Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon

Augustus felt stunned--fora moment he was unable to speak. Once, while he was reluctantly trying his hand at blacksmithing, a horse that he was shoeing caught him with a powerful kick that struck him full in the diaphragm. For ten minutes he could only gasp for breath; he could not have spoken a ^w had his life depended on it.

That was how he felt now, standing in the sunny Austin street with Clara Forsythe, the girl he had raced in to kiss only an hour before, holding his hand. The ^ws Clara had just spoken were the ^ws he had long feared to hear, and their effect on him was as paralyzing as the kick of the horse.

"I know it's hard news," Clara said. "But I've made up my mind and it's not fair to hold it back." After leaving Governor Pease, Augustus had gone straight to a barber, meaning to get shaved and barbered properly before hurrying back to Clara to collect more kisses. She had consented to one more, but then had led him out the back door of the store, so that neither her father nor a casual customer would interrupt them while she was telling Gus the truth she owed him, which was that she had decided to marry Robert f. Allen, the horse trader from Nebraska.

Augustus went white with the news; he was still white. Clara stood close to him and held his hand, letting him take his time, while he absorbed the blow. She knew it was a terrible blow, too. Augustus had courted her ardently from the day he met her, when she had been barely sixteen. She knew that, though much given to whoring, he loved only her and would marry her in an instant if she would consent. Several times she had been tempted to give in, allow him what he wanted, and attempt to make a marriage with him.

Yet some cool part of her, some tendency to think and consider when she was most tempted just to stop thinking and open her arms, had kept her from saying yes.

What stopped her was the feeling that had come over her when he rushed off to see Governor Pease: one kiss and then you're gone. Augustus was a Texas Ranger: at the end of the kissing or what followed it, there'd be an hour when he would be gone; she would have to carry, for days or weeks, a heavy sense of his absence; she would have to cope with all the sad feelings that assailed her when Gus was away. Clara was active: she wanted to live the full life of her emotions every day--she didn't like the feeling that full life would have to wait for the day Augustus returned, if he did return.

Almost every time the ranger troop left Austin there would be a man among them who did not come back. It was a fact Clara couldn't forget; no woman could. And she had seen the anguish and the struggle that was the lot of frontier widows.

"If this is a joke it's a poor one," Augustus said, when he could find breath for speech.

But Clara was looking at him calmly, her honest eyes fixed on his. Of course she loved to tease him, and he would have liked to persuade himself that she was teasing him this time. But her eyes danced when she teased him, and her eyes were not dancing--not now.

"It ain't a joke, Gus," she said. "It's a fact. We're going to be married on Sunday." "But ... you kissed me," Augustus said.

"When I came running in you called me your ranger, just like you always do." "Why, you are my ranger ... you always will be," Clara said. "Of course I kissed you .

I'll always kiss you, when you come to see me. I suppose I have the right to kiss my friends, and I'll never be so married that I won't be a friend." "But I'm a captain now," Gus said. "A captain in the Texas Rangers. Couldn't you have at least waited till I got home with the news?" "Nope," Clara said firmly. "I've spent enough of my life waiting for you to get home from some jaunt. I don't like waiting much. I don't like going weeks not even knowing if you're alive. I don't like wondering if you've found another woman, in some town I've never been to." At the memory of all her anxious waiting, a tear started in her eye.

"I wasn't meant for waiting and wondering, Gus," she said. "It was making me an old woman before my time. Bob Allen's no cavalier. He'll never have your dash--I know that.

But I'll always know where he is--I won't have to be wondering." "Hell, I'll quit the rangers if a stay-at-home is what you're looking for," Gus said, very annoyed. "I'll quit 'em today!" He knew, even as he said the ^ws, that it was a thing he had often offered to do, over the years, when Clara taxed him with his absences. But he never quite got around to quitting. Now he would, though, captain or no captain. What was being a captain, compared to being married to Clara?

To his dismay, Clara shook her head.

"No," she said. "It's too late, Gus.

I gave Bob Allen my promise. Besides, being a captain in the rangers is what you've always wanted. You've talked of it many times." "Well, I was a fool," Gus said. "Being a captain just means making a lot of decisions I ain't smart enough to make. Woodrow, he's always studying--let him make 'em!

"I'm quitting, I mean it!" he said, feeling desperate. He felt he had just as soon die, if he couldn't change Clara's decision.

"Hush that--it's nonsense," Clara said.

"I'm promised now--d you think I'm so light a girl that I'd break my promise just because you quit a job?" Augustus felt a terrible flash of anger.

"No, if you promised, I expect you'll go through with it even if it ruins both our lives and his too!" he said.

"You shut up, Gusffwas Clara said, with a flash to match his. "I've been telling you what I needed for ten years--if you'd wanted me enough to quit the rangers you would have quit long ago. But you didn't--y just kept riding off time after time with Woodrow Call. You could have had me, but you chose him!" "Why, that's foolish--he's just my pard," Gus said.

"It may be foolish but it's how I felt and how I feel," Clara said.

She calmed herself with an effort. She had not called him into the street to fight over the disappointments of a decade--though it had not all been disappointment by any means.

Augustus didn't know what to do. Though it appeared to be a hopeless thing, he didn't know how to simply give up. The hope of someday marrying Clara had been the deepest hope of his life. What would his life be, with that hope lost?

He could not even formulate a guess, though he knew it would be bleak and black.

"When will you be leaving?" he asked finally, in a flat voice.

"Why, Sunday," Clara said. "We're going to New Orleans and take the steamer up the Mississippi and the Missouri. It'll be chilly travelling, I expect--at least the last part of it will." Gus felt such a weight inside him that he didn't know how he was even going to walk away.

"Then it's goodbye, I guess," he said.

"For a while, yes," Clara said. "My hope is that you'll visit, in about ten years." "Visit you once you're married--now why would you want that?" Augustus asked, startled by the remark.

"Because I'd want you to know my children," Clara said. "I'd want them to have your friendship." Augustus was silent for a bit. Clara was looking at him with something in her eyes that he couldn't define. Though she had just broken his heart, she still seemed to want something of him--what, he was not sure.

"You're just saying that now, Clara," he said, though he thought his throat might close up with sadness and leave him unable to speak.

"Bob, he won't be wanting me there, and you won't either, once you've been married awhile," he said finally.

Clara shook her head and put her arms around him.

"I can't claim to know too much about marriage yet, but there is one thing I know for sure--I'll never be so married that I won't need your friendship --don't you forget that," she said.

Then tears started in her eyes again--she turned abruptly and walked quickly back into her store.

Augustus stayed where he was for a bit, looking at the store. Whether staying or returning, looking at that store had long filled him with hope. The sight of the Forsythe store--j a plain frame building--affected him more powerfully than any sight on earth; for the store contained Clara.