Lonesome Dove, Page 20

  But when the moon was just a little white hook, Deets tended to lose his worries. After all, water was still sweet, except for an alkaline river or two, like the Pecos. Perhaps if the Indians got on the moon, they had all fallen off.

  Sometimes Deets wished that he could have had some schooling, so as to maybe learn the answers to some of the things that puzzled and intrigued him. Night and day itself was something to ponder: there had to be a reason for the sun to fall, lie hidden and then rise again from the opposite side of the plain, and other reasons for the rain, the thunder and the slicing north wind. He knew the big motions of nature weren't accidents; it was just that his life had not given him enough information to grasp the way of things.

  And yet Indians, who could not even talk a normal language, seemed to understand more about it even than Mr. Gus, who could talk a passel about the motions of nature or anything else you wanted to hear talked about. Mr. Gus had even tried to tell him the world was round, though Deets regarded that as just joking talk. But it was Mr. Gus who put his name on the sign so that everyone who could read would realize he was part of the outfit — it made up for a lot of joking.

  Deets rested happily by the water trough, now and then glancing at the moon. The ground shadows hid him completely, and any vaquero foolish enough to try and slip in would get a sharp surprise.

  * * *

  Dish himself got something of a surprise when he walked into the Dry Bean, for Lorena was not alone, as he had been imagining her to be. She sat at a table with Xavier and Jasper Fant, the skinny little waddie from upriver. Dish had met Jasper once or twice and rather liked him, though at this time he would have liked him a lot better if he had stayed upriver, where he belonged. Jasper had a sickly look to him, but in fact was as healthy as the next man and had an appetite to rival Gus McCrae's.

  "There's Dish," Lorena said, when he came in the door. "Now we can have a game."

  Lippy, as usual, was kibbitzing, putting in his two cents' worth whether they were wanted or not.

  "Not unless he's been to the bank, we can't," he said. "Xavier cleaned Dish out last night, and he ain't active enough to make his fortune back in one day."

  "Don't mean he can't take a hand," Jasper said, giving Dish a friendly nod. "Xavier's cleaned me out too and I'm still playing."

  "We all got weaknesses," Lippy observed. "Wanz's is playing poker for credit. That's why he can't afford to pay his pianer player an honest wage,"

  Xavier endured these witticisms silently. He was in a worse mood than usual, and he knew why. Jake Spoon had come to town and promptly deprived him of a whore, an asset vital to an establishment such as his in an out-of-the-way place like Lonesome Dove. Many a traveler, who might not ordinarily come that far, would, because of Lorie. There was no woman like her on the border. She was not friendly, but because of her, men came and stayed to drink away the night. He would not be likely to get another such-whore: there were Mexican women as pretty, but few cowboys would ride the extra miles for a Mexican woman, those being plentiful in most parts of south Texas.

  Besides, he himself bought Lorie once a week, if not more. Once in a period of restless enthusiasm he had bought her six times in five days — after which, being ashamed of his extravagance, if not his lust, he abstained for two weeks. It was a happy convenience having Lorie in the place, and a fine change from his wife, Therese, who had been stingy with her favors and a bully to boot. Once Therese had denied him anything resembling a favor for a period of four months, which, for a man of Xavier's temperament, was a painful thing. He had been required to hunt Mexican women himself during that period, and had come close to feeling the wrath of a couple of Mexican husbands.

  By contrast, Lorie was restful, and he had come to love her. She did not exhibit the slightest fondness for him, but neither did she raise the slightest objection when he felt like buying her, a fact Lippy was deeply resentful of. She refused to be bought by Lippy at any price.

  Now Jake Spoon had spoiled it all, and the only way Xavier could vent his annoyance was by winning money from Jasper Fant, most of which he would never collect.

  "Where's Jake?" Lorie asked — a shock to Dish. His hopes, which had been soaring as he walked through the dark to the saloon, flopped down to boot level. For her to inquire about the man so shamelessly bespoke a depth of attachment that Dish could barely imagine. It was not likely she would ever inquire at all about him, even if he stepped out the door and vanished for a year.

  "Why, Jake's with Gus and the boys," he said, sitting down to make the best face of it he could.

  It was not much of a face, for Lorie had never seemed prettier to him. She had pushed up the sleeves of her dress, and when it came her turn to handle the cards her white arms all but mesmerized him. He could hardly think to bet for watching Lorie's arms and her firm lips. Her arms were plumpish, but more graceful than any Dish had ever seen. He could not think what he was doing, he wanted her so much; it caused him to play so badly that in an hour he had lost three months' wages.

  Jasper Fant fared no better, whether from love of Lorie or lack of skill, Dish didn't know. Didn't know, and didn't care. All he was conscious of was that somehow he would have to outlast Jake, for there could be no woman for him except the one across the table. The very friendliness with which she treated him stung like a scorpion bite, for there was nothing special in it. She was almost as friendly to Lippy, a pure fool, and with a hole in his stomach to boot.

