True Grit

by Charles Portis

Rooster said, “Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!” and he took the reins in his teeth and pulled the other saddle revolver and drove his spurs into the flanks of his strong horse Bo and charged directly at the bandits.

Now the prisoner has an advantage over his keeper in this respect, that he is always thinking of escape and watching for opportunities, while the keeper does not constantly think of keeping him.

I hurriedly cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger. The charge exploded and sent a lead ball of justice, too long delayed, into the criminal head of Tom Chaney.

I soon recovered my wits. I am falling. I need that shirt. These thoughts bore upon me with urgency. I had no stomach for the task ahead but there was nothing else to be done in my desperate circumstances. My plan was to give the shirt a smart jerk in hopes of tearing it free from the skeleton. I will have that shirt!

studied the arm. Bits of cartilage held it together at the elbow joint. With some twisting I managed to separate it at that place. I took the long bone of the upper arm and secured it under my armpit to serve as a cross-member. This would keep me from plunging through the hole should I reach that point in my descent.

Rooster Cogburn’s rifle stock smashing the wounded head of Tom Chaney.

Now Rooster himself began to run, or jog as it were under the load, and his breath came hard.

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.

He told me the posse of marshals had found LaBoeuf, and that the officer had refused to leave the place until he had recovered the body of Tom Chaney. None of the marshals was anxious to go down in the pit, so LaBoeuf had them lower him on a rope.

Then in the early 1890s I learned he had abandoned the Potter woman and her brood and had gone north to Wyoming with a reckless character named Tom Smith where they were hired by stock owners to terrorize thieves and people called nesters and grangers. It was a sorry business, I am told, and I fear Rooster did himself no credit there in what they called the “Johnson County War.”

Same war that influences SHANE, I think.

the Cole Younger and Frank James “Wild West” show

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.

These old-timers had all fought together in the border strife under Quantrill’s black standard, and afterward led dangerous lives, and now this was all they were fit for, to show themselves to the public like strange wild beasts of the jungle.

Rooster’s body removed to Dardanelle on the train.

They say I love nothing but money and the Presbyterian Church and that is why I never married. They think everybody is dying to get married. It is true that I love my church and my bank. What is wrong with that?

I heard nothing more of the Texas officer, LaBoeuf.

This ends my true account of how I avenged Frank Ross’s blood over in the Choctaw Nation when snow was on the ground.

Then there are the books we love so much that we read them every year or two, and know passages of them by heart; that cheer us when we are sick or sad and never fail to amuse us when we take them up at random; that we press on all our friends and acquaintances; and to which we return again and again with undimmed enthusiasm over the course of a lifetime.

The opening paragraph sets up the premise of the novel elegantly and economically:

1870s,

more particularly, of William Clarke Quantrill’s bloody border gang, notorious in American history for the massacre at Lawrence, Kansas, and also for launching the careers of the teenaged Frank and Jessie James.

Finally, when they cannot get Mattie to turn back, they accept her: first, in anger, as a worrisome tagalong; then, grudgingly, as a mascot and equal of sorts; and at last—as she stands among them and proves herself—a relentless force in her own right.

True Grit is a monologue, and the great, abiding pleasure of it that compels the reader to return to it again and again is Mattie’s voice.

True Grit also masters the more complicated subtleties of time.

the Wild West of the 1870s, as recollected in a spinster’s memory and filtered through the sedate sepia tones of the early 1900s. Mattie’s narrative tone is naive, didactic, hardheaded, and completely lacking in self-consciousness—and, at times, unintentionally hilarious,

a great part of True Grit’s charm is in Mattie’s blasé view of frontier America. Shootings, stabbings, and public hangings are recounted frankly and flatly, and often with rather less warmth than the political and personal opinions upon which Mattie digresses.

her own very distinctive voice (blunt, unsentimental, yet salted with parlor platitudes) echoes throughout the reported speech of all the other characters—lawmen and outlaws alike—to richly comic effect, as when Rooster remarks

Her deadpan manner is reminiscent of Buster Keaton:

One cannot picture Huckleberry Finn in the same light; for while Huck is an adventuresome spirit, duty and discipline are wholly foreign to him; conscripted by any army, any cause, he would desert in short order, slipping away the first chance he got to his easy riverbank life. Mattie

In her Old Testament morality, in her legalistic and exacting turn of mind, in the thunderous blackness of her wrath

she is less Huck Finn’s little sister than Captain Ahab’s.

And yet it is scoundrelly old Rooster who—like Huck Finn, revolting instinctively against the accepted brutality of his day—rises unexpectedly to True Grit’s moments of justice and nobility.

True Grit, in short, begins where chivalry meets the frontier—where the old Confederacy starts to merge and shade away into the Wild West.

Certainly when I was growing up in the 1970s, True Grit was widely thought to be a classic; when I was about fourteen years old, it was read along with Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe in the Honors English classes at my school.