The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  “Well, no, I ain’t,” Soupy said. “He’s a fair hand, but it don’t seem right a fair hand should be put over a top hand unless there’s a reason.”

  “He’s young and needs the training—you don’t. That’s the reason,” Call said. “If I tell you to take orders from him you will, or else leave. They’ll be my orders, at second hand.”

  Soupy reddened at the disgusting thought of taking orders from a boy. He stuffed his wages in his pocket, planning to leave, but an hour’s contemplation caused him to mellow and he gave Call back the wages. That night, though, he suddenly stuck out a foot and tripped Newt, when Newt walked past with a plateful of food. Newt fell on his face but he rose and flung himself on Soupy in a second, so angry at the insult that he even held his own for a few licks, until Soupy could bring his weight and experience into play—after which Newt got thoroughly pounded, so thoroughly that he was not aware when the fight stopped. He was sitting on the ground spitting blood, and Soupy had walked away. Call had expected the fight and watched impassively, pleased that the boy had fought so hard. Winning would have been beyond his powers.

  The battle won Soupy no friends; he had assumed so many airs once Dish left that he had few friends anyway, whereas Newt was popular. Reaction was so unfavorable that a few days later Soupy drew his wages again and left, taking Bert with him. They had concluded they could make Texas, if they went together.

  Call was worried for a few weeks about being shorthanded, but then three young men he had seen at the fort decided to quit soldiering and try their hand at ranching. All three were from Kentucky. They were inept at first but industrious. Then two genuine cowboys showed up, lured all the way north from Miles City by the news that there was a ranch on the Milk. They had given up cowboying for mule skinning the year before and concluded they had made a bad mistake. Then a tall boy named Jim wandered in alone. He had been with a wagon train but had lost interest in getting to Oregon.

  Soon, instead of being short-handed, Call found that he had almost more men than he needed. He decided to start the branding early. Several hundred calves had been born since they left Texas; many were yearlings, and a struggle to brand. A few of the men questioned the necessity, since they were the only cattle outfit in the Territory, but Call knew that would soon change. Others would come.

  The roundup took ten days. The cattle had spread themselves wide over the range between the Milk and the Missouri in their foraging during the winter. Then the branding took a week. At first the men enjoyed the activity, competing with one another to see who could throw the largest animals the quickest. There was also much disagreement over who should get to rope and who should work on foot. Newt improved so rapidly as a roper that he was soon sharing that task with Needle Nelson, the only one of the original crew skilled with a lariat.

  With the branding ended, and the spring grass spiking through the thin May snows, Call knew the time had come for him to fulfill his promise to his old friend. It was awkward—indeed, it seemed absurd—to have to tote a six-months-old corpse to Texas, but there it was.

  Yet May wore on and June approached, and still he had not gone. The snows had melted, all down the plains, he imagined, and yet something held him. It wasn’t work. There were plenty of men to do the work—they had even had to turn away three or four men who came looking to hire on. Many times Call spent much of the afternoon watching Newt work with the new batch of horses they had bought on a recent trip to the fort. It was work he himself had never been particularly good at—he had always lacked the patience. He let the boy alone and never made suggestions. He liked to watch the boy with the horses; it had become a keen pleasure. If a cowboy came over and tried to talk to him while he was watching he usually simply ignored the man until he went away. He wanted to watch the boy and not be bothered. It could only be for a few days, he knew. It was a long piece to Texas and back. Sometimes he wondered if he would even come back. The ranch was started, and the dangers so far had been less than he feared. He felt sometimes that he had no more to do. He felt much older than anyone he knew. Gus had seemed young even when he was dying, and yet Call felt old. His interest in work had not returned. It was only when he was watching the boy with the horses that he felt himself.

  In those hours he would lose himself in memory of other times, of other men who had lived with horses, who had broken them, ridden them, died on them. He felt proud of the boy, and with it, anguish that their beginnings had been as they had. It could not be changed, though. He thought he might speak of it sometime, as Gus had wanted him to, and yet he said nothing. He couldn’t. If he happened to be alone with the boy, his words went away. At the thought of speaking about it a tightness came into his throat, as if a hand had seized it. Anyway, what could a few words change? They couldn’t change the years.

