Lonesome Dove (10 page)

Call left the mare saddled, snubbed, and on three legs, and came to the fence to have a smoke and let the mare have a moment to consider the situation.

“Where’s Jake?” he asked.

“Catching a nap,” Augustus said. “I reckon the anxiety wore him out.”

“He ain’t changed a bit,” Call said. “Not a dern bit.”

Augustus laughed. “You’re one to talk,” he said. “When’s the last time you changed? It must have been before we met, and that was thirty years ago.”

“Look at her watch us,” Call said. The mare
was
watching them—even had her ears pointed at them.

“I wouldn’t take it as no compliment,” Augustus said. “She ain’t watching you because she loves you.”

“Say what you will,” Call said, “I never seen a more intelligent filly.”

Augustus laughed again. “Oh, that’s what you look for, is it? Intelligence,” he said. “You and me’s got opposite ideas about things. It’s intelligent creatures you got to watch out for. I don’t care if they’re horses or women or Indians or what. I learned long ago there’s much to be said for dumbness. A dumb horse may step in a hole once in a while, but at least you can turn your back on one without losing a patch of hide.”

“I’d rather my horses didn’t step in no holes,” Call said. “You reckon somebody’s really on Jake’s trail?”

“Hard to judge,” Augustus said. “Jake was always nervous. He’s seen more Indians that turned out to be sage bushes than any man I know.”

“A dead dentist ain’t a sage bush,” Call said.

“No—in that case it’s the sheriff that’s the unknown factor,” Gus said. “Maybe he didn’t like his brother. Maybe some outlaw will shoot him before he can come after Jake. Maybe he’ll get lost and end up in Washington, D.C. Or maybe he’ll show up tomorrow and whip us all. I wouldn’t lay money.”

They fell silent for a moment, the only sound the grinding of the windlass as Dish drew up another bucket of dirt.

“Why not go north?” Call said, taking Augustus by surprise.

“Why, I don’t know,” Augustus said. “I’ve never given the matter no thought, and so far as I know you haven’t either. I do think we’re a shade old to do much Indian fighting.”

“There won’t be much,” Call said. “You heard Jake. It’s the same up there as it is down here. The Indians will soon be whipped. And Jake does know good country when he sees it. It sounds like a cattleman’s paradise.”

“No, it sounds like a goddamn wilderness,” Augustus said. “Why, there ain’t even a house to go to. I’ve slept on the ground enough for one life. Now I’m in the mood for a little civilization. I don’t have to have oprys and streetcars, but I do enjoy a decent bed and a roof to keep out the weather.”

“He said there were fortunes to be made,” Call said. “It stands to reason he’s right. Somebody’s gonna settle it up and get that land. Suppose we got there first. We could buy you forty beds.”

The surprising thing to Augustus was not just what Call was suggesting but how he sounded. For years Call had looked at life as if it were essentially over. Call had never been a man who could think of much reason for acting happy, but then he had always been one who knew his purpose. His purpose was to get done what needed to be done, and what needed to be done was simple, if not easy. The settlers of Texas needed protection, from Indians on the north and bandits on the south. As a Ranger, Call had had a job that fit him, and he had gone about the work with a vigor that would have passed for happiness in another man.

But the job wore out. In the south it became mainly a matter of protecting the cattle herds of rich men like Captain King or Shanghai Pierce, both of whom had more cattle than any one man needed. In the north, the Army had finally taken the fight against the Comanches away from the Rangers, and had nearly finished it. He and Call, who had no military rank or standing, weren’t welcomed by the Army; with forts all across the northwestern frontier the free-roving Rangers found that they were always interfering with the Army, or else being interfered with. When the Civil War came, the Governor himself called them in and asked them not to go—with so many men gone they needed at least one reliable troop of Rangers to keep the peace on the border.

It was that assignment that brought them to Lonesome Dove. After the war, the cattle market came into existence and all the big landowners in south Texas began to make up herds and trail them north, to the Kansas railheads. Once cattle became the game and the brush country filled up with cowboys and cattle traders, he and Call finally stopped rangering. It was no trouble for them to cross the river and bring back a few hundred head at a time to sell to the traders who were too lazy to go into Mexico themselves. They prospered in a small way; there was enough money in their account in San Antonio that they could have considered themselves rich, had that notion interested them. But it didn’t; Augustus knew that nothing about the life they were living interested Call, particularly. They had enough money that they could have bought land, but they hadn’t, although plenty of land could still be had wonderfully cheap. -It was that they had roved too long, Augustus concluded, when his mind turned to such matters. They were people of the horse, not of the town; in that they were more like the Comanches than Call would ever have admitted. They had been in Lonesome Dove nearly ten years, and yet what little property they had acquired was so worthless that neither of them would have felt bad about just saddling up and riding off from it.

