Lonesome Dove Part 85

Indeed, the Hat Creek outfit was in disarray, the wagon and the remuda still fleeing south, half the hands thrown and the other half fighting their horses. The cattle hadn't run yet, but they were nervous. Newt had been thrown sky-high off the sorrel Clara had given him and had landed painfully on his tailbone. He started to limp back to the wagon, only to discover that the wagon was gone. All that was left of it was Po Campo, who looked puzzled. He was too short to see over the cattle and had no idea there was a bear around.

"Is it Indians?" Newt asked. He had not yet seen the bear either.

"I don't know what it is," Po Campo said. "But it's something mules don't like."

Only the two pigs were relatively undisturbed. A sack of potatoes had bounced out of the fleeing wagon and the pigs were calmly eating them, grunting now and then with satisfaction.

The Texas bull was the only animal directly facing the bear. The bull let out a challenging bellow and began to paw the earth. He took a few steps forward and pawed the earth again, throwing clouds of dust above his back.

"You don't think that little bull is fool enough to charge that bear, do you?" Augustus asked. "Charging Needle Nelson is one thing. That bear'll turn him wrong side out."

"Well, if you want to go rope that bull and lead him to the barn, help yourself," Call said. "I can't do nothing with this horse."

The bull trotted forward another few steps and stopped again. He was no more than thirty or forty yards from the bear. The bear dropped on all fours, watching the bull. He growled a rough, throaty growl that caused a hundred or so cattle to scatter and run back a short distance. They stopped again to watch. The bull bellowed and slung a string of s...o...b..r over his back. He was hot and angry. He pawed the earth again, then lowered his head and charged the bear.

To the amazement of all who saw it, the bear batted the Texas bull aside. He rose on his hind legs again, dealt the bull a swipe with his forepaw that knocked the bull off its feet. The bull was up in a second and charged the bear again-this time it seemed the bear almost skinned him. He hit the bull on the shoulder and ripped a capelike piece of skin loose on his back, but despite that, the bull managed to drive into the bear and thrust a horn into his flank. The bear roared and dug his teeth into the bull's neck, but the bull was still moving, and soon bear and bull were rolling over and over in the dust, the bull's bellows and the bear's roar so loud that the cattle did panic and begin to run. The h.e.l.l b.i.t.c.h danced backward, and Augustus's horse began to pitch again and threw him, though Augustus held the rein and managed to get his rifle out of the scabbard before the horse broke free and fled. Then Call found himself thrown too; the h.e.l.l b.i.t.c.h, catlike, had simply doubled out from under him.

It came at an inopportune moment too, for the bull and the bear, twisting like cats, had left the creek bank and were moving in the direction of the herd, although the dust the battle raised was so thick no one could see who had the advantage. It seemed to Call, when he looked, that the bull was being ripped to pieces by the bear's teeth and claws, but at least once the bull knocked the bear backward and got a horn into him again.

"Reckon we ought to shoot?" Augustus said. "h.e.l.l, this outfit will run clean back to the Red River if this keeps up."

"If you shoot, you might hit the bull," Call said. "Then we'd have to fight the bear ourselves, and I ain't sure we can stop him. That's a pretty mad bear."

Po Campo came up, holding his shotgun, Newt a few steps behind him. Most of the men had been thrown and were watching the battle tensely, clutching their guns.

The sounds the two animals made were so frightening that they made the men want to run. Jasper Fant wanted badly to run-he just didn't want to run alone. Now and then he would see the bear's head, teeth bared, or his great claws slashing; now and then he would see the bull seem to turn to bunched muscle as he tried to force the bear backward. Both were bleeding, and in the heat the blood smell was so strong that Newt almost gagged.

Then it stopped. Everyone expected to see the bull down-but the bull wasn't down. Neither was the bear. They broke apart, circling one another in the dust. Everyone prepared to pour bullets into the bear if he should charge their way, but the bear didn't charge. He snarled at the bull, the bull answering with a s...o...b..ry bellow. The bull turned back toward the herd, then stopped and faced the bear. The bear rose on his hind legs again, still snarling-one side was soaked with blood. To the men, the bear seemed to tower over them, although fifty yards away. In a minute he dropped back on all fours, roared once more at the bull, and disappeared into the brush along the creek.

