Larry McMurtry - Dead Man's Walk

by Dead Man's Walk

  "It's a passel of stuff to pack up," Johnny Carthage said again, looking at the litter of blankets, cook pots, and miscellaneous gear scattered around him.

  "Oh, hush your yapping," Bigfoot said.

  Blackie Slidell came racing up--he had had his shirt off, helping to load a wagon, and was so fearful of being left that he had put it back on, wrong side out, as he rode.

  Call looked down at Gus--he was still prone, but not so angry.

  "I have no idea what you're riled about," he said. "I guess I'll see you up the trail." "Good-bye," Gus said, suddenly sorry for his angry behaviour. Before he could say more, Bigfoot wheeled his horse and loped off after Shadrach; the Rangers, still assembling themselves, followed as closely as they could.

  Gus felt a sudden longing to be with them, though he knew it was impossible. Tears came to his eyes, as he watched his companions lope away.

  It would be lonely with no one but the cranky Johnny Carthage to talk to all night.

  In a minute or two, though, he felt better. His ankle still felt full of needles, but Clara Forsythe had said she would come and rub more liniment on his sore ankle, if the expedition didn't depart too early. All he had to do was get through the night, and he would see her again.

  What made him feel even better was that this time he would have Clara all to himself. Call was gone.

  The thought cheered him so that within ten minutes he was pestering Johnny to go buy them a fresh jug of whiskey from the Mexican peddler.

  "I can't be getting too drunk, I got all this packing to do," Johnny protested, but Gus shrugged his protest off.

  "You just buy the whiskey," he instructed.

  "I'll do the getting drunk."

  A storm blew up during the night, with slashing rain and wind and thunder. Shadrach and Bigfoot paid the weather no attention--they set a fast pace, and didn't stop. In the dark, Call grew fearful of falling behind and being lost. They cut through several clumps of live oak and scrub--he was afraid he and his little bay would fight themselves out of a thicket, only to find themselves alone. He stayed as close to the rump of the horse in front of him as he could. He didn't want to get lost on his first Indian chase. The party consisted of fifteen men, many of whom he didn't know. Call would have thought it would be easy to keep fifteen riders in sight, but he hadn't counted on the difficulties posed by rain and darkness. At times, he couldn't see his own horse's head--he had to proceed on sense, like a night-hunting animal.

  It was a relief, when the smoky, foggy dawn came, to see that he was still with the troop. All the men were soaked, streams of water running from their hats or their hair. There was no stopping for breakfast. Shadrach peeled off, and ranged to the north of the troop. He was lost to sight for an hour or more, but when they came to the burned-out farm he was there, examining tracks.

  At first, Call saw no victims--he supposed the family had escaped. The cabin had been burned; though a few of the logs still smouldered. The area around the cabin was a litter, most of it muddy now. There were clothes and kitchen goods, broken chairs, a muddy Bible, a few bottles. The corn-shuck mattresses had been ripped open, and the corn shucks scattered in the mud.

  Bigfoot dismounted, and stepped inside the shell of the cabin for a moment--then he stepped out.

  "Where are they?" he asked Shadrach, who looked up briefly and pointed to the nearby cornfield.

  "Call, gather up them wet sheets," Bigfoot said. Several muddy sheets were amid the litter.

  "Why?" Call asked, puzzled.

  "To wrap them in--why else?" Bigfoot said, swinging back on his horse.

  The woman lay between two corn rows, six arrows in her chest, her belly ripped up. The man had been hacked down near a little rock fence --when they ripped his scalp off, a long tear of skin had come loose with the scalp, running down the man's back. A boy of about ten had three arrows in him, and had had his head smashed in with a large rock. A younger boy, six or seven maybe, had a big wound in his back.

  "Lanced him," Bigfoot said. "I thought there was a young girl here." "They took her," Shadrach informed him. "They took the mule, too. I expect that's what she's riding." Call felt trembly, but he didn't throw up. He noticed Bigfoot and Shadrach watching him, from the edge of the cornfield. Though they had all expected carnage, most of them had not been prepared for the swollen, ripped-open bodies--the smashed head, the torn stomach.

  "Roll them in the sheets, best you can," Bigfoot told him. "When you get to the woman, just break them arrows off. They're in too deep to pull out." Shadrach walked over and squatted by the dead woman for a moment--he seemed to be studying the arrows. Then he tugged gently at an arrow in the center of the woman's breastbone.

  "This one's gone clean through, into the ground," he said. "This is Buffalo Hump's arrow." "How do you know that?" Call asked.

  Shadrach showed him the feathers at the end of the arrow.

  "Them's from a prairie chicken," he said.

  "He always feathers his arrows with prairie chicken.

  He stood over her and shot that arrow clean through her breastbone." Bigfoot came over and looked at the arrow, too. The woman's body didn't budge. It was as if it were nailed to the ground. It was a small, skinny arrow, the shaft a little bent.