  Newt was puzzled at first when the Captain began watching him with the horses. At first he was nervous—he felt the Captain might be watching because he was doing something that needed correcting. But the afternoons passed, and the Captain merely watched, sometimes sitting there for hours, even if it turned wet or squally. Newt came to expect him. He came to feel that the Captain enjoyed watching. Because of the way the Captain had been behaving, giving him more and more of the responsibility for the work, Newt came to feel that Mr. Gus must have been right. The Captain might be his father. On some afternoons, with the Captain there by the corrals watching, he felt almost sure of it, and began to expect that the Captain would tell him soon. He began to listen—waiting to be told, his hope always growing. Even when the Captain didn’t speak, Newt still felt proud when he saw him come to watch him work.

  For two weeks, through the spring evenings, Newt was very happy. He had never expected to share such a time with the Captain, and he hoped the Captain would speak to him soon and explain all that had puzzled him for so long.

  One night toward the end of May, Call couldn’t sleep. He sat in front of the tent all night, thinking of the boy, and Gus, and the trip he had to make. That morning, after breakfast, he called Newt aside. For a moment he couldn’t speak—the hand had seized his throat again. The boy stood waiting, not impatient. Call was annoyed with himself for his strange behavior, and he eventually found his voice.

  “I have to take Gus back,” he said. “I guess I’ll be gone a year. You’ll have to be the range boss. Pea will help you, and the rest are mostly reliable, though I think that Irishman is homesick and might go home.”

  Newt didn’t know what to say. He looked at the Captain.

  “That woman gets half the money when you sell stock,” Call said. “It was Gus’s request. You can bank it for her in Miles City. I’ll tell her it’s there when I see her.”

  Newt could hardly believe he would be made boss over the men. He expected more orders, but the Captain turned away.

  Later in the morning, he and Pea Eye and Needle were riding the banks of the Milk, seeing if any cattle were bogged. They were always bogging. Getting them out was hard, muddy work, but it had to be done; if it rained, the river might rise in the night and drown the bogged animals.

  The day was cold and blowy. Newt had to wade out into the mud three times to lift the hind ends of the bogged yearlings, while Needle roped the animals by the head and drug them out. Newt scraped the mud off his legs as best he could, put his pants back on, and was getting ready to turn back toward headquarters when he saw the Captain riding toward them. He was riding the Hell Bitch and leading Greasy, the big mule that had come with them all the way from Texas, and a rangy dun named Jerry, the mount he preferred after the Hell Bitch. Augustus’s old sign was tied to the pack mule.

  “I guess the Captain’s going,” Pea Eye said. “He’s taking old Greasy and an extra horse.”

  Newt felt his spirits sink. He knew the Captain had to leave, and yet he hoped he wouldn’t—not for another few days anyway.

  Call rode up to the three men, dismounted and, to everyone’s surprise unsaddled the Hell Bitch and put the saddle on Jerry. Then he led
the Hell Bitch over to where Newt stood.

  “See how your saddle fits her,” Call said.

  Newt was so surprised he could only look at the Captain in silence. He thought he must have misunderstood. No one but the Captain had ridden the mare since the Hat Creek outfit had acquired her.

  “Do what?” he asked finally.

  “Put your saddle on her,” Call said. He felt tired and was finding it difficult to speak. He felt at any moment he might choke.

  “I doubt she’d like it,” Newt said, looking at the mare, who pointed her ears at him as if she knew what had been said. But the Captain didn’t take back the order, so he unsaddled the little sorrel he had been riding, the one Clara had given him, and carried his saddle over to the mare. Call held the bridle while Newt saddled her. Then he handed Newt the reins and went over and took his big Henry out of its scabbard. He removed the Winchester from the boy’s saddle and stuck the Henry in his saddle scabbard. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but it would do.

  “You’ll need it for them big bears,” he said.

