Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove

by Lonesome Dove

  Then she remembered that she had not fed Bob.

  She took the baby down to the kitchen and heated the chicken broth. "Think of the work I'd save if everything didn't have to be hot," she said to the infant, who slept on.

  She laid it at the foot of Bob's bed while she fed her husband, tilting his head so he could swallow. It was strange to her that he could swallow when he couldn't even close his eyes.

  He was a big man with a big head--every time she fed him her wrist ached from supporting his head.

  "I guess we got us a boy, Bob," she said. The doctors had told her to talk to him-- they thought it might make a difference, but Clara found that the only difference was that she got depressed. The depressing aspect of it was that it reminded her too clearly of their years together, for she had liked to chatter, and Bob never talked.

  She had talked at him for years and got no answers. He only spoke if money was concerned. She would talk for two hours and he would never utter a sentence. So far as conversation went, the marriage was no different than it had ever been --it was just easier for her to have her way about money, something that also struck her as sad.

  She picked the baby up and held it to her bosom--the thought was in her head that if he saw her with a child it might make a difference. Bob might see it, think it was theirs. It might startle him into life again.

  It was unnatural, she knew, for a mother to leave her child a day after it was born. Of course, children were endless work. They came when you didn't want them and had needs you didn't always want to meet.

  Worst of all, they died no matter how much you loved them--the death of her own had frozen the hope inside her harder than the wintry ground. Her hopes had frozen hard and she vowed to keep it that way, and yet she hadn't: the hopes thawed. She had hopes for her girls, and might even come to have them for the baby at her bosom, child of another mother. Weak as it was, and slim though its chances, she liked holding the child to her. I stole you, she thought. I got you and I didn't even have to go through the pain. Your mother's a fool not to want you, but she's smart to realize you wouldn't have much of a chance with her and those buffalo hunters.

  It wasn't smartness, though, she thought--the woman just didn't care.

  She looked down at Bob and saw that the baby had made no difference. He lay as he had, nothing left to him but need. Suddenly Clara felt angry that the man had been fool enough to think he could break that mare, when both she and Cholo had warned him to leave her alone. It made her angry at herself, to have lived so long with a horse trader who had no more savvy than that.

  Yet there he was, his eyes staring upward, as helpless as the baby. She put the child down again and fed Bob soup until her wrist got tired from holding his head. Then she lay Bob's head back on his pillow, and ate the rest of the chicken soup herself.

  Big Zwey was worried that Elmira had left the baby. When she came out to the wagon, she didn't have it. "Hitch the team and let's go," she said, and that was all she said. He did it, but he felt confused.

  "Ain't we gonna take the baby?" he asked shyly, just before they left.

  Elmira didn't answer. She had no breath to answer with, she was so tired. Walking downstairs and out to the wagon had taken all her strength.

  Zwey had to lift her into the wagon, at that, and she sat propped against the buffalo skins, too tired even to care about the smell. She was so tired that she felt like she wasn't there. She couldn't even tell Zwey to start--Luke had to do it.

  "Let's go, Zwey," he said. "She don't want the baby." Zwey started the wagon, and they were soon out of sight of the house, but he was bothered. He kept looking back at Ellie, propped against the buffalo skins, her eyes wide open. Why didn't she want her baby? It was a puzzle.

  He had never understood the whole business, but he knew mothers took care of babies, just as husbands took care of wives.

  In his eyes he had married Ellie, and he intended to take good care of her. He felt he was her husband. They had come all that way together in the wagon. Luke had tried to marry her too, but Zwey had soon stopped that, and Luke had been behaving a lot better since.

  Luke had tied his horse beside the wagon, and he rode on the wagon seat beside Zwey, who kept looking around to see if Ellie was asleep. She wasn't moving, but her eyes were still wide open.

  "What are you looking at?" Luke asked.

  "I wisht she'd brought the baby," Zwey said. "I always wanted us to have one." The way he said it struck Luke as curious.

  It was almost as if Zwey thought the baby was his.

  "Why would you care? It ain't yours," Luke said, to scotch that suspicion. Even if Zwey had got up his nerve to approach Ellie, which he doubted, they hadn't been on the road long enough to make a baby.

  "We're married," Zwey answered. "I guess it's ours." A suspicion dawned on Luke which was even more curious--the suspicion that Zwey didn't even understand about men and women. They had spent days around the buffalo herds when the bulls and cows were mating, and yet Zwey had evidently never connected such goings-on with humans. Luke remembered that Zwey never went with whores. He mainly just watched the wagon when the other hunters went to town. Zwey had always been considered the dumbest of the dumb, but Luke knew that none of the hunters had suspected him of being that dumb. That much dumbness was hard to believe--Luke wanted to make sure he hadn't misunderstood.

  "Now, wait a minute, Zwey," he said.

  "Why do you think that baby was yours?" Zwey was silent a long time. Luke was smiling, as he did when he wanted to make fun of him. It didn't ordinarily much bother him that Luke made fun of him, but he didn't want him to make fun about the baby. He didn't want Luke to talk about it. It was painful enough that she had had it and then gone off and left it. He decided not to answer.

