The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  Joey didn’t think the blond woman was going to be able to take Call’s leg off. She was tiring, and he could see her chest heaving. She stopped at times to rest, but she always returned to the task. Finally, when Joey had concluded that she wasn’t going to succeed, she got through the bone and the leg came off. Then the woman walked away from the camp and sat on a rock to rest. For a second, Joey was tempted to shoot her—it would be a test for Captain Call, to see if he could survive with only one leg and no one to help him.

  But Joey didn’t shoot her. He watched her mount the buckskin horse and saw her ride away, leading the horse that Captain Call was slumped on.

  It was a strange thing to see, a whore strong enough to cut a man’s leg off. Joey watched them go and then put his spyglass back in its leather case. He imagined Captain Call would die somewhere on the trail to the south.

  Now he had to go to Mexico and kill Call’s men. They had come after him in his own country and he meant to see that such effrontery cost them their lives. After he killed them he thought he might go to Ojinaga, though he didn’t intend to let anyone in the village see him when he got there.

  Once he got home, it would be Rafael’s and Teresa’s turns to die. He thought he might steal a horse and then tie them on the horse. He could take them to his cave for a while to tease them. The idea of throwing his brother and sister off a cliff had begun to appeal to him. He would take them to his cave and see how he felt about it then.

  8.

  THE DAY AFTER Lorena amputated his leg, Captain Call developed a fever so high that Lorena felt sure he would die. She had nursed five children through many fevers, but in the very young, fevers came and went like clouds in the skies. As the children grew older, high fevers were more serious—Captain Call was an old man, and he was burning up. Even Lorena couldn’t remember Georgie having fevers that felt as hot to the touch as Call’s, and Georgie was prone to blazing fevers.

  Call soon became incoherent. He mumbled, slumped over Blackie’s neck. The leg bled, but not much. Lorena had used the last of her extra clothing for bandages, and she had no more cloth to make bandages with. She had no medicines with which to treat the fever. If Call died, he died. All she could do was keep pressing on, hoping to come to the river.

  Lorena knew she was going in the right direction. She could tell that from the sun. But she was in a big country where she had never been before, and she didn’t know how to aim for the town. It could not be a very large town. The country rolled so that she knew she might not be able to see Presidio, unless she spotted it from the top of a ridge. Captain Call had said it was on the Rio Grande. That was all she knew.

  She stopped twice and tried to get the Captain to wake up and look around. If he could only glance around, he would probably figure out where they were and correct her if she was off course. He had mentioned that he had been over the country many times.

  But Captain Call was lost in fever, more lost even than Lorena was in the vast country. She would have to keep going as she was going and hope to know which direction to turn when she came to the river.

  They endured another cold night. Lorena was too tired to gather enough wood to see them through the night; the fire died well before dawn. She piled the heavy saddle blanket and all but one of the smaller blankets on the Captain, but it was not enough to keep him from shivering and shivering. Looking at him, so old and frail and sick, caused Lorena to feel pity but also puzzlement. What kept the man alive? Why didn’t he just die? The big bullet was still in him, close to his heart. His leg was gone, and the wound had not been treated. If it got infected, he would surely die. His arm was also terrible. She wasn’t going to try to cut it off; she wasn’t up to another amputation. Any of the three wounds might prove mortal.

  Yet the man still breathed. He burned with fever, he couldn’t talk, and couldn’t see, yet he breathed. Even if she wrestled him onto his horse and got him to Presidio and they found a doctor, what could the doctor do? And what would there be left for him if he did live? He couldn’t hunt men anymore. He wasn’t a rancher. He didn’t farm. He had lived all his life by the gun, and now no one would ever want him for his fighting abilities again. Better that he died—he wouldn’t have this suffering, and he wouldn’t have to live as an old cripple.

  Call had done what Gus McCrae wouldn’t do. He had given up his leg in order to keep his life. For years, Lorena had wished Gus had chosen to live, to live anyhow, and she had been angry with him because he hadn’t. But now, seeing Call, she wasn’t so sure.

  Riding over the barren ridges, leading the horse with the sick, feverish, diminished man on it toward a destination she didn’t know if she could even locate, made Lorena feel doubtful. Gus might have taken the sensible option, after all. He was the smartest man she had ever known, Gus McCrae. He had a fine, soaring imagination. Gus had not been able to put his imaginings in writing, as Mr. Dickens and Mr. Browning could, but he could speak them and he had spoken them to Lorena in the months they had been together. Gus had been himself—a full man. He’d had his flaws, and Lorena knew them. He was selfish at times past believing, as selfish as Pea Eye was unselfish. Gus knew himself. He knew how he wanted to be, and he had chosen in the critical hour not to accept being less.

  Perhaps after all, Augustus McCrae had been right. But that was something Lorena could never know, not for herself and not for Gus. If Gus had lived, he would probably have married Clara; and if he had married Clara, Lorena would have had to take her heartbreak and go away with it. She could not have lived around their happiness. She might never have taken up her studies and never have been friends with Clara’s girls. She would have left with her sorrow. She would never have married Pea Eye and would not have had her children. She would have drifted off, been an unhappy woman, and gone back to whoring, probably. By now she would be dead of discouragement. She would not have killed herself, but she would have found her way out of an existence that, without Gus, Clara, Clara’s girls, or Pea Eye, would have become too heavy to carry.

