Comanche Moon

by Larry McMurtry

  "What are you, Gus, Yank or Reb?" Lee Hitch asked, putting the question cautiously, as if afraid of the answer he might receive.

  "I'm a Texas Ranger with a good wife to bury, Lee," Gus said. "Will you go find Deets and Pea for me? I'd like to get them started on the grave." "We'll find them--we'll help too, Gus," Lee assured him.

  Call and Augustus walked briskly to the lots and caught their horses. It was a short walk to the Governor's office, but if they walked everybody they met would try to sound them out about the war, an intrusion they wanted to avoid.

  "Remember what Scull said, when he first told us war was coming?" Call asked.

  ""Brother against brother and father against son,"' that's what I remember," Augustus replied.

  "He was accurate too," Call said. "It's happened right here in the troop, and the news not an hour old." Augustus looked puzzled.

  "You mean there's Yankees in the company?" he asked.

  "Lee Hitch," Call said. "And Stove is a Reb." "My Lord, that's right," Augustus said.

  "Lee's from the North." Governor Clark stood by a window, looking out at the sunlit hills, when the two rangers were admitted to his office. He was a spare, solemn executive; no one could remember having heard him joke. He was patient, though, and dutiful to a fault. No piece of daily business was left unfinished; Gus and Call themselves had seen lamplight in the Governor's office well past midnight, as the Governor attended, paper by paper, to the tasks he had set himself for the day.

  In the streets, men, most of them Rebels, were rejoicing. All of them assumed that the imperious Yankees would soon be whipped. Governor Clark was not rejoicing.

  "Captain McCrae, how's your wife?" the Governor asked.

  "She just died, Governor," Gus said.

  "I would have excused you from this meeting, had I known that," Governor Clark said.

  "There would be no reason to, Governor," Gus said. "There's nothing I can do for Nellie now except get a deep grave dug." "If I had money to invest, which I don't, I'd invest it in mortuaries," the Governor said. "Ten thousand grave diggers won't be enough to bury the dead from this war, once it starts. There's a world of money to be made in the mortuary trade just now, and I expect the Yankees will make the most of it, damn them." "I guess that means you're a Reb, Governor," Gus said.

  "Up to today I've just been an American citizen, which is what I'd prefer to stay," Governor Clark said. "Now I doubt I'll have the luxury. Do you know your history, gentlemen?" There was a long silence. Call and Augustus both felt uneasy.

  "We're not studied men, Governor," Call admitted, eventually.

  "I'm so ignorant myself I hate to talk much," Augustus said. The remark annoyed Call--in private Augustus bragged about his extensive schooling, even claiming a sound knowledge of the Latin language. When Captain Scull was around, Augustus moderated his bragging, it being clear that Captain Scull .was extensively schooled.

  Augustus was not confident enough, though, to attempt a display of learning with Governor Clark looking at him severely.

  "Civil wars are the bloodiest, that's my point, gentlemen," the Governor said. "There was Cromwell. There were the French. People were torn apart in the streets of Paris." "Torn to bits, sir?" Gus asked.

  "Torn to bits and fed to dogs," the Governor said. "It was as bad or worse as what our friends the Comanches do." "Surely this will just be armies fighting, won't it?" Call asked. Though he had read most of his Napoleon book, there was nothing in it about people being torn to bits in the streets.

  "I hope so, Captain," the Governor said.

  "But it's war--in war you can't expect tea parties." "Who do you think will win, Governor?" Call asked. He had lived his whole life in Texas. The work of rangering had taken him to New Mexico and old Mexico and, a time or two, into Indian Territory; but of the rest of America he knew nothing. He did know that almost all their goods and equipment came from the North.