  "What's the matter with you, Zwey?" Luke said. "You and Ellie ain't really married. You ain't married to somebody just because she comes on a trip with you." Zwey began to feel very sad--it might be true, what Luke said. Yet he liked to think that he and Ellie were married.

  "Well, we are," he said finally.

  Luke began to laugh. He turned to Ellie, who was still sitting with her back against the skins.

  "He thinks that baby's his," Luke said.

  "He really thinks it's his. I guess he thinks all he had to do was look at you to make it happen." Then Luke laughed a long time. Zwey felt sad, but he didn't say any more. Luke could always find something to laugh at him about.

  Elmira began to feel cold. She started to shiver and reached for the pile of blankets in the wagon, but she was too weak even to untangle the blankets.

  "Help me, boys," she said. "I'm real cold." Zwey immediately handed the reins to Luke and went back to help cover her up. It was a warm night, but Ellie was still shivering. He put the blankets on her, but she didn't stop shivering.

  On the wagon seat, Luke would laugh from time to time when he thought of Zwey's baby. Before they had gone five miles, Ellie was delirious.

  She huddled in the blankets, talking to herself, mostly about the man called Dee Boot. Her look was so wild that Zwey became frightened.

  Once his hand happened to brush her and her skin was as hot as if the sun were burning down on her.

  "Luke, she's got a fever," Zwey said.

  "I ain't a doctor," Luke said. "We shouldn't have left that house." Zwey bathed her face with water, but it was like putting water on a stove, she was so hot.

  Zwey didn't know what to do. A person so hot could die. He had seen much death, and very often it came with fever. He didn't understand why she had had the baby if it was only going to make her so sick. While he was bathing her face, she sat up straight and looked at him, her eyes wide.

  "Dee, is that you?" she asked. "Where have you been?" Then she fell back against the skins.

  Luke drove as fast as he could, but it was still a long road. The sky was light in the east when they finally found a wagon track and pulled into Ogallala.

  The town was not large--just a long stre
et of saloons and stores, and a few shacks on the slope north of the Platte. One of the saloons was still open. Three cowboys were lounging around outside, getting ready to mount up and go back to work. The two who were soberest were laughing at the third because he was so drunk he was trying to mount his horse from the wrong side.

  "Hell, Joe's fixing to get on backwards," one said. They were not much interested in the fact that a wagon had pulled up. The drunk cowboy slipped and fell in the street. The other cowboys found that hilarious, one laughing so hard that he had to go over by the saloon and vomit.

  "Where's the doctor live?" Luke asked the soberest cowboy. "We got a sick woman here." At that the cowboys all stopped and stared. All they could see was Ellie's hair. The rest of her was covered with blankets.

  "Where'd she come from?" one asked.

  "Arkansas," Luke said. "Where's the doctor?" Ellie had dropped into a fevered doze. She opened her eyes and saw the buildings. It must be the town where Dee was. She began to shove off the blankets.

  "Do you know Dee Boot?" she asked the cowboys. "I come to find Dee Boot." The cowboys stared at her as if they hadn't heard. Her hair was long and tangled, and she was wearing a nightdress. A huge buffalo hunter sat beside her.

  "Ma'am, Dee Boot is in jail," one of the cowboys said politely. "It's that building over there." Light was just filtering into the street between the shadowed buildings.

  "Where's the doctor?" Luke asked again.

  "I don't know if there is one," the cowboy said. "We just got here last night. I know about Boot because they were talking about him in the saloon." Ellie began to try and climb over the side of the wagon. "Help me, Zwey," she said.

  "I wanta see Dee." She got one leg over the side board of the wagon and suddenly began to feel weak again. She clung to the board, trembling.

  "Help me, Zwey," she said again.

  Zwey lifted her out of the wagon as if she were a doll. Elmira took two steps and stopped. She knew she would fall if she tried another step, and yet Dee Boot was just across the street. Once she saw Dee she felt she could start getting well.

  Zwey stood beside her, big as one of the horses the cowboys rode.

  "Carry me over," she said.

  Zwey felt afraid. He had never carried a woman, much less Ellie. He felt he might break her, if he wasn't careful. But she was looking at him and he felt he had to try.

  He lifted her in his arms and found again that she was light as a doll. She smelled different from anything he had ever carried, too. Mostly he had just carried skins, or carcasses of game.

  As he was carrying her, a man came out of the jail and stepped around the corner of the building. It proved to be a deputy sheriff--his name was Leon--going out to relieve himself. He was startled to see a huge man standing there with a tiny woman in a nightgown in his arms. Nothing so surprising had happened in his whole tenure as deputy. It stopped him in his tracks.

  "I want to see Dee Boot," the woman said, her voice just a whisper.

  "Dee Boot?" Leon said, startled.

  "Well, we got him, all right, but I doubt he's up." "I'm his wife," Ellie said.

  That was another surprise. "Didn't know he was even married," Leon said.

  Leon was watching the buffalo hunter, who was very large. It occurred to him that the couple might have come to try and break Dee Boot out of jail.

