Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove

Bolivar went out the door with the bucket, looking as if it might be a while before he came back.

Dish meanwhile was doing some hard thinking. He had meant to leave right after breakfast and ride back to the Matagorda, where he had a sure job. The Hat Creek outfit was hardly known as a traildriving bunch, but on the other hand Captain Call was not a man to indulge in idle talk. If he was contemplating a drive he would probably make one. Meanwhile there was Lorena, who might come to see him in an entirely different light if he could spend time with her for a few days running. Of course, getting to spend time with her was expensive, and he had not a cent, but if word got around that he was working for the Hat Creek outfit he could probably attract a little credit.

One thing Dish prided himself on was his skill at driving a buggy; it occurred to him that since Lorena seemed to spend most of her time cooped up in the Dry Bean, she might appreciate a buggy ride along the river in a smart buggy, if such a creature could be found in Lonesome Dove. He got up and carried his plate to the wash bucket.

"Captain, if you mean it I'd be pleased to stay the day or two," Dish said.

The Captain had stepped out on the back porch and was looking north, along the stage road that threaded its way through the brush country toward San Antonio. The road ran straight for a considerable distance before it hit the first gully, and Captain Call had his eyes fixed on it. He seemed not to hear Dish's reply, although he was only a few feet away. Dish stepped out on the porch to see what it was that distracted the man. Far up the road he could see two horsemen coming, but they were so far yet that it was impossible to tell anything about them. At moments, heat waves from the road caused a quavering that made them seem like one horseman. Dish squinted but there was nothing special about the riders that his eye could detect. Yet the Captain had not so much as turned his head since they appeared.

"Gus, come out here," the Captain said.

Augustus was busy cleaning his plate of honey, a process that involved several more biscuits.

"I'm eating," he said, though that was obvious.

"Come see who's coming," the Captain said, rather mildly, Dish thought.

"If it's Deets my watch is already set," Augustus said. "Anyway, I don't suppose he's changed clothes, and if I have to see his old black knees sticking out of them old quilts he wears for pants it's apt to spoil my digestion."

"Deets is coming all right," Call said. "The fact is, he ain't by himself."

"Well, the man's always aimed to marry," Augustus said. "I imagine he just finally met up with that dark-complexioned lady I was referring to."

"He ain't met no lady," Call said with a touch of exasperation. "Who he's met is an old friend of ours. If you don't come here and look I'll have to drag you."

Augustus was about through with the biscuits anyway. He had to use a forefinger to capture the absolute last drop of honey, which was just as sweet licked off a finger as it was when eaten on good sourdough biscuits.

"Newt, did you know honey is the world's purest food?" he said, getting up.

Newt had heard enough lectures on the subject to have already forgotten more than most people ever know about the properties of honey. He hurried his plate to the tub, more curious than Mr. Gus about who Deets could have found.

"Yes, sir, I like it myself," he said, to cut short the talk of honey.

Augustus was a step behind the boy, idly licking his forefinger. He glanced up the road to see what Call could be so aroused about. Two riders were coming, the one on the left clearly Deets, on the big white gelding they called Wishbone. The other rider rode a pacing bay; it took but a moment for recognition to strike. The rider seemed to slump a little in the saddle, in the direction of his horse's off side, a tendency peculiar to only one man he knew. Augustus was so startled that he made the mistake of running his sticky fingers through his own hair.

"'I god, Woodrow," he said. "That there's Jake Spoon."

THE NAME STRUCK NEWT like a blow, so much did Jake Spoon mean to him. As a very little boy, when his mother had still been alive, Jake Spoon was the man who came most often to see her. It had begun to be clear to him, as he turned over his memories, that his mother had been a whore, like Lorena, but this realization tarnished nothing, least of all his memories of Jake Spoon. No man had been kinder, either to him or his mother-her name had been Maggie. Jake had given him hard candy and pennies and had set him on a pacing horse and given him his first ride; he had even had old Jesus, the bootmaker, make him his first pair of boots; and once when Jake won a lady's saddle in a card game he gave the saddle to Newt and had the stirrups cut down to his size.

Those were the days before order came to Lonesome Dove, when Captain Call and Augustus were still Rangers, with responsibilities that took them up and down the border. Jake Spoon was a Ranger too, and in Newt's eyes the most dashing of them all. He always carried a pearl-handled pistol and rode a pacing horse-easier on the seat, Jake claimed. The dangers of his profession seemed to sit lightly on him.

But then the fighting gradually died down along the border and the Captain and Mr. Gus and Jake and Pea Eye and Deets all quit rangering and formed the Hat Creek outfit. But the settled life seemed not to suit Jake, and one day he was just gone. No one was surprised, though Newt's mother was so upset by it that for a time he got a whipping every time he asked when Jake was coming back. The whippings didn't seem to have much to do with him, just with his mother's disappointment that Jake had left.

Newt stopped asking about Jake, but he didn't stop remembering him. It was barely a year later that his mother died of fever; the Captain and Augustus took him in, although at first they argued about him. At first Newt missed his mother so much that he didn't care about the arguments. His mother and Jake were both gone and arguments were not going to bring them back.

But when the worst pain passed and he began to earn his keep around the Hat Creek outfit by doing the numerous chores that the Captain set him, he often drifted back in his mind to the days when Jake Spoon had come to see his mother. It seemed to him that Jake might even be his father, though everyone told him his name was Newt Dobbs, not Newt Spoon. Why it was Dobbs, and why everyone was so sure, was a puzzle to him, since no one in Lonesome Dove seemed to know anything about a Mr. Dobbs. It had not occurred to him to ask his mother while she was alive-last names weren't used much around Lonesome Dove, and he didn't realize that the last name was supposed to come from the father. Even Mr. Gus, who would talk about anything, seemed to have no information about Mr. Dobbs. "He went west when he shouldn't have," was his only comment on the man.

Newt had never asked Captain Call to amplify that information-the Captain preferred to volunteer what he wanted you to know. In his heart, though, Newt didn't believe in Mr. Dobbs. He had a little pile of stuff his mother had left, just a few beads and combs and a little scrapbook and some cutout pictures from magazines that Mr. Gus had been kind enough to save for him, and there was nothing about a Mr. Dobbs in the scrapbook and no picture of him amid the pictures, though there was a scratchy picture of his grandfather, Maggie's father, who had lived in Alabama.

If, as he suspected, there had been no Mr. Dobbs, or if he had just been a gentleman who stopped at the rooming house a day or two-they had lived in the rooming house when Maggie was alive-then it might be that Jake Spoon was really his father. Perhaps no one had informed him of it because they thought it more polite to let Jake do so himself when he came back.