her began to weigh on Roscoe’s mind. It had been nice of her to feed him, but that didn’t answer the question of what was to be done with her. Old Sam had not looked like a man who would take kindly to losing something he regarded as his property. He might be trailing them at that very moment, and since they weren’t far from the cabin he might be about to catch up.

  “I guess that old man will be coming after you,” Roscoe said, feeling nervous.

  “Nope,” the girl said.

  “Well, he said you was his,” Roscoe said. “Why wouldn’t he come after you?”

  “He’s got rheumatism in his knees,” the girl said.

  “Don’t he have a horse?”

  “No, it foundered,” she said. “Besides, I took the big pan and whacked him across the knees to keep him still a few days.”

  “My goodness,” Roscoe said. “You’re a rough customer, I guess.”

  The girl shook her head. “I ain’t rough,” she said. “Old Sam was rough.”

  She took the utensils to the creek and washed them before putting them back in the packs.

  Roscoe was painfully aware that he had to make a decision. It was near midday and he had only covered a few miles. The girl was a handy person to have along on a trip, he had to admit. On the other hand, she was a runaway, and it would all be hard to explain to July.

  “Don’t you have no folks?” he asked, hoping there was a relative somewhere ahead whom he could leave the girl with.