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“The tragedy of man is not death or epidemic or lust or rage or fitful jealousy,” he said loudly—his voice tended to rise while declaiming unpleasant facts. “No sir, the tragedy of man is boredom, sir—boredom!” the Captain said. “A man can only do a given thing so many times with freshness and spirit—then, no matter what it is, it becomes like an office task.
“It’s the quality of the opponent that makes soldiering a thing worth doing,” he said. “It ain’t the cause you fight for—the cause is only a cause. Those torturing fiends down there are the best opponents I’ve ever faced. I mean to kill them to the last man, if I can—but once it’s done I’ll miss ’em.”
“Post coitum omne animal triste,” he said, leaning over to put a hand, for a moment, on the young man’s shoulder. “That’s Aristotle.” “What, sir?” Augustus asked. “I expect that’s Latin, but what does it mean?” “ ‘After copulation every animal is sad,’ ” the Captain said. “It’s true, too—though who can say why? The seed flies, and the seeder feels blue.”
Though he and Augustus were good friends, they had a way of disagreeing about almost everything.
Maudy began to sob and could not stop. She thought of her boy, lying in the thin grass with his broken head, dying alone, and the wall around her feelings broke. She
He didn’t think it wise to say more, or to try and rush the woman back from the place she had gone in her mind. It was a place she had had to go to survive, as much as she had survived, he felt sure. If she was let alone she might come back, although he realized there was a chance she wouldn’t come back. What was sure was that the men who would have killed her were dead.
“If I were to break my whiskey jug I expect I could glue it so it would look like a fine jug,” Augustus replied. “But it would still be leaky and let the whiskey run out. That’s the way it is with her, Woodrow. They might get her back in church and sing hymns at her till she stops screaming them screams. But she’ll always be leaky. She won’t never be right.”
Along the old war trail the moon of the fall was called the “Comanche moon”; for longer than anyone could remember it had been under the generous light of the fall moon that the Comanches had struck deep into Mexico, to kill and loot and bring back captives.
The depth of her love for Woodrow Call gave him a power over her that was too great—and he didn’t even know he had it.
There was no changing men—not much, anyway; mainly men stayed the way they were, no matter what women did.
Sometimes Woodrow seemed so young to her, not young outside but young inside, that it made her fearful for him; it made her even more determined to marry him and take care of him.
I won’t tolerate rude behavior.”
People were always leaving, men mostly.
Without risk there was no power, not for a grown man. That was why Kicking Wolf was taking the Buffalo Horse to Ahumado—if he went into Ahumado’s stronghold and survived he could sing his power all the way home; he could sing it to Buffalo Hump and sit with him as an equal—for he would have challenged the Black Vaquero and lived, something no Comanche had ever done.
He had come to Mexico expecting to die, and now he was going to die. He was not upset; it was a moment he had been waiting for since the shitting sickness killed his wife and his three children. He had wanted to die then, with his family, but his stubborn body had not wanted to go. But some of his spirit had gone with his wife and his little ones and he had not been able to attend much to the things of the world, since then.
It it was only when she saw the blood on her own hands that she noticed an arrow in her hip.
Ahumado was supposed to have stolen much treasure, in his robberies, but he didn’t seem rich. He just seemed like an old, dark man who was cruel to people. It was all puzzling.
They had only been in Austin two days: what happened with Clara happened so fast that, when he thought back on it, it was more like a visit in a dream than something real.
Buffalo Hump wanted to see the ocean because the ocean would always be as it was. Few things could stay forever in the way they were when the spirits made them.
“It that the whole prophecy?”
The fact was, he didn’t like her; it was just that he had an emptiness in him, an emptiness that hadn’t been there until Clara left. It was the emptiness that brought him up the hill to Madame Scull. Being with her invariably left a bad taste in his mouth, yet he kept coming.
Still, Woodrow Call, with his nightly absences and the six dollars a month which he punctually left, was still the best that life offered, or was likely to offer, in the place where Maggie was. Sometimes she felt so defeated that she wondered if she ought to give up on the idea of respectability altogether.
Years had worn off the calendar, but what had changed?
Why was he there? What did he care about rangering now? He’d never stroll the streets of Austin again, either with the woman or the friend; at the thought, such a hopeless sadness took him that he turned and walked out the door,
He knew that the spirits of suicides were restless; they were more likely than other people to float out of their graves and become spooks, harassing those who had offended them in life.
The one weapon Scull had left to him was his hatred—always, throughout his life, hatred had come easier to him than love. The Christian view that one should love his brethren struck him as absurd. His brethren were conniving, brutish, dishonest, greedy, and cruel—and that judgment included, particularly, his own brothers and most of the men he had grown up with.
