Lonesome Dove

by Larry McMurtry

day. If he wasn’t tilting the rope-bottomed chair, he was tilting the jug. The days in Lonesome Dove were a blur of heat and as dry as chalk, but mash whiskey took some of the dry away and made Augustus feel nicely misty inside—foggy and cool as a morning in the Tennessee hills.

“Look at that, Pea,” he said. “I bet you can’t do that.” Pea Eye was so used to seeing Newt stand on one leg to clean his boot that he couldn’t figure out what it was Gus thought he couldn’t do.

Newt’s fondest hope was to get old enough to be taken along on the raids. Many a night he lay in his hot little bunk, listening to old Bolivar snore and mumble below him, peering out the window toward Mexico, imagining the wild doings that must be going on. Once in a while he even heard gunfire, though seldom more than a shot or two, from up or down the river—it got his imagination to working all the harder.

As he strolled away he heard the boy’s footsteps hitting the stairs at the back of the saloon. Dish was a good boy, not much less green than Newt, though a more experienced hand. Best to help such boys have their moment of fun, before life’s torments snatched them.

A man that depended on an indoor cookstove would miss the sunrise, and if he missed sunrise in Lonesome Dove, he would have to wait out a long stretch of heat and dust before he got to see anything so pretty.

He was not overly religious, but he did consider himself a fair prophet and liked to study the styles of his predecessors. They were mostly too long-winded, in his view, and he made no effort to read them verse for verse—he just had a look here and there, while the biscuits were browning.

Contrast to previous evening's sin

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;

In a flash, as he stood half-through the swinging doors, Dish’s whole conception of woman changed; it was as if lightning had struck, burning his old notions to a crisp in one instant. Nothing was going to be as he had imagined it—maybe nothing ever would again.

“Hell, if this is the Fourth of July I’ll set off my own firecrackers,” he said, taking out his pistol.

She realized he was a finicky man—she could not get away with being lazy about herself, any longer. A man who noticed a frayed collar with a near-naked woman standing right in front of him was a new kind of man to Lorena—one who would soon notice other things, some perhaps more serious than a collar.

“First you run out of Indians, now you’ve run out of bandits, that’s the point,” Augustus said. “You’ve got to have somebody to outwit, don’t you?”

He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.

Lorena kept looking out the window. It was as if her mind had already left Lonesome Dove and moved up the trail.

They only talked of going, not of coming back. It might be he would never see Mexico again, or his lovely daughters, if he left. And yet, when he looked across the river and thought of his village, he just felt tired. He was too tired to deal with a disappointed woman, and much too tired to be a bandit.

“I hope this is hard enough for you, Call,” he said. “I hope it makes you happy. If it don’t, I give up. Driving all these skinny cattle all that way is a funny way to maintain an interest in life, if you ask me.” “Well, I didn’t,” Call said. “No, but then you seldom ask,” Augustus said. “You should have died in the line of duty, Woodrow. You’d know how to do that fine. The problem is you don’t know how to live.”

It seemed to him it was better to do as other people did—if society at large did things a certain way it had to be for a good reason, and he looked upon common practices as rules that should be obeyed.

Occasionally the very youngness of the young moved him to charity—they had no sense of the swiftness of life, nor of its limits. The years would pass like weeks, and loves would pass too, or else grow sour.

Augustus and Deets could do little for Sean except sit with him while his life was ending.

The man turned his blue eyes on July for a moment. “Why, son, I’m fine,” he said. “You’re the one in trouble. I can see you carry a weight on your heart.

“I see you’re in a hurry to get someplace. It’s a great mistake to hurry.” “Why?” Joe asked, puzzled by almost everything the traveler said. “Because the grave’s our destination,” Mr. Sedgwick said. “Those who hurry usually get to it quicker than those who take their time.

“Does it ever occur to you that everything we done was probably a mistake? Just look at it from a nature standpoint. If you’ve got enough snakes around the place you won’t be overrun with rats or varmints. The way I see it, the Indians and the bandits have the same job to do. Leave ’em be and you won’t constantly be having to ride around these dern settlements.”

I aim to ride you across the Yellowstone, and if I don’t it’ll be because one of us gets killed first.”

Her mother had been touched. She often babbled of people no one knew. She talked to dead relatives, dead babies, speaking to them as if they were still alive. Lorena wondered if it was mistakes that had made her mother do that. Perhaps, after so many mistakes, your mind finally broke loose and wandered back and forth between past and present.

You’re like a starving person whose stomach is shrunk up from not having any food. You’re shrunk up from not wanting nothing.”

“Life in San Francisco is still just life. If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.”

