词汇：grave
adj. 严肃的；重大的；黯淡的
相关场景
- “There,” he said. “This will teach me to be more careful about what I promise.” He used the plank with “Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium” on it as a crossbar, tying it to a long mesquite stick, which he drove into the ground with a big rock. While he was tying the crossbar tight with two saddle strings, a wagon with settlers in it came along the ridge. They were a young couple, with two or three children peeking shyly around them, narrow-faced as young possums. The young man was fair and the sun had blistered him beet-red; his young wife had a bonnet pulled close about her face. It was clear that the grave marker puzzled them. The young man stopped the wagon and stared at it. Not having seen him put Augustus under, they were not sure whether they were looking at a grave, or just a sign.“Where is this Hat Creek outfit, mister?” the young man asked.
“在那里，”他说。“这会让我对自己的承诺更加小心。”他用那块上面写着“帽溪牛公司和Livery Emporium”的木板作为横杆，把它绑在一根长的豆科木棍上，然后用一块大石头把它压到地上。当他用两根马鞍绳把横杆系紧时，一辆载有定居者的马车沿着山脊驶来。他们是一对年轻夫妇，有两三个孩子害羞地在他们周围偷看，脸像小负鼠一样窄。这个年轻人很漂亮，太阳把他晒得通红；他年轻的妻子把一顶帽子紧紧地戴在脸上。很明显，墓碑让他们很困惑。年轻人停下马车，盯着它看。没有看到他把奥古斯都放在下面，他们不确定自己是在看坟墓，还是只是在看一个标志。“先生，帽子溪的衣服在哪里？”年轻人问。>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇- Call dug the grave with a little hand shovel. In his condition it took most of a day; at one point he grew so weak that he sat down in the grave to rest, sweat pouring off him—if there had been anyone else to shovel he would have been inclined to be buried there himself. But he pulled himself up and finished the work and lowered Augustus in.
Call用一把小手铲挖了坟墓。在他的情况下，这花了一天的大部分时间；有一次，他变得如此虚弱，以至于坐在坟墓里休息，汗水从他身上倾泻而下——如果还有其他人来铲，他自己也会倾向于埋在那里。但他把自己拉起来，完成了工作，把奥古斯都放了下来。>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇- “Gus was crazy and you’re foolish to drag a corpse that far,” Clara said bluntly. “Bury him here and go back to your son and your men. They need you. Gus can rest with my boys.” Call flinched when she said the word “son,” as if she had never had a doubt that Newt was his. He himself had once been a man of firm opinion, but now it seemed to him that he knew almost nothing, whereas the words Clara flung at him were hard as rocks.“I told him that very thing,” Call said. “I told him you’d likely want him here.” “I’ve always kept Gus where I wanted him, Mr. Call,” Clara said. “I kept him in my memory for sixteen years. Now we’re just talking of burying his body. Take him to the ridge and I’ll have July and Dish get a grave dug.” “Well, it wasn’t what he asked of me,” Call said, avoiding her eyes. “It seems that picnic spot you had in Texas is where he wanted to lay.” “Gus was a fine fool,” Clara said. “He was foolish for me or any other girl who would have him for a while. Because it was me he thought of, dying, is no reason to tote his bones all the way to Texas.” “It was because you picnicked in the place,” Call said, confused by her anger. He would have thought a woman would feel complimented by such a request, but Clara clearly didn’t take it that way.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
- Call had begun to think of Gus, and the promise he had made. It would soon be spring, and he would have to be going if he were to keep the promise, which of course he must. Yet the ranch had barely been started, and it was hard to know who to leave in command. The question had been in his mind all winter. There seemed to be no grave danger from Indians or anything else. Who would best keep things going? Soupy was excellent when set a task, but had no initiativeand was unused to planning. The men were all independent to a fault and constantly on the verge of fist fights because they fancied that someone had attempted to put himself above them in some way. Pea Eye was clearly the senior man, but Pea Eye had contentedly taken orders for thirty years; to expect him to suddenly start giving them was to expect the impossible.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
- She sat silently, not watching, while July sat just as silently. He could not help but wish that Dish Boggett had got lost in Wyoming or had somehow gone on to Texas. Hardly a day passed without him seeing what he thought were signs that Clara was taken with the man. Sooner or later, when Dish gave up on Lorena, he would be bound to notice. July felt helpless—there was nothing he could do about it. Sometimes he sat near Lorena, feeling that he had more in common with her than with anyone else at the ranch. She loved a dead man, he a woman who hardly noticed him. But whatever they had in common didn’t cause Lorena to so much as look his way. Lorena looked more beautiful than ever, but it was a grave beauty since news of the death had come. Only the young girl, Betsey, who loved Lorena completely, could occasionally bring a spark of life to her eyes. If Betsey was ill, Lorena nursed her tirelessly, taking her into her own bed and singing to her. They read stories together, Betsey doing the reading. Lorena could only piece out a few words—the sisters planned to teach her reading, but knew it would have to wait until she felt better.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
- “Take the sign back and stick it over my grave.” “Have you wrote them notes for the women yet?” Call asked. “I won’t know what to say to them, you see.” “Dern, I forgot, and my two favorite women, too,” Augustus said. “Get me some paper.” The doctor had brought in a tablet for Augustus to write his will on. Augustus drew himself up and slowly wrote two notes.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
- “Yes, me,” Call said. “Why not me?” “I take it back, Woodrow,” Augustus said. “I have no doubt you’ll miss me. You’ll probably die of boredom this winter and I’ll never get to Clara’s orchard.” “Why do you call it that?” “We had picnics there,” Augustus said. “I took to calling it that. It pleased Clara. I could please her oftener in those days.” “Well, but is that any reason to go so far to be buried?” Call said. “She’d allow you a grave in Nebraska, I’m sure.” “Yes, but we had our happiness in Texas,” Augustus said. “It was my best happiness, too. If you’re too lazy to take me to Texas, then just throw me out the window and be done with it.” He spoke with vehemence. “She’s got her family in Nebraska,” Augustus added, more quietly. “I don’t want to lie there with that dumb horse trader she married.” “This would make a story if there was anybody to tell it,” Call said. “You want me to carry your body three thousand miles because you used to go picnicking with a girl on the Guadalupe River?” “That, plus I want to see if you can do it,” Augustus said.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
- “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.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
