So he stayed on and did his work, neither truly content nor bitterly discontented. He still dreamed of Elmira and felt an aching sadness when he thought about her.
Despite that ache, the thing that made July least comfortable of all was that he knew he was in love with Clara. The feeling had started even before he knew Elmira was dead, and it grew even when he knew he ought to be grieving for Elmira.
He felt guilty about it, he felt hopeless about it, but it was true. At night he thought of her, and imagined her in her room, in her gown.
At breakfast and supper he watched her, whenever he thought he could do so without her noticing. He had many opportunities, too, for she seemed to have ceased taking any notice of him at all. He had the sense that she had become disappointed in him, though he didn't know why. And when she did look at him it frightened him. Occasionally, when he caught Clara looking at him, he almost flinched, for he did not imagine that he could hide anything from her. She was too smart--he had the sense that she could figure out anything. Her eyes were mysterious to him--often she seemed to be amused by him, at other times irritated. Sometimes her eyes seemed to pierce him, as if she had decided to read his thoughts as she would read a book. And then, in a moment, she would lift her head and ignore him, as if he were a book she had glanced through and found too uninteresting for further perusal.
And she was married. Her husband lay sick above their heads, which made his love seem all the more hopeless. But it didn't stop the longing he felt for her. In his daydreams he fell to reinventing the past, imagining that he had married Clara instead of Elmira. He gave himself a very different marriage. Clara wouldn't sit in the loft with her feet dangling all day. She wouldn't have run off on a whiskey boat. Probably she wouldn't have cared that Jake Spoon shot Benny. He imagined them raising horses and children together.
Of course, they had begun to do just that--raise horses and children together. But the reality was far different from the daydream. They weren't together. He could not go into her room at night and talk to her.
He knew that if he could, he probably wouldn't be able to think of much to say, or if he did and said something stupid, Clara would answer sharply. Still he longed for it and lay awake at night in his little shed, thinking of her.
He was doing that when Lorena came to tell him Bob was dead. Hearing the footsteps, he had the hope that it was Clara, and he pictured her face in his mind, not stern and impersonal, as it often was when she was directing some work, but soft and smiling, as it might be if she were playing with Martin at the dinner table.
He opened the door and saw to his surprise that it was Lorena.
"He died," Lorena said.
"Who?" July asked absently.
"Her husband," Lorena said.
Then she's free, July thought. He couldn't feel sad.
"Well, I guess it's for the best," he said.
"The man wasn't getting no better." Lorena noticed that he sounded happier than she had heard him sound since she arrived at the ranch. She knew exactly what it meant. She had often seen him looking at Clara with helpless love in his eyes. She herself didn't care one way or the other about July Johnson, but the dumb quality of his love annoyed her. Many men had looked at her that way, and she was not flattered by it. They wanted to pretend, such men, that they were different, that she was different, and that what might happen between them would be different than it would ever be. They wanted to pretend that they wanted pretty dresses and smiles, when what they really wanted was for her to lay down under them. That was the real wish beneath all the pretty wishes men had.
And when she was under them, they could look down and pretend something pretty was happening, but she would look up and only see a dumb face above her, strained, dishonest and anything but pretty.
"She wants you to bring the coffin," she said to July, watching him. Let Clara worry about the man. Watching him only made her long for Gus. He gave things that no one else could give. He wasn't dumb, and he didn't pretend that he wanted smiles when he wanted a poke.
They put the coffin in the front room, and July carried the frail corpse downstairs and put him in the coffin. Then, on Clara's instructions, he rode off to inform the few neighbors and to find a preacher. Clara and Lorena and the girls sat with the body all night, while Cholo dug a grave on the ridge above the barn where the boys were buried.
Betsey slept most of the night in Lorena's arms--Clara thought it nice that she had taken to the young woman so.
At dawn Clara went out and took Cholo some coffee. He had finished digging and was sitting on the mound of earth that would soon cover Bob.
Walking toward the ridge in the early sunlight, Clara had the momentary sense that they were all watching her, the boys and Bob. The vision lasted a second; it was Cholo who was watching her. It was windy, and the grass waved over the graves of her three boys--four now, she felt. In memory Bob seemed like a boy to her also. He had a boyish innocence and kept it to the end, despite the strains of work and marriage in a rough place. It often irritated her, that innocence of his. She had felt it to be laziness--it left her alone to do the thinking, which she resented. Yet she had loved it, too. He had never been a knowing man in the way that Gus was knowing, or even Jake Spoon. When she decided to marry Bob, Jake, who was a hothead, grew red in the face and proceeded to throw a fit. It disturbed him terribly that she had chosen someone he thought was dumb. Gus had been better behaved, if no less puzzled. She remembered how it pleased her to thwart them--to make them realize that her measure was different from theirs. "I'll always know where he is," she told Gus. It was the only explanation she ever offered.
Now, indeed, she would know where he was.
Cholo was watching her to see if she was hurt.
He loved Clara completely and tried in small ways to make life easier for her, although he had concluded long before that she wasn't seeking ease.
