Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove

by Lonesome Dove

  Tobe Walker looked wi/l when they told him they were taking a herd to Montana. "If I hadn't married, I bet I'd go with you," he said. "I imagine there's some fair pastures up there. Being a lawman these days is mostly a matter of collaring drunks, and it does get tiresome." When they left, he went off dutifully to make his rounds. Augustus hitched the new mules to the new wagon. The streets of San Antonio were silent and empty as they left. The moon was high and a couple of stray goats nosed around the walls of the old Alamo, hoping to find a blade of grass. When they had first come to Texas in the Forties people had talked of nothing but Travis and his gallant losing battle, but the battle had mostly been forgotten and the building neglected.

  "Well, Call, I guess they forgot us, like they forgot the Alamo," Augustus said.

  "Why wouldn't they?" Call asked. "We ain't been around." "That ain't the reason--the reason is we didn't die," Augustus said. "Now Travis lost his fight, and he'll get in the history books when someone writes up this place. If a thousand Comanches had cornered us in some gully and wiped us out, like the Sioux just done Custer, they'd write songs about us for a hundred years." It struck Call as a foolish remark. "I doubt there was ever a thousand Comanches in one bunch," he said. "If there had been they would have taken Washington, D.c." But the more Augustus thought about the insults they had been offered in the bar--a bar where once they had been hailed as heroes--the more it bothered him.

  "I ought to have given that young pup from Mobile a rap or two," he said.

  "He was just scared," Call said. "I'm sure Tobe will lecture him next time he sees him." "It ain't the pint, Woodrow," Augustus said. "You never do get the pint." "Well, what is it, dern it?" Call asked.

  "We'll be the Indians, if we last another twenty years," Augustus said. "The way this place is settling up it'll be nothing but churches and dry-goods stores before you know it.

  Next thing you know they'll have to round up us old rowdies and stick us on a reservation to keep us from scaring the ladies." "I'd say that's unlikely," Call said.

  "It's dern likely," Augustus said. "If I can find a squaw I like, I'm apt to marry her. The thing is, if I'm going to be treated like an Indian, I might as well act like one. I think we spent our best years fighting on the wrong side." Call didn't want to argue with nonsense like that. They were nearly to the edge of town, passing a few adobe hovels where the poorer Mexicans lived. In one of them a baby cried. Call was relieved to be leaving. With Gus on the prod, anything could happen. In the country, if he got mad and shot something, it would probably be a snake, not a rude bartender.

  "We didn't fight on the wrong side," Call said. "What's a miracle is that you stayed on the right side of the law for as long as you have. Jake's too cowardly to be much of an outlaw, but you ain't." "I may be one yet," Augustus said.

  "It'd be better than ending up like Tobe Walker, roping drunks for a living. Why, the man nearly cried when we left, he wanted to come so bad. Tobe used to be quick, and look at him now, fat as a gopher." "It's true he's put on weight, but then Tobe was always chunky built," Call said.

  On that one, though, he suspected Gus was right.

  Tobe had looked at them sadly when they mounted to ride away.

  As far as Roscoe was concerned, travel started bad and got worse. For one thing, it seemed he would never find Texas, a fact that preyed on his mind. From all indications it was a large place, and if he missed it he would be laughed out of Fort Smith--assuming he ever got back.

  When he started out, he supposed that the easiest way to find Texas would be just to ask the settlers he encountered, but the settlers proved a remarkably ignorant lot. Most of them seemed never to have been more than a few hundred feet from the place they happened to be settled.

  Many were unable to give directions to the next settlement, much less to a place as remote as Texas. Some were able to point in the general direction of Texas, but after riding a few miles, dodging thickets and looking for suitable crossings on the many creeks, Roscoe could not be sure he was still proceeding in that direction.

  Fortunately the problem of direction was finally solved one afternoon when he ran into a little party of soldiers with a mule team. They claimed to be heading for someplace called Buffalo Springs, which was in Texas. There were only four soldiers, two horseback and two in the wagon, and they had relieved the tedium of travel by getting drunk.

  They were generous men, so generous that Roscoe was soon drunk too. His relief at finding men who knew where Texas was caused him to imbibe freely. He was soon sick to his stomach. The soldiers considerately let him ride in the wagon--not much easier on his stomach, for the wagon had no springs. Roscoe became so violently ill that he was forced to lie flat in the wagon bed with his head sticking out the back end, so that when the heaves hit him he could vomit, or at least spit, without anyone losing time.

  An afternoon passed in that way, with Roscoe alternately vomiting and lying on his back in the wagon, trying to recover his equilibrium. When he lay on his back the hot sun beat right down in his face, giving him a hard headache. The only way to block the sun was to put his hat over his face, but when he did that the close atmosphere in the hat, which smelled like the hair lotion Pete Peters, the barber back in Fort Smith, had used liberally, made him sick to his stomach again.

  Soon Roscoe had nothing left in him to throw up but his guts, and he was expecting to see them come up any time. When he finally sat up, feeling extremely weak, he found that they had come to the banks of a wide, shallow river. The soldiers had ignored his illness, but they couldn't ignore the river.

