Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove

by Lonesome Dove

  "Reckon we ought to shoot?" Augustus said.

  "Hell, this outfit will run clean back to the Red River if this keeps up." "If you shoot, you might hit the bull," Call said. "Then we'd have to fight the bear ourselves, and I ain't sure we can stop him. That's a pretty mad bear." Po Campo came up, holding his shotgun, Newt a few steps behind him. Most of the men had been thrown and were watching the battle tensely, clutching their guns.

  The sounds the two animals made were so frightening that they made the men want to run. Jasper Fant wanted badly to run--he just didn't want to run alone. Now and then he would see the bear's head, teeth bared, or his great claws slashing; now and then he would see the bull seem to turn to bunched muscle as he tried to force the bear backward. Both were bleeding, and in the heat the blood smell was so strong that Newt almost gagged.

  Then it stopped. Everyone expected to see the bull down--but the bull wasn't down. Neither was the bear. They broke apart, circling one another in the dust. Everyone prepared to pour bullets into the bear if he should charge their way, but the bear didn't charge. He snarled at the bull, the bull answering with a slobbery bellow. The bull turned back toward the herd, then stopped and faced the bear. The bear rose on his hind legs again, still snarling--one side was soaked with blood. To the men, the bear seemed to tower over them, although fifty yards away. In a minute he dropped back on all fours, roared once more at the bull, and disappeared into the brush along the creek.

  "Captain, can we go after him?" Soupy Jones said, clutching his rifle.

  "Go after him on what?" Augustus asked.

  "Have you gone daft, Soupy? You want to chase a grizzly bear on foot, after what you've seen?

  You wouldn't even make one good bite for that bear." The bear had crossed the stream and was ambling along lazily across the open plain.

  Despite Augustus's cautions, as soon as the men could catch their horses, five of them, including Dish Boggett, Soupy, Bert, the Irishman and Needle Nelson, raced after the bear, still visible though a mile or more away. They began to fire long before they were in range, and the bear loped toward the mountains. An hour later the men returned, their horses run down, but with no bear trophies.

  "We hit him but he was faster than we thought," Soupy explained. "He got in some trees up toward the hills." "We'll get the next one," Bert predicted.

  "Hell, if he was in the trees, you should have gone in and tapped him with your pistol butt," Augustus said. "That would probably have tamed him." "Well, the horses wouldn't go in them trees," Soupy explained.

  "I didn't want to either," Allen O'Brien admitted. "If we had gone in the trees we might not have come out." The mules had run three miles before stopping, but because the plain was fairly smooth, the wagon was undamaged. The same could not be said for Lippy, who had bounced so hard at one point that he had bitten his tongue nearly in two. The tongue bled for hours, little streams of blood spilling over his long lip. The remuda was eventually rounded up, as well as the cattle.

  When the Texas bull calmed down enough so that it was possible to approach him, his wounds seemed so extensive that Call at first considered shooting him. He had only one eye, the other having been raked out, and the skin had been ripped off his neck and hung like a blanket over one shoulder. There was a deep gash in his flank and a claw wound running almost the whole length of his back. One horn had been broken off at the skull as if with a sledgehammer. Yet the bull still pawed the earth and bellowed when the cowboys rode too close.

  "It seems a pity to shoot him," Augustus said. "He fought a draw with a grizzly. Not many critters can say that." "He can't walk to Montana with half his skin hanging off his shoulders," Call pointed out. "The flies will get on that wound and he'll die anyway." Po Campo walked to within fifty feet of the bull and looked at him.

  "I can sew him up," he said. "He might live. Somebody catch him for me." "Yes, rope him, Dish," Augustus said.

  "It's your job. You're our top hand." Dish had to do it or be embarrassed by his failure for the rest of the trip. His horse didn't want to go near the bull, and he missed two throws from nervousness and expected to be killed himself if he did catch the animal.

  But he finally got a rope over the bull's head and slowed him until four more ropes could be thrown on him.

  Even then, it was all they could do to throw the bull, and it took Po Campo over two hours to sew the huge flap of skin back in place.

  When it was necessary to turn the bull from one side to another, it took virtually the whole crew, plus five horses and ropes, to keep him from getting up again. Then, when the bull did roll, he nearly rolled on Needle Nelson, who hated him anyway and didn't approve of all the doctoring. When the bull nearly rolled on him, Needle retreated to the wagon and refused to come near him again. "I was rooting for the bear," he said. "A bull like that is going to get somebody sooner or later, and it might be me." The next day the bull was so sore he could barely hobble, and Call feared the doctoring had been in vain. The bull fell so far behind the herd that they decided to leave him. He fell several miles behind in the course of the day. Call kept looking back, expecting to see buzzards in the sky--if the bull finally dropped, they would feast.

  But he saw no buzzards, and a week after the fight the bull was in the herd again. No one had seen him return, but one morning he was there. He had only one horn and one eye, and Po Campo's sewing job was somewhat uneven, the folds of skin having separated in two or three places--but the bull was ornery as ever, bellowing at the cowboys when they came too close. He resumed his habit of keeping well to the front of the herd. His wounds only made him more irascible; the hands gave him a wide berth.