The night he heard she was dead he left the town without a word to anyone and rode up the river alone for a week. He knew at once that he had forever lost the chance to right himself, that he would never again be able to feel that he was the man he had wanted to be.

the sight of the road of bones stretching over the prairie was a shock. Maybe roads of bones were all that was left. The thought gave the very emptiness of the plains a different feel. With those millions of animals gone, and the Indians mostly gone in their wake, the great plains were truly empty, unpeopled and ungrazed. Soon the whites would come, of course, but what he was seeing was a moment between, not the plains as they had been, or as they would be, but a moment of true emptiness, with thousands of miles of grass resting unused, occupied only by remnants—of the buffalo, the Indians, the hunters. Augustus thought they were crazed remnants, mostly, like the old mountain man who worked night and day gathering bones to no purpose.

“Son, this is a sad thing,” Augustus said. “Loss of life always is. But the life is lost for good. Don’t you go attempting vengeance. You’ve got more urgent business. If I ever run into Blue Duck I’ll kill him. But if I don’t, somebody else will. He’s big and mean, but sooner or later he’ll meet somebody bigger and meaner. Or a snake will bite him or a horse will fall on him, or he’ll get hung, or one of his renegades will shoot him in the back. Or he’ll just get old and die.” He went over and tightened the girth on his saddle. “Don’t be trying to give back pain for pain,” he said. “You can’t get even measures in business like this. You best go find your wife.”

A few owls competed with the snakes for the mice.

He broke up the remains of an old wagon to make a fire.

Synonym for the old west at the time.

And, as in the rainstorms, his misery increased to a pitch and then was gradually replaced by fatigue and resignation. The sky had turned to grasshoppers—it seemed that simple. The other day it had turned to hailstones, now it was grasshoppers.

Mouse had never behaved like other horses, and now he had even found a unique way to die. Newt had had him for eight years and felt his loss so keenly that for the first time on the drive he wished it wouldn’t get light so soon.

“That old badger made a good snatch and got himself a few bones. But the ground will get his bones too, in a year or two. It’s like I told you last night, son. The earth is mostly just a boneyard.

A clean bullet was better than a scratchy rope, and his old partners could shoot clean when they wanted to.

“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.”

Jake grinned. Something in the way Call said it amused him, and for a second he regained a bit of his old dash. “Hell, don’t worry about it, boys,” he said. “I’d a damn 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 compañeros, at least—those boys who had haunted his dreams. Straying off from them had been his worst mistake. “Well, adiós, boys,” he said. “I hope you won’t hold it against me.”

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.”

Gus told her about Jake, but Lorena felt little. Jake hadn’t come to find her. For days she had hoped he would, but when he didn’t, and her hope died, the memory of Jake died with it. When she listened to Gus talk about him it was as if he were talking about a man she hadn’t known.

“You’re a damn impertinent man,” Weaver said. “Those Indians killed a buffalo hunter and a woman, two days ago.

Don’t you still want to marry her, Gus?” “No,” Augustus lied.

“Can’t you wait till morning to leave?” she asked. “No, I’m going as soon as I can saddle up,” Augustus said. “It takes willpower to leave a houseful of ladies just to ride along with some scraggly cowhands. I better do it now, if I’m going to.”

Part of her felt she should have gone with him, to look after him. But she knew that was foolish: Gus, if anyone, could look after himself. She was dry-eyed and felt blank, but Clara cried, tears born of vexation, long affection and regret.

JOSH DEETS SERVED WITH ME 30 YEARS. FOUGHT IN 21 ENGAGEMENTS WITH THE COMMANCHE AND KIOWA. CHERFUL IN ALL WEATHERS, NEVER SHERKED A TASK. SPLENDID BEHAVIOUR.

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.

The cowboys had lived for months under the great bowl of the sky, and yet the Montana skies seemed deeper than the skies of Texas or Nebraska. Their depth and blueness robbed even the sun of its harsh force—it seemed smaller, in the vastness, and the whole sky no longer turned white at noon as it had in the lower plains. Always, somewhere to the north, there was a swath of blueness, with white clouds floating in it like petals in a pond.

Absolutely beautiful

“Pea, you ain’t got your grip on the point,” Augustus said. “I just wanted to chase a buffalo once more. I won’t have the chance much longer, and nobody else will either, because there won’t be no buffalo to chase. It’s a grand sport too.”

It was then that the conviction struck Pea Eye that he would never see Gus alive again. Mainly what they were into was just another Indian fight, and all of those had inconveniences. But Gus had never sustained a wound before that Pea could remember. The arrows and bullets that had missed him so many times had finally found him.

“Imagine getting killed by an arrow in this day and age,” Augustus said. “It’s ridiculous, especially since they shot at us fifty times with modern weapons and did no harm.” “You always was careless,” Call said. “Pea said you rode over a hill and right into them. I’ve warned you about that very thing a thousand times. There’s better ways to approach a hill.” “Yes, but I like being free on the earth,” Augustus said. “I’ll cross the hills where I please.”

Augustus was looking out the window. “Look there at Montana,” he said. “It’s fine and fresh, and now we’ve come and it’ll soon be ruint, like my legs.”

“Your horse but not your name?” Clara said. “You haven’t even given him your name?” “I put more value on the horse,” Call said,