Lonesome Dove

by Larry McMurtry

  Thin milk, Clara thought — and no wonder, for the woman probably hadn't eaten a decent meal in months. She refused to look at the baby, even when it took her breast. Clara had to hold it and encourage it, rubbing its little lips with milk.

  "They say you're married to a sheriff," Clara said, thinking conversation might help. The man might be the cause of her flight, she thought. She probably didn't want him in the first place, and hadn't asked for this child.

  Elmira didn't answer. She didn't want to talk to this woman. Her breasts were so full they hurt; she didn't care that the baby took the milk, she just didn't want to look at it. She wanted to get up and make Zwey take her to town, to Dee, but she knew she couldn't do it yet. Her legs were so weak she could hardly move them on the bed. She would never get downstairs unless she crawled.

  Clara looked at Elmira for a moment and held her peace. It was not a great surprise for her that the woman didn't want the baby. She hadn't wanted Sally, out of fear that she would die. The woman must have her own fears — after all, she had traveled for months across the plains with two buffalo hunters. Perhaps she was fleeing a man, perhaps looking for a man, perhaps just running — there was no point in pressing questions, for the woman might not know herself why she ran.

  Besides, Clara remembered the immense fatigue that had seized her when Betsey was born. Though the last, Betsey had been the most difficult of her births, and when it was over she could not lift her head for three hours. To speak took an immense effort — and Elmira had had a harder time than she had. Best just to let her rest. When her strength came back she might not be so ill-disposed toward the child.

  Clara took the baby downstairs and had the girls watch him while she went outside and killed a pullet. Big Zwey watched silently from the wagon as she quickly wrung the chicken's neck and plucked and cleaned it.

  "It takes a mess of chicken soup to run this household these days," she said, bringing the chicken back in. They had some broth left and she heated a little and took it to Elmira. She was startled to find Elmira on her feet, staring out the window.

  "Goodness, you best lay down," Clara said. "You've lost blood — we've got to build you up."

  Elmira obeyed passively. She allowed Clara to feed her a few spoonfuls of the soup.

  "How far's town?" she asked.

  "Too far for you to walk, or ride either," Clara said. "That town isn't going to run away. Can't you just rest for a day or two?"

  Elmira didn't answer. The old man had said Dee was a pistolero. Though she didn't care what Dee was, as long as she could find him, the news worried her. Somebody might shoot him before she arrived. He might leave, might have already left. She couldn't stand the thought. The future had shrunk to one fact: Dee Boot. If she couldn't find him she meant to kill herself.

  Clara tried several times during the day to get Elmira interested in the little boy, but with no success. Elmira allowed it to nurse, but that was not successful, either. The milk was so weak that the baby would only sleep an hour and then be hungry again. Her girls wanted to know why the baby cried so much. "He's hungry," Clara said.

  "I can milk the cow early," Sally said. "We can give him some of that milk."

  "We may have to," Clara said. "We'll have to boil it first." It'll be too rich for him and the colic will probably kill him, she thought. She carried the helpless little creature herself most of the day, rocking him in her arms and whispering to him. From being red, he had gone to pale, and he was a small baby, not five pounds, she guessed. She herself was very tired, and as the evening drew on and the sun fell she found herself in a very uneven temper — scolding the girls harshly for their loudness one minute, going out on her porch with the baby, almost in tears herself, another. Perhaps it's best that it dies, she doesn't want it, she thought, and then the next moment the baby's eyes would open for a second and her heart would fill. Then she would reproach herself for her own callousness.

  When night fell she went in and lit a lamp in the room where Elmira lay. Clara, seeing that her eyes were open, started to take the baby to her. But once again Elmira turned her head away.

  "What's your husband's name?" Clara asked.

  "I'm looking for Dee Boot," Elmira said. She didn't want to say July's name. The baby was whimpering but she didn't care. It was July's and she didn't want to have anything to do with anything of July's.

  Clara got the infant to nurse a little and then took it up to her own room, to lie down awhile. She knew it wouldn't sleep long, but she herself had to sleep and was afraid to trust it with its mother yet.