  When he turned back to look at the boy, the choking feeling almost overcame him. He decided he would tell the boy he was his son, as Gus had wanted him to. He thought they would ride away a little distance, so they could speak in private.

  And yet, when he looked at Newt, standing there in the cold wind, with Canada behind him, Call found he couldn’t speak at all. It was as if his whole life had suddenly lodged in his throat, a raw bite he could neither spit out nor swallow. He had once seen a Ranger choke to death on a tough bite of buffalo meat, and he felt that he was choking, too—choking on himself. He felt he had failed in all he had tried to be: the good boy standing there was evidence of it. The shame he felt was so strong it stopped the words in his throat. Night after night, sitting in front of Wilbarger’s tent, he had struggled with thoughts so bitter that he had not even felt the Montana cold. All his life he had preached honesty to his men and had summarily discharged those who were not capable of it, though they had mostly only lied about duties neglected or orders sloppily executed. He himself was far worse, for he had been dishonest about his own son, who stood not ten feet away, holding the reins of the Hell Bitch.

  Call thought he might yet say it, even if the men were there to hear. He trembled from the effort, and his trembling and the look on his face caused great consternation in Pea Eye, who had never known the Captain to be at a loss for words. The Captain would ride up and give an order, and that was that—but now he merely stood looking at Newt, a jerking in his throat.

  Looking at the Captain, Newt began to feel sadder than he had ever felt in his life. Just go on, he wanted to say. Go on, if it’s that hard. He didn’t want the Captain to go on, of course. He felt too young; he didn’t want to be left with it all. He felt he couldn’t bear what was happening, it was so surprising. Five minutes before, he had been pulling a yearling out of a bog. Now the Captain had given him his horse and his gun, and stood with a look of suffering on his face. Even Sean O’Brien, dying of a dozen snakebites, had not shown so much pain. Go on, then, Newt thought. Just let it be. It’s been this way always. Let it be, Captain.

  Call walked the few steps to the boy and squeezed his arm so hard Newt thought his fingers had pinched the bone. Then he turned and tried to mount the dun. He had to try for the stirrup three times before he could mount. He wished he had died on the Musselshell with Gus. It would have been easier than knowing he could not be honest. His own son stood there—surely, it was true; after doubting it for years, his own mind told him over and over that it was true—yet he couldn’t call him a son. His honesty was lost, had long been lost, and he only wanted to leave.

  When he mounted, the feeling loosened a bit and he fell back into the habit he had vowed to discard—the habit of leading.

  “There’s two heifers bogged yet,” he said. “They’re half a mile downstream. You better go get them.”

  Then he rode over and shook Pea Eye’s hand. Pea Eye was so astonished he couldn’t close his mouth. Gus had never shaken his hand until the last minute, and now the Captain was shaking it too.

  “Help Newt,” Call said. “He’ll need a steady man, and you qualify if anybody ever did.”

  He raised his hand to Needle Nelson and turned his horse.

  “So long, boys,” he said.

  But he looked again at Newt. The boy looked so lonesome that he was reminded of his own father, who had never been comfortable with people. His father had fallen drunk out of a barn loft in Mississippi and broken his neck. Call remembered the watch that had been passed on to him, an old pocket watch with a thin gold case. He had carried it since he was a boy. He raised up in his stirrups, took it out of his pocket and handed it to Newt.

  “It was my pa’s,” he said, and turned and left.

  “Dern, Newt,” Pea Eye said, more astonished than he had ever been in his life. “He gave you his horse and his gun and that watch. He acts like you’re his kin.”

  “No, I ain’t kin to nobody in this world,” Newt said bitterly. “I don’t want to be. I won’t be.”

  Despair in his heart, he mounted the Hell Bitch as if he had ridden her for years, and turned downstream. He felt he never wanted to hope for anything again, and yet no more than a minute later the strange hope struck him that the Captain might have turned back. He might have forgotten something—perhaps an order he had meant to give. Even that he would have welcomed. It felt so lonely to think of the Captain being gone. But when he turned to look, the Captain was merely a speck on the long plain. He was gone, and things would never be as Newt had hoped—never. Somehow it had been too hard for the Captain, and he had left.