"Captain, can we go after him?" Soupy Jones said, clutching his rifle.

"Go after him on what?" Augustus asked. "Have you gone daft, Soupy? You want to chase a grizzly bear on foot, after what you've seen? You wouldn't even make one good bite for that bear."

The bear had crossed the stream and was ambling along lazily across the open plain.

Despite Augustus's cautions, as soon as the men could catch their horses, five of them, including Dish Boggett, Soupy, Bert, the Irishman and Needle Nelson, raced after the bear, still visible though a mile or more away. They began to fire long before they were in range, and the bear loped toward the mountains. An hour later the men returned, their horses run down, but with no bear trophies.

"We hit him but he was faster than we thought," Soupy explained. "He got in some trees up toward the hills."

"We'll get the next one," Bert predicted.

"h.e.l.l, if he was in the trees, you should have gone in and tapped him with your pistol b.u.t.t," Augustus said. "That would probably have tamed him."

"Well, the horses wouldn't go in them trees," Soupy explained.

"I didn't want to either," Allen O'Brien admitted. "If we had gone in the trees we might not have come out."

The mules had run three miles before stopping, but because the plain was fairly smooth, the wagon was undamaged. The same could not be said for Lippy, who had bounced so hard at one point that he had bitten his tongue nearly in two. The tongue bled for hours, little streams of blood spilling over his long lip. The remuda was eventually rounded up, as well as the cattle.

When the Texas bull calmed down enough so that it was possible to approach him, his wounds seemed so extensive that Call at first considered shooting him. He had only one eye, the other having been raked out, and the skin had been ripped off his neck and hung like a blanket over one shoulder. There was a deep gash in his flank and a claw wound running almost the whole length of his back. One horn had been broken off at the skull as if with a sledgehammer. Yet the bull still pawed the earth and bellowed when the cowboys rode too close.

"It seems a pity to shoot him," Augustus said. "He fought a draw with a grizzly. Not many critters can say that."

"He can't walk to Montana with half his skin hanging off his shoulders," Call pointed out. "The flies will get on that wound and he'll die anyway."

Po Campo walked to within fifty feet of the bull and looked at him.

"I can sew him up," he said. "He might live. Somebody catch him for me."

"Yes, rope him, Dish," Augustus said. "It's your job. You're our top hand."

Dish had to do it or be embarra.s.sed by his failure for the rest of the trip. His horse didn't want to go near the bull, and he missed two throws from nervousness and expected to be killed himself if he did catch the animal. But he finally got a rope over the bull's head and slowed him until four more ropes could be thrown on him.

Even then, it was all they could do to throw the bull, and it took Po Campo over two hours to sew the huge flap of skin back in place. When it was necessary to turn the bull from one side to another, it took virtually the whole crew, plus five horses and ropes, to keep him from getting up again. Then, when the bull did roll, he nearly rolled on Needle Nelson, who hated him anyway and didn't approve of all the doctoring. When the bull nearly rolled on him Needle retreated to the wagon and refused to come near him again. "I was rooting for the bear," he said. "A bull like that is going to get somebody sooner or later, and it might be me."

The next day the bull was so sore he could barely hobble, and Call feared the doctoring had been in vain. The bull fell so far behind the herd that they decided to leave him. He fell several miles behind in the course of the day. Call kept looking back, expecting to see buzzards in the sky-if the bull finally dropped, they would feast.

But he saw no buzzards, and a week after the fight the bull was in the herd again. No one had seen him return, but one morning he was there. He had only one horn and one eye, and Po Campo's sewing job was somewhat uneven, the folds of skin having separated in two or three places-but the bull was ornery as ever, bellowing at the cowboys when they came too close. He resumed his habit of keeping well to the front of the herd. His wounds only made him more irascible; the hands gave him a wide berth.

As a result of the battle, night herding became even more unpopular. Where there was one grizzly bear, there could be others. The men who had been worrying constantly about Indians began to worry about bears. Those who had chased the wounded bear horseback could not stop talking about how fast he had moved. Though he had only seemed to be loping along, he had easily run off and left them. "There ain't a horse in this outfit that bear couldn't catch, if he wanted to," Dish contended.

