LEAVING
CHEYENNE
LARRY
McMURTRY
To Jo, for her gallantry and her integrity, with my love
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1962, 1963 by Larry McMurtry
Copyright renewed © 1990, 1991 by Larry McMurtry
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
First Simon & Schuster paperback edition 2004
Published by arrangement with the author
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please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales:
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Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
ISBN-13: 978-0-684-85387-1
ISBN-10: 0-684-85387-6
eISBN-13: 978-1-451-60777-2
A portion of Leaving Cheyenne appeared as a short story in Stanford Short Stories 1962, edited by Wallace Stegner and Richard Scowcroft.
My foot’s in the stirrup,
My pony won’t stand;
Goodbye, old partner,
I’m leaving Cheyenne.
The Cheyenne of this book is that part of the cowboy’s day’s circle which is earliest and best: his blood’s country and his heart’s pastureland.
L. M.
South of my days’ circle, part of my blood’s country, rises that tableland … clean, lean,
hungry country. …
I know it dark against the stars, the high lean country,
full of old stories that still go walking in my sleep.
JUDITH WRIGHT from South of My Days
THE BLOOD’S COUNTRY I
one
When I woke up Dad was standing by the bed shaking my foot. I opened my eyes, but he never stopped shaking it. He shook it like it was a fence post and he was testing it to see if it was in the ground solid enough. All my life that’s the way he’d wake me up—I hated it like poison. Once I offered to set a glass of water by the bed, so he could pour that over me in the mornings and wake me up, but Dad wouldn’t do it. I set the water out for him six or seven times, and he just let it sit and shook my foot anyway. Sometimes though, if he was thirsty, he’d drink the water first.
“Get up from there,” he said. “If you’re big enough to vote, you don’t need to sleep past daylight. You do the chores today. I’m gonna trot off down in the pasture and look around. One of them scrawny heifers might have calved, for all I know.”
And off he went, as usual. The last time Dad done the chores was when I was twelve years old, and the only reason he done them then was because I had let the ax slip and cut my foot nearly off. I never did know what he done down in the pasture every morning; by the time I could get the horses fed and the milking done, he’d be back.
For once though I was kinda glad he woke me up. It was election day, and my sly friend Johnny had worked it around somehow so that he and Molly got to watch the ballot box during the first shift. There was supposed to be at least two people to a shift. What he figured was that nobody would be there to vote till after dinner, so he could do a little courting with Molly on the government’s time. Only I didn’t intend to let him get away with it. I never liked to see a man cheat on the government.
I done the chores a little too quick. By six-thirty I didn’t have a thing left to do, and I knew there wasn’t any use getting to the schoolhouse before about eight o’clock. It was just over on Idiot Ridge, about a ten-minute ride. If there’s one thing I can’t do at all, it’s wait. So I got a rag and polished the saddle a little, and that was a mistake. It was a pleasure to polish a saddle like that; the mistake was that Dad walked in and caught me.
“You needn’t jump,” he said. “And you needn’t try to hide it. I found it day before yesterday anyhow. It’s a nice saddle. Why ain’t you been using it?”
I had put the saddle under a tarp, way back in the dark end of an empty oatbin. But you couldn’t hide nothing from Dad.
“Because it ain’t mine,” I said.
“Hell it ain’t,” he said, a little surprised. “What’d you do, steal it?”
“You aggravate the piss out of me,” I said. “I never stole a penny in my life, and you know it.”
“Plenty’s waited longer than you to start. Whose is it then?”
“Didn’t you see the name plate?” I said. “It’s sterling silver, looks like you’d have noticed it. I had this saddle made for Johnny, and I just haven’t got around to giving it to him yet.”
For once Dad was flabbergasted. I knew he would be, but I didn’t see no sense in lying to him.
“Giving it to him?” he said. “You’re giving a hundred-and-fifty-dollar saddle to a thirty-dollar-a-month cowboy. That wouldn’t make sense to a crazy man. And it sure don’t to me.”
“Well, I can’t help it, Dad,” I said. “Johnny did me a big favor, which I ain’t at liberty to talk about. Nobody ever did me that much favor before, and I may live to be older than you without nobody doing me that much favor agin. Johnny never owned a quality piece of equipment his whole life. I had the money and I just thought I’d get him something he could use. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Dad had real black eyes, and when he wanted to look fierce he didn’t look it halfway. He looked fierce then.
“Giving a saddle like that to a McCloud is like pinning a diamond stud pin on a goat’s ass,” he said. “Favor or no favor. And besides, whatever money you had come from me.”
“Johnny ain’t sorry,” I said. “Being poor don’t make him no-count. I worked plenty hard for the money I spent on this saddle, and if you think I’m overpaid, hire you another hand.”
“Settle down,” he said. “I ain’t gonna whip you, you’re too old. Let’s go outside. You can polish his saddle some other time.”
We went out and stood by the water trough and looked at the cattle grazing down in the Field pasture, just this side of the River. I washed the saddlesoap off my hands.
“Ain’t this a good ranch?” Dad said. “I put a lot of work and a lot of years into it, but by god I’ve got it all back in money and satisfaction.”