  Pea Eye and Needle followed Newt silently. Pea Eye felt old and frightened. In a few minutes the whole ground of his life had shifted, and he felt stricken with foreboding. For thirty years the Captain had been there to give orders, and frequently the orders had kept them alive. He had always been with the Captain, and yet now he wasn’t. He couldn’t understand why the Captain had given Newt the horse, the gun and the watch. The business of the ax, and what he had heard when retrieving it, was forgotten—it had puzzled him so long that it had finally just slipped from his mind.

  “Well, here we are,” he said wearily. “I guess we’ll just have to do the work.”

  The Texas bull was standing a hundred yards or so away with a small group of cows. When the riders drew near, he began to bellow and paw the earth. It irritated him if he saw several riders together, though he had not charged anyone lately.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, I may shoot that bull yet,” Needle said. “I’ve put up with that son of a bitch about long enough. The Captain may like him, but I don’t.”

  Newt heard the talk, but didn’t speak. He knew the Captain had left him with too much, but he didn’t say it. He would have to try and do the work, even if he no longer cared.

  Feeling that it was pointless, but acting from force of habit, they pulled the two stuck heifers from the Milk River mud.

  101.

  IN MILES CITY, Call found that the storage of Augustus’s remains had been bungled. Something had broken into the shed and knocked the coffin off the barrels. In the doctor’s opinion it had probably been a wolverine, or possibly a cougar. The coffin had splintered and the varmint had run off with the amputated leg. The mistake wasn’t discovered until after a blizzard had passed through, so of course the leg had not been recovered.

  The look on Call’s face, when he heard the news, was so grim it made the doctor extremely nervous.

  “We’ve mostly kept him,” he said, avoiding Call’s eye. “I had him repacked. He had done lost that leg before he died anyway.”

  “It was in the coffin when I left here,” Call said. He didn’t care to discuss the matter with the man. Instead, he found the carpenter who had built the coffin in the first place and had him reinforce it with strong planks. The result was a heavy piece of work.

  By luck, the same day, Call saw a buggy for sale.
It was old but it looked sturdy enough, and he bought it. The next day he had the coffin covered in canvas and lashed to the seat. The buggy hood was in tatters, so he tore it off. Greasy, the mule, was used to pulling the wagon and hardly noticed the buggy, it was so light. They left Miles City on a morning when it had turned unseasonably cold—so cold that the sun only cast a pale light through the frigid clouds. Call knew it was dangerous to go off with only two animals, but he felt like taking his chances.

  The weather improved the next day and he rode for a time beside a hundred or so Crow Indians who were traveling south. The Crow were friendly, and their old chief, a dried-up little man with a great appetite for tobacco and talk, tried to get Call to camp with them. They were all interested in the fact that he was traveling with a coffin and asked him many questions about the man inside it.

  “We traveled together,” Call said. He did not want to talk about Gus with the old man, or anyone. He wanted to get on, but he was cordial and rode with the Crow because he felt that if he were discourteous some of the young bucks might try to make sport with him farther south, when he was out of range of the old chief’s protection.

  Once he struck Wyoming, he rode for eleven days without seeing a soul. The buggy held up well, but Greasy lost flesh from the pace Call kept up. The coffin got some bad jolts crossing the gullies near the Powder River, but the reinforcements held it together.

  The first people he saw, as he approached Nebraska, were five young Indians who had gotten liquor somewhere. When they saw he was carrying a dead man they let him alone, though they were too drunk to hunt successfully and begged him for food. None of them looked to be eighteen, and their horses were poor. Call started to refuse, but then he reflected that they were just boys. He offered them food if they would give up their liquor, but at that they grew quarrelsome. One drew an old pistol and acted as if he might fire at him, but Call ignored the threat, and they were soon gone.

  He regretted that he had to take Gus to the women, but felt it was part of his obligation to deliver the notes Gus had written when he was dying. The Platte was so full of ducks and geese that he heard their gabbling all day, though he rode a mile from the river.