Thalia

by Larry McMurtry

  Thinking about them, I got lonesome, and went in and woke Johnny up. We stayed awake the rest of the night, talking about all the different big outfits we could work for. It would be the JAs most likely, or maybe the Matadors, depending on where we decided to go from Amarillo. We had about fifteen dollars apiece, cash money, and our saddles and saddle blankets, so we felt pretty well off.

  We got off the train at the big brick station in Amarillo, and it was like getting off at the North Pole. The wind whistled down those big streets like the town belonged to it, and the people were just renters it was letting stay.

  “Goddamn,” Johnny said. “I never realized it was this cold up north in the wintertime.”

  We got a hotel room and decided to take the day to look around. Only the hotel room was so toasty and warm we stretched out and slept till almost six o’clock. When we went outside the lights were on and the streets were plumb empty, like the wind had blown everybody away. We found some saloons, though, and the people were in them.

  “Let’s celebrate before we go to work,” I said.

  He was agreeable, and boy did we celebrate. I wished we’d eaten supper first. I guess around home we never drank enough to keep in shape. We found some girls, too, even if they wasn’t no raving beauties. We would have kept them for the night but they said our hotel was too respectable for them. They wouldn’t take us to their places, so we went back to the saloons and drank some more and did without.

  When we finally got back to the room we agreed we’d have to get up at four o’clock and look for a job. Boy, it was a bad night. If the hotel hadn’t had a bathtub, we would have ruined the place. I brought up a good gallon, myself, before morning, and I wasn’t nothing to Johnny. He made twice as many trips as I did. About the time it got light I seen him on his way to the bathroom agin, only he was crawling.

  “What are you doing crawling?” I said. “Can’t you even walk?”

  “I might could,” he said, and crawled on in anyway. I thought that was pretty funny.

  “Hell, I can at least walk,” I said. He was in asleep on the bathroom floor.

  We never made it up at four, but we did get downstairs by about six-thirty. I had got emptied out and was feeling okay, but Johnny wasn’t. I made him eat some breakfast, though, and he kept it down.

  “That’ll make you good as new,” I said.

  “I’ll never be that good agin,” he said.

  By the time we got our hotel bills paid it was after sunup. The wind was still cold as ice.

  “How much money you got?” I said.

  “Oh, few dollars,” he said. “Enough to last.”

  But, by god, when we counted, we had three dollars between us. Where the rest of it went I’ll never know.

  “We better go to Clarendon,” he said. “That’s the place to get jobs. Hell, we’ll be broke by supper.”

  So we got railroad tickets to Clarendon; they cost a dollar apiece. Johnny went to sleep right off, but I sat up and looked out the window. That old plains country sure did look cold and gray to me, and I wasn’t so sure I liked it. We ought to have waited till springtime to leave home. But still, it was a good feeling to be loose like we were; it was a kind of adventure, in a way, and it didn’t too much matter about the cold. It mattered more about Molly and Dad. I was just glad Johnny was along. It wouldn’t have been much fun by myself. I couldn’t figure out what had happened to all our money.

  They put us off in Clarendon about one o’clock. Johnny was all refreshed, and we turned up our collars and went walking down the street to see the town. It would have been a nice walk if it hadn’t been for carrying the saddles.

  I guess we were lucky; the first thing we struck was a horse auction. They were auctioning off a couple of hundred broncs some fellers had driven in from New Mexico. A lot of cattlemen were there. After we watched the bidding awhile we saw a funny-looking old man who didn’t look like he could be very important, so we asked him if he knew where two cowpunchers could get a job. He was pretty friendly.

  “You boys cowpunchers?” he said. “What else can you do? Can either one of your ride broncs?” He was a grizzly old feller and didn’t have but half an ear on one side of his head.

  “Both of us can,” Johnny said. Which was a damn lie; he couldn’t ride a bronc if all four of its feet were hobbled. He was an awful good hand on a horse, but he wasn’t no hand to make a horse, so I contradicted him.

