The Last Kind Words Saloon: A Novel

by Larry McMurtry

  “We could hum, Mr. Russell,” Mary said; and so they did, while Nellie Courtright danced alone.

  -38-

  Goodnight was impatient when the English-man on the mule showed up, wanting to see where Lord Ernle had gone off the cut bank. The sorting of the three herds had not gone well, which was only to be expected since there was some eight thousand cattle. Goodnight’s brand book was some help, but the other two cattlemen had lost theirs; besides which many of the original brands had been grown over or blurred.

  The sorting took more than ten days, and left none of the original owners fully satisfied.

  “Hazards of the business, I guess,” Russell said. “Force majeure, I suppose.”

  “No sir, it was bad planning on my part,” Goodnight said. “Next time I start I’ll be sure to have these damn plains to myself.”

  “I wonder what the longitude is,” Russell said, startling Goodnight.

  “Why would you care about the longitude?” Goodnight wondered. “Lord Ernle is dead, whatever the longitude.”

  Russell ignored the rebuke.

  “I want to compliment you on your excellent wife,” he added. “You don’t often see a woman that spirited this far out on the veldt.”

  “I heard you danced with her—what did you do for music?”

  “I whistled some and we hummed. A swallow or two of brandy was enough to limber us up,” Russell said.

  Goodnight looked at the man closely, trying to see them in his mind’s eye. He had only meant to be gone a week, but the sorting dragged on and was imperfect anyway.

  I better get home, he thought. Mary sounds mad.

  The Englishman pulled a large album out of his saddlebag and began to sketch.

  Why does the fellow bother, Goodnight thought. There’s nothing to see but a bleak bend of the Canadian River. But when he showed the sketch to Goodnight the cattleman was impressed.

  “Dern, you’ve got the gift, sir—you even got in that little hawk up there soaring.”

  “I like to have a record, even if I have to do the drawing myself,” Russell said.

  -39-

  Mary was a little huffy next time Charlie got home, but she cooked him a beefsteak anyway. Nellie Courtright had just gone home.

  “She made friends with Shanghai Pierce—Nellie could make friends with anybody,” Mary added.

  It was Charlie’s turn to get huffy.

  “Well, I don’t approve,” he said.

  “Don’t approve of what? Nellie needed to get home and Shanghai was going that way.”

  “I have a low opinion of Shanghai Pierce,” he said. For some reason it rankled him that Nellie had gone off with the man—a loudmouth and a braggart, in his opinion.

  “You have a low opinion of everybody, Charlie,” Mary said. “Except Bose: he’s the only one that qualifies.”

  “No, you qualify,” he said. “Would I have married someone I didn’t approve of?”

  “It’s not a question I can answer,” Mary said. “I’ve often wondered why you married me—and I wonder even more why I married you.”

  He looked across the table and saw San Saba smiling. She said little, but Mary had already told him that she had been a big help with school, and several cowboys mentioned that she had also improved the mustangs. It seemed to him that he and Mary were accumulating a pretty unusual household, but so far it wasn’t a bad thing.

  At the moment he couldn’t get his mind off Nellie Courtright, whose husband Zenas was somewhere in the South Seas. There was no knowing if Zenas was even alive, or if he would come back—meanwhile there was Nellie, a comely woman if there ever was one.

  Goodnight considered Nellie to be both impudent and rash, like all women, and yet he thought of her often: more often, probably, than he spent thinking about his own admirable wife, who certainly paid close attention to his behavior. He considered himself a man of certainties. He meant to speak to Mary about her constant scrutiny but every time he got ready to say something Mary got some comment in first. It made him wonder why he talked to Mary at all, since in most conversations he came away feeling like a fool.

  Later, while they were eating cobbler San Saba made with some peaches she found somewhere, Mary suddenly guffawed.

  “Why, I’ve got it: this big oaf has got the sweets for Nellie. Think he’ll run off with her, folks?”

  The table consisted of herself, Charlie, San Saba, Flo, and Caddo Jake, who came by to give Mary some fossils he had found. His was a fragrant presence thanks to the skunks, but Mary liked the old man and never sent him away.

