Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

“Are you gonna invite them for the night?” Sally asked. “Want me to kill a hen?” “Not just yet, they may not be in the mood to stop,” Clara said. “Besides, you and I don’t agree about hens. You might kill one of the ones I like.” “Mother, they’re just to eat,” Sally said.

“你要邀请他们过夜吗？”萨莉问。“想让我杀一只母鸡吗？”“现在还不行，他们可能没心情停下来，”克拉拉说。“此外，你和我对母鸡的看法不一致。你可以杀了一只我喜欢的母鸡。”“妈妈，它们只是用来吃的，”萨莉说。

“Nope. I keep those hens to talk to me when I’m lonesome,” Clara said. “I’ll only eat the ones who can’t make good conversation.” Betsey wrinkled up her nose, amused by the comment. “Oh, Ma,” she said, “hens don’t talk.” “They talk,” Clara said. “You just don’t understand hen talk. I’m an old hen myself and it makes good sense to me.” “You ain’t old, Ma,” Sally said.

克拉拉说：“不是的。我让那些母鸡在我孤独的时候和我说话。”。“我只吃那些不能很好地交谈的人。”贝琪皱着鼻子，被这句话逗乐了。“哦，妈，”她说，“母鸡不会说话。”“它们会说话，”克拉拉说。“你就是不懂母鸡的话。我自己也是一只老母鸡，这对我来说很有道理。”“你不老，妈妈，”萨莉说。

“That wagon won’t be here for an hour,” Clara said. “Go see about your pa. His fever comes up in the afternoon. Wet a rag and wipe his face.” Both girls stood looking at her silently. They hated to go into the sickroom. Both of them had bright-blue eyes, their legacy from Bob, but their hair was like hers and they were built like her, even to the knobby knees. Bob had been kicked in the head by a mustang he was determined to break, against Clara’s advice. She had seen it happen—he had the mare snubbed to a post with a heavy rope and only turned his back on her for a second. But the mare struck with her front feet, quick as a snake. Bob had bent over to pick up another rope and the kick had caught him right back of the ear. The crack had sounded like a shot. The mare pawed him three or four times before Clara could reach him and drag him out of the way, but those blows had been minor. The kick behind the ear had almost killed him. They had been so sure he would die that they even dug the grave, up on the knoll east of the house where their three boys were buried: Jim and Jeff and Johnny, the three deaths Clara felt had turned her heart to stone: she hoped for stone, anyway, for stone wouldn’t suffer from such losses.

“那辆马车要一个小时才能到，”克拉拉说。“去看看你爸。他下午发烧了。把抹布弄湿，擦他的脸。”两个女孩都站在那里默默地看着她。他们讨厌进病房。他们俩都有一双明亮的蓝眼睛，这是鲍勃留给他们的遗产，但他们的头发和她的一样，他们的身材也和她一样，甚至到了膝盖的小瘤。鲍勃违背克拉拉的建议，被一支他决心要打破的野马踢到头上。她亲眼目睹了这一切——他用一根沉重的绳子把母马拖到柱子上，只转过身去看了她一秒钟。但母马用前脚猛踢，速度像蛇一样快。鲍勃弯下腰去捡另一根绳子，一脚踢到了他的耳朵后面。裂缝听起来像枪声。母马抓了他三四次，克拉拉才够到他，把他拖开，但这些打击都很小。耳朵后面的踢腿几乎要了他的命。他们非常确定他会死，甚至在埋葬他们三个儿子的房子东边的小丘上挖了坟墓：吉姆、杰夫和约翰尼，克拉拉的三次死亡让她的心变成了石头：不管怎样，她希望石头，因为石头不会遭受这样的损失。

Bob, though, hadn’t died—neither had he recovered. His eyes were open, but he could neither speak nor move. He could swallow soup, if his head was tilted a certain way, and it was chicken broth that had kept him alive the three months since his accident. He simply lay staring up with his large blue eyes, feverish sometimes but mostly as still as if he were dead.