  Call tried to imagine the force it would take to send a thin piece of wood through a woman's body and into the dirt. Several of the new men came over and stood in silence near the body of the woman. One or two of them glanced at the body briefly, then walked away. Several of them gripped their weapons so hard their knuckles were white. Call remembered that it had been that way beyond the Pecos--men squeezing their guns so hard their knuckles turned white. They were scared: they had ridden out of Austin into a world where the rules were not white rules, where torture and mutilation awaited the weak and the unwary, the slow, the young.

  Bigfoot rode off with Shadrach to study the trail, leaving Call to wrap the four bodies in the muddy sheets. From the center of the cornfield the little cabin, now just a shell, its logs still smouldering, seemed small and sad to Call. The little family had built it, with much labor, in the clearing, sheltered in it, worked and planted their crops. Then, in an hour or less, it was all destroyed: four of them dead, one girl captured, the cabin burnt. Even the milk cow was dead, shot full of arrows. The cow was bloated now, its legs sticking up in the air.

  Call did his best with the bodies, but when it came to the woman, he had to ask Blackie Slidell for help. Blackie had to take her feet and Call her arms before they could pull her free, so deep was Buffalo Hump's arrow in the ground. Call had butchered several goats and a sheep or two, when he worked for Jesus--the woman he was trying to wrap in a wet, mouldy sheet had been butchered, just like a sheep.

  "Lord, I hope we can whip 'em if we catch up to them," Blackie said, in a shaky voice. "I don't want one of them devils catching me." Long Bill came over and helped Call with the graves. "I'll help--I'd rather be working than thinking," he said.

  They scooped out four shallow graves, rolled the bodies in them, and covered them with rocks from the little rock fence the family had been building.

  "They won't need no fence now," Rip Green observed. "All that work, and now they're dead." Before they had quite finished the burying, Bigfoot and Shadrach came loping back. Bigfoot had the body of a dead girl across his horse.

  "Here's the last one--bury her," Bigfoot said, easing the body down to Call. "The mule went lame a few miles from here. I guess they didn't have no horse to spare for this girl. They brained her and shot the mule." A little later, as the troop was riding north, they passed the dead mule. A big piece had been cut out of its haunch.

  "Shadrach done that," Bigfoot said. "He says the game's poorly this year, and it was a fat mule." They rode north all day, into a broken country of limestone hills. It rained intermittently, the clouds low. In the distance, some of the clouds rested on the low hills, like caps.

  Now and again Shadrach or Bigfoot rode off in one direction or another, but never fo
r long. In the afternoon, they stopped and cooked the mule meat.

  Shadrach cut the haunch into little strips and gave each man one, to cook as preferred. Call stuck his on a stick and held it over the fire until it was black. He had never planned to eat mule and didn't expect to like the taste, but to his surprise the meat was succulent--it tasted fine.

  "When will we catch 'em?" he asked Bigfoot at one point. They had not seen a trace of the Comanches--yet for all he knew, they were close, in one of the rocky valleys between the hills. Several times, as they rode north, he kept his eyes to the ground, trying to make out the track that the troop was following. But all he saw was the ground. He would have liked to know what clues the two scouts picked up to guide the chase, but no one offered to inform him. He was reluctant to ask--it made him seem too ignorant. But in fact he was ignorant, and not happy about it. At least Shadrach had taught him how to identify Buffalo Hump's arrow--he thought he could recognize the feathers again, if he saw them. That was the only piece of instruction to come his way, though.

  When he asked Bigfoot when he thought they would catch up with the Comanches, Bigfoot looked thoughtful for a moment.

  "We won't catch them," he said.

  Call was puzzled. If the Rangers weren't going to catch the enemy, why were they pursuing them at all?

  Bigfoot's manner did not invite more questions.

  He had been eager, back on the Rio Grande, to talk about the finer points of suicide, but when it came to their pursuit of the Comanche raiding party, he was not forthcoming. Call rode on in silence for a few miles, and then tried again.

  "If we ain't going to catch them, why are we chasing them?" he asked.

  "Oh, I just meant we can't outrun them," Bigfoot said. "They can travel faster than we can. But we might catch 'em anyway." "How?" Call asked, confused.

  "There's only one way to catch an Indian, which is to wait for him to stop," Bigfoot said. "Once they get across the Brazos they'll feel a little safer. They might stop." "And then we'll kill them?" Call said--he thought he understood now.

  "Then we'll try," Bigfoot said.

  To Gus's dismay, the order to move out of Austin came at three in the morning. Captain Falconer rode through the camps on a snorting, prancing horse, telling the men to get their gear.

  "Colonel Cobb's ready," he informed them.

  "No lingering. We'll be leaving town at dawn." "Dern, it's the middle of the night," Johnny Carthage said. Though he had been provided with two mules and a heavy cart, he had as yet totally neglected his instructions in regard to packing. Instead, he and Gus had got drunk.

  Nothing was packed, and it was raining and pitch dark.

  Gus's preparations for the grand expedition to Santa Fe consisted in dragging himself, his guns, and a blanket into the heavy cart. Then he huddled in the cart, so drunk that he was not much bothered by the fact that Johnny Carthage was pitching every object he could get his hands on in on top of him. The cooking pots, the extra saddlery, blankets and guns, ropes and boxes of medicines, were all heaped in the cart, with little care taken as to placement.

