Thalia

by Larry McMurtry

  “Hell no,” he said. “A hired woman would get the best of me in no time. We’ll just get along by ourselves.”

  One day me and him drove a little bunch of cattle down to the League pasture. On the way back we stopped on the Ridge and talked and rested awhile. It was a pretty day. The mesquite was leafed out, and everything smelled like spring. Dad had got down to pull up a devil’s claw, and said he didn’t feel like getting back up right then; we sat under a post oak and talked. I had got where I liked to talk to Dad; it taken me a long time. From where we were sitting we could look off west and see halfway across the county, to the little ridges above Onion Creek, where Dad’s land ended.

  “I got a good ranch,” he said. “That’s one thing that cheers me up. The best land in the county.”

  He was right, I guess. To me it didn’t seem like much consolation.

  “The nice thing is that I’m a damn sight nearer worn out than this country. I’d hate to get old in a worn-out country.”

  “You ain’t worn out,” I said. “You’re just damn pessimistic. If you’d stay in the hospital awhile, you’d get well.”

  He didn’t say nothing for a minute.

  “Well, it’s too bad she married him,” he said, looking across the country. “She’ll make a good one. But just let me tell you something, son, a woman’s love is like the morning dew, it’s just as apt to settle on a horse turd as it is on a rose. So you better just get over it.”

  “Aw, I ain’t hurt much,” I said. “Why in the world did she want to marry a bastard like that? It just don’t figure.”

  “Well, she’s got a lot of sense when it comes to taking care of herself,” he said. “A lot more than you have. She’ll make it.”

  “Why, she ain’t got no sense, when it comes to taking care of herself,” I said.

  Sitting on the ground, you could smell the spring coming right up through the grass and into the breeze. It was sad Dad felt so awful at such a pretty time of year.

  “It’s my fault you don’t have more,” he said. “You’ve always had me to give you orders. I never put you on your own enough. She’s been on her own since she could walk.

  “But there’s no use in you sitting on your butt sulking,” he said. “Sulking never made a dime nor kept a friend.”

  “We better get on home,” I said.

  By the time we got to the barn it was late evening, and the last of the sun was shining on the weathervanes above the barn. Dad was tired. He drank some buttermilk and went to bed. He had seemed a little bit worried about me.

  “Anyhow you’re stubborn,” he said. “Stubbornness will get a feller through a lot of mean places.”

  The next morning he never woke me up, and there was a note lying on the table when I come down.

  DEAR GID

  Miserable night. There’s no profit in putting up with this.

  I think I’ll go out on the hill and turn my horses free, or did you ever know that song? It’s an old one.

  Take good care of the ranch, it’s a dilly, and don’t trust ever damn fool that comes up the road. Always work outside when you can, it’s the healthiest thing.

  Tell Miss Molly I appreciated her coming and helping us, just tell her much obliged until she is better paid.

  Well, this is the longest letter I’ve written in ten years, it is too long. Be sure and get that windmill fixed, I guess you had better put in some new sucker rod.

  YOUR DAD

  The rifle wasn’t in the closet, so I knew that was that, and I sat down and held my head. I wisht old Johnny had been there, or Molly, but they wasn’t. Directly I went outside and turned off the windmill and went on down to the barn and hitched the wagon and put the wagon sheet in it and headed off across the hill. He was right on the west side; he had on a clean khaki shirt and Levi’s and had taken his hat off and was laying on his back on the grass. Once I seen him I wasn’t so scared, for some reason. He just looked natural, like Dad, and comfortable. I put him in the wagon and took him up to the house and laid him on the couch in the living room and got a counterpane to cover him with. It was worse in that cool darkish dusty old living room than it had been out in the sunshine. I hated to be the one to start treating Dad like a dead person. It was a long time before he seemed dead to me. For three months after that I would wonder in the morning why he hadn’t come to wake me up.

