Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove

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 bitten 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 nearing eight children on the bare dirt. He had heard it said that Ned had never got over the wan, 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 bonder 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 hand 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 cane 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 redfaced 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 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 on 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 ned 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. "On 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 flit 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."

That night he slept in a wagon in the Raineys' yard. He had been offered a place in the loft, but it was piled so high with children that he hardly trusted himself in it. Anyway, he preferred the out-of-doors, though the out-of-doors at the Raineys' was more noisy than he was used to. The pigs grunted all night, looking for lizards on something to eat. Then there was a barn owl that wouldn't stop calling, so he had a time getting to sleep.