  "This is the Red," one soldier said. "That's Texas right across yonder." Roscoe crawled out of his wagon, thinking to ride Memphis across, but found he couldn't make the climb into the saddle. Of course, Memphis was a tallish horse, but normally the saddle was reachable. Suddenly it wavered in the heat. It wasn't that the saddle was rising, it was that Roscoe's legs were sinking. He found himself sitting on the ground, holding to one stirrup.

  The soldiers laughed at his plight and pitched him on Memphis as if he were a sack of potatoes.

  "It's a good thing you run into us, Deputy," one soldier said. "If you'd kept on going west into the Territory, the dern Indians would have got you and et your testicles off." "Et my what?" Roscoe asked, appalled at the casual way the soldier dropped such a terrible remark.

  "I've heard that's what occurs if you let 'em catch you alive," the soldier said.

  "Well, what's the Indian situation in Texas then?" Roscoe asked. The soldiers seemed completely uninformed on the subject.

  They were from Missouri. All they knew about Indians was that they liked to do bad things to white captives. One mentioned that a soldier he knew had been shot with an arrow at such close range that the arrow went in one ear and the point came out the other side of the soldier's head.

  The soldiers seemed to enjoy telling such stories, but Roscoe couldn't share their enthusiasm. He lay awake most of the night, thinking about testicles and arrows in the head.

  The next afternoon the soldiers turned west, assuring him that he only had to hold a course southwest and he would eventually hit San Antonio. Though recovered from his drunk, he didn't feel very vigorous--lack of proper sleeping conditions was slowly breaking down his health, it seemed.

  That evening, as dusk was falling, he was about to reconcile himself to another night spent propped against a tree. He didn't like sleeping sitting up, but it meant he could be up and running quicker, if the need arose. But before he could select a tree to lean against he spotted a cabin a little distance ahead.

  When he approached, he saw an old man with a tobacco-stained beard sitting on a stump skinning a small animal--a possum, as it turned out. Roscoe felt encouraged. The old man was the first person he had seen in Texas, and perhaps would be a source of accurate information about the road.

  "Howdy," he said loudly, for the old man had not looked up from his skinning and Roscoe considered it dangerous to take people by surprise.


  The old man didn't look up, but a form appeared in the doorway of the cabin--a girl, Roscoe thought, though in the dusk he couldn't be sure.

  "Mind if I stop for the night?" Roscoe asked, dismounting.

  The old man squinted at him briefly.

  "If you want supper you'll have to kill your own varmint," he said. "And leave the gal alone, she's mine, bought and paid for." That struck Roscoe as strange. The old man's manner was anything but friendly. "Well, it's a little too late to go possum-huntin'," Roscoe said, trying to make light talk.

  "I've got a biscuit I can eat." "Leave the gal alone," the old man said again.

  The old man, a hard-looking customer, didn't look up again until he had finished skinning the possum. All Roscoe could do was stand around uneasily. The silence was heavy. Roscoe almost wished he had ridden on and spent the night sitting up against a tree. The level of civilization in Texas definitely wasn't very high if the old man was an example of it.

  "Come get the varmint," the old man said to the girl.

  She slipped out and took the bloody carcass without a word. In the dusk it was hard to make out much about her except that she was thin. She was barefoot and had on a dress that looked like it was made from part of a cotton sack.

  "I gave twenty-eight skunk hides for her," the old man said suddenly. "You got any whiskey?" In fact, Roscoe did have a bottle that he had bought off the soldiers. He could already smell frying meat--the possum, no doubt--and his appetite came back. He had nothing in his stomach and could think of little he would rather eat than a nice piece of fried possum. Around Fort Smith the Negroes kept the possums thinned out; they were seldom available on the tables of white folks.

  "I got a bottle in my bag," Roscoe said. "You're welcome to share it." He assumed that such an offer would assure him a place at the table, but the assumption was wrong.

  The old man took the whiskey bottle when he offered it, and then sat right on the stump and drank nearly all of it. Then he got up without a word and disappeared into the dark cabin. He did not reappear. Roscoe sat on the stump--the only place there was to sit--and the darkness got deeper and deeper until he could barely see the cabin fifteen feet away. Evidently the old man and the girl had no light, for the cabin was pitch-dark.

  When it became plain he was not going to be invited for supper, Roscoe ate the two biscuits he had saved. He felt badly treated, but there was little he could do about it. When he finished the biscuits he pitched his bedroll up against the side of the cabin. As soon as he stretched out, the moon came up and lit the little clearing so brightly it made it hard to sleep.

  Then he heard the old man say, "Fix the pallet." The cabin was crudely built, with cracks between the logs big enough for a possum to crawl through, it seemed to Roscoe. He heard the old man stumbling around. "Goddamn you, come here," the old man said. Roscoe began to feel unhappy that he had stopped at the cabin. Then he heard a whack, as if the old man had hit the girl with a belt or a razor strap or something. There was a scuffle which he couldn't help but hear, and the strap landed a couple more times. Then the girl began to whimper.

