The black men, evidently feeling that the bull was now gone, began to edge off the limb.
Call was hoping that Captain King would at least make some proposal regarding the cattle. After all, the Governor had asked, even if his letter did get a little wet. It was annoying that Captain King felt he could simply disregard it. He seemed far more interested in the carpenters than in the fate of Captain Scull.
One by one the carpenters edged down the bole of the live oak tree. They were all elderly men, each carrying a small sack of possessions—not much.
“Captain Scull is my captain,” Call said. “I’m obliged to try and rescue him if I can.”
Captain King only looked at him the more severely.
“I’m a blunt man, Captain,” he said. “I know Scull’s rank and I know your mission. In my opinion you and those tipplers back in Lonesome Dove could no more drive a thousand head of cattle to the Sierra Perdida than you could a thousand jackrabbits. I won’t give you a cow, and besides that, I’m in the midst of the branding season and can’t spare my vaqueros, either. Were that not enough, I happen to know that the state of Texas is broke, and I am not the sort of man who enjoys giving away livestock.”
“Well, Mr. Fogg said as much,” Call told him.
“Oh, Denton Fogg, that gloomy fool,” Captain King said. “He’ll starve out in another year or two and have to take those spavined women back east.”
“You won’t sell us any cattle, then, Captain?” Call asked.
Captain King, whose mind seemed to be elsewhere, swung his severe gaze back to Call.
“You’re a persistent man, I see, Captain,” he said. “Do you like Inish Scull?”
“What, sir?” Call asked, surprised by the question.
“It’s a simple question, Captain,” Richard King said. “Do you like Inish Scull?”
Call resented the question so much that it was all he could do to keep from simply riding off with the black carpenters. He didn’t like Inish Scull, as it happened: the man had been rude to him too often. But that was his business, not Captain King’s.
“The Governor gave us orders,” he said. “I mean to carry them out, if I can. I’d appreciate your help, but if I can’t get it I’ve still got my orders to carry out.”
“I should have asked McCrae,” Captain King said. “I expect I would have got an answer from McCrae. You do like McCrae, don’t you, Captain? Will you admit that much?”
“I had better take these men and head back to Lonesome Dove, Captain,” Call said. “I don’t want to get caught in this brush after dark.”
“I’m glad you didn’t take me up on that job offer, Captain Call,” Richard King said. “I fear we’d quarrel.”
“We would if you asked about things that are none of your business,” Call said.
Captain King’s look grew dark.
“Everything that happens in Texas is my business, Captain Call,” he said. “Everything! I trust you’ll remember that.”
Without another word or look he turned his horse and left, disappearing into the brush at the point where the bull and the old vaquero had been.
Call found himself no wiser in the matter of the ransom than he had been when he left Austin. They had no cattle, and could find no one who would let them have any. Yet another mission was tending toward failure.
Besides that, he was in the midst of the south Texas brush country, with four elderly black men who did not seem happy to have been left with him. He suddenly realized that he had failed to ask Captain King whether the men were slave or free. If they were free he had no right to insist that they go back to Lonesome Dove with him. He decided just to ask them if they would come.
“I’m ready to go, men—are you coming with me?” he asked.
All the men nodded—they clearly didn’t want to be caught in the brush after dark either.
“Missus Therese gonna whip us, though,” the oldest of the men said.
“Oh, does she whip you, then?” Call asked. To his surprise the four men all smiled broadly.
“She get after us with the buggy whip,” one said.
“Mister Xavier too, though,” another commented. “She get after Mister Xavier worse.”
“Her husband, you mean,” Call asked.
The old black man nodded; the others looked suddenly fearful, as if they might have said too much.
Call didn’t question them further—it would only embarrass them. As he rode back down the narrow trail he recalled that Madame Scull was said to go after the Captain with a bullwhip, when in a temper. Now here was another wife who whipped her husband—it struck him as strange. Though he and Maggie were not married, he could not imagine her behaving so.
“Well, at least it’s just a buggy whip,” he said.
None of the black men said anything.
