Lonesome Dove

The funny thing about Woodrow Call was how hard he was to keep in scale. He wasn’t a big man—in fact, he was barely middle-sized—but when you walked up and looked him in the eye it didn’t seem that way. Augustus was four inches taller than his partner, and Pea Eye three inches taller yet, but there was no way you could have convinced Pea Eye that Captain Call was the short man. Call had him buffaloed, and in that respect Pea had plenty of company. If a man meant to hold his own with Call it was necessary to keep in mind that Call wasn’t as big as he seemed. Augustus was the one man in south Texas who could usually keep him in scale, and be built on his advantage whenever he could.

The business with the Comanches had been long and ugly—it had occupied Call most of his adult life—but it was really over. In fact, it had been so long since he had seen a really dangerous Indian that if one had suddenly ridden up to the crossing he would probably have been too surprised to shoot—exactly the kind of careless attitude he was concerned to guard himself against. Whipped they might be, but as long as there was one free Comanche with a horse and a gun it would be foolish to take them lightly.

He tried to keep sharp, but in fact the only action he had scared up in six months of watching the river was one bandit […]

Even though he still came to the river every night, it was obvious to Call that Lonesome Dove had long since ceased to need guarding.

[Call] had run with Jake Spoon off and on for twenty years, and liked him well; but the man had always worried him a little, underneath. There was no more likeable man in the west, and no better rider, either; but riding wasn’t everything, and neither was likeableness. Something in Jake didn’t quite stick. Something wasn’t quite consistent. […]

Augustus knew it too. He was a great sponsor of Jake’s and had stayed fond of him although for years they were rivals for Clara Allen […]. But Augustus felt, with Call, that Jake wasn’t long on backbone. When he left the Rangers Augustus said more than once that he would probably end up hung. So far that hadn’t happened, but […] Jake prided himself on pretty horses, and would never ride a horse as hard as the bay had been ridden if trouble wasn’t somewhere behind him.

It was funny how one shot could make a man’s reputation like that. It was a hip shot Jake made because he was scared, and it killed a Mexican bandit […]. Jake shot blind from the hip, with the sun in his eyes to boot, and hit the bandit right in the Adam’s apple, a thing not likely to occur more than once in a lifetime, if that often.

But it was Jake’s luck that most of the men who saw him make the shot were raw boys too, with not enough judgment to appreciate how lucky a thing it was. Those that survived grew up told the story all across the West [… about] what a dead pistol shot Jake Spoon was, though any many who had fought with him through the years would know that he was no shot at all with a pistol and only a fair shot with a rifle.

“Why, women and children and settlers are just cannon fodder for lawyers and bankers,” Augustus said. “They’re part of the scheme. After the Indians wipe out enough of them you get your public outcry, and we go chouse the Indians out of the way. If they keep coming back then the Army takes over and chouses them worse. Finally the Army will manage to whip ’em down to where they can be squeezed onto some reservation, so the lawyers and bankers can come in and get civilization started. Every bank in Texas ought to pay us a commission for the work we done. If we hadn’t done it, all the bankers would still be back in Georgia, living on poke salad and turnip greens.”

“I don’t know why you stuck with it, if that’s the way you think,” Call said.

[…] “I wanted a look at it before the bankers and lawyers get it.”

The Captain was seldom really harsh with him unless he made a pure mess of some job, but the Captain never passed him a kind word, either. The Captain did not go around handing out kind words—but if he was in the mood to do so Newt knew he would be the last to get one. No compliment ever came to him from the Captain, no matter how well he worked. It was a little discouraging: the harder he tried to please the Captain, the less the Captain seemed to be pleased. When Newt managed to do some job right, the Captain seemed to feel that he had been put under an obligation, which puzzled Newt and made him wonder what was the point of working well if it was only going to irritate the Captain. And yet all the Captain seemed to care about was working well.

In fact, though, Gus McCrae was a cool customer—perhaps the coolest Call had ever known—and he had known many men who didn’t scare easily. His disregard of danger was so complete that Call initially thought he must want to die. He had known many men who did want to die—who for some reason had ended up with a dislike of life—and most of them had got the death they wanted. […]

But Gus loved to live and had no intention of letting anyone do him out of any of his pleasures. Call finally decided his coolness was just a byproduct of his general vanity and overconfidence. Call himself spent plenty of time on self-appraisal. He knew what he could certainly do, and what he might do if he was lucky, and what he couldn’t do barring a miracle. The problem with Gus was that he regarded himself as the miracle […].