不过，鲍勃没有死，也没有康复。他的眼睛是睁开的，但他既不能说话也不能动。如果他的头朝某个方向倾斜，他就能喝汤，而正是鸡汤让他在事故发生后的三个月里活了下来。他只是躺在那里，睁着大大的蓝眼睛，有时会发烧，但大部分时间都像死了一样一动不动。

He was a large man, over two hundred pounds, and it took all her strength to move him and clean him every day—he had no control over bowels or bladder. Day after day Clara removed the soiled bedclothes, stuffing them in a washtub she filled beforehand from the cistern. She never let the girls see or help her with the operation; she supposed Bob would die in time, and she didn’t want his daughters to feel disgust for him, if she could prevent it. She only sent them in once a day to bathe his face, hoping that the sight of them would bring him out of his state.“Is Daddy going to die?” Betsey often asked. She had been only one when Johnny, her last brother, had died, and had no memories of death, just a great curiosity about it.

他是个大块头，体重超过两百磅，她每天都要用尽全力来移动他和清洁他——他无法控制自己的肠道或膀胱。克拉拉日复一日地脱下脏兮兮的床上用品，把它们塞进她事先从水箱里装满的洗衣盆里。她从不让女孩们看到或帮助她做手术；她以为鲍勃会及时死去，如果她能阻止的话，她不想让他的女儿们对他感到厌恶。她每天只派她们来洗一次他的脸，希望看到她们能让他摆脱这种状态。“爸爸会死吗？”贝茜经常问。当她最后一个哥哥约翰尼去世时，她是唯一一个，对死亡没有记忆，只是对它非常好奇。

“I don’t know, Betsey,” Clara said. “I don’t know at all. I hope not.” “Well, but can’t he ever talk again?” Sally asked. “His eyes are open, why can’t he talk?” “His head is hurt,” Clara said. “It’s hurt on the inside. Maybe it’ll heal, if we take care of him, and then he can talk again.” “Do you think he can hear the piano when I play?” Betsey asked.

“我不知道，贝琪，”克拉拉说。“我一点也不知道。我希望不是。”“好吧，但他不能再说话了吗？”萨莉问。“他的眼睛睁着，为什么不能说话？”“他的头受伤了，”克拉拉说。“里面很疼。如果我们照顾好他，也许会痊愈，然后他就可以再说话了。”“你觉得我弹钢琴的时候他能听见吗？”贝琪问。

“Just go and bathe his face, please. I don’t know what he can hear,” she said. She felt as if a flood of tears might come at any moment, and she didn’t want the girls to see them. The piano, over which she and Bob had argued for two years, had come the week before his accident—it had been her victory, but a sad one. She had ordered it all the way from St. Louis, and it had been woefully out of tune when it finally came, but there was a Frenchman who played the piano in a saloon in town who tuned it for her for five dollars. And although she assumed it was a whorehouse he played the piano in, she hired him at the big fee of two dollars a week to ride out and give her daughters lessons.

“请去给他洗脸。我不知道他能听到什么，”她说。她觉得眼泪随时都可能流出来，她不想让女孩们看到。她和鲍勃争论了两年的钢琴，在他出事的前一周来了——这是她的胜利，但很悲伤。她从圣路易斯一路订购的，当它终于来的时候，它已经严重失调了，但有一个法国人在城里的一家酒馆里弹钢琴，他花了五美元为她调音。尽管她以为他在妓院弹钢琴，但她还是以每周两美元的高价雇了他出去给女儿上课。

The Frenchman’s name was Jules. He was really a French-Canadian who had been a trader on the Red River of the North and had gone broke when smallpox hit the tribes. He had wandered down through the Dakotas to Ogallala and turned to music for a living. He loved to come out and teach the girls—he said they reminded him of the cousins he had once played with in his grandmother’s house in Montreal. He wore a black coat, when he came, and waxed his mustache. Both girls thought he was the most refined man they had ever seen, and he was.