Indeed, it seemed to Augustus that that was what both of them had always expected would happen. They were not of the settled fraternity, he and Call. From time to time they talked of going west of the Pecos, perhaps rangering out there; but so far only the rare settler had cared to challenge the Apache, so there was no need for Rangers.

Augustus had not expected that Call would be satisfied just to rustle Mexican cattle forever, but neither had he expected him to suddenly decide to strike out for Montana. Yet it was obvious the idea had taken hold of the man.

“I tell you what, Call,” Augustus said. “You and Deets and Pea go on up there to Montany and build a nice snug cabin with a good fireplace and at least one bed, so it’ll be waiting when I get there. Then clear out the last of the Cheyenne and the Blackfeet and any Sioux that look rambunctious. When you’ve done that, me and Jake and Newt will gather up a herd and meet you on Powder River.”

Call looked almost amused. “I’d like to see the herd you and Jake could get there with,” he said. “A herd of whores, maybe.”

“I’m sure it would be a blessing if we could herd a few up that way,” Augustus said. “I don’t suppose there’s a decent woman in the whole territory yet.”

Then the thought struck him that there could be no getting to Montana without crossing the Platte, and Clara lived on the Platte. Bob Allen or no, she would ask
him
to supper, if only to show off her girls. Jake’s news might be out of date. Maybe she had even run her husband off since Jake had passed through. Anyway, husbands had been got around a few times in the history of the world, if only to the extent of having to set a place for an old rival at the supper table. Such thoughts put the whole prospect in a more attractive light.

“How far do you reckon it is to Montany, Call?” he asked.

Call looked north across the dusty flats, as if estimating in his mind’s eye the great rise of the plains, stretching even farther than hearsay, away and beyond the talk of men. Jake that morning had mentioned the Milk River, a stream he had never heard of. He knew the country he knew, and had never been lost in it, but the country he knew stopped at the Arkansas River. He had known men speak of the Yellowstone as if it were the boundary of the world; even Kit Carson, whom he had met twice, had not talked of what lay north of it.

But then his memory went back to a camp they had made on the Brazos, many years before, with an Army captain; there was a Delaware scout with him who had been farther than any man they knew—all the way to the headwaters of the Missouri.

“Remember Black Beaver, Gus?” he asked. “He’d know how far it was.”

“I remember him,” Augustus said. “It was always a puzzle to me how such a short-legged Indian could cover so much ground.”

“He claimed to have been all the way from the Columbia to the Rio Grande,” Call said. “That’s knowing the country, I’d say.”

“Well, he was an Indian,” Augustus said. “He didn’t have to go along establishing law and order and making it safe for bankers and Sunday-school teachers, like we done. I guess that’s why you’re ready to head off to Montany. You want to help establish a few more banks.”

“That’s aggravating,” Call said. “I ain’t a banker.”

“No, but you’ve done many a banker a good turn,” Augustus said. “That’s what we done, you know. Kilt the dern Indians so they wouldn’t bother the bankers.”

“They bothered more than bankers,” Call said.

“Yes, lawyers and doctors and newspapermen and drummers of every description,” Augustus said.

“Not to mention women and children,” Call said. “Not to mention plain settlers.”

“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. “You should have gone home and taught school.”

“Hell, no,” Augustus said. “I wanted a look at it before the bankers and lawyers get it.”

“Well, they ain’t got to Montana,” Call said.

“If we go they won’t be far behind,” Augustus said. “The first ones that get there will hire you to go hang all the horsethieves and bring in whichever Indians have got the most fight left, and you’ll do it and the place will be civilized. Then you won’t know what to do with yourself, no more than you have these last ten years.”

“I ain’t a boy,” Call said. “I’ll be dead before all that happens. Anyhow, I ain’t going there to law. I’m going there to run cattle. Jake said it was a cattleman’s paradise.”

“You ain’t a cattleman, Call,” Augustus said. “No more than I am. If we was to get a ranch I don’t know who would run it.”