  He assumed it was a rich place, but he had no sense of it, nor, for that matter, much sense of the South. He had known or encountered men from most of the states--f Georgia and Alabama, from Tennessee and Kentucky and Missouri, from Pennsylvania and Virginia and Massachusetts--but he didn't know those places. He knew that the East had factories; but the nearest thing to a factory that he himself had ever seen was a lumber mill. He knew that the Southern boys, the Rebs, without exception assumed they could whip the Yankees-- rout them, in fact. But Captain Scull, whose opinion he respected, scorned the South and its soldiers. "Fops," he had called them.

  Call was not sure what a fop was, but Captain Scull had uttered the ^w with a sort of casual contempt, a scorn Call still remembered. Captain Scull seemed to feel himself equal to any number of Southern fops.

  "Nobody will win, but I expect the North will prevail," the Governor said. "But they won't win tomorrow, or next year either, and probably not the year after. Meanwhile we've still got settlers to defend and a border swarming with thieves." The Governor stopped talking and looked at the two men solemnly.

  "There won't be many men staying here, not if they're able-bodied, and not if the war lasts as long as I think it will," he said. "They'll be off looking for glory. Some of them will find it and most of the rest of them will die in the mud." "But the South will win, won't it, Governor?" Augustus asked. "I would hate to think the damn Yankees could whip us." "They might, sir--they might," the Governor said.

  "Half the people in Texas come from the Northern part of the country," Call observed. "Look at Lee Hitch. There's hundreds like him. Who do you think they'll fight for?" "There will be confusion such as none of us expected to have to live through," the Governor said.

  "That could have been prevented, but it wasn't, so now we'll have to suffer it." He paused and gave them another solemn inspection.

  "I want you to stay with the rangers, gentlemen," he said. "Texas has never needed you more. The people respect you and depend on you, and we're still a frontier state." Augustus let bitterness fill him, for a moment; bitterness and grief. He remembered the cheap dusty room Nellie had just died in.

  "If we're so respected, then the state ought to pay us better," he said. "We've been rangers a long time now and we're paid scarcely better than we were when we started out. My wife just died in a room scarcely fit for dogs." You could have afforded better if you'd been careful with your money, Call thought, but he didn't say it; in fact Augustus's criticism was true.

  Their salaries were only a little larger than they had been when they were raw beginners.

  "I wouldn't go to no war looking for glory," Gus said. "But I might go if the pay was good." "I take your point," the Governor said.

  "It's a scandal that you've been paid so poorly.

  I'll see that it's raised as soon as the legislature sits--if we still have a legislature when the smoke clears." There was a long pause--in the distance there was the sound of gunshots. The rowdies were still celebrating.

  "Will you stay, gentlemen?" the Governor asked. "The Comanches will soon find out about this war, and the Mexicans too. If they think the Texas Rangers have disbanded, they'll be at us from both directions, thick as fleas on a dog." Call realized that he and Augustus had not had a moment to discuss the future, or their prospects as soldiers, or anything. They had scarcely had a minute alone, since Nellie McCrae got sick.

  "I can't speak for Captain McCrae but I have no wish to desert my duties," Call said.

  "I have no quarrel with the Yankees, that I know of, and no desire to fight them." "Thank you, that's a big relief," the Governor said. "I recognize it's a poor time to ask, but what about you, Captain McCrae?" Augustus didn't answer--he felt resentful. From the moment, years before on the llano, when Inish Scull abruptly made him a captain, it seemed that, every minute, people had pressed him for decisions on a host of matters large and small. It might be trivial--someone might want to know which pack mules to pack--or it might be serious, like the question the Governor had just asked him. He was from Tennessee. If Tennessee were to join
the war, he might want to fight with the Tennesseeans; not having heard from home much in recent years, he was not entirely sure which side Tennessee would line up with. Now the Governor was wanting him to stay in Texas, but he wasn't ready to agree. He had lost two wives in Texas--not to mention Clara, who, in a way, made three. Why would he want to stay in a place where his luck with wives was so poor? His luck with cards hadn't been a great deal better, he reflected.

  "I assure you there'll be an improvement in the matter of salaries," the Governor said.

