The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  “He is quick,” Blue Duck admitted. “He shot me while he was shitting. I didn’t know anyone could shoot straight while they were shitting.”

  Buffalo Hump looked the boy over. He saw no wounds that looked serious.

  “I had another son once,” Buffalo Hump said. “Gun-in-the-Water shot him too—shot him dead. He was almost drowned in the Brazos River but he was still quick enough to kill my son. You’re lucky he didn’t kill you too. Where is your horse?”

  The boy stood before him wearing a sullen look. No doubt he had run across the canyon, hoping to be praised because he had gone alone against the whites and been wounded. It was a brave thing: Buffalo Hump didn’t doubt the boy’s courage. Blue Duck always led the charge, and could not sleep for days, from excitement, when a raid was planned.

  Bravery was important in war, of course, but that did not mean that a warrior could afford to neglect the practicalities of war. The boy seemed to have rolled much of the way down the canyon and kept his weapons undamaged, which was good. On the other hand, he had lost a horse, which was not good. Also, he had attacked a proven warrior, Gun-in-the-Water, without being sure of his kill. Courage would not keep a warrior alive for long if courage was not backed up by judgment.

  “My horse is dead,” Blue Duck admitted. “Silver Hair McCrae shot him—I was running for my life. Big Horse Scull almost cut me with the long knife.”

  Buffalo Hump motioned to Hair-on-the-Lip, indicating that she was to tend to the boy’s wounds. Slow Tree was approaching, at the head of his band, and would have to be greeted with the proper ceremony. Though Buffalo Hump would have liked to lecture the boy some more, he could not do it with Slow Tree and his warriors only half a mile from camp. He looked sternly at his young wife, Lark—he did not want her tending Blue Duck’s wounds. The women made much of Blue Duck, old women and young women too. He did not want Lark to be doctoring his handsome son. He had seen many unfortunate things happen, in his years as a chief. Sometimes young women, married to old men, could not resist coupling with the old men’s sons, a thing that made bitter blood. If Lark was reckless with Blue Duck he would beat her so that she could not move for three days, and then he would drive Blue Duck out of camp, or else kill him.

  “Why is Slow Tree coming?” Blue Duck asked, as Hair-on-the-Lip began to poke at the wound in his side.

  Buffalo Hump walked away without answering. It was none of Blue Duck’s business why Slow Tree had chosen to visit. Slow Tree could come and go as he pleased, as did all the Comanche. He himself was not particularly pleased to see the old man coming, though. Slow Tree was very pompous; he insisted on making long speeches that were boring to listen to. Buffalo Hump had long since heard all that Slow Tree had to say, and did not look forward to listening to him anymore. Because he was old and lazy, Slow Tree had even begun to argue that the Comanche should live in peace with the Texans. He thought they ought to go onto reservations and learn to grow corn. He pointed out that the buffalo were no longer plentiful; soon the Comanche would have to find something else to eat. There were not enough deer and antelope to feed the tribe, nor enough wild roots and berries. The People would starve unless they made peace with the whites and learned their agriculture.

  Buffalo Hump knew that on some points Slow Tree was right. He himself had ridden all the way north to the Republican River to find enough buffalo, in the fall just passed. The whites were killing more and more buffalo each year, and the People would, someday, have to find something else to eat. Such facts were plain; he did not need a long speech from Slow Tree to explain what was obvious.

  What Buffalo Hump disagreed with was Slow Tree’s solution. He himself did not like corn, and did not plan to grow it. Instead, since the white men were there in his land, his country, he meant to live off their animals: their horses, their pigs, and particularly their cattle. The land along the Nueces boiled with cattle. They were as plentiful as buffalo had once been. He himself preferred horsemeat to the meat of the cow, but the meat of the cow would suffice, if it proved impossible to kill enough buffalo or steal enough horses to get the band through the winter.

  Some of the cattle were as wild as any buffalo, but because they were small animals the Texans seemed to think they owned them. The cattle were so numerous that the Comanches, once they practiced a little, could easily steal or kill enough of them to survive.