It seemed the Irishmen were part of the outfit, though. Their total inexperience was offset by an energy and a will to learn that impressed even Call. He let them stay in the first place, because he was so short-handed he couldn’t afford to turn away any willing hand. By the time more competent men arrived the Irishmen had gotten over their fear of horses and worked with a will. Not being cowboys, they had no prejudice against working on the ground. Once shown the proper way to throw a roped animal, they cheerfully flung themselves on whatever the ropers drug up to the branding fire, even if it was a two-year-old bull with lots of horn and a mean disposition. They had no great finesse, but they were dogged and would eventually get the creature down.

He didn’t tell Newt all he knew. He didn’t tell him that even when life seemed easy, it kept on getting harder. Deets liked his work, liked being part of the outfit and having his name on the sign; yet he often felt sad. His main happiness consisted of sitting with his back against the water trough at night, watching the sky and the changing moon.

He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness from just the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.

Those feelings hadn’t come to the boy yet.

“I hope this is hard enough for you, Call,” he said. I hope it makes you happy. If it don’t, I give up. Driving all these skinny cattle all that way is a funny way to maintain an interest in life, if you ask me.”

“Well, I didn’t,” Call said.

“No, but then you seldom ask,” Augustus said. “You should have died in the line of duty, Woodrow. You’d know how to do that fine. The problem is you don’t know how to live.”

“Whereas you do?” Call asked.

“Most certainly,” Augustus said. “I’ve lived about a hundred to your one. I’ll be a little riled if I end up being the one to die in the line of duty, because it ain’t my duty and it ain’t yours, either. This is just fortune hunting.”

“Well, we wasn’t finding one in Lonesome Dove,” Call said.

“Well, I’ll say a word,” Augustus said. “This was a good, brave boy, for we all saw that he conquered his fear of riding. He had a fine tenor voice, and we’ll all miss that. But he wasn’t used to this part of the world. There’s accidents in life and he met with a bad one. We may all do the same if we ain’t careful.”

He turned and mounted old Malaria. “Dust to dust,” he said. “Let’s the rest of us go to Montana.”

He’s right, Call thought. The best thing to do with a death was to move on from it. One by one the cowboys mounted and went off to the herd, many of them taking a quick last look at the muddy grave under the tree.

On the way to San Antonio they passed two settlements […].

“Now look at that,” Augustus said. “The dern people are making towns everywhere. It’s our fault, you know.” […]

Call said [,] “People can do what they want.”

“Why, naturally, since we chased out the Indians and hung all the good bandits,” Augustus said. “Does it ever occur to you that everything we done was probably a mistake? Just look at it from a nature standpoint. If you’ve got enough snakes around the place you won’t be overrun with rats or varmints. The way I see it, the Indians and the bandits have the same job to do. Leave ’em be and you won’t constantly have to ride around these dern settlements.”

“[…] What harm do they do?”

“If I’d have wanted civilization, Id’ have stayed in Tennessee and wrote poetry for a living,” Augustus said.

“Yes, that’s your problem,” he said. “You don’t like buttermilk, or nothing else. You’re like a starving person whose stomach is shrunk up from not having any food. You’re shrunk up from not wanting nothing.”

“I want to get to San Francisco,” Lorena said. “It’s cool, they say.”

“You’d be better off if you could just enjoy a poke every once in a while,” Augustus said, taking one of her hands and smoothing her fingers. “Life in San Francisco is still just life. If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.”

Lorena didn’t answer. She shut her eyes and let Gus hold her hand. She was afraid he would try more […] but he didn’t. It was a very still morning. Gus seemed content to hold her hand and sit quietly.

“You broke her heart,” Gus said, many times.

“What are you talking about,” Call said. “She was a whore.”

“Whores got hearts,” Augustus said.

The bitter truth was that Gus was right. Maggie hadn’t even seemed like a whore. There was nothing hard about her—in fact, it was obvious to everyone that she was far too soft for the life she was living. She had tender expressions—more tender than any he had ever seen. He could still remember her movements—those more than her words. She could never quite get her hair to stay fixed, and was always touching it nervously with one hand. “It won’t behave,” she said, as if her hair were a child.

“You take care of her, if you’re so worried,” he said to Gus, but Gus shrugged that off. “She ain’t in love with me, she’s in love with you,” he pointed out.

The thought that Gus was dead began to weigh on Call. It came to him several times a day, at moments, and made him feel empty and strange. They had not had much of a talk before Gus left. Nothing much had been said. He began to wish that somehow things could have been rounded off a little better. Of course he knew death was no respecter. People just dropped when they dropped, whether they had rounded things off or not. Still, it haunted him that Gus had just ridden off and might not ride back. He would look over the cattle herd strung out across the prairie and feel that it was all worthless, and a little absurd. Some days he almost felt like turning the cattle loose and paying off the crew. He could take Pea and Deets and maybe the boy and they would look for Gus until they found him.

