Thalia

by Larry McMurtry

  We worked for about an hour, I guess. He threw the shocks up to me with his fork, and I stacked them on the wagon. The wagon was stacked up pretty high.

  “I just need eight or ten more,” I said. “Let’s hurry, then we can take a rest.”

  He stuck his fork in a big shock, and I noticed him stop to look at it pretty close. I figured there was a rattlesnake under it; we had killed five or six that day. Oatschocks were a great place for rattlesnakes, because so many rats lived under them.

  It was awful hot, and I started to take my gloves off to wipe my face. Then Johnny picked up the shock and got ready to heave. I seen it coming and reached out to catch it, but just before I got my hands on it this big snake head came right up between my hands and hissed in my face. It scared the piss out of me and I went to running backward for all I was worth, but the shock kept right on coming till it looked like the snake was going to fall right on my face. I kicked like hell and went off the wagon backward, fighting with my hands to keep the snake out of my lap. I never seen where it went, because I hit the ground like I had fallen off a cloud. I never rolled an inch. In a little while I heard a lot of people laughing and one of them was Johnny. I looked around and Johnny and three or four of the harvesters were about to bust their guts laughing. Then I seen the snake sliding off the wagon wheel: it was an old brown bullsnake was all. It was mad, too, but not no madder than I was. I had to lay back down; I was seeing spots before my eyes.

  “We better help him up,” one of them said. “He might have busted something.”

  “Hell no, he’ll be up in a minute,” Johnny said. “You better get back to work or you’ll be the one with something busted.”

  I propped up on my elbows and looked at him. “You’re a damn bastard,” I said. “What if that had been a rattlesnake?”

  “It couldn’t have scared you any worse,” he said. “Besides, I seen what it was.”

  “Well, you better take a good look at the world,” I said, getting up on my hands and knees. “You won’t be able to see much when I get through with you.”

  “Goodness me,” he said. “Maybe that’ll teach you not to fiddle with my girl.”

  I was beginning to feel the blood coming back from wherever it went to when I seen that snake. Johnny was standing about ten feet away, leaning against the wagon wheel and grinning.

  “She’s no such a thing your girl,” I said.

  Then I went for him, and we had it out right there. I nearly got the best of him right off, but then I got to missing ever time I swung at him. I guess the fall had thrown off my aim. Pretty soon I got tired and he did too, but we just kept standing there, pounding the piss out of one another. Finally we both stopped for a minute.

  “When you’ve had enough, say calf rope,” I said. “I don’t want to put you in no hospital.”

  “Calf rope, your ass,” he said. “You’re going to bleed to death if we don’t quit.”

  “Hell,” I said. “My nose always bleeds in the summertime.”

  “Let’s quit anyway,” he said. “Get a drink of water. You quit first.”

  “Nope.”

  “Then we’ll just have to stand here till you drop,” he said. “I never seen such a stubborn bastard.”

  We might have stood there till dark, I don’t know. Finally the boss harvester noticed us and came over.

  “Damn boys,” he said, “why don’t you fight with the pitchforks next time? There won’t be so much blood that way.”

  “He started it,” I said.

  “Load the wagon,” he said. “You can fight some more tonight if you want to.”

  So I wiped off a little blood and Johnny got his pitchfork, and we finished making up the load. He never threw up no more snakes, either. Finally we got all the oats we could haul and went to the barn. Johnny rode on the seat with me.

  “Shit-fire,” he said. “I’m quitting this job. I ain’t no damn clodhopper, and I ain’t gonna let no fat-ass like that give me orders.”

  “What are you gonna do for money when you quit?” I asked.

  “I been thinking about that.” he said. “You know what, Gid, I think I’ll go to the Panhandle. This here country ain’t no place for a cowboy. It’s all right if you got your own ranch, like you have, but if you ain’t, it’s no good. I’d like to go up on the plains, where them big ranches are, and do some real cowboying. I’m tired of sitting around here listening to my old man bitch at me. I think I’ll just strike out.”

  “I wouldn’t mind going with you,” I said. “Hell, working for Dad’s worse than being a hired hand. He thinks he has to tell me ever move to make.”

