The Berrybender Narratives

by Larry McMurtry

  62

  She felt a stir of unease.

  VICKY DIDN’T TRY TO EXPLAIN to Tasmin why she grieved so when the news came that her husband, Lord Berrybender, was dead. She found it easier to talk to Buffum, who, after all, had lost a husband also—perhaps a better husband than Albany Berry-bender could ever have been. There were men who dissembled and men who changed, and then there were men who could only be what they were. Lord Berrybender was a man of the latter sort. He had been many things that were not nice. He had been violent and he had been cold; he had been drunken, unfaithful, and brutal; he begged shamelessly when she refused him, yet he thought no more of lying to her than he would have of lying to a fly. Cruelest of all, he had shown no interest in their children, had scarcely ever invited either boy into his lap, where Tasmin’s brash Petal installed herself without bothering to ask permission.

  “There is always more than people on the outside can see,” Vicky told Buffum. “He was so sweet sometimes, Buffum—so infinitely sweet. I vowed a thousand times not to forgive him, and yet when he looked at me in a certain way I could not hold to my purpose. I forgave him countless times. Do you think I’m wrong?”

  “No,” Buffum said. “When men are sweet there’s no holding out.”

  “They say the flesh is weak—it’s a true saying,” Vicky told her. “And yet if one is not weak—if one is strong, like Tasmin, it seems one must be mainly alone.”

  She sighed.

  “I was not made to be alone,” she said.

  “Nor I,” Buffum told her. “I fear that Tassie is very likely to end up alone. She is so very unbending.”

  “I’m certainly nothing of the sort,” Tasmin said indignantly, when Mary repeated the remark to her. “How dare she say that? I’ve yielded, I’ve compromised, I’ve abandoned position after position in order to avoid being alone. I don’t know what Buffum means. Even now all I can think of is when my husband will appear. I’ve spent more than half my marriage waiting for Jimmy to appear. I won’t have Buffum telling me that I don’t bend.”

  Cook was out early the next morning, hoping to find a few eggs—the hens in Washington-on-theBrazos were skinny things. Cook felt it was better to rely on them for eggs than to attempt to cook such wiry specimens.

  It was when she looked up from a nest with a single egg in it that she saw Mr. Jim coming. Behind him, on other horses, were some very ragged people. Riding beside him, at his elbow, was a brown woman. Something in the way the two looked at one another caught Cook’s attention. She felt a stir of unease.

  Nonetheless she at once woke Tasmin, to give her the news.

  “What? Where is he?” Tasmin asked, jumping out of bed.

  “He’s just stopped to speak to Mr. Fitzpatrick,” Cook said. She was in rather a quandary about what it was best to say.

  “Why do you look that way?” Tasmin asked. “Is Jimmy hurt? Tell me.”

  “No, he’s not hurt,” Cook assured her, wishing she had never spoken. But Tasmin had known Cook so long that dissembling was impossible.

  “There’s a woman with him,” Cook at last said. “A woman? What do you mean, a captive?” Tasmin asked, more puzzled than concerned.

  “Just a woman—I shouldn’t have mentioned it,” Cook said.

  63

  She had been fearful of being scorned . . .

  PETAL, FRIENDLY AS COULD BE, put her short white arm next to Rosa’s brown one, comparing the two tones.

  “I wish I was brown—it’s prettier,” she concluded.

  “You better just stay white,” Rosa told her. “If you’re white maybe you can be the queen someday.”

  “Yes, and she’d certainly like that,” Cook observed. “She acts like a queen already, this little miss does.”

  “I boss her,” Petal said, smiling. “I boss everybody. I even bossed my grandpa, only now he’s gone’d.”

  “Your pa’s dead?” Jim asked, very startled, when Tasmin told him the news. “I didn’t think anybody could kill that old man.”

  “There were said to be five thousand soldiers with General Santa Anna—I suppose it was enough to do the job,” she told him.

  Tasmin refrained from asking Jim about Rosa, who had met all the Berrybenders and now sat with Petal and Cook. Jim was just back. Tasmin intended to resist her impulse to be the prying housewife. Tasmin assumed Jim had rescued Rosa, and then came to like her. It was easy to see that he did like her. Meeting the Berrybenders had made Rosa a little nervous, but not very. What they all noted about her was that she seemed very calm.