It seemed to Call the mare had probably stood on three legs long enough, and he had surely jawed with Gus long enough. Sometimes Gus sang a strange tune. He had killed as many Indians as any Ranger, and had seen enough of their butchery that you’d think he knew why he was doing it; and yet when he talked he seemed to be on their side.

“As to the ranch,” he said, “the boy could run it. He’s nearly grown.”

Augustus puzzled over that for a moment, as if it had never occurred to him. “Well, maybe so, Call,” he said. “I guess he could run it if he was a mind to, and if you would let him.”

“I don’t know why he wouldn’t be a mind to,” Call said, and walked over to the mare.

8

BY THE MIDDLE of the afternoon it was so hot nobody could think. At least Newt couldn’t, and the other hands didn’t seem to be thinking very fast either. All they could find to argue about was whether it was hotter down in the well digging or up in the sun working the windlass. Down in the well they all worked so close together and sweated so much that it practically made a fog, while up in the sun fog was no problem. Being down in the well made Newt nervous, particularly if Pea was with him, because when Pea got to working the crowbar he didn’t always look where he was jabbing and once had almost jabbed it through Newt’s foot. From then on Newt worked spraddle-legged, so as to keep his feet out of the way.

They were going at it hard when the Captain came riding back, having lathered the mare good by loping her along the river for about twenty miles. He rode her right up to the well.

“Hello, boys,” he said. “Ain’t the water flowing yet?”

“It’s flowin’,” Dish said. “A gallon or two of it flowed outa me.”

“Be thankful you’re healthy,” Call said. “A man that couldn’t sweat would die in this heat.”

“I don’t suppose you’d trade for that mare,” Dish asked. “I like her looks.”

“You ain’t the first that’s liked them,” Call said. “I’ll keep her, I believe. But you boys can stop work now and catch a little rest. We have to go to Mexico tonight.”

They all went over and sat in the alleyway of the barn—it had a little shade in it. The minute they sat down Deets began to patch his pants. He kept a big needle and some heavy thread in a cigar box in the saddle shed—given any chance he would get out his needle and start patching. He was woolly-headed and his wool was just getting gray.

“If I was you I’d give up on them pants,” Dish said. “If you’ve got to wear quilts you best find a new one and start over.”

“No, sir,” Deets said genially. “These pants got to last.”

Newt was a little excited. The Captain hadn’t separated him off from the rest of the men when he told them to rest. It might mean he was going to get to go to Mexico at last. On the other hand, he had been down in the well, so the Captain might just have forgotten him.

“I do fancy that mare,” Dish said, watching the Captain unsaddle her.

“I don’t see why,” Pea said. “She near kilt the Captain just yesterday. Bit a hunk out of him the size of my foot.”

They all looked at Pea’s foot, which was about the size and shape of a scoop shovel.

“I’d say that passes belief,” Dish said. “Her whole head ain’t the size of your foot.”

“If that chunk had come out of you, you’d have thought it was big enough, I guess,” Pea said mildly.

After Dish had caught his breath he pulled his case knife out of his pocket and asked if anyone wanted a game of root-the-peg. Newt had a pocketknife too and was quick to take him up. The game involved flipping the knives in various ways and making them stick in the dirt. Dish won and Newt had to dig a peg out of the ground with his teeth. Dish drove the peg in so far that Newt had dirt up his nose before he finally got it out.

The sight amused Pea no end. “By gosh, Newt, if we break the crowbar you can finish digging the well with your nose,” he said.

While they were sitting around, idly experimenting with a few new knife throws, they heard the clop of horses and looked up to see two riders approaching from the east at an easy trot.

“Now who would that be?” Pea asked. “It’s an odd time of day to visit.”

“Well, if it ain’t old Juan Cortinas it’s probably just a couple of bank robbers,” Dish said, referring to a Mexican cattle thief who was hailed, south of the river, as a great hero due to the success of his raids against the Texans.

“No, it ain’t Cortinas,” Pea Eye said, squinting at the riders. “He always rides a gray.”

Dish could hardly believe anyone would be so dumb as to believe Juan Cortinas would just ride into Lonesome Dove with only one man.

