Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

Watching Lorena, as she sat blank with grief every day, scarcely stirring unless Betsey urged her to, Clara felt helpless.

Lorena would either live or die, and Clara felt it might be die. Lorena’s only tie to life was Betsey. She didn’t care for sweets or men or horses; her only experience with happiness had been Gus. The handsome young cowboy who sent her countless looks of love meant nothing to her. Pleasure had no hold on Lorena—she had known little of it, and Clara didn’t count on its drawing her back to life. The young cowboy would be doomed to find his love blocked by Gus in death even as it had been in life. Betsey had a better chance of saving Lorena than Dish. Betsey worried about her constantly and tried to get her mother to do something.

“I can’t make Mr. McCrae alive again, which is all she wants,” Clara said. “What do you think I can do?” “Make her not so sad,” Betsey pleaded.

“Nobody can do that,” Clara said. “I can’t even make you not sad when you’re sad.” Yet one day she did try. She came upon Lorie standing in the hall, her hair uncombed. She had the look of a beaten dog.

Clara stopped and hugged her, as suddenly as she had hugged July Johnson. In him her hug had stirred a fever of hope; in Lorena it stirred nothing.

“I guess you wish you’d gone with him,” Clara said. “It would have given you a little more time.” Lorena looked surprised—it was the one thing she had been thinking since the news came.

“I should have,” she said.

“No,” Clara said. “You. would have had a little more time, I grant you, but now you’d be stuck in Montana with a bunch of men who don’t care that you loved Gus. They’d want you to love them. Dish wants it so much that he rode to you through the blizzards.” The thought of Dish merely made Lorena feel cold. “He wasted his time,” she said.

“I know that, but don’t expect him to realize it,” Clara said.

“He bought me once, when I was a whore,” Lorena said, surprised at the word on her tongue. She had never used it before.

“And Gus didn’t?” Clara said.

Lorena was silent. Of course Gus had. She wondered if Clara would ask her to leave, knowing what she had been.

“Dish loved you and took the only way he had to get your attention,” Clara said.

“He didn’t get my attention,” Lorena said. “He didn’t get anything.” “And Gus did the same and got everything,” Clara said. “Gus was lucky and Dish isn’t.” “I ain’t either,” Lorena said.Clara offered no advice. A few days later, when she was sewing, Lorena came and stood in front of her. She looked no better. “Why did you ask me to stay, when it was you Gus loved?” she asked. “Why didn’t you ask him to stay? If you had he’d be alive.” Clara shook her head. “He loved us both,” she said, “but Gus would never miss an adventure. Not for you or me or any other woman. No one could have kept him home. He was a rake and a rambler, though you’d have kept him longer than I could have.” Lorena didn’t believe it. She remembered how often Gus had talked of Clara. Of course it no longer mattered—nothing like that mattered anymore, and yet she couldn’t keep her mind from turning to it.

“It ain’t so,” she said. She had used her voice so little that it sounded weak.

“It is so,” Clara said. “You’re more beautiful and less bossy. When I told Gus I was marrying Bob, all those years ago, he looked relieved. He tried to act disappointed, but he was relieved. I’ve never forgot it. And he had proposed to me thirty times at least. But he saw it would be a struggle if he won me, and he didn’t want it.” Clara was silent for a moment, looking into the other woman’s eyes.

“Bob was too dumb to realize there’d be a struggle,” Clara said. “Half the time he didn’t notice it even when he was in it.

So mainly I had the struggle with myself.

“It’s been lonely,” she added.

She thought the conversation a good sign. Maybe Lorie was going to come out of it. But it was the last conversation they had for months. Lorena lived through the winter in silence, only speaking to Betsey, who remained as loyal as ever.

Dish Boggett remained loyal too, although Lorena gave him no encouragement. He spent more and more time playing cards with Sally, whose bright girlish chatter he had come to like. Every day he tried his best with Lorena, but he had begun to feel hopeless. She would not even speak to him, no matter how sweetly he asked. She met everything he said with silence—the same silence she had had in Lonesome Dove, only deeper. He told himself that if the situation didn’t improve by the spring he would go to Texas and try to forget her.

Yet when spring came Dish told Clara he would be glad to stay and help her with the colts.

IT CAME TO RANKLE CALL that Gus had left his half of the cattle herd to the woman. The woman was down in Nebraska.

She was not there helping. Of course, if she had been there helping, there would have been trouble, but that didn’t lessen the aggravation of what Gus had done. He could simply have given her money—he had money. As it was, every time Call sold a bunch of stock to the Army he had to put aside half the money for a woman he had never approved of, who might, for all any of them knew, have already forgotten Gus and married someone else, or even gone back to being a whore.

Still, Call had halved the money. However aggravating it was, Gus had meant it, and he would do it, though when he went back with the body he planned to see if he could at least buy her out. He didn’t like the thought of being in partnership with a woman, much less a whore—although he conceded that she might have reformed.