  “I suppose it’s because she’s had to put up with worse things than meeting a bunch of half-addled Europeans,” Geoff remarked, trying to put his finger on the quality of Rosa’s calm.

  “But does she want my husband?” Tasmin wondered. “It’s clear that Jim wants her—but it’s not clear that she intends to accept him. What do you think, George?”

  “She was taken by slavers—undoubtedly a rough experience,” George said. “Remember what happened to Buffum at the Mandans’. These hothouse questions probably mean nothing to the woman. She’s far from home—she has nothing but the clothes on her back. What Jim wants or doesn’t want may be the least of her problems.”

  “But it’s not the least of mine,” Tasmin told him. “I’m not criticizing her, George. I think I like her. Whatever she is, one can see that she’s not cheap. Jim didn’t bring back a whore.”

  Though Tasmin didn’t say it to the company, the questions she wanted to ask did not all have to do with Jim. The man who had ridden away, flinty faced, to revenge the murder of a wife and son was not the man who had come back, leading ten captives and a dignified Mexican woman. Jim had always been lean—it was one source of his appeal. Tasmin had always disliked fleshy men. Master Stiles had been lean, Pomp had been lean, Jim was lean. But now he seemed a skeleton, hollow-faced, haunted. He wore a look of deep unhappiness, which only changed when he looked at Rosa, or sat by her for a moment. Tasmin felt perplexed. Jim had fought fierce battles before: with the Piegans, with the Pawnee boys, with Obregon and his men. He blazed with rage, became the Sin Killer, then slowly came back to being Jim. Only this time it was clear that he had not come back. He was not the old Jim—even Petal could not quite reach him. Whatever they had gone through together had left Jim in great need of this quiet woman.

  Despite her curiosity, Tasmin felt hesitant about trying to get the story from Jim—he never liked it when she questioned him. While he was busy with the horses, listening to Tom Fitzpatrick fill him in on what was known about the terrible massacre at the Alamo, Tasmin saw an opportunity and sat down by Rosa.

  “Will you tell me what happened?” she asked. Why not be direct? “My husband doesn’t seem quite like himself.”

  Rosa was relieved that Jim’s wife could speak to her in a friendly, frank way. She had been fearful of being scorned, perhaps even beaten, although she had done nothing sinful with Jem. But a wife wouldn’t know that—a wife might have suspicions. She had had plenty of suspicions about her husband—and well-founded ones, too.

  “I was taken by the slavers, like the others,” Rosa said. “They were very bad men, cruel. Jem came in the morning and killed them all, every one. No one escaped him.”

  “That’s no surprise,” Tasmin told her. “He spilled much blood—he couldn’t stop,” Rosa went on. “He was going to kill everybody— those women—even those children.”

  She nodded toward the other captives, who were sitting listlessly nearby, waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

  “I was able to stop him,” Rosa told Tasmin. “I grabbed his bridle—in time he came back to himself. When he realized what he had been about to do, he broke his sword. Now Jem thinks I saved him.”

  “It sounds to me like you did save him,” Tasmin said. “You kept him from killing innocent people. So it’s no wonder that now he needs you very much.”

  “Yes, he needs me,” Rosa agreed. “I don’t know for how long. He saved my life. He killed th
e men who dishonored me. He kept us all from starving. He told me he had a wife. I’m glad you are friendly toward me. I am not a husband stealer. I told Jem I would be his servant. I can cook and make fires and do the things a servant does.”

  “But do you have a home to go to?” Tasmin asked.

  Rosa shook her head. “My little ones are dead,” she replied. “So is my husband—he was no great loss. So if you and Jem need a servant I will stay and work for you, to show that I am grateful.”

  Tasmin didn’t immediately answer, because she didn’t know what to say. That Jim wanted to keep Rosa was obvious. What was less certain was whether he wanted to keep his wife. He had not kissed her, not touched her. He had kissed Petal, but that was all.

  Cook soon took to Rosa, who immediately set about making herself useful. Tasmin could only brood and wonder.

  Jim was aware that he needed to explain things to Tasmin. She was his—when night came she would expect him in her bed. And yet he meant to do as he had been doing, spending his nights by the campfire with Rosa.

