Lonesome Dove (34 page)

He had seen the occasional snake in rivers along the coast but never more than one or two together; there had been at least twenty, probably more, around the boy. On the south bank, the horse he had ridden was rolling over and over in the mud, ignored by the frightened cowboys. Maybe the horse was bitten too.

Pea, who had been the first to the rescue, swimming his mount right into the midst of the snakes, suddenly felt so weak he thought he would fall off his horse. He dismounted, clinging to the horn in case his legs gave out.

Augustus noticed how white he was and went to him.

“Are you snake-bit, Pea?” he asked, for in the confusion a man could get wounds he wasn’t aware of. He had known more than one man to take bullets without noticing it; one Ranger had been so frightened when his wound was pointed out to him that he died of fright, not the bullet.

“I don’t think I’m bit,” Pea said. “I think I whupped them off.”

“Get your pants down,” Call said. “One could have struck you down low.”

They could find no wound on Pea—meanwhile, the cattle had begun to drift, with no one watching them cross. Some were making the bank a hundred yards downstream. The cowboys on the south bank had still not crossed.

“Gus, you and Deets watch him,” Call said, mounting. “We’ve got to keep the cattle from drifting.”

He noticed Newt sitting beside Pea’s horse, his face white as powder.

“Come help us,” he said, as Pea and Dish loped off toward the cattle.

Newt turned his horse and followed the Captain, feeling that he was doing wrong. He should have said something to Sean, even if Sean couldn’t hear him. He wanted to tell Sean to go on and find a boat somewhere and go back to Ireland quick, whatever the Captain might think. Now he knew Sean was going to die, and that it was forever too late for him to find the boat, but he wanted to say it anyway. He had had a chance to say it, but had missed it.

He trotted beside the Captain, feeling that he might vomit, and also feeling disloyal to Sean.

“He wanted to go back to Ireland!” he said suddenly, tears pouring out of his eyes. He was so grieved he didn’t care.

“Well, I expect he did,” the Captain said quietly.

Newt held his reins, still crying, and let Mouse do the work. He remembered Sean’s screams, and how much the snakes had looked like giant wiggly worms. When at last the cattle were started back toward the main herd the Captain put his horse back into the river, which startled Newt. He didn’t see how anybody could just ride back into a river that could suddenly be filled with snakes, but this time no snakes appeared. Newt saw that Mr. Gus and Deets had not moved, and wondered if Sean was dead yet. He kept feeling he ought to leave the cattle and go talk to Sean, even if it was too late for Sean to answer, but he was afraid to. He didn’t know what to do, and he sat on his horse and cried until he started vomiting. He had to lean over and vomit beneath his horse’s neck.

In his mind he began to wish for some way to undo what had happened—to make the days run backward, to the time when they were still in Lonesome Dove. He imagined Sean alive and well—and did what he had not done, told him to go off to Galveston and find a boat to take him home. But he kept looking back, and there was Deets and Mr. Gus, kneeling by Sean. He longed to see Sean sit up and be all right, but Sean didn’t, and Newt could only sit hopelessly on his horse and hold the cattle.

Augustus and Deets could do little for Sean except sit with him while his life was ending.

“I guess it would have been better if Pea had just let him drown,” Augustus said. “He was an unlucky young sprout.”

“Mighty unlucky,” Deets said. He felt an unsteadiness in his limbs. Though he had seen much violent death, he had not seen one more terrible than the one that had just occurred. He felt he would never again cross a river without remembering it.

Before his brother crossed the river, Sean O’Brien died. Augustus covered the boy with his slicker just as the horse herd came clambering up the bank. The herd passed so close that when some of the horses stopped to shake themselves the fine spray wet Deets’s back. The Spettle boys came out of the river wide-eyed with fright, clinging to their wet mounts. On the far bank Call had the other men helping to ease the wagon down the steep crossing.

“Now if them snakes had come at Bol, he would have had a chance,” Augustus said. “He has his ten-gauge.”

“The storm stirred’ them up,” Deets said again. He felt guilty, for he had chosen the crossing in preference to one up the river, and now a boy was dead.

“Well, Deets, life is short,” Augustus said. “Shorter for some than for others. This is a bad way to start a trip.”