法国人的名字叫朱尔斯。他实际上是一名法裔加拿大人，曾是北方红河的商人，在天花袭击部落时破产了。他穿过达科他州来到奥加拉拉，以音乐为生。他喜欢出来教女孩们——他说她们让他想起了他曾经在蒙特利尔祖母家玩过的表亲。他来的时候穿了一件黑色外套，给胡子打蜡。两个女孩都认为他是她们见过的最优雅的男人，事实也的确如此。

Clara had bought the piano with money saved all those years from the sale of her parents’ little business in Texas. She had never let Bob use the money—another bone of contention between them. She wanted it for her children, so when the time came they could be sent away to school and not have to spend their whole youth in such a raw, lonely place. The first of the money she spent was on the two-story frame house they had built three years before, after nearly fifteen years of life in the sod house Bob had dug for her on a slope above the Platte. Clara had always hated the sod house—hated the dirt that seeped down on her bedclothes, year after year. It was dust that caused her firstborn, Jim, to cough virtually from his birth until he died a year later. In the mornings Clara would walk down and wash her hair in the icy waters of the Platte, and yet by supper time, if she happened to scratch her head, her fingernails would fill with dirt that had seeped down during the day. For some reason, no matter where she moved her bed, the roof would trickle dirt right onto it. She tacked muslin, and finally canvas, on the ceiling over the bed but nothing stopped the dirt for long. It sifted through. It seemed to her that all her children had been conceived in dust clouds, dust rising from the bedclothes or sifting down from the ceiling. Centipedes and other bugs loved the roof; day after day they crawled down the walls, to end up in her stewpots or her skillets or the trunks where she stored her clothes.

克拉拉用多年来卖掉父母在得克萨斯州的小生意攒下的钱买了这架钢琴。她从未让鲍勃使用这笔钱——这是他们之间的另一个争论点。她想把它送给她的孩子，这样到时候他们就可以被送去上学，而不必在这样一个原始、孤独的地方度过整个青春。她花的第一笔钱是他们三年前建造的两层框架房子，在鲍勃在普拉特河上方的一个斜坡上为她挖的草皮房子里生活了近十五年。克拉拉一直讨厌那间草皮屋，讨厌年复一年地渗到她床上用品上的污垢。正是灰尘导致她的长子吉姆从出生到一年后去世几乎一直咳嗽。每天早上，克拉拉都会走下来，在普拉特冰冷的水中洗头，但到了晚饭时间，如果她碰巧挠头，她的指甲里就会充满白天渗出的污垢。不知为什么，无论她把床移到哪里，屋顶上的污垢都会直接流到上面。她在床的天花板上钉上了细棉布，最后是帆布，但没有什么能长时间阻挡污垢。它通过筛选。在她看来，她所有的孩子都是在尘埃云中孕育的，尘埃云是从床上用品上升起的，还是从天花板上筛下的。蜈蚣和其他虫子喜欢屋顶；日复一日，它们沿着墙壁爬行，最终落入她的炖锅、煎锅或她存放衣服的箱子里。

“I’d rather live in a tepee, like an Indian,” she told Bob many times. “I’d be cleaner. When it got dirty we could burn it.” The idea had shocked Bob, a conventional man if there ever was one. He could not believe he had married a woman who wanted to live like an Indian. He worked hard to give her a respectable life, and yet she said things like that—and meant them. And she stubbornly kept her own money, year after year—for the children’s education, she said, although one by one the three boys died long before they were old enough to be sent anywhere. The last two lived long enough for Clara to teach them to read. She had read them Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe when Jeff and Johnny were six and seven, respectively.

