Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon

by Comanche Moon

  "I wish I could take my head off," he said, to Maggie. "If I could take it off I'd chuck it far enough away that I couldn't feel it throb." "Many a man has ruined his health for good, drinking whiskey with Gus McCrae," Maggie informed him sternly.

  Pea Eye didn't dispute the opinion.

  "Gus? He can hold more liquor than a tub," he said. "Is this your quilt?" "Yes, I thought I better cover you," Maggie said.

  "I had an awful dream," Pea Eye said.

  "I dreamed a big Comanche held me up by my legs and scalped me." "That wasn't a Comanche, that was me," Maggie said. "Your legs were sticking into the street--I was afraid a wagon would run over you, so I pulled you around." "Jake's gone off to Colorado to find a silver mine," Pea Eye said.

  Maggie didn't answer. Instead, to Pea Eye's consternation, she began to cry. She didn't say anything; she just took her quilt and walked home with it, crying.

  Pea Eye, never certain about what women might do, got up at once and walked back to the bunkhouse. He resolved in future never to get drunk and fall asleep where a woman might spot him. That way there would be no tears.

  "Maybe I shouldn't have talked about my dream," he said, a little later, discussing the incident with Deets.

  "Do you think it would upset a woman to hear about my dream?" Pea asked.

  "Don't know. I ain't a woman and I ain't had no dream," Deets said.

  Inish Scull--General Scull now, thanks to a brilliant, some would say brutal, series of victories in the long conflict with the South--had just settled into his study, with the morning papers and a cup of Turkish coffee, when his nephew Augereau, a wispy youth with French leanings, wandered in with an annoyed look on his face.

  "It's a damn nuisance, not having a butler," Augereau said. "Why would Entwistle enlist?" "I suppose he didn't want to miss the great fight," General Scull replied. "I didn't so much mind his enlisting--the real nuisance is that the man got himself killed, and within two weeks of the armistice too. If the fool had only kept his head down for another two weeks you wouldn't be having to answer the door, would you, Augereau?" "It is rather annoying--I ain't a butler," Augereau said. "I was reading Vauvenargues." "Well, Vauvenargues will keep, but what about the fellow at the door? I suppose it was a fellow," Scull said.

  "Yes, I believe he's a colonel," Augereau said.

  "There's no reason to expect. Either he is or he isn't," Scull said. "Would it discommode you too much to show him in?" "I suppose I could show him in, since he's here," Augereau said. "I say, will Auntie Inez be back soon? It's a good deal more jolly when Auntie Inez is here." "Your aunt just inherited a great deal of money," Scull informed him. "She's run off to Cuba, to buy another plantation. I don't know when she'll be returning. Her tropical habits ain't exactly suited to Boston." "Oh what, the masturbation?" young Augereau said. "But there was a lap robe and they were in a carriage. What's the bother?" "Augereau, would you mind going and getting that colonel?" Scull said. "We can discuss your dear Auntie's behaviour some other time." Augereau went to the door, but he didn't quite exit the study. He stood for almost a minute right in the doorway, as if undecided whether to go out or stay in.

  "The fact is, I don't much care for Vauvenargues," he said. "I do care for Auntie--hang the bloody masturbation!" Then, before Scull could speak to him again about the colonel he had misplaced somewhere in the house, Augereau turned and drifted off, leaving the door to the study ajar, a lapse that irritated Scull intensely. He liked doors, drawers, shutters, windows, and cabinets to be closed properly, and, on balance, was more annoyed with his impeccably trained butler, Entwistle, for getting himself shot at an obscure depot in Pennsylyania than he was at Inez for masturbating old Jervis Dalrymple in an open carriage injudiciously parked near Boston Common. Somehow the lap robe had slipped during the operation; to Inez's annoyance the policeman who happened to be passing was a tall Vermonter, well able to look into the carriage and witness the act, which resulted in a charge of public fornication, not to mention much fuss and bother.