  "I'll raise you even if I have to pay you out of my own pocket until this crisis passes." "Let it pass--there'll just be another one right behind it," Augustus said, irritably. "It's just been one crisis after another, the whole time I've been rangering." Then he stood up--fed up. He felt he had to get outside or else choke.

  "I've got to get my wife decently buried, Governor," he said. "She won't keep, not with the weather this warm. I expect I'll stay with Woodrow and go on rangering, but I ain't sure. I just ain't sure, not right this minute. I agree with Woodrow--allyankees are still Americans, and I'm used to fighting Comanche Indians or else Mexicans." He paused a moment, remembering his family.

  "I've got two brothers, back in Tennessee," he added. "If my brothers was to fight with the Yankees, I wouldn't want to be shooting at them, I know that much." Governor Clark sighed.

  "Go home, Captain," he said. "Bury your wife. Then let me know what you decide." "All right, Governor," Augustus said.

  "I wish there was a good sheriff here. He ought to arrest those fools who are shooting off their guns in the street."

  Inish Scull--Hoppity Scull, as he was known in Boston, because he was still occasionally seized by involuntary fits of hopping; they might occur at a wedding or a dinner party or even while he was rowing, in which case he hopped into the chilly Charles--was walking across Harvard Yard, a copy of Newton's Opticks in his hand, when a student ran up to him with the news that war had been declared.

  "Why the Southern rascals!" Scull exclaimed, after hearing of the provocation that had occurred.

  His mind, though, was still on optics, where it had been much of the time since Ahumado had removed his eyelids. He had just spent three years making a close study of the eye, sight, light, and everything having to do with vision--Harvard had even been prompted to ask him to teach a course on optics, which is what he had been doing just before news of the Southern insurrection reached him. He was wearing his goggles, of course; even in the thinner light of Boston a chance ray of sunlight could cause him intense pain; the headaches, when they came, still blinded him for days. He was convinced, though, from his study of the musculature of the eye, that his experiment with the Swiss surgeon and the frog membrane need not have failed. He had been planning to go back to Switzerland, armed with new knowledge and also better membranes, to try again.

  But the news that the spindly student had brought him, once it soaked in, drove optics, in all their rich complexity, out of Inish Scull's mind. The excitement in Cambridge was general; even the streets of Boston, usually silent as a cemetery, rang with talk. Scull rarely walked home, but today he did, growing more excited with every step. He still had his commission in the army of the United States; the thought of battle made a sojourn in Switzerland seem pallid. He longed to lead men again, to see the breaths of cavalry horses condense in white clouds on cold mornings, to ride and curse and shoot under the old flag, Bible and sword.

  When he flung open the door of the great house on Beacon Hill, the house where he had been born and been raised, the sight that greeted him was one to arouse ardor, but not of a military kind.

  Inez Scull, entirely bored with Boston, was striding up and down the long, gloomy entrance hall, naked from the waist down, slashing at the Scull family portraits with a quirt.

  Lately she had begun to exhibit herself freely, mostly to shock the servants, good proper Boston servants all, very unused to having their mistress exhibit her parts in the drawing room or wherever she happened to be, and at all hours of the day, as well.

  Hearing the door open, Entwistle, the butler, appeared--old Ben Mickelson had been sent to the house in Maine, to dodder and tipple through the summer. Without giving Madame Scull so much as a glance, Entwistle took the master's coat.

  "So there, Inez, I hope you're satisfied," Inish said.

  "I'm very far from satisfied, the stable boy was hasty," Inez said, turning her red face toward him as she continued to quirt the portraits.

  "Entwistle, would you find a towel for Madame?" Scull said. "I fear she's dripping. She'll soil the Aubusson if she's not careful." "You Bostonians are so beggarly," Inez said. "It's just a rug." "Sack the stable boy, if you don't mind, Entwistle," Scull added. "He's managed to anger me while not quite pleasing Madame." Then he looked at his wife.

