Lonesome Dove Part 66

Call and Augustus had to grab his arms and hold him steady. Dan dug his chin into his chest, so that Deets had to grab his hair and pull his head back to get the rope around his neck.

"You're a fool, Suggs," Augustus said. "You don't appreciate a professional when you see one. Men Deets hangs don't have to dance on the rope, like some I've seen."

"You're yellowbellies, both of you, or you would have fought me fair," Dan Suggs said, glaring down at him. "I'll fight you yet, barehanded, if you'll just let me down. I'll fight the both of you right now, and this n.i.g.g.e.r boy too."

"You'd do better to say goodbye to your brothers," Call said. "I expect you got them into this."

"They're not worth a red p.i.s.s and neither are you," Dan said.

"I'll say this for you, Suggs, you're the kind of son of a b.i.t.c.h it's a pleasure to hang," Augustus said. "If guff's all you can talk, go talk it to the devil."

He gave Dan Suggs's horse a whack with a coiled rope and the horse jumped out from under him. When Dan's horse jumped, little Eddie's bolted too, and in a moment the two men were both swinging dead from the limb.

Roy Suggs looked pained. A brother dangled on either side of him. "I ought to have been second," he said. "Little Eddie was the youngest."

"You're right and I'm sorry," Augustus said. "I never meant to scare that boy's horse."

"That horse never had no sense," Roy Suggs remarked. "If I was little Eddie I would have got rid of him long ago."

"I guess he waited too long to make the change," Augustus said. "Are you about ready, sir?"

"Guess so, since the boys are dead," Roy Suggs said. "Right or wrong, they're my brothers."

"It's d.a.m.n bad luck, having a big brother like Dan Suggs, I'd say," Augustus said.

He walked over to Jake and put a hand on his leg for a moment.

"Jake, you might like to know that I got Lorie back," he said.

"Who?" Jake asked. He felt very dull, and for a second the name meant nothing to him. Then he remembered the young blond wh.o.r.e who had been so much trouble. She had put him off several times.

"Why, Lorie-have you had so many beauties that you've forgotten?" Augustus said. "That d.a.m.n outlaw took her away."

To Jake it seemed as remote as his rangering days-he could barely get his mind back to it. Call walked over. Now that they were about it he felt a keen sorrow. Jake had ridden the river with them and been the life of the camp once-not the steadiest boy in the troop, but lively and friendly to a fault.

"Well, it'll soon be dark," he said. "I'm sorry it's us, Jake-I wish it had fallen to somebody else."

Jake grinned. Something in the way Call said it amused him, and for a second he regained a bit of his old dash.

"h.e.l.l, don't worry about it, boys," he said. "I'd a d.a.m.n sight rather be hung by my friends than by a bunch of strangers. The thing is, I never meant no harm," he added. "I didn't know they was such a gun outfit."

He looked down at Pea Eye and Deets, and at the boy. Everyone was silent, even Gus, who held the coiled rope. They were all looking at him, but it seemed no one could speak. For a moment, Jake felt good. He was back with his old companeros companeros, at least-those boys who had haunted his dreams. Straying off from them had been his worst mistake.

"Well, adios adios, boys," he said. "I hope you won't hold it against me."

He waited a moment, but Augustus seemed dumbstruck, holding the rope.

Jake looked down again and saw the glint of tears in the boy's eyes. Little Newt cared for him, at least.

"Newt, why don't you take this pony?" he said, looking at the boy. "He's a pacer-you won't find no easier gait. And the rest of you boys divide what money's in my pocket."

He smiled at the thought of how surprised they would be when they saw how much he had-it was that lucky week in Fort Worth he had to thank for it.

"All right, Jake, many thanks," Newt said, his voice cracking.

Before he got the thanks out, Jake Spoon had quickly spurred his pacing horse high back in the flanks with both spurs. The rope squeaked against the bark of the limb. Augustus stepped over and caught the swinging body and held it still.

"I swear," Pea Eye said. "He didn't wait for you, Gus."

"Nope, he died fine," Augustus said. "Go dig him a grave, will you, Pea?"

