“He’s Rosie’s husband,” Nellie said. “Rosie is the woman I work for. They don’t get along. Rosie sends me out, and he runs me off.” She tried to recover from her fright and to look alluring, but the attempt was so pathetic that it saddened Augustus. She looked like a frightened young girl.
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“You’re worrying yourself into a sweat for nothing,” he said. “Clara’s husband will probably live to be ninety-six, and anyway she and I probably ain’t got no use for one another now. I ain’t got the energy for Clara. I doubt I ever did.” At night, when she finally slept, he would sit in the tent, pondering it all. He could see the campfire. Whatever boys weren’t night herding would be standing around it, swapping jokes. Probably all of them envied him, for he had a woman and they didn’t. He envied them back, for they were carefree and he wasn’t. Once started, love couldn’t easily be stopped. He had started it with Lorie, and it might never be stopped. He would be lucky to get again such easy pleasures as the men enjoyed, sitting around a campfire swapping jokes. Though he felt deeply fond of Lorena, he could also feel a yearning to be loose again and have nothing to do but win at cards.
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“My husband’s dying,” Clara said. “But whether he’s dead or alive, I’ll still raise that child.” “I don’t know what to do,” July said. “It’s been so long since I done anything right that I can’t remember it. I don’t know if I’ll ever get Ellie back to Fort Smith. They might even have hired a new sheriff by now.” “Finding a job’s the least of your problems,” Clara said. “I’ll give you a job, if you want one. Cholo’s been doing Bob’s work and his too, and he can’t keep it up forever.” “I always lived in Arkansas,” July said. It had never occurred to him that he might settle anywhere else.
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“I’m getting attached to Martin,” she said. “He ain’t mine, but he ain’t your wife’s anymore, either. Young things mainly belong to themselves. How they grow up depends on who gets attached to them. I’ll take Martin, if she don’t, or you don’t.” “But your husband’s sick,” July said. Why would the woman want a baby to care for when she had two girls to manageand a big horse outfit to run?
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“July, I know you’re tired,” Clara said. “I expect you’re heartsick. I’m going to say a terrible thing to you. I used to be ladylike, but Nebraska’s made me blunt. I don’t think that woman wants you or the baby either. I don’t know what she does want, but she left that baby without even looking at it.” “She must have been addled,” July said. “She had a hard trip.” Clara sighed. “She had a hard trip, but she wasn’t addled,” she said. “Not every woman wants every child, and plenty of wives don’t want the husbands they took.
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“I need to ask you a favor,” she said. “Could you help me turn my husband, or are you feeling too poorly?” He would help her, of course. Several times he had helped her with her husband. The man had lost so much weight that July could simply lift him while Clara changed the bedding. The first time it bothered him a good deal, for the man never closed his eyes. That night he worried about what the man might think—another man coming in with his wife. Clara was businesslike about it, telling him what to do when he was slow. July wondered if the man was listening, and what he was thinking, in case he was.
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“Bob’s my husband,” she said. “He’s injured. We don’t hold out too much hope for him.” She had strained and heated a little milk, and while July ate she fed the baby, using a big nipple she had fixed over a fruit jar.
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“We get a lot of travelers,” she said, as though he hadn’t spoken. “Situating this place right here was one of the smartest things my husband ever did. Anyone coming along the Platte who might need a horse isn’t going to miss us. We’re on the only road. If we hadn’t located on this road, we’d have been starved out long ago.” “It seems...” July said, and he couldn’t finish. It was all he had hoped for, to be able to find her someday. He had risked and lost three lives to do it, and though Ellie wasn’t right there, surely she was in town. He began to tremble and then to cry—he couldn’t help it. His hopes were to be answered after all.
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“Let’s go, Zwey,” he said. “She don’t want the baby.” Zwey started the wagon, and they were soon out of sight of the house, but he was bothered. He kept looking back at Ellie, propped against the buffalo skins, her eyes wide open. Why didn’t she want her baby? It was a puzzle. He had never understood the whole business, but he knew mothers took care of babies, just as husbands took care of wives. In his eyes he had married Ellie, and he intended to take good care of her. He felt he was her husband. They had come all that way together in the wagon. Luke had tried to marry her too, but Zwey had soon stopped that, and Luke had been behaving a lot better since.
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She laid it at the foot of Bob’s bed while she fed her husband, tilting his head so he could swallow. It was strange to her that he could swallow when he couldn’t even close his eyes. He was a big man with a big head—every time she fed him her wrist ached from supporting his head.