  Buffalo Hump considered himself as wild as the buffalo or the antelope or the bear; he would not be owned by the whites and he would not tear up the grass and grow corn. But Slow Tree, evidently, was no longer too wild to be owned, so now he talked of peace with the whites, though that was not the reason for his visit. The old man knew that Buffalo Hump’s band had buffalo—what he had come for was to eat.

  Slow Tree was a great Comanche chief, and Buffalo Hump meant to welcome him with proper ceremony. But that did not mean that he trusted the old man. Slow Tree had been a great killer, when he was younger, and an unscrupulous killer too. Slow Tree was old; he had heard things from the old women of the tribe that the younger Comanches did not know. Long ago Buffalo Hump had been told by his grandmother that he could only die if his great hump was pierced. Old Slow Tree knew of this prophecy. Several times, over the years, in camp here and there, usually after feasting and dancing, Buffalo Hump would get an uneasy feeling. Three times he had turned and found that Slow Tree was behind him. Once Slow Tree had had a lance in his hand; another time he held a rifle, and he had had a cold look in his eye—the look of the killer. Slow Tree had long been jealous of Buffalo Hump’s prowess as a raider. Once, on a raid all the way to the Great Water, Buffalo Hump had run off three thousand horses—it was a raid all the young warriors sang about and dreamed of equaling. Slow Tree, though fierce in battle, had never made such a raid. He didn’t like it when the young men sang of Buffalo Hump.

  But, always, because of the uneasy feeling he got, Buffalo Hump had turned before Slow Tree could strike with the lance or fire the gun. He had saved himself, but he had never trusted Slow Tree and still didn’t. The fact that the man was old did not mean he was harmless.

  Buffalo Hump turned to look at his young wife, Lark; her eyes were cast down in modesty. Heavy Leg and Hair-on-the-Lip, his other wives, had stripped the boy, Blue Duck, in order to tend his wounds. He stood naked not far from Lark, but Lark kept her eyes cast down. She was the wife of Buffalo Hump—she looked at her husband, when she wanted to look at a man.

  Blue Duck became impatient with the women, who were smearing grease on his wounds.

  “There are only a few whites up there,” he said to his father—he pointed toward the top of the canyon. “I killed one of them last night—there are only a few left. We could kill them all if we hurry.”

  “I imagine you scared them so badly that they are running away by now,” Buffalo Hump said casually. “We would have to chase them to the Brazos to kill them, and I don’t want to chase them. I have to wait for Slow Tree and listen to him tell me I should be growing corn.”

  Blue Duck was sorry he had spoken. His father had only mocked him, when he said the whites were afraid of him. Big Horse Scull was not afraid of him, nor Gun-in-the-Water, nor McCrae. He wanted to go back and kill the Texans, but Buffalo Hump had already turned and was walking away. Slow Tree had entered the camp and had to be shown the proper respect. Blue Duck wasn’t interested in the old chief himself, but he had heard that Slow Tree had several pretty wives. He was impatient with the women who were dressing his wounds—he wanted to go over and have a look at Slow Tree’s wives.

  “Hurry up,” he said, to Hair-on-the-Lip. “I have to go stand with my father. Slow Tree is here.”

  Hair-on-the-Lip didn’t like the rude boy, whelp of a Mexican woman. Rosa, the boy’s mother, had once been Buffalo Hump’s favorite, but she had run away and frozen to death on the Washita River. Now Lark was his favorite—Lark was young and plump—but he still kept Hair-on-the-Lip with him many nights, because she had the gift of stories. She told him many stories
about the animal people, but not just the animal people. She knew some old Comanche women who were lustful and full of wickedness. The old women hid in the bushes, looking for young men. Buffalo Hump had had only a few wives, unlike Slow Tree and some of the other chiefs. He told Hair-on-the-Lip that it would be too much trouble to have more wives. He wanted to save his strength for hunting, and for fighting the whites. He liked to hear about women, though, particularly the old lustful women who were always in the bushes, trying to get young boys to couple with them. Many nights Hair-on-the-Lip had lain with Buffalo Hump, while the cold wind blew around the lodges. Hair-on-the-Lip was not pretty and she was not young—the young women of the tribe wondered why such a great chief would stay with her, when he could have the youngest and prettiest wives.