They buried Jake Spoon by moonlight on the slope above the creek and, after some discussion, cut down Roy Suggs and little Eddie, plus the old man Dan Suggs had killed, a drummer named Collins with a wagonful of patent medicines. There was a good lantern in the wagon, which, besides the medicines, contained four white rabbits in a cage. The old man had run a medicine show, evidently, and did a little magic. The wagon contained a lot of cheaply printed circulars which advertised the show.

"Headed for Denver, I guess," Call said.

Dan Suggs they left hanging. Augustus took one of the circulars and wrote "Dan Suggs, Man Burner and Horse Thief on the back of it. He rode over and pinned the sign to Dan Suggs's s.h.i.+rt.

"That way if a lawman comes looking for him he'll know he can quit the search," Augustus said.

They rounded up Wilbarger's horses and unhitched the two mules that had been pulling the little wagon. Augustus wanted to take the white rabbits, but the cage was awkward to carry. Finally Deets put two in his saddlebags, and Augustus took the other two. He also sampled the patent medicines and took several bottles of it.

"What do you think it will cure, Gus?" Pea Eye asked.

"Sobriety, if you guzzle enough of it," Augustus said. "I expect it's just whiskey and syrup."

The wagon itself was in such poor repair that they decided to leave it sit. Call broke up the tailgate and made a little marker for Jake's grave, scratching his name on it with a pocketknife by the light of the old man's lantern. He hammered the marker into the loose-packed dirt with the blunt side of a hatchet they had found in the wagon. Augustus trotted over, bringing Call his mare.

"I'm tired of justice, ain't you?" he asked.

"Well, I wish he hadn't got so careless about his company," Call said. "It was that that cost him."

"Life works out peculiar," Augustus said. "If he hadn't talked you into making this trip, we wouldn't have had to hang him today. He could be sitting down in Lonesome Dove, playing cards with Wanz."

"On the other hand, it was gambling brought him down," Call said. "That's what started it."

Deets and Pea Eye and Newt held the little horse herd. Newt was leading the horse Jake had left him. He didn't know if it was right to get on him so soon after Jake's death.

"You can ride the pacing pony," Deets said. "Mister Jake meant you to have it."

"What will I do with his saddle?" Newt asked. "He didn't say anything about the saddle."

"It's better than that old singletree of yours," Pea Eye said. "Take it-Jake's through with it."

"Don't neither of you want it?" Newt asked. It bothered him to take it, for Jake hadn't mentioned it.

"Oh, no," Deets said. "Saddle goes with the horse, I guess."

Nervous and a little reluctant, Newt got on Jake's horse. The stirrups were too long for him, but Deets got down and quickly adjusted them. As he was finis.h.i.+ng the lacing, Call and Augustus rode by. Deets took the bridle off Newt's other horse and turned him, still saddled, into the horse herd. No one seemed to have anything to say.

They started Wilbarger's horses west across the dark prairie in the direction the cattle should be. Captain Call led, Augustus and Deets rode to the sides, and Pea Eye and Newt brought up the rear. Newt had to admit that Jake's horse had a beautiful smooth gait, but even so he wished he hadn't changed horses-not so soon. It seemed wrong to be enjoying Jake's horse, and his fine saddle too, after what had happened. But he was tired, so tired he didn't even feel the sadness for very long. Soon his head dropped and he sat on the pacing gelding, sound asleep. Pea Eye noticed and trotted close beside him so he could catch the weary boy if he started to fall off.

PART III

75.

CLARA WAS MILKING A MARE when Sally, her oldest girl, came racing down to the lots.

"Somebody's coming, Ma," Sally said, excitement in her face. Sally was ten years old and sociable-she loved visitors.

The young mare had dropped her foal early and the colt was too weak to stand up, which was why she was milking. The colt would suck milk off a rag, and Clara was determined to save it if she could. When Sally ran up, the mare flinched, causing Clara to squirt a stream of milk along her own arm.

"Haven't I told you to walk walk up to horses?" Clara said. She stood up and wiped the milk off her dripping arm. up to horses?" Clara said. She stood up and wiped the milk off her dripping arm.

"I'm sorry, Ma," Sally said, more excited than sorry. "See, there's a wagon coming."

