词汇：mother

n. 母亲；大娘；女修道院院长

相关场景

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.>>完整场景

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

“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.>>完整场景

Clara got the infant to nurse a little and then took it up to her own room, to lie down awhile. She knew it wouldn’t sleep long, but she herself had to sleep and was afraid to trust it with its mother yet.>>完整场景

“Oh, Ma, we can cook,” Sally said. She loved to get her mother out of the kitchen—then she could boss her younger sister around.>>完整场景

“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.>>完整场景

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.>>完整场景

“Yes, he’s guilty with the rest of them,” Call said. “Any judge would hang him.” He walked on, and Newt put his cheek for a moment against the warm neck of the horse he had just saddled. The warmth made him want to cry. His mother had been warm too, in the years when they first knew Jake. But he couldn’t bring any of it back, and Jake was standing not twenty yards away, weaving from drink, his hands tied, sad-looking. Newt choked back his feelings and led the horses over.>>完整场景

“Have we got to hang Jake too?” he asked. “He was my ma’s friend.” Call was surprised by the remark. Newt was surprised too—it had just popped out. He remembered how jolly Jake had been, then—it was mainly on Jake’s visits that he had heard his mother laugh. It puzzled him how the years could have moved so, to bring them from such happy times to the moment at hand.>>完整场景

He walked all day, hoping to cross a creek but finding none. He had a half canteen of water—not enough to get him back to the Cimarron. And he had nothing to eat. He made a dry camp and sat all night on his blanket, so wakeful he thought he would never sleep again. He sat for hours, watching the moon climb high amid the bright stars. He remembered the cold nights in their Arkansas cabin when he was a boy—how his mother piled quilts on top of him and his brothers, how peaceful it seemed under the quilts. Then it seemed like sleep was one of the most wonderful things in life.>>完整场景

“Because of Jake we lost ’em both, I guess,” Dish said. “Jake is a goddamn bastard.” It was painful to Newt to have to think of Jake that way. He still remembered how Jake had played with him when he was a little child, and that Jake had made his mother get a lively, merry look in her eyes. All the years Jake had been gone, Newt had remembered him fondly and supposed that if he ever did come back he would be a hero. But it had to be admitted that Jake’s behavior since his return had not been heroic at all. It bordered on the cowardly, particularly his casual return to card playing once Lorena had been stolen.>>完整场景

“You better be glad of that,” he said. “If it had been an Indian you’d have got scalped.” “Reckon they’ve had the fight yet?” Joe asked. “I’ll be glad when they get back.” “It might be morning before they get back,” Roscoe said. “We better just rest. The minute July gets back he’ll wanta go on looking for your mother.” “I guess she’s found Dee,” Joe said. “She likes Dee.” “Then how come she married July, dern it?” Roscoe asked. “It was the start of all this, you know. We’d be back in Arkansas playing dominoes if she hadn’t married July.” Every time Roscoe tried to think back along the line of events that had led to his being in a place where there was no trees to lean against, he strayed off the line and soon got all tangled up in his thinking. It was probably better not to try and think back down the line of life.>>完整场景

“Dee,” Joe said. “Dee Boot.” “But he’s dead,” July said, looking very disturbed. “Ellie told me he died of smallpox.” From the look on July’s face, Joe knew he had made a mistake in mentioning Dee. Of course, it was his mother’s fault. She had never told him that Dee had died—if he had. Joe didn’t believe he was dead either. It was probably just something his mother had told July for reasons of her own.>>完整场景

“I guess we better go find your mother,” he said, though even as he said it he knew it meant letting Jake Spoon get away.>>完整场景

Actually, he didn’t think his mother Would care one way or another whether she got a letter from July. His mother didn’t think much of July—she had told him so in no uncertain terms several times.>>完整场景

