词汇：memory

n. 记忆，记忆力；回忆；内存，存储器

相关场景

“I wish we’d brought a bathtub on this trip,” Augustus said, grinning. “I’m so dirty it’s like kissing a groundhog.” Later, he went to the chuck wagon and brought back some supper. They ate outside the tent. In the distance the Irishman was singing. Gus told her about Jake, but Lorena felt little. Jake hadn’t come to find her. For days she had hoped he would, but when he didn’t, and her hope died, the memory of Jake died with it. When she listened to Gus talk about him it was as if he were talking about a man she hadn’t known. She had a stronger memory of Xavier Wanz. Sometimes she dreamed of Xavier, standing with his dishrag in the Dry Bean. She remembered how he had cried the morning she left, how he’d offered to take her to Galveston.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
All during the trip he had been haunted by the memory of something that had happened in Fort Smith several years before. One of the nicest men in town, a cotton merchant, had gone to Memphis on a business trip, only to have his wife take sick while he was gone. They tried to send a telegram to notify the man, but he was on his way back and the telegram never got delivered. The man’s name was John Fisher. As he rode back into Fort Smith, John Fisher saw a burying party out behind the church. Being a neighborly man, he had ridden over to see who had died, and the people had all stopped, stricken, for they were burying his wife. July had been helping to cover the coffin. He never forgot the look on John Fisher’s face when he realized he was a day late—his wife had died the afternoon before his return. Though a healthy man, John Fisher only lived another year himself. If he ran into someone on the street who had seen his wife on her sickbed he always asked, “Do you think Jane might have lived if I’d got back sooner?” Everyone told him no, you couldn’t have done a thing, but John Fisher didn’t believe them.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
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.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
Jake tried to get his mind to work, but it wouldn’t snap to. He had the feeling that there ought to be something he could say that would move Call or Gus on his behalf. It made him proud that the two of them had caught Dan Suggs so easily,although it had brought him to a hard fix. Still, it cut Dan Suggs down to size. Jake tried to think back over his years of rangering—to try and think of a debt he could call in, or a memory that might move the boys—but his brain seemed to be asleep. He could think of nothing. The only one who seemed to care was the boy Newt—Maggie’s boy, Jake remembered.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“Hell, I’m the only one of your customers that’s taken a bath this year,” Jake complained. “You could take up with bankers and lawyers, and the sheets wouldn’t stink so.” “I like ’em muddy and bloody,” Sally said. “I ain’t nice, this ain’t a nice place, and it ain’t a nice life. I’d take a hog to bed if I could find one that walked on two legs.” Jake had seen hogs that kept cleaner than some of the men Sally Skull took upstairs, but something about her raw behavior stirred him, and he stayed with her and paid the daily ten dollars. The cowboys that came through were very poor cardplayers, so he could usually make his fee back in an hour. He tried other whores in other saloons, skinny ones and fat ones, but with them a time came when he would remember Lorena and immediately lose interest. Lorena was the most beautiful woman he had ever known, and her beauty grew in his memory. He thought of her often with a pang, but also with anger, for in his view it was entirely her own fault that she had been stolen. Whatever was happening to her, it was her punishment for stubbornness. She could easily have been living with him in a decent hotel in Austin or Fort Worth.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“Newt can go with me and learn to be a ladies’ man,” Augustus said. “You won’t claim him anyway, and the last boy that got near Blue Duck had his head smashed in with a rifle butt.” “Nope,” Call said. “I’m primed to see Montana. If we’re the first ones there we can take our pick of the land.” “You take your pick,” Augustus said. “I’m in the mood to travel. Once you boys get settled I may go to China, for all you know.” And with that he rode off. Call smoked a while, feeling odd and a little sad. Jake had proved a coward and would never be part of the old crew again. Of course, he hadn’t been for ten years—the old crew was mostly a memory, though Pea and Deets were still there, and Gus, in his strange way. But it was all changing.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
The men wondered about Lorena. Many still held her beauty in their minds. What had happened to her? What did she look like now? Hers was the most beauty many of them had seen, and now that she was near it shone fresh in memory and made them all the more anxious to see her.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
He was thinking about Lorie when the Indians broke for him. Where they had hidden he didn’t know, for he was in the center of a level plain. He first heard a little cutting sound as bullets zipped into the grass, ten yards from his horse. Later, the sound of bullets cutting grass was more distinct in his memory than the sounds of shots. Before he really heard the shots he had his horse in a dead run, heading south. It seemed to him there were ten or twelve Indians, but he was more concerned with outrunning them than with getting a count. But within minutes he knew he wasn’t going to be able to outrun them. He had pushed his horse too hard and soon was steadily losing ground.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
