The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  “That way if a lawman comes looking for him he’ll know he can quit the search,” Augustus said.

  They rounded up Wilbarger’s horses and unhitched the two mules that had been pulling the little wagon. Augustus wanted to take the white rabbits, but the cage was awkward to carry. Finally Deets put two in his saddlebags, and Augustus took the other two. He also sampled the patent medicines and took several bottles of it.

  “What do you think it will cure, Gus?” Pea Eye asked.

  “Sobriety, if you guzzle enough of it,” Augustus said. “I expect it’s just whiskey and syrup.”

  The wagon itself was in such poor repair that they decided to leave it sit. Call broke up the tailgate and made a little marker for Jake’s grave, scratching his name on it with a pocketknife by the light of the old man’s lantern. He hammered the marker into the loose-packed dirt with the blunt side of a hatchet they had found in the wagon. Augustus trotted over, bringing Call his mare.

  “I’m tired of justice, ain’t you?” he asked.

  “Well, I wish he hadn’t got so careless about his company,” Call said. “It was that that cost him.”

  “Life works out peculiar,” Augustus said. “If he hadn’t talked you into making this trip, we wouldn’t have had to hang him today. He could be sitting down in Lonesome Dove, playing cards with Wanz.”

  “On the other hand, it was gambling brought him down,” Call said. “That’s what started it.”

  Deets and Pea Eye and Newt held the little horse herd. Newt was leading the horse Jake had left him. He didn’t know if it was right to get on him so soon after Jake’s death.

  “You can ride the pacing pony,” Deets said. “Mister Jake meant you to have it.”

  “What will I do with his saddle?” Newt asked. “He didn’t say anything about the saddle.”

  “It’s better than that old singletree of yours,” Pea Eye said. “Take it—Jake’s through with it.”

  “Don’t neither of you want it?” Newt asked. It bothered him to take it, for Jake hadn’t mentioned it.

  “Oh, no,” Deets said. “Saddle goes with the horse, I guess.”

  Nervous and a little reluctant, Newt got on Jake’s horse. The stirrups were too long for him, but Deets got down and quickly adjusted them. As he was finishing the lacing, Call and Augustus rode by. Deets took the bridle off Newt’s other horse and turned him, still saddled, into the horse herd. No one seemed to have anything to say.

  They started Wilbarger’s horses west across the dark prairie in the direction the cattle should be. Captain Call led, Augustus and Deets rode to the sides, and Pea Eye and Newt brought up the rear. Newt had to admit that Jake’s horse had a beautiful smooth gait, but even so he wished he hadn’t changed horses—not so soon. It seemed wrong to be enjoying Jake’s horse, and his fine saddle too, after what had happened. But he was tired, so tired he didn’t even feel the sadness for very long. Soon his head dropped and he sat on the pacing gelding, sound asleep. Pea Eye noticed and trotted close beside him so he could catch the weary boy if he started to fall off.

  Part III

  75.

  CLARA WAS MILKING A MARE when Sally, her oldest girl, came racing down to the lots.

  “Somebody’s coming, Ma,” Sally said, excitement in her face. Sally was ten years old and sociable—she loved visitors.

  The young mare had dropped her foal early and the colt was too weak to stand up, which was why she was milking. The colt would suck milk off a rag, and Clara was determined to save it if she could. When Sally ran up, the mare flinched, causing Clara to squirt a stream of milk along her own arm.

  “Haven’t I told you to walk up to horses?” Clara said. She stood up and wiped the milk off her dripping arm.

  “I’m sorry, Ma,” Sally said, more excited than sorry. “See, there’s a wagon coming.”

  Then Betsey, only seven, came flying out of the house, her brown hair streaming, and raced down to the corrals. Betsey liked company as much as her sister.

  “Who’s coming?” she asked.

  The wagon was barely visible coming along the Platte from the west.

  “I thought I told you girls to churn,” Clara said. “Seems like all you do is hang out the window watching for travelers.”