  Those younger women didn’t know how much he liked the stories.

  10.

  CLARA WAS UNPACKING some new crockery for the store when she happened to glance up and see Maggie Tilton crossing the street—Maggie, too anxious to stop herself, was coming to inquire about Woodrow Call. Every few days Maggie came on the same errand, thinking Clara might have some news of the rangers. Clara didn’t—but she could well understand Maggie’s anxiety—she herself grew worried when several weeks passed without news of Gus McCrae. Except for the anxiety, though, their positions in regard to the men in question were opposite: Maggie’s one hope was that Woodrow Call would someday unbend enough to marry her, while Clara was doing everything she could to check her foolish passion for Gus McCrae. Clara was doing her best not to marry Gus, while Maggie pinned all her hopes on finally marrying Woodrow. Maggie and Clara talked little—their respective stations didn’t permit it. What little conversation they had was usually just about the small purchases Maggie made. Yet they had become, if not friends, at least women who were sympathetic to one another because of their common problem: what to do about the menfolk.

  The dishes and cups Clara was unwrapping and setting on the counter were nice, serviceable brown stoneware from Pennsylvania. Only the day before she had had a bit of a tiff with her father, over the stoneware. Usually George Forsythe let Clara have her way, when it came to ordering dishware, but, in this case, he happened to look at the bill and had what for him was a fit. He took off his coat, put it back on, told Clara she was bankrupting him with her impulsive ordering, and walked out of the store, not to return for three hours. Clara was more amused than offended by her father’s little fit. George Forsythe considered that he and he alone knew what was best for the solid frontier citizens who frequented their store. Whenever Clara ordered something that appealed to her, even if it was as simple as a pewter pitcher, her father invariably concluded that it was too fancy; soon the store would fill up with things Clara liked that the customers either didn’t want or couldn’t afford; and ruin would follow.

  “I’ve had a store on this street since it started being a street,” he informed his daughter—sometimes, when he was particularly exercised, he even wagged his finger at her—“and I know one thing: the people of Austin won’t shell out for your fancy Eastern goods.”

  “Now, that’s not true, Pa,” Clara protested. “Mrs. Scull shells out for them. Besides, nearly all our goods are Eastern goods. That’s about the only place they make goods, seems like.”

  “As for that woman, I consider her little better than a harlot,” her father said. Most of the citizens of Austin looked up to George Forsythe; they had voted him mayor twice; but Inez Scull looked down on him, as she would on any tradesman, and she was quick to let him know it.

  “Just hold off on the Philadelphia plates,” her father told her, at the height of his fit, just before he walked out. “Plain plates and plain cutlery will serve around here just fine.”

  The point of the brown stoneware, as Clara meant to tell him once he cooled down, was that it was plain; and yet it was satisfying to look at and solid besides. Clara loved the look and feel of it; she believed her father to be wrong, in this instance. After all, she had been working with him in the store for a decade; she felt she ought to have a right to order a little nice crockery now and then, if she took the notion. If Inez Scull happened to like it she would buy all of it anyway; Inez Scull always bought all of anything she liked, whether it was a swatch of pretty cloth or two new sidesaddles that happened to appeal to her. George Forsythe, seeing her shaky old butler loaded down with two new sidesaddles, could not resist asking why she needed two.

  “Why, one for Sunday, of course,” Inez said, with a flounce. “I can’t be seen in the same old saddle seven days a week.”

  “But those two are just alike,” George pointed out.

  “Nonetheless, one is for Sunday—I doubt you’d understand, sir,” Inez said, as she swept out of the store.

  Clara loved the look and feel of the new stoneware and felt sure her father was wrong in assuming that it wouldn’t appeal to local tastes. After all, Austin was no longer just a frontier outpost, as it had been when her father and mother opened the store. There were respectable women in Austin now, even educated women, and they weren’t all as high-handed as Inez Scull. Clara herself didn’t care for either Scull—the famous Captain had twice taken advantage of her father’s absence to attempt to be familiar with her, once even trying to look down her bodice on a hot day when she had worn a loose dress. On that occasion Clara slapped him smartly—she considered that she had tolerated quite enough, famous man or not—but the Captain had merely bowed to her and bought himself a speckled cravat. But, like it or not, the Sculls were too wealthy to throw out entirely—had it not been for their profligate spending, her father might, at times when drought dried up the farms and sapped the resources of the local livestock men, have had to worry seriously about the bankruptcy he accused Clara of bringing upon him.