In the night Lorena tried to sort it out in her mind. She had been hungry so much, tired so much, scared so much, that her mind didn’t work well anymore. Sometimes she would try to remember something and couldn’t—it was as if her mind and memory had gone and hidden somewhere until things were better. Dog Face had given her an old blanket; otherwise she would have had to sleep on the ground in what was left of her clothes. She wrapped the blanket around her and tried to think back over the talk. It meant Gus was coming—it was Gus Blue Duck wanted the Kiowas to kill. She had almost forgotten he was following her, life had gotten so hard. The Kiowas had been sent to kill him, so Gus might never arrive. It was hard to believe that Gus would get her out—the times when she had known him had been so different from the hard times. She didn’t think she would ever get out. Blue Duck was too bad. Dog Face was her only chance, and Dog Face was scared of Blue Duck. Sooner or later Blue Duck would give her to Ermoke or someone just as hard. If that was going to happen it was better that her mind had gone to hide.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
Of course they had heard that the buffalo were being wiped out, but with the memory of the southern herd so vivid, they had hardly credited the news. Discussing it in Lonesome Dove they had decided that the reports must be exaggerated—thinned out, maybe, but not wiped out. Thus the sight of the road of bones stretching over the prairie was a shock. Maybe roads of bones were all that was left. The thought gave the very emptiness of the plains a different feel.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
But he was forced to wait, as the old man scratched around in piles of dusty papers and looked in fifteen or twenty pigeonholes. “Dern,” the old man said. “I remember you having a letter. I hope some fool ain’t thrown it away by mistake.” Three cowboys came in, all with letters they had written to their sisters or sweethearts, and all of them had to stand there waiting while the old man continued his search. July’s heart began to sink. Probably the old man had a poor memory, and if there was a letter it was for somebody else.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“Mr. Gus used to make the biscuits, but he had to leave his ovens behind,” Newt said. He was hungry, and the memory of how good Mr. Gus’s biscuits had tasted when they lived in Lonesome Dove came over him so strongly that for a second he felt faint.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“I like to walk slow,” Po Campo said. “If I walk too fast I might miss something.” “There ain’t much to miss around here,” Newt said. “Just grass.” “But grass is interesting,” the old man said. “It’s like my serape, only it’s the earth it covers. It covers everything and oneday it will cover me.” Though the old man spoke cheerfully, the words made Newt sad. He remembered Sean O’Brien. He wondered if the grass had covered Sean yet. He hoped it had—he had not been able to rid himself of the memory of the muddy grave they had put Sean in, back by the Nueces.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
The memory should have died, and yet it wouldn’t. It had a life different from any other memory. He had seen terrible things in battle and had mostly forgotten them, and yet he couldn’t forget the sad look in Maggie’s eyes when she mentioned that she wished he’d say her name. It made no sense that such a statement could haunt him for years, but as he got older, instead of seeming less important it became more important. It seemed to undermine all that he was, or that people thought he was. It made all his trying, his work and discipline, seem fraudulent, and caused him to wonder if his life had made sense at all.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
The boy, growing up in the village, first with a Mexican family and then with the Hat Creek outfit, was a living reminder of his failure. With the boy there he could never be free of the memory and the guilt. He would have given almost anything just to erase the memory, not to have it part of his past, or in his mind, but of course he couldn’t do that. It was his forever, like the long scar on his back, the result of having let a horse throw him through a glass window.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
Call got his rifle, out of the scabbard and cleaned it, though it was in perfect order. Sometimes the mere act of cleaning a gun, an act he had performed thousands of times, would empty his mind of jarring thoughts and memories—but this time it didn’t work. Gus had jarred him with mention of Maggie, the bitterest memory of his life. She had died in Lonesome Dove some twelve years before, but the memory had lost none of its salt and sting, for what had happened with her had been unnecessary and was now uncorrectable. He had made mistakes in battle and led men to their deaths, but his mind didn’t linger on those mistakes; at least the battles had been necessary, and the men soldiers. He could feel that he hadBut Maggie had not been a fighting man—just a needful young whore, who had for some reason fixed on him as the man who could save her from her own mistakes. Gus had known her first, and Jake, and many other men, whereas he had only visited her out of curiosity to find out what it was that he had heard men talk and scheme about for so long. It turned out not to be much, in his view—a brief, awkward experience, where the pleasure was soon drowned in embarrassment and a feeling of sadness. He ought not to have gone back twice, let alone a third time, yet something drew him back—not so much the need of his own flesh as the helplessness and need of the woman. She had such frightened eyes. He never met her in the saloon but came up the back stairs, usually after dark; she would be standing just inside the door waiting, her face anxious. Some weakness in him brought him back every few nights, for two months or more. He had never said much to her, but she said a lot to him. She had a small, quick voice, almost like a child’s. She would talk constantly, as if to cover his embarrassment at what they had met to do. Some nights he would sit for half an hour, for he came to like her talk, though he had long since forgotten what she had said. But when she talked, her face would relax for a while, her eyes lose their fright. She would clasp his hand while she talked—one night she buttoned his shirt. And when he was ready to leave—always a need to leave, to be away, would come over him—she would look at him with fright in her face again, as if she had one more thing to say but couldn’t say it.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“It weren’t that simple,” Augustus said, looking at the creek and the little grove of trees and remembering all the happiness he had had there. He turned old Malaria and they rode on toward Austin, though the memory of Clara was as fresh in his mind as if it were her, not Woodrow Call, who rode beside him. She had had her vanities, mainly clothes. He used to tease her by saying he had never seen her in the same dress twice, but Clara just laughed. When his second wife died and he was free to propose, he did one day, on a picnic to the place they called her orchard, and she refused instantly, without losing a trace of her merriment.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