  "What's that?" Roscoe said, thinking that if he spoke up the old man might let her be. But it didn't work. The scuffling continued and the girl kept whimpering. Then it seemed they fell against the cabin, not a foot from Roscoe's head. "If you don't lay still I'll whup you tomorrow till you'll wisht you had," the old man said.

  He sounded out of breath. Roscoe tried to think of what July would do in such a situation. July had always cautioned him about interfering in family disputes--the most dangerous form of law work, July claimed. July had once tried to stop a woman who was going after her husband with a pitchfork and had been wounded in the leg as a result.

  In this case, Roscoe didn't know if it was even a family dispute that he was hearing. The old man had just said he bought the girl, though of course slavery had been over for years, and in any case the girl was white. The girl seemed to be putting up a good fight, despite her whimpering, for the old man was breathing hard and cursing her when he could get his breath. Roscoe wished more than ever that he had never spotted the cabin. The old man was a sorry customer, and the girl could only be having a miserable life with him.

  The old man soon got done with the girl, but she whimpered for a long time--an unconscious whimpering, such as a dog makes when it is having a bad dream. It disturbed Roscoe's mind.

  She seemed too young a girl to have gotten herself into such a rough situation, though he knew that in the hungry years after the war many poor people with large families had given children to practically anyone who would take them, once they got of an age to do useful work.

  Roscoe woke up soaked, though not from rain.

  He had rolled off his blanket in the night and been soaked by the heavy dew. As the sun rose, water sparkled on the grass blades near his eyes. In the cabin he could hear the old man snoring loudly. There was no sound from the girl.

  Since there was no likelihood he would be offered breakfast, Roscoe mounted and rode off, feeling pretty sorry for the girl. The old man was a rascal who had not even thanked him for the whiskey. If Texans were all going to be like him, it could only be a sorry trip.

  A mile or two along in the day, Memphis began to grow restive, flicking his ears and looking around. Roscoe looked, but saw nothing. The country was pretty heavily wooded. Roscoe thought maybe a wolf was following them, or possibly some wild pigs, but he could spot nothing. They covered five or six miles at a leisurely pace.

  Roscoe was half asleep in the saddle when a bad thing happened. Memphis brushed against a tree limb that had a wasp's nest on it. The nest broke loose from the limb and fell right in Roscoe's lap. It soon rolled off the saddle, but not before twenty or thirty wasps buzzed up. When Roscoe awoke, all he could see was wasps. He was stung twice on the neck, twice on the face, and once on the hand as he was battling them.

  It was a rude awakening. He put Memphis into a lope and soon outran the wasps, but two had got down his shirt, and these stung him several more times before he could crush them to death against his body. He quickly got down from his horse and took off his shirt to make sure no more wasps were in it.

  While he was standing there, smarting from yellow-jacket stings, he saw the girl--the same skinny girl who had been in the cabin, wearing the same cotton-sack dress. She tried to duck behind a bush but Roscoe happened to look up just at the right second and see her.

  Roscoe hastily put his shirt back on, though the wasp stings were stinging like fire and he would have liked to spit on them at least. But a man couldn't be rubbing spit on himself with a girl watching.

  "Well, come on out, since you're here," Roscoe said, thinking it interesting that the girl had easily kept up with Memphis for six miles.

  For all he knew the old man had sent her to request more whiskey, or something.

  The girl came slowly to him, shy as a rabbit. She was still barefoot and her legs were scratched from all the rough country. She stopped twenty feet away, as if not sure how close she was supposed to come. She was rather a pretty girl, Roscoe thought, although her brown hair was dirty and she had bruises on her thin arms from the old man's rough treatment.

  "How come you to follow?" Roscoe asked. It was the first good look he had had at her--she seemed not more than fourteen or fifteen.

  The girl just stood, too shy to talk.

  "I didn't get your name," Roscoe said, trying to be polite.

  "Ma called me her Janey," the girl said.

  "I run off from old Sam." "Oh," Roscoe said, wishing that the wasps had picked another time to sting him, and also that the girl named Janey had picked another time to run off.

  "I near kilt him this morning," the girl said.

  "He used me bad and I ain't really his anyway, it's just he give Bill some skunk pelts for me. I was gonna take the ax and kill him but then you come by and I run off to go with you." The girl had a low husky voice, lower than a boy's, and once over her first momen
t of shyness wasn't loath to talk.

  "I seen you get stung," she said. "There's a creek just along there. Mud poultices are the best for them yellow-jacket stings. You mix 'em with spit and it helps." That of course was common knowledge, though it was thoughtful of the girl to mention it. The running-away business he thought he better deal with at once.

  "I'm a deputy sheriff," Roscoe said.

  "I'm headed down to Texas to find a man. I must travel fast, and I've got but one horse." He stopped, feeling sure the girl would take the hint. Instead, something like a smile crossed her face for an instant.

  "You call this fast travelin'?" she asked.

  "I could have been two miles ahead of you just running on foot. I done already walked all the way here from San Antone, and I guess I can keep up with you unless you lope." The remark almost swayed Roscoe in the girl's favor. If she had been to San Antonio, she might know how to get back. He himself had been plagued from the start by a sense of hopelessness about finding his way, and would have welcomed a guide.