  "I wasn't talking about the success--or lack of it--of your amours, Inez, when I said I hoped you were satisfied," he informed her. "The fact is, your imbecile cousins have gotten us into a war." "The darlings, I'm so glad," Inez replied. "What did they do?" "They fired on us," Scull said. "The impertinent fools--they'll soon wish they hadn't." At that point Entwistle returned with a towel, which he handed to Madame Scull, who immediately flung it back in his face. Entwistle, unsurprised, picked up the towel and draped it over the banister near where Madame Scull stood.

  "Find that stable boy?" Scull asked.

  "No, he didn't, and he won't," Inez said, before Entwistle could answer.

  "Why's that, my dear?" Scull asked, noting that a whitish substance was still dripping copiously down his wife's leg. Happily, though, her quirtings had done little damage to the Scull portraits, which hung in imposing ranks along the hallway.

  "Because I've stowed him in a closet, where I mean to keep him until he proves his mettle," Inez said.

  "I should shoot you on the spot, you Oglethorpe slut," Scull said. "No Boston jury would convict me." "What, because I had a tumble with the stable boy, you think that's grounds for murder?" Inez asked, coming at him with menace in her eyes.

  "No, of course not," he said. "I'd do it because you embarrassed Entwistle. You don't embarrass butlers, not here in our Boston." "My cousins will soon put you to rout, you damn Yankee hounds," Inez said, starting up the stairs.

  "Hickling Prescott suspects you of Oglethorpe blood--did you hear me, you dank slut?" Inish yelled after her.

  Inez Scull did not reply.

  Before he could say more he was taken with a fit of hopping. He was almost to the kitchen before Entwistle and the parlor maids could get him stopped.

  Maggie considered it a happy turnabout that she now had a position in the store that had once been the Forsythes'. She did the very jobs that Clara had once done: unpacking, arranging goods on the shelves, helping customers, writing up bills, wrapping the purchases that required wrapping.

  She thought often of Clara, and felt lucky to have, at last, a respectable job. Clara, she thought, would have understood and approved. The store's new owner, Mr. Sam Stewart, was from Ohio, and a newcomer to Austin. He knew little of Maggie's past, and what he knew he ignored.

  Fetching and competent clerks were not plentiful in Austin--Mrs. Sam Stewart was glad to accept the fiction that Maggie was a widow, and Newt the son of a Mr. Dobbs, killed by Indians while on a trip. Sam Stewart had a few irregularities in his past himself and was not disposed either to look too closely or to judge too harshly when Maggie applied for the job, though he did once mention to his formidable wife, Amanda Stewart, that Maggie's boy, Newt, then four, bore a strong resemblance to Captain Call.

  "I'd mind your own business, if I were you, Sam," Amanda informed him. "I'm sure Maggie's done the best she could. I'll nail your skin to the back door if you let Maggie go." "Who said anything about letting her go, Manda?" Sam asked. "I have no intention of letting her go." "Scoundrels like you often get churchly once they're safe from the hang rope," Amanda informed him. She said no more, but Sam Stewart went around for days wondering what s
keleton his wife thought she had uncovered now.

  It was while clerking in the store that Maggie made friends with Nellie McCrae. Nellie often came in to purchase little things for Gus, but rarely spent a penny on herself, though she was a fetching young woman whose beauty would have shone more brightly if she had allowed herself a ribbon, now and then, or a new frock.

  That Nellie was not strong had always been clear --once or twice she had become faint, while doing her modest shopping; Maggie had had to insist that she rest a bit on the sofa at the back of the store before going home.

  Then Nellie commenced dying, and was seen in the store no more. Maggie sorrowed for her and sat up all night rocking Newt, who had a cough, when news of the death came.

  She was dressing to go to the funeral when Graciela, the Mexican woman who watched Newt while Maggie worked, came hobbling in in terror--Graciela was convinced she had been bitten by a snake.

  "Was it a rattler?" Maggie asked, not without skepticism--the day seldom passed without nature striking some near-fatal blow at Graciela.