Lonesome Dove (103 page)

101

IN MILES CITY, Call found that the storage of Augustus’s remains had been bungled. Something had broken into the shed and knocked the coffin off the barrels. In the doctor’s opinion it had probably been a wolverine, or possibly a cougar. The coffin had splintered and the varmint had run off with the amputated leg. The mistake wasn’t discovered until after a blizzard had passed through, so of course the leg had not been recovered.

The look on Call’s face, when he heard the news, was so grim it made the doctor extremely nervous.

“We’ve mostly kept him,” he said, avoiding Call’s eye; “I had him repacked. He had done lost that leg before he died anyway.”

“It was in the coffin when I left here,” Call said. He didn’t care to discuss the matter with the man. Instead, he found the carpenter who had built the coffin in the first place and had him reinforce it with strong planks. The result was a heavy piece of work.

By luck, the same day, Call saw a buggy for sale. It was old but it looked sturdy enough, and he bought it. The next day he had the coffin covered in canvas and lashed to the seat. The buggy hood was in tatters, so he tore it off. Greasy, the mule, was used to pulling the wagon and hardly noticed the buggy, it was so light. They left Miles City on a morning when it had turned unseasonably cold—so cold that the sun only cast a pale light through the frigid clouds. Call knew it was dangerous to go off with only two animals, but he felt like taking his chances.

The weather improved the next day and he rode for a time beside a hundred or so Crow Indians who were traveling south. The Crow were friendly, and their old chief, a dried-up little man with a great appetite for tobacco and talk, tried to get Call to camp with them. They were all interested in the fact that he was traveling with a coffin and asked him many questions about the man inside it.

“We traveled together,” Call said. He did not want to talk about Gus with the old man, or anyone. He wanted to get on, but he was cordial and rode with the Crow because he felt that if he were discourteous some of the young bucks might try to make sport with him farther south, when he was out of range of the old chief’s protection.

Once he struck Wyoming, he rode for eleven days without seeing a soul. The buggy held up well, but Greasy lost flesh from the pace Call kept up. The coffin got some bad jolts crossing the gullies near the Powder River, but the reinforcements held it together.

The first people he saw, as he approached Nebraska, were five young Indians who had gotten liquor somewhere. When they saw he was carrying a dead man they let him alone, though they were too drunk to hunt successfully and begged him for food. None of them looked to be eighteen, and their horses were poor. Call started to refuse, but then he reflected that they were just boys. He offered them food if they would give up their liquor, but at that they grew quarrelsome. One drew an old pistol and acted as if he might fire at him, but Call ignored the threat, and they were soon gone.

He regretted that he had to take Gus to the women, but felt it was part of his obligation to deliver the notes Gus had written when he was dying. The Platte was so full of ducks and geese that he heard their gabbling all day, though he rode a mile from the river.

He thought often of the men he had left up on the Milk, and of the boy. He had not expected the parting to go as it had, and could not get his mind off it. For several hundred miles, down through Montana and Wyoming, he left them all over again in his mind, day after day. He imagined many times that he had said things he had not said, and, from concentrating on it too much as he traveled down the plains, he began to grow confused. He missed being able to sit at the corrals and watch Newt work with the horses. He wondered if the boy was handling the Hell Bitch well and if any more men had left the ranch.

Then, before he had scarcely reined in at Clara’s house, where he found Dish Boggett breaking horses with the young sheriff from Arkansas, the woman began a quarrel with him. She had acquired some small shrubs somehow and was out planting them, bareheaded and in overshoes, when he arrived.

“So you’re doing it, are you, Mr. Call?” Clara said, when she saw him. She had a look of scorn in her eyes, which puzzled him, since he was merely carrying out the request of the man who had loved her for so long. Of course Dish had told her that Gus wanted his body taken to Texas.

“Well, he asked, and I said I’d do it,” Call said, wondering why she disliked him so. He had just dismounted.

“Gus was crazy and you’re foolish to drag a corpse that far,” Clara said bluntly. “Bury him here and go back to your son and your men. They need you. Gus can rest with my boys.”

Call flinched when she said the word “son,” as if she had never had a doubt that Newt was his. He himself had once been a man of firm opinion, but now it seemed to him that he knew almost nothing, whereas the words Clara flung at him were hard as rocks.

