Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove

He had grown up with the sun shining, with mesquite and chaparral, armadillos and coyotes, Mexicans and the shallow Rio Grande. Only once had he been to a city: San Antonio. Deets had taken him on one of his banking trips, and Newt had been in a daze from all there was to see.

Once, too, he had gone with Deets and Pea to deliver a small bunch of horses to Matagorda Bay, and had seen the great gray ocean. Then, too, he had felt dazed, staring at the world of water.

But even the sight of the ocean had not stirred him so much as the thought of the north. All his life he had heard talk of the plains that had no end, and of Indians and buffalo and all the creatures that lived on them. Mr. Gus had even talked of great bears, so thick that bullets couldn't kill them, and deerlike creatures called elk, twice the size of ordinary deer.

Now, in only a few days, he would be going north, a prospect so exciting that for hours at a stretch he was taken away from himself, into imaginings. He continued to do his normal work, although his mind wasn't really on it. He could imagine himself and Mouse out in a sea of grass, chasing buffalo. He could scare himself to the point where his breath came short, just imagining the great thick beans.

Before the Irishmen had been there a week, he had made friends with Sean O'Brien. At first the conversation was one-sided, for Sean was full of worries and prone to talking a blue streak; once he found that Newt would listen and not make fun of him, the talk gushed out, most of it homesick talk. He missed his dead mother and said over and over again that he would not have left Ireland if she hadn't died. He would cry immediately at the thought of his mother, and when Newt revealed that his mother was also dead, the friendship became closer.

"Did you have a pa?" Newt asked one day, as they were resting by the river after a stretch of branding.

"Yes, I had one, the bastard," Sean said grimly. "He only came home when he was a mind to beat us."

"Why would he beat you?" Newt asked.

"He liked to," Sean said. "He was a bastard, Pa. Beat Ma and all of us whenever he could catch us. We laid for him once and was gonna brain him with a shovel, but he was a lucky one. The night was dark and we never seen him."

"What happened to him?" Newt asked.

"Ha, the drunkard," Sean said. "He fell down a well and drownded. Saved us killing him and going to jail, I guess."

Newt had always missed having a father, but the fact that Sean spoke so coldly of his put the matter in a different light. Perhaps he was not so unlucky, after all.

He was riding around the herd when Jake Spoon trotted past on his way to Lonesome Dove.

"Going to town, Jake?" Newt asked.

"Yes, I think I will," Jake said. He didn't stop to pass the time; in a second he was out of sight in the shadows. It made Newt's spirits fall a little, for Jake had seldom said two words to him since he came back. Newt had to admit that Jake was not much interested in him, or the rest of them either. He gave the impression of not exactly liking any thing around the Hat Creek outfit.

Listening to the talk around the campfire at night, Newt learned that the cowboys were unanimously hostile to Jake for fixing it so that Lorena was no longer a whore. Dish, he knew, was particularly riled, though Dish never said much when the other boys were talking about it:

"Hell," Needle said, "there never was but one thing worth doing on this border, and now a man can't even do that."

"A man can do it plenty over in Mexico," Bert observed. "Cheaper too."

"That's what I like about you, Bert," Augustus said, as he whittled a mesquite twig into a toothpick. "You're a practical man."

"No, he just likes them brown whores," Needle said. Needle kept a solemn look on his face at all times, seldom varying his expression.

"Gus, I've heard it said you had a fancy for that woman yourself," Jasper Fant said. "I wouldn't have suspected it in a man as old as you."

"What would you know about anything, Jasper?" Augustus asked. "Age don't slow a man's whoring. It's lack of income that does that. No more prosperous than you look, I wouldn't think you'd know much about it."

"We oughtn't to talk this way around these young boys," Bert said. "I doubt a one of 'em's even had a poke, unless it was at a milk cow."

A general laugh went up.

"These young uns will have to wait until we get to Ogallala," Augustus said. "I've heard it's the Sodom of the plains."

"If it's worse than Fort Worth I can't wait to get there," Jasper said. "I've heard there's whores you can marry for a week, if you stay in town that long."

"It won't matter how long we stay," Augustus said. "I'll have skinned all you boys of several years' wages before we get that far. I'd skin you out of a month or two tonight, if somebody would break out the cards."

That was all it took to get a game started. Apart from telling stories and speculating about whores, it seemed to Newt the cowboys would rather play cards than anything. Every night, if there were as many as four who weren't working, they'd spread a saddle blanket near the campfire and play for hours, mostly using their future wages as money. Already the debts which existed were so complicated it gave Newt a headache to think about them. Jasper Fant had lost his saddle to Dish Boggett, only Dish was letting him keep it and use it.

"A man dumb enough to bet his saddle is dumb enough to eat gourds," Mr. Gus had said when he heard about that bet.

"I have et okra," Jasper replied, "but I have never yet et no gourd."

So far neither Newt nor the Rainey or Spettle boys had been allowed to play. The men felt it would be little short of criminal to bankrupt young men at the outset of their careers. But sometimes when nobody was using the deck, Newt borrowed it and he and the others played among themselves. Sean O'Brien joined in. They usually played for pebbles, since none of them had any money.

Talking to Sean had made Newt curious about Ireland. Sean said the grass was thick as a carpet there. The description didn't help much for Newt had never seen a carpet. The Hat Creek outfit possessed no rugs of any kind, or anything that was green. Newt had a hard time imagining how a whole country could be covered with green grass.

"What do you do in Ireland?" he asked.

"Mostly dig spuds," Sean said.

"But aren't there horses and cows?" Newt asked.

Sean thought for a moment, but could only remember about a dozen cows in the vicinity of his village, which was near the sea. He had slept beside their own old milk cow on many a cold night, but he figured if he tried to lie down beside one of the animals they called cows in America the cow would be fifty miles away before he got to sleep.

"There are cows," he said, "but you don't find them in bunches. There'd be no place to put them."

"What do you do with all the grass then?" Newt asked.

"Why, nothing," Sean said. "It just grows."

The next morning, while helping Deets and Pea build the branding fires, Newt mentioned that Sean said he brought his milk cow into the house and slept with her. Deets had a good laugh at the thought of a cow in a house. Pea stopped working for about ten minutes while he thought the matter over. Pea never liked to give his opinion too quickly.

"It wouldn't work around the Captain," he said finally, that being his opinion.

"How long do you think it will take us to get up north?" Newt asked Deets, the acknowledged expert on times and distances.

Though he had laughed about the cow in the house, Deets had not been his usual cheerful self for the last few days. He felt a change coming. They were leaving Lonesome Dove, where life had been quiet and steady, and Deets could not understand the reason for it. The Captain was not prone to rash moves-and yet it seemed rash to Deets to just pick up and go north. Usually when he thought about the Cap tam's decisions he agreed with him, but this time he couldn't. He was going, but he felt uneasy in his mind. He remembered one thing the Captain had drilled into them many times during the rangering years: that a good start made for a good campaign.