  “Company’s too scarce out here on the baldies,” Mary said. “I can’t afford to be picky.”

  Caddo Jake took no interest in the Goodnights’ domestic life, and neither did San Saba and Flo.

  “You couldn’t talk such bosh in front of the company,” Charlie told Mary. “I have known Nellie Courtright a damn long time and I take some interest in her welfare, that’s all, and traveling with Shanghai Pierce is risky at best.”

  Mary was smiling to herself, a habit he deplored. If something was funny why not speak out? And if it wasn’t funny, why not keep quiet?

  Caddo Jake soon nodded off; Mary passed the cobbler to Charlie, who always liked peaches. He awarded himself a goodly serving.

  The west wind blew through the ruin of Lord Ernle’s great house. It was picking up force and Mary felt it and felt a moment’s alarm. A huge red sun was sinking in the west: then the sun vanished and darkness came.

  Goodnight had been on the plains in all weathers but had never seen the sun go so quickly.

  Caddo Jake snapped awake and looked to the west.

  “Sand,” he said, and that was all he said.

  -40-

  The sand came like a wall—a moving wall one hundred feet high. Seeing it come, Jessie felt an overpowering fear. They were in a train just west of Deming, New Mexico, which was not much of a town. Wyatt and Doc had spent most of the night in saloons there and she had stayed with them out of fear. There was a parrot and the parrot kept saying Joe. Wyatt didn’t like her staying in bars unless she was working and she wasn’t working. They were on their way to Arizona, where he promised her she could get a job tending bar.

  Now Wyatt and Doc were looking at the wall of sand with amazement: so were the few passengers on the train.

  “My lord, what’s that?” Doc said: he was startled but not particularly alarmed. Neither was Wyatt alarmed, though the wall of sand dwarfed the train.

  “What do you think, Doc? Can a wall of sand push over a train?”

  “Hope not,” Doc said, and then pitch darkness came.

  “Hope not too,” Wyatt said. Jessie buried her face in Wyatt’s chest. Suddenly it was pitch dark. Sand began to seep into the car through the doors and windows. Jessie began to feel grit on her teeth. The door to the car they were in didn’t fit quite snug. Big tumbleweeds blowing from the north began to smack into the wall, which annoyed Doc.

  “Jessie’s upset,” Wyatt said. “She’s shaking like a leaf, and she ain’t a leaf.”

  He was just remembering how aggravating it was to travel with a woman, particularly Jessie.

  And when Jessie wasn’t scared she was mad.

  “We’re in a pickle, we’re in a pickle,” he said, three or four times. Only a minute before the moon had been shining brightly. He stood at the back of the train, smoking a cheroot. For some reason Jessie didn’t like the smell of tobacco—even fine tobacco—so when it wasn’t chilly he went outside to smoke. Now it was blowing so hard he didn’t dare step out. He might blow right off the train and be lost in New Mexico—if they were still even in New Mexico.

  One windowpane was broken in their car and the sand poured in as if it were being pumped.

  “Hush, goddamnit,” Wyatt said.

  “It won’t kill us. It’ll blow over directly.”

  “What if it doesn’t?” Jessie said. “What if God sent it to punish us for our sins.”

  The comment struck D
oc as funny. He slapped his leg and laughed, which brought him a glare from Wyatt, although he didn’t see it. Wyatt’s sense of humor was limited at times.

  Then the car began to rock from the force of the wind. It would rock and settle back, rock and settle back.

  In Doc’s memory no railroad car had ever rocked that way.

  They had brought no horses. If the train blew over they would have to make it about thirty miles back to Deming, New Mexico. It would be a hard straggle.

  Then a whole window blew in and sand followed until they were up to their knees in it. Jessie sobbed hopelessly.

  “I would never have considered Arizona if I had known it was going to be so goddamn dusty,” Wyatt said.

  Jessie began to pray to the saints. “Oh, Saint Michael,” she praised. “Oh, Saint George.”

  “A woman who just keeps talking when the menfolks would rather have quiet is a woman who’s asking for trouble,” Wyatt said.