  “Then let’s go,” he said. He was excited about it. But I knew I never would be able to get away from Dad. There was too much that needed doing around the place that he couldn’t do. Besides, we had done been gone two months, to that hospital. I pulled the wagon over in the shade of the barn, and we got down.

  “Let’s go over to the horse trough,” I said. “Wash this blood off.” I figured if he was going off to punch cattle, I had better give him his saddle. Even if I was still mad at him.

  “Well, you coming with me?” he said. Then he bent over and ducked his head plumb under the water and came up shaking it like a wet dog.

  “I don’t reckon so,” I said. “I guess I got too much to do here.”

  “Too much cowboying or too much courting, which one?”

  “You better watch out,” I said. “I ain’t going to take no more off you today.”

  He slapped his hat back on without even drying his hair. “Hell, I ain’t eager to go off and leave Molly, either,” he said. “But a man’s got to get out and see a little of the world in his life. I guess they’ll be some pretty sweet girls up there.”

  “Not that sweet,” I said. “Let’s unload the hay.”

  “I may not go after all,” he said.

  But stacking those damn itchy oats in the hot oatbin almost got us down. I guess we was both weak from the fight.

  “Oh hell,” he said, when we finished. “Piss on this. This here’ll kill a good cowboy in a week. It takes weak-minded bastards to stand this kind of work. I’m quitting.”

  “I don’t blame you,” I said, and I didn’t. It would be the real life, up on the plains, with all those big ranches and cow outfits. I just couldn’t manage it, though.

  “Come around here,” I said. “I got something for you.”

  We went around in the hallway of the barn, and I drug out the saddle. He never knew what to make of it.

  “That’s a beauty,” he said. “Whose is it?”

  “Yours,” I said. “I thought you ought to have it for going to the hospital with me and taking care of me all that time. If you’re going off to cowboy, you’ll get some use out of this.”

  “Why, my god,” he said. “You don’t mean it! Why, ain’t it a beauty. That’s as nice a saddle as I ever seen.”

  “Yeah, it ought to last you a long time.”

  “Well damn, sure much obliged, Gid,” he said, feeling of the leather. “This here’s something to be proud of. I never had nothing this well made in my life.”

  “Let’s try it out,” I said. “It’s too late to haul oats today.”

  We caught a couple of horses and went for a ride. I never saw Johnny so tickled over anything, or so excited. He rode it awhile and then I rode it awhile, and it rode like a rocking chair. It was a little creaky and new, but he would ride that out of it in a hurry.

  We got back to the barn just in time to start the evening chores. Dad was out fiddling around in the lots, watching the milk-pen calves.

  “Well, this settles it,” Johnny said “I ain’t wasting a saddle like this on this part of the country. I think I’ll leave in a day or two. Sure wish you’d go with me.”

  “Can’t make it,” I said. “You better wait till them eyes get better. Ain’t nobody going to hire a blind man.”

  “Blind, my ass,” he said. “What about your nose?”

  “It
ain’t very bad squashed. It’ll straighten out.”

  Dad finally come poddling over and looked at the saddle some.

  “Well, I see you boys been beating on one another,” he said. “Too bad neither one of you had any sense to beat into the other one.”

  “Oh, we wasn’t out for blood,” Johnny said. Dad got a big laugh when he told him about me reaching out for the snake. Johnny could tell things so they sounded a whole lot funnier than they were.

  “What do you think about my new saddle, Mr. Fry?” Johnny asked.

  Dad just grunted. “I think it’s a better one than I ever had,” he said. “And I’m four times your age and several times your smart.” He walked off toward the house. Johnny winked at me and I grinned. Dad never got Johnny’s goat quite, and it tickled me.

  TWO DAYS later Johnny rode to Henrietta and pitched his saddle in the caboose and took the train north. That left me and Molly with the country to ourselves, but I was kinda sorry to see old Johnny go. He was a good buddy even if he was a smart aleck, and I felt lonesome whenever he wasn’t around.

