The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  There were three or four pots laying around the camp, pots people had left in their careless haste. Xitla took one of the pots and filled it with water from the stream. Then she searched though her treasures until she found enough rawhide string to make a cord long enough to lower the water to the white man. It would please her to help the prisoner in the pit, but when she lowered the water and looked at the man she realized it would not be easy to save him—he was very weak. He was on the point of giving up, this man, but Xitla hoped that a little cool water and some food would bring his spirit back its strength.

  It took Xitla a long time to get the water, moving slowly as she did, and she was careful when she lowered it into the pit. When the white man stood up to catch the jug Xitla saw that one of his ankles was injured. He could not put his foot on the ground without pain, a fact which complicated his escape. It would be hard for him to climb out of the pit with such a sore ankle.

  Xitla decided to take her blanket and go to the little cornfield by the stream. The corn was young, but it was the only food close to the camp that she might bring him. She would pile some of the soft corn on her blanket and drag it to the pit, so that the man would have something to eat. She could stay alive on very little, and the white man could too or he would have already starved.

  “Gracias, gracias,” Scull said, when the water jug was safely in his hands. He took the water in little sips, just a drop or two at a time, to soothe his swollen tongue. His tongue was so thick that he could barely speak his words of thanks.

  It was a good sign that Scull was careful with the water, Xitla thought. He was disciplined; if she could get him a little corn his spirit might revive.

  That night Xitla listened carefully to the animal noises around the camp. She wanted to be awake in case Ahumado came back. He had always been a night raider; he struck at the most peaceful hour, when people were deep in restful sleep. Young women, dreaming of lovers, would not know anyone was there until the hard hands of the pistoleros took them away into slavery, far from their villages and their lovers. People were not alert enough to sense the approach of Ahumado, but animals could sense it. All the animals knew that Ahumado had been given the poison leaf, and did evil things. Sometimes he made Goyeto tie up animals and skin them, for practice. The animals knew better than to let such an old man catch them. The coyotes stayed away, and the skunks and even the rats. The night birds didn’t sing when Ahumado was around.

  Xitla listened carefully, and was reassured. There were plenty of animals out that night, enjoying the bright moon. Just beyond the cornfield where she meant to go in the morning with her blanket there were some coyotes playing, yipping at one another, teasing and calling out. She watched a skunk pass by, and heard an owl from a tree near the cliff.

  Hearing the sounds of the animals made Xitla feel peaceful, content to doze by her little fire of twigs and branches. She didn’t know where Ahumado had gone, or why, but it was enough, for the moment, to know that he was far away. In the morning she would go to the cornfield with her blanket and pick some young corn for the white man, Captain Scull.

  46.

  THERESE WANZ was much put out when she emerged from the white tent and discovered that Captain Call and Captain McCrae had left Lonesome Dove in the night. She had been up early, gathering eggs in her basket from hens’ nests in the crumbling house left by Preacher Windthorst. She liked the two young captains; having them there was a fine change from the company of her husband, Xavier, a man disposed to look on the dark side of life, a man who had little natural cheer in him or even a satisfactory amount of the natural appetites all men should have. Frequently, due to his gloom, Therese had to sit on Xavier in order to secure her conjugal pleasures. Xavier was convinced they would starve to death in the Western wilderness they had come to, but Therese knew better. In only one day, with the rangers there, they had made more money than they would have made in France in a month, doling out liquor in their village for a few francs a day.

  All day the rangers had drunk liquor and paid them cash money, a fact not lost on Xavier, who threw off his gloom long enough to accord Therese a healthy dose of conjugal pleasure without her having to go to the trouble of sitting on him.

  She sprang up early, ready to make the rangers a fine omelette and collect a few more of their dollars, only to discover that the two rangers she liked best had ridden off to Mexico. Only the black man had seen them leave; the other rangers were as startled as Therese to discover they were gone.

  “You mean they left us here?” Lee Hitch asked.

  “Yes sir,” Deets said. “Gone to get the Captain.”