  It angered Jessie slightly. She reached in her bag and came out with a pocketknife, which she opened with her teeth, and pointed it at Wyatt, who had just managed to get a lantern lit. He didn’t like the look in Jessie’s eye.

  “What were you going to do, Wyatt, cut my throat?” she asked. Her eyes flashed in a way that Wyatt didn’t like.

  “I merely meant to shake you, put away that knife,” Wyatt said. If the knife impressed him he didn’t show it.

  “You may not mean business but I do,” Jessie said. “You oughtn’t to have brought me to a place this terrible.”

  “You don’t know,” he said. “This train might be headed straight to paradise.”

  Jessie stood her ground, the hot look in her eye.

  “Put that darn knife down before I’m forced to shoot you,” Wyatt said.

  Wyatt didn’t shoot her.

  After a time he went to the back of the car and lit a cheroot.

  -41-

  “The children just like the guts,” Quanah said. He sat next to Goodnight, watching the butchery going on below them. In the great sandstorm that no plains person would ever forget, Goodnight’s herd had run before it so near the Palo Duro rim that eighteen animals had been pushed off a cutback to their doom. All of them broke at least one limb. These Goodnight shot and the Indian children were pulling out the guts and eating them like candy. Occasionally an aggressive dog would snatch a piece. Several old Comanche women were cutting out the sweetbreads, while others set up poles on which to dry the meat.

  “It’s not only Englishmen who can run off cliffs,” Goodnight said. “We’re about one hundred miles from your reservation. How did you happen to hear about it so quick?”

  “The birds told us, and the wolves—especially the wolves,” Quanah said. “There’s two of them right now.”

  Sure enough, two lobo wolves were watching the operation.

  “They hope to get the bones,” Quanah explained.

  “I’ve seen wolves before,” Goodnight said. “What did you do when the big sandstorm hit?”

  “Went to a cellar,” Quanah said. “All but one woman, and that one was pretty dusty. We found her in a ditch when morning came.”

  “Surely this mansion had a cellar,” he added.

  “Nope, but I aim to start digging one tomorrow,” he said, swinging in the saddle.

  “Thank you for the beef,” Quanah said.

  “A dead beef animal is no use to me,” Goodnight said. “The lesson here if there is one is that I need to do my ranching on the flatland prairie. No dern cutbacks.”

  “I’m glad you and I didn’t have to fight. I can beat most white men, but you’re quick.”

  “I hear you once could have taken Mackenzie’s scalp,” Goodnight replied, referring to the brilliant young cavalry officer who did more than any American soldier to break the Comanche power on the south plains.

  “Yes, at Blanco Canyon, before he learned how to fight us,” Quanah said. “But he learned how to fight us and he fought us only too well.”

  “So why’d you spare him, Quanah?”

  Quanah shrugged.

  “For no reason,” he said. “Sometimes I just do things like that. Then, later on, he beat us good, and he even beat Dull Knife too.”

  Goodnight watched the Indian children eating gut.

  “You went in but you didn’t always stay in,” Goodnight said. “I’d still like to know how you found out about these eighteen beeves.”

  “Just gossip,” Quanah said. “Caddo Jake knew about it.”

  “They say Mackenzie went crazy the night before his wedding and he died in New York in an asylum,” Goodnight said.

  “Yes, we fought him too hard,” Quanah said.

  “I rarely talk this much in a week,” Goodnight said, and rode away.

  -42-

  When Goodnight was out of sight one of the old Comanche women who was drying beef began to badger Quanah. Her name was Crow Talks and she talked as much as any crow. Her incessant chatter annoyed most warriors but Quanah indulged her and didn’t beat her. The main reason for his forebearance was that she had been a friend of his mother, Cynthia Ann. He had a hunger for news of his mother, even though she was dead.

  Crow Talks knew of his longing and told him many stories, including some that weren’t true.

  “Goodnight was there when the whites took your mother back,” Crow Talks said.

  “Yes . . . you tell me that every time I see you,” he said.

  “You should have killed him,” she said.

  “If I had, whose beef would we be eating now?”

  “Nobody’s beef,” he added. Sometimes he answered his own questions.