  Three

  I GUESS DAD HAD BEEN HOPING I’D CHANGE MY MIND AND KEEP the new saddle for myself. When Johnny actually took off and left the country with it, it put Dad in a such a bad humor he never got over it for a month. And when he was in a bad humor he could think up a million mean jobs for me to do. I spent the last part of July and the whole damn month of August digging corner postholes and cleaning out sewer lines and cutting devil’s claws and plowing. I hated the plowing the worst. And all the time I was down in the field, eating dust and yanking on the damn contrary mules, Johnny was up on the plains, riding his new saddle and living like a cowboy should. I got so tired of thinking about it that one day I just come right out and told Dad I was pretty much in the notion to go up there too.

  “The hell you will,” he said. We were riding one of the River pastures, looking for screwworms, and Dad rode up on a hill and stopped his horse long enough to tell me off.

  “You’ll just stay right where you are,” he said. “And if I tell you to plow, by god, you plow.”

  “But I ain’t no damn farmer,” I said. “Why don’t you hire your farming done? Why do I have to waste my time doing it?”

  “I am hiring it done, and you’re the one I’m hiring,” he said. “Why pay somebody else to do something we can do ourselves? That ain’t no way to get rich.”

  “I see a few cattle down toward the southwest corner,” I said. “What makes you think I want to be rich anyway?”

  “Because I bred you,” he said. “I know damn well I couldn’t breed a boy with so little sense as to want to be poor. You got enough sense to know it’s better to be rich than poor, ain’t you?”

  “That ain’t what the Bible says,” I said.

  He just looked at me. “I ain’t responsible for what the Bible says,” he said. “If it says that, it’s wrong. And I never asked you for no preaching, either. I know there’s fools in the world who say poverty is holy, but you let them go without shoes some cold winter, like I did when I was a kid, and then see how holy they think it is. Being poor just makes people little and mean, most of the time. It’s a damn degrading thing.”

  “All right,” I said. “Hold your horses. I don’t want to be poor. But you can not want to be poor and still not care whether you’re rich or not.”

  “Yes, and them’s the kind of people that never accomplish nothing,” he said. “They’re just damn mediocre. If you’re gonna try at all, you ought to try for something big.”

  “Well, I’ll never get nothing big from plowing that worn-out field.”

  “You might,” he said. “You might plow up a diamond, you don’t know. I count twenty cattle in that corner.”

  “I just counted eighteen. Let’s go get them.”

  “I ain’t finished telling you what’s good for you yet. Now you got the itch to go up on the plains and cowboy, just because Johnny McCloud’s up there. Now I’ll tell you about Johnny McCloud. He’s a good cowhand and he ain’t scared of nothing. I’ll admit that. But that’s the limitation of him, right there. He’ll never be nothing but a damn good cowhand. When he dies he’ll own just what he’s got on and what he’s inherited. And that saddle you gave him, if he don’t lose it in a poker game first. He’ll fiddle around his whole life working for wages, and never accomplish a damn thing.”

  “That don’t make him bad,” I said.

  “Course not. It don’t make him bad at all. I’ve known a lot of fellers like him, and some of them I liked a lot. The point is, you ain’t like that. You’ve got too much of me in you. Punching somebody else’s cows never would satisfy you. But you might waste a lot of time before you figure that out. The man that gets the farthest is the man that wastes the least time and the least energy he possibly can. You ain’t old enough to know that yet, but I am. If you can just learn to listen to me, you’ll save yourself a lot of misery.”

  “I guess you know everything in the world, don’t you?” I said. “I don’t guess you was ever known to be wrong, was you?”

  “Oh yes, I’ve been wrong. I’ve been wrong more times than most people have been right. But that ain’t no significance. I’ve also done forgot more than most people ever know.

  “But anyhow,” he said, “it don’t take much sense to figure out that you and Johnny are two different kinds of people. Let’s go look at them cattle.”

  We doctored a few worms, and was riding home down the lane, late in the afternoon. It was close to sundown, and Dad had worn down a little around the edges.

  “Gid,” he said, “now there’s no need for you to go around feeling sorry for yourself for two months just because you have to plow an oat field once in a while. Before you’re my age you’ll have had all the cowboying you need. A man that’s training himself to run a ranch has got to be able to do all kinds of things.”