- 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.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
- 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.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
- 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.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
- So she walked into the room. Betsey had just won a hand. She whooped, for she loved to beat her sister. She was a beautiful child, with curls that would drive men mad some day. “I won the pot, Ma,” she said, and then saw by the grave set of Clara’s face that something was wrong.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
- Call had one too. The medal had a green ribbon on it, but the color had mostly faded out. Augustus made a loop of the ribbon and put the loop over the grave board and tied it tightly. Captain Call had walked away to put up the hammer.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
- They walked down to the grave. Call had finished his hammering and stood resting. Two or three of the cowboys trailed back to the grave, a little tentative, not sure they were invited.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
- “It was Josh.” “Well, I swear,” Jasper said. “That’s a fine name. Starts with a J, like mine. We could have been calling him that all the time, if we’d known.” Then they heard the sound of the hammer—it was the big hammer that they used for straightening the rims of the wagon wheels. Captain Call was hammering the long board deep into the dirt by the grave.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
- They expected to start the herd that day, as Captain Call had never been known to linger. But this time he did. He came back from the grave, got a big hammer and knocked a board loose from the side of the wagon. He didn’t explain what he was doing to anyone, and the look on his face discouraged anyone from asking. He took the board and carried it down to the grave. The rest of the day he sat alone by Deets’s grave, carving something into it with his knife. The sun flashed on his knife, and the cowhands watched in puzzlement. They just didn’t know what it could be that would take the Captain so long.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
- Po Campo led the team down to the grave and Deets was put in and quickly covered. The Irishman, unasked, began tosing a song of mourning so sad that all the cowboys at once began to cry, even the Spettle boy, who had not shed a tear when his own brother was buried.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
- Lippy offered to help with the grave-digging, and Call let him. It was the task that usually got assigned to Deets himself, grave-digging. Call had laid many a compañero in graves Josh Deets had dug, including, most recently, Jake Spoon. Lippy was not a good digger—in fact, he was mostly in the way, but Call tolerated him. Lippy also talked constantly, saying nothing. They were digging on a little rise, north of the juncture of where Salt Creek joined the Powder River.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
- The other hands were somber. Soupy Jones and Bert Borum, who didn’t feel it appropriate for white men to talk much to niggers, exchanged the view that nevertheless this one had been uncommonly decent. Needle Nelson offered to help dig the grave, for Deets had been the man who finally turned the Texas bull the day the bull got after him. Dish Boggett hadn’t said much to Deets, either, but he had often been cheered, from his position on the point, to see Deets come riding back through the heat waves. It meant he was on course, and that water was somewhere near. Dish wished he had said more to the man at some point.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
- Finally Po Campo gave up. “Better to bury him with it,” he said. “I would have liked to see that boy. The lance went all the way to his collarbone. It went through the heart.” Newt sat in his blankets, feeling alone. No one noticed him or spoke to him. No one explained Deets’s death. Newt began to cry, but no one noticed that either. The sun had risen, and everyone was busy with what they were doing, Mr. Gus eating, the Captain and Lippy digging the grave. Soupy Jones was repairing a stirrup and talking in subdued tones to Bert Borum. Newt sat and cried, wondering if Deets knew anything about what was going on. The Irishman and Needle and the Rainey boys held the herd. It was a beautiful morning, too—mountains seemed closer. Newt wondered if Deets knew about any of it. He didn’t look at the corpse again, but he wondered if Deets had kept on knowing, somehow. He felt he did. He felt that if anyone was taking any notice of him, it was probably Deets, who had always been his friend. It was only the thought that Deets was still knowing him, somehow, that kept him from feeling totally alone.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
- “What are we waiting on?” Lippy asked. “We’re three miles behind already.” Po Campo stood by the water’s edge, looking across the Platte to the south. He was thinking of his dead sons, killed by Blue Duck on the Canadian. He didn’t think often of his sons, but when he did, a feeling of sadness filled him, a feeling so heavy that it was an effort for him to move. Thinking of them in their graves in New Mexico made him feel disloyal, made him feel that he should have shot himself and been buried with them, for was it not the duty of a parent to stay with the children? But he had left, first to go south and kill his faithless wife, and now to the north, while Blue Duck, the killer, still rode free on the llano—unless someone had killed him, which Po Campo doubted. Lippy’s fears about Indians did not move him—the sight of flowing water moved him, stirring feelings in him which, though sad, were deep feelings. They made him want to sing his saddest songs.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
- Then the next winter both boys had died of pneumonia within a month of one another. It was a terrible winter, the ground frozen so deep there was no way to dig a grave. They had had to put the boys in the little kindling shed, wrapped tightly in wagon sheets, until winter let up enough that they could be buried. Many days Bob would come home from delivering horses to the Army—his main customer—to find Clara sitting in the icy shed by the two small bodies, tears frozen on her cheeks so hard that he would have to heat water and bathe the ice from her face. He tried to point out to her that she mustn’t do it—the weather was below zero, and the wind swept endlessly along the Platte. She could freeze to death, sitting in the kindling shed. If only I would, Clara thought—I’d be with my boys.