“我宁愿像印度人一样住在帐篷里，”她多次告诉鲍勃。“我会更干净。当它变脏时，我们可以烧掉它。”这个想法震惊了鲍勃，他是一个传统的人。他简直不敢相信自己娶了一个想像印度人一样生活的女人。他努力工作，让她过上体面的生活，然而她却说出了这样的话——而且是认真的。她说，她年复一年地固执地保留着自己的钱，用于孩子们的教育，尽管三个男孩一个接一个地在他们长大到可以被送到任何地方之前就去世了。最后两个孩子活得足够长，克拉拉教他们读书。杰夫和约翰尼分别六岁和七岁时，她读过沃尔特·斯科特的《艾芬豪》。

Then the next winter both boys had died of pneumonia within a month of one another. It was a terrible winter, the ground frozen so deep there was no way to dig a grave. They had had to put the boys in the little kindling shed, wrapped tightly in wagon sheets, until winter let up enough that they could be buried. Many days Bob would come home from delivering horses to the Army—his main customer—to find Clara sitting in the icy shed by the two small bodies, tears frozen on her cheeks so hard that he would have to heat water and bathe the ice from her face. He tried to point out to her that she mustn’t do it—the weather was below zero, and the wind swept endlessly along the Platte. She could freeze to death, sitting in the kindling shed. If only I would, Clara thought—I’d be with my boys.

第二年冬天，两个男孩在一个月内相继死于肺炎。那是一个可怕的冬天，地面冻得太深，无法挖坟墓。他们不得不把男孩们放在小火棚里，用马车布紧紧包裹着，直到冬天足够暖和，他们才能被埋葬。很多天，鲍勃把马送到军队——他的主要客户——回家后，会发现克拉拉坐在两具小尸体旁的冰棚里，脸颊上的泪水冻得如此之硬，以至于他不得不加热水，把她脸上的冰洗掉。他试图向她指出，她不能这样做——天气在零度以下，风沿着普拉特河无休止地吹着。她坐在火棚里会冻死的。要是我愿意就好了，克拉拉想——我会和我的孩子们在一起。

But she didn’t freeze, and Jeff and Johnny had been buried beside Jim, and despite her resolve never to lay herself open to such heartbreak again, she had the girls, neither of whom had ever had more than a cold. Bob couldn’t believe his own bad luck; he longed for a strong boy or two to help him with the stock.

但她没有冻僵，杰夫和约翰尼被埋在吉姆旁边，尽管她决心再也不让自己心碎，但她有两个女儿，她们都没有感冒过。鲍勃简直不敢相信自己运气不好；他渴望有一两个强壮的男孩来帮他处理股票。

And yet he loved the girls in his unspeaking way. His love mostly came out in awkwardness, for their delicacy frightened him. He was continually warning them about their health and trying to keep them wrapped up. Their recklessness almost stopped his heart at times—they were the kind of girls who would run out in the snow barefoot if they chose. He feared for them, and also feared the effect on his wife if one of them should die. Impervious to weather himself, he came to dread the winters for fear winter would take the rest of his family. Yet the girls proved as strong as their mother, whereas the boys had all been weak. It made no sense to Bob, and he was hoping if they could only have another boy, he would turn into the helper he needed.The only hand they had was an old Mexican cowboy named Cholo. The old man was wiry and strong, despite his age, and stayed mainly because of his devotion to Clara. It was Cholo, and not her husband, who taught her to love horses and to understand them. Cholo had pointed out to her at once that her husband would never break the mustang mare; he had urged her to persuade Bob to sell the mare unbroken, or else let her go. Though Bob had been a horse trader all his adult life, he had no real skill with horses. If they disobeyed him, he beat them—Clara had often turned her back in disgust from the sight of her husband beating a horse, for she knew it was his incompetence, not the horse’s, that was to blame for whatever incident had provoked the beating. Bob could not contain his violence when angered by a horse.