“I told him that very thing,” Call said. “I told him you’d likely want him here.”

“I’ve always kept Gus where I wanted him, Mr. Call,” Clara said. “I kept him in my memory for sixteen years. Now we’re just talking of burying his body. Take him to the ridge and I’ll have July and Dish get a grave dug.”

“Well, it wasn’t what he asked of me,” Call said, avoiding her eyes. “It seems that picnic spot you had in Texas is where he wanted to lay.”

“Gus was a fine fool,” Clara said. “He was foolish for me or any other girl who would have him for a while. Because it was me he thought of, dying, is no reason to tote his bones all the way to Texas.”

“It was because you picnicked in the place,” Call said, confused by her anger. He would have thought a woman would feel complimented by such a request, but Clara clearly didn’t take it that way.

“Yes, I remember our picnics,” she said. “We mostly quarreled. He wanted what I wouldn’t give. I wanted what he didn’t have. That was a long time ago, before my boys died.”

Tears came to her eyes when she said it, as they always did when the thought of her boys struck her. She was aware that she was being anything but hospitable, and that the man didn’t understand what she said. She scarcely knew what she meant herself—she just knew that the sight of Woodrow Call aroused in her an unreasoning hate and disgust.

“He wrote you,” Call said, remembering why he had come. “There’s a letter for you and one for her. He left her his half of our cattle.” He untied his saddlebag and brought out the two notes, handing them to Clara.

“I would have sent them with Dish but he left in the winter and there was no knowing if he’d get through,” Call said.

“But you always get through, don’t you, Captain?” Clara said, with a look so hard that Call turned aside from it and stood by the horses, tired. He was ready to agree with her that Gus had been foolish to make such a request of him.

Then he turned and saw Clara walk over to Greasy, the mule. She stroked the mule along his neck and spoke to him softly before breaking into sobs. She hid her face against the mule, who stood as if planted, though normally he was a rather skittish animal. But he stood while Clara sobbed against his side. Then, taking the notes and not looking at Call, she hurried into the house.

From the lots, Dish and July were watching. Dish felt a little queasy, seeing Gus’s coffin. He had not gotten over his nervousness about the dead. It seemed to him quick burial was the best way to slow their ghosts.

July, of course, had heard all about Gus McCrae’s death, and his strange request, but had not quite believed it. Now it had turned out to be true. He remembered that Gus had ridden down with him on the Kiowa campfire and killed every single man, while he himself had not been able to pull a trigger. Now the same man, dead a whole winter, had turned up in Nebraska. It was something out of the ordinary, of that he felt sure.

“I knowed the Captain would do it,” Dish said. “I bet them boys up on the Milk are good and skeert, now he’s gone.”

“I hear it’s hard winters up there,” July said—not that they were easy in Nebraska.

The Captain, as if distracted, walked a little way toward the lots and then stopped. Dish walked out to greet him, followed by July, and was shocked by the change in the man. The Captain looked like an old man—he had little flesh on his face and his beard and mustache were sprinkled with gray.

“Why, Captain, it’s fine to see you,” Dish said. “How are them northern boys doing?”

Call shook Dish’s hand, then July’s. “We wintered without losing a man, or much stock either,” he said, very tired.

Then he saw that Dish was looking beyond him. He turned and saw that the blond woman had come out of the house. She walked to the buggy and stood by the coffin. Clara’s two daughters followed her out on the back porch, a toddling child between them. The girls didn’t follow Lorena to the buggy. They watched a minute and then guided the child back in the house.

Dish Boggett would have given anything to be able to go to Lorena, but he knew he couldn’t. Instead he led the Captain back down to the lots and tried to interest him in the horses. But the Captain’s mind was elsewhere.

When the plains darkened and they went in to supper, Lorena still stood by the wagon. The meal was eaten in silence, except for little Martin’s fretting. He was used to being the center of gay attention and couldn’t understand why no one laughed when he flung his spoon down, or why no one sang to him, or offered him sweets.

“Oughtn’t we to go get Lorie?” Dish asked, at one point, anguished that she was left to stand alone in the darkness.