  “I can ride broncs and he can do everything else,” I said.

  “My name’s Grinsom,” he said. “I could use a couple of hands myself. I’m gonna have a bunch of horses to drive home when this is over, and then somebody’s gonna have to break them, I damn sure ain’t. You boys come along and I’ll try you for a week. I’ll give you a dollar apiece to give these broncs a good ride, and If we get along with one another it’ll be fifteen a month and bunk and board. That suit you?”

  It didn’t seem no great amount of money to me, and I couldn’t figure a little dried-up feller like Mr. Grinsom owning much of a ranch, but Johnny thought it was fine, so we hired on. It turned out Mr. Grinsom owned thirty-eight thousand acres. He bought nineteen broncs and offered me and Johnny our pick of them to ride to the ranch.

  Since Johnny had spoke up about being a bronc rider, that was pretty funny. He got throwed four times on the way to the ranch. I only got thrown once, and that was an accident. I was looking around and not paying enough attention to what I was doing.

  “You ain’t gonna break no broncs that way,” Mr. Grinsom said to him, after the fourth buck-off.

  Johnny was about half-crippled by then, and too mad to lie. “Hell no, I ain’t no damn bronc rider,” he said. “Gid can break these horses; he likes that kind of stuff. I’m a cowboy. I like to ride a horse that already knows something, so I can get work done. You keep me a week, and if I don’t turn out to be the best hand you got by then, why by god just fire me.”

  Mr. Grinsom got tickled. He had pretty much of a sense of humor, at least about some things.

  “My boys may give you a little competition,” he said.

  IT TURNED OUT he really meant his boys, too. He had a big fat good-natured wife and seven grown sons. He had two hired hands, too, but he never worked them half as hard as he worked his own boys. All the boys’ names started with J: Jimmy, Johnny, Jerry, Joe, Jakey, Jay, and Jordman. I never could tell them apart, but they were nice enough old boys. They had a great big bunkhouse, and me and Johnny and the two hired hands and the seven boys all slept in it. We ate supper at the big house, and Mrs. Grinsom explained to us that after they’d had the fourth boy it had got too noisy in the house and they’d put them out in the bunkhouse with the cowboys when they got big enough to get around. I don’t know where all the noise went; the only words I ever heard them say were: “Thank you for the supper, Momma, it sure was good.” Each one of them said that to Mrs. Grinsom after their meals.

  Me and Johnny thought it was a pretty strange family. But the other two cowboys, one’s name was Ed and the other’s name was Malonus, they really thought so. They were so glad to have new hands around that wasn’t in the family that they just about hugged us.

  THE NEXT MORNING the old man asked me if I really wanted to break the horses. I said for a dollar apiece, like he offered, I’d give them a good first ride.

  “How many do you want to ride a day?” he said.

  “Oh, I ought to be done with them by three o’clock,” I said. “There ain’t but eighteen left. I rode one yesterday.”

  He acted like he didn’t believe me. He sent Johnny off with the boys and the other hands and stayed around the lots all day, doing little chores and watching me out of the corner of his eye.

  I didn’t care. I felt real good that morning. The cold didn’t even bother me. I made a good strong hackamore and went after them broncs. By dinnertime I only liked six being done with them and I got the six in another three hours. I even saddled up a few of the worst ones and rode them agin, just so the old man would r
eally get his money’s worth. By that time he was sitting on the fence. I bet he chewed a whole plug of tobacco that afternoon. When I got done and turned them out in the horse pasture, he walked off to the house without saying a word. But I didn’t care about that, either. I had been throwed seven times and was stiff and sore as hell, but I felt like a million dollars. I felt like I could have ridden fifty horses if I’d just had somebody to do the saddling for me.

  That night the old man did a strange thing. He paid me at the supper table.