  “That’s all right, Lee,” Stove Jones said. “I imagine they expect us to wait, and at least we’ll be waiting in a place where the saloon don’t close.”

  “It’ll close if Mr. Buffalo Hump shows up,” Lee said, with an apprehensive look around the clearing. Toward the river the blue sow and the blue boar were standing head-to-head, as if in conversation. Xavier Wanz was attempting to fasten a bow tie to his collar, a task that soon reduced him to a state of exasperation.

  At the mention of Buffalo Hump, Jake Spoon came awake with a start.

  “Why would he show up, Lee?” Jake asked. “There ain’t a town here yet—he wouldn’t get much if he shows up here.”

  “My tooth twitched half the night, that’s all I know,” Lee Hitch said. “When my tooth twitches it means Indians are in the vicinity.”

  “Goddamn them, why did they go?” Jake said, annoyed at the two captains for leaving them unprotected. Since the big raid on Austin his fear of Indians had grown until it threatened to spoil his sleep.

  Pea Eye was shocked that Jake would use such language in talking about Captain Call and Captain McCrae. They were the captains—if they left, it was for a good reason.

  Then, to Pea Eye’s surprise, the Frenchwoman began to wave at him, beckoning him to come help her prepare the breakfast. She was breaking eggs into a pan, and swirling it around; her husband, meanwhile, took out his tablecloth, from a bag where he kept it, and spread it on the table, smoothing it carefully. The man had on a bow tie, which struck Pea Eye as unnecessary, seeing as there was only a rough crew to serve.

  “Quick, monsieur, the woods!” Therese said, when Pea Eye bashfully approached. He saw that the cook fire was low and immediately got a few good sticks to build it up. As Therese swirled the eggs in the pan her bosom, under the loose gown, moved with the swirling motion. Pea Eye found that despite himself his eyes were drawn to her bosom. Therese didn’t seem to mind. She smiled at him and, with her free hand, motioned for him to bring more sticks.

  “Hurry, I am cooking but the fire is going lows,” she said.

  Though it was so early that there were still wisps of ground fog in the thickets, Lee Hitch and Stove Jones presented themselves at the bar, expecting liquor. To Pea Eye’s amazement Jake Spoon stepped right up beside them. Only the night before Jake had confided in him that he didn’t have a cent on him—he had lost all his money in a card game with Lee, a man who rarely lost at cards.

  Xavier Wanz put three glasses on the bar and filled them with whiskey; Jake drank his down as neatly as the two grown men. Both Lee and Stove put money on the bar, but Jake had none to put, a fact he revealed with a smile.

  “You’ll stand me a swallow, won’t you, boys?” he asked. “I’m a little thin this morning, when it comes to cash.”

  Neither Lee nor Stove responded happily to the request.

  “No,” Lee said bluntly.

  “No one invited you to be a drunkard at our expense,” Stove added.

  Jake’s face reddened—he did not like being denied what seemed to him a modest request.

  “You’re barely weaned off the teat, Jake,” Lee said. “You’re too young to be soaking up good liquor, anyway.”

  Jake stomped off the floor of the saloon, only to discover another source of annoyance: the Frenchwoman had summoned Pea Eye, rather than himself, to help her with the cook fire. The wom
an, Therese, was certainly comely. Jake liked the way she piled her abundant hair high on her head. Jake sauntered over, his hat cocked back jauntily off his forehead.

  “Pea, you ought to be helping Deets with the horses—I imagine they’re restless,” Jake said.

  To his shock the Frenchwoman suddenly turned on him, spitting like a cat.

  “You go away—ride the horses yourself, monsieur,” she said emphatically. “I am cooking with Monsieur,” she said emphatically. “I am cooking with Monsieur Peas. You are in the way. Vite! Vite!

  “Young goose!” she added, motioning with her free hand as if she were shooing away a gosling that had gotten underfoot.

  Mortified, Jake turned and walked straight down to the river. He had not expected to be rudely dismissed, so early in the day; it was an insult of the worst kind because everybody heard it—Jake would never suppose such a blow to his pride would occur in such a lowly place.

