True Grit

by Charles Portis

“The good Christian does not flinch from difficulties.” “Neither does he rashly court them. The good Christian is not willful or presumptuous.” “You think I am wrong.” “I think you are wrongheaded.”

“He don’t know what to make of a rider so light as you,” said the smith. “He thinks they is a horsefly on his back.”

I was afraid he might founder himself on the rich grain.

“I want him to know he is being punished for killing my father. It is nothing to me how many dogs and fat men he killed in Texas.”

He was singing the hymn Beulah Land to himself in a low bass voice. It is one of my favorites. He stopped singing when he saw me.

The Indian woman spoke good English and I learned to my surprise that she too was a Presbyterian. She had been schooled by a missionary. What preachers we had in those days! Truly they took the word into “the highways and hedges.” Mrs. Bagby was not a Cumberland Presbyterian but a member of the U.S. or Southern Presbyterian Church. I too am now a member of the Southern Church. I say nothing against the Cumberlands. They broke with the Presbyterian Church because they did not believe a preacher needed a lot of formal education. That is all right but they are not sound on Election. They do not fully accept it. I confess it is a hard doctrine, running contrary to our earthly ideas of fair play, but I can see no way around it. Read I Corinthians 6: 13 and II Timothy 1: 9, 10. Also I Peter 1: 2, 19, 20 and Romans 11: 7. There you have it. It was good for Paul and Silas and it is good enough for me. It is good enough for you too.

Rooster said, “If I ever meet one of you Texas waddies that says he never drank from a horse track I think I will shake his hand and give him a Daniel Webster cigar.”

“Then you don’t believe it?” asked LaBoeuf. “I believed it the first twenty-five times I heard it.”

I said, “Would you two like to hear the story of ‘The Midnight Caller’? One of you will have to be ‘The Caller.’ I will tell you what to say. I will do all the other parts myself.”

He reminded me of some of those Slovak people that came in here a few years ago to cut barrel staves. The ones that stayed have made good citizens. People from those countries are usually Catholics if they are anything. They love candles and beads.

I said, “Do you want us to tell your brother what happened to you?” He said, “It don’t matter about that. He knows I am on the scout. I will meet him later walking the streets of Glory.” Rooster said, “Don’t be looking for Quincy.” “Quincy was always square with me,” said Moon. “He never played me false until he killed me.

Here is what was in his eyes: confusion. Soon it was all up with him and he joined his friend in death. He looked about thirty pounds lighter.

Rooster ate a corn dodger and offered me one. I said, “Strike a match and let me look at it first.” “What for?” said he. “There was blood on some of them.” “We ain’t striking no matches.” “I don’t want it then. Let me have some taffy.”

us having rode with Bill Anderson and Captain Quantrill.

I went to Cairo, Illinois, with mine and started calling myself Burroughs and bought a eating place called The Green Frog and married a grass widow. It had one billiard table. We served ladies and men both, but mostly men.”

She said, ‘Goodbye, Reuben, a love for decency does not abide in you.’ There is your divorced woman talking about decency.

You would not want to see a clumsier child than Horace.

Some of his stories had too many people in them and were hard to follow but they helped to pass the hours and took my mind off the cold. I did not give credence to everything he said. He said he knew a woman in Sedalia, Missouri, who had stepped on a needle as a girl and nine years later the needle worked out of the thigh of her third child. He said it puzzled the doctors.

The scrap did not last as long as it has taken me to describe it.

The dun horse belonging to Moon bolted and bared his teeth and would not permit his dead master to be placed on his back. A less sensitive horse was found to serve.

As we rode along LaBoeuf commenced whistling tunes, perhaps to take his mind off his sore arm. Rooster said, “God damn a man that whistles!” It was the wrong thing to say if he wished it to stop.

He was trying to get his “goat.”

Use of quotation marks as adult narrator Mattie would likely use them.

“You do not think much of me, do you, Cogburn?” “I don’t think about you at all when your mouth is closed.”

“We missed Jim Lane. What army was you in, mister?”

Jim Lane led a raid on Rooster’s hometown, Osceola.

We reached J. J. McAlester’s store about 10 o’clock that morning. The people of the settlement turned out to see the dead bodies and there were gasps and murmurs over the spectacle of horror, made the worse by way of the winter morning being so sunny and cheerful.

I said to the captain, “Perhaps you are wondering who I am.” “Yes, I was wondering that,” said he. “I thought you were a walking hat.” “My name is Mattie Ross,” said I. “The man with the black mark goes by the name of Tom Chaney. He shot my father to death in Fort Smith and robbed him. Chaney was drunk and my father was not armed at the time.”

What a great line. It made me laugh out loud for a long time.

I said to the captain, “Perhaps you are wondering who I am.” “Yes, I was wondering that,” said he. “I thought you were a walking hat.” “My name is Mattie Ross,” said I. “The man with the black mark goes by the name of Tom Chaney. He shot my father to death in Fort Smith and robbed him. Chaney was drunk and my father was not armed at the time.”