Then Betsey, only seven, came flying out of the house, her brown hair streaming, and raced down to the corrals. Betsey liked company as much as her sister.

"Who's coming?" she asked.

The wagon was barely visible coming along the Platte from the west.

"I thought I told you girls to churn," Clara said. "Seems like all you do is hang out the window watching for travelers."

Of course, no one could blame them, for company was rare. They lived twenty miles from town, and a bad town at that-Ogallala. If they went in, it was usually for church, but they seldom made the trip. Their company mostly consisted of men who came to trade horses with Bob, her husband, and now that he was injured, few came. They had just as many horses-more, in fact-and Clara knew more about them than Bob had ever learned, but there were few men disposed to bargain with a woman, and Clara was not disposed to give their horses away. When she named a price she meant it, but usually men got their backs up and wouldn't buy.

"I expect they're just buffalo hunters," Clara said, watching the distant wagon creep over the brown plains. "You girls won't learn much from them, unless you're interested in learning how to spit tobacco."

"I ain't," Betsey said.

"You aren't, you mean," Sally said. "I thought all the buffalo were dead-how come they still hunt them?"

"Because people are slow learners, like your sister," Clara said, grinning at Betsey to mitigate the criticism.

"Are you gonna invite them for the night?" Sally asked. "Want me to kill a hen?"

"Not just yet, they may not be in the mood to stop," Clara said. "Besides, you and I don't agree about hens. You might kill one of the ones I like."

"Mother, they're just to eat," Sally said.

"Nope. I keep those hens to talk to me when I'm lonesome," Clara said. "I'll only eat the ones who can't make good conversation." Betsey wrinkled up her nose, amused by the comment. "Oh, Ma," she said, "hens don't talk."

"They talk," Clara said. "You just don't understand hen talk. I'm an old hen myself and it makes good sense to me."

"You ain't old, Ma," Sally said.

"That wagon won't be here for an hour," Clara said. "Go see about your pa. His fever comes up in the afternoon. Wet a rag and wipe his face."

Both girls stood looking at her silently. They hated to go into the sickroom. Both of them had bright-blue eyes, their legacy from Bob, but their hair was like hers and they were built like her, even to the k.n.o.bby knees. Bob had been kicked in the head by a mustang he was determined to break, against Clara's advice. She had seen it happen-he had the mare snubbed to a post with a heavy rope and only turned his back on her for a second. But the mare struck with her front feet, quick as a snake. Bob had bent over to pick up another rope and the kick had caught him right back of the ear. The crack had sounded like a shot. The mare pawed him three or four times before Clara could reach him and drag him out of the way, but those blows had been minor. The kick behind the ear had almost killed him. They had been so sure he would die that they even dug the grave, up on the knoll east of the house where their three boys were buried: Jim and Jeff and Johnny, the three deaths Clara felt had turned her heart to stone: she hoped for stone, anyway, for stone wouldn't suffer from such losses.

Bob, though, hadn't died-neither had he recovered. His eyes were open, but he could neither speak nor move. He could swallow soup, if his head was tilted a certain way, and it was chicken broth that had kept him alive the three months since his accident. He simply lay staring up with his large blue eyes, feverish sometimes but mostly as still as if he were dead. He was a large man, over two hundred pounds, and it took all her strength to move him and clean him every day-he had no control over bowels or bladder. Day after day Clara removed the soiled bedclothes, stuffing them in a washtub she filled beforehand from the cistern. She never let the girls see or help her with the operation; she supposed Bob would die in time, and she didn't want his daughters to feel disgust for him, if she could prevent it. She only sent them in once a day to bathe his face, hoping that the sight of them would bring him out of his state.

"Is Daddy going to die?" Betsey often asked. She had been only one when Johnny, her last brother, had died, and had no memories of death, just a great curiosity about it.

"I don't know, Betsey," Clara said. "I don't know at all. I hope not."

"Well, but can't he ever talk again?" Sally asked. "His eyes are open, why can't he talk?"

"His head is hurt," Clara said. "It's hurt on the inside. Maybe it'll heal, if we take care of him, and then he can talk again."

"Do you think he can hear the piano when I play?" Betsey asked.

