Lonesome Dove - Streets Of Laredo Part 78

He's crippled, for life!

"You better just shut up about crutch factories!" she whispered later, with unusual vehemence.

Pea Eye came to feel that his chance remark was the worst thing he had ever said in his life. His main hope was that the Captain would just forget it. But the Captain said so little to anyone that it was hard to know what he was remembering or forgetting. The Captain just lay there. He only fought when Pea Eye tried to help him relieve himself, struggling with his one weak hand. His struggles unnerved Pea Eye so much that he did a poor job the first time, and he made a mess. This incompetence annoyed Lorena to the point that she ignored the Captain's objections and helped him herself after that.

"You'll have to learn to do things for him, Pea," Lorena said. "He's helpless. He'll have to live with us for a while, I guess. I told Maria I'd take her children, and we've got them to think about, too. We're both going to have all we can do. You better make up your mind to start helping Captain Call. You have to help him now whether he likes it or not. You know the man. You worked for him most of your life. He don't like it when I help him. I don't know whether he just don't like me, or whether it's because I'm a woman, or because I was what I was, once ... I don't know. But we're going to have all we can do, both of us, and the Captain ought to be your responsibility." "Why, that little blind girl takes care of him pretty well herself," Pea said. Indeed, Teresa's attentiveness and the Captain's acceptance of it surprised him. He had never known the Captain to cotton to a child. He had never even come to visit their children, and he and Lorena had five.

Teresa brought the Captain his food and sat by him and fed him. She brought a rag and washed his face when he finished. If he wanted to turn on his side, he let Teresa help him.

Often, she whispered to him and the Captain responded, though in a voice so low that Pea Eye could not pick up the words. The little girl was quick as a lizard. She could be across the room and out the door in a flash, and Pea Eye never saw her b.u.mp into anything.

Maria and Joey were buried in the two graves Billy and Olin had dug. Many people came; not for Maria, but so they could say they had seen Joey Garza buried. Billy and Lorena went across the river and got the coffins, plain pine boxes.

They tried to find Mullins, the photographer, and return his donkey, but Mullins was drunk somewhere and could not be located. The collapse of his prospects proved too much for him. Billy Williams was a little abashed; it had all been the vaqueros' fault, not the photographer's. But they could not spend all day looking for a drunken photographer, so they took the donkey back to Mexico.

The old sisters and a few local women came to the burial, but very few men showed up. Gordo, the butcher, walked by sullenly and went home.

He was still angry with Maria for being dead and thus unavailable for marriage.

"There ought to be singing," Lorena said. She knew Pea Eye couldn't sing, and Billy and Olin were unknown quant.i.ties when it came to hymn singing. She remembered the songs in Laredo, during the burial of the deputy's young wife. She had learned from Pea that the deputy was dead now, too; it made her want to go live in a country where not so much blood was spilled. She remembered how the wh.o.r.e with the curly hair had poured her heart into the song for the young woman, as if she had known how the deputy's wife must have felt, to want to take her own life. Though not confident of her own voice, Lorena resolved to sing alone if necessary. She began "There's a Home Beyond the River"--after all, the river was right there in sight--and to her surprise, Olin Roy joined her. He had a fine baritone voice. He sang so well that a few of the gawkers from Presidio were moved to join in.

That night, dark feelings burdened Lorena.

She could not get Maria's horrible end to leave her mind. She tried to sleep, but could not. She lay beside Pea Eye on the pallet and began to shake. The feeling came over her that had made her want to die when Blue Duck took her and when Mox Mox prepared to burn her. Evil men or evil circ.u.mstances would come and prove stronger than all the good in her life. She had her husband back and would soon have her children with her, but in her fear, she could not help feeling that the reprieve was only temporary. Clara Allen herself had watched all three of her sons die.

Two of Maria's children had afflictions, and the one who had been whole and beautiful was evil. He had murdered many men and, in the end, had even murdered the woman who had carried him in her womb. Lorena couldn't control her fear, for it came from places too deep and too real, from what she had known and what she had seen. She and her family were safe, but only for a time. Her children were still young, and disease could take them. Her boys were still small; one of them could be a Joey. She didn't expect it, but Maria probably hadn't expected it either, when Joey had been the age of Georgie or Ben.