The observation worried Jasper Fant so much that he lost his appet.i.te and his ability to sleep. He lay awake in his blankets for three nights, clutching his gun-and when he couldn't avoid night herding he felt such anxiety that he usually threw up whatever he ate. He would have quit the outfit, but that would only mean crossing hundreds of miles of bear-infested prairie alone, a prospect he couldn't face. He decided if he ever got to a town where there was a railroad, he would take a train, no matter where it was going.

Pea Eye, too, found the prospect of bears disturbing. "If we strike any more, let's all shoot at once," he suggested to the men repeatedly. "I guess if enough of us. .h.i.t one it'd fall," he always added. But no one seemed convinced, and no one bothered to reply.

92.

WHEN SALLY AND BETSEY asked her questions about her past, Lorena was perplexed. They were just girls-she couldn't tell them the truth. They both idolized her and made much of her adventure in crossing the prairies. Betsey had a lively curiosity and could ask about a hundred questions an hour. Sally was more reserved and often chided her sister for prying into Lorena's affairs.

"She don't have to tell you about her whole life," Sally would protest. "Maybe she can't remember. I can only remember back to when I was three."

"What happened when you was three?" Lorena asked.

"That old turkey pecked me," Sally said. "A wolf got him and I'm glad."

Clara overheard part of the conversation. "I'm getting some more turkeys pretty soon," she said. "Lorie's so good with the poultry, I think we might raise a few."

The poultry ch.o.r.es had been a.s.signed to Lorena-mainly just feeding the twenty-five or thirty hens and gathering the eggs. At first it seemed that such a small household couldn't possibly need so many eggs, and yet they absorbed them effortlessly. July Johnson was a big egg eater, and Clara, who had a ferocious sweet tooth, used them in the cakes she was always making. She made so many cakes that everyone got tired of them except her.

"I got to have sweets, at least," Clara said, eating a piece of cake before she went to bed, or again while she was cooking breakfast. "Sweets make up for a lot."

It didn't seem to Lorena that Clara had that much that needed making up for. She mostly did what she pleased, and what she pleased usually had to do with horses. Housework didn't interest her, and washing, in particular, didn't interest her. That became Lorena's job too, though the girls helped her. They asked questions all the time they worked, and Lorena just gave them whatever answers came into her head-few of them true answers. She didn't know if the answers fooled them-the girls were smart. Sometimes she knew she didn't fool them.

"Are you gonna marry that man?" Betsey asked one day. "He's already got white hair."

"That's no reason not to marry him," Sally said.

"It is, too," Betsey insisted. "If he's got white hair he could die any time."

Lorena found that she didn't think about Gus all that much. She was glad she had stayed at Clara's. For almost the first time in her life she had a decent bed in a clean room and tasteful meals and people around who were kind to her. She liked having a whole room to herself, alone. Of course, she had had a room in Lonesome Dove, but it hadn't been the same. Men could come into that room-letting them in was a condition of having it. But she didn't have to let anyone into her room in Clara's house, though often she-did let Betsey, who suffered from nightmares, into it. One night Betsey stumbled in, crying-Clara was out of the house, taking one of the strange walks she liked to take. Lorena was surprised and offered to go find Clara, but Betsey wasn't listening. She came into the bed like a small animal and snuggled into Lorena's arms. Lorena let her stay the night, and from then on, when Betsey had a nightmare, she came to Lorena's room and Lorena soothed her.

Only now and then did she miss Gus, though then she missed him with a painful ache and felt almost desperate to see him. At such times she felt cowardly for not having gone with him, though, of course, he himself had urged her to stay. She didn't miss the rest of it at all-the cowboys watching her and thinking things about her, the hot tent, the unpredictable storms and the fleas and mosquitoes that were always there.

She didn't miss the fear, either-the fear that someday Gus would be off somewhere and Blue Duck would come back. What had happened had been bad enough, but she knew if he ever got her again it would be worse. Fearing him and missing Gus were mixed together, for Gus was the only person who could protect her from him.