然而，他以一种不说话的方式爱着这些女孩。他的爱大多是在尴尬中流露出来的，因为它们的微妙让他害怕。他不断地提醒他们注意自己的健康，并试图让他们保持健康。他们的鲁莽有时几乎让他心跳停止——她们是那种如果愿意，会光着脚在雪地里跑出来的女孩。他为他们担心，也担心如果他们中的一个死了，会对他的妻子产生影响。他对天气毫不知情，开始害怕冬天，因为担心冬天会带走他的家人。然而，事实证明，女孩们和他们的母亲一样强壮，而男孩们都很虚弱。这对鲍勃来说毫无意义，他希望如果他们能再要一个男孩，他就能成为他需要的帮手。他们仅有的一只手是一位名叫乔洛的墨西哥老牛仔。这位老人虽然年纪大了，但又瘦又壮，留下来主要是因为他对克拉拉的忠诚。是乔洛，而不是她的丈夫，教会了她爱马和理解马。乔洛立刻向她指出，她的丈夫永远不会折断那匹野马；他催促她说服鲍勃把母马完好无损地卖掉，否则就放了她。虽然鲍勃成年后一直是一名马贩子，但他对马没有真正的技能。如果他们不服从他，他就会打他们——克拉拉经常因为看到丈夫打马而厌恶地转过身去，因为她知道，无论是什么事件引发了殴打，都是他的无能，而不是马的无能。鲍勃被马激怒时，忍不住大发雷霆。

With her, it was different. He had never raised a hand to her, though she provoked him often, and deeply. Perhaps it was because he had never quite believed that she would marry him, or never quite understood why she had. The shadow of Augustus McCrae had hung over their courtship; Bob had never known why she chose him over the famous Ranger, or over any of the other men she could have had. In her day she had been the most sought-after girl in Texas, and yet she had married him, and followed him to the Nebraska plains, and stayed and worked beside him. It was hard country for women, Bob knew that. Women died, went crazy or left. 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.” Maude had had a husband and four children, but had killed herself anyway. For a time, Clara had taken in the children, until their grandparents in Missouri came for them. Len Jones, Maude’s husband, soon drank himself into poverty. He fell out of his wagon drunk one night and froze to death not two hundred yards from a saloon.

和她在一起，情况就不同了。他从未向她举手，尽管她经常深深地激怒他。也许是因为他从来没有完全相信她会嫁给他，或者从来没有完全理解她为什么会嫁给他。奥古斯特·麦克雷的影子笼罩着他们的求爱；鲍勃从来不知道她为什么选择他而不是著名的游侠，或者她本可以拥有的任何其他男人。在她那个时代，她是得克萨斯州最受欢迎的女孩，但她嫁给了他，跟着他去了内布拉斯加州平原，在他身边呆着工作。鲍勃知道，这对女人来说是个艰难的国家。女人死了，疯了，或者离开了。一天早上，他们最近的邻居莫德·琼斯的妻子用霰弹枪自杀，留下一张纸条，上面只写着：“再也受不了这风了。”莫德有一个丈夫和四个孩子，但还是自杀了。有一段时间，克拉拉收留了孩子们，直到他们在密苏里州的祖父母来接他们。莫德的丈夫伦琼斯很快就喝得酩酊大醉，陷入了贫困。一天晚上，他醉醺醺地从马车上掉下来，在离酒馆不到两百码的地方冻死了。

Clara had lived, and stayed, though she had a look in her gray eyes that frightened Bob every time he saw it. He didn’t really know what the look meant, but to him it meant she might leave if he didn’t watch out. When they first came to Nebraska, he had had the drinking habit. Ogallala was hardly even a town then; there were few neighbors, and almost no socials. The Indians were a dire threat, though Clara didn’t seem to fear them. If they had company, it was usually soldiers—the soldiers drank, and so did he. Clara didn’t like it. One night he got pretty drunk, and when he got up in the morning she had that look in her eye. She made him breakfast, but then she looked at him coldly and lay down a threat. “I want you to stop drinking,” she said. “You’ve been drunk three times this week. I won’t live here and get dirt in my hair for the love of a drunkard.” It was the only threat she ever had to make. Bob spent the day worrying, looking at the bleak plains and wondering what he would do in such a place without her. He never touched whiskey again. The jug he had been working on sat in the cupboard for years, until Clara finally mixed it with sorghum molasses and used it for cough medicine.