The fear made Lorena restless. She got up, then lay down again. The room was too small to walk in. She could hear Pea Eye's breathing, and the Captain's and Rafael's; the large boy snored in his sleep.

Billy Williams and Olin Roy were outside, drinking and smoking. In her restlessness, Lorena went out. She had never drunk much whiskey, but she wanted something that would dull her feeling--the feeling that there was no safety and that nothing could prevent things happening to her or her loved ones, things that were even worse than what had already happened. She knew she was lucky, for she was healthy, she wasn't dead, none of her children were sick, and her husband's wounds would heal.

But it was only temporary, her luck. The next Mox Mox might find her, or the next plague, or a storm or a fire or a war.

Maria had been a kind woman, but her fate had been far from kind--her fate had been hard and her end terrible. It was a warning; but a warning for a condition which had no cure, or of a threat that there was no guarding against.

Lorena put on Pea Eye's coat and stepped out into the cold night. The two men sat a little distance from the house. They had made a small campfire and were staring into it, pa.s.sing a bottle back and forth. Lorena walked out to the fire.

Both men saw Lorena coming and felt uneasy.

She had been courteous to both of them and had made Billy Williams an ally forever because of her kindness to Maria. Maria would have died even harder had she not known that Lorena would take care of her children.

Billy and Olin had roamed the border country for most of their lives, and both of them remembered Lorena from other days when she had been a beautiful young wh.o.r.e in Lonesome Dove. Both had visited her. Olin Roy remembered the Frenchman, Xavier Wanz, who had loved Lorena so feverishly that he burned his own saloon and himself with it, in his grief when Lorena went north with the Hat Creek outfit. Neither had supposed they would encounter the woman so much later in life, married to the gangly Pea Eye. She was heavier and her fresh beauty had been worn away by life, but she was the same woman: she was respectable and competent by any standard.

She had amputated Woodrow Call's leg and brought him to safety across more than a hundred miles of desert. Few men would have been equal to that task. Now she was walking toward their campfire, in her husband's big coat. In the heat of action and the sadness of the last days, neither man had thought much about their earlier brief connection with Lorena. But now they wondered, separately, if she would remember that they had been among her many customers, long ago.

"Could you spare me a little of your liquor, gentlemen?" Lorena asked. "I'm feeling chill." "Here, ma'am--we've got a fresh bottle," Billy said, handing it to her. "This one ain't been s...o...b..red on." Lorena took the full bottle and drank.

The whiskey burned her throat, but she sat down by the campfire, tucked the coat around her, and drank anyway. Pea Eye's coat was a heavy gray capote, with a hood for rough weather.

Lorena pulled the hood over her head and drank. The men had fallen silent, which annoyed her a little. It irritated her that men were so uneasy in her company most of the time. She had been courteous to these men--why had they immediately stopped talking when she arrived? Even Pea Eye was sometimes ill at ease in her company, for no reason she could understand. She was doing exactly the same thing as the men: sitting by a campfire drinking whiskey. Why wouldn't they talk?

"I don't mean to impose," Lorena said to them. "You don't have to choke off your conversation just because I'm here." "We wasn't saying much anyway," Billy Williams told her. "We was just chatting about Mary." "Tell me about her," Lorena said. "I didn't have time to get to know her very well." "She was married four times," Billy Williams said. "Three of her husbands got killed, and the other one run off. I never cared much for any of them myself, but it was Mary who took them as husbands, not me.

"Then Joey went bad," he added.

"Was she ever happy?" Lorena asked.

"Mary? Yes, we used to dance a lot," Billy Williams remembered.

"I guess you both cared for her," Lorena said. "Seems like you did, or you wouldn't be here.

Didn't either of you want to marry her?" "Oh, I did," Billy Williams said.

"She wouldn't have me, but we got along anyway." Olin Roy remained silent. His disappointments in regard to Maria were too deep to voice.

"Were any of her husbands good to her?" Lorena wondered.

The two men were silent. They had known little of what went on in Maria's marriages. When she was with Roberto Sanchez, her face had often been bruised; apparently he was rough, though Maria had never mentioned it to either of them. Carlos Garza had been a vaquero, off in the cow camps with other vaqueros. Juan Castro had been cheap; besides her midwifing, Maria had done cleaning for white people across the river when she was married to him. Benito had merely been lazy; he seemed to have no malice in him.