The old man didn’t appear to want his death, particularly; he could have had that at any time. What he wanted was his pride, and taking the eyelids was a smart way to whittle it down. When the sun shone full in his face, Scull’s pupils seemed as wide as a tunnel, a tunnel that let searing light into his brain.
if we have to shoot ever damn cow we see?”
What’s the name of this place?” “Lonesome Dove—that’s its name,” Call said.
“There used to be a traveling preacher who wandered through this border country. I knew the man well. His name was Windthorst—Herman Windthorst. He stopped in this clearing and preached a sermon to a bunch of vaqueros once, but while he was preaching a dove lit on a limb above him. I guess Herman took it as a holy omen, because he decided to stop wandering and start up a town.”
“I hate a thing like death,” Augustus said. “Well, everybody hates it, I expect,” Call said. “One reason I hate it is because it don’t leave you no time to finish conversations,” Gus said.
But the fight was over. He had seen many men—generals, captains, privates, bankers, widowers—arrive at the moment of surrender. Some came to it quickly, after only a short sharp agony; others held to their lives far longer than was seemly. But finally they gave up. He had seen it, on the battlefield, in hospital, in the cold toils of marriage or the great houses of commerce; finally men gave up. He thought he would never have to learn resignation, but that was hubris. It was time to give up, to stop fighting, to wait for death to ease in.
He thought he had fought well in every war he had been able to find, but now was the day of surrender, the day when he had to snap the sword of his will, to cease all battling and be quiet, be calm; then, finally, would come the moment when his breath would stop.
Why will people die on days this pretty?” Sunlight poured down on them; the sky was cloudless and the air soft. No one had an answer to Gus’s question. Darkness and death seemed far away; but war had been declared between South and North, and Nellie McCrae lay dead not two blocks away.
“Civil wars are the bloodiest, that’s my point, gentlemen,” the Governor said. “There was Cromwell. There were the French. People were torn apart in the streets of Paris.”
the bitter truth Maggie slowly came to accept was that Woodrow Call liked being alone; he liked his solitude as much as Gus and Jake liked female company.
he liked it that the Kickapoo was curious about things that other men didn’t even notice.
Captain Call was very much a white man; he lived by rules. But Captain McCrae had little patience with rules; he lived by what was inside him, by the urgings of his heart and his spirit—and now, grieved by the death of his wife, Captain McCrae’s spirit urged him to get on his black mare and go west.
Call felt both relief and envy: relief that Famous Shoes had accepted the job; envy because he wished he could be as young and unburdened with duties as Pea Eye Parker.
Famous Shoes knew that the words of the song would be mysterious to the young man, who had awakened to listen, but he sang anyway. That things were mysterious did not make them less valuable.
Perhaps even then the song he had just sung was working in the young man’s dreams; perhaps as he grew older he would learn to trust mysteries and not fear them. Many white men could not trust things unless they could be explained; and yet the most beautiful things, such as the trackless flight of birds, could never be explained.
He had never particularly liked to sleep, and rarely did for more than three or four hours a night. Even that necessity he begrudged. Why just lay there, when you could be living? A little rest at night was needful, but the less the better.
it seemed to him that he had been under orders for his entire life, and he was tired of it.
That night when he looked into the fire he saw no one. Women had been constantly in his thoughts since his youth, but that night he was free of even the thought of them.
“She’s in the love business but love ain’t been kind to her.
“I suppose she’s just dying of living—that’s the one infection that strikes us all down, sooner or later.”
Now, suddenly, it was very much in his mind, and yet he had no one to discuss the matter with and was far from knowing even what he felt himself.
Ikey thought back, across sixty years, to the girl he had sparked in Illinois, whose name was Sally. They had danced once in a hoedown; she had blue eyes. But Sally had fallen out of a boat on a foggy morning, while crossing the Mississippi River on a trip to St. Louis with her father. Her body, so far as he could recall, had never been found. Had her name been Sally? Or had it been Mary? Had her eyes been blue? Or had they been brown? He had danced with her once at a hoedown. Was it her father she had been with on the boat trip? Or was it her mother?
Nothing was easier to detect in a man than fear. It showed even in the way he fumbled with his cup while drinking coffee; and it was normal that he would be afraid.
Also, he often went back to places he had been at earlier times in his life, just to see if the places would seem the same. In most cases, because he himself had changed, the places did not seem exactly as he remembered them, but there were exceptions.
