Lonesome Dove

Clara Allen is milking a mare—its foal came early and is too weak to nurse—when her daughters Sally and Betsey come running down from the house. They’ve seen a wagon approaching on the trail, and they’re excited by the prospect of visitors. Clara sends the girls back inside to wash their father’s face. Bob Allen was trying to break a wild mare when it kicked him in the head three months earlier, and he’s been wasting away in bed, unconscious but alive, ever since. Every day, Clara feeds him chicken broth, turns his body to slow the progress of his bedsores, changes the sheets and washes his body—he has become incontinent.

Bob was a conventional man, kind in his way but taciturn and plain. The few arguments they’d had were mostly about money—Bob resented the fact that Clara always kept the funds from selling her parents’ business back in Texas. He worried she would use it to run away. She saved it so she could send their children to good schools, but their three sons had all died before they’d had a chance to do much more than learn their letters at home. Just before Bob’s accident, Clara spent some of it on a piano and lessons for the girls. The accident followed another argument: Bob ignored the warnings of Clara and the Allen’s hired hand, Cholo, to leave the mare alone. Despite being a horse trader, he never was any good with horses.

Bob never knew why Clara—one of the most eligible girls in Texas—had chosen to marry him and follow him to a life of hardship in Nebraska. He wanted her to be happy and did what he could to please her. He stopped drinking when she asked him to. His primary sadness in life was that they hadn’t had yet had another son, although he loved Betsey and Sally, too. When Clara washes the excrement from his body, sometimes he gets an erection, and it strikes her as a silent reproach at her failure to give him another son. But she knows it’s too late, even if she felt she could stand the potential heartbreak of having another child that could just up and die on her.

One of the things Clara did that annoyed Bob was that she never got the hang of rising early. She also knows that he didn’t exactly value her reading habit—she sends away for novels and literary magazines. Clara admires the stories of Thackeray and Dickens and Eliot and Gaskell, especially the women writers. Once, she wanted to be an author herself, but she doesn’t know what she’d write about all the way out here in the empty, lonely prairie, where the wind rips away the flowers she plants each spring as soon as they bloom.

Cholo doesn’t like the look of the wagon’s occupants, so he quietly insists on staying near the house. He’s old, wise, and kind. Clara relies on and respects him deeply. No sooner have Elmira, Big Zwey, and Luke pulled into the yard than Elmira starts asking after Dee Boot. Cholo recognizes the name, and he says that Dee—a pistolero or gunfighter—is in Ogallala. Clara invites the trio to stay at least long enough to rest their tired animals. And although Elmira wants to keep going, she faints as soon as she climbs down from the wagon.

That night, Elmira goes into labor. It’s long and difficult, thanks to her exhausted and malnourished state, but in the end, she delivers a tiny baby boy. Soon afterwards, it becomes apparent that mother and child will both live, but that Elmira has no interest in the child. Clara adds caring for the infant to her list of chores. Elmira tries to get out of bed, but Clara encourages her to rest. Elmira complies—just as she reluctantly feeds the newborn—during the day. But at night, while Clara is sleeping, Elmira gets Big Zwey and Luke to hitch up the wagon and take her to town. All she can think about is Dee Boot.