  The next morning, she saw the ribbon of river shining far ahead. But she saw no town. She had found the Rio Grande, but where was she, north or south of the town and the Rio Conoho? She didn’t know. When she tried to nudge Call out of his delirium, she failed again. He couldn’t see, for his eyes were hot with fever.

  Lorena crossed the river. She remembered that Call had said Pea Eye was half a day to the south. He had mentioned an old scout named Billy Williams who was staying in a little village in Mexico. The old scout might tell her the way or even lead her. Call had told her about Billy Williams before she cut his leg off. He must have known that he would be useless to her, even if he lived.

  Lorena crossed the river and looked both ways. There was nothing to see in either direction but the gray land. She had hoped for a spiral of smoke or an adobe hut, but there was nothing.

  The choice was a coin toss: Lorena had to choose between two emptinesses. She chose to go north, for no better reason than that she was right-handed. For six hours she led the Captain’s horse north, feeling more and more despairing, more and more convinced that she had made the wrong choice. She became seriously frightened. She had eaten the last of the bacon that morning, and had only enough coffee for two more camps. If she didn’t find a settlement or a dwelling soon, she would wear out and give up. Her nerves had not recovered from the amputation, and she was exhausted but unable to sleep. She could not get warm, no matter how close to the fire she slept, and she had troubling dreams about her children when she did sleep. They were vague dreams, and she could not remember them clearly, but in all of them her children were under threat. Laurie was sick, or a horse was running away with Clarie, or Georgie had fallen down a well.

  Lorena stuck close to the riverbank. If she wandered off and lost the river, it would probably be the end. Toward evening, as the weak sun began to sink, she thought she saw a movement near the river. There was a little rapid, and just above it she thought she saw a brown rock move. She had been
nodding in her fatigue, perhaps even dreaming. Brown rocks didn’t move.

  When Lorena rode a little closer, she saw that an old Mexican woman sat by the river, just above the little rapid. She was wrapped in a brown serape and looked from a distance like a rock, but she was a woman. Call was slumped over his horse’s neck, unconscious.

  “I have seen that man before,” the old woman said. “He was in our village. Who cut off his leg?”

  “I did,” Lorena said. “I had to.”

  “He is the famous Texas Ranger. He killed Maria’s father,” the old woman said. “He killed her brother, too. That was a long time ago, when my children lived with me.”

  “He was a lawman,” Lorena said. “I need food and I need a doctor. He has a bullet in him. I need to find a doctor who will take it out.”

  “There is no doctor in our village,” the old woman told her. “The butcher might take the bullet out—his name is Gordo. But he is lazy, I don’t know if he would want to help a gringo. Maria can do many things. She might take the bullet out. But this lawman killed her father and killed her brother. Maria may not be willing to help him.”

  “I’ll have to take the chance,” Lorena said. “I’m out of food. Where is your village?”

  “Go on the way you are going, it isn’t far,” the old woman replied.

  Lorena wondered why the old woman had chosen to sit by the river. The dark was coming, but she was making no move to go home. Lorena thought she might be sick, and she felt she should offer to help her.

  “If you’re tired, you can ride my horse,” Lorena said to her. “I can walk, if the village isn’t too far.”

  “No, I want to stay here tonight,” the old woman said. “My children live here. If you listen, you will hear their vocies.”

  Lorena did listen, but all she heard was the splashing of the water in the little rapid. She decided the old woman must be crazy.

  She rode on another mile, and soon saw the village. The setting sun shone on it. There were only some eight or ten small buildings, but after days of seeing nothing but the gray land, the sight of even one building would have been welcome.

  It was welcome to the horses, too; they were hungry. Both of them tried to speed up, but Lorena held them back. She was afraid that a faster pace might jar the Captain and cause worse bleeding.

  As she rode into the village, a few goats walked out to meet her, bleating. She saw a large boy and a small, slight girl standing with the goats. Both children were barefooted, despite the cold. The little girl was very pretty, but she moved oddly, holding her head to the side like a bird. Lorena was only a few feet away from them, when she realized that the little girl was listening, not looking. She was blind.

  Behind the children, in the doorway of a small house, Lorena saw a woman with a butcher knife in one hand—probably she had been cutting meat for supper. A tall, older man with a slight limp came out and stood beside the woman. He looked American. Perhaps he was the scout Call had mentioned, the one who might take her to find her husband. She stopped, and the woman and the tall man came out to greet her.

  “I have a wounded man,” Lorena said to them. “I need help. If there’s a doctor here, I’d appreciate it if someone would find him. This man has a bullet in him that needs to come out.”

  Billy Williams took the reins of Call’s horse. He was shocked at how the man looked. He had seen many wounded men, but could not recall seeing anyone still breathing who was in worse shape than Call was in.

  “It’s Woodrow Call,” Billy said, to Maria. “Somebody’s about finished him.”

