Streets of Laredo: A Novel (3 page)

"I'll help you, Ma, while Pa's gone," Clarie said.

"Why, yes, you'll help me, when you can spare the time from Roy Benson," Lorena said. Clarie was a young woman, and the cowboys were already coming around.

The gawky Benson boy was particularly attentive.

"Oh, Ma, don't talk about him," Clarie protested, embarrassed.

"Like I say, it's cash money," Pea Eye said, feeling that his problem had somehow been forgotten. It was often that way with women, it seemed. One minute Lorie would be drilling holes in him with her eyes, and the next minute she and Clarie would be combing one another's hair and singing tunes.

"We heard you," Lorena said. It was true that her wages for the schoolteaching were apt to be a side of beef or hand-me-down clothes for the children, or a horse that was getting along in years and might do to pull her buggy. Her wages were likely to be whatever folks could spare. It was a fair arrangement; indeed, the only possible arrangement in a place where there were still only a scattering of homesteads and not many settlements.

Pea Eye had only brought up the cash money in order to remind Lorena that the Captain didn't expect him to work for nothing. Having cash money never hurt.

Another bad aspect of the bandit-catching trips was that the very fact Lorena had secured enough education to become a schoolteacher, caused some tension between Pea Eye and the Captain. Lorena's educational accomplishments filled Pea Eye with pride, and he liked to talk about them. It was Clara Allen, the woman who sheltered Lorena in Nebraska, who had seen to it that Lorena learned to read and write and figure. Perhaps that was why the Captain got so stiff every time Pea Eye bragged about his smart wife. Clara and the Captain rubbed one another the wrong way. That was no reason, though, in Pea Eye's view, why he should be any less proud of Lorena's scholarly skills.

Clara had gone all the way to St. Louis to find acceptable teachers for Lorena, and of course, the teachers were expected to instruct Clara's two daughters as well. Clara boarded the teachers in her own home, often for months at a stretch. Betsey, her oldest daughter, had even married one of them.

Everyone agreed that Lorena was the sharpest pupil in that part of Nebraska. For a time, Clara ordered books for her, but soon Lorena was ordering them for herself. It was a proud day for all concerned when Lorena received her diploma from the correspondence college in Trenton, New Jersey.

Once they bought the farm in Texas the neighbors soon found out about Lorena's diploma, and they promptly persuaded her to teach their children. Her first classes were held in a barn.

Charles Goodnight rode by one day, saw her teaching in the cold, drafty barn, and wrote a check on the spot sufficient to allow the community to construct a one-room schoolhouse on a bluff overlooking the Red River. The school was a five-mile buggy ride each way from their farm, but Lorena drove it without complaint. When their babies came she took them with her, lining an old cartridge case with quilts to make a crib.

To Pea Eye, and to many citizens of the plains, it was impressive that Lorena would care enough about her teaching to bounce her children ten miles over the prairie every day. She didn't want to disappoint her pupils, most of whom could only expect three or four years of schooling at best.

Once the boys got to be nine or ten, they would be needed for work. The Benson boy who liked Clarie so much was still in school at fourteen, but that was exceptional. Even the girls would be needed in the fields by the time they were eleven or twelve.

Lorena thought Captain Call resented the fact that his old partner, Gus McCrae, had left her his half of the proceeds from the herd the Hat Creek outfit had trailed from Texas to Montana. Lorena's half didn't amount to that much money--not enough to resent, in Pea Eye's view. The whole Montana scheme had collapsed in less than two years. Gus was killed before they even established the ranch. Dish Boggett, their top hand, quit the first winter. The Captain left that spring. Newt--the Captain's son, most people thought, although the Captain himself had never owned to it--had been killed late in the summer when the Hell Bitch, the mare the Captain gave him, reared and fell back on him. The saddle horn crushed his rib cage, and crushed his heart as well. It was the view of everyone who knew horses that, while an able ranch manager, Newt was much too inexperienced to trust with a horse as mean and as smart as the Hell Bitch. Still, the Captain had given Newt the horse, and Newt felt obliged to ride her. He rode her, and one day she killed him, just as Lippy and Jasper and one or two others had predicted she would.