42.
“GET UP, MONSIEUR. Make the liquors. The customer is here!” Therese Wanz said, flinging each word at her husband as if it were a small stone. Xavier Wanz, her husband, seemed to be thinking thoughts of his own; he continued to sit at the table with the white tablecloth, staring at his glass.
Therese, in only a few moments in her tent, had managed to sweep her abundant brown hair up on her head in an appealing mound; the gown she wore did not quite conceal her plump shoulders. Augustus McCrae, who had not expected to see a woman, much less an attractive woman, for several years, if ever, found that the sight of Therese brought an immediate improvement in his mood.
She stood in the middle of the barroom floor, hands on her hips, looking at the rangers cheerfully.
“See, already the customers,” she said to Xavier. “Vite! Vite! Make the liquors.”
Xavier Wanz compressed his lips, and then, as if propelled by a spasm of fury, jumped from his chair and strode over to the tent, beside which a sizable mound of goods was covered by a large wagon sheet. Xavier dove under the sheet like a rat seeking cover; for a moment, only his rump was visible, but, in the space of a minute, he emerged with two bottles of whiskey and several glasses. He hurried to the bar, set the bottles and glasses on it, and paused to straighten his cuffs.
“Messieurs,” he said, bowing slightly, “the pleasures are mine.”
“If the bar’s open I expect a few of those pleasures might be ours, too,” Gus said.
Pea Eye declined the liquor and Deets wasn’t offered any, but in a few minutes the other rangers, including young Jake Spoon, were all seated around the table where Xavier had sat. At Therese’s strident urging Xavier had applied himself again to the mound under the wagon seat and come out with several chairs.
“These glasses are clean,” Gus said, in astonishment. “You could spend a week in the saloons of Austin and never encounter a clean glass.”
As soon as each glass was emptied, a process that didn’t take long, Xavier appeared with a bottle, poured, and bowed.
“Monsieur,” he said, invariably.
Ikey Ripple, who had passed easily and quickly into a state of profound inebriation, found himself a little put off by the bowing.
“Why’s he bowing to us?” Ikey asked.
“To be polite—why shouldn’t he bow?” Augustus asked.
“That’s right, a bartender ought to bow,” Lee Hitch said—although, so far as he could remember, none of the bartenders of his acquaintance had ever bothered to bow to him before.
“I say it’s a goddamn trick,” Ikey declared. “I think he means to get us drunk and steal all our money.”
“Ikey, if you’ve got cash money on you, you don’t need to wait for a Frenchman to steal it,” Gus said. “Loan it to me and I’ll invest it for you.”
“Invest it in whores—that’s all you know about, Gus,” Ikey said.
“Well, that way you wouldn’t have to be anxious about it,” Gus told him.
Therese Wanz, a smile on her lips, seemed to be studying the rangers closely. Pea Eye had elected to help Deets with the horses, but Jake Spoon had boldly taken his place at the table and was drinking
whiskey as if he had a right to, a fact that annoyed Gus McCrae a good deal. Even more annoying was the fact that the Frenchwoman was looking at Jake with interest.
“Jake, you ought to be helping with the horses,” Gus said, in an irritable tone.
Jake knew well that when Gus was out of temper it was better to walk small. He saw the Frenchwoman watching him, but didn’t connect it with Gus’s angry tone. After all, the woman’s husband was standing right behind her.
Therese decided right away that she liked Monsieur McCrae, but she saw nothing wrong with flirting a little with the curly-headed boy. Opportunities to flirt were limited in Lonesome Dove.
Opportunities to make money were no less rare, and Therese liked money. Captain and Therese liked money. Captain King assured her there would soon be a brisk trade in the town—he seemed to think that merchants would rush to Lonesome Dove in order to take advantage of the fine river crossing, but, so far, very few merchants had appeared, a fact which frustrated Therese’s commercial instincts severely.
Now, at the sight of the tired, dusty, unshaven men, Therese began to think in terms of money. She quickly decided that the first task would be to barber them—they could all use shaves and two or three of them needed haircuts as well.