  I guess Dad had been better known than I thought; there was a big funeral and a lot of talk about what a pioneer he had been. It never done him much good, or me either. The worst of it all was seeing Molly. After I went into town to the undertaker a lot of people came out to visit me and bring stuff to eat. Molly, she came too, and brought a cake, and it was so awkward I got a headache from it. I knew she was remembering when her dad died and wishing she could really help me, but she couldn’t. All those people were there trying to cheer me up, and it just made me bluer. Every once in a while I would see Molly looking at me from across the room, and she would be crying and looking so sad I wished I could have gone over and hugged her and told her it was okay. Finally I did talk to her just a minute.

  “Molly,” I said. “One of the last things Dad did was tell me to thank you for helping us last winter. He sure appreciated it.”

  “I hope you’ll come and see me sometime, Gid,” she said. “When all of this is over.” Right after that she left. I seen her at the funeral, but just at a distance. Eddie was even there. I guess old Johnny was the only one that wasn’t. I wrote him a card and told him a little about it, but he never answered. In September, after he was back, we had a kind of little funeral ourselves: we took Dad’s old white saddlehorse that he called Snowman out on the hill and let him loose in the pasture; nobody ever rode him agin. We left Dad’s saddle hanging in the harness shed. Sometimes when I’m doing the chores early in the mornings, I wonder if Dad and that old pony aren’t still out there, maybe, slipping around through the misty pastures and checking up on the new calves.

  Eighteen

  ONE AFTERNOON ABOUT TEN DAYS AFTER DAD DIED I decided I ought to look over the ranch. Of course I had been over every inch of it a hundred times, but it had been Dad’s ranch then, and not mine. It was a nice sunny day, with a few white clouds in the sky, and not too hot; the week Dad killed himself we had a two-inch rain—it was just his luck to miss it—and the country looked wonderful. We had lots of grass, and the weeds weren’t too bad yet. Dad had about ten thousand acres; he had had the whole county to pick from, and he picked careful. There was a creek to the southeast and a creek to the northwest, and the River down the middle, so if there was water anywhere in the country, we had it. And of course he had built good tanks. I saddled old Denver and started off east, through the Dale pasture and rode down our east fence plumb to the southeast corner; then I cut back across Westfork and rode west between it and the River, winding through through the brush till I got nearly to the west side and then turned north and rode up on the hill in the south pasture and rested awhile. The whole south end of our land was brushy, mesquite and post oak mixed; the farther north you went, the more mesquite and the less post oak. Dad said when he first saw the country there wasn’t a mesquite tree anywhere, or a prickly pear. Then I crossed the River and rode northwest till I hit Onion Creek, and turned and came back southeast agin along the top of Idiot Ridge. There wasn’t no mesquite on the Ridge; it hadn’t got that far north. The north end of our land was still prairie, but you could look south off the Ridge and see the brush coming. Our headquarters sits southeast of the Ridge, on a long hill. Finally I rode back through the League pasture to the barn and turned old Denver loose. I sat on the lot fence awhile, resting and thinking. It was about an hour before sundown, and I didn’t much want to go up to the house, since there wasn’t nobody there. At least the milk-pen calves were a little company.

  For a day or two after Dad died I had actually been in the mood to sell the place, just dump it, and go where I wouldn’t have to be reminded of Dad all the time, or of Molly. But I got over wanting
to do that. For one thing, I got so I liked being reminded of Dad. Of course I didn’t like to think of Molly and Eddie, but it would have been pretty yellow-bellied to let them run me out of the country. Most of the time I hadn’t paid much attention to the country; Dad had done that. But what I saw that afternoon looked pretty good to me.

  I didn’t think no more about moving; but even staying took a lot of thinking about. One thing for sure, I wasn’t no solitary owl. I couldn’t stay on the place by myself; in about a month I would have been dead of lonesomeness. So I figured the best thing to do was marry Mabel. She was the best girl left in the county, and I figured I could get along with her okay. She would be so grateful to me just for marrying her that she shouldn’t fuss none for about fifteen years.