After Newt's death the ranch soon fell inffdisorder; the Captain had to come back and sell it. Cattle prices were down, so he didn't get much, but Lorena's half enabled her and Pea Eye to buy the farm in Texas.

Lorena's view, expressed to Clara, not to Pea, was that the Captain wasn't prepared to forgive her hard past.

"He don't think whores should become schoolteachers," she said.

To Pea Eye, Lorena advanced a different theory.

"He didn't like it that Gus liked me," she said. "Now that you married me I've taken two men from him. I took Gus and then I took you.

He'll never forgive it, but I don't care." Pea Eye preferred to put such difficult questions out of his mind. With so much farm work to do and no one to do it but himself--none of the boys was old enough to plow--he had little time to spare for speculation.

If he had more time, he wouldn't have used it trying to figure out why the Captain did things the way he did, or why he liked people or didn't like people.

The Captain was as he was, and to Pea Eye, that was just life. Lorena and Clara could discuss it until they were blue in the face: no talk would change the Captain.

It bothered Pea Eye considerably that the Captain had never ridden over to see their farm or meet their children. His shack on the Goodnight place was not that far away. Pea Eye was proud of the farm and doubly proud of his children. He would have liked to introduce the Captain to his family and show him around the farm.

Instead, in only half an hour, he would have to leave his wife and children to go help a man who didn't like his wife and had never met his children. The thought made Pea Eye sick at heart.

Catching bandits was tricky work. There was no telling how long it might take. Little Laurie was tiny. She had come nearly a month early and was going to have to struggle through a bitter Panhandle winter. Pea Eye loved little Laurie with all his heart. He thought she looked just like her mother, and could not get enough of looking at her.

He had bought a rabbit fur robe from an old deaf Kiowa man who lived on the Quitaque.

The robe made a nice warm lining for the cartridge-box crib. Lorena kept assuring him that it was a snug enough crib now that it was lined with rabbit fur, but still Pea Eye worried. The cold was bitter. Winter never failed to carry off several little ones from neighboring farms and ranches.

Pea Eye had many dreams in which little Laurie died. It tormented him to think she might not be there to look at when he returned.

For days he had been choking his fear down--no need to burden Lorie with his worries--but suddenly, kneeling on the kitchen floor and trying unsuccessfully to wipe up the spilled coffee, fear and sadness came rushing up from inside him, too swiftly and too powerfully for him to control.

"I don't want to go, this time!" he said.

"What if Laurie dies while I'm gone?" He thought Lorena would be mighty surprised to hear him say that he didn't want to go with the Captain. Never before had he even suggested that he might not accompany Captain Call if the Captain needed him.

Lorena didn't seem surprised, though.

Perhaps she was too busy with Laurie. Because Laurie was so tiny, she was a fitful nurser, giving up sometimes before she had taken enough milk to satisfy her. Lorie had just given her the breast again, hoping she would take enough nourishment to keep her asleep for a while.

"What if we all died, while you was gone?" Lorena asked, calmly. She didn't want any agitated talk while the baby was at the breast. But her husband had to be very upset to say such a thing, and she didn't want to ignore his distress, either.

"Well, I'd never get over it, if any of you died," Pea Eye said.

"You would--people get over anything--I've got over worse than dying myself, and you know it," Lorena said. "But that's in the past. You don't need to worry so much. I'm not going to die, and I won't let this baby die, either. I won't let any of our children die." Pea Eye stood up, but despite Lorie's calm words, he felt trembly.

He felt he could trust Lorie--if she said she'd keep their family alive, he knew she would do her best. But people did their best and died anyway. Sometimes their children outlived them. That was the natural order; but sometimes, they didn't. He knew Lorie meant well when she told him not to worry, but he also knew that he would worry anyway.