The men stopped on the far side of the lots to read the sign Augustus had put up when the Hat Creek outfit had gone in business. All Call wanted on the sign was the simple words Hat Creek Livery Stable, but Augustus could not be persuaded to stop at a simple statement like that. It struck him that it would be best to put their rates on the sign. Call had been for tacking up one board with the name on it to let people know a livery stable was available, but Augustus thought that hopelessly unsophisticated; he bestirred himself and found an old plank door that had blown off somebody’s root cellar, perhaps by the same wind that had taken their roof. He nailed the door onto one corner of the corrals, facing the road, so that the first thing most travelers saw when entering the town was the sign. In the end he and Call argued so much about what was to go on the sign that Call got disgusted and washed his hands of the whole project.

That suited Augustus fine, since he considered that he was the only person in Lonesome Dove with enough literary talent to write a sign. When the weather was fair he would go sit in the shade the sign cast and think of ways to improve it; in the two or three years since they had put it up he had thought of so many additions to the original simple declaration that practically the whole door was covered.

At first he had started out spare and just put the name of the firm, “Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium,” but that caused controversy in itself. Call claimed nobody knew what an emporium was, including himself, and he still didn’t despite Augustus’s many long-winded attempts to explain it to him. All Call knew was that they didn’t run one, and he didn’t want one, whatever it was, and there was no way something like that could fit with a cattle company.

However, Augustus had his way, and “Emporium” went on the sign. He mainly put it in because he wanted visitors to know there was at least one person in Lonesome Dove who knew how to spell important words.

Next he had put his name and Call’s, his first because he was two years older and felt seniority should be honored. Call didn’t care—his pride ran in other directions. Anyway he soon came to dislike the sign so much that he would just as soon not have had his name on it at all.

Pea Eye badly wanted his name on the sign, so one year Augustus lettered it in for him as a Christmas present. Pea, of course, couldn’t read, but he could look, and once he got his name located on the sign he was quick to point it out to anyone who happened to be interested. He had already pointed it out to Dish, who wasn’t interested particularly. Unfortunately it had been three decades since anyone had called Pea anything but Pea, and even Call, who had been the man to accept him into the Rangers, couldn’t remember his real first name, though he knew his last name was Parker.

Having no wish to embarrass the man, Augustus had written him in as “P. E. Parker, Wrangler.” He had wanted to list him as a blacksmith, since in truth Pea was a superior blacksmith and only an average wrangler, but Pea Eye thought he could sit a horse as well as anyone and didn’t wish to be associated publicly with a lower trade.

Newt recognized that he was rightly too young to have his name on the sign and never suggested the possibility to anyone, though it would have pleased him mightily if someone had suggested it for him. No one did, but then Deets had to wait nearly two years before his name appeared on the sign, and Newt resigned himself to waiting too.

Of course, it had not occurred to Augustus to put Deets’s name on, Deets being a black man. But when Pea’s name was added there was a lot of discussion about it, and around that time Deets developed a tremendous case of the sulks—unlike him and perplexing to Call. Deets had ridden with him for years, through all weathers and all dangers, over country so barren they had more than once had to kill a horse to have meat, and in all those years Deets had given cheerful service. Then, all because of the sign, he went into a sulk and stayed in it until Augustus finally spotted him looking wistfully at it one day and figured it out. When Augustus told Call about his conclusion, Call was further outraged. “That damn sign’s ruint this outfit,” he said, and went into a sulk himself. He had known Augustus was vain but would never have suspected Deets or Pea of such a failing.

Of course Augustus was happy to add Deets’s name to the sign, although, as in the case of Pea, there was some trouble with the particulars. Simply writing “Deets” on the sign didn’t work. Deets couldn’t read either, but he could see that his name was far too short in comparison with the others. At least it was short in comparison with the other names on the sign, and Deets wanted to know why.

“Well, Deets, you just got one name,” Augustus said. “Most people got two. Maybe you’ve got two and just forgot one of them.”

Deets sat around thinking for a day or two, but he could not remember ever having another name, and Call’s recollection bore him out. At that point even Augustus began to think the sign was more trouble than it was worth, since it was turning out to be so hard to please everyone. The only solution was to think up another name to go with Deets, but while they were debating various possibilities, Deets’s memory suddenly cleared.

“Josh,” he said, one night after supper, to the surprise of everyone. “Why, I’m Josh. Can you write that, Mr. Gus?”

“Josh is short for Joshua,” Augustus said. “I can write either one of them. Joshua’s the longest.”

“Write the longest,” Deets said. “I’m too busy for a short name.”