“Go on and bawl me out,” I said. “I’ve got some pretty urgent business to get to this morning.”
“You sure have,” he said. “You’ve got to rush over to the schoolhouse and see if you can keep your good friend Johnny from getting in Miss Molly’s pants. If you can keep him out, you figure you’ll eventually get in. Well, suppose you just sit here and listen about five minutes. You might learn something.”
“I don’t like the way you talk about my friends,” I said.
“Pity,” he said. “I’m gonna have to leave this ranch to you some day; now I want you to get to taking that serious. I ain’t mad about the saddle. But you took off and left, right in the middle of the calving season. You never gave me no warning or nothing, and you took that McCloud kid with you. And you’ve never said one word to me about where you’ve been or why. That don’t add up to very sensible behavior, and I ain’t too happy about leaving this ranch to somebody who ain’t sensible, I don’t care what kin he is
to me.”
“Well, I’m sorry as I can be, and you know it,” I said. “But there ain’t nothing I can tell you about that. I just had to leave.”
He set there and looked off down the pasture. Dad was getting quite a bit of age on him.
“Nobody ever did me favor enough in my entire life for me to waste two hundred dollars on them,” he said. “I guess by the time I’m dead ten years you’ll have thrown away what I spent fifty years making. Old age is a worthless damn thing.”
“Oh, hush,” I said. “By the time I’ve run this ranch for ten years it’s liable to be twice the size it is now.”
“Yeah and I’m liable to flap my arms and take off from here and fly like a buzzard any minute now,” he said. “That sure is a good saddle. I’ll tell you one thing, Johnny McCloud ain’t no favorite of mine.”
“Well, you ain’t no favorite of his either, that I know of,” I said. I went and put the tarp back over the saddle, and Dad went up to the house to eat.
Of course things never worked like I planned. Dad had found a sick yearling that morning, but he never took time to doctor it himself, so I had to catch a horse and go hunt it up and doctor it before I could go to the voting place. It was after nine o’clock when I got there, and Johnny and Molly had been there since eight. I hated it so bad I could taste it.
They were sitting on the schoolhouse steps when I loped up. She was letting Johnny hold her hand, and they were both grinning. Oh me, Molly looked pretty. She had on a blue and white polka-dot dress, and her long black hair was whipping around in the wind. There wasn’t another soul around. Johnny was looking wild and reckless, so no telling what had went on. Molly was just a sucker when it come to Johnny.
“Look who’s here,” he said. “What happened, you ain’t but an hour early? Where’s your friend Ikey?”
“I been working,” I said. “Hello, Molly.” I knew he’d bring Ikey up, but I didn’t intend to talk about it. Ikey was a nigger, but he was a nigger that could vote, and he was supposed to be partners with me to watch the voting box. Molly had already promised she would stay awhile with me after Johnny’s shift was up, so what I had to do was figure out a way to get rid of Ikey quick. Johnny knew just what I was up to, of course, but it wasn’t gonna do him any good.
“Get down,” Molly said. She grinned at me, as sweet as ever, but Johnny still had ahold of her hand, and she never made him turn loose.
I couldn’t think of too much to say, so I took my horse over and tied him to a mesquite. I went in and was going to vote, but they had been so busy spooning around they hadn’t even unpacked the ballots, and I had to do it. I never voted though, I forgot about it. I don’t think I voted in that election at all. Molly had finally got her hand loose, and when she stood up we all went over to the cistern and got a drink.
“What’s that I smell on you, Gid?” Johnny said. “Smells like screwworm dope. You ought to taken a bath before you come to work for the government.”
“You don’t smell like no prairie flower yourself,” I said. “Been trapping any skunks lately?” When Johnny was just a boy the McClouds had had to sell skunk hides to keep going. They wasn’t the only ones, of course, but Johnny hated skunks worse than anything. His folks had finally got better off, but they still just had a little two-section place.
“Not lately,” he said, but it kinda irritated him.
Molly, she never taken sides when me and Johnny argued. She would just stand there and grin her pretty, friendly grin, and curl a loop of her hair around one finger. She was pretty as a picture when she done that.
It didn’t seem like I’d been there no time when Ikey come. He had an old brown mule that was about half-crippled; he rode the mule bareback wherever he went. We seen Ikey coming and Johnny began to grin. He always had some trick to play on Ikey, and most of them were funny.
“Looky there,” he said. “Here he comes, riding that three-legged mule. I tell you what, Gid, some day let’s saw that crippled leg off. That way it won’t drag and slow Ikey down.”
“You hush that,” Molly said. “How’d you like to have one of your legs sawed off?”
“I might like it,” he said. “You want to saw one off for me?”
“That’s no way to talk. Make him hush, Gid.” She sidled over toward me just a little bit.
Johnny just looked that much more devilish.
“What he needs is his damn head sawed off,” I said. “That’s the only kind of sawing that would do him any good.”