Clara didn’t answer. The girls had cooked the meal, and she directed the serving with only a glance now and then. Watching Woodrow Call awkwardly handling his fork caused her to repent a little of her harshness when he arrived, but she didn’t apologize. She had stopped expecting July to contribute to the conversation, but she resented his silence nevertheless. Once Martin spat out a bite of perfectly good food and Clara looked at him sharply and said “You behave,” in a tone that instantly put a stop to his fretting. Martin opened his mouth to cry but thought better of it and chewed miserably on his spoon until the meal was finished.

After supper the men went out of the house to smoke, all glad to escape the company of the silent woman. Even Betsey and Sally, accustomed to chattering through supper, competing for the men’s attention, were subdued by their mother’s silence, and merely attended to serving.

After supper Clara went to her bedroom. Gus’s letter lay on her bureau, unread. She lit her lamp and picked it up, scratching at the dried blood that stained one corner of the folded sheet. “I ought not to read this,” she said, aloud. “I don’t like the notion of words from the dead.”

“What, Momma?” Betsey asked. She had come upstairs with Martin and had overheard.

“Nothing, Betsey,” Clara said. “Just a crazy woman talking to herself.”

“Martin acts like he’s got a stomach-ache,” Betsey complained. “You didn’t have to look so mean at him, Ma.”

Clara turned for a moment. “I won’t have him spitting out food,” she said. “The reason men are awful is because some woman has spoiled them. Martin’s going to learn manners if he learns nothing else.”

“I don’t think men are awful,” Betsey said. “Dish ain’t.”

“Let me be, Betsey,” Clara said. “Put Martin to bed.”

She opened the letter—just a few words in a scrawling hand:

Dear Clara—

I would be obliged if you’d look after Lorie. I fear she’ll take this hard.

I’m down to one leg now and this life is fading fast, so I can’t say more. Good luck to you and your gals, I hope you do well with the horses.

Gus

Clara went out on her porch and sat, twisting her hands, for an hour. She could see that the men were below, still smoking, but they were silent. It’s too much death, she thought. Why does it keep coming to me?

The dark heavens gave no answer, and after a while she got up and went downstairs and out to Lorena, who still stood by the buggy, where she had been from the time Call arrived.

“Do you want me to read you this letter?” she said, knowing the girl couldn’t read. “It’s bad handwriting.”

Lorena held the letter tightly in her hand. “No, I’ll just keep it,” she said. “He put my name on it. I can read that. I’ll just keep if.”

She didn’t want Clara to see the letter. It was hers from Gus. What the words were didn’t matter.

Clara stood with her for a bit and went back in.

The moon rose late, and when it did the men walked to the little shack by the lots where they slept. The old Mexican was coughing. Later Lorena heard the Captain get his bedroll and walk away with it. She was glad when the lights went out in the house and the men were all gone. It made it easier to believe Gus knew she was there.

They’ll all forget you—they got their doings, she thought. But I won’t, Gus. Whenever it comes morning or night, I’ll think of you. You come and got me away from him. She can forget and they can forget, but I won’t, never, Gus.

The next morning Lorena still stood by the buggy. The men scarcely knew what to think about it. Call was perplexed. Clara made breakfast as silently as she had presided over supper. They could all look out the window and see the blond girl standing like a statue by the buggy, the letter from Augustus clutched in her hand.

“For that girl’s sake I wish you’d forget your promise, Mister Call,” Clara said finally.

“I can’t forget no promise to a friend,” Call said. “Though I do agree it’s foolish and told him so myself.”

“People lose their minds over things like this,” Clara said. “Gus was all to that girl. Who’ll help me, if she loses hers?”

Dish wanted to say that he would, but couldn’t get the words out. The sight of Lorie, standing in grief, made him so unhappy that he wished he’d never set foot in the town of Lonesome Dove. Yet he loved her, though he could not approach her.

Clara saw that it was hopeless to hammer at Call. He would go unless she shot him. His face was set, and only the fact that the girl stood by the buggy had kept him from leaving already. It angered her that Gus had been so perverse as to extract such a promise. There was no proportion in it—being drug three thousand miles to be buried at a picnic site. Probably he had been delirious and would have withdrawn the request at once if he had been allowed a lucid moment. What angered her most was Gus’s selfishness in regard to Call’s son. He had been a sweet boy with lonesome eyes, polite. He was the kind of boy she would have given anything to raise, and here, for a romantic whim, Gus had seen to it that father and son were separated.