  Then if Johnny ever come back, I could hire him to help me run the place. I wanted to buy some new land if I could; I didn’t intend to stop with what I’d inherited; that would have been pure laziness. Of course Mabel and Johnny wasn’t too fond of one another, but I figured that would iron out once me and her was married and he quit trying to get in her pants.

  I sat on the fence and never even noticed sundown. I happened to notice the moon’s reflection in the milklot water trough. The house looked so lonesome I just didn’t go in, I caught old Denver and rode to Thalia without even eating supper.

  WHEN I stepped up on the boardinghouse porch I could see Mabel hadn’t gone to bed. She was sitting in her chair, patching a quilt. I felt sorry for her. When I knocked she had to put on a bathrobe before she let me in.

  “Why, come in, Gid,” she said. “I was just thinking about you.

  “You look kinda blue,” she said. “Want some hot chocolate?”

  I said no. Her bedroom was neat as a pin.

  “I guess I am a little down in the dumps,” I said. “You want to sit out on the porch awhile? It’s a real warm night.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  We got in the glider and rocked, and she snuggled up against me, warm as a hot-water bottle. We seen the moon, way up there, and I wondered if its reflection was still down at the ranch, in the water trough.

  “Honey, let’s get married,” I said. “I’m sick of this living alone.”

  “Why, I am too,” she said, and she squeezed my hand right hard.

  I hugged her and kissed her and stood up, thinking she’d go in and get her clothes on, so we could wake up the J.P. and get it done and go on home, but boy she fooled me. I never seen her run backward so quick.

  “Why, I couldn’t hold my head up if I got married that way,” she said. “What are you thinking about?”

  She talked like it would take us two weeks, just to get married. I never knew she was that silly about things before. She wouldn’t even let me spend the night with her. I ended up having to pay fifty cents to spend the night in the damn hotel.

  BUT I DIDN’T back out. There wasn’t nothing to be gained from that; not that I knew of. Only I told her the next morning that I wasn’t going to wait around no two weeks, I had too many other things to do. She said I’d have to at least ride back to the ranch and get my good clothes; I had just come in like I was. So I done it. While I was gone she quit her job and packed her suitcases. And when I got back to town I hunted up a feller I knew and just bought me an automobile. I figured if Eddie White could afford one, I could too. He showed me how to drive it and I got it to the rooming house and put Mabel’s stuff in it. Then we walked over to the Methodist preacher’s house. It was a pretty day and Mabel was dolled up like a hundred dollars; I had on a wool suit and was about to cook. Anyway, the preacher called his wife in to witness, and he married us. I gave him three dollars. Mabel hung on my arm all the way back to the rooming house, and I guess everybody in town knew what we’d done. I sure was hot and embarrassed, but Mabel didn’t even want me to take my coat off till we got out of town. It took a lot of wrassling to get that damn car home, no better roads than there were; I wisht a hundred times I’d never bought it. But we finally made it, and I yanked the car stopped by the back gate.

  “Well, here we are,” I said. “Man and wife.” And I started to get her stuff out of the rumbleseat.

  “Gid, you ought to be ashamed, ain’t you going to help me down?” she said. “I see I’ll have to do a little work on you.” And she never wasted no time starting.

  Nineteen

  THE FIRST MONTH WE WERE MARRIED, I DON’T THINK WE saw a living soul but one another. I guess I must have run into a few other people, here and there, but I sure didn’t say much to them, and I didn’t give them the chance to say much to me. If there was one thing I didn’t feel like putting up with, it was jokes about newlyweds. Just being one was joke enough.

  Of course, it really wasn’t that Mabel was so bad herself. She was a good person, a real good person, I guess, and she damn sure wasn’t lazy or anything like that. She did her work, and she looked after me a damn sight better than I had been looking after myself. And there was a many a time when I was awful glad to have her around.