"Just go and bathe his face, please. I don't know what he can hear," she said. She felt as if a flood of tears might come at any moment, and she didn't want the girls to see them. The piano, over which she and Bob had argued for two years, had come the week before his accident-it had been her victory, but a sad one. She had ordered it all the way from St. Louis, and it had been woefully out of tune when it finally came, but there was a Frenchman who played the piano in a saloon in town who tuned it for her for five dollars. And although she a.s.sumed it was a wh.o.r.ehouse he played the piano in, she hired him at the big fee of two dollars a week to ride out and give her daughters lessons.

The Frenchman's name was Jules. He was really a French-Canadian who had been a trader on the Red River of the North and had gone broke when smallpox hit the tribes. He had wandered down through the Dakotas to Ogallala and turned to music for a living. He loved to come out and teach the girls-he said they reminded him of the cousins he had once played with in his grandmother's house in Montreal. He wore a black coat, when he came, and waxed his mustache. Both girls thought he was the most refined man they had ever seen, and he was.

Clara had bought the piano with money saved all those years from the sale of her parents' little business in Texas. She had never let Bob use the money-another bone of contention between them. She wanted it for her children, so when the time came they could be sent away to school and not have to spend their whole youth in such a raw, lonely place. The first of the money she spent was on the two-story frame house they had built three years before, after nearly fifteen years of life in the sod house Bob had dug for her on a slope above the Platte. Clara had always hated the sod house-hated the dirt that seeped down on her bedclothes, year after year. It was dust that caused her firstborn, Jim, to cough virtually from his birth until he died a year later. In the mornings Clara would walk down and wash her hair in the icy waters of the Platte, and yet by supper time, if she happened to scratch her head, her fingernails would fill with dirt that had seeped down during the day. For some reason, no matter where she moved her bed, the roof would trickle dirt right onto it. She tacked muslin, and finally canvas, on the ceiling over the bed but nothing stopped the dirt for long. It sifted through. It seemed to her that all her children had been conceived in dust clouds, dust rising from the bedclothes or sifting down from the ceiling. Centipedes and other bugs loved the roof; day after day they crawled down the walls, to end up in her stewpots or her skillets or the trunks where she stored her clothes.

"I'd rather live in a tepee, like an Indian," she told Bob many times. "I'd be cleaner. When it got dirty we could burn it."

The idea had shocked Bob, a conventional man if there ever was one. He could not believe he had married a woman who wanted to live like an Indian. He worked hard to give her a respectable life, and yet she said things like that-and meant them. And she stubbornly kept her own money, year after year-for the children's education, she said, although one by one the three boys died long before they were old enough to be sent anywhere. The last two lived long enough for Clara to teach them to read. She had read them Walter Scott's Ivanhoe Ivanhoe when Jeff and Johnny were six and seven, respectively. Then the next winter both boys had died of pneumonia within a month of one another. It was a terrible winter, the ground frozen so deep there was no way to dig a grave. They had had to put the boys in the little kindling shed, wrapped tightly in wagon sheets, until winter let up enough that they could be buried. Many days Bob would come home from delivering horses to the Army-his main customer-to find Clara sitting in the icy shed by the two small bodies, tears frozen on her cheeks so hard that he would have to heat water and bathe the ice from her face. He tried to point out to her that she mustn't do it-the weather was below zero, and the wind swept endlessly along the Platte. She could freeze to death, sitting in the kindling shed. If only I would, Clara thought-I'd be with my boys. when Jeff and Johnny were six and seven, respectively. Then the next winter both boys had died of pneumonia within a month of one another. It was a terrible winter, the ground frozen so deep there was no way to dig a grave. They had had to put the boys in the little kindling shed, wrapped tightly in wagon sheets, until winter let up enough that they could be buried. Many days Bob would come home from delivering horses to the Army-his main customer-to find Clara sitting in the icy shed by the two small bodies, tears frozen on her cheeks so hard that he would have to heat water and bathe the ice from her face. He tried to point out to her that she mustn't do it-the weather was below zero, and the wind swept endlessly along the Platte. She could freeze to death, sitting in the kindling shed. If only I would, Clara thought-I'd be with my boys.