  "I'm his wife, I want to see Dee," the woman said. "Zwey don't have to come." "Dee can probably hear you, he's right in this cell," Leon said, pointing to a small barred window on the side of the jail.

  "Carry me over, Zwey," Elmira said, and Zwey obeyed.

  The window was tiny and the cell still mostly dark, but Elmira could make out a man lying on a little bare bunk. He had his arm over his eyes and at first she doubted it was Dee--if so, he had put on weight, which wouldn't be like Dee. He prided himself on being slim and quick.

  "Dee," she said. "Dee, it's me." Her voice was the merest whisper, and the man didn't awake. Ellie felt angry--here she had come such a distance, and she had found him, yet she couldn't make him hear.

  "Say something to him, Zwey," she whispered.

  "Your voice is louder." Zwey was at a loss. He had never met Dee Boot and had no idea what to say to him.

  The task embarrassed him a little.

  "Don't know nothing to say," he said.

  Fortunately it didn't matter. The deputy had gone back in and he woke Dee Boot himself.

  "Wake up, Boot," he said. "You got visitors." The sleeping man immediately sprang up with a wild look. Ellie saw that it was him, although he hardly looked like the dapper man she remembered.

  He glanced at the window fearfully, then just stood and stared.

  "Who's that?" he asked.

  "Why, it's your wife," Leon said.

  Dee came to the window--it was just two steps.

  Ellie saw that he had not shaved in several days --another surprise. Dee was particular about barbering and had always had the best barber in town come and shave him every morning. The eyes that she had remembered almost every day of the long trip--Dee's merry eyes--now just looked scared and sad.

  "It's me, Dee," she said.

  Dee just stared at her and at the large man holding her in his arms. Ellie realized he might have the wrong idea about Zwey, although he had never been particularly the jealous type.

  "It's just Zwey," she whispered. "Him and Luke brought me in the wagon." "There ain't nobody else?" Dee said, coming close to the bars and trying to peer out.

  Ellie didn't know what was wrong. He could see it was her, and yet he hardly looked at her. He seemed scared, and his hair had little pieces of cotton ticking in it from a tear in the thin mattress he slept on. The scruffy growth of whiskers made him seem a lot older than she had remembered him.

  "It's just me," Elmira whispered. She was beginning to feel scared--she felt so weak she could hardly hold her eyes open, and she wanted more than anything to talk to Dee. She didn't want to faint before they had their talk, and yet she was afraid she might.

  "I left July," she said. "I couldn't do it. All I could think of was you, the whole time. I should have gone with you and not even tried it. I took a whiskey boat and then Zwey and Luke brought me in the wagon. I had a baby but I left it.

  I been coming back to you as quick as I could, Dee." Dee kept trying to peer around them, as if he was sure there were more people than he could see. Finally he stopped trying, and looked at her. She was hoping for the old smile, but Dee didn't have it in him to smile.

  "They're gonna hang me, Ellie," he said. "That's why I jumped up--I been expecting lynchers." Elmira couldn't believe it. Dee had never done anything wrong--not wrong enough to make people hang him. He gambled and flirted, but those weren't hanging crimes.

  "Why, Dee?" she asked.

  Dee shrugged. "Killed a boy," he said.

  "I was just trying to scare him and he jumped the wrong way." Ellie felt confused. She had never even heard of Dee Boot shooting a gun. He carried one, like all men did, but he never ever practiced with it that she knew. Why would he try to scare a boy?

  "Was he aggravating you, or what?" she asked.

  Dee shrugged again. "It was a settler's boy," he said. "Some cowmen hired me to run the settlers out. Most of them will run if you shoot over their heads a time or two. This one just moved the wrong way." "We'll get you out," Elmira said. "Zwey and Luke will help me." Dee looked at the big man holding Ellie. He did look big enough to pull the little jail apart--but of course he couldn't do it while he was holding a sick woman.

  "I'm due to hang next week, but they may come lynch me first," Dee said.

  Zwey felt something wet on his arms. Ellie was so light he didn't mind holding her. The sun was up and they could see into the cell a little better. Zwey didn't know why he felt so wet. He shifted Ellie a little and saw to his shock that the wetness was blood.

  "She's bleeding," he said.

  Dee looked out and saw that blood was dripping off Ellie's nightdre
ss.

  "Get her to the Doc," Dee said. "Leon knows where he lives." Dee began to yell for the deputy and soon Leon came running around the jail. Elmira didn't want to go. She wanted to stay and talk to Dee, assure him that it would be all right, they would get him out. She would never let them hang Dee Boot. She looked in at him, but she couldn't talk anymore. She couldn't say the things she wanted to say. She tried, but no words came out. Her eyes wanted to close, and no matter how hard she tried to keep them open and look at Dee, they kept trying to close. She tried to see Dee again, as Zwey was carrying her away, but Dee's face was lost in a patch of sunlight. The sun shone brightly against the wall of the jail and Dee's face was lost in the light.

  Then, despite herself, her head fell back against Zwey's arm and all she could see was the sky.