Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

“They leave,” Cholo said.

Clara jumped up and ran into the room where Elmira had been—sure enough, she was gone. She went to the window and could see the wagon, north of the corrals. Behind her she could hear the baby crying.

“Señora, I couldn’t stop them,” Cholo said.

“I doubt they’ll stop just because you ask, and we don’t need any gunfights,” Clara said.

“Let ’em go. If she lives, she might come back. Did you milk?” Cholo nodded.

“I wish we had a goat,” Clara said. “I’ve heard goat’s milk is better for babies than cow’s milk. If you see any goats next time you go to town, let’s buy a couple.” Then she grew a little embarrassed. Sometimes she talked to Cholo as if he were her husband, and not Bob. She went downstairs, made a fire in the cookstove and began to boil some milk. When it was boiled, she took it up and gave the baby a little, dipping a cotton rag in the milk and letting the baby suck it. It was a slow method and took patience. The child was too weak to work at it, but she knew if she didn’t persist the baby would only get weaker and die. So she kept on, dribbling milk into its mouth even when it grew too tired to suck on the rag.“I know this is slow,” she whispered to it. When the baby had taken all it would, she got up to walk it. It was a nice moonlight night and she went out on her porch for a while. The baby was asleep, tucked against her breast. You could be worse off, she thought, looking at it. Your mother had pretty good sense—she waited to have you until she got to where there were people who’ll look after you.

Then she remembered that she had not fed Bob. She took the baby down to the kitchen and heated the chicken broth.

“Think of the work I’d save if everything didn’t have to be hot,” she said to the infant, who slept on.

She laid it at the foot of Bob’s bed while she fed her husband, tilting his head so he could swallow. It was strange to her that he could swallow when he couldn’t even close his eyes. He was a big man with a big head—every time she fed him her wrist ached from supporting his head.

“I guess we got us a boy, Bob,” she said. The doctors had told her to talk to him—they thought it might make a difference, but Clara found that the only difference was that she got depressed. The depressing aspect of it was that it reminded her too clearly of their years together, for she had liked to chatter, and Bob never talked. She had talked at him for years and got no answers. He only spoke if money was concerned. She would talk for two hours and he would never utter a sentence. So far as conversation went, the marriage was no different than it had ever been—it was just easier for her to have her way about money, something that also struck her as sad.

She picked the baby up and held it to her bosom—the thought was in her head that if he saw her with a child it might make a difference. Bob might see it, think it was theirs. It might startle him into life again.

It was unnatural, she knew, for a mother to leave her child a day after it was born. Of course, children were endless work.

They came when you didn’t want them and had needs you didn’t always want to meet. Worst of all, they died no matter how much you loved them—the death of her own had frozen the hope inside her harder than the wintry ground. Her hopes had frozen hard and she vowed to keep it that way, and yet she hadn’t: the hopes thawed. She had hopes for her girls, and might even come to have them for the baby at her bosom, child of another mother. Weak as it was, and slim though its chances, she liked holding the child to her. I stole you, she thought. I got you and I didn’t even have to go through the pain. Your mother’s a fool not to want you, but she’s smart to realize you wouldn’t have much of a chance with her and those buffalo hunters.

It wasn’t smartness, though, she thought—the woman just didn’t care.

She looked down at Bob and saw that the baby had made no difference. He lay as he had, nothing left to him but need.

Suddenly Clara felt angry that the man had been fool enough to think he could break that mare, when both she and Cholo had warned him to leave her alone. It made her angry at herself, to have lived so long with a horse trader who had no more savvy than that.

Yet there he was, his eyes staring upward, as helpless as the baby. She put the child down again and fed Bob soup until her wrist got tired from holding his head. Then she lay Bob’s head back on his pillow, and ate the rest of the chicken soup herself.

BIG ZWEY WAS WORRIED that Elmira had left the baby. When she came out to the wagon, she didn’t have it. “Hitch the team and let’s go,” she said, and that was all she said. He did it, but he felt confused.

“Ain’t we gonna take the baby?” he asked shyly, just before they left.

Elmira didn’t answer. She had no breath to answer with, she was so tired. Walking downstairs and out to the wagon had taken all her strength. Zwey had to lift her into the wagon, at that, and she sat propped against the buffalo skins, too tired even to care about the smell. She was so tired that she felt like she wasn’t there. She couldn’t even tell Zwey to start—Luke had to do it.

“Let’s go, Zwey,” he said. “She don’t want the baby.” Zwey started the wagon, and they were soon out of sight of the house, but he was bothered. He kept looking back at Ellie, propped against the buffalo skins, her eyes wide open. Why didn’t she want her baby? It was a puzzle. He had never understood the whole business, but he knew mothers took care of babies, just as husbands took care of wives. In his eyes he had married Ellie, and he intended to take good care of her. He felt he was her husband. They had come all that way together in the wagon. Luke had tried to marry her too, but Zwey had soon stopped that, and Luke had been behaving a lot better since.

Luke had tied his horse beside the wagon, and he rode on the wagon seat beside Zwey, who kept looking around to see if Ellie was asleep. She wasn’t moving, but her eyes were still wide open.

“What are you looking at?” Luke asked.

“I wisht she’d brought the baby,” Zwey said. “I always wanted us to have one.” The way he said it struck Luke as curious. It was almost as if Zwey thought the baby was his.

“Why would you care? It ain’t yours,” Luke said, to scotch that suspicion. Even if Zwey had got up his nerve to approach Ellie, which he doubted, they hadn’t been on the road long enough to make a baby.