Unlike the girls, Clara seldom asked her any questions. Lorena came to wish that she would. For a while she had an urge to apologize to Clara for not having always been able to be a lady. It still seemed to her a miracle that she had been allowed to stay in Clara's house and be one of the family. She looked for it to go bad in some way, but it didn't go bad. The only thing that changed was that Clara spent more and more time with the horses, and less and less time in the house.

"You came at a good time," she said one day as Lorena was coming in from feeding the hens. It was a task Lorena enjoyed-she liked the way the hens chirped and complained.

"How's that?" Lorena asked.

"I nagged Bob to build this house, and I don't really care about a house," Clara said. "We needed it for the girls, but that wasn't why I built it. I just wanted to nag him into it and I did. The main reason was he wouldn't let me work with the horses, although I'm better with them than he ever was. But he didn't think it fitting-so I thought. All right then, Bob, build me a house. But I'd rather be down with the horses, and now there's nothing to stop me."

Two weeks later, Bob died in the night. Clara went in in the morning to change him, and found him dead. He looked exactly as he had: he just was no longer breathing. He weighed so little by then that she could lift him. Having long concluded that he would die, she had had Cholo bring a pine coffin from town. He had brought it in at night and hidden it from the girls. It was ready.

Clara closed Bob's eyes and sat with her memories for an hour. The girls were downstairs now, pestering Lorena and eating. Now and then she could hear their laughter.

They were happy girls; they laughed often. It pleased Clara to hear them. She wondered if Bob could hear his two lively daughters laughing, as he lay dying. She wondered if it helped, if it made up in any way for her bad tempers and the deaths of the three boys. He had counted so on those boys-they would be his help, boys. Bob had never talked much, but the one thing he did talk about was how much they would get done once the boys got big enough to do their part of the work. Often, just hearing him describe the fences they would build, or the barns, or the cattle they would buy, Clara felt out of sorts-it made her feel very distant from Bob that he saw their boys mainly as hired hands that he wouldn't have to pay. He sees them different, she thought. For her part, she just liked to have them there. She liked to look at them as they sat around the table, liked to watch them swimming and frolicking in the river, liked to sit by them sometimes when they slept, listening to them breathe. Yet they had died, and both she and Bob lost what they loved-Bob his dreams of future work with his sons, she the immediate pleasure of having sons to look at, to touch, to scold and tease and kiss.

It struck her that endings were never as you would expect them to be. She had thought she would be relieved when Bob finally died. She hadn't felt he was part of their life anymore, and yet, now that he was gone, she knew he had been. A silent part, an uncomfortable part, but still there, still her husband, still the girls' father. He had been changed, but not removed.

Now he had gone where her boys had gone. As well as she knew the boys, as much as she loved them, time had robbed her of them. At times she found herself mixing details and events up, not in big ways but in small. In dreams she saw her sons' faces, and when she awoke could not remember which son she had dreamed about. She wondered if she would dream of Bob, and what she would remember if she thought of him in ten years. Their marriage had had few high spots. She had often been happy during it, but not because of anything Bob did. She had had more happiness from horses than from her husband, though he had been a decent husband, better than most women had, from what she could judge.

She didn't cry, but merely felt a wish, now he was gone, that she could somehow escape dealing with the tiresome formalities of death. Someone would have to go for a preacher; there would have to be some kind of funeral. They had no close neighbors, but the two or three closest would still feel they had to come, bring food, pay their respects.

She covered Bob with a clean sheet and went downstairs. Lorena was teaching the girls to play cards. They were playing poker for b.u.t.tons. Clara stood in the shadows, wishing she didn't have to interrupt their fun. Why interrupt it for a death that couldn't be helped? And yet death was not something you could ignore. It had its weight. It was a dead man lying upstairs, not a man who was sick. It seemed to her she had better not form the practice of ignoring death. If she tried it, death would find a way to answer back-it would take another of her loved ones, to remind her to respect it.

So she walked into the room. Betsey had just won a hand. She whooped, for she loved to beat her sister. She was a beautiful child, with curls that would drive men mad some day. "I won the pot, Ma," she said, and then saw by the grave set of Clara's face that something was wrong.