Bolivar was unhappy. He didn’t think the wagon would make it, even across such a small river, but he was not willing to leave it either. He sat grimly on the wagon seat, Lippy beside him, while the cowboys got ropes on the wagon.

“You mean Sean’s dead?” Allen O’Brien asked the Captain, so stunned he could barely speak.

“Yes, he’s dead,” Call said—he had seen Gus cover the corpse.

“It’s me that done it,” Allen said, tears on his round face. “I never should have brought the boy. I knew he was too young.”

Call said nothing more. The boy’s age had had nothing to do with what had happened, of course; even an experienced man, riding into such a mess of snakes, wouldn’t have survived. He himself might not have, and he had never worried about snakes. It only went to show what he already knew, which was that there were more dangers in life than even the sharpest training could anticipate. Allen O’Brien should waste no time on guilt, for a boy could die in Ireland as readily as elsewhere, however safe it might appear.

Jasper and Bert had seen the snakes, and Jasper was so terrified that he couldn’t look at the water. Soupy Jones was almost as scared. The Rainey boys looked as if they might fall off their horses.

More than anything, Jasper wanted to quit. He had crossed the Nueces many times, and yet, as the moment approached when he would have to do it again, he felt he couldn’t. Pea and Dish and the others who had already crossed seemed to him like the luckiest men in the world.

“Captain, do you reckon them snakes are gone?” he asked.

“Well, they’re scattered,” Call said.

As they got ready to go in Jasper drew his pistol, but Call shook his head. “No shooting,” he said. He had no confidence that any of the men could shoot from a swimming horse and hit anything, as Gus had.

“Just quirt ’em if you see any,” he added.

“I hope none don’t crawl in this wagon,” Lippy said, his lip quivering with apprehension.

The wagon floated better than expected—Bolivar barely got his feet wet. Jasper flinched once when he saw a stick he thought was a snake, but the moccasins had scattered and were not seen again.

Allen O’Brien dismounted and stood and cried over his brother. Jasper Fant cried, too, mostly from relief that he was still alive.

While they were having their cry, Deets and Pea got shovels from the wagon and dug a grave, back from the river a hundred yards, beside a live oak tree. Then they cut off part of one of the wagon sheets, wrapped the dead boy in it and carried him in the wagon to the grave. They laid him in it and Deets and Pea soon covered him, while most of the crew stood around, not knowing what to do or say.

“If you’d like to sing or something, do it,” Call said. Allen stood a moment, started singing an Irish song in a quavering voice, then broke down crying and couldn’t finish it.

“I don’t have no pianer or I’d play one of the church hymns,” Lippy said.

“Well, I’ll say a word,” Augustus said. “This was a good, brave boy, for we all saw that he conquered his fear of riding. He had a fine tenor voice, and we’ll all miss that. But he wasn’t used to this part of the world. There’s accidents in life and he met with a bad one. We may all do the same if we ain’t careful.”

He turned and mounted old Malaria. “Dust to dust,” he said. “Lets the rest of us go on to Montana.”

He’s right, Call thought. The best thing to do with a death was to move on from it. One by one the cowboys mounted and went off to the herd, many of them taking a quick last look at the muddy grave under the tree.

Augustus waited for Allen O’Brien, who was the last to mount. He was so weak from shock, it seemed he might not be able to, but he finally got on his horse and rode off, looking back until the grave was hidden by the tall gray grass. “It seems too quick,” he said. “It seems very quick, just to ride off and leave the boy. He was the babe of our family,” he added.

“If we was in town we’d have a fine funeral,” Augustus said. “But as you can see, we ain’t in town. There’s nothing you can do but kick your horse.”

“I wish I could have finished the song,” Allen said.

36

THE WHISKEY BOAT STANK, and the men on it stank, but Elmira was not sorry she had taken passage. She had a tiny little cubbyhole among the whiskey casks, with a few planks and some buffalo skins thrown over it to keep the rain out, but she spent most of her time sitting at the rear of the boat, watching the endless flow of brown water. Some days were so hot that the air above the water shimmered and the shore became indistinct; other days a chill rain blew and she wrapped herself in one of the buffalo robes and kept fairly dry. The rain was welcome, for it discouraged the fleas. They made her sleep uneasy, but it was a small price to pay for escaping from Port Smith. She had lived where there were fleas before, and worse things than fleas.