  It stung, it burned—the high-handedness of women was intolerable, he decided. Better to do as Woodrow Call had done and form an alliance with a whore—no whore would dare speak so rudely to a man.

  The worst of it, though, was having Pea Eye chosen over him, to do a simple chore. Pea Eye was gawky and all thumbs; he was always dropping things, bumping his head, or losing his gun—yet the Frenchwoman had summoned Pea and not himself.

  While Jake was brooding on the insult he heard a splashing and looked down the river to see a group of riders coming. At the thought that they might be Indians his heart jumped, but he soon saw that they were white men. The horses were loping through the shallows, throwing up spumes of water.

  The man in the lead was Captain King, who loped right past Jake as if he wasn’t there. The men following him were Mexican; they carried rifles and they looked hard. He turned and followed the riders back toward the saloon.

  When he arrived Captain King had already seated himself at the table with the tablecloth, tucked a napkin under his chin, and was heartily eating the Frenchwoman’s omelette. One of the vaqueros had killed a javelina. By the time Jake got there they had the little pig skinned and gutted. One of the men started to throw the pig guts into the bushes but Therese stopped him.

  “What do you do? You would waste the best part!” Therese said, scowling at the vaquero. “Xavier, come!”

  Jake, and a number of the other rangers too, were startled by the avid way Therese and Xavier Wanz went after the pig guts. Even the vaquero who had killed the pig was taken aback when Therese plunged her hands to the wrists in the intestines and plumped coil after coil of them on a tray her husband held. Her hands were soon bloody to the elbow, a sight that caused Lee Hitch, not normally a delicate case, to feel as if his stomach might come up.

  “Oh Lord, she’s got that gut blood on her,” he said, losing his taste for the delicious omelette he had just been served.

  Captain King, eating his omelette with relish, observed this sudden skittishness and chuckled.

  “You boys must have spent too much time in tea parlors,” he said. “I’ve seen your Karankawa Indians, of which there ain’t many, anymore, pull the guts out of a dying deer and start eating them before the deer had even stopped kicking.”

  “This is fine luck, Captain,” Therese said, bringing the heaping tray of guts over for him to inspect. “Tonight we will have the tripes.”

  “Well, that’s fine luck for these men—while they’re eating tripe I’ll be tramping through Mexico,” he said. “Some thieving caballeros run off fifty of our cow horses, but I expect we’ll soon catch up with them.”

  “You could take us with you, Captain,” Stove Jones said. “Call and McCrae, they left us. We ain’t got nothing to do.”

  Captain King wiped his mouth with his napkin and shook his head at Stove.

  “No thanks—taking you men would be like dragging several anchors,” he said bluntly. “Call and McCrae were unwise to bring you—they should have left you to the tea parlors.”

  He spoke with such uncommon force that none of the men knew quite what to say.

  “It was the Governor sent us on this errand,” Lee Hitch said finally.

  “He just wanted to get rid of you so he could claim he’d tried,” Captain King said, with the same bluntness. “Ed Pease knows that few Texas cattlemen are such rank fools as to deliver free cattle to an old bandit like Ahumado. He takes what livestock he wants anyway.”

  “It was to ransom Captain Scull,” Stove Jones reminded him.

  Captain King stood up, wiped his mouth, scattered some coins on the table, and went to his horse. Only when he was mounted did he bother to reply.

  “Inish Scull is mainly interested in making mischief,” he said. “He got himself into this scrape, and he ought to get himself out, but if he can’t, I imagine Call and McCrae will bring him back.”

  “Well, they left us,” Lee Hitch said.

  “Yes, got tired of dragging anchors, I suppose,” the Captain said.

  He motioned to his men, who looked dismayed. They had cut up the javelina and prepared it for the fire, but so far the meat was scarcely singed.

  “You will have to finish cooking that pig in Mexico,” he informed them. “I cannot be sitting around here while you cook a damn pig. I need to get those horses back and hang me a few thieves.”