  "Really, you Yankeesffwas Inez remarked in annoyance. "I was only doing off his pizzle in order to calm him down. I couldn't take him into Mr. Cabot's tea party in that state, now could I? He might have thrust himself on some innocent young miss." "I have no doubt your action was well intended," Scull told his wife, "but you might have been more careful about where you parked." "I'll park where I please--th is a free country, or at least it was until you filthy Yankees won the war," Inez told him, her fury rising. "It was no worse than milking a cow. I suppose next I'll be arrested if I decide to milk my Jersey in public." "Your Jersey and a Dalrymple pizzle are not quite the same thing, not in the eyes of Boston," Scull informed her. He had recently been forced to turn all the Scull portraits face to the wall, to prevent Inez from ruining them with her wild quirtings.

  Young Augereau never reappeared, but, after a bit, Scull heard a tread in the hallway, a hesitant and rather unmilitary tread. He put down his Turkish coffee and stepped out of the study just in time to stop a thin, stooped colonel in the United States Army from proceeding along the almost endless hallway.

  "I'm here, Colonel--we lost our butler, you know," Scull said.

  "I'm Colonel Soult," the man said. "We met not long after Vicksburg, but I don't suppose you remember. That's S-o-u-l-t--x's often confused with "salt."' In my youth I was called "Salty"' because of the confusion." Scull had no memory of the man, but he did recall seeing the name "Soult"' on a muster roll or document of some sort.

  "Samuel Soult, is it?" he inquired, only to see a flush of delight come to the man's sallow features.

  "Why, yes, that's me, Sam Soult," he said, shaking Scull's hand.

  "What brings you to our old Boston, Colonel Soult?" Scull asked, once the two of them were settled in his study. A sulky cook had even been persuaded to bring Colonel Soult a cup of the strong Turkish coffee General Scull now favored.

  Scull wore the multilensed dark glasses he had worn throughout the war--glasses which got him the nickname "Blinders" Scull. With a touch of his finger he could regulate the tint and thickness of the lenses to compensate for whatever intensity of light prevailed. The study, at the time, was rather a litter. Scull could see that the disorder offended the neat colonel a little; but, by the end of the war, he was in a fever of impatience to get back to the book he had just started writing when the conflict broke out: The Anatomy and Function of the Eyelid in Mammals, Reptiles, Fish, and Birds. At the moment he was plowing through the classical authors, noting every reference to the eyelids, however slight. A towering pile of papers, journals, books, letters, photographs, and drawings had had to be dumped out of the chair where Colonel Soult was by now rather cautiously sitting.

  "I was sent, sir--sent by the generals," Colonel Soult said. "You did leave the front rather quickly, once the peace was settled." "True, I'm not a man to wait," Scull said. "The fighting was over--the details can be left to the clerks. I had a book to write, as you can see--a book on the eyelid, a neglected subject. Until I lost my own I didn't realize how neglected. I was eager to get to it--st am. I hope you've not come all this way to try and pull me away from my researches, Colonel Soult." "Well, I .was sent by the generals," Colonel Soult admitted. "They believe you're the man to take the West--I believe that's the general view." The Colonel was almost stuttering in his anxiety.

  "Take the West? Take it where?" Scull asked.

  "What I meant to say was, administer it," the Colonel said. "General Grant and General Sherman, they're of the view that you're the man to do it." "What did General Sherman think about this scheme?" Scull inquired. He knew that the rough Sherman was not likely to sponsor or support his candidacy for such an important post.

  "Don't know that Sherman was consulted," the Colonel admitted. "If you won't take the West, would you at least take Texas? The savages there require a firm hand and the border is not entirely pacified, if reports are to be believed." "No, the savages in Texas are broken," Scull said firmly. "I don't doubt that there
are a few free remnants, but they won't last long. As for the border, my view is that we should never have bothered stealing it from Mexico in the first place. It's only thorn and mesquite anyway." He let that opinion sink in and then pointed his thick blinders directly at the quaking colonel and let fly.

  "You're a poor specimen of colonel, Sam Soult," Scull said. "First you offer me the West and then you reduce me to Texas before I even refused the first offer. All I did was inquire about General Sherman's opinion, which you evidently can't provide." "Oh, beg pardon, General--I suppose I'm not used to this sweet coffee," the Colonel said, aghast at the blunder he had just committed.