  Finally Tasmin bearded him—indecision and uncertainty were states not to be born.

  “Jimmy, I’m not angry—I just want to know what you want.”

  “I have to stay with Rosa,” Jim said, relieved that Tasmin didn’t seem angry.

  “She saved me, now I need her,” he added. “I guess we should marry.”

  “Well, that might work in the Ute country, where men are allowed various wives—but it won’t work here,” Tasmin said. “It would make you a bigamist, and bigamy is a crime, I’m sure—besides, I imagine Rosa’s Catholic, and the Catholic Church certainly frowns on bigamy.”

  “Rosa saved me from slaughtering the women and children,” Jim said. “She’s the real Sin Killer— she killed the big sin I was about to do.”

  Tasmin walked away, perplexed. She needed to talk to her counselors—George and Geoff.

  “Jim’s been through a crucible—the slaughter in that camp must have been terrible,” George said. “He’s had a moral crisis and it’s left him not himself. He badly needs Rosa to lean on, but of course that may be temporary.”

  “She seems a nice woman,” Geoff added. “She is, but I don’t know that I am,” Tasmin told them. “It’s so complicated. She’s very grateful to Jimmy, of course. She offered to be our servant, to show her gratitude. Besides that, she has no place to go. I don’t think a servant is what Jimmy wants. I think he wants to take her to wife. He said as much. And yet here I am, the old wife but hardly the easy wife. Rosa seems to want to be as Little Onion was. She’s been misused, and Jem, as she calls him, saved her. So she wants to help him. I don’t think she means to mate with him.”

  “That could change,” Geoff told her. “Of course, given enough time—but enough time might mean years,” Tasmin said. “What am I to do right now?”

  Her counselors looked stumped. They ceased to counsel.

  “It’s very peculiar, the situations life presents one with,” Father Geoff reflected.

  Night fell, the company ate. Tasmin slept alone. Rosa built a campfire, and she and Jim sat beside it.

  64

  . . . Tasmin woke up tearful . . .

  IN THE NIGHT Tasmin woke up tearful, from an aching pain—but the pain was not because her husband was sitting by a campfire with a quiet Mexican woman. She cried from the grief that woke her two nights out of three—her grief for her boys. It was a grief she had come to doubt she could bear and remain sane. If Jim had known how to help her, she felt she might get better—but Jim didn’t know how to help her—never had. When, yesterday, he had casually said that he wanted to marry Rosa, Tasmin suddenly realized that words such as “marry,” “husband,” “wife” had, for Jim, neither legal nor sacramental weight. Those words didn’t mean to Jim what they meant to people brought up in settled societies. All he meant by “husband,” “wife,” “marry” was that he and the woman in question might travel together for some while. But his scanty reading of his tattered Bible had given him no sense of holy matrimony as it was understood by settled people. His agreeing to get “hitched up” with her had been, for him, a light thing. He was a mountain man; he saw no reason not to add wives when a pleasing new

  woman came along—it wasn’t a fault exactly, merely the fruit of his unparented upbringing. Tasmin didn’t hold this against him—how, under the circumstances, could it have been otherwise?—but it did make her feel lonelier when she woke up in the night grieving for her boys. She now considered that she should have known all this at once, on their first night together, when she had got slapped for attempting to explain what theology was. Jim had no theology, just a notion or two: that sin, whatever it was, should be punished; that wives should be silent and obey their husbands. He had the merest scraps of belief and he couldn’t help her when she felt sad in the night.

  When dawn came she went straight to the fire Rosa was already building up.

  “Excuse me for inviting myself into your company this early,” Tasmin said. Jim looked tired and a little wary. Rosa offered Tasmin coffee.

  “I’ve got to say this, Jim,” she told him, trying to control her voice, trying not to begin to cry.

  “I can accept the death of our boys because I have to—they’re dead,” she said. “What I can’t accept is how they’re buried.”

  Jim looked perplexed. The boys were buried where they died, as most travelers were buried.

  “Here it is, Jim,” she went on. “I can’t bear to think of them buried lonely and far apart, far from either of us. I want them buried together, in a churchyard we could visit. A nice churchyard, with grass, and a headstone for each of them.”

  “I buried my girls that way,” Rosa said. “I put up little crosses.