克拉拉活了下来，也留了下来，尽管她灰色的眼睛里有一种眼神，每次鲍勃看到它都会害怕。他真的不知道这种眼神是什么意思，但对他来说，这意味着如果他不小心，她可能会离开。当他们第一次来到内布拉斯加州时，他有喝酒的习惯。那时奥加拉拉甚至还不是一个小镇；邻居很少，几乎没有社交活动。印第安人是一个可怕的威胁，尽管克拉拉似乎并不害怕他们。如果他们有同伴，通常是士兵——士兵们喝酒，他也是。克拉拉不喜欢这样。一天晚上，他喝得酩酊大醉，当他早上起床时，她的眼睛里有那种表情。她给他做了早餐，但随后她冷冷地看着他，发出了威胁。“我希望你停止饮酒，”她说。“你这周喝醉了三次。我不会为了一个醉汉的爱而住在这里，头发上沾满污垢。”这是她唯一一次威胁。鲍勃整天都在担心，看着荒凉的平原，想知道如果没有她，他会在这样的地方做什么。他再也没碰过威士忌。他一直在做的罐子在橱柜里放了好几年，直到克拉拉终于把它和高粱糖蜜混合在一起，用来治咳嗽。

They had few quarrels, most of them about money. Clara was a good wife and worked hard; she never did anything untoward or unrespectable, and yet the fact that she had that Texas money made Bob uneasy. She wouldn’t give it up or let him use it, no matter how poor they were. Not that she spent it on herself—Clara spent nothing on herself, except for the books she ordered or the magazines she took. She kept the money for her children, she said—but Bob could never be sure she wasn’t keeping it so she could leave if she took a notion. He knew it was foolish—Clara would leave, money or no money, if she decided to go—but he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind. She wouldn’t even use the money on the house, although she had wanted the house, and they had had to haul the timber two hundred miles. Of course, he had prospered in the horse business, mainly because of the Army trade; he could afford to build her a house. But he still resented her money. She told him it was only for the girls’ education—and yet she did things with it that he didn’t expect.

他们很少吵架，大多是为了钱。克拉拉是个好妻子，工作很努力；她从来没有做过任何不愉快或不可原谅的事，然而，她拥有得克萨斯州的钱这一事实让鲍勃感到不安。不管他们有多穷，她都不会放弃或让他使用它。这并不是说她把钱花在了自己身上——克拉拉除了订的书或买的杂志外，什么也没花在自己身上。她说，她把钱留给了孩子们，但鲍勃永远无法确定她没有留下，所以如果她有想法，她可以离开。他知道这很愚蠢——如果克拉拉决定去，不管有没有钱，她都会离开——但他无法打消这个念头。她甚至不会把钱花在房子上，尽管她想要房子，他们不得不把木材拖两百英里。当然，他在马生意上很成功，主要是因为军队贸易；他能给她盖房子。但他仍然讨厌她的钱。她告诉他，这只是为了女孩的教育，但她却做了一些他没想到的事情。

The winter before she had bought Cholo a buffalo coat, an action which shocked Bob. He had never heard of a married woman buying a Mexican cowboy an expensive coat. Then there was the piano. She had ordered that too, although it cost two hundred dollars and another forty to transport. And yet he had to admit he loved to see his girls sitting at the piano, trying to learn their fingering. And the buffalo coat had saved Cholo’s life when he was trapped in an April blizzard up on the Dismal River, Clara got her way, and her way often turned out to make sense—and yet Bob more and more felt that her way skipped him, somehow. She didn’t neglect him in any way that he could put his finger on, and the girls loved him, but there were many times when he felt left out of the life of his own family. He would never have said that to Clara—he was not good with words, and seldom spoke unless he was spoken to, unless it was about business. Watching his wife, he often felt lonely. Clara seemed to sense it and would usually come and try to be especially nice to him, or to get him laughing at something the girls had done—and yet he still felt lonely, even in their bed.