“Because of Jake we lost ’em both, I guess,” Dish said. “Jake is a god-damn bastard.”

It was painful to Newt to have to think of Jake that way. He still remembered how Jake had played with him when he was a little child, and that Jake had made his mother get a lively, merry look in her eyes. All the years Jake had been gone, Newt had remembered him fondly and supposed that if he ever did come back he would be a hero. But it had to be admitted that Jake’s behavior since his return had not been heroic at all. It bordered on the cowardly, particularly his casual return to card playing once Lorena had been stolen.

By the time it registered that they were really Indians, they had already cut off the steer and were driving it away, as the Captain sat and watched. Newt was almost afraid to look at them, but when he did he was surprised at how thin and poor they looked. The old man who was their leader was just skin and bones. He rode near enough for Newt to see that one of his eyes was milky white. The other Indians were young. Their ponies were as thin as they were. They had no saddles, just saddle blankets, and only one had a gun, an old carbine. The Indians boxed the steer out of the herd as skillfully as any cowboys and soon had him headed across the empty plain. The old man raised his hand to the Captain as they left, and the Captain returned the gesture.

And, as in the rainstorms, his misery increased to a pitch and then was gradually replaced by fatigue and resignation. The sky had turned to grasshoppers—it seemed that simple. The other day it had turned to hailstones, now it was grasshoppers. Al he could do was try and endure it—you couldn’t shoot grasshoppers. Finally the cattle slowed, and Mouse slowed, and Newt just plodded along, occasionally wiping the grasshoppers off the front of his shirt when they got two or three layers deep. He had no idea how long a grasshopper storm might last.

In this case it lasted for hours. Newt mainly hoped it wouldn’t go on all night. If he had to ride through grasshoppers all day and then all night, he felt he’d just give up. It was already fairly dark from the cloud they made, though it was only midday.

“I like to keep Woodrow feeling that he’s caused a peck of trouble,” Augustus said. “I don’t want him to get sassy. But I wouldn’t have missed coming up here. I can’t think of nothing better than riding a fine horse into a new country. It’s exactly what I was meant for, and Woodrow too.”

“Do you think we’ll see Indians?” Newt asked.

“You bet,” Augustus said. “We might all get killed this afternoon, for all I know. That’s the wild for you—it’s got its dangers, which is part of the beauty. ’Course the Indians have had this land forever. To them it’s precious because it’s old. To us it’s exciting because it’s new.”

Newt noticed that Mr. Gus had a keen look in his eye. His white hair was long, almost to his shoulders. There seemed to be no one who could enjoy himself like Mr. Gus.

“I hope you won’t mistreat Newt,” he said.

“Have I ever mistreated him?” Call asked.

“Yes, always […] You ought to do better by that boy. He’s the only son you’ll ever have—I’d bet my wad on that—though I guess it’s possible that you’ll take to women in your old age.”

“No, I won’t. […] They don’t like me. I never recall mistreating that boy.”

“Not naming him is mistreatment […] Give him your name, and you’ll have a son you can be proud of. And Newt will know you’re his pa.”

“I don’t know that myself.” […]

“I know it and you know it […] Women are goddamn right not to like you. You don’t want to admit you ever needed one of them, even for a moment’s pleasure. Though you’re human, and you did need one once—but you don’t want to need nothing you can’t get for yourself.”

Looking at the Captain, Newt began to feel sadder than he had ever felt in his life. Just to on, he wanted to say. Go on, if it’s that hard. He didn’t want the Captain to go on, of course. He felt too young; he didn’t want to be left with it all. He felt he couldn’t bear what was happening, it was so surprising. Five minutes before, he had been pulling a yearling out of a bog. Now the Captain had given him his horse and his gun, and stood with a look of suffering on his face. Even Sean O’Brien, dying of a dozen snakebites, had not shown such pain. Go on, then, Newt thought. Just let it be. It’s been this way always. Let it be, Captain.

“I’ll put it to you once more, in the plainest terms, Mr. Call,” Clara said. “A live son is more important than a dead friend. Can you understand that?”

“A promise is a promise,” Call said.

“A promise is words—a son is a life,” Clara said. “A life, Mr. Call. I was better fit to raise boys than you’ve ever been, and yet I lost three. I tell you no promise is worth leaving that boy up there, as you have. Does he know he’s your son?”

“I suppose he does—I gave him my horse,” Call said, feeling that it was hell to have her, of all women, talk to him about the matter.

“You horse but not your name?” Clara said. “You haven’t even given him your name?”

“I put more value on the horse,” Call said, turning the dun.