Mattie has a great, short elevator-speech kind of message ready for everyone she might need to deliver it to.

We learned that the boy was called Billy. His father ran a steam sawmill on the South Canadian River, the captain told us, and there was a large family at home. Billy was one of the eldest children and he had helped his father cut timber. The boy was not known to have been in any devilment before this.

You may think Rooster was hard in appropriating the traps of the dead men but I will tell you that he did not touch one cent of the money that was stolen at gunpoint from the passengers of the Katy Flyer.

They drank whiskey and used up about sixty corn dodgers like that. None of them ever hit two at one throw with a revolver but Captain Finch finally did it with his Winchester repeating rifle, with somebody else throwing. It was entertaining for a while but there was nothing educational about it. I grew more and more impatient with them. I said, “Come on, I have had my bait of this. I am ready to go. Shooting cornbread out here on this prairie is not taking us anywhere.”

Little Blackie did not falter. He had good wind and his spirit was such that he would not let LaBoeuf’s shaggy mount get ahead of him on an open run. Yes, you bet he was a game pony!

He would not be taken in charge and I shot him. If I had killed him I would not now be in this fix. My revolver misfired twice.” “They will do it,” said Lucky Ned Pepper. “It will embarrass you every time.” Then he laughed. He said, “Most girls like play pretties, but you like guns, don’t you?” “I don’t care a thing in the world about guns. If I did I would have one that worked.”

Chaney said, “Five minutes is well up.” “I will give them a little more time,” said the bandit chieftain. “How much more?” said Chaney. “Till I think they have had enough.”

Then Rooster and LaBoeuf disappeared over the hill. The last thing I saw was Little Blackie. I think it did not come home to me until that moment what my situation was. I had not thought Rooster or LaBoeuf would give in to the bandits so easily.

So many times, Maddie shows pride of place in her references to Yell County.

Chaney said, “Everything is against me.”

I had not thought before of this disfigured robber having had a childhood. I expect he was mean to cats and made rude noises in church when he was not asleep. When he needed a firm restraining hand, it was not there. An old story!

Lucky Ned Pepper said, “Well, Rooster, will you give us the road? We have business elsewhere!”

Tom Chaney, seizing the occasion, picked up a rock about the size of a new cooking pumpkin and broke LaBoeuf’s head with it.

About the size of a cooking pumpkin. What a great line. It is also from the feminine perspective.

Then I saw the horse. It was Little Blackie! The scrub pony had saved us! My thought was: The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner.

When Blackie slowed again, Rooster took salt from his pocket and rubbed the wound with it and the pony leaped forward as before.

In a very few minutes this torture was mercifully ended. Blackie fell to the ground and died, his brave heart burst and mine broken. There never lived a nobler pony.

I have no recollection of the stop at the Poteau River where Rooster commandeered a wagon and a team of mules from a party of hunters at gunpoint. I do not mean to suggest the hunters were reluctant to lend their team in such an emergency but Rooster was impatient of explanation and he simply took the rig.

On the third day Dr. Medill gave me a sizable dose of morphine and amputated the arm just above the elbow with a little surgical saw. My mother and Lawyer Daggett sat at my side while this work was done. I very much admired my mother for sitting there and not flinching, as she was of a delicate temperament. She held my right hand and wept.

I went home on a varnish train, lying flat on my back on a stretcher that was placed in the aisle of a coach.

private car, or private varnish is a railroad passenger car either originally built or later converted for service as a business car for private individuals.

Lawyer Daggett interviewed me about it and in the course of our conversation I learned something disturbing. It was this. The lawyer had blamed Rooster for taking me on the search for Tom Chaney and had roundly cursed him and threatened to prosecute him in a court action. I was upset on hearing it. I told Lawyer Daggett that Rooster was in no way to blame, and was rather to be praised and commended for his grit. He had certainly saved my life. Whatever his adversaries, the railroads and steamboat companies, may have thought, Lawyer Daggett was a gentleman, and on hearing the straight of the matter he was embarrassed by his actions.

I will say here that Judy was never recovered, nor was the second California gold piece. I kept the other one for years, until our house burned. We found no trace of it in the ashes.

He took his cat General Price and the widow Potter and her six children and went to San Antonio, Texas, where he found work as a range detective for a stockmen’s association. He

and I fear Rooster did himself no credit there in what they called the “Johnson County War.”

Little Frank had teased me and chaffed me over the years about Rooster, making out that he was my secret “sweetheart.” By sending this notice he was having sport with me, as he thought. He had penciled a note on the cutting that said, “Skill and dash! It’s not too late, Mattie!” Little Frank loves fun at the other fellow’s expense and the more he thinks it tells on you the better he loves it. We have always liked jokes in our family and I think they are all right in their place. Victoria likes a good joke herself, so far as she can understand one. I have never held it against either one of them for leaving me at home to look after Mama, and they know it, for I have told them.