前一个冬天，她给乔洛买了一件水牛外套，这一举动震惊了鲍勃。他从未听说过一个已婚女人给墨西哥牛仔买昂贵的外套。然后是钢琴。她也订购了，尽管运输费用为200美元和40美元。然而，他不得不承认，他喜欢看到他的女儿们坐在钢琴前，试图学习她们的指法。当乔洛被困在迪马尔河上的四月暴风雪中时，水牛外套救了他的命，克拉拉如愿以偿，她的方式往往被证明是有道理的——然而鲍勃越来越觉得她的方式不知怎么地跳过了他。她没有以任何他能理解的方式忽视他，女孩们也爱他，但很多时候，他觉得自己被排除在自己家庭的生活之外。他永远不会对克拉拉这么说——他不善言辞，除非有人跟他说话，除非是关于生意，否则很少说话。看着妻子，他经常感到孤独。克拉拉似乎感觉到了，通常会来试着对他特别好，或者让他嘲笑女孩们做的事情——但他仍然感到孤独，即使在他们的床上。

Now Bob lay in that bed all day, staring his empty stare. They had moved the bed near the window so that he would get the summer breezes and could look out if he liked and watch his horses grazing on the plain, or the hawks circling, or whatever little sights there might be. But Bob never turned his head, and no one knew if he felt the breezes. Clara had taken to sleeping on a little cot. The house had a small upper porch and she moved the cot out there in good weather.

现在鲍勃整天躺在床上，茫然地盯着他。他们把床移到窗户附近，这样他就可以享受夏日的微风，如果他喜欢的话，可以向外看，看他的马在平原上吃草，或者鹰在盘旋，或者任何可能的小风景。但鲍勃从来没有转过头来，没有人知道他是否感觉到了微风。克拉拉已经习惯睡在小床上了。房子有一个小的上门廊，天气好的时候，她把小床搬到了外面。

Often she lay awake, listening, half expecting Bob to come back to himself and call her. More often what happened was that he fouled himself; and instead of hearing him she would smell him. Even so, she was glad it happened at night so she could change him without the girls seeing.

她经常醒着躺着，听着，一半期待鲍勃会回来给她打电话。更常见的情况是，他犯规了；而不是听到他，她会闻到他的味道。即便如此，她还是很高兴这件事发生在晚上，这样她就可以在女孩们看不见的情况下改变他。