  With that he turned and headed for the river. The vaqueros hastily pulled the slabs of uncooked javelina off the fire and stuffed them in their saddlebags. A couple of the slabs were so hot that smoke was seeping out of their saddlebags as they rode away.

  Therese and Xavier Wanz began to cut up the pig guts, stripping them of their contents as they worked. Xavier had taken off his black coat, but he still wore his neat bowtie.

  Lee Hitch and Stove Jones were both annoyed by Captain King. In their view he had been rude to the point of disrespect.

  “Why does he think we sit around in tea parlors?” Stove asked.

  “The fool, I don’t know—why didn’t you ask him yourself?” Lee said.

  47.

  “LORD, MEXICO’S a big country,” Augustus said. It was a warm night; they had only a small campfire, just adequate to the cooking they needed to do. Just after crossing the river, Call had shot a small deer—meat for a day or two at least. They were camped on a dry plain, and had not seen a human being since coming into Mexico.

  “The sky’s higher in Mexico,” Gus observed; he felt generally uneasy.

  “It ain’t higher, Gus,” Call said. “We’ve just traveled sixty miles. Why would the sky be higher, just because we’re in Mexico?”

  “Look at it,” Gus insisted. He pointed upward. “It’s higher.”

  Call declined to look up. Whenever Gus McCrae was bored and restless he always tried to start some nonsensical argument, on topics Call had little patience with.

  “The sky’s the same height no matter what country you’re in,” Call told him. “We’re way out here in the country—you can just see the stars better.”

  “How would you know? You’ve never been to no country but Texas,” Gus commented. “If we was in a country that had high mountains, the sky would have to be higher, otherwise the mountains would poke into it.”

  Call didn’t answer—he wanted, if possible, to let the topic die.

  “If a mountain was to poke a hole in the sky, I don’t know what would happen,” Gus said.

  He felt aggrieved. They had left in such a hurry that he had neglected to procure any whiskey, an oversight he regretted.

  “Maybe the sky would look lower if I had some whiskey to drink,” he said. “But you were in such a hurry to leave that I forgot to pack any.”

  Call was beginning to be exasperated. They were in deserted country and could get some rest, which would be the wise thing.

  “You should clean your guns and stop worrying about the sky being too high,” he said.

  “I wish you talked more, Woodrow,” Augustus said. “I get gloomy if I have to sit around with you all night. You don’t talk enough to keep m
y mind off them gloomy topics.”

  “What topics?” Call asked. “We’re healthy and we’ve got no reason to be gloomy, that I can see.”

  “You can’t see much anyway,” Gus said. “Your eyesight’s so poor you can’t even tell that the sky’s higher in Mexico.”

  “The fact is, I was thinking about Billy,” Augustus said. “We’ve never gone on a rangering trip without Billy before.”

  “No, and it don’t feel right, does it?” Call agreed.

  “Now if he were here I’d have someone to help me complain, and you’d be a lot more comfortable,” Augustus said.

  They were silent for a while; both stared into the campfire.

  “I feel he’s around somewhere,” Augustus said. “I feel Billy’s haunting us. They say people who hang themselves don’t ever rest. They don’t die with their feet on the ground so their spirits float forever.”

  “Now, that’s silly,” Call said, although he had heard the same speculation about hanged men.

  “I can’t stop thinking about him, Woodrow,” Gus said. “I figure it was just a mistake Billy made, hanging himself. If he’d thought it over a few more minutes he might have stayed alive and gone on rangering with us.”

  “He’s gone, though, Gus—he’s gone,” Call reminded him, without reproach. He realized he had many of the feelings Augustus was trying to express. All through the bush country he had been nagged by a sense that something was missing, the troop incomplete. He knew it was Long Bill Coleman he missed, and Augustus missed him too. It was, in a way, as if Long Bill were following them at an uncomfortable distance; as if he were out somewhere, in the thin scrub, hoping to be taken back into life.

  “I hate a thing like death,” Augustus said.