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“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.
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“What’s your husband’s name?” Clara asked.
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“Is that woman real sick?” Betsey asked. “Why does she yell so much?” “She’s working at a hard task,” Clara said. “You better not burn that porridge, because I want some.” She carried the bucket up to the bedroom, pulled the smelly sheets out from under Bob, and washed him. Bob stared straight up, as he always did. Usually she warmed the water but this morning she hadn’t taken the time. It was cold and raised goosebumps on his legs. His big ribs seemed to stick out more every day. She had forgotten to bring fresh sheets—it was a constant problem, keeping fresh sheets—so she covered him with a blanket and walked out on her porch for a minute. She heard Elmira begin to moan, again and again. She ought to go relieve Cholo, she knew, but she didn’t rush. The birth might take another day. Everything took longer than it should, or else went too quick. Her sons’ lives had been whipped away like a breath, while her husband had lain motionless for two months and still wasn’t dead. It was wearying, trying to adjust to all the paces life required.
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“I can’t just order men around,” Clara said. “Anyway, you’ve met buffalo hunters before. Smelled them too. These don’t smell much different from any of the others.” “One of them’s big,” Betsey observed. “Is he the lady’s husband?” “I don’t think so, and don’t be a busybody,” Clara said. “She’s worn out. Maybe tomorrow she’ll feel like talking.” But the girls were to hear Elmira’s voice long before morning. The men sitting in the wagon heard it too—long screams that raked the prairie night for hours.
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Reading stories by all the women, not only George Eliot, but Mrs. Gore and Mrs. Gaskell and Charlotte Yonge, she sometimes had a longing to do what those women did—write stories. But those women lived in cities or towns and had many friends and relatives nearby. It discouraged her to look out the window at the empty plains and reflect that even if she had the eloquence to write, and the time, she had nothing to write about. With Maude Jones dead, she seldom saw another woman, and had no relatives near except her husband and her children. There was an aunt in Cincinnati, but they only exchanged letters once or twice a year. Her characters would have to be the horses and the hens, if she ever wrote, for the menfolk that came by weren’t interesting enough to put in books, it seemed to her. None of them were capable of the kind of talk men managed in English novels.
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It seemed to her, after a month of it, that she was carrying Bob away with those sheets; he had already lost much weightand every morning seemed a little thinner to her. The large body that had lain beside her so many nights, that had warmed her in the icy nights, that had covered her those many times through the years and given her five children, was dribbling away as offal, and there was nothing she could do about it. The doctors in Ogallala said Bob’s skull was fractured; you couldn’t put a splint on a skull; probably he’d die. And yet he wasn’t dead. Often when she was cleaning him, bathing his soiled loins and thighs with warm water, the stem of life between his legs would raise itself, growing as if a fractured skull meant nothing to it. Clara cried at the sight—what it meant to her was that Bob still hoped for a boy. He couldn’t talk or turn himself, and he would never beat another horse, most likely, but he still wanted a boy. The stem let her know it, night after night, when all she came in to do was clean the stains from a dying body. She would roll Bob on his side and hold him there for a while, for his back and legs were developing terrible bedsores. She was afraid to turn him on his belly for fear he might suffocate, but she would hold him on his side for an hour, sometimes napping as she held him. Then she would roil him back and cover him and go back to her cot, often to lie awake half the night, looking at the prairies, sad beyond tears at the ways of things. There Bob lay, barely alive, his ribs showing more every morning, still wanting a boy. I could do it, she thought—would it save him if I did? I could go through it one more time—the pregnancy, the fear, the sore nipples, the worry—and maybe it would be a boy. Though she had borne five children, she sometimes felt barren, lying on her cot at night. She felt she was ignoring her husband’s last wish—that if she had any generosity she would do it for him. How could she lie night after night and ignore the strange, mute urgings of a dying man, one who had never been anything but kind to her, in his clumsy way. Bob, dying, still wanted her to make a little Bob. Sometimes in the long silent nights she felt she must be going crazy to think about such things, in such a way. And yet she came to dread having to go to him at night; it became as hard as anything she had had to do in her marriage. It was so hard that at times she wished Bob would go on and die, if he couldn’t get well. The truth was, she didn’t want another child, particularly not another boy. Somehow she felt confident she could keep her girls alive—but she lacked that confidence where boys were concerned. She remembered too well the days of icy terror and restless pain as she listened to Jim cough his way to death. She remembered her hatred of, and helplessness before, the fevers that had taken Jeff and Johnny. Not again, she thought—I won’t live that again, even for you, Bob. The memory of the fear that had torn her as her children approached death was the most vivid of her life: she could remember the coughings, the painful breathing. She never wanted to listen helplessly to such again.