As the boat inched its way up the Arkansas, the brown river gradually narrowed, and as it narrowed the boatmen and whiskey traders grew more restless. They drank so much whiskey themselves that Elmira felt they would be lucky to have any left to sell. Though she often felt them watching her as she sat at the end of the boat, they let her alone. Only Bowler, the chief trader, ever spoke more than a word or two to her. Fowler was a burly man with a dirty yellow beard and one eyelid that wouldn’t behave. It twitched and jerked up and down erratically, so that looking at him was disconcerting: one minute he would be looking at you out of both eyes, and then the eyelid would droop and he would only be looking with an eye and a half.

Fowler drank continuously—all day and all night, so far as Elmira could tell. When she woke, from the fleas or the rocking of the boat, she would always hear his hoarse voice, talking to anyone who would listen. He kept a heavy rifle in the crook of his arm, and his eyes were always scanning the banks.

Mainly Fowler talked of Indians, for whom he had a pure hatred. He had been a buffalo hunter and had had many run-ins with them. When the buffalo ran out he began to traffic in whiskey. So far neither he nor any of his men had offered Elmira the slightest offense. It surprised her. They were a rough-looking bunch, and she had taken a big gamble in getting on the boat. No one in Fort Smith had seen her leave, as far as she knew, and the boatmen could have killed her and thrown her to the turtles without anyone’s being the wiser. The first few nights in her cubbyhole she had been wakeful and a little frightened, expecting one of the men to stumble in and fall on her. She waited, thinking it would happen—if it did, she would only have her old life back, which had been part of the point of leaving. She would stop being July Johnson’s wife, at least. It might be rough for a while, but eventually she would find Dee and life would improve.

But the men avoided her, day or night—all except Fowler, who wandered the boat constantly. Once, standing beside her, he knelt suddenly and cocked his rifle, but what he thought was an Indian turned out to be a bush. “The heat’s got my eye jumping,” he said, spitting a brown stream of tobacco into the water.

Elmira also watched the distant banks, which were green with the grass of spring. As the river gradually narrowed, she saw many animals: deer, coyote, cattle—but no Indians. She remembered stories heard over the years about women being carried off by Indians; in Kansas she had had such a woman pointed out to her, one who had been rescued and brought back to live with whites again. To her the woman seemed no different from other women, though it was true that she seemed cowed; but then, many women were cowed by events more ordinary. It was hard to see how the Indians could be much worse than the buffalo hunters, two of whom were on board. The sight of them brought back painful memories. They were big men with buffalo-skin coats and long shaggy hair—they looked like the animals they hunted. At night, in her cubbyhole, she would sometimes hear them relieving themselves over the side of the boat; they would stand just beyond the whiskey casks and pour their water into the Arkansas.

For some reason the sound reminded her of July, perhaps because she had never heard him make it. July was reticent about such things and would walk far into the woods when he had to go, to spare her any embarrassment. She found his reticence and shyness strangely irritating—it sometimes made her want to tell him what she had really done before they married. But she held back that truth, and every other truth she knew; she ceased talking to July Johnson at all.

In the long days and nights, with no one to talk to but Fowler, and him only occasionally, Elmira found herself thinking more and more about Dee. Joe she didn’t think about, had never thought about much. He had never seemed hers, exactly, though she had certainly borne him. But from the first she had looked at him with detachment and only mild interest, and the twelve years since his birth had been a waiting period—waiting for the time for when she could send him away and belong only to herself again. It occurred to her that the one good thing about marrying July Johnson was that he would do to leave Joe with.

With Dee, she could belong to herself, for if ever a man belonged to himself, it was Dee. You never knew where Dee would be from one day to the next; when he was there he was always eager to share the fun, but then, before you could look around he had vanished, off to another town or another girl.

Soon the skies above the river got wider and wider as the river wound out of the trees and cut through the plains. The nights were cool, the mornings warming quickly, so that when Elmira woke the river behind her would be covered with a frosting of mist, and the boat would be lost in the mist completely, until the sun could break through. Several times ducks and geese, taking off in the mist, almost flew into her as she stood at the rear of the boat wrapped in the buffalo robe. When the mist was heavy the splash of birds or the jumping of fish startled her; once she was frightened by the heavy beat of wings as one of the huge gray cranes flew low over the boat. As the mist thinned she would see the cranes standing solemnly in the shallows, ignoring the strings of ducks that swam nearby. Pockets of mist would linger on the water for an hour or more after the sun had risen and the sky turned a clear blue.

