Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove

He felt a heavy guilt, though, for he had gone back time after time, and had let the need grow without even thinking about it or recognizing it. And then he left.

"Broke her heart," Gus said, many times.

"What are you talking about?" Call said. "She was a whore."

"Whores got hearts," Augustus said.

The bitter truth was that Gus was right. Maggie hadn't even seemed like a whore. There was nothing hard about her-in fact, it was obvious to everyone that she was far too soft for the life she was living. She had tender expressions-more tender than any he had even seen. He could still remember her movements-those more than her words. She could never quite get her hair to stay fixed, and was always touching it nervously with one hand. "It won't behave," she said, as if her hair were a child.

"You take care of her, if you're so worried," he said to Gus, but Gus shrugged that off. "She ain't in love with me, she's in love with you," he pointed out.

It was the point in all his years with Gus when they came closest to splitting the company, for Gus would not let up. He wanted Call to go back and see Maggie.

"Go back and do what?" Call asked. He felt a little desperate about it. "I ain't a marrying man."

"She ain't proposed, has she?" Gus asked sarcastically.

"Well, go back and do what?" Call asked.

"Sit with her-just sit with her," Gus said. "She likes your company. I don't know why."

Instead, Call sat by the river, night after night. There was a period when he wanted to go back, when it would have been nice to sit with Maggie a few minutes and watch her fiddle with her hair. But he chose the river, and his solitude, thinking that in time the feeling would pass, and best so: he would stop thinking about Maggie, she would stop thinking about him. After all, there were more talkative men than him-Gus and Jake, for two.

But it didn't pass-all that passed were years. Every time he heard of her being drunk, or having some trouble, he would feel uneasy and guilty, as if he were to blame. It didn't help that Gus piled on the criticism, so much so that twice Call was on the point of fighting him. "You like to have everyone needing you, but you're right picky as to who you satisfy," Gus had said in the bitterest of the fights.

"I don't much want nobody needing me," Call said.

"Then why do you keep running around with this bunch of halfoutlaws you call Texas Rangers? There's men in this troop who won't piss unless you point to a spot. But when a little thing like Maggie, who ain't the strongest person in the world, gets a need for you, you head for the river and clean your gun."

"Well, I might need my gun," Call said. But he was aware that Gus always got the better of their arguments.

All his life he had been careful to control experience as best he could, and then something had happened that was forever beyond his control, just because he had wanted to find out about the business with women. For years he had stayed to himself and felt critical of men who were always running to whores. Then he had done it himself and made a mockery of his own rules. Something about the girl, her timidity or just the lonely way she looked, sitting by her window, had drawn him. And somehow, within the little bits of pleasure, a great pain had been concealed, one that had hunt him far more than the three bullets he had taken in battle over the years.

When the boy was born it got worse. For the first two years he was in torment over what to do. Gus claimed Maggie had said the boy was Call's, but how could she know for sure? Maggie hadn't had it in her to refuse a man. It was the only reason she was a whore, Call had decided-she just couldn't turn away any kind of love. He felt it must all count as love, in her thinking-the cowboys and the gamblers. Maybe she just thought it was the best love she could get.

A few times he almost swayed, almost went back to marry her, though it would have meant disgrace. Maybe the boy was his-maybe it was the proper thing to do, although it would mean leaving the Rangers.

A time or two he even stood up to go to her, but his resolve always broke. He just could not go back. The night he heard she was dead he left the town without a word to anyone and node up the river alone for a week. He knew at once that he had forever lost the chance to right himself, that he would never again be able to feel that he was the man he had wanted to be. The man he had wanted to be would never have gone to Maggie in the first place. He felt like a cheat-he was the most respected man on the border, and yet a whore had a claim on him. He had ignored the claim, and the woman died, but somehow the claim remained, like a weight he had to carry forever.

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.

Occasionally Gus would try to get him to claim the boy, but Call wouldn't. He knew that he probably should, not out of certainty so much as decency, but he couldn't. It meant an admission he couldn't make-an admission that he had failed someone. It had never happened in battle, such failure. Yet it had happened in a little room over a saloon, because of a small woman who couldn't keep her hair fixed. It was strange to him that such a failure could seem so terrible, and yet it did. It was such a torment when he thought of it that he eventually tried to avoid all situations in which women were mentioned-only that way could he keep the matter out of mind for a stretch of time.

But it always came back, for sooner or later men around the camp fires or the wagon or the outfit would begin to talk of whores, and the thought of Maggie would sting his mind as sweat stings a cut. He had only seen her for a few months. 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.

What he wanted most was what he could never have: for it not to have happened-any of it. Better by far never to have known the pleasure than to have the pain that followed. Maggie had been a weak woman, and yet her weakness had all but slaughtered his strength. Sometimes just the thought of her made him feel that he shouldn't pretend to lead men anymore.

Sitting on the low bluff, watching the moon climb the dark sky, he felt the old sadness again. He felt, almost, that he didn't belong with the very men he was leading, and that he ought to just leave: ride west, let the herd go, let Montana go, be done with the whole business of leading men. It was peculiar to seem so infallible in their eyes and yet feel so empty and sad when he thought of himself.

Call could faintly hear the Irishman still singing to the cattle. Once more the Texas bull lowed. He wondered if all men felt such disappointment when thinking of themselves. He didn't know. Maybe most men didn't think of themselves. Probably Pea Eye gave no more thought to his life than he did to which side of a horse he approached. Probably, too, Pea Eye had no Maggie-which was only another irony of his leadership. Pea had been faithful to his tenets, whereas he had not.