  As a result of the battle, night herding became even more unpopular. Where there was one grizzly bear, there could be others. The men who had been worrying constantly about Indians began to worry about bears. Those who had chased the wounded bear horseback could not stop talking about how fast he had moved. Though he had only seemed to be loping along, he had easily run off and left them.

  "There ain't a horse in this outfit that bear couldn't catch, if he wanted to," Dish contended.

  The observation worried Jasper Fant so much that he lost his appetite and his ability to sleep.

  He lay awake in his blankets for three nights, clutching his gun--and when he couldn't avoid night herding he felt such anxiety that he usually threw up whatever he ate. He would have quit the outfit, but that would only mean crossing hundreds of miles of bear-infested prairie alone, a prospect he couldn't face. He decided if he ever got to a town where there was a railroad, he would take a train, no matter where it was going.

  Pea Eye, too, found the prospect of bears disturbing. "If we strike any more, let's all shoot at once," he suggested to the men repeatedly. "I guess if enough of us hit one it'd fall," he always added. But no one seemed convinced, and no one bothered to reply.

  When Sally and Betsey asked her questions about her past, Lorena was perplexed. They were just girls-- she couldn't tell them the truth. They both idolized her and made much of her adventure in crossing the prairies. Betsey had a lively curiosity and could ask about a hundred questions an hour. Sally was more reserved and often chided her sister for prying into Lorena's affairs.

  "She don't have to tell you about her whole life," Sally would protest. "Maybe she can't remember. I can only remember back to when I was three." "What happened when you was three?" Lorena asked.

  "That old turkey pecked me," Sally said.

  "A wolf got him and I'm glad." Clara overheard part of the conversation. "I'm getting some more turkeys pretty soon," she said. "Lorie's so good with the poultry, I think we might raise a few." The poultry chores had been assigned to Lorena--mainly just feeding the twenty-five or thirty hens and gathering the eggs. At first it seemed that such a small household couldn't possibly need so many eggs, and yet they absorbed them effortlessly. July Johnson was a big egg eater, and Clara, who had a ferocious sweet tooth, used them in the cakes she was always making. She made so m
any cakes that everyone got tired of them except her.

  "I got to have sweets, at least," Clara said, eating a piece of cake before she went to bed, or again while she was cooking breakfast. "Sweets make up for a lot." It didn't seem to Lorena that Clara had that much that needed making up for. She mostly did what she pleased, and what she pleased usually had to do with horses. Housework didn't interest her, and washing, in particular, didn't interest her. That became Lorena's job too, though the girls helped her. They asked questions all the time they worked, and Lorena just gave them whatever answers came into her head--few of them true answers.

  She didn't know if the answers fooled them--the girls were smart. Sometimes she knew she didn't fool them.

  "Are you gonna marry that man?" Betsey asked one day. "He's already got white hair." "That's no reason not to marry him," Sally said.

  "It is, too," Betsey insisted. "If he's got white hair he could die any time." Lorena found that she didn't think about Gus all that much. She was glad she had stayed at Clara's. For almost the first time in her life she had a decent bed in a clean room and tasteful meals and people around who were kind to her. She liked having a whole room to herself, alone. Of course, she had had a room in Lonesome Dove, but it hadn't been the same. Men could come into that room-- letting them in was a condition of having it. But she didn't have to let anyone into her room in Clara's house, though often she did let Betsey, who suffered from nightmares, into it. One night Betsey stumbled in, crying--Clara was out of the house, taking one of the strange walks she liked to take. Lorena was surprised and offered to go find Clara, but Betsey wasn't listening.

  She came into the bed like a small animal and snuggled into Lorena's arms. Lorena let her stay the night, and from then on, when Betsey had a nightmare, she came to Lorena's room and Lorena soothed her.

  Only now and then did she miss Gus, though then she missed him with a painful ache and felt almost desperate to see him. At such times she felt cowardly for not having gone with him, though, of course, he himself had urged her to stay. She didn't miss the rest of it at all--the cowboys watching her and thinking things about her, the hot tent, the unpredictable storms and the fleas and mosquitoes that were always there.

  She didn't miss the fear, either--the fear that someday Gus would be off somewhere and Blue Duck would come back. What had happened had been bad enough, but she knew if he ever got her again it would be worse. Fearing him and missing Gus were mixed together, for Gus was the only person who could protect her from him.

  Unlike the girls, Clara seldom asked her any questions. Lorena came to wish that she would.

  For a while she had an urge to apologize to Clara for not having always been able to be a lady.

  It still seemed to her a miracle that she had been allowed to stay in Clara's house and be one of the family. She looked for it to go bad in some way, but it didn't go bad. The only thing that changed was that Clara spent more and more time with the horses, and less and less time in the house.

  "You came at a good time," she said one day as Lorena was coming in from feeding the hens. It was a task Lorena enjoyed--she liked the way the hens chirped and complained.