  “You can say all you want to,” I said. “I still wish I’d gone to the Panhandle. I ain’t training to be no oat planter. I intend to enjoy my life.”

  “If that ain’t a fine ambition,” he said. “Why, any damn fool can enjoy himself. What makes you think life’s supposed to be enjoyed anyhow?”

  “Well,” I said, “if you ain’t supposed to enjoy it, what are you supposed to do with it?”

  “Fight it. Fight the hell out of it.” And then he got to talking about the cattle and the screwworms, and about how dry it was. He said he’d like to build some new tanks if he thought he’d have the pleasure of living long enough to see them full; we didn’t argue no more. In a way I wanted to go, and in a way I didn’t. Old as Dad was getting, and as much work as there was to do, I wouldn’t have been too happy about going off and leaving him. There would be too many times when I’d have to think about him making the rounds by himself, and that would have spoiled the fun. When it come right down to it, Dad and I got along pretty well. All that time I was in the hospital I kept thinking about him home working, and it bothered me worse than the stuff itself. Johnny and me was different that way. His dad was just as old and had about as much to do, but it never bothered Johnny to go off and leave him. Course Johnny’s mother was still alive, but he just figured his dad could take care of himself.

  “If I did stay home it wouldn’t make no difference,” he said. “Daddy would be out working himself to death anyway, only he’d be working me to death along with him. I can’t see no profit in that.”

  He was right, I guess. It’s just all in the way you feel about a thing like that. Me being home never slowed Dad down either, but at least if I was there I didn’t have to fight no guilty conscience.

  ONE GOOD THING about having old Johnny out of the country was that I didn’t have to watch Molly so close all the time. I knew there wasn’t nobody besides me and him she cared much about; not unless you wanted to count Eddie White, and I never. Eddie was a shiftless old boy about my age; he worked around the oil patch whenever he felt like working, and when he didn’t he hung around Thalia playing
dominos or running his hounds. He was too no-count for a girl like Molly to pay much attention to. I think she just mentioned him once in a while to keep me and Johnny uneasy.

  I guess the best time me and her had all the time Johnny was gone was the day I took her fishing. We had shipped a carload of calves to Fort Worth just to try out the market, and Dad had gone with them, to sit around the stockyards a day or two and watch them sell. When Dad took a big vacation like that he always come back wanting to do all the work in sight in the first half-hour, so I thought I better take me a little time off while I had the chance.

  It was late September then—a nice warm day, but not too warm. We had had our first little norther about four days before; it cooled things off to where they were just about right. I waited around the house till nine or ten o’clock, then caught my horse and rode across the west pasture and up the hill to the Taylor place.

  Old Man Taylor was there of course. He was sitting on the cellar, sharpening his pocketknife and drinking his morning whiskey. He was a terrifying sight. Along his cheeks his beard was white, but all of it that was underneath his mouth was a kind of muddy yellow from all the tobacco juice and whiskey he had dripped on it.

  “Clean your feet before you come in this yard,” he said. “I don’t want none of your damn cowshit in my yard.”

  That would have been funny if he hadn’t said it in such a mean voice. His yard looked like a slaughterhouse anyway. The old man done everything he had to do in the yard, and it showed it: there were bones and chicken heads and empty whiskey jugs and junk iron and baling wire and old shoes and pieces of plank and mule harness and horse turds and slop buckets, and I don’t know what all else scattered everywhere. Molly said she tried to clean the yard up once in a while, but the old man wouldn’t let her: anything that was there, he said, was there because he might need it. The miracle of it was that such a sweet, nice girl like Molly could have grown up in such a nasty place.

  I scraped my feet on the fence wire and the old man never said another word to me.

  Molly was in the living room, trying to kill a stinging lizard that had run in one of the woodboxes. She was dressed like a boy, in an old shirt and a pair of pants that had belonged to one of her brothers; they had all left home. But she looked like a girl; I wanted to grab her right there and kiss her, but if the old man had come in there would have been hell to pay.