  “If I am ever in my village again I will visit them,” she said sadly. “But I don’t know if I will be.”

  “You see, Jimmy?” Tasmin said. “That’s how any good mother would feel.”

  Jim waited, not sure what the women were telling him.

  “I think I have the resources to be happy again, sometime in my life,” Tasmin told him. “If I can just visit my boys from time to time and know that they’re together in a proper graveyard I can reconcile myself to what’s happened and go on. But if one poor tyke is over by the Rio Grande and the other I know not where, in time I think I’ll go mad. It’s a thing I just can’t bear.”

  “You should go get them for her—you can find them,” Rosa said. “If you buried them you can find them—it will help her.”

  “That’s just what I intended to ask—that you go gather in our boys,” Tasmin told him, grateful to Rosa for smoothing the way. “I haven’t asked you for many favors—I’m sure you’ll agree. But I’m asking this.”

  Jim thought the request strange, but had no objection to doing it so long as Rosa would come along.

  “I would be grateful if you’d go with him,” Tasmin said, to Rosa. “As their mother I know it’s my job. But it would mean leaving Petal in the lap of this infant republic and I fear she would soon bring it down. They’d be trying to recall General Santa Anna if they had to cope with Petal for a month.”

  “You mean you want to wait here?” Jim asked. “No—not here,” she said. “I mean to leave Texas and I hope never to come back. I’ll wait for you in Saint Louis. I’ll make George or Geoff wait with me, and perhaps Buffum and her young corporal as well.”

  Jim looked at Tasmin several times—she had a wild, desperate look, like a mare that had been lo-coed. Her face was thinning, making her eyes even larger, wilder.

  “Please, Jim,” Tasmin asked. “We’ve got Petal to think of. I don’t want to become a crazed mother. If you can’t find the time to bring them all the way to Saint Louis, then take them to Bent’s Fort. I’m sure Kit would bring them the rest of the way.”

  Jim thought he could see the right in it, brothers laid together in a settled place.

  “No, I won’t send them by Kit—they’re our boys,” he told her. “I�
��ll go get them and bring them wherever you want them.”

  “Thank you,” Tasmin said.

  She turned to Rosa. “It’ll be a hard journey, I know. I’m grateful to you for attempting it.”

  “I never took no journey till I was stolen,” Rosa said. “That trip was hard enough.”

  “This one will be easier,” Jim told her. “The weather will be easing, and I’ll get you a better horse. That old sack of bones you’re riding barely made it this far.”

  He talked for a bit, discussing the practicalities of the journey. Tasmin and Rosa listened with only half a mind, half an ear. Jim was thinking of guns and blankets, meat and bullets. The women were thinking of dead children, those they had brought into being, had suckled, had cleaned when they soiled, but had lost.

  “I expect it will take four months,” Jim concluded.

  “I’ll be in Saint Louis by then,” Tasmin promised.

  65

  . . . they were still good shoulders, she considered.

  I THINK IT PAYS to be particular about cocks,” Buffum told them. “I’ve been lucky twice.” She was pregnant again and glowing. Corporal Dominguin was evidently given little rest. Somehow Buffum had turned into a beauty; no one seeing her now would suppose she had ever been plain. Whether this change was a result of a particularity about cocks no one could say; but Buffum was rapidly becoming the beauty of the family. Tasmin, feeling old and dowdy, was too distracted to do much about herself, although, once they got to Galveston Island, where some adornments were available, Father Geoff urged a few purchases on her: a new hairbrush, scent, a frock. Still, when General Houston gave a ball for the Berrybenders as they passed through, Tasmin had as many young men petitioning her for dances as Buffum. Tasmin bared her shoulders; they were still good shoulders, she considered. She let herself be swept up in the dancing for an hour—it took her mind off other things.

  General Houston, rather grumpy, somewhat dyspeptic, did not dance. Tasmin had hoped that someone would recover her father’s body from the Alamo, but the hope was forlorn. The heaps of dead had been thrown into common graves. Vicky still teared up when Lord Berrybender’s name was mentioned, which was more and more seldom as they straggled on toward the port of Galveston and began the confusing business of attempting to decide which of them were going home to Europe and which merely to Saint Louis with Tasmin and Petal.