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With her, it was different. He had never raised a hand to her, though she provoked him often, and deeply. Perhaps it was because he had never quite believed that she would marry him, or never quite understood why she had. The shadow of Augustus McCrae had hung over their courtship; Bob had never known why she chose him over the famous Ranger, or over any of the other men she could have had. In her day she had been the most sought-after girl in Texas, and yet she had married him, and followed him to the Nebraska plains, and stayed and worked beside him. It was hard country for women, Bob knew that. Women died, went crazy or left. The wife of their nearest neighbor, Maude Jones, had killed herself with a shotgun one morning, leaving a note which merely said, “Can’t stand listening to this wind no more.” Maude had had a husband and four children, but had killed herself anyway. For a time, Clara had taken in the children, until their grandparents in Missouri came for them. Len Jones, Maude’s husband, soon drank himself into poverty. He fell out of his wagon drunk one night and froze to death not two hundred yards from a saloon.
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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.
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“I thought I told you girls to churn,” Clara said. “Seems like all you do is hang out the window watching for travelers.” Of course, no one could blame them, for company was rare. They lived twenty miles from town, and a bad town at that—Ogallala. If they went in, it was usually for church, but they seldom made the trip. Their company mostly consisted of men who came to trade horses with Bob, her husband, and now that he was injured, few came. They had just as many horses—more, in fact—and Clara knew more about them than Bob had ever learned, but there were few men disposed to bargain with a woman, and Clara was not disposed to give their horses away. When she named a price she meant it, but usually men got their backs up and wouldn’t buy.
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Jennie giggled, looking at him. “You sure are drunk, Mister Johnson,” she said. “Let’s go have a little fun. I always liked stealing Elbe’s boys and here I’ve got a chance to steal her husband.” The way she giggled made July feel happy suddenly. He had not heard a woman giggle in a long time. Ellie never giggled.
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“Look at them blubber,” little Eddie said. “I never seen such cowards.” “Will you shut your damn mouth?” Dan said. “Why wouldn’t they be scared? I would be, in their place. But I’d like to get the woman hushed long enough to see if she can talk English.” The woman either couldn’t or wouldn’t. She didn’t utter a word in any language. She was tall and skinny, and she just stood there by her husband, crying. It was plain all three of them expected to be killed.
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“Tell ’em I had to do it,” he said. “That old man might have cracked my skull with that gun.” Then he turned and walked back toward the Suggs brothers. He looked back once at the girl, and she smiled at him—a smile that was to puzzle him whenever he thought about it. She had not even got down from the wagon to see if her husband was dead—yet she gave him that smile, though by that time the nesters were all around the wagon.
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Then nesters began to boil out of Doan’s Store—it seemed there were twenty or thirty of them. Jake felt discouraged by the sight, for it reminded him of how people had boiled out of the saloons in Fort Smith when they discovered Benny Johnson lying dead in the mud. Now another man was lying dead, and it was just as much an accident: if the old nester had just announced himself politely as the girl’s husband, Jake would have tipped his hat and walked off. But the old man had whacked him and offered to do it again—he had only shot to protect himself.
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Monkey John got up and came over to her. “Who is this old man?” he asked. “You got a husband?” Lorena stayed in her silence. It infuriated Monkey John. He grabbed her by the hair and cuffed her, knocking her over.
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Dear Ellie—We have come a good peace and have been lucky with the weather, it has been clear.No sign of Jake Spoon yet but we did cross the Red River and are in Texas, Joe likes it. His horse has been behaving all right and neither of us has been sick.I hope that you are well and have not been bothered too much by the skeeters.Your loving husband,July He studied over the letter for days and wanted to put in that he missed her or perhaps refer to her as his darling, but he decided it was too risky—Elmira sometimes took offense at such remarks. Also he was bothered by spelling and didn’t know if he had done a good job with it. Several of the words didn’t look right to him, but he had no way of checking except to ask Joe, and Joe had only had a year or two of schooling so far. He was particularly worried about the word “skeeters,” and scratched it in the dirt one night while they were camped, to ask Joe’s opinion.
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