The memory of the frying possum crossed his mind, reminding him that he was very hungry. What with the wasp stings on top of the hunger, it was difficult to express himself clearly, or even to think clearly, for that matter.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“Nope,” he said. “You got to go respectable. I bet you make a schoolmarm yet.” Then he had given her a sweet kiss, told her to look after his boy, and left her with ten dollars and the memory of their reckless years together in Abilene and Dodge. She had known he wouldn’t take her north—Dee traveled alone. It was only when he settled in a town to gamble that he liked a woman. But he had offered to go shoot the buffalo hunter who had used her so hard. She had pretended she didn’t know the man’s name. Dee wasn’t a hard man, certainly not as hard as the buffalo hunter. He would have been the one to end up dead.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
On the other hand, he couldn’t very well take her—no one in his memory had ever tried to bring a woman into one of Call’s camps.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“We’ve the Lord to thank for this bath,” she said. “I personally didn’t need it, but I’m bound to say it might work an improvement where you’re concerned. You ain’t as bad-looking as I thought, now that you’re nearly clean.” By the time she got to her back porch the rain was slackening and the sun was already striking little rainbows through the sparkle of drops that still fell. Pea had walked on home, the water dripping more slowly from his hat. He never mentioned the incident to anyone, knowing it would mean unmerciful teasing if it ever got out. But he remembered it. When he lay on the porch half drunk and it floated up in his mind, things got mixed into the memory that he hadn’t even known he was noticing, such as the smell of Mary’s wet flesh. He hadn’t meant to smell her, and hadn’t made any effort to, and yet the very night after it happened the first thing he remembered was that Mary had smelled different from any other wet thing he had ever smelled. He could not find a word for what was different about Mary’s smell—maybe it was just that, being a woman, she smelled cleaner than most of the wet creatures he came in contact with. It had been more than a year since the rainstorm, and yet Mary’s smell was still part of the memory of it. He also remembered how she seemed to bulge out of her corset at the top and the bottom both.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
Even more persistent than the thought of her reading the Psalms was another memory. One day he had been passing her house just as a little thunderstorm swept through the town, scaring the dogs and cats and rolling tumbleweeds down the middle of the street. Mary had hung a washing and was out in her backyard trying to get it in before the rain struck, but the thunderstorm proved too quick for her. Big drops of rain began to splatter in the dust, and the wind got higher, causing the sheets on Mary’s clothesline to flap so hard they popped like guns. Pea had been raised to be helpful, and since it was obvious that Mary was going to have a hard time with the sheets, he started over to offer his assistance.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“I didn’t see it,” Augustus said. “I think he may have swallowed a hunk of barbed wire.” Dish meanwhile heard a new voice above him and turned his head enough to see that the Captain had joined the group of spectators. It was an eventuality he had been dreading, even in his sickness. He had no memory of what had happened in the Dry Bean, except that he had sung a lot of songs, but even in the depths of his drunkenness he had realized he would have to answer for it all to Captain Call. At some point he had lost sight of Lorena, forgot he was in love with her and even forgot she was sitting across the room with Jake, but he never quite forgot that he was supposed to ride that night with Captain Call. In his mind’s eye he had seen them riding, even as he drank and sang, and now the Captain had come, and it was time to begin the ride. Dish didn’t know if he had the strength to stand up, much less mount a horse, much less stay aboard one and round up livestock, but he knew his reputation was at stake and that if he didn’t give it a try he would be disgraced forever. His stomach had not quite quit heaving, but he managed to take a deep breath and get to his feet. He made a pretense of walking up the bank as if nothing was wrong, but his legs had no life in them and he was forced to drop to his knees and crawl up, which only added embarrassment to his misery, the bank being scarcely three feet high and little more than a slope.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
“Well, Deets, you just got one name,” Augustus said. “Most people got two. Maybe you’ve got two and just forgot one of them.” Deets sat around thinking for a day or two, but he could not remember ever having another name, and Call’s recollection bore him out. At that point even Augustus began to think the sign was more trouble than it was worth, since it was turning out to be so hard to please everyone. The only solution was to think up another name to go with Deets, but while they were debating various possibilities, Deets’s memory suddenly cleared.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇
But then his memory went back to a camp they had made on the Brazos, many years before, with an Army captain; there was a Delaware scout with him who had been farther than any man they knew—all the way to the headwaters of the Missouri.
>> Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