But was Maria ever happy? Both could remember her smile, and the sound of her laughter, and the look on her face when she was pleased as well as when she was displeased. But was Maria ever happy? It was a hard question.

"She had her children," Billy replied. "She was good to her children." Lorena asked no more questions. She felt she had been foolish to inquire. The two men were probably decent, as men went. Both had clearly been devoted to Maria, else why would they be here, reluctant to leave her grave? But how the woman had felt when she closed the doors of her house at night and was alone with one of her husbands and her children, was not something that men could be expected to know. What Maria had felt in the years of her womanhood was lost. Who would know what feelings she had struggled with as she lost four husbands and raised her children? How could men, decent or not, know what made a woman happy or unhappy? She herself had known little happiness until she had persuaded Pea Eye to accept her. Why she felt she might be happy with Pea instead ofwith any of the other men who had sought her hand in the years after Gus McCrae's death was elusive, too. Lorena had thought she'd known what drew her to Pea Eye once, but now, sitting by the campfire in Mexico, she found she couldn't recover her own reckonings in the matter.

She had been right, though, for she had known great happiness with Pea Eye and their children. Probably there was no explaining any of it; probably it had been mostly luck.

The night grew colder, and the stars shone even more sharply in the deep, inky sky. Lorena drank most of the bottle of whiskey. She knew that she would feel like her head was cracking in the morning, but she didn't care. The restlessness she felt had to be conquered; the deep fear inside her had to be dulled. She needed the fire of the whiskey and the numbness that finally came.

Even with the whiskey in her, Lorena could not stop thinking of Maria. She wished she'd had more time with her, time not so filled with violence and pain. There had been no time for the talk of women when there had been so many injured to attend to. Then Maria had become one of the injured herself. She'd had to save her strength for her final request.

Maria's eyes, at the end, haunted Lorena. She wanted to forget Maria's eyes, but she also wanted to know what Maria knew and what she had felt. She wished the two of them could have had even one talk about their lives. She wished it very much, but that wish could not be granted.

The white line of dawn began to show in the east, across the river. Soon, Lorena knew, she would have to go in, drunk or not, rested or not, and start tending to the injured and the children. It was too late for the knowledge she craved; she would never know much about Maria.

That chance--an important one--had been lost forever.

The line of white to the east widened, and the lower stars began to fade. In that direction, only a few steps beyond where the goats were sleeping, Maria Sanchez lay buried, not far from the Rio Grande, in a narrow grave.

Call's greatest embarra.s.sment was that he could not stand up and walk outside to relieve himself. For a time he had no crutch and would have been too weak to use one, even if one had been available. He had to make water in a jug, and often was too weak even to do that properly. He had only his left hand, and his finger joints were still swollen so badly with arthritis that he couldn't work his own b.u.t.tons.

Mostly, Pea Eye helped him. But if Pea Eye was sleeping or had hobbled outside with Maria's children, Lorena came and a.s.sisted him matter-of-factly, ignoring his embarra.s.sment and shame. She did it quickly, as she might have dipped water out of a bucket.

"We don't have the bedding to spare, Captain," she said once; it was her only comment on the matter.

At such times, Call wanted to take out his pocketknife and cut his own throat. But someone had taken his pocketknife, and even if he had had it, he doubted he could have made a clean job of it with only his left hand to use.

Call spoke only to the little blind girl, Teresa. She insisted on caring for him and he accepted her help, although sometimes her girlish chatter tired him. She was very helpful to him; also, she was a young child, and blind. She could not see his stumps, or the black bruise that covered most of his chest, where the bullet was that the doctor had not been bold enough to remove. Call wished the man had made an attempt; perhaps then he would have died.

At least Teresa couldn't see him, and she hadn't known him as he had been. She sat by him and fed him, and while she fed him, told him little stories about spiders and rabbits. Her speech was like a birdsong, quick and light. Hearing her voice was Call's only pleasure. He never reproached Teresa or sent her away, even when he was weary or hot with pain. In the mornings he waited patiently for her; as soon as she awoke, Teresa would come over and put her cool hand on Call's forehead to see how bad his fever was.