  "Your tone when I offered the West was not encouraging --of course, if you would take the whole West, the generals would be delighted." "No sir, I pass," Scull said. "Let General Sherman run the West. I expect the Sioux and the Cheyenne will lead him on a merry chase for a few more years." "I don't believe he wants it either," the Colonel said, with a droop in his tone.

  "General Sherman has not declared his intentions." "If Sherman won't take it, give to whoever you want," Scull said. "I doubt the northern tribes will last ten years, if they last that long." "But General, what about Texas?" the lugubrious colonel asked. "We have no one to send. The President was particularly hopeful that you'd take Texas." Inish Scull clicked his lenses a few times, until he came to the last lens, the one that shut out all light, and insured perfect darkness.

  Behind his black lens he could no longer see the Colonel, which was how he preferred it. He wanted to think for a few minutes. Inez hated the black lens; she knew he could click the black lens and make her vanish from view.

  But Colonel Soult was not in on the secret; he didn't know that he had just vanished from view.

  All he could tell was that Blinders Scull, victor in fifteen engagements with the Rebs, was staring at him from behind the very blinders that had produced his nickname.

  It made Colonel Soult distinctly uncomfortable, but no more uncomfortable, he felt sure, than having to journey back to Washington with the news that Scull had refused everything. The refusal would undoubtedly be taken as the result of his own inadequate diplomacy; he was unhappily aware that he had blundered by offering General Scull Texas before he had quite refused the whole West. If ^w of that misspeaking leaked out, the Colonel knew that his own next posting was not likely to be one that would appeal to Mrs.

  Soult; if it happened to be west of Ohio, Mrs. Soult would be disturbed, it being her firm belief that Ohio was the westernmost point at which a civilized existence could be sustained. She had heard once of a frontiersman who, faced with a howling blizzard, had actually torn pages out of one of Mrs. Browning's books in order to start a fire; Mrs. Soult herself wrote a little poetry, mostly of a devotional nature--the report of the frontiersman and the fire struck her as evidence enough that, beyond Ohio, there was only barbarism and blizzards.

  General Scull, secure behind his blinders, was reflecting on the fact that he had abruptly stopped hopping during the siege of Viicksburg. The flea malady, as he called it, that had seized him while in Ahumado's pit had left him because of a particularly loud cannon blast one gray morning in Mississippi. He had been hopping uncontrollably, to the bewilderment of his troops, when the cannon boomed in his ear; since then he had not indulged in a single hop.

  Now he had been offered the West, land of distances and sky, the place where the last unpacified aboriginal people dwelled. He had been at a conclave once attended by a few Cheyenne and thought he had never seen a handsomer people.

  The necessity of blasting and starving them into line with territorial policy did not appeal to him. It was a job he could happily refuse.

  When he remembered Texas, though, he found himself unable to be quite so immediate or so categorical in his refusal. He had enjoyed tramping the plains at the head of his ranger troop--it beat mowing down his cousins from the Carolinas, or Inez's cousins from Georgia. He remembered his sharp engagements with Buffalo Hump, an enemy he had never even really seen, at close range. He remembered the daring thievery of Kicking Wolf, and the loquacity of the tracker Famous Shoes. In particular Scull remembered Ahumado, the Black Vaquero, the pit, the cages, the raw pigeons, and the blistering his brain suffered once the old Mayan had taken off his eyelids.

  His friend Freddie Catherwood and his companion Johnnie Stephens had regaled him several times with tales of Chiapas and the Yucatan.

  Catherwood had even given him a portfolio of drawings of lost temples in the Yucatan, made on his last journey with Johnnie Stephens.

  Ahumado, he recalled, had been a man of the south, of the very regions Catherwood and Stephens had explored. Scull felt he might go someday and see the jungles and the temples, the place that had spawned his shrewdest foe.