But she didn't freeze, and Jeff and Johnny had been buried beside Jim, and despite her resolve never to lay herself open to such heartbreak again, she had the girls, neither of whom had ever had more than a cold. Bob couldn't believe his own bad luck; he longed for a strong boy or two to help him with the stock.

And yet he loved the girls in his unspeaking way. His love mostly came out in awkwardness, for their delicacy frightened him. He was continually warning them about their health and trying to keep them wrapped up. Their recklessness almost stopped his heart at times-they were the kind of girls who would run out in the snow barefoot if they chose. He feared for them, and also feared the effect on his wife if one of them should die. Impervious to weather himself, he came to dread the winters for fear winter would take the rest of his family. Yet the girls proved as strong as their mother, whereas the boys had all been weak. It made no sense to Bob, and he was hoping if they could only have another boy, he would turn into the helper he needed.

The only hand they had was an old Mexican cowboy named Cholo. The old man was wiry and strong, despite his age, and stayed mainly because of his devotion to Clara. It was Cholo, and not her husband, who taught her to love horses and to understand them. Cholo had pointed out to her at once that her husband would never break the mustang mare; he had urged her to persuade Bob to sell the mare unbroken, or else let her go. Though Bob had been a horse trader all his adult life, he had no real skill with horses. If they disobeyed him, he beat them-Clara had often turned her back in disgust from the sight of her husband beating a horse, for she knew it was his incompetence, not the horse's, that was to blame for whatever incident had provoked the beating. Bob could not contain his violence when angered by a horse.

With her, it was different. He had never raised a hand to her, though she provoked him often, and deeply. Perhaps it was because he had never quite believed that she would marry him, or never quite understood why she had. The shadow of Augustus McCrae had hung over their courts.h.i.+p; Bob had never known why she chose him over the famous Ranger, or over any of the other men she could have had. In her day she had been the most sought-after girl in Texas, and yet she had married him, and followed him to the Nebraska plains, and stayed and worked beside him. It was hard country for women, Bob knew that. Women died, went crazy or left. The wife of their nearest neighbor, Maude Jones, had killed herself with a shotgun one morning, leaving a note which merely said, "Can't stand listening to this wind no more." Maude had had a husband and four children, but had killed herself anyway. For a time, Clara had taken in the children, until their grandparents in Missouri came for them. Len Jones, Maude's husband, soon drank himself into poverty. He fell out of his wagon drunk one night and froze to death not two hundred yards from a saloon.

Clara had lived, and stayed, though she had a look in her gray eyes that frightened Bob every time he saw it. He didn't really know what the look meant, but to him it meant she might leave if he didn't watch out. When they first came to Nebraska, he had had the drinking habit. Ogallala was hardly even a town then; there were few neighbors, and almost no socials. The Indians were a dire threat, though Clara didn't seem to fear them. If they had company, it was usually soldiers-the soldiers drank, and so did he. Clara didn't like it. One night he got pretty drunk, and when he got up in the morning she had that look in her eye. She made him breakfast, but then she looked at him coldly and lay down a threat. "I want you to stop drinking," she said. "You've been drunk three times this week. I won't live here and get dirt in my hair for the love of a drunkard."

It was the only threat she ever had to make. Bob spent the day worrying, looking at the bleak plains and wondering what he would do in such a place without her. He never touched whiskey again. The jug he had been working on sat in the cupboard for years, until Clara finally mixed it with sorghum mola.s.ses and used it for cough medicine.