  “By god,” he said, after supper. “Now, Mother, make these boys be quiet.” None of the boys had made a sound anyway. “I want you all to notice,” he said. “This here’s one feller that can do the job. He rode eighteen wild horses today, I seen him myself. And one yesterday.” I was real embarrassed. The old man got up and stomped off to the bedroom and came back jingling a sack full of money. “I’ll pay you right here,” he said. “It might put some ambition into these boys of mine.” And he counted me out nineteen dollars, mostly in silver money. There wasn’t a sound in the room but the money clinking. Even after I gathered it up and put it in my pockets, there still wasn’t a sound. Later that night Ed told me the old man never paid the boys atall, just give them a dollar apiece at Christmastime. That didn’t surprise me much. Mr. Grinsom wasn’t the first tight feller I’d ever seen.

  WE WORKED pretty good for about a week. Me and Johnny never had no trouble matching the other hands; by the time the week was over Johnny wasn’t in no danger of getting fired. The old man was funny. He treated us like friends and his own boys like hound dogs.

  But there were two things I couldn’t get over: one was making nineteen dollars in one day, and the other was being homesick. If I could make nineteen dollars in one day, I was stupid to work a whole month for fifteen. And besides, I remembered the time in Fort Worth when I’d made four hundred in about two hours. Cowboying was fun, but it wasn’t near enough fun to make fifteen dollars a month worth while. I knew I could beat that.

  The homesickness was the worst part of it, though. I didn’t mind the work, and I didn’t mind the company; I didn’t mind the country, or even the cold weather. I just minded feeling like I wasn’t where I belonged. Home was where I belonged, but tell that to Johnny and he would have laughed like hell. He didn’t feel like he belonged to any certain place, and I did. He was born not five miles from where I was, too. When you came right down to it, Dad was right: me and him was a lot different. I couldn’t get over thinking about Dad and Molly and the country and the ranch, the things I knew. The things that were mine. It wasn’t that I liked being in Archer Country so much—sometimes I hated it. But I was just tied up with it; whatever happened there was happening to me, even if I wasn’t there to see it. The country might not be very nice and the people might be onery; but it was my country and my people, and no other country was; no other people, either. You do better staying with what’s your own, even if it’s hard. Johnny carried his with him; I didn’t. If you don’t stick with a place, you don’t have it very long.

  Me and Johnny argued for ten days. I just plain wanted to go back, and he just plain didn’t. I got so I couldn’t sleep; I would wake up and lie awake for hours. Then one Saturday, Johnny was in Clarendon and run into a man who had a ranch out near the New Mexico line; he wanted a cowboy or two to look after it through the winter; it was so dull he couldn’t stand the winter there himself. He offered double what we were getting, and said besides he had a pretty little Indian woman who would stay out and do the cooking. So Johnny hired on for both of us, but he told the man we had two more weeks to go for Grinsom. I told him right off I wasn’t going any farther west or north, but he thought I’d change my mind. Then on a Tuesday, Mr. Grinsom sent us out in one of his big pastures to look for sicklings—that was all he had for us to do—and I just decided I was through. I pulled up and stopped.

  “Hell with it,” I said. “I’m going to Archer County. There ain’t no use in me loafing around here any longer.”

  We turned our backs to the wind and watched it whipping across the high open flats. He tried to talk me out of it. “Don’t do nothing rash,” he said. “Wait till we get on the new job. Think of that Indian woman.”

  “You go on out there,” I said. “I don’t want to spend no winter in New Mexico. What would I want with an Indian woman when Molly’s just three miles from home?”

  “Yes, but Molly’s crazy,” he said.

  “I never stopped to argue,” I said. “You coming or staying?”

  He hunched his neck down into his collar and frowned. “I hate to see you miss a good winter,” he said. “What’ll I do for company if that woman don’t talk English?”

  But he was staying. “There ain’t as much at home for me as there is for you,” he said. “This here’s more the life for me.”

  And I was crazy enough to want to stay with him, even when I knew I was going home. We were pretty good buddies.

  “Well, I hate to run off and leave you,” I said. “But I got to go. You’ll be coming home next summer, won’t you?”