"Good," Clara said. "A good cardplayer is just what this family needs. Now I have to tell you something sad. Your father's dead."

"Oh, he ain't!" Sally said.

"Honey, he died just now," Clara said.

Sally ran to her, but Betsey turned to Lorena, who was nearer. Lorena was surprised, but she put her arms around the child.

"Could you go get July?" Clara asked Lorena, when the girls had calmed a bit.

July now lived in a little room attached to the saddle shed. It wouldn't do when winter came, but for summer it was all right. He had never felt comfortable in the house with Clara and the girls, and since Lorena had come he felt even more uncomfortable. Lorena seldom spoke to him, and Clara mainly discussed horses, or other ranch problems, yet he felt nervous in their company. Day to day, he felt it was wrong to have taken the job with Clara. Sometimes he felt a strong longing to be back in his old job in Fort Smith, even if Roscoe was no longer alive to be his deputy.

But he had a son now, a baby he saw every day at supper and breakfast. His son was the darling of the ranch. The women and girls pa.s.sed Martin around as if he belonged to them all; Lorena had developed a rapport with him and took the main responsibility for him when Clara was off with the horses. The baby was happy, and no wonder, with two women and two girls to spoil him. July could hardly imagine what the women would do if he tried to take the baby and raise him in Arkansas. Anyway, such a plan was not feasible.

So he stayed on and did his work, neither truly content nor bitterly discontented. He still dreamed of Elmira and felt an aching sadness when he thought about her.

Despite that ache, the thing that made July least comfortable of all was that he knew he was in love with Clara. The feeling had started even before he knew Elmira was dead, and it grew even when he knew he ought to be grieving for Elmira. He felt guilty about it, he felt hopeless about it, but it was true. At night he thought of her, and imagined her in her room, in her gown. At breakfast and supper he watched her, whenever he thought he could do so without her noticing. He had many opportunities, too, for she seemed to have ceased taking any notice of him at all. He had the sense that she had become disappointed in him, though he didn't know why. And when she did look at him it frightened him. Occasionally, when he caught Clara looking at him, he almost flinched, for he did not imagine that he could hide anything from her. She was too smart-he had the sense that she could figure out anything. Her eyes were mysterious to him-often she seemed to be amused by him, at other times irritated. Sometimes her eyes seemed to pierce him, as if she had decided to read his thoughts as she would read a book. And then, in a moment, she would lift her head and ignore him, as if he were a book she had glanced through and found too uninteresting for further perusal.

And she was married. Her husband lay sick above their heads, which made his love seem all the more hopeless. But it didn't stop the longing he felt for her. In his daydreams he fell to reinventing the past, imagining that he had married Clara instead of Elmira. He gave himself a very different marriage. Clara wouldn't sit in the loft with her feet dangling all day. She wouldn't have run off on a whiskey boat. Probably she wouldn't have cared that Jake Spoon shot Benny. He imagined them raising horses and children together.

Of course, they had begun to do just that-raise horses and children together. But the reality was far different from the daydream. They weren't together. He could not go into her room at night and talk to her. He knew that if he could, he probably wouldn't be able to think of much to say, or if he did and said something stupid, Clara would answer sharply. Still he longed for it and lay awake at night in his little shed, thinking of her.

He was doing that when Lorena came to tell him Bob was dead. Hearing the footsteps, he had the hope that it was Clara, and he pictured her face in his mind, not stern and impersonal, as it often was when she was directing some work, but soft and smiling, as it might be if she were playing with Martin at the dinner table.

He opened the door and saw to his surprise that it was Lorena.

"He died," Lorena said.

"Who?" July asked absently.

"Her husband," Lorena said.

Then she's free, July thought. He couldn't feel sad.

"Well, I guess it's for the best," he said. "The man wasn't getting no better."