Ikey arrived about then, and got off his mule. “Good mornin’, Mis’ Molly,” he said. “Mornin’, Mistuh Johnny, mornin’, Mistuh Gid.” The thing that worried me about Ikey was that he was so proud of being good enough to watch a ballot box like the white folks that he probably wasn’t going to be in too big a hurry to leave. But I figured I could persuade him.
“Morning, Ikey,” Johnny said. “Whyn’t you shoot that pore old mule and put him out of his misery?”
I had to grin at that. Ikey was as surprised as if Johnny had asked him to shoot his wife. He thought he had one of the best mules in the country.
“Shoot dis mule?” he said, looking at it real close. “Den how’d I get aroun’?”
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Molly said. “He’s crazy. Come on in and vote, Ikey.”
I was all for that, so I went in and fixed him up a ballot. I thought if we made a big enough thing of him voting Ikey might be satisfied and go on home.
“Boy, this is a big election,” I said. “They say every vote is gonna be important. Think it over good, Ikey. Don’t be in too big a hurry.”
“Naw, don’t excite Ikey,” Johnny said. “He might stab himself with that pencil. It ain’t worth the trouble, Ikey. The man with the most money’s gonna get it anyway. It always turns out that way.”
“It don’t, do it?” Molly said. She never liked to hear anybody run down politics. I guess it was because her old man had been commissioner for our precinct one year; everybody criticized him so she had to take up for him twice as hard as she usually done. He was the most thieving commissioner there ever was, besides the most lazy, and Molly knew it. She just never would admit it, to herself or nobody else. Her daddy didn’t get elected because he was the man with the most money; he got elected because he was the man with the most whiskey to give away. There weren’t but twelve people in the precinct able to vote, and he gave ever one of them a jug of whiskey and still only won by one vote. The man that was running against him was too decent to vote for himself, and Old Man Taylor wasn’t, so he won it. Afterward he got hold of the ballots and found out who voted against him and went around and got his jugs back from those. I know that’s true, because one of the ones that voted against him was Dad, and the jug was damn sure all he got back. I guess Molly was the only person in the world who ever liked that old man.
Ikey, though, he never paid any attention to what we were saying to him. He was set up so he could just pay attention to one thing at a time, and right then he was paying attention to voting. He got out his spectacles that he was so proud of and polished them on his pants leg and put them on and adjusted them so he could see over them. It’s a damn cinch he couldn’t see through them. It would have been like looking through a pair of stovelids. After he got them set so they wouldn’t interfere with his vision, he began to read the ballot. That took so long that me and Johnny had to go off behind the schoolhouse to pee before he got through. We left Molly there to help Ikey read.
“You sneaky bastard,” I said, when we got out. “How long was you’all over here before I come?”
“Why, I’m ashamed of myself about that,” he said. “Don’t you think I’ve got a pretty girl, though?”
“I think Molly’s a pretty girl, all right,” I said, “but you ain’t got her by a long shot. Why don’t you take after Mabel Peters, anyway?”
“Why, Mabel’s crazy about you,” he said. “Watch where you’re pissing. You get it on these gabardine pants and your name’s mud. I
mean it.”
Actually I just splattered a little on his boots. “It’s about time you were going home, ain’t it?”
“Why, yes,” he said. “I’ll go get Molly.”
He went, but he never got her. I went too. She walked out the door with him and he had her hand agin, but she must have told him she had promised to stay awhile with me. He didn’t look too cheerful. I went on in to help Ikey.
He was sitting there licking his pencil, and after he’d done that about five minutes, he voted.
“Good lord,” I said. “I just remembered something. I was supposed to cut a big patch of cuckleburrs today. Down on the River. Dad’s been after me about that for two weeks.”
“Well then, why don’t you go cut them?” Johnny said. “I’ll stay here and do your turn at the voting box. You just go right ahead.”
“Oh no,” I said. “I wouldn’t want nobody to do that. That’s my responsibility.”
“Don’t worry so much,” Molly said. I guess she was so sweet it never occurred to her what I was really worrying about. It damn sure occurred to Johnny.
“He better worry,” he said. “I wouldn’t want Mr. Fry mad at me. I think his best chance is just to forget about this voting and go do his work.”
“Well,” I said. “Since you’re so anxious to help, I wonder if you’d like to lope off down there and cut them for me. It wouldn’t take more than four hours.”
That got into his quick. “Hell no, I wouldn’t like to,” he said. “I’m a cowboy, I ain’t no damn cuckleburr chopper.”
“Well, Ikey, what all do you have to do today?” I said. “Maybe I can hire you to do it. I’ll give you two dollars, and you don’t need to worry about watching this voting. Miss Molly’s gonna stay here a little while and she’ll be glad to do your part for you.”
Ikey didn’t give any argument at all. I wasn’t much expecting him to: his normal wage was about a quarter a day.
“I’ll cut ’em an’ be glad,” he said. “I’ll jus’ be glad.” I gave him the two dollars and that settled it. That much money was such a shock to him that he couldn’t hardly get it in his pocketbook. Then he folded up his ballot real slow and careful and looked kinda sad about having to drop it in the box. One thing about him, he really liked to vote. Then he got up and put away his spectacles.
Leaving Cheyenne Page 1