  At some point she heard the baby whimpering but she was too tired to rise. In the back of her mind she knew that she had to get up and feed Bob but the desire to sleep was too heavy — she couldn't make herself move.

  Then she felt a hand on her shoulder and saw Cholo kneeling by the bed.

  "What's the matter?" Clara asked.

  "They leave," Cholo said.

  Clara jumped up and ran into the room where Elmira had been — sure enough, she was gone. She went to the window and could see the wagon, north of the corrals. Behind her she could hear the baby crying.

  "Señora, I couldn't stop them," Cholo said.

  "I doubt they'll stop just because you ask, and we don't need any gunfights," Clara said.

  "Let 'em go. If she lives, she might come back. Did you milk?"

  Cholo nodded.

  "I wish we had a goat," Clara said. "I've heard goat's milk is better for babies than cow's milk. If you see any goats next time you go to town, let's buy a couple."

  Then she grew a little embarrassed. Sometimes she talked to Cholo as if he were her husband, and not Bob. She went downstairs, made a fire in the cookstove and began to boil some milk. When it was boiled, she took it up and gave the baby a little, dipping a cotton rag in the milk and letting the baby suck it. It was a slow method and took patience. The child was too weak to work at it, but she knew if she didn't persist the baby would only get weaker and die. So she kept on, dribbling milk into its mouth even when it grew too tired to suck on the rag.

  "I know this is slow," she whispered to it. When the baby had taken all it would, she got up to walk it. It was a nice moonlight night and she went out on her porch for a while. The baby was asleep, tucked against her breast. You could be worse off, she thought, looking at it. Your mother had pretty good sense — she waited to have you until she got to where there were people who'll look after you.

  Then she remembered that she had not fed Bob. She took the baby down to the kitchen and heated the chicken broth. "Think of the work I'd save if everything didn't have to be hot," she said to the infant, who slept on.

  She laid it at the foot of Bob's bed while she fed her husband, tilting his head so he could swallow. It was strange to her that he could swallow when he couldn't even close his eyes. He was a big man with a big head — every time she fed him her wrist ached from supporting his head.

  "I guess we got us a boy, Bob," she said. The doctors had told her to talk to him — they thought it might make a difference, but Clara found that the only difference was that she got depressed. The depressing aspect of it was that it reminded her too clearly of their years together, for she had liked to chatter, and Bob never talked. She had talked at him for years and got no answers. He only spoke if money was concerned. She would talk for two hours and he would never utter a sentence. So far as conversation went, the marriage was no different than it had ever been — it was just easier for her to have her way about money, something that also struck her as sad.

  She picked the baby up and held it to her bosom — the thought was in her head that if he saw her with a child it might make a difference. Bob might see it, think it was theirs. It might startle him into life again.

  It was unnatural, she knew, for a mother to leave her child a day after it was born. Of course, children were endless work. They came when you didn't want them and had needs you didn't always want to meet. Worst of all, they died no matter how much you l
oved them — the death of her own had frozen the hope inside her harder than the wintry ground. Her hopes had frozen hard and she vowed to keep it that way, and yet she hadn't: the hopes thawed. She had hopes for her girls, and might even come to have them for the baby at her bosom, child of another mother. Weak as it was, and slim though its chances, she liked holding the child to her. I stole you, she thought. I got you and I didn't even have to go through the pain. Your mother's a fool not to want you, but she's smart to realize you wouldn't have much of a chance with her and those buffalo hunters.

  It wasn't smartness, though, she thought — the woman just didn't care.

  She looked down at Bob and saw that the baby had made no difference. He lay as he had, nothing left to him but need. Suddenly Clara felt angry that the man had been fool enough to think he could break that mare, when both she and Cholo had warned him to leave her alone. It made her angry at herself, to have lived so long with a horse trader who had no more savvy than that.

  Yet there he was, his eyes staring upward, as helpless as the baby. She put the child down again and fed Bob soup until her wrist got tired from holding his head. Then she lay Bob's head back on his pillow, and ate the rest of the chicken soup herself.