  “Oh sure,” he said. “I just don’t feel like going that direction right now, Gid. I hate to be stuck off out here with no company, though.”

  “Well, write me once in a while,” I said. “I believe I’ll lope on back. I might could get to Amarillo tonight.”

  “Say hello to the country for me,” he said. “Give old Molly a big kiss and tell her she’s still my girl.”

  “I’ll sure do it,” I said. “Don’t let no crazy horse fall on you.”

  “Oh hell,” he said. “Won’t nothing hurt me unless I freeze to death. You watch out yourself.”

  I guess we should have shook hands, but we never. He kinda nodded, and turned and tucked his head down and trotted off into the wind, headed north. I set there a minute, watching him cross the windy pasture. Then I loped back to the ranch, gave notice, and talked the old man into loaning me a horse to ride to Clarendon.

  “Why you running off?” he said. “Too dull? I may buy some more broncs in a week or two.”

  “Oh no,” I said. “I just guess I’ll go run my own ranch.”

  It was a pretty lonesome trip home. I had to wait till way after dark for a train out of Clarendon, and was the only one on it, then, so I didn’t have a soul to talk to. I never slept a wink all night, I was too excited about going home. Only I wisht old Johnny had come; train riding was dull without him. I got off in Wichita Falls about ten the next morning and found a man with a wagon going to Thalia. We drove in about an hour before dark, and the first person I saw was Mabel Peters, coming out of the dry goods store where she worked.

  “Why, if it ain’t Gid,” she said. She had put on a little flesh and was dressed nice and looked real cheerful. In spite of all I could do, she made me go home and have supper with her at the boardinghouse. All the boarders were there, so she didn’t dare ask me up to her room, but she followed me out on the porch after supper and hung on to me for an hour, she was so glad to see me. She asked me four or five times if I would come back and see her.

  It was so late when I left Mabel that I had trouble finding anybody to borrow a horse from, but I finally got one and rode home. I was practically sick at my stomach I was so glad to be going home. It was good to ride over some familiar country. I even went by Molly’s, but there wasn’t no light; I sat on my horse by the back fence a minute, thinking about her.

  Our place was dark too. When I got in the first thing I did was tiptoe down the hall to Dad’s door, to listen a minute. He was snoring like he always did. Once I heard him cough and hawrk. I was glad he was asleep. I guess I was afraid I would find him out in the moonlight, plowing that old oat field.

  Fourteen

  THE MORNING AFTER I GOT HOME I REMEMBERED DAD came in my room real early, but he never woke me up. I was about half-awake and I seen him standing inside the door. But I guess he figured I needed the rest, because he went on out and I stayed in bed till nine o’clock.

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nbsp; When I finally got dressed and outside he was down at the lots filling up the hayracks. It was a cold morning, with a big frost on the ground.

  “Well, how’s the Panhandle?” he said. “I guess you got rich quicker than I thought you would, or else you went broke quicker. Which was it?”

  “Aw, I just got homesick,” I said. “How’s ever thing here?”

  “Run down and wore out,” he said. “Specially me. Why don’t you get the horses up? A couple of them need their shoes pulled off, and I ain’t had the energy.”

  Dad sure looked bad. He hadn’t hired no help at all; I knew he wouldn’t. But he wasn’t lying when he said he was worn out. He didn’t have much flesh on him any more, and he had been a big fleshy man. When I first got home I thought it was from working too hard, but it wasn’t. He was just sick; he didn’t have no wind any more, nor much grip in his hands. But he wouldn’t go to a doctor for love nor money.

  I felt real bad about having gone off and left him so long. I know it wouldn’t have made any difference to his health if I had stayed, but it would have made some difference to me.

  “Hell, you ought to go see a doctor, Dad,” I told him. “You probably just need some kind of pep-up medicine. Why do you want to be so contrary?”

  “I ain’t contrary,” he said. “I just don’t want to pay no doctor to tell me what I already know. There ain’t no medicine for old age.”