  The card game soon became a torture for everyone but Lorie, who won hand after hand. It pleased her to think how surprised Jake would be when he came back and saw her winnings. He would know she wasn't helpless, at least. Xavier himself didn't lose much — he never lost much — but he wasn't playing with his usual alertness. Lorie knew that might be because of her, but she didn't care. She had always liked playing cards, and liked it even better now that it was all she had to do until Jake came back. She even liked Dish and Jasper, a little. It was a relief not to have to hold herself out of the fun because of what they wanted. She knew they felt hopeless, but then she had felt hopeless enough times, waiting for them to work up their nerve, or else borrow two dollars. Let them get a taste.

  "Dish, we might as well stop," Jasper said. "We'll barely get out of debt this year as it is."

  "I'll take a hand," Lippy said. "I might be rusty but I'm willing."

  "Let him play," Xavier said suddenly. It was a house rule that Lippy was not allowed to gamble. His style was extravagant and his resources meager. Several times his life had been endangered when strangers discovered he had no means of paying them the sums he had just lost.

  But Xavier had lost faith in house rules since it had also been a house rule that Lorena was a whore, and now she wasn't anymore. If a whore could retire so abruptly, Lippy might as well play cards.

  "What's he gonna pay me with when I win?" Lorena asked.

  "Sweet music," Lippy said cheerfully. "I'll play your favorite song."

  It was not much enticement, Lorena thought, since he played her favorite songs every time she came in the room as it was, hoping his skill at the keyboard would finally move her to let him buy a poke.

  She wasn't about to start that, but she did play him a few hands — the cowboys were too sunk even to drink. The boys said goodnight to her politely, hoping she would think kindly of them, but she didn't. Boys didn't interest her as much as cards.

  Outside, Jasper paused in the street and had a smoke with Dish.

  "Hired on yet?" Jasper asked. He had a mustache no thicker than a shoestring, and a horse that was not much thicker than the mustache.

  "I think so," Dish said. "I'm working for these Hat Creek boys right now. They're thinking of getting up a drive."

  "You mean they hire you to play cards?" Jasper asked. He fancied himself a joker.

  "Oh, I was just resting," Dish said. "I'm helping their darky guard some stock."

  "Guard it from what?"

  "From the Mexicans we stole it from," Dish said.
"The Captain went off to hire a crew."

  "Hell," Jasper said. "If the Mexicans knew the Captain was gone they'd come and take back Texas."

  "I reckon not," Dish said. He felt the remark was slightly insulting. The Captain was not the only man in Texas who could fight.

  "He can hire me, if he wants to, when he gets back," Jasper said.

  "He probably will," Dish said. Jasper had a reputation for being reliable, if not brilliant.

  Though aware that Dish might be touchy on the subject, Jasper was curious about what had happened to change Lorie so. He looked wishfully at the light in her window.

  "Is that girl got married, or what?" he asked. "Every time I jingled my money she looked at me like she was ready to carve my liver."

  Dish resented the question. He was not so coarse as to enjoy discussing Lorie with just any man who happened to ask. On the other hand, it was hard to see Jasper Fant as a rival. He looked half starved, and probably was.

  "It's a scoundrel named Jake Spoon," Dish said. "I reckon he's beguiled her."

  "Oh, so that's it," Jasper said. "I believe I've heard the name. A pistolero of some kind, ain't he?"

  "I wouldn't know what he is," Dish said, in a tone that was meant to let Jasper know he had no great interest in discussing the matter further. Jasper took the hint and the two of them rode over to the Hat Creek pens in silence, their minds on the white-armed woman in the saloon. She was no longer unfriendly, but it seemed to both of them that things had gone a little better before the change.

  16

  BY THE END of the first day's hiring, Call had collected four boys, none of them yet eighteen. Young Bill Spettle, the one they called Swift Bill, was no older than Newt, and his brother Pete only a year older than Bill. So desperate were their family circumstances that Call was almost hesitant to take them.

  The widow Spettle had a brood of eight children, Bill and Pete being the oldest. Ned Spettle, the father of them all, had died of drink two years before. It looked to Call as if the family was about to starve out. They had a little creek-bottom farm not far north of Pickles Gap, but the soil was poor and the family had little to eat but sowbelly and beans. The widow Spettle, however, was eager for him to take the boys, and would hear no protest from Call. She was a thin woman with bitter eyes. Call had heard from someone that she had been raised rich, in the East, with servants to comb her hair and help her into her shoes when she got up. It might just have been a story — it was hard for him to imagine a grownup who would need to be helped into their own shoes — but if even part of it was true she had come a long way down. Ned Spettle had never got around to putting a floor in the shack of a house he built. His wife was rearing eight children on the bare dirt. He had heard it said that Ned had never got over the war, which might have explained it. Plenty hadn't. It accounted for the shortage of grown men of a certain age, that war. Call himself felt a kind of guilt at having missed it, though the work he and Gus had done on the border had been just as dangerous, and just as necessary.