Often in the morning when she came down to the lots she would be somber and would stand by the fence for an hour, not saying a word to anyone. Other times there would be something working in her that scared the horses. He thought of Clara as like the clouds. Sometimes the small black clouds would pour out of the north; they seemed to roll over and over as they swept across the sky, like tumbleweeds. On some mornings things rolled inside Clara, and made her tense and snappish.
She could do nothing with the horses on days like that.
They became as she was, and Cholo would try gently to persuade her that it was not a good day to do the work. Other days, her spirit was quiet and calm and the horses felt that too. Those were the days they made progress training them.
Clara had brought two cups. She was very glad to be out of the house. She poured Cholo his coffee and then poured some for herself. She sat down on the mound of dirt beside him and looked into the open grave.
"Sometimes it seems like grave-digging is all we do," she said. "But that's wrong. I guess if we lived in a big town it wouldn't seem that way. I guess in New York there are so many people you don't notice the dying so much. People come faster than they go. Out here it shows more when people go--especially when it's your people." "Mister Bob, he didn't know mares," Cholo said, remembering that ignorance had been his downfall.
"Nope," Clara said. "He didn't know mares." They sat quietly for a while, drinking coffee. Watching Clara, Cholo felt sad.
He did not believe she had ever been happy.
Always her eyes seemed to be looking for something that wasn't there. She might look pleased for a time, watching her daughters or watching some young horse, but then the rolling would start inside her again and the pleased look would give way to one that was sad.
"What do you think happens when you die?" she asked, surprising him. Cholo shrugged. He had seen much death, but had not thought much about it. Time enough to think about it when it happened.
"Not too much," he said. "You're just dead." "Maybe it ain't as big a change as we think," Clara said. "Maybe you just stay around near where y
ou lived. Near your family, or wherever you was happiest. Only you're just a spirit, and you don't have the troubles the living have." A minute later she shook her head, and stood up. "I guess that's silly," she said, and started back to the house.
That afternoon July came back with a minister. The two nearest neighbors came--German families. Clara had seen more of the men than of the women--the men would come to buy horses and stay for a meal. She almost regretted having notified them.
Why should they interrupt their work just to see Bob put in the ground? They sang two hymns, the Germans singing loudly in poor English. Mrs.
Jensch, the wife of one of the German farmers, weighed over three hundred pounds. The girls had a hard time not staring at her. The buggy she rode in tilted far to one side under her weight. The minister was invited to stay the night and got rather drunk after supper--he was known to drink too much, when he got the chance. His name was the Reverend Spinnow and he had a large purple birthmark under one ear. A widower, he was easily excited by the presence of women. He was writing a book on prophecy and rattled on about it as they all sat in the living room. Soon both Clara and Lorena felt like choking him.
"Will you be thinking of moving into town now, Mrs.
Allen?" the Reverend asked hopefully. It was worth the inconvenience of a funeral way out in the country to sit with two women for a while.
"No, we'll be staying right here," Clara said.
July and Cholo carried out the mattress Bob had died on--it needed a good airing.
Betsey cried a long time that night and Lorena went up to be with her. It was better than listening to a minister go on about prophecy.
The baby was colicky and Clara rocked him while the minister drank. July came in and asked if there was anything else she needed him to do.
"No," Clara said, but July sat down anyway. He felt he should offer to rock his son, but knew the baby would just cry louder if he took him away from Clara. The minister finally fell asleep on the sofa and then, to their surprise, rolled off on the floor and began to snore loudly.
"Do you want me to carry him out?" July asked, hoping to feel useful. "He could sleep in a wagon just as well." "Let him lie," Clara said, thinking it had been an odd day. "I doubt it's the first time he's slept on a floor, and anyway he isn't your lookout." She knew July was in love with her and was irritated that he was so awkward about it. He was as innocent as Bob, but she didn't feel moved to patience, in July's case. She would save her patience for his son, who slept at her breast, whimpering now and then. Soon she got up with the baby and went to her room, leaving July sitting silently in a chair while the drunken minister snored on the floor.
Once upstairs she called Sally. Sally had not cried much. When she came into Clara's room she looked drawn. Almost immediately she began to sob. Clara put the baby down and held her daughter.
"Oh, I'm so bad," Sally said, when she could talk. "I wanted Daddy to die. I didn't like it that he just lay up there with his eyes open. It was like he was a spook. Only now I wish he hadn't died." "Hush," Clara said. "You ain't bad. I wanted him to die too." "And now you wish he hadn't, Ma?" Sally asked.
"I wish he had been more careful around horses, is what I wish," Clara said.
As the herd and the Hat Creek outfit slowly rode into Montana out of the barren Wyoming plain, it seemed to all of them that they were leaving behind not only heat and drought, but ugliness and danger too.
Instead of being chalky and covered with tough sage, the rolling plains were covered with tall grass and a sprinkling of yellow flowers. The roll of the plains got longer; the heat shimmers they had looked through all summer gave way to cool air, crisp in the mornings and cold at night. They rode for days beside the Bighorn Mountains, whose peaks were sometimes hidden in cloud.
