The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  The next day the two of them left the canyon of the Yellow Cliffs. Kicking Wolf carried the bones of Three Birds tied safely in the deerskin. He meant to take them to Three Birds’ brother.

  “We must come back soon and catch those wild horses,” he said to Buffalo Hump, as they were crossing the river, back into Texas.

  “I have never known a man who wanted horses so much,” Buffalo Hump said.

  Book III

  1.

  AUGUSTUS MCCRAE was sitting at the bedside of his second wife, Nellie, when Woodrow Call tapped lightly on the door. Bright sunlight poured through the window, but, to Gus’s eye, the sunlight only pointed up the shabbiness of the two poor rooms where Nellie was having to die. There was no carpet on the floor, and the curtains were dusty; the windows faced on Austin’s busiest street—horses and wagons were always throwing up dust.

  “Come in,” Augustus said. Call opened the door and stepped inside. The sick woman was pale as a bedsheet, as she had been for several weeks. He thought it could not be long before Nellie McCrae breathed her last.

  Augustus, weary and confused, held one of the dying woman’s hands.

  “Well, what’s the news, Woodrow?” he asked.

  “War—civil war,” Call said. “War between the North and the South. The Governor just found out.”

  Augustus didn’t answer. Nellie was in a war, too, at the moment, and was losing it. Thought of a larger war, one that could split the nation, seemed remote when set beside Nellie’s ragged breathing.

  “The Governor would like to see us, when you can spare a moment,” Call said.

  Augustus looked up at his friend. “I can’t spare one right now, Woodrow—I’m helping Nellie die. I don’t expect it will be much longer.”

  “No—it’s not likely to,” Call agreed.

  A bottle of whiskey and a glass with a swallow or two left in it sat on a little table by the bed, along with two vials of medicine and a wet rag that, now and then, Augustus used to wipe his wife’s face.

  “Captain Scull predicted this war years ago,” Call said. “Do you remember that?”

  “Old Blinders—I expect he’s already enlisted on the Yankee side,” Gus said.

  Once they had returned Captain Scull from captivity, his mind recovered, though not immediately. For months he was still subject to bursts of hopping, which could seize him in the street or anywhere. He soon invented a kind of goggle, containing a thin sheet of darkened glass, to protect his lidless eyes from the sunlight. The goggles gained him the nickname “Blinders” Scull—he and Madame Scull were soon as intemperately married as ever, yelling curses at one another as they raced through town in an elegant buggy the Captain had ordered.

  Then, overnight, they were gone, moved to Switzerland, where a renowned doctor attempted to make Scull usable eyelids, using the skin of a brown frog; rumor had it that the experiment failed, forcing the Captain to get by with his goggles from then on.

  “Yes, I expect he’s signed up,” Call said. It was not likely that Inish Scull would sit out a war, eyelids or not.

  Call put his hand on Gus’s shoulder for a moment and prepared to leave, but Gus looked up and stopped him.

  “Sit with me for a minute, Woodrow,” he said, feeling sad. It was not much more than a year ago that his first wife, Geneva, had been carried off by a fever.

  “You’ve no luck with wives, Gus,” Call said. He sat back down and listened as the sick woman drew her shallow breaths.

  “I don’t, for a fact,” Augustus said. “Geneva barely lasted four months and it’s not yet been a year since Nellie and I wed.”

  He was quiet for a bit, looking out the window.

  “I guess it’s a good thing Clara turned me down,” he said. “If we’d married, I fear she would have died off years ago.”

  Call was surprised that Gus would bring up Clara, with Nellie dying scarcely a yard away. But the sick woman didn’t react—she seemed to hear little of what was said.

  Neither of the two women Gus had married had been able to survive a year. Call knew it had discouraged his friend profoundly. Unable to secure a healthy wife, he had already gone back to the whores.

  “I wish Nell could go on and go,” Gus said. “She ain’t going to get well.”

  “I would prefer to be shot, myself, if I get that sick,” Call said. “Once there’s no avoiding death I see no point in lingering.”