  But Ahumado, if alive, was in Mexico, whereas Texas was the theater he was being offered. He wondered which of the men he had once led were still alive, and whether Buffalo Hump still held the great Palo Duro Canyon. Scull had kept up, as best he could, with the battle reports from Texas, but it had been years since he had seen Buffalo Hump's name mentioned in connection with a raid. Like most great chiefs, his name had simply dropped from history, once he grew old.

  It occurred to him, as he hid behind his blinders, that the one good reason for going back to Texas was Inez. Since there was no way to control her it was no doubt better to turn her loose on a frontier than in the somber streets of Boston.

  The cattle business was booming, from what he could read. With cowboys and cattle barons to amuse her Inez might be content, for a year or two.

  But Inez was in Cuba, mistress now to the greatest plantation on the island. There was no telling when or if she would return, and, in any case, experience persuaded him that it was seldom wise to return to a theater he had left. There were far too many places in the world that he hadn't seen to waste his years revisiting those he had already been to. Johnnie Stephens had been to Persia and was enthusiastic about it, going on and on about the blue mosques and the long light.

  Then there was the impediment of his book. All during the war sentences and paragraphs had boiled up in his brain; he had scribbled them down on every imaginable article, including, on occasion, his saddlebags. He had worn out a whole set of Pickering's excellent little Diamond Classics, thumbing through them during intervals in battle for chance references to eyelids.

  When at last he clicked his lenses and brought Colonel Soult back into focus he saw that the man was almost shaking with anxiety. Battle itself could have hardly unnerved him more than his hour in the dim old mansion on Beacon Hill.

  "They thought if I came myself, to bring you their respects in person, maybe you would consider a command in the West," Colonel Soult said. "Some part of the West, at least, General." The Colonel saw from the set of General Scull's jaw that he was about to deliver a refusal. Sam Soult had not served as a subordinate to seven generals not to know when he was about to get a no rather than a yes.

  "Thank them kindly, Colonel, but as you can see I'm a man of the library now," Scull said. "I've just served five years in a great war --the only struggle that still interests me is the conflict with the sentence, sir--the English sentence." Colonel Soult had got the refusal he expected, but the grounds the General gave confused him.

  "Excuse me, General--the sentence?" Colonel Soult replied.

  Scull seized a blank sheet of foolscap and waved it dramatically in front of Colonel Soult's face--it might make the man's job easier if he could be sent back to Washington with the conviction that the great General Inish Scull was a little teched.

  "See this page of paper? It's blank," Scull said. "That, sir, is the most frightening battlefield in the world: the blank page. I mean to fill this paper with decent sentences, sir-- this page and hundreds like it. Let me tell you, Colonel, it's harder than fighting Lee.

  Why, it's harder than fighting Napoleon. It requires unremitting attention, which is why I can't oblige the President, or the generals who sent yo
u here." Then he leaned back and smiled.

  "Besides, they just want one to go back and eat dust so they won't have to," he said. "I won't do it, sir. That's my final ^w." "Well, if you won't, you won't, General," Colonel Soult said. It was a dictum he was to repeat to himself many times on the somber train ride back to Washington. General Scull had said no, which meant that he himself could look forward to a posting well west of Ohio, where Mrs. Browning's books were considered little better than kindling. Sam Soult knew well that it would greatly dismay his wife.

  Famous Shoes was travelling by night, covering as much ground as he could, when he heard the singing to the south. At first, when he was far from the singer, he thought the faint sound he heard might be a wolf, but as he came closer he realized it was a Comanche, though only one Comanche. All that was very curious. Why would a single Comanche be singing by himself at night, on the llano?

  He himself had been to the Cimarron River, where a few old people of his tribe still held out. He had been showing some of the flints he had found while tracking Captain McCrae to some of the oldest of the Kickapoos. Over the years since his discovery he had shown the flints to most of the oldest members of his tribe, and they had been impressed. He had been back several times to the place where he found the flints, and had located so many arrowheads and spearheads that he had to take a sack with him, to carry them. He had found a fine hiding place, too, on the Guadalupe River, a small cave well concealed by bushes, which is where he hid the flints that had been made by the Old p.