  Still, it never changed the facts, and the facts was that I had done an awful ignorant thing. When I first realized just how ignorant, I was flat embarrassed for myself. A ten-year-old kid could have showed as much judgment as I showed. I guess Dad had been right when he said I didn’t know anything about taking care of myself.

  Mabel was a big surprise to me, of course. I thought I knew her to a T before I ever went in to marry her. I hadn’t been married to her two weeks before I knew that a blind idiot could have found out more about her than I managed to. For one thing, she was a lot prouder of herself than I thought she was, and for another, a lot less proud of me. I soon found out that she didn’t consider me no particular prize, but I had better be sure and let her know that I considered her one. She seen herself as the belle of the county; nobody was going to talk her out of that view. I soon gave up trying; she could see herself any way she wanted to.

  It come down to two things: the first was that Mabel just wasn’t a very generous person. I guess she never had anything to learn to be generous with. For every nickel’s worth of her she put out, she wanted a dollar’s worth of me. And got it, too.

  The second thing was that I was still crazy about Molly. What few little times I’d been with her meant more to me than a lifetime with Mabel could have. I had feeling for Molly, and didn’t for Mabel. And Mabel had none for me.

  It wasn’t very long before I was hanging around the lots till dark for a plumb different reason. It used to be I didn’t want to go to the house because nobody was there; pretty soon I was working late because I didn’t know what to do at the house when I got there. I seen the moon in the water trough many a time, and I seen it in the sky, and if one thing was for sure, it was that the moon didn’t care. What I did didn’t make no difference to it, or to nothing, or to nobody, I felt like. I did get a card from Johnny, but I didn’t have the guts to answer it.

  I never was bluer than I was that first month. If a feller has to be lonesome, he’s better off being lonesome alone. But I’d kicked that advantage away forever, and there was no use sulking about it. It was done and that was final; I would just have to make the best of it. Only it didn’t look like a very good best.

  It reminded me of something Old Man Grinsom had said one time; it was the day we first run into him in Clarendon. Just to make conversation I asked him how long he had been in the Panhandle.

  “Since ’93,” he said. “I come here with nothing but a fiddle and a hard on. I’ve still got the fiddle.” And when we seen them seven boys we knew where the other went. My case was a little different. I got married with a ranch and the other, and I still had them both. And to be right honest, I guess it served me right.

  Twenty

  IT WAS LATE APRIL WHEN WE MARRIED, AND MAY WAS THE month we stayed by ourselves. By June I knew I had to do a little better than that for myself, someway. I was getting where I didn’t even enjoy my work. One morning I had to fix a little fence on the northwest side, and when I go
t that done I decided it was time I went and checked up on my neighbors. The closest one was Molly.

  When I rode past her barn I didn’t see no automobile, and that was a great relief. It took so much nerve to get me there I would have hated to have to ride away agin. But Molly, she was there, out in the back yard hanging the washing on the line. There was a good breeze, and the sheets were flapping, so she didn’t notice me riding up. She looked like the same old Molly, only more so, wearing Levi’s and an old cotton shirt with the shirttail out; she had a clothespin in her mouth and three or four more in the shirt pocket. Her shirttail was damp in front, where the sheets had flopped against her. And her hair was loose, hanging down her back and getting in her face now and then; I seen her brush it out of the way with one hand. I thought she just looked lovely.

  I got off and tied old Willy to a mesquite tree; then I walked into the yard and stopped behind her, at the windmill. I didn’t know if I could talk.

  “Hello, neighbor,” I said. “How are you getting along?”

  She turned around with a tablecloth in her hands; I thought she was going to cry. She had those little dark places under her eyes. She dropped the wet tablecloth in the grass, and I went over to pick it up.

  “My, Gid,” she said. “You scared me.”

  For some reason I was real embarrassed; I squatted down and picked up the wet tablecloth and was going to try and wipe the grass off it. But Molly squatted down too and put one of her wet hands on my neck, and then there was her face and she kissed me. I shivered clear through. But her face against mine was as warm as sunshine, and I had to sit down in the grass and hug her.