That made no particular sense, nor were they ever able to get Deets to specify how he happened to remember that Josh was his other name. Augustus wrote him on the sign as “Deets, Joshua,” since he had already written the “Deets.” Fortunately Deets’s vanity did not extend to needing a title, although Augustus was tempted to write him in as a prophet—it would have gone with the “Joshua,” but Call had a fit when he mentioned it.

“You’ll have us the laughingstock of this whole county,” Call said. “Suppose somebody come up to Deets and asked him to prophesy?”

Deets himself thought that was an amusing prospect. “Why, I could do it, Captain,” he said. “I’d prophesy hot and I’d prophesy dry and I’d charge ’em a dime.”

Once the names were settled the rest of the sign was a simple matter. There were two categories, things for rent and things for sale. Horses and rigs were available for rental, or at least horses and one rig, a spring buggy with no springs that they had bought from Xavier Wanz after his wife, Therese, had got smashed by it. For sale Augustus listed cattle and horses. As an afterthought he added, “Goats and Donkeys Neither Bought nor Sold,” since he had no patience with goats and Call even less with donkeys. Then, as another afterthought, he had added, “We Don’t Rent Pigs,” which occasioned yet another argument with Call.

“Why, they’ll think we’re crazy here when they see that,” he said. “Nobody in their right mind would want to rent a pig. What would you do with a pig once you rented it?”

“Why, there’s plenty of useful tasks pigs can do,” Augustus said. “They could clean the snakes out of a cellar, if a man had a cellar. Or they can soak up mud puddles. Stick a few pigs in a mud puddle and pretty soon the puddle’s gone.”

It was a burning day, and Call was sweated down. “If I could find anything as cool as a mud puddle I’d soak it up myself,” he said.

“Anyhow, Call, a sign’s a kind of a tease,” Augustus said. “It ought to make a man stop and consider just what it is he wants out of life in the next few days.”

“If he thinks he wants to rent a pig he’s not a man I’d want for a customer,” Call said.

The caution about pigs ended the sign to Augustus’s satisfaction, at least for a while, but after a year or two had passed, he decided it would add dignity to it all if the sign ended with a Latin motto. He had an old Latin schoolbook that had belonged to his father; it was thoroughly battered from having been in his saddlebags for years. It had a few pages of mottoes in the back, and Augustus spent many happy hours poring over them, trying to decide which might look best at the bottom of the sign. Unfortunately the mottoes had not been translated, perhaps because by the time the students got to the back of the book they were supposed to be able to read Latin. Augustus had had only a fleeting contact with the language and had no real opportunity to improve his knowledge; once he had been caught in an ice storm on the plains and had torn out a number of pages of the grammar in order to get a fire started. He had kept himself from freezing, but at the cost of most of the grammar and vocabulary; what was left didn’t help him much with the mottoes at the end of the book. However, it was his view that Latin was mostly for looks anyway, and he devoted himself to the mottoes in order to find one with the best look. The one he settled on was
Uva uvam vivendo varia fit
, which seemed to him a beautiful motto, whatever it meant. One day when nobody was around he went out and lettered it onto the bottom of the sign, just below “We Don’t Rent Pigs.” Then he felt that his handiwork was complete. The whole sign read:

HAT CREEK CATTLE COMPANY AND LIVERY EMPORIUM

CAPT. AUGUSTUS MCCRAE—CAPTAIN W. F. CALL (PROPS.)

P. E. PARKER (WRANGLER)
DEETS, JOSHUA
FOR RENT: HORSES AND RIGS
FOR SALE: CATTLE AND HORSES
GOATS AND DONKEYS NEITHER BOUGHT NOR SOLD
WE DON’T RENT PIGS.
UVA UVAM VIVENDO VARIA FIT.

Augustus didn’t say a word about the motto, and it was a good two months before anybody even noticed it, which showed how unobservant the citizens of Lonesome Dove really were. It galled Augustus severely that no one appreciated the fact that he had thought to write a Latin motto on a sign that all visitors could see as they rode in, though in fact those riding in took as little note of it as those already in, perhaps because getting to Lonesome Dove was such a hot, exhausting business. The few people who accomplished it were in no mood to stop and study erudite signs.

More galling still was the fact that no member of his own firm had noticed the motto, not even Newt, from whom Augustus expected a certain alertness. Of course two members of the firm were totally illiterate—three, if he chose to count Bolivar—and wouldn’t have known Latin from Chinese. Still, the way they casually treated the sign as just part of the landscape caused Augustus to brood a good deal about the contempt that familiarity breeds.