  Of course, no one could blame them, for company was rare. They lived twenty miles from town, and a bad town at that—Ogallala. If they went in, it was usually for church, but they seldom made the trip. Their company mostly consisted of men who came to trade horses with Bob, her husband, and now that he was injured, few came. They had just as many horses—more, in fact—and Clara knew more about them than Bob had ever learned, but there were few men disposed to bargain with a woman, and Clara was not disposed to give their horses away. When she named a price she meant it, but usually men got their backs up and wouldn’t buy.

  “I expect they’re just buffalo hunters,” Clara said, watching the distant wagon creep over the brown plains. “You girls won’t learn much from them, unless you’re interested in learning how to spit tobacco.”

  “I ain’t,” Betsey said.

  “You aren’t, you mean,” Sally said. “I thought all the buffalo were dead—how come they still hunt them?”

  “Because people are slow learners, like your sister,” Clara said, grinning at Betsey to mitigate the criticism.

  “Are you gonna invite them for the night?” Sally asked. “Want me to kill a hen?”

  “Not just yet, they may not be in the mood to stop,” Clara said. “Besides, you and I don’t agree about hens. You might kill one of the ones I like.”

  “Mother, they’re just to eat,” Sally said.

  “Nope. I keep those hens to talk to me when I’m lonesome,” Clara said. “I’ll only eat the ones who can’t make good conversation.” Betsey wrinkled up her nose, amused by the comment. “Oh, Ma,” she said, “hens don’t talk.”

  “They talk,” Clara said. “You just don’t understand hen talk. I’m an old hen myself and it makes good sense to me.”

  “You ain’t old, Ma,” Sally said.

  “That wagon won’t be here for an hour,” Clara said. “Go see about your pa. His fever comes up in the afternoon. Wet a rag and wipe his face.”

  Both girls stood looking at her silently. They hated to go into the sickroom. Both of them had bright blue eyes, their legacy from Bob, but their hair was like hers and they were built like her, even to the knobby knees. Bob had been kicked in the head by a mustang he was determined to break, against Clara’s advice. She had seen it happen—he had the mare snubbed to a post with a heavy rope and only turned his back on her for a second. But the mare struck with her front feet, quick as a snake. Bob had bent over to pick up another rope and the kick had caught him right back of the ear. The crack had sounded like a shot. The mare pawed him three or four times before Clara could reach him and drag him out of the way, but those blows had been minor. The kick behind the ear had almost killed him. They had been so sure he would die that they even dug the grave, up on the knoll east of the house where their three boys were buried: Jim and Jeff and Johnny, the three deaths Clara felt had turned her heart to stone: she hoped for stone, anyway, for stone wouldn’t suffer from such losses.

  Bob, though, hadn’t died—neither had he recovered. His eyes were open, but he could neither speak nor move. He could swallow soup, if his head was tilted a certain way, and it was chicken broth that had kept him alive the three months since his accident. He simply lay staring up with his large blue eyes, feverish sometimes but mostly as still as if he were dead. He was a large man, over two hundred pounds, and it took all her strength to move him and clean him every day—he had no control over bowels or bladder. Day after day Clara removed the soiled bedclothes, stuffing them in a washtub she filled beforehand from the cistern. She never let the girls see or help her with the operation; she supposed Bob would die in time, and she didn’t want his daughters to feel disgust for him, if she could prevent it. She only sent them in once a day to bathe his fa
ce, hoping that the sight of them would bring him out of his state.

  “Is Daddy going to die?” Betsey often asked. She had been only one when Johnny, her last brother, had died, and had no memories of death, just a great curiosity about it.

  “I don’t know, Betsey,” Clara said. “I don’t know at all. I hope not.”

  “Well, but can’t he ever talk again?” Sally asked. “His eyes are open, why can’t he talk?”

  “His head is hurt,” Clara said. “It’s hurt on the inside. Maybe it’ll heal, if we take care of him, and then he can talk again.”

  “Do you think he can hear the piano when I play?” Betsey asked.

  “Just go and bathe his face, please. I don’t know what he can hear,” she said. She felt as if a flood of tears might come at any moment, and she didn’t want the girls to see them. The piano, over which she and Bob had argued for two years, had come the week before his accident—it had been her victory, but a sad one. She had ordered it all the way from St. Louis, and it had been woefully out of tune when it finally came, but there was a Frenchman who played the piano in a saloon in town who tuned it for her for five dollars. And although she assumed it was a whorehouse he played the piano in, she hired him at the big fee of two dollars a week to ride out and give her daughters lessons.