At night many sounds came from the banks, the most frequent being the thin howling of coyotes. From time to time during the day they would see a coyote or a gray wolf on the bank, and the hunters would sharpen their aim by shooting at the animals. They seldom killed one, for the river was still too wide; sometimes Elmira would see the bullets kick mud.

When there was no rain she liked the nights and would often slip to the rear of the boat and listen to the gurgle and suck of the water. There were stars by the millions; one night the full moon seemed to rise out of the smoky river. The moon was so large that at first it seemed to touch both banks. Its light turned the evening mist to a color like pearl. But then the moon rose higher and grew yellow as a melon.

It was the morning after the full moon that a fight broke out between one of the whiskey traders and a buffalo hunter. Elmira, waking, heard loud argument, which was nothing new—almost every night there was loud argument, once the men got drunk. Once or twice they fought with fists, bumping against the casks that formed the walls of her room, but those fights ran their course. She had seen many men fight and was not much disturbed.

But the morning fight was different—she was awakened by a high scream. It ended in a kind of moan and she heard a body fall to the deck of the boat. Then she heard heavy breathing, as the winner of the fight caught his breath. The man soon walked away and a heavy silence fell—so heavy that Elmira wondered if everyone had left the boat. She began to feel frightened. Maybe Indians had got on the boat and killed all the whiskey traders. She huddled in her quilts, wondering what to do, but then she heard Fowler’s gruff voice. It had just been a fight of some kind.

When the sun came up she went to her place at the rear of the boat. It was very still. The men were up, sitting in a group at the far end. When she looked, she saw a man lying face down near the place where the fight had taken place. He wasn’t moving. She recognized him as one of the whiskey traders by his red hair.

A few minutes later Fowler and a couple of the men came and stood looking at the body. Then, as Elmira watched, they took off his belt and boots, rolled him over and cleaned out his pockets. The front of his body was stiff with blood. When the men had everything valuable off his body they simply picked the man up and threw him overboard. He floated in the water face down, and as the boat went on, Elmira looked and saw the body bump the boat. That’s the end of you, she thought. She didn’t know the man’s name. She wished he would sink so she wouldn’t have to see him. It was still misty, though, and soon the body was lost in the mist.

A little later Fowler brought her a plate of breakfast.

“What was the fight about?” she asked.

“’Bout you,” Fowler said, his eyelid drooping.

That was a surprise. The men seemed to have almost no interest in her. Also, if the fight was over her, it was unusual that the victim had not tried to claim her.

“About me how?” she asked.

Fowler looked at her with his eye and a half.

“Well, you’re the only woman we got,” he said. “There’s some would take advantage of you. Only the one talking it the most is kilt now.”

“I guess he is,” she said. “Which one killed him?”

“Big Zwey,” Fowler said.

Big Zwey was the worst-looking of the buffalo hunters. He had an oily beard and fingernails as black as tar. It was peculiar to think that a buffalo hunter had been her protector after what she had been through with them.

“Why’d he do it?” she asked. “What difference does it make to him what happens to me?”

“He fancies you,” Fowler said. “Wants to marry you, he says.”

“Marry me?” Elmira said. “He can’t marry me.”

Fowler chuckled. “He don’t know that,” he said. “Big Zwey ain’t quite normal.”

None of you are quite normal, Elmira thought, and I must not be either, or I wouldn’t be here.

“You took a chance, gettin’ on a boat with men like us,” Fowler said.

Elmira didn’t respond. Often, from then on, she felt Big Zwey’s eyes on her, though he never spoke to her or even came near her. None of the other men did either—probably afraid they would be killed and dumped overboard if they approached her. Sometimes Zwey would sit watching her for hours, from far down the boat. It made her feel bitter. Already he thought she belonged to him, and the other men thought so too. It kept them away from her, but in their eyes she didn’t belong to herself. She belonged to a buffalo hunter who had never even spoken to her.

Their fright made her contemptuous of them, and whenever she caught one of them looking at her she met the look with a cold stare. From then on she said nothing to anyone and spent her days in silence, watching the brown river as it flowed behind.