  76

  BIG ZWEY WAS WORRIED that Elmira had left the baby. When she came out to the wagon, she didn't have it. "Hitch the team and let's go," she said, and that was all she said. He did it, but he felt confused.

  "Ain't we gonna take the baby?" he asked shyly, just before they left.

  Elmira didn't answer. She had no breath to answer with, she was so tired. Walking downstairs and out to the wagon had taken all her strength. Zwey had to lift her into the wagon, at that, and she sat propped against the buffalo skins, too tired even to care about the smell. She was so tired that she felt like she wasn't there. She couldn't even tell Zwey to start — Luke had to do it.

  "Let's go, Zwey," he said. "She don't want the baby."

  Zwey started the wagon, and they were soon out of sight of the house, but he was bothered. He kept looking back at Ellie, propped against the buffalo skins, her eyes wide open. Why didn't she want her baby? It was a puzzle. He had never understood the whole business, but he knew mothers took care of babies, just as husbands took care of wives. In his eyes he had married Ellie, and he intended to take good care of her. He felt he was her husband. They had come all that way together in the wagon. Luke had tried to marry her too, but Zwey had soon stopped that, and Luke had been behaving a lot better since.

  Luke had tied his horse beside the wagon, and he rode on the wagon seat beside Zwey, who kept looking around to see if Ellie was asleep. She wasn't moving, but her eyes were still wide open.

  "What are you looking at?" Luke asked.

  "I wisht she'd brought the baby," Zwey said. "I always wanted us to have one."

  The way he said it struck Luke as curious. It was almost as if Zwey thought the baby was his.

  "Why would you care? It ain't yours," Luke said, to scotch that suspicion. Even if Zwey had got up his nerve to approach Ellie, which he doubted, they hadn't been on the road long enough to make a baby.

  "We're married," Zwey answered. "I guess it's ours."

  A suspicion dawned on Luke which was even more curious — the suspicion that Zwey didn't even understand about men and women. They had spent days around the buffalo herds when the bulls and cows were mating, and yet Zwey had evidently never connected such goings-on with humans. Luke remembered that Zwey never went with whores. He mainly just watched the wagon when the other hunters went to town. Zwey had always been considered the dumbest of the dumb, but Luke knew that none of the hunters had suspected him of being that dumb. That much dumbness was hard to believe — Luke wanted to make sure he hadn't misunderstood.

  "Now, wait a minute, Zwey," he said. "Why do you think that baby was yours?"

  Zwey was silent a long time. Luke was smiling, as he did when he wanted to make fun of him. It didn't ordinarily much bother him that Luke made fun of him, but he didn't want him to make fun about the baby. He didn't want Luke to talk about it. It was painful enough that she had had it and then gone off and left it. He decided not to answer.

  "What's the matter with you, Zwey?" Luke said. "You and Ellie ain't really married. You ain't married to somebody just because she comes on a trip with you."

  Zwey began to feel very sad — it might be true, what Luke said. Yet he liked to think that he and Ellie were married.

  "Well, we are," he said finally.

  Luke began to laugh. He turned to Ellie, who was still sitting with her back against the skins.

  "He thinks that baby's his," Luke said. "He really thinks it's his. I guess he thinks all he had to do was look at you to make it happen."

  Then Luke laughed a long time. Zwey felt sad, but he didn't say any more. Luke could always find something to laugh at him about.

  Elmira began to feel cold. She started to shiver and reached for the pile of blankets in the wagon, but she was too weak even to untangle the blankets.

  "Help me, boys," she said. "I'm real cold."

  Zwey immediately handed the reins to Luke and went back to help cover her up. It was a warm night, but Ellie was still shivering. He put the blankets on her, but she didn't stop shivering. On the wagon seat, Luke would laugh from time to time when he thought of Zwey's baby. Before they had gone five miles, Ellie was delirious. She huddled in the blankets, talking to herself, mostly about the man called Dee Boot. Her look was so wild that Zwey became frightened. Once his hand happened to brush her and her skin was as hot as if the sun were burning down on her.