At times, waiting, she had almost decided just to take the horse and the mule and try to find her way back to Lonesome Dove. Xavier had said he would marry her and take her anywhere she wanted to go. She remembered the day he had come into the room—his wild eyes, his threat to kill Jake. When she had nothing to do but sit around and think about it, her capacity for mistakes discouraged her so that she considered drowning herself in the little pool. But it was a sunny, pretty morning, and when she went into the pool a little later, it was only to wash her hair in the cool water. For a moment she put her head under and opened her eyes, but it felt silly—to die in such an element was only ridiculous. She began to wonder if perhaps she was touched—if that was why she made mistakes. Her mother had been touched. She often babbled of people no one knew. She talked to dead relatives, dead babies, speaking to them as if they were still alive. Lorena wondered if it was mistakes that had made her mother do that. Perhaps, after so many mistakes, your mind finally broke loose and wandered back and forth between past and present.>>完整场景

By contrast the Rainey boys were disappointing. Both had taken homesick, missing their jolly mother and her well-stocked table. They drug around listlessly, not actually shirking their work but taking a long time to do it.>>完整场景

Joe didn’t share July’s discomfort with the fact that his mother seldom came to the table. When she did come it was usually to scold him, and he got scolded enough as it was—besides, he liked eating with July, or doing anything else with July. So far as he was concerned, marrying July was the best thing his mother had ever done. She scolded July as freely as she scolded him, which didn’t seem right to Joe. But then July accepted it and never scolded back, so perhaps that was the way of the world: women scolded, and men kept quiet and stayed out of the way as much as possible.>>完整场景

She seldom did eat with them. It bothered July a good deal, though he made no complaint. Since their little table was almost under the loft he could look up and see Elmira’s bare legs as he ate. It didn’t seem normal to him. His mother had died when he was six, yet he could remember that she always ate with the family; she would never have sat with her legs dangling practically over her husband’s head. He had been at supper at many cabins in his life, but in none of them had the wife sat in the loft while the meal was eaten. It was a thing out of the ordinary, and July didn’t like for things to be out of the ordinary in his life. It seemed to him it was better to do as other people did—if society at large did things a certain way it had to be for a good reason, and he looked upon common practices as rules that should be obeyed. After all, his job was to see that common practices were honored—that citizens weren’t shot, or banks robbed.>>完整场景

“He sings too sad,” Needle Nelson said, for the sound of Sean’s voice affected him as it had Newt. It brought to mind his mother, who had died when he was eight, and also a little sister he had been fond of, who had succumbed to a fever when only four.>>完整场景

Before the Irishmen had been there a week, he had made friends with Sean O’Brien. At first the conversation was one- sided, for Sean was full of worries and prone to talking a blue streak; once he found that Newt would listen and not make fun of him, the talk gushed out, most of it homesick talk. He missed his dead mother and said over and over again that he would not have left Ireland if she hadn’t died. He would cry immediately at the thought of his mother, and when Newt revealed that his mother was also dead, the friendship became closer.>>完整场景

“Oh,” he asked politely, “what kind of varmints?” “Whatever the dogs catch,” Maude said. “Or the dogs themselves, if they don’t manage to catch nothing. I won’t support a lazy dog.” “She put a possum in,” one of the little girls said. She seemed as full of mischief as her fat mother, who, fat or not, had made plenty of mischief among the men of the area before she settled on Joe.>>完整场景

When he took his leave, Mrs. Spettle and the six remaining children scarcely noticed him. They stood in the hot yard, with a scrawny hen or two scratching around their bare feet, watching the boys and crying. The mother, who had scarcely touched her sons before they left, stood straight up and cried. Three of the children were girls, but the other three were boys in their early teens, old enough, at least, to be of use to their mother.>>完整场景

“Take ’em,” the widow Spettle said, looking at her boys as if she wondered why she’d borne them. “I reckon they’ll work as hard as any.” Call knew the boys had helped take a small herd to Arkansas. He paid the widow a month’s wage for each boy, knowing she would need it. There was evidently not a shoe in the family—even the mother was barefoot, a fact that must shame her, if the servant story were true.>>完整场景

The woman doing the crying was the whore named Maggie, Newt’s mother, whom Jake Spoon took such a fancy to later.>>完整场景