They had few quarrels, most of them about money. Clara was a good wife and worked hard; she never did anything untoward or unrespectable, and yet the fact that she had that Texas money made Bob uneasy. She wouldn't give it up or let him use it, no matter how poor they were. Not that she spent it on herself-Clara spent nothing on herself, except for the books she ordered or the magazines she took. She kept the money for her children, she said-but Bob could never be sure she wasn't keeping it so she could leave if she took a notion. He knew it was foolish-Clara would leave, money or no money, if she decided to go-but he couldn't get the idea out of his mind. She wouldn't even use the money on the house, although she had wanted the house, and they had had to haul the timber two hundred miles. Of course, he had prospered in the horse business, mainly because of the Army trade; he could afford to build her a house. But he still resented her money. She told him it was only for the girls' education-and yet she did things with it that he didn't expect. The winter before she had bought Cholo a buffalo coat, an action which shocked Bob. He had never heard of a married woman buying a Mexican cowboy an expensive coat. Then there was the piano. She had ordered that too, although it cost two hundred dollars and another forty to transport. And yet he had to admit he loved to see his girls sitting at the piano, trying to learn their fingering. And the buffalo coat had saved Cholo's life when he was trapped in an April blizzard up on the Dismal River, Clara got her way, and her way often turned out to make sense-and yet Bob more and more felt that her way skipped him, somehow. She didn't neglect him in any way that he could put his finger on, and the girls loved him, but there were many times when he felt left out of the life of his own family. He would never have said that to Clara-he was not good with words, and seldom spoke unless he was spoken to, unless it was about business. Watching his wife, he often felt lonely. Clara seemed to sense it and would usually come and try to be especially nice to him, or to get him laughing at something the girls had done-and yet he still felt lonely, even in their bed.

Now Bob lay in that bed all day, staring his empty stare. They had moved the bed near the window so that he would get the summer breezes and could look out if he liked and watch his horses grazing on the plain, or the hawks circling, or whatever little sights there might be. But Bob never turned his head, and no one knew if he felt the breezes. Clara had taken to sleeping on a little cot. The house had a small upper porch and she moved the cot out there in good weather. Often she lay awake, listening, half expecting Bob to come back to himself and call her. More often what happened was that he fouled himself; and instead of hearing him she would smell him. Even so, she was glad it happened at night so she could change him without the girls seeing.

It seemed to her, after a month of it, that she was carrying Bob away with those sheets; he had already lost much weight and every morning seemed a little thinner to her. The large body that had lain beside her so many nights, that had warmed her in the icy nights, that had covered her those many times through the years and given her five children, was dribbling away as offal, and there was nothing she could do about it. The doctors in Ogallala said Bob's skull was fractured; you couldn't put a splint on a skull; probably he'd die. And yet he wasn't dead. Often when she was cleaning him, bathing his soiled loins and thighs with warm water, the stem of life between his legs would raise itself, growing as if a fractured skull meant nothing to it. Clara cried at the sight-what it meant to her was that Bob still hoped for a boy. He couldn't talk or turn himself, and he would never beat another horse, most likely, but he still wanted a boy. The stem let her know it, night after night, when all she came in to do was clean the stains from a dying body. She would roll Bob on his side and hold him there for a while, for his back and legs were developing terrible bedsores. She was afraid to turn him on his belly for fear he might suffocate, but she would hold him on his side for an hour, sometimes napping as she held him. Then she would roil him back and cover him and go back to her cot, often to lie awake half the night, looking at the prairies, sad beyond tears at the ways of things. There Bob lay, barely alive, his ribs showing more every morning, still wanting a boy. I could do it, she thought-would it save him if I did? I could go through it one more time-the pregnancy, the fear, the sore nipples, the worry-and maybe it would be a boy. Though she had borne five children, she sometimes felt barren, lying on her cot at night. She felt she was ignoring her husband's last wish-that if she had any generosity she would do it for him. How could she lie night after night and ignore the strange, mute urgings of a dying man, one who had never been anything but kind to her, in his clumsy way. Bob, dying, still wanted her to make a little Bob. Sometimes in the long silent nights she felt she must be going crazy to think about such things, in such a way. And yet she came to dread having to go to him at night; it became as hard as anything she had had to do in her marriage. It was so hard that at times she wished Bob would go on and die, if he couldn't get well. The truth was, she didn't want another child, particularly not another boy. Somehow she felt confident she could keep her girls alive-but she lacked that confidence where boys were concerned. She remembered too well the days of icy terror and restless pain as she listened to Jim cough his way to death. She remembered her hatred of, and helplessness before, the fevers that had taken Jeff and Johnny. Not again, she thought-I won't live that again, even for you, Bob. The memory of the fear that had torn her as her children approached death was the most vivid of her life: she could remember the coughings, the painful breathing. She never wanted to listen helplessly to such again.