The Captain would be unlikely to sympathize, because he didn't understand it. Captain Call had always been a single man. He had no one to miss, much less anyone to worry about.

"I never finished cleaning those guns," Pea Eye said distractedly, looking down at his wife. August, the youngest boy, not yet two, came wandering into the kitchen just then. He was rubbing his eyes with his fists.

"Hongry," he said, only half awake.

He began to crawl into his mother's lap.

"You cleaned them enough to smell like gun grease all night," Lorena said. August had a runny nose, and she held out her hand for Pea Eye's rag.

"This is a dishrag," he said, still distracted.

"It was--now it's a snot rag," Lorena said. August arched his back and tried to duck away--he hated having his nose wiped. But his mother was too skilled for him. She pinned him to her with an elbow and wiped it anyway.

"You should take care of your weapons, if you're going after a killer," she said. "I don't want you neglecting important things, even if I complain about you being smelly." "I don't want to go," Pea Eye said.

"I just don't want to go, this time." There was a silence, broken only by August's whimpering, and the soft sucking sound the baby made as she drew on the nipple. Pea Eye had just said the words Lorena had long hoped to hear, but the fact was, she hadn't gotten her sleep out--she was drowsy and would have liked to go back to bed.

It was a hopeless wish. August was up, and Ben and Georgie would be crawling out of bed any time.

Whether she liked it or not, the day had begun.

She had long resented Pea Eye's blind loyalty to the Captain but knew there was nothing she could do about it. Mainly, she just tried to shut her mind to it.

Clara had told her that was how it would be, but Clara had advised her to marry Pea Eye anyway.

"He's simple--sometimes that's good," Clara said. "He's gentle, too, but he's not weak.

His horses respect him. I tend to trust a horse's respect.

"He doesn't talk much, though," she added.

"I don't care whether he talks or not," Lorena said. "I wouldn't marry a man just for conversation. I'd rather read, now that I know how, than listen to any man talk." "You're going to have to propose to Pea Eye, you know," Clara said. "He has no inkling that you want him. I doubt it's ever crossed his mind, that he could aspire to a beauty like you." Pea Eye had been working for Clara about a year, at that time. July Johnson, the former sheriff from Arkansas who had loved Clara deeply but failed to win her, drowned trying to ford the Republican River with a herd of seventy young horses. July had no judgment about horses, or water, or women, as it turned out. His son, Martin, was going to know more, but that was because Martin had her to teach him, Clara reflected.

After Newt's death and the breakup of the Hat Creek outfit, Pea Eye had drifted south, meaning to descend the ladder of rivers until he got home to Texas. But, as luck would have it--the best piece of luck in his whole life, in his view--he showed up in Ogallala at a time when Clara was shorthanded, and she hired him on the spot.

Out her window, as she was advising Lorena to marry him, Clara could see Pea Eye in the lots, trying to halter-break a young sorrel colt. Of course, Pea Eye was older; too old, in a way, for Lorena. But people couldn't have everything. Clara herself would have liked a husband.

She considered herself to be reasonably good-looking, she attempted to be considerate, and thought she was tolerably easy to get along with. But she had no husband, and no prospects. Decent men were scarce, and she knew that Pea Eye was a decent man. Lorena had little to gain by waiting for someone better to come along, and Clara told her so.

Looking at her husband, so shaky from the thought of leaving her that he could barely stand up, Lorena knew that Clara Allen had been right. He was loyal to her, and loyalty from men was a rarity in her life. Even Gus McCrae, her greatest love, had really been in love with Clara and would have left her to marry Clara, if he could have persuaded Clara to have him. Someday, Lorena imagined, some bandit would finally outshoot Captain Call, and she would finally have Pea Eye all to herself--if he could just stay alive, in the meantime.

Coffee was still dripping off the table--Pea Eye had made a poor job of wiping up his spill. He patted August on the head and left the room. In a few minutes he came back, wearing his hat and carrying his slicker. He didn't have his guns.