  “There are lots of stories now about the old days . . . the time of the People,” the old woman said. “I’m a forgetful old woman . . . myself. I have never been quite sure what happened to your father, Peta.”

  “Peta was wounded in the Palo Duro fight, when Mackenzie beat us,” Quanah said, wondering why he bothered to talk to this pesky old woman. Maybe it was because he liked to be reminded of the years of the Comanche glory, when the People were lords of the plain—then they could go anywhere, kill anybody, torture and scalp.

  “I was not in that battle,” Crow Talks said.

  “No woman was in that battle,” he reminded her, with a sharp look.

  “Peta was good to your mother,” she said, thinking it might be time to change the subject.

  Quanah had been with his father as the wound from Mackenzie’s soldiers festered and pulled Peta away.

  They were picking wild plums on the Canadian River when it happened. Eight warriors sang over him as he died.

  Peta had been their leader; at his death Quanah became the leader. Not all Comanches were pleased with that, but none challenged him, not even Isatai, the medicine man who had failed so badly when, for a second time, they tried to drive the buffalo hunters out of the old trading post called Adobe Walls. The whites had attacked there once before, led by the great Kit Carson, but the People had been strong then and Carson had barely escaped with his life.

  In the second battle, when Isatai assured them that his magic was unbeatable, it had not proved as unbeatable as the big .50 caliber Spencer rifles, guns that could kill at a mile’s distance. Isatai lost his power then. He tried to blame his defeat on a skunk, but all the warriors knew it was caused by those Spencer rifles.

  Crow Talks started in on something but Quanah cut her off.

  “I don’t want that beef to spoil,” he said. “Go back to your work.”

  -43-

  Wyatt, Doc, and Jessie entered Arizona by way of Lordsburg, New Mexico. The sandstorm that cost Charles Goodnight eighteen cattle also gummed up several cars on the Southern Pacific Railroad.

  The coach that finally carried them west also contained a fat woman with three howling brats and a Frenchman who spoke no English.

  Naturally the coach rattled and bounced. Doc picked up a toothache and Jessie grew queasy from the uneven progress. Wyatt was merely bored.

&nb
sp; “I didn’t bargain for cactus,” Jessie said.

  “Well, you got some, bargain or not,” Wyatt replied. He tried to remember a time when Jessie had sounded friendly, but he couldn’t think of one.

  “I hope I don’t have to pull my own tooth,” Doc said. “What a tragedy that would be.”

  Just at that moment the fat woman came out with a scream.

  “I seen an Indian,” she said. Her three brats howled with her.

  Wyatt glanced out the window and sure enough there was an Indian, a short brown man with a Winchester standing by a yucca that was taller than himself.

  “She’s right,” Wyatt informed the company. “There’s an Indian fellow out by that yucca.”

  “I don’t suppose a naked savage would be able to afford dental work,” Doc said.

  He had a strong urge to throw the three howling brats out the window, but refrained.

  “I wonder if Virg and Warren have got their saloon open yet,” Wyatt mentioned. “I would welcome a few swallows of whiskey.”

  “You promised me I could bartend,” Jessie reminded him. “It’s my main pleasure.”

  “You can bartend if there’s a bar,” Wyatt assured her. “I’ll be the bouncer, if one’s needed.”

  “Unless we get scalped in the next few miles,” he added.

  “What’s that?” Doc asked. “I was reliably informed that all the wild Indians had run off to Mexico.”

  “You may not be as reliably informed as you like to think,” Wyatt said. “The one I just saw wasn’t in Mexico. For all I know it was Geronimo himself. He was carrying a Winchester rifle, which is an expensive gun.”

  Ahead they saw a cluster of shacks, which seemed to be all the Arizona towns consisted of. Jessie was getting the feeling that she had made a mistake leaving Kansas City.

  “That’s probably Tombstone,” Wyatt said.

  But it wasn’t. It was Douglas, a town on the border. But any chance to stretch their legs was welcome. No sooner had the three brats hit the ground than they took off running, at which point their mother started praying to the angels. Then one of the engineers began to beat on another.