Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

Such a thought had never occurred to July, though it had crossed his mind that he might take Roscoe.

“Why, you’ll need him,” July said. “You’ve got the chores.” Elmira shrugged. “I can milk that old cow,” she said. “The chores ain’t hard. We ain’t raising cotton, you know. I want you to take Joe. He needs to see the world.” It was true the boy might be useful on a long trip. There would be someone to help him watch the prisoner, once there was a prisoner. But it meant leaving Ellie alone, which he didn’t like.

As if reading his mind, she sat down at the table and looked at him.

“I been alone before, July,” she said. “It ain’t gonna hurt me. Roscoe can help if I need something I can’t carry.” That was true, of course—not that Roscoe would be particularly obliging about it. Roscoe claimed to have a bad back and would complain for days if forced to do anything resembling manual labor.

“There could be a fight,” July said, remembering that Jake Spoon was said to have difficult friends. “I don’t expect it, but you never know with a gambler.” “I don’t reckon they’d shoot a boy,” Elmira said. “You take Joe. He’s got to grow up sometime.” Then, to escape the stuffy cabin, she went outside and sat on a stump for a while. The night was thick with fireflies. In alittle while she heard July come out. He didn’t say anything. He just sat.

Despite his politeness and constant kindness, Elmira felt a bitterness toward him. The thing he didn’t know was that she was with child. He wouldn’t know it, either, if she could help it. She had just married out of fright—she didn’t want him or the child either. And yet she was scared to try and stop the child—in Abilene she had known a girl who bled to death from trying to stop a baby. She had died on the stairs outside Elmira’s room on a bitter cold night; blood had run all the way down the stairs and frozen in the night into red ice. The girl, whose name was Jenny, had stuck to the stairs. They had had to heat water in order to get her loose.

The sight had been enough to discourage her from trying to stop a baby. Yet the thought that she had one made her bitter. She didn’t want to go through it all again, and she didn’t want to live with July Johnson. It was just that the buffalo hunter had been so rough; it had scared her into thinking she had to find a different life.

Life in Fort Smith was different, too—so dull that she found little reason to raise herself from her quilts, most days. The women of the town, though they had no reason to suspect her, suspected her anyway and let her alone. Often she was tempted just to walk into a saloon where there was a girl or two she might have talked to, but instead she had given way to apathy, spending whole days sitting on the edge of her sleeping loft, doing nothing.

Watching the fireflies sparkle in the woods behind the cabin, Elmira waited, listening. Sure enough, in a few minutes, she heard the little metallic clicks, as July slowly rotated the chambers in his pistol before going back to town to make his rounds. It set her teeth on edge that he would do it every night.

“Guess I’ll go have a look,” he said. “Won’t be long.” It was what he said every night. It was true, too. Unless the rivermen were fighting, he was never long. Mainly he hoped that when he came to bed she’d want him. But she didn’t want him. She had kept him at a distance since she was sure about the baby. It hurt his feelings, but she didn’t care.

As she heard him walk off through the darkness, her spirits sank even lower. It seemed there was no winning in life. She wanted July and Joe to be gone, suddenly, so she would not have to deal with them every day. Their needs were modest enough, but she no longer wanted to face them. She had reached a point where doing anything for anyone was a strain. It was like heavy work, it was so hard.

It came to her more strongly every day how much she missed Dee Boot. He was the exact opposite of July Johnson. July could be predicted down to the least gesture, whereas Dee was always doing what a person least expected. Once, in Abilene, to get revenge on a madam he hadn’t liked, he had pretended to bring her a nice pie from the bakery, and indeed he had got the baker to produce what looked like a perfect piecrust—but he had gone over to the livery stable and filled the piecrust with fresh horse turds. The madam, a big, mean woman named Sal, had actually cut into it before she sensed the joke.

