Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon

"Nell's gone," Gus added, before Call could ask. "She opened her eyes and died. I never had a chance to ask her if she needed anything. Why will people die on days this pretty?" Sunlight poured down on them; the sky was cloudless and the air soft. No one had an answer to Gus's question. Darkness and death seemed far away; but war had been declared between South and North, and Nellie McCrae lay dead not two blocks away.

"What are you, Gus, Yank or Reb?" Lee Hitch asked, putting the question cautiously, as if afraid of the answer he might receive.

"I'm a Texas Ranger with a good wife to bury, Lee," Gus said. "Will you go find Deets and Pea for me? I'd like to get them started on the grave." "We'll find them--we'll help too, Gus," Lee assured him.

Call and Augustus walked briskly to the lots and caught their horses. It was a short walk to the Governor's office, but if they walked everybody they met would try to sound them out about the war, an intrusion they wanted to avoid.

"Remember what Scull said, when he first told us war was coming?" Call asked.

""Brother against brother and father against son,"' that's what I remember," Augustus replied.

"He was accurate too," Call said. "It's happened right here in the troop, and the news not an hour old." Augustus looked puzzled.

"You mean there's Yankees in the company?" he asked.

"Lee Hitch," Call said. "And Stove is a Reb." "My Lord, that's right," Augustus said.

"Lee's from the North." Governor Clark stood by a window, looking out at the sunlit hills, when the two rangers were admitted to his office. He was a spare, solemn executive; no one could remember having heard him joke. He was patient, though, and dutiful to a fault. No piece of daily business was left unfinished; Gus and Call themselves had seen lamplight in the Governor's office well past midnight, as the Governor attended, paper by paper, to the tasks he had set himself for the day.

In the streets, men, most of them Rebels, were rejoicing. All of them assumed that the imperious Yankees would soon be whipped. Governor Clark was not rejoicing.

"Captain McCrae, how's your wife?" the Governor asked.

"She just died, Governor," Gus said.

"I would have excused you from this meeting, had I known that," Governor Clark said.

"There would be no reason to, Governor," Gus said. "There's nothing I can do for Nellie now except get a deep grave dug." "If I had money to invest, which I don't, I'd invest it in mortuaries," the Governor said. "Ten thousand grave diggers won't be enough to bury the dead from this war, once it starts. There's a world of money to be made in the mortuary trade just now, and I expect the Yankees will make the most of it, damn them." "I guess that means you're a Reb, Governor," Gus said.

"Up to today I've just been an American citizen, which is what I'd prefer to stay," Governor Clark said. "Now I doubt I'll have the luxury. Do you know your history, gentlemen?" There was a long silence. Call and Augustus both felt uneasy.

"We're not studied men, Governor," Call admitted, eventually.

"I'm so ignorant myself I hate to talk much," Augustus said. The remark annoyed Call--in private Augustus bragged about his extensive schooling, even claiming a sound knowledge of the Latin language. When Captain Scull was around, Augustus moderated his bragging, it being clear that Captain Scull .was extensively schooled.

Augustus was not confident enough, though, to attempt a display of learning with Governor Clark looking at him severely.

"Civil wars are the bloodiest, that's my point, gentlemen," the Governor said. "There was Cromwell. There were the French. People were torn apart in the streets of Paris." "Torn to bits, sir?" Gus asked.

"Torn to bits and fed to dogs," the Governor said. "It was as bad or worse as what our friends the Comanches do." "Surely this will just be armies fighting, won't it?" Call asked. Though he had read most of his Napoleon book, there was nothing in it about people being torn to bits in the streets.

"I hope so, Captain," the Governor said.

"But it's war--in war you can't expect tea parties." "Who do you think will win, Governor?" Call asked. He had lived his whole life in Texas. The work of rangering had taken him to New Mexico and old Mexico and, a time or two, into Indian Territory; but of the rest of America he knew nothing. He did know that almost all their goods and equipment came from the North.

He assumed it was a rich place, but he had no sense of it, nor, for that matter, much sense of the South. He had known or encountered men from most of the states--f Georgia and Alabama, from Tennessee and Kentucky and Missouri, from Pennsylvania and Virginia and Massachusetts--but he didn't know those places. He knew that the East had factories; but the nearest thing to a factory that he himself had ever seen was a lumber mill. He knew that the Southern boys, the Rebs, without exception assumed they could whip the Yankees-- rout them, in fact. But Captain Scull, whose opinion he respected, scorned the South and its soldiers. "Fops," he had called them.

Call was not sure what a fop was, but Captain Scull had uttered the ^w with a sort of casual contempt, a scorn Call still remembered. Captain Scull seemed to feel himself equal to any number of Southern fops.

"Nobody will win, but I expect the North will prevail," the Governor said. "But they won't win tomorrow, or next year either, and probably not the year after. Meanwhile we've still got settlers to defend and a border swarming with thieves." The Governor stopped talking and looked at the two men solemnly.

"There won't be many men staying here, not if they're able-bodied, and not if the war lasts as long as I think it will," he said. "They'll be off looking for glory. Some of them will find it and most of the rest of them will die in the mud." "But the South will win, won't it, Governor?" Augustus asked. "I would hate to think the damn Yankees could whip us." "They might, sir--they might," the Governor said.

"Half the people in Texas come from the Northern part of the country," Call observed. "Look at Lee Hitch. There's hundreds like him. Who do you think they'll fight for?" "There will be confusion such as none of us expected to have to live through," the Governor said.

"That could have been prevented, but it wasn't, so now we'll have to suffer it." He paused and gave them another solemn inspection.

"I want you to stay with the rangers, gentlemen," he said. "Texas has never needed you more. The people respect you and depend on you, and we're still a frontier state." Augustus let bitterness fill him, for a moment; bitterness and grief. He remembered the cheap dusty room Nellie had just died in.

"If we're so respected, then the state ought to pay us better," he said. "We've been rangers a long time now and we're paid scarcely better than we were when we started out. My wife just died in a room scarcely fit for dogs." You could have afforded better if you'd been careful with your money, Call thought, but he didn't say it; in fact Augustus's criticism was true.

Their salaries were only a little larger than they had been when they were raw beginners.

"I wouldn't go to no war looking for glory," Gus said. "But I might go if the pay was good." "I take your point," the Governor said.

"It's a scandal that you've been paid so poorly.

I'll see that it's raised as soon as the legislature sits--if we still have a legislature when the smoke clears." There was a long pause--in the distance there was the sound of gunshots. The rowdies were still celebrating.

"Will you stay, gentlemen?" the Governor asked. "The Comanches will soon find out about this war, and the Mexicans too. If they think the Texas Rangers have disbanded, they'll be at us from both directions, thick as fleas on a dog." Call realized that he and Augustus had not had a moment to discuss the future, or their prospects as soldiers, or anything. They had scarcely had a minute alone, since Nellie McCrae got sick.