  "Why do we have to leave in the middle of the night?" Gus asked, several times--but Johnny Carthage was muttering and coughing; he made no reply. He had an old lantern, and was searching all around the large area of the camp, well aware that he would be blamed if he left anything behind.

  But with only one eye and a gimpy leg, and with Gus too crippled and too drunk to help, gathering up the belongings of the whole troop on a dark, rainy night was chancy work.

  At some point well before dawn, Quartermaster Brognoli made a tour of the area, to see that the fifteen or twenty different groups of free-ranging adventurers, many of them merchants or would-be merchants, were making adequate progress toward departure. Gus stuck his head out from under a dripping blanket long enough to talk to him a minute.

  "Why leave when it's dark?" he asked. "Why not wait for sunup?" Brognoli had taken a liking to the tall boy from Tennessee. He was green but friendly, and he moved quick. Years of trying to get soldiers on the move had given Brognoli a distaste for slow people.

  "Colonel Cobb don't care for light nor dark," he informed Gus. "He don't care for the time of day or the month or the year. When he decides to go, we go." "But three in the morning's an odd time to start an expedition," Gus pointed out.

  "No, it's regular enough," Brognoli said.

  "If we start pushing out about three the stragglers will clear Austin by six or seven. Colonel Cobb left an hour ago. We're going to stop at Bushy Creek for breakfast, so we better get moving. If we ain't there when the Colonel expects us, there won't be no breakfast." The mules were hitched, and the cart with all the Rangers' possessions in it was moving through the center of Austin when Gus McCrae suddenly remembered Clara Forsythe. More than thirty wagons, small herds of sheep and beef cattle, and over a hundred horsemen of all ages and degrees of ability were jostling for position in the crowded streets. Some of the mule skinners had lanterns, but most didn't. There were several collisions and much cursing. Once or twice, guns were fired. Occasional lightning lit the western sky--the faint grey of a cloudy dawn was just visible to the east.

  The reason Gus remembered Clara was that the little cart, driven by a wet, tired, apprehensive Johnny Carthage, happened to pass right in front of the general store. Gus suddenly recalled that the pretty young woman he had such a desire to marry had been meaning to come and rub liniment on his wounded ankle sometime during the day that was just dawning. He had been drinking for quite a few hours--most of the hours since he fell off the bluff, in fact--and had reached such a depth of drunkness that he had temporarily forgotten the most important fact of all: Clara, his future wife.

  "Stop, I got to see her!" he told Johnny, who was urging the mules through a sizable patch of mud, while at the same time trying to avoid colliding with the wagon containing the comatose General Lloyd. He knew it was General Lloyd's wagon because a kind of small tent had been erected in it so the General could be protected from the elements while he drank and snoozed.

  "What?" Johnny Carthage asked.

  "Stop, goddamn you--stop!" Gus demanded.

  "I've got business in the general store." "But it ain't open," Johnny protested.

  "If I stop now we'll never get out of this mud." "Stop or I'll strangle you, damn you!" Gus said. It was not a threat he had ever made before, but he was so desperate to see Clara that he felt he could carry it out. Johnny Carthage didn't hear it, though--one of the mules began to bray, just at that moment, and a rooster that had managed to get in General Lloyd's wagon was crowing loudly, too.

  The mud was thick--the cart was barely inching forward anyway, so Gus decided to just flop out of it. In his eagerness to get to Clara he forgot about his sore ankle, though only until the foot attached to it hit the ground. The pain that surged through him was so intense that he tried to flop forward, back into the cart, but the cart lurched ahead just as he did it, and he went facedown into the slick mud. The patch of mud was deep, too--Gus was up to his elbows in it, trying to struggle up onto his one good foot, when he thought he heard a peal of girlish laughter somewhere above him.

  "Look, Pa, it's Mr. McCrae--come to propose to me, I expect," Clara said.

  Gus looked up to see a white figure, standing at a window above the street. Although he knew he was muddy, his heart lifted at the thought that at least he had not missed Clara. It was her.

  She was laughing at him, but what did that matter?

  He looked up, wishing the sun would come out so he could see her better. But he knew it was her, from the sound of her voice and the fact that she was at a window above the store. The thought of her father seeing him in such a state was embarrassing--but in fact, there was no sign of the old man. Perhaps she was just joshing him--she did seem to love to josh.

  "Ain't you coming down?" he asked. "I've still got this sore foot." "Shucks, what kind of a Romeo would fall off a bluff and hurt his foot just when it's time to propose to J
uliet?" Clara asked.

  "You're supposed to sing me a song or two and then climb up here and beg me to marry you." "What?" Gus asked. He had no idea what the woman was talking about. Why would he try to climb up the side of the general store when all she would have to do was come down the stairs? He had seen the stairs himself, when he was in the store helping her unpack.

  "What, you ain't read Shakespeare--what was wrong with your schooling?" Clara asked.

  Gus's head had cleared a little. He had been so drunk that his vision swam when he got to his feet--or foot. He still held his sore ankle just above the mud. Now that he was upright he remembered that his sisters had been great admirers of the writer Shakespeare, though exactly what had occurred between Romeo and Juliet he could not remember.