  "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.

  He didn't take the Spettle boys with him, for he had brought no spare horses. But the boys started at once for Lonesome Dove on foot, each of them carrying a blanket. They had one pistol between them, a Navy Colt with half its hammer knocked off. Though Call assured them he would equip them well once they got to Lonesome Dove, they wouldn't leave the gun.

  "We've never shot airy other gun," Swift Bill said, as if that meant they couldn't.

  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.

  "We'll take good care of them," Call said, wasting words. The young girls hung onto the widow's frayed skirts and cried. Call rode on, though with a bad feeling in his throat. It was better that the boys go; there was not enough work for them there. And yet they were the pride of the family. He would take as good care of them as he could, and yet what did that mean, with a drive of twenty-five hundred miles to make?

  He made the Rainey ranch by sundown, a far more cheerful place than the Spettle homestead. Joe Rainey had a twisted leg, the result of an accident with a buckboard, but he got around on the leg almost as fast as a healthy man. Call was not as fond of Maude, Joe's fat red-faced wife, as Augustus was, but then he had to admit he was not as fond of any woman as Augustus was.

  Maude Rainey was built like a barrel, with a bosom as big as buckets and a voice that some claimed would make hair fall out. It was the general consensus around Lonesome Dove that if she and Augustus had married their combined voices would have deafened whatever children they might have produced. She talked at the table like some men talked when they were driving mules.

  Still, she and Joe had managed to produce an even dozen children so far, eight of them boys and all of them strapping. Among them the Raineys probably ate as much food in one meal as the Spettles consumed in a week. As near as Call could determine they all devoted most of their waking hours to either growing or butchering or catching what they ate. Augustus's blue pigs had been purchased from the Raineys and were the first thing Maude thought to inquire about when Call rode up.

  "Have you et that shoat yet?" Maude asked, before he could even dismount.

  "No, we ain't," Call said. "I guess Gus is saving him for Christmas, or else he just likes to talk to him."

  "Well, step down and have a wash at the bucket," Maude said. "I'm cooking one of that shoat's cousins right this minute."

  It had to be admitted that Maude Rainey set a fine table. Call had no sooner got his sleeves rolled up and his hands clean than supper began. Joe Rainey just had time to mumble a prayer before Maude started pushing around the cornbread. Call was faced with more meats than he had seen on one table since he could remember: beefsteak and pork chops, chicken and venison, and a stew that appeared to contain squirrel and various less familiar meats. Maude got red in the face when she ate, as did everyone else at her table, from the steam rising off the platters.

  "This is my varmint stew, Captain," Maude said.

  "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.

  "Now, Maggie, don't be giving away my recipes," Maude said. "Anyway, the Captain's likely et possum before."

  "At least it ain't a goat," Call said, trying to make conversation. It was an unfamiliar labor, since at his own table he mostly worked at avoiding it. But he knew women liked to talk to their guests, and he tried to fit into the custom.

  "We've heard a rumor that Jake is back and on the run," Joe Rainey said. He wore a full beard, which at the moment was shiny with pork drippings. Joe had a habit of staring straight ahead. Though Call assumed he had a neck joint like other men, he had never seen him use it. If you happened to be directly in front of him, Joe would look you in the eye; but if you were positioned a little to the side, his look went floating on by.

  "Yes, Jake arrived," Call said. "He's been to Montana and says it's the prettiest country in the world."

  "It's probably filt with women, then," Maude said. "I remember
Jake. If he can't find a woman he gets so restless he'll scratch."

  Call saw no need to comment on Jake's criminal status, if any. Fortunately the Raineys were too busy eating to be very curious. The children, who had been well brought up, didn't try for the better meats, but made do with a platter of chicken and some fryback and cornbread. One little tad, evidently the runt of the family, got nothing but cornbread and chicken gizzards, but he knew better than to complain. With eleven brothers and sisters all bigger than him, complaint would have been dangerous.

  "Well, what's Gus up to?" Maude asked. "I been sitting here waiting for him to come over and try to take me away from Joe, but I don't guess he's coming. Has he still got his craving for buttermilk?"

  "Yes, he drinks it by the gallon," Call said. "I fancy it myself, so we compete."

  He felt Maude's statement not in the best of taste, but Joe Rainey continued to stare straight ahead and drip into his beard.

  Call finally asked if he could hire a couple of the boys. Maude sighed, and looked down her double row of children. "I'd rather sell pigs than hire out boys," she said, "but I guess they've got to go see the world sometime."

  "What's the pay?" Joe asked, always the practical man.

  "Why, forty dollars and found, I reckon," Call said. "Of course we'll furnish the mounts."