The coolness of the air seemed to improve the men's eyesight--they fell to speculating about how many miles they could see. The plains stretched north before them. They saw plenty of game, mainly deer and antelope. Once they saw a large herd of elk, and twice small groups of buffalo. They saw no more bears, but bears were seldom far from their thoughts.
The cowboys had lived for months under the great bowl of the sky, and yet the Montana skies seemed deeper than the skies of Texas or Nebraska. Their depth and blueness robbed even the sun of its harsh force--it seemed smaller, in the va/s, and the whole sky no longer turned white at noon as it had in the lower plains.
Always, somewhere to the north, there was a swath of blueness, with white clouds floating in it like petals in a pond.
Call had scarcely spoken since the death of Deets, but the beauty of the high prairies, the abundance of game, the coolness of the mornings finally raised his spirits. It was plain that Jake Spoon, who had been wrong about most things, had been right about Montana. It was a cattleman's paradise, and they were the only cattlemen in it.
The grassy plains seemed limitless, stretching north. It was strange that they had seen no Indians, though. Often he mentioned this to Augustus.
"Custer didn't see them either," Augustus pointed out. "Not till he was caught. Now that we're here, do you plan to stop, or will we just keep going north till we get into the polar bears?" "I plan to stop, but not yet," Call said.
"We ain't crossed the Yellowstone. I like the thought of having the first ranch north of the Yellowstone." "But you ain't a rancher," Augustus said.
"I guess I am now." "No, you're a fighter," Augustus said.
"We should have left these damn cows down in Texas. You used them as an excuse to come up here, when you ain't interested in them and didn't need an excuse anyway. I think we oughta just give them to the Indians when the Indians show up." "Give the Indians three thousand cattle?" Call said, amazed at the notions his friend had.
"Why do that?" "Because then we'd be shut of them," Augustus said. "We could follow our noses, for a change, instead of following their asses. Ain't you bored?" "I don't think like you do," Call said.
"They're ours. We got 'em. I don't plan on giving them to anybody." "I miss Texas and I miss whiskey," Augustus said. "Now here we are in Montana and there's no telling what will become of us." "Miles City's up here somewhere," Call said. "You can buy whiskey." "Yes, but I'll have to drink it indoors," Augustus complained. "It's cool up here." As if to confirm his remark, the very next day an early storm blew out of the Bighorns. An icy wind came up and snow fell in the night. The men on night herd wrapped blankets around themselves to keep warm. A thin snow covered the plains in the morning, to the amazement of everyone. The Spettle boy was so astonished to wake and see it that he refused to come out of his blankets at first, afraid of what might happen. He lay wide-eyed, looking at the whiteness. Only when he saw the other hands tramping in it without ill effect did he get up.
Newt had been curious about snow all the way north, but he had lost his jacket somewhere in Kansas, and now that snow had actually fallen he felt too cold to enjoy it. All he wanted was to be warm again. He had taken his boots off when he lay down to sleep, and the snow had melted on his feet, getting his socks wet. His boots were a tight fit, and it was almost impossible to get them on over wet socks. He went over to the fire barefoot, hoping to dry his socks, but so many of the cowboys were huddled around the fire that he couldn't get a place at first.
Pea Eye had scooped up a handful of snow and was eating it. The Rainey boys had made snowballs, but all the cowboys were stiff and cold and looked threatening, so the Raineys merely threw the snowballs at one another.
"This snow tastes like hail, except that it's soft," Pea Eye observed.
The sun came out just then and shone so brightly on the white plains that some of the men had to shield their eyes. Newt finally got a place by the fire, but by then the Captain was anxious to move on and he didn't get to dry his socks. He tried to pull his boots on but had no luck until Po Campo noticed his difficulty and came over with a little flour, which he sprinkled in the boots.
"This will help," he said, and he was right, though getting the
boots on still wasn't easy.
The sun soon melted the thin snow, and for the next week the days were hot again. Po Campo walked all day behind the wagon, followed by the pigs, who bored through the tall grass like moles--a sight that amused the cowboys, although Augustus worried that the pigs might stray off.
"We ought to let them ride in the wagon," he suggested to Call.
"I don't see why." "Well, they've made history," Augustus pointed out.
"When?" Call asked. "I didn't notice." "Why, they're the first pigs to walk all the way from Texas to Montana," Augustus said.
"That's quite a feat for a pig." "What will it get them?" Call inquired.
"Eaten by a bear if they ain't careful, or eaten by us if they are. They've had a long walk for nothing." "Yes, and the same's likely true for us," Augustus said, irritated that his friend wasn't more appreciative of pigs.
With Deets dead, Augustus and Call alternated the scouting duties. One day Augustus asked Newt to ride along with him, much to Newt's surprise. In the morning they saw a grizzly, but the bear was far upwind and didn't scent them. It was a beautiful day--no clouds in the sky. Augustus rode with his big rifle propped across the saddle--he was in the highest of spirits. They rode ahead of the herd some fifteen miles or more, and yet when they stopped to look back they could still see the cattle, tiny black dots in the middle of the plain, with the southern horizon still far behind them.
Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove Page 96