It seemed to her, after a month of it, that she was carrying Bob away with those sheets; he had already lost much weightand every morning seemed a little thinner to her. The large body that had lain beside her so many nights, that had warmed her in the icy nights, that had covered her those many times through the years and given her five children, was dribbling away as offal, and there was nothing she could do about it. The doctors in Ogallala said Bob’s skull was fractured; you couldn’t put a splint on a skull; probably he’d die. And yet he wasn’t dead. Often when she was cleaning him, bathing his soiled loins and thighs with warm water, the stem of life between his legs would raise itself, growing as if a fractured skull meant nothing to it. Clara cried at the sight—what it meant to her was that Bob still hoped for a boy. He couldn’t talk or turn himself, and he would never beat another horse, most likely, but he still wanted a boy. The stem let her know it, night after night, when all she came in to do was clean the stains from a dying body. She would roll Bob on his side and hold him there for a while, for his back and legs were developing terrible bedsores. She was afraid to turn him on his belly for fear he might suffocate, but she would hold him on his side for an hour, sometimes napping as she held him. Then she would roil him back and cover him and go back to her cot, often to lie awake half the night, looking at the prairies, sad beyond tears at the ways of things. There Bob lay, barely alive, his ribs showing more every morning, still wanting a boy. I could do it, she thought—would it save him if I did? I could go through it one more time—the pregnancy, the fear, the sore nipples, the worry—and maybe it would be a boy. Though she had borne five children, she sometimes felt barren, lying on her cot at night. She felt she was ignoring her husband’s last wish—that if she had any generosity she would do it for him. How could she lie night after night and ignore the strange, mute urgings of a dying man, one who had never been anything but kind to her, in his clumsy way. Bob, dying, still wanted her to make a little Bob. Sometimes in the long silent nights she felt she must be going crazy to think about such things, in such a way. And yet she came to dread having to go to him at night; it became as hard as anything she had had to do in her marriage. It was so hard that at times she wished Bob would go on and die, if he couldn’t get well. The truth was, she didn’t want another child, particularly not another boy. Somehow she felt confident she could keep her girls alive—but she lacked that confidence where boys were concerned. She remembered too well the days of icy terror and restless pain as she listened to Jim cough his way to death. She remembered her hatred of, and helplessness before, the fevers that had taken Jeff and Johnny. Not again, she thought—I won’t live that again, even for you, Bob. The memory of the fear that had torn her as her children approached death was the most vivid of her life: she could remember the coughings, the painful breathing. She never wanted to listen helplessly to such again.

Besides, Bob wasn’t really alive, even then—his eyes never flickered. It was only reflex that enabled him to swallow the soup she fed him. That his rod still seemed to live when she bathed him, that, too, was reflex, an obscene joke that life was playing on the two of them. It raised no feelings of tenderness in her, just a feeling of disgust at the cruelties of existence. It seemed to mock her, to make her feel that she was cheating Bob of something, though it was not easy to say what. She had married him, followed him, fed him, worked beside him, borne his children—and yet even as she changed his sheets she felt there was a selfishness in her that she had never mastered. Something had been held back—what it was, considering all that she had done, was hard to say. But she felt it anyway, fair judgment or not, and lay awake on her cot through half the night, tense with self-reproach.

此外，即使在那时，鲍勃也不是真的活着——他的眼睛从来没有眨过。这是唯一能让他吞下她喂他的汤的反射。当她给他洗澡时，他的鱼竿似乎还活着，这也是一种反射，一个淫秽的笑话，说生活在他们俩身上玩。这并没有让她感到温柔，只是对生存的残酷感到厌恶。这似乎在嘲笑她，让她觉得自己在欺骗鲍勃，尽管说什么并不容易。她嫁给了他，跟着他，喂他，在他身边工作，生了他的孩子——然而，即使她换了他的床单，她也觉得自己有一种从未掌握过的自私。有些事情被隐瞒了——考虑到她所做的一切，很难说是什么。但不管公平与否，她还是感觉到了，躺在床上睡了半个晚上，自责得很紧张。

In the mornings she lay wrapped in a quilt until the smell of Cholo’s coffee waked her. She had fallen into the habit of letting Cholo make the coffee, mainly because he was better at it than she was. She would lie in her quilt, watching the mists float over the Platte, until one or both of the girls tiptoed out. They always tiptoed, as if they might wake their father, though his eyes were as wide open as ever.

“Ma, ain’t you up?” Sally would say. “We been up awhile.” “Wanta gather the eggs?” Betsey asked. It was her favorite chore but she preferred to do it with her mother—some of the hens were irritable with Betsey and would peck her if she tried to slide an egg out from under them, whereas they would never peck Clara.

“I’d rather gather you two,” Clara said, pulling both girls onto the cot with her. With the sunlight flooding the wide plain, and both her two girls in bed with her, it was hard to feel as bad about herself as she had felt alone in the night.

“Don’t you wanta get up?” Sally asked. She had more of her father in her than Betsey had, and it bothered her a little to see her mother lazing in bed with the sun up. It seemed to her a little wrong—at least, her father had often complained about it.