  His fits, though, Clara knew, weren’t really about the store, or the ordering, or the Eastern crockery; they were about the fact that she was unmarried, and getting no younger. Suitor after suitor had failed to measure up; her twenties were flying past, and yet, there she was, still on her father’s hands. She ought, in his view, to have long since become a well-established wife, with a hardworking husband to support her.

  Many hardworking men, solid citizens, well able to support a wife, had sat in the Forsythe parlor and made their proposals. All were refused. Some licked their wounds for a few years and came back with new proposals, only to have those rejected too. After two tries and two failures most of the local men gave up and took wives who were less exacting; only Augustus McCrae, and a man named Bob Allen, a rancher who wished to venture up to Nebraska and trade in horses, persisted year after year. In his own mind and everyone else’s, Gus McCrae, the proud Texas Ranger, seemed to have the inside track; yet in Clara’s mind, though she dearly loved Gus McCrae, the issues were not so clear, nor the resolution so simple.

  Still, her father could not be blamed too much for worrying that she might never find—or at least might never accept—a decent mate. Her mother, so sickly that she rarely ventured downstairs, worried too, but said little. The thing they all knew was that there was hardly another respectable young woman in Austin who, at Clara’s age, was still unmarried.

  In fact, one of the few women Clara’s age who was still single was Maggie Tilton, the young woman who was walking slowly and a little forlornly across the dusty street toward the store. Maggie, though, could not be included in the Forsythes’ reckoning, because she was not one of the respectable young women of Austin. Inez Scull might behave like a harlot, while enjoying the prestige and position of being the Captain’s wife, but Maggie Tilton was a harlot. She had survived some rough years in the tents and shacks of Austin, moved to San Antonio for a bit, and then came back to Austin. She had tried to rise but failed and had come back to be where Woodrow Call was—or at least where he was quartered when the rangers were not in the field.

  Clara watched, with interest, as Maggie came up the steps and hesitated a moment, as she looked at herself in the glass window; it was
as if she had to reassure herself that she looked respectable enough to enter a regular store—Maggie always stopped and looked at herself before she would venture in to buy a ribbon, or a powder for headaches, or any little article of adornment.

  In Clara’s view Maggie looked plenty respectable. Her clothes were simple but clean, and she was always neat to a fault, as well as being modestly dressed. Madame Scull, for one, could scarcely be bothered to conceal her ample bosom—even Clara’s own father, George Forsythe, the former mayor, had trouble keeping his eyes off Inez Scull’s bosom, when it was rolling like the tide practically under his nose.

  Maggie, though, was always proper to a fault; there was nothing flashy about her appearance. And yet she did what she did with men, with only the sadness in her eyes to tell of it, though that sadness told of it eloquently, at least to Clara. Sometimes Clara wished she could talk to Maggie—she longed to shake her good and tell her to forget about that hardheaded Woodrow Call. In her view Maggie ought to marry some decent farmer, many of whom would have been only too pleased to have her, despite her past.

  Sometimes, lying alone at night in her room above the hardware store, a room that had been hers since birth, to which, so far, she had been reluctant to admit any man—though Gus McCrae had impulsively crowded into it once or twice—Clara thought of Maggie Tilton, in her poor room down the hill. She tried, once or twice, in her restlessness, to imagine that she and Maggie had traded places; that she was what Maggie was, a whore, available to any man who paid the money. But Clara would never make the imagining work, not quite. She could picture herself down the hill, in a shack or a tent, but when it came to the business with men she was not able to picture it, not really. Though fervent in her kissing with Gus McCrae—fervent and even bold, riding alone with him into the country, to swim at a particular spring—she still stopped short, well short, of what Maggie Tilton did regularly, for money, in order to survive.