第二年冬天，两个男孩在一个月内相继死于肺炎。那是一个可怕的冬天，地面冻得太深，无法挖坟墓。他们不得不把男孩们放在小火棚里，用马车布紧紧包裹着，直到冬天足够暖和，他们才能被埋葬。很多天，鲍勃把马送到军队——他的主要客户——回家后，会发现克拉拉坐在两具小尸体旁的冰棚里，脸颊上的泪水冻得如此之硬，以至于他不得不加热水，把她脸上的冰洗掉。他试图向她指出，她不能这样做——天气在零度以下，风沿着普拉特河无休止地吹着。她坐在火棚里会冻死的。要是我愿意就好了，克拉拉想——我会和我的孩子们在一起。>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇- “That wagon won’t be here for an hour,” Clara said. “Go see about your pa. His fever comes up in the afternoon. Wet a rag and wipe his face.” Both girls stood looking at her silently. They hated to go into the sickroom. Both of them had bright-blue eyes, their legacy from Bob, but their hair was like hers and they were built like her, even to the knobby knees. Bob had been kicked in the head by a mustang he was determined to break, against Clara’s advice. She had seen it happen—he had the mare snubbed to a post with a heavy rope and only turned his back on her for a second. But the mare struck with her front feet, quick as a snake. Bob had bent over to pick up another rope and the kick had caught him right back of the ear. The crack had sounded like a shot. The mare pawed him three or four times before Clara could reach him and drag him out of the way, but those blows had been minor. The kick behind the ear had almost killed him. They had been so sure he would die that they even dug the grave, up on the knoll east of the house where their three boys were buried: Jim and Jeff and Johnny, the three deaths Clara felt had turned her heart to stone: she hoped for stone, anyway, for stone wouldn’t suffer from such losses.
“那辆马车要一个小时才能到，”克拉拉说。“去看看你爸。他下午发烧了。把抹布弄湿，擦他的脸。”两个女孩都站在那里默默地看着她。他们讨厌进病房。他们俩都有一双明亮的蓝眼睛，这是鲍勃留给他们的遗产，但他们的头发和她的一样，他们的身材也和她一样，甚至到了膝盖的小瘤。鲍勃违背克拉拉的建议，被一支他决心要打破的野马踢到头上。她亲眼目睹了这一切——他用一根沉重的绳子把母马拖到柱子上，只转过身去看了她一秒钟。但母马用前脚猛踢，速度像蛇一样快。鲍勃弯下腰去捡另一根绳子，一脚踢到了他的耳朵后面。裂缝听起来像枪声。母马抓了他三四次，克拉拉才够到他，把他拖开，但这些打击都很小。耳朵后面的踢腿几乎要了他的命。他们非常确定他会死，甚至在埋葬他们三个儿子的房子东边的小丘上挖了坟墓：吉姆、杰夫和约翰尼，克拉拉的三次死亡让她的心变成了石头：不管怎样，她希望石头，因为石头不会遭受这样的损失。>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇- “Sobriety, if you guzzle enough of it,” Augustus said. “I expect it’s just whiskey and syrup.” The wagon itself was in such poor repair that they decided to leave it sit. Call broke up the tailgate and made a little marker for Jake’s grave, scratching his name on it with a pocketknife by the light of the old man’s lantern. He hammered the marker into the loose-packed dirt with the blunt side of a hatchet they had found in the wagon. Augustus trotted over, bringing Call his mare.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
- “I swear,” Pea Eye said. “He didn’t wait for you, Gus.” “Nope, he died fine,” Augustus said. “Go dig him a grave, will you, Pea?” They buried Jake Spoon by moonlight on the slope above the creek and, after some discussion, cut down Roy Suggs and little Eddie, plus the old man Dan Suggs had killed, a drummer named Collins with a wagonful of patent medicines. There was a good lantern in the wagon, which, besides the medicines, contained four white rabbits in a cage. The old man had run a medicine show, evidently, and did a little magic. The wagon contained a lot of cheaply printed circulars which advertised the show.>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