  "Luke, she's got a fever," Zwey said.

  "I ain't a doctor," Luke said. "We shouldn't have left that house."

  Zwey bathed her face with water, but it was like putting water on a stove, she was so hot. Zwey didn't know what to do. A person so hot could die. He had seen much death, and very often it came with fever. He didn't understand why she had had the baby if it was only going to make her so sick. While he was bathing her face, she sat up straight and looked at him, her eyes wide.

  "Dee, is that you?" she asked. "Where have you been?" Then she fell back against the skins.

  Luke drove as fast as he could, but it was still a long road. The sky was light in the east when they finally found a wagon track and pulled into Ogallala.

  The town was not large — just a long street of saloons and stores, and a few shacks on the slope north of the Platte. One of the saloons was still open. Three cowboys were lounging around outside, getting ready to mount up and go back to work. The two who were soberest were laughing at the third because he was so drunk he was trying to mount his horse from the wrong side.

  "Hell, Joe's fixing to get on backwards," one said. They were not much interested in the fact that a wagon had pulled up. The drunk cowboy slipped and fell in the street. The other cowboys found that hilarious, one laughing so hard that he had to go over by the saloon and vomit.

  "Where's the doctor live?" Luke asked the soberest cowboy. "We got a sick woman here."

  At that the cowboys all stopped and stared. All they could see was Ellie's hair. The rest of her was covered with blankets.

  "Where'd she come from?" one asked.

  "Arkansas," Luke said. "Where's the doctor?"

  Ellie had dropped into a fevered doze. She opened her eyes and saw the buildings. It must be the town where Dee was. She began to shove off the blankets.

  "Do you know Dee Boot?" she asked the cowboys. "I come to find Dee Boot."

  The cowboys stared at her as if they hadn't heard. Her hair was long and tangled, and she was wearing a nightdress. A huge buffalo hunter sat beside her.

  "Ma'am, Dee Boot is in jail," one of the cowboys said politely. "It's that building over there."

  Light was just filtering into the street between the shadowed buildings.

  "Where's the doctor?" Luke asked again.

  "I don't know if there is one," the cowboy said. "We just got here last night. I
know about Boot because they were talking about him in the saloon."

  Ellie began to try and climb over the side of the wagon. "Help me, Zwey," she said. "I wanta see Dee." She got one leg over the side board of the wagon and suddenly began to feel weak again. She clung to the board, trembling.

  "Help me, Zwey," she said again.

  Zwey lifted her out of the wagon as if she were a doll. Elmira took two steps and stopped. She knew she would fall if she tried another step, and yet Dee Boot was just across the street. Once she saw Dee she felt she could start getting well.

  Zwey stood beside her, big as one of the horses the cowboys rode.

  "Carry me over," she said.

  Zwey felt afraid. He had never carried a woman, much less Ellie. He felt he might break her, if he wasn't careful. But she was looking at him and he felt he had to try. He lifted her in his arms and found again that she was light as a doll. She smelled different from anything he had ever carried, too. Mostly he had just carried skins, or carcasses of game.

  As he was carrying her, a man came out of the jail and stepped around the corner of the building. It proved to be a deputy sheriff — his name was Leon — going out to relieve himself. He was startled to see a huge man standing there with a tiny woman in a nightgown in his arms. Nothing so surprising had happened in his whole tenure as deputy. It stopped him in his tracks.

  "I want to see Dee Boot," the woman said, her voice just a whisper.

  "Dee Boot?" Leon said, startled. "Well, we got him, all right, but I doubt he's up."

  "I'm his wife," Ellie said.

  That was another surprise. "Didn't know he was even married," Leon said.

  Leon was watching the buffalo hunter, who was very large. It occurred to him that the couple might have come to try and break Dee Boot out of jail.

  "I'm his wife, I want to see Dee," the woman said. "Zwey don't have to come."

  "Dee can probably hear you, he's right in this cell," Leon said, pointing to a small barred window on the side of the jail.