“Xavier! The woods, monsieur!” she said crisply, with a glance at her husband. “I want to shave these men and give them the hair-offs.”
Xavier Wanz, severely depressed as he was by the many differences between Texas and France, walked over to a campfire that smoldered in front of the tent. He would have preferred, himself, to sit at the table all day, enjoying the seemliness of his clean tablecloth, and perhaps drinking just enough liquor to blind himself to the ugliness of the mesquite trees that surrounded the clearing where, if Captain King was to be believed, a town would one day exist.
Therese, of course, had her own ideas; every day Lonesome Dove presented some new challenge to her energies, and her energies were not small. Every day, in this new land, Therese arose, impatient; every day Xavier was the man who bore the brunt of her impatience. Yesterday, Therese’s impatience had overflowed and scared away the carpenters; today, at least, there were these men to occupy her, these rangers. If she wanted to barber them it was fine with him.
With his foot he nudged a few more sticks of firewood into the fire, before returning to his bar.
“Hair-offs—hair-offs!” Therese said, coming to the table. “You first, monsieur,” she said, tapping Augustus on the shoulder.
“All right, I’ll volunteer—do I get a shave too?” Gus said.
Therese didn’t answer—she had already marched off to her tent. When she emerged, carrying a razor, a razor strop, and several other tools of the barbering trade, she pulled another chair from under the wagon sheet and insisted that Gus sit on it.
The rangers, most of them now drunk, watched with interest as Therese vigorously stropped her razor.
“I’m shaggier than Gus, she ought to have barbered me first,” Stove Jones complained.
“What you complaining about? I’ll be lucky to even get a shave,” Lee Hitch said, well aware that his bald head offered little incentive to a barber.
Jake Spoon gulped down what was left of the whiskey and went off to sit with Pea Eye and Deets. It was vexing that Gus McCrae seemed to get the first attentions, if a woman was around. Now the woman was wrapping Gus in a sheet and cooing over him as if he were something special. The sight put Jake in such a hot mood that he picked up three clods and threw them at the blue sow, who had consumed the bull snake and had flopped down under a small bush to rest. The clods missed but Xavier Wanz noticed and immediately walked over to Jake.
“Monsieur!” he said sternly. “Do not disturb the pig.”
“That’s right, it ain’t your pig, don’t be chunking it,” Gus said, from his barber chair. “That pig’s the pride of the community—it needs its rest.”
His pride stung, Jake walked straight past Pea Eye and on toward the river. He had merely thrown three clods at a sow. What right had Gus to speak to him in such a tone? He felt like quitting the rangers on the spot. He could hammer and saw; maybe the French couple would hire him to carpenter. With Gus gone the Frenchwoman might even come to like his curly hair, as Madame Scull once had. Perhaps she would take him up and teach him the language; he imagined how chagrined Gus McCrae would be if, the next time the rangers stopped in Lonesome Dove, he and Madame Wanz were chattering in French.
“Where do you suppose he’s going?” Pea Eye asked, when Jake walked past.
“Could be going to take a wash,” Deets said.
“Now you’ve run Jake off, picking on him,” Lee Hitch remarked.
“The pup, he’s welcome to drown himself for all I care,” Gus said, well aware that he was the envy of the troop, by virtue of having been chosen to receive the first haircut.
Therese Wanz, though flirtatious in her approach to barbering, was all seriousness when she got down to the business itself. She decided to start with the shave and promptly lathered Gus’s face liberally with a nice-smelling soap.
“Boy, this beats that old lye soap,” Gus said, but Therese rapped his head sharply with her knuckles, indicating that the time for talk was over. Therese then shaved him carefully and expertly, not omitting to do some careful work under his nose. Then she wrapped his face in a hot towel and began the haircut, moving his head this way and that, touching him, making him sit up straighter, or insisting that he turn one way or another. With the hot towel steaming on his face and Therese’s deft hands working it with scissors and comb, Gus drifted into a kind of half sleep, in which he allowed himself to imagine that it was Clara doing the barbering. On occasion, dissatisfied with the work of the local barbers, Clara had barbered him, sitting him down on the steps behind the store and scissoring away until she had him looking the way she wanted him to look, a process that took much squinting and inspecting.