  "How's that?" Lorena asked.

  "I nagged Bob to build this house, and I don't really care about a house," Clara said.

  "We needed it for the girls, but that wasn't why I built it. I just wanted to nag him into it and I did. The main reason was he wouldn't let me work with the horses, although I'm better with them than he ever was. But he didn't think it fitting--so I thought, All right then, Bob, build me a house. But I'd rather be down with the horses, and now there's nothing to stop me." Two weeks later, Bob died in the night.

  Clara went in in the morning to change him, and found him dead. He looked exactly as he had: he just was no longer breathing. He weighed so little by then that she could lift him. Having long concluded that he would die, she had had Cholo bring a pine coffin from town. He had brought it in at night and hidden it from the girls. It was ready.

  Clara closed Bob's eyes and sat with her memories for an hour. The girls were downstairs now, pestering Lorena and eating. Now and then she could hear their laughter.

  They were happy girls; they laughed often. It pleased Clara to hear them. She wondered if Bob could hear his two lively daughters laughing, as he lay dying. She wondered if it helped, if it made up in any way for her bad tempers and the deaths of the three boys. He had counted so on those boys--they would be his help, boys. Bob had never talked much, but the one thing he did talk about was how much they would get done once the boys got big enough to do their part of the work. Often, just hearing him describe the fences they would build, or the barns, or the cattle they would buy, Clara felt out of sorts--it made her feel very distant from Bob that he saw their boys mainly as hired hands that he wouldn't have to pay.

  He sees them different, she thought. For her part, she just liked to have them there. She liked to look at them as they sat around the table, liked to watch them swimming and frolicking in the river, liked to sit by them sometimes when they slept, listening to them breathe.

  Yet they had died, and both she and Bob lost what they loved--Bob his dreams of future work with his sons, she the immediate pleasure of having sons to look at, to touch, to scold and tease and kiss.

  It struck her that endings were never as you would expect them to be. She had thought she would be relieved when Bob finally died. She hadn't felt he was part of their life anymore, and yet, now that he was gone, she knew he had been. A silent part, an uncomfortable part, but still there, still her husband, still the girls' father. He had been changed, but not removed.

  Now he had gone where her boys had gone. As well as she knew the boys, as much as she loved them, time had robbed her of them. At times she found herself mixing details and events up, not in big ways but in small. In dreams she saw her sons' faces, and when she awoke could not remember which son she had dreamed about. She wondered if she would dream of Bob, and what she would remember if she thought of him in ten years.

  Their marriage had had few high spots. She had often been happy during it, but not because of anything Bob did. She had had more happiness from horses than from her husband, though he had been a decent husband, better than most women had, from what she could judge.

  She didn't cry, but merely felt a wish, now he was gone, that she could somehow escape dealing with the tiresome formalities of death. Someone would have to go for a preacher; there would have to be some kind of funeral. They had no close neighbors, but the two or three closest would still feel they had to come, bring food, pay their respects.

  She covered Bob with a clean sheet and went downstairs. Lorena was teaching the girls to play cards. They were playing poker for buttons. Clara stood in the shadows, wishing she didn't have to interrupt their fun. Why interrupt it for a death that couldn't be helped? And yet death was not something you could ignore. It had its weight. It was a dead man lying upstairs, not a man who was sick. It seemed to her she had better not form the practice of ignoring death. If she tried it, death would find a way to answer back--it would take another of her loved ones, to remind her to respect it.

  So she walked into the room. Betsey had just won a hand. She whooped, for she loved to beat her sister. She was a beautiful child, with curls that would drive men mad some day. "I won the pot, Ma," she said, and then saw by the grave set of Clara's face that something was wrong.

  "Good," Clara said. "A good cardplayer is just what this family needs. Now I have to tell you something sad. Your father's dead." "Oh, he ain't!" Sally said.

  "Honey, he died just now," Clara said.

  Sally ran to her, but Betsey turned to Lorena, who was nearer. Lorena was surprised, but she put her arms around the child.

  "Could you go get July?" Clara asked Lorena, when the girls had calmed a bit.

  July now lived in a little room attached to the saddle shed. It wouldn't do when winter came, but for summer it was all right. He had never felt comfortable in
the house with Clara and the girls, and since Lorena had come he felt even more uncomfortable. Lorena seldom spoke to him, and Clara mainly discussed horses, or other ranch problems, yet he felt nervous in their company.

  Day to day, he felt it was wrong to have taken the job with Clara. Sometimes he felt a strong longing to be back in his old job in Fort Smith, even if Roscoe was no longer alive to be his deputy.

  But he had a son now, a baby he saw every day at supper and breakfast. His son was the darling of the ranch. The women and girls passed Martin around as if he belonged to them all; Lorena had developed a rapport with him and took the main responsibility for him when Clara was off with the horses. The baby was happy, and no wonder, with two women and two girls to spoil him. July could hardly imagine what the women would do if he tried to take the baby and raise him in Arkansas. Anyway, such a plan was not feasible.