Lorena noticed that he sounded happier than she had heard him sound since she arrived at the ranch. She knew exactly what it meant. She had often seen him looking at Clara with helpless love in his eyes. She herself didn't care one way or the other about July Johnson, but the dumb quality of his love annoyed her. Many men had looked at her that way, and she was not flattered by it. They wanted to pretend, such men, that they were different, that she was different, and that what might happen between them would be different than it would ever be. They wanted to pretend that they wanted pretty dresses and smiles, when what they really wanted was for her to lay down under them. That was the real wish beneath all the pretty wishes men had. And when she was was under them, they could look down and pretend something pretty was happening, but she would look up and only see a dumb face above her, strained, dishonest and anything but pretty. under them, they could look down and pretend something pretty was happening, but she would look up and only see a dumb face above her, strained, dishonest and anything but pretty.

"She wants you to bring the coffin," she said to July, watching him. Let Clara worry about the man. Watching him only made her long for Gus. He gave things that no one else could give. He wasn't dumb, and he didn't pretend that he wanted smiles when he wanted a poke.

They put the coffin in the front room, and July carried the frail corpse downstairs and put him in the coffin. Then, on Clara's instructions, he rode off to inform the few neighbors and to find a preacher. Clara and Lorena and the girls sat with the body all night, while Cholo dug a grave on the ridge above the barn where the boys were buried. Betsey slept most of the night in Lorena's arms-Clara thought it nice that she had taken to the young woman so.

At dawn Clara went out and took Cholo some coffee. He had finished digging and was sitting on the mound of earth that would soon cover Bob. Walking toward the ridge in the early sunlight, Clara had the momentary sense that they were all watching her, the boys and Bob. The vision lasted a second; it was Cholo who was watching her. It was windy, and the gra.s.s waved over the graves of her three boys-four now, she felt. In memory Bob seemed like a boy to her also. He had a boyish innocence and kept it to the end, despite the strains of work and marriage in a rough place. It often irritated her, that innocence of his. She had felt it to be laziness-it left her alone to do the thinking, which she resented. Yet she had loved it, too. He had never been a knowing man in the way that Gus was knowing, or even Jake Spoon. When she decided to marry Bob, Jake, who was a hothead, grew red in the face and proceeded to throw a fit. It disturbed him terribly that she had chosen someone he thought was dumb. Gus had been better behaved, if no less puzzled. She remembered how it pleased her to thwart them-to make them realize that her measure was different from theirs. "I'll always know where he is," she told Gus. It was the only explanation she ever offered.

Now, indeed, she would know where he was.

Cholo was watching her to see if she was hurt. He loved Clara completely and tried in small ways to make life easier for her, although he had concluded long before that she wasn't seeking ease. Often in the morning when she came down to the lots she would be somber and would stand by the fence for an hour, not saying a word to anyone. Other times there would be something working in her that scared the horses. He thought of Clara as like the clouds. Sometimes the small black clouds would pour out of the north; they seemed to roll over and over as they swept across the sky, like tumbleweeds. On some mornings things rolled inside Clara, and made her tense and snappish. She could do nothing with the horses on days like that. They became as she was, and Cholo would try gently to persuade her that it was not a good day to do the work. Other days, her spirit was quiet and calm and the horses felt that too. Those were the days they made progress training them.

Clara had brought two cups. She was very glad to be out of the house. She poured Cholo his coffee and then poured some for herself. She sat down on the mound of dirt beside him and looked into the open grave.

"Sometimes it seems like grave-digging is all we do," she said. "But that's wrong. I guess if we lived in a big town it wouldn't seem that way. I guess in New York there are so many people you don't notice the dying so much. People come faster than they go. Out here it shows more when people go-especially when it's your people."

"Mister Bob, he didn't know mares," Cholo said, remembering that ignorance had been his downfall.

"Nope," Clara said. "He didn't know mares."

They sat quietly for a while, drinking coffee. Watching Clara, Cholo felt sad. He did not believe she had ever been happy. Always her eyes seemed to be looking for something that wasn't there. She might look pleased for a time, watching her daughters or watching some young horse, but then the rolling would start inside her again and the pleased look would give way to one that was sad.

"What do you think happens when you die?" she asked, surprising him. Cholo shrugged. He had seen much death, but had not thought much about it. Time enough to think about it when it happened.

"Not too much," he said. "You're just dead."

"Maybe it ain't as big a change as we think," Clara said. "Maybe you just stay around near where you lived. Near your family, or wherever you was happiest. Only you're just a spirit, and you don't have the troubles the living have."