  Maria had the knife in her hand. She walked up to the horse and looked at Call. For years, when she was younger and the sting of her father’s and her brother’s deaths had been sharper, Maria had promised herself that she would kill Captain Call if she ever got the opportunity.

  Now the opportunity was an arm’s length away. They were planning to kill a goat, and Billy Williams had just sharpened the butcher knife. Maria hadn’t spoken—Billy always grew nervous when Maria didn’t speak. Her angers matured in silence. Then they came boiling up.

  But Maria didn’t raise the knife and she didn’t strike. She looked at the blond woman on the other horse. It was easy to see that the woman had come a long way, for she looked cold and she looked tired. She looked as exhausted as Maria had felt when she got back from Crow Town.

  “Get down,” she said, to the woman. “Come into my house and eat.”

  Maria looked only briefly at the man tied to the black horse. He was an old man, and so wounded that he was only just barely alive. Though he bore the name of the man who had killed her father and her brother, Maria knew he was no longer that man, the one she had wanted to kill. She had wanted to kill him in his power because he had used his power wrongly. She wanted him to know that he could not simply kill people, good people, and be excused.

  But the man who had wielded the power and done the killing was not the old, sick man on the black horse. To stab him now would be pointless—for she would not be stabbing the Captain Call she had hated for so long, but only the clothes and the fleshy wrappings of that man. She began to untie the knots that held him to the horse. The knots were slick with his blood.

  “Take him in,” she said to Billy. “Put a blanket down by the fire and put him on it. I want to look at his wounds.”

  Billy cut the bloody knots and lifted Call off the horse. Call moaned when his wounded arm bumped against the saddle horn. Teresa came over and stood beside Billy as he lifted Call.

  “Is that the man who was here before?” Teresa asked. “I hear him breathe—is he sick?”

  “Yes, he’s sick,” Maria said. She was unsaddling Call’s horse. “Tell Rafael to drive the goats to the pen. We don’t want the wolves getting them.”

  Lorena was stiff. She hadn’t yet dismounted. She was trying to adjust to the fact that she had actually found the village. She had stopped believing that she would find any settlement, anyplace with people in it.

  “Get down,” Maria told her. “Billy will take care of your horse. You need to wash and you need to eat.”

  Lorena eased off the horse.

  “I’ve come a long distance,” she said. “I’m tired.”

  “Who cut his leg off?” Maria asked. Not until Billy lifted Call down did she notice the missing leg.

  “I did,” Lorena responded. “It was that or let him die.”

  “No wonder you are tired,” Maria said. “Come into my house and rest.”

  It was a small house. There was a table with a lamp on it, two plain chairs, and some blankets spread on the dirt floor. But it was a house, so warm inside that before Lorena had been there five minutes, she began to nod.

  The large boy brought in a bowl full of cold water for her from the well. Lorena splashed it on her face, trying to wake up. She saw Maria bending over Call. The old scout was there, too. They cut his shirt off and examined the wound in his chest. Then they looked at his arm.

  “You should have cut the arm off, too,” Maria told her, when Lorena squatted beside her.

  “I was just too tired,” Lorena answered. “It was just too much cutting.

  “You have a pretty daughter,” she added. The little blind girl was ladling food out of a pot. The girl moved around the house lightly, like a moth.

  “Thank you,” Maria said.

  “Well, I ain’t going in after that bullet,” Billy Williams said. “That bullet is lodged in a bad place. Whoever takes it out needs to know what he’s doing, and I don’t.”

  “There’s no doctor here?” Lorena asked.

  “Just the butcher, and he’s a butcher,” Maria said. “Who shot this man?”

  “Joey Garza, I guess,” Lorena said. “Neither of us ever saw who it was. The man shot from under a horse. Captain Call said he thought it was Joey Garza, though.”

  Maria was silent. Her son would be very famous now; he had brought down the great manhunter. All the girls on the border would want him, though th
at would make little difference to Joey. He didn’t like girls.

  But Joey had avenged her father and her brother. He had crippled their killer, and there was no need for her to do more. She could even help the old man a little, though she knew she was not skillful enough to remove the bullet from his chest. She could probably cut off his arm if the butcher couldn’t be persuaded to do it. Or they could send across the river for the doctor in Presidio. He didn’t like coming to Mexico—the people were too poor to pay him—but he might come to treat Captain Call. He was a famous Ranger, not a poor Mexican.

  “Do you know Joey Garza?” Lorena asked. She had seen the woman stiffen a little, when she said the name.

  “He is my son,” Maria said.

  Lorena thought she must have misheard. Surely she hadn’t carried Captain Call for three days across the wastes, only to bring him to the house of the boy who had tried to kill him.

  “I am Joey’s mother, but I am not like him,” Maria said. She saw that Lorena was frightened.

  “You need to rest,” she added. “There is a bed in the other room. You can sleep without worrying. We will take care of your friend. We are not going to kill him. If I had meant to kill him, I would not have brought him into my house.”

  Lorena was so tired that she wasn’t thinking or even hearing very well. She had to sleep soon, no matter what happened to Captain Call.

  “Teresa, take her,” Maria said.

  Lorena followed the little blind girl into the other room.

  “I cleaned your bed,” the little girl said. “When you wake up, I will tell you a story.”