Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

“Could you go get July?” Clara asked Lorena, when the girls had calmed a bit.

July now lived in a little room attached to the saddle shed. It wouldn’t do when winter came, but for summer it was all right. He had never felt comfortable in the house with Clara and the girls, and since Lorena had come he felt even more uncomfortable. Lorena seldom spoke to him, and Clara mainly discussed horses, or other ranch problems, yet he felt nervous in their company. Day to day, he felt it was wrong to have taken the job with Clara. Sometimes he felt a strong longing to be back in his old job in Fort Smith, even if Roscoe was no longer alive to be his deputy.

But he had a son now, a baby he saw every day at supper and breakfast. His son was the darling of the ranch. The women and girls passed Martin around as if he belonged to them all; Lorena had developed a rapport with him and took the main responsibility for him when Clara was off with the horses. The baby was happy, and no wonder, with two women and twogirls to spoil him. July could hardly imagine what the women would do if he tried to take the baby and raise him in Arkansas. Anyway, such a plan was not feasible.

So he stayed on and did his work, neither truly content nor bitterly discontented. He still dreamed of Elmira and felt an aching sadness when he thought about her.

Despite that ache, the thing that made July least comfortable of all was that he knew he was in love with Clara. The feeling had started even before he knew Elmira was dead, and it grew even when he knew he ought to be grieving for Elmira. He felt guilty about it, he felt hopeless about it, but it was true. At night he thought of her, and imagined her in her room, in her gown. At breakfast and supper he watched her, whenever he thought he could do so without her noticing.

He had many opportunities, too, for she seemed to have ceased taking any notice of him at all. He had the sense that she had become disappointed in him, though he didn’t know why. And when she did look at him it frightened him.

Occasionally, when he caught Clara looking at him, he almost flinched, for he did not imagine that he could hide anything from her. She was too smart—he had the sense that she could figure out anything. Her eyes were mysterious to him—often she seemed to be amused by him, at other times irritated. Sometimes her eyes seemed to pierce him, as if she had decided to read his thoughts as she would read a book. And then, in a moment, she would lift her head and ignore him, as if he were a book she had glanced through and found too uninteresting for further perusal.

And she was married. Her husband lay sick above their heads, which made his love seem all the more hopeless. But it didn’t stop the longing he felt for her. In his daydreams he fell to reinventing the past, imagining that he had married Clara instead of Elmira. He gave himself a very different marriage. Clara wouldn’t sit in the loft with her feet dangling all day. She wouldn’t have run off on a whiskey boat. Probably she wouldn’t have cared that Jake Spoon shot Benny. He imagined them raising horses and children together.

Of course, they had begun to do just that—raise horses and children together. But the reality was far different from the daydream. They weren’t together. He could not go into her room at night and talk to her. He knew that if he could, he probably wouldn’t be able to think of much to say, or if he did and said something stupid, Clara would answer sharply.

Still he longed for it and lay awake at night in his little shed, thinking of her.

He was doing that when Lorena came to tell him Bob was dead. Hearing the footsteps, he had the hope that it was Clara, and he pictured her face in his mind, not stern and impersonal, as it often was when she was directing some work, but soft and smiling, as it might be if she were playing with Martin at the dinner table.

He opened the door and saw to his surprise that it was Lorena.

“He died,” Lorena said.

“Who?” July asked absently.

“Her husband,” Lorena said.

Then she’s free, July thought. He couldn’t feel sad.

“Well, I guess it’s for the best,” he said. “The man wasn’t getting no better.” Lorena noticed that he sounded happier than she had heard him sound since she arrived at the ranch. She knew exactly what it meant. She had often seen him looking at Clara with helpless love in his eyes. She herself didn’t care one way or the other about July Johnson, but the dumb quality of his love annoyed her. Many men had looked at her that way, and she was not flattered by it. They wanted to pretend, such men, that they were different, that she was different, and that what might happen between them would be different than it would ever be. They wanted to pretend that they wanted pretty dresses and smiles, when what they really wanted was for her to lay down under them. That was the real wish beneath all the pretty wishes men had. And when she was under them, they could look down and pretend something pretty was happening, but she would look up and only see a dumb face above her, strained, dishonest and anything but pretty.

“She wants you to bring the coffin,” she said to July, watching him. Let Clara worry about the man. Watching him only made her long for Gus. He gave things that no one else could give. He wasn’t dumb, and he didn’t pretend that he wanted smiles when he wanted a poke.

They put the coffin in the front room, and July carried the frail corpse downstairs and put him in the coffin. Then, on Clara’s instructions, he rode off to inform the few neighbors and to find a preacher. Clara and Lorena and the girls sat with the body all night, while Cholo dug a grave on the ridge above the barn where the boys were buried. Betsey slept most of the night in Lorena’s arms—Clara thought it nice that she had taken to the young woman so.

At dawn Clara went out and took Cholo some coffee. He had finished digging and was sitting on the mound of earth that would soon cover Bob. Walking toward the ridge in the early sunlight, Clara had the momentary sense that they were all watching her, the boys and Bob. The vision lasted a second; it was Cholo who was watching her. It was windy, and the grass waved over the graves of her three boys—four now, she felt. In memory Bob seemed like a boy to her also. He had aboyish innocence and kept it to the end, despite the strains of work and marriage in a rough place. It often irritated her, that innocence of his. She had felt it to be laziness—it left her alone to do the thinking, which she resented. Yet she had loved it, too. He had never been a knowing man in the way that Gus was knowing, or even Jake Spoon. When she decided to marry Bob, Jake, who was a hothead, grew red in the face and proceeded to throw a fit. It disturbed him terribly that she had chosen someone he thought was dumb. Gus had been better behaved, if no less puzzled. She remembered how it pleased her to thwart them—to make them realize that her measure was different from theirs. “I’ll always know where he is,” she told Gus. It was the only explanation she ever offered.

Now, indeed, she would know where he was.

Cholo was watching her to see if she was hurt. He loved Clara completely and tried in small ways to make life easier for her, although he had concluded long before that she wasn’t seeking ease. Often in the morning when she came down to the lots she would be somber and would stand by the fence for an hour, not saying a word to anyone. Other times there would be something working in her that scared the horses. He thought of Clara as like the clouds. Sometimes the small black clouds would pour out of the north; they seemed to roll over and over as they swept across the sky, like tumbleweeds. On some mornings things rolled inside Clara, and made her tense and snappish. She could do nothing with the horses on days like that. They became as she was, and Cholo would try gently to persuade her that it was not a good day to do the work. Other days, her spirit was quiet and calm and the horses felt that too. Those were the days they made progress training them.

Clara had brought two cups. She was very glad to be out of the house. She poured Cholo his coffee and then poured some for herself. She sat down on the mound of dirt beside him and looked into the open grave.

“Sometimes it seems like grave-digging is all we do,” she said. “But that’s wrong. I guess if we lived in a big town it wouldn’t seem that way. I guess in New York there are so many people you don’t notice the dying so much. People come faster than they go. Out here it shows more when people go—especially when it’s your people.” “Mister Bob, he didn’t know mares,” Cholo said, remembering that ignorance had been his downfall.

“Nope,” Clara said. “He didn’t know mares.” They sat quietly for a while, drinking coffee. Watching Clara, Cholo felt sad. He did not believe she had ever been happy.