Elmira smiled to herself, remembering some of the funny things Dee did. They had known one another for nearly fifteen years, since she had found herself stranded, as a girl, way up in Kansas. It hadn’t been all Dee, of course; there had been plenty of others. Some had lasted only a few minutes, some a week or two or a month, but somehow she and Dee always found themselves back together. It irritated her that he had been content just to pull his mustache and head for the north without her. He seemed to think it would be easy for her to be respectable. Of course, it was her fault for picking July. She hadn’t expected his politeness to irritate her so much.

After the night deepened, the moon came out and rose above the pines. Elmira sat on the stump and watched it, glad to be alone. The thought that July and Joe would be going off caused her spirits to lift—it occurred to her that once they left there would be nothing to stop her from leaving too. Boats went up the Arkansas nearly every week. It might be that Dee Boot was missing her as much as she missed him. He wouldn’t mind that she was with child—such things he took lightly.

It made her smile to think of finding Dee. While July tracked one gambler, she would track another, in the opposite direction. When July got back, with or without Jake, and discovered that his wife was gone, it might surprise him so much he would even forget to drink his buttermilk.

THE NEXT MORNING, an hour before dawn, July and Joe left the cabin and caught their horses. Joe was almost stunned with excitement at getting to go with July. His friend Roscoe Brown had been stunned, too, when July went by the jail and told Roscoe they were going.

“You’ll get that boy kilt before I even teach him all my domino tricks,” Roscoe said. It puzzled him that July would do such a thing.

Joe was not tempted to question the miracle. The main thing that bothered him was that he lacked a saddle, but July took care of that by borrowing an old singletree from Peach Johnson. She was so pleased July was finally going after her husband’s killer that she would have given them the saddle—rats had eaten most of it, anyway.

Elmira got up and cooked them breakfast, but the food did nothing to ease the heaviness of heart which July felt. All night he had hoped she might turn to him, it being his last night at home for a while—but she hadn’t. Once he had accidentally touched her, turning on the pallet they slept on, and she had stiffened. It was clear to July that she wasn’t going to miss him, though he was certainly going to miss her. It was peculiar, but she showed no sign of being sorry to see Joe go, either. Yet Joe was her son and he was her husband—if she didn’t love her husband and her son, who did she love? For all she knew they would be gone for months, and yet she was just as brisk with them as if it was an ordinary day. She saw to it that Joe drew another bucket of water before he left, and then jumped on July for nearly forgetting his jaundice medicine.

Yet, for all her bad temper, it was no relief to leave. He felt apprehension so strongly that at one point it seemed to tighten his throat and nearly caused him to choke on a bite of corn bread. He felt he was being carried along through his life as a river might carry a chip. There seemed to be no way he could stop anything that was happening, although it all felt wrong.

The only relief he could find was in the knowledge that he was doing his job and earning the thirty dollars a month the town paid him. There were a few tightfisted citizens who didn’t think there was thirty dollars’ worth of sheriffing to do in Fort Smith in a given month. Going after a man who had killed the mayor was the kind of work people seemed to think a sheriff ought to do, although it would probably be less dangerous than having to stop two rivermen from carving one another up with knives.

They left Elmira standing in the door of the cabin and rode through the dark town to the jail, but before they got there Red, Joe’s horse, suddenly bowed up, began to buck, and threw him. Joe was not hurt, but he was dreadfully embarrassed to be thrown right at the outset of such an important trip.

“It’s just Red,” July said. “He’s got to have his buck. He’s gotten rid of me a time or two that way.” Roscoe slept on a couch in the jail and was up and stumbling around in his bare feet when they got there. July got a rifle and two boxes of bullets and then got down a shotgun too.

“That’s my shotgun,” Roscoe said. He was not in the best of tempers. He hated to have his sleeping quarters invaded before it was even light.

“We’ll need to eat,” July said. “Joe can shoot a rabbit now and then if we don’t see no deer.” “You’ll probably see a Comanche Indian and they’ll cook both of you as if you was dern rabbits,” Roscoe said.