Therese Wanz, more expert than Clara, was also more decisive. When she took the hot towel off his face she produced some small tweezers and began to yank the hairs out of his nose. Gus had never had his nose hairs interfered with before. He was relaxed, half asleep, and a little drunk—the first extraction took him so completely by surprise that he yelped.
His companions had been watching the barbering operation closely, all of them filled with envy. When Therese yanked out the first nose hair Gus’s reaction struck them as the funniest thing they had ever seen. They howled with laughter. Lee Hitch was so amused that a chair could not hold him—he lay on his back on the floor of the saloon, laughing violently. Stove Jones laughed nearly as loud. Far down the street, Jake Spoon heard the laughter and turned, wondering what could be so funny.
Pea Eye and Deets, who had been trimming a gelding’s hoof, had not been paying too much attention to the barbering. When they saw the Frenchwoman pulling hairs out of Gus’s nose they began to laugh too.
Augustus McCrae, who had been in a pleasurably relaxed state, found that he had suddenly become an object of wild amusement to the men. Therese, though, brooked no resistance; she finished his nose to her satisfaction and began to yank hairs out of his ears, oblivious to the laughter from the saloon. She proceeded briskly with her tweezers, seizing a hair and extracting it with the same motion.
Xavier Wanz, standing stiffly behind a bar, thought the men he was serving must be crazy. He had never heard such desperate laughter, and at what? Because his wife was giving their captain the hair-offs? Not knowing quite what to do, he contented himself with folding and refolding his little white towel several times.
The hairs out, Therese began to rub Gus with an unguent whose smell she liked. The young monsieur had nice hair; she felt she might enjoy entertaining him in her tent for a bit, if only Xavier could be distracted, which didn’t seem likely.
Meanwhile, there was business. Once she had combed Gus’s hair the way she considered that it ought to be combed, she took the sheet off him and announced that he could stand up.
> “One dollars, monsieur,” she said. “Now you look like a fine cavalier.”
Augustus was somewhat startled by the price; he had not expected to pay more than fifty cents for his barbering, in such a place. Many a whore would cost little more than the haircut. But Therese smiled at him and whisked him off with her little brush. He liked her plump shoulders—why be tight?
“A bargain at the price, ma’am,” he said, and paid her the dollar.
43.
WHEN CALL CAME BACK to Lonesome Dove with the four carpenters he was surprised to find that the whole troop had been barbered and shaved. Pea Eye was just rising from the chair when he rode up. Only Deets, watching silently from a seat on a stump, had not been worked on. All the men were preening as if they had just come out of church. Therese Wanz, the woman who had clipped the considerable pile of hair that was around the barber chair, was bent over a large washtub, wringing out a towel.
“Ma’am, you need to strop your razor—here’s one more,” Gus said. “I’ll take your horse, Woodrow—you’ve got a treat in store.”
Madame Wanz was evidently a woman of cheerful temperament. She sat Call down and poured out a torrent of French.
“Do you know what she’s saying?” he asked Augustus.
“Just keep still and do your duty, Woodrow,” Gus said.
Madame Wanz made a little bow when she sat Call in the barber’s chair. He felt a touch of embarrassment; he had heard of women barbers but had never been worked on by one before. All of the men were in high good humor. They looked more presentable than they had looked in months.
“I expect you better shear me,” Call said. “It’ll probably be a good spell before I see a barber again.”
Call had relaxed and slipped into a half-doze by the time Therese Wanz got around to the extraction of his nose hairs. He jumped so violently at the first jerk of the tweezers that he turned the barber chair over—all the men, who had been watching for just such a reaction, exploded with laughter. Augustus laughed so hard he had to hold his side. Even Call had to smile. It must have been funny, seeing him tip over a barber’s chair.
The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4) Page 95