  The Frenchman’s name was Jules. He was really a French-Canadian who had been a trader on the Red River of the North and had gone broke when smallpox hit the tribes. He had wandered down through the Dakotas to Ogallala and turned to music for a living. He loved to come out and teach the girls—he said they reminded him of the cousins he had once played with in his grandmother’s house in Montreal. He wore a black coat, when he came, and waxed his mustache. Both girls thought he was the most refined man they had ever seen, and he was.

  Clara had bought the piano with money saved all those years from the sale of her parents’ little business in Texas. She had never let Bob use the money—another bone of contention between them. She wanted it for her children, so when the time came they could be sent away to school and not have to spend their whole youth in such a raw, lonely place. The first of the money she spent was on the two-story frame house they had built three years before, after nearly fifteen years of life in the sod house Bob had dug for her on a slope above the Platte. Clara had always hated the sod house—hated the dirt that seeped down on her bedclothes, year after year. It was dust that caused her firstborn, Jim, to cough virtually from his birth until he died a year later. In the mornings Clara would walk down and wash her hair in the icy waters of the Platte, and yet by supper time, if she happened to scratch her head, her fingernails would fill with dirt that had seeped down during the day. For some reason, no matter where she moved her bed, the roof would trickle dirt right onto it. She tacked muslin, and finally canvas, on the ceiling over the bed but nothing stopped the dirt for long. It sifted through. It seemed to her that all her children had been conceived in dust clouds, dust rising from the bedclothes or sifting down from the ceiling. Centipedes and other bugs loved the roof; day after day they crawled down the walls, to end up in her stewpots or her skillets or the trunks where she stored her clothes.

  “I’d rather live in a tepee, like an Indian,” she told Bob many times. “I’d be cleaner. When it got dirty we could burn it.”

  The idea had shocked Bob, a conventional man if there ever was one. He could not believe he had married a woman who wanted to live like an Indian. He worked hard to give her a respectable life, and yet she said things like that—and meant them. And she stubbornly kept her own money, year after year—for the children’s education, she said, although one by one the three boys died long before they were old enough to be sent anywhere. The last two lived long enough for Clara to teach them to read. She had read them Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe when Jeff and Johnny were six and seven, respectively. Then the next winter both boys had died of pneumonia within a month of one another. It was a terrible winter, the ground frozen so deep there was no way to dig a grave. They had had to put the boys in the little kindling shed, wrapped tightly in wagon sheets, until winter let up enough that they could be buried. Many days Bob would come home from delivering horses to the Army—his main customer—to find Clara sitting in the icy shed by the two small bodies, tears frozen on her cheeks so hard that he would have to heat water and bathe the ice from her face. He tried to point out to her that she mustn’t do it—the weather was below zero, and the wind swept endlessly along the Platte. She could freeze to death, sitting in the kindling shed. If only I would, Clara thought—I’d be with my boys.

  But she didn’t freeze, and Jeff and Johnny had been buried beside Jim, and despite her resolve never to lay herself open to such heartbreak again, she had the girls, neither of whom had ever had more than a cold. Bob couldn’t believe his own bad luck; he longed for a strong boy or two to help him with the stock.

  And yet he loved the girls in his unspeaking way. His love mostly came out in awkwardness, for their delicacy frightened him. He was continually warning them about their health and trying to keep them wrapped up. Their recklessness almost stopped his heart at times—they were the kind of girls who would run out in the snow barefoot if they chose. He feared for them, and also feared the effect on his wife if one of them should die. Impervious to weather himself, he came to dread the winters for fear winter would take the rest of his family. Yet the girls proved as strong as their mother, whereas the boys had all been weak. It made no sense to Bob, and he was hoping if they could only have another boy, he would turn into the helper he needed.