  Augustus smiled at the comment, and poured himself a little more whiskey.

  “We’re all just lingering, Woodrow,” he said. “None of us can avoid dying—though old Scull did the best job of it of any man I know, while that old bandit had him.”

  “Do you have an opinion about the war?” Call asked. “One I could take to Governor Clark?” The hubbub in the streets had already grown louder. Soon the citizens of Austin, some of whom sided with the Yankees and more of whom sided with the South, might decide to begin a war at the local level, in which case there would soon be more people dying than Gus McCrae’s wife.

  “No opinion—and the Governor has no right to press me, at a time like this,” Augustus said.

  “He just wants to know if we’ll stay,” Call told him. In the last few years he and Augustus had been the twin mainstays of frontier defense. Naturally a governor wouldn’t want to lose his two most experienced captains, not at a time when most of the fighting men in the state would be going off to fight in the great civil war.

  “I don’t know yet—you vote for me, Woodrow,” Augustus said. “Once Nellie dies I’m going to want to go drinking. When Nellie’s buried and I’m fully sober again, I’ll get around to thinking about this war.”

  Call smiled at the comment.

  “I’ve known you a good many years and I’ve rarely seen you fully sober,” he remarked. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this war is fought and finished before that happens.

  “The whole nation might kill itself before you’re fully sober,” he added.

  He smiled when he said it, and Gus returned a weary glance.

  “You go on and manage the Governor, Woodrow,” he said. “I’ve got to manage Nellie.”

  Hearing gunfire in the street, Call hurried out, to discover that it was only a few rowdies shooting off their guns. They wanted to celebrate the fact that, at long last, war had come.

  2.

  CALL MADE SLOW PROGRESS up the street. Every man he saw wanted his opinion about the war; but the sight of Gus and his Nellie, in the poor cheap bedroom, left him feeling melancholy—it was hard to deal with the war question because he couldn’t get his mind off Gus and Nellie. He had not known Nellie well—Gus had married her on only a week’s acquaintance, but she seemed to be a decent young woman who had done her best to settle Augustus down and make him comfortable with the little they had. The only thing he knew about Nellie McCrae was that she was from Georgia; the only fondness he had ever heard her express was for mint tea. Now Lee Hitch and Stove Jones came crowding up with war questions, when all Call could think about was the sadness Gus must feel at having married twice, only to lose both wives.

  “When are you leaving to fight the Yankees, Captain?” Stove Jones asked—it was only at that moment, when he saw Lee Hitch draw back in shock, that Stove realized he and Lee might favor different sides. It dawned on him too late that Lee Hitch hailed from Pennsylvania, a Yankee state, as well as he could remember.

  Call didn’t have to answer. Lee and Stove were looking at one another in astonishment. The two old friends agreed about almost everything; it had not occurred to either of them that they might be divided on the issue of the war that had just begun.

  “Why, are you a Reb, Stove?” Lee asked, in puzzlement.

  “I’m a Carolina boy,” Stove reminded him; but his appetite for discussion of the coming conflict had suddenly diminished.

  “We’ve still got the Comanches to fight, here in Texas,” Call reminded them. “I suppose they’re Yankees enough for me.”

  “But everybody’s going to wa
r, Captain—that’s the talk, up and down the street,” Stove Jones said. “There’ll be some grand battles before this is settled.”

  “Some grand battles and some grand dying,” Augustus said. He had come quietly up to where Call and the two men were talking. His arrival, so soon, took Call by surprise, though Augustus did not seem quite as sad as he had been in the rooming house.

  “Nell’s gone,” Gus added, before Call could ask. “She opened her eyes and died. I never had a chance to ask her if she needed anything. Why will people die on days this pretty?”

  Sunlight poured down on them; the sky was cloudless and the air soft. No one had an answer to Gus’s question. Darkness and death seemed far away; but war had been declared between South and North, and Nellie McCrae lay dead not two blocks away.

  “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—from 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 word 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 ablebodied, 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.”