  The only hand they had was an old Mexican cowboy named Cholo. The old man was wiry and strong, despite his age, and stayed mainly because of his devotion to Clara. It was Cholo, and not her husband, who taught her to love horses and to understand them. Cholo had pointed out to her at once that her husband would never break the mustang mare; he had urged her to persuade Bob to sell the mare unbroken, or else let her go. Though Bob had been a horse trader all his adult life, he had no real skill with horses. If they disobeyed him, he beat them—Clara had often turned her back in disgust from the sight of her husband beating a horse, for she knew it was his incompetence, not the horse’s, that was to blame for whatever incident had provoked the beating. Bob could not contain his violence when angered by a horse.

  With her, it was different. He had never raised a hand to her, though she provoked him often, and deeply. Perhaps it was because he had never quite believed that she would marry him, or never quite understood why she had. The shadow of Augustus McCrae had hung over their courtship; Bob had never known why she chose him over the famous Ranger, or over any of the other men she could have had. In her day she had been the most sought-after girl in Texas, and yet she had married him, and followed him to the Nebraska plains, and stayed and worked beside him. It was hard country for women, Bob knew that. Women died, went crazy or left. The wife of their nearest neighbor, Maude Jones, had killed herself with a shotgun one morning, leaving a note which merely said, “Can’t stand listening to this wind no more.” Maude had had a husband and four children, but had killed herself anyway. For a time, Clara had taken in the children, until their grandparents in Missouri came for them. Len Jones, Maude’s husband, soon drank himself into poverty. He fell out of his wagon drunk one night and froze to death not two hundred yards from a saloon.

  Clara had lived, and stayed, though she had a look in her gray eyes that frightened Bob every time he saw it. He didn’t really know what the look meant, but to him it meant she might leave if he didn’t watch out. When they first came to Nebraska, he had had the drinking habit. Ogallala was hardly even a town then; there were few neighbors, and almost no socials. The Indians were a dire threat, though Clara didn’t seem to fear them. If they had company, it was usually soldiers—the soldiers drank, and so did he. Clara didn’t like it. One night he got pretty drunk, and when he got up in the morning she had that look in her eye. She made him breakfast, but then she looked at him coldly and lay down a
threat. “I want you to stop drinking,” she said. “You’ve been drunk three times this week. I won’t live here and get dirt in my hair for the love of a drunkard.”

  It was the only threat she ever had to make. Bob spent the day worrying, looking at the bleak plains and wondering what he would do in such a place without her. He never touched whiskey again. The jug he had been working on sat in the cupboard for years, until Clara finally mixed it with sorghum molasses and used it for cough medicine.

  They had few quarrels, most of them about money. Clara was a good wife and worked hard; she never did anything untoward or unrespectable, and yet the fact that she had that Texas money made Bob uneasy. She wouldn’t give it up or let him use it, no matter how poor they were. Not that she spent it on herself—Clara spent nothing on herself, except for the books she ordered or the magazines she took. She kept the money for her children, she said—but Bob could never be sure she wasn’t keeping it so she could leave if she took a notion. He knew it was foolish—Clara would leave, money or no money, if she decided to go—but he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind. She wouldn’t even use the money on the house, although she had wanted the house, and they had had to haul the timber two hundred miles. Of course, he had prospered in the horse business, mainly because of the Army trade; he could afford to build her a house. But he still resented her money. She told him it was only for the girls’ education—and yet she did things with it that he didn’t expect. The winter before she had bought Cholo a buffalo coat, an action which shocked Bob. He had never heard of a married woman buying a Mexican cowboy an expensive coat. Then there was the piano. She had ordered that too, although it cost two hundred dollars and another forty to transport. And yet he had to admit he loved to see his girls sitting at the piano, trying to learn their fingering. And the buffalo coat had saved Cholo’s life when he was trapped in an April blizzard up on the Dismal River. Clara got her way, and her way often turned out to make sense—and yet Bob more and more felt that her way skipped him, somehow. She didn’t neglect him in any way that he could put his finger on, and the girls loved him, but there were many times when he felt left out of the life of his own family. He would never have said that to Clara—he was not good with words, and seldom spoke unless he was spoken to, unless it was about business. Watching his wife, he often felt lonely. Clara seemed to sense it and would usually come and try to be especially nice to him, or to get him laughing at something the girls had done—and yet he still felt lonely, even in their bed.