Streets of Laredo: A Novel (58 page)

But she didn't want to have to be the one to remove Captain Call's leg. Better to travel night and day until they reached a settlement where there was a qualified doctor. The knee looked so bad that she was even indecisive about cleaning it. Still, there was Gus and his death to remember. The clot on the Captain's knee was black.

Lorena thought about it until her mind went numb. She tipped over by the hot fire and slept a little.

In the morning when she awoke, the Captain was looking at her out of feverish eyes. Lorena looked at the leg and then looked away.

"You might bleed to death," she said.

"I didn't yet," Call whispered. "I ain't handsome, like Gus. I've got no women to lose. If I have to be one-legged, I will. I want to live to kill that boy." Lorena felt a flush of disgust. The man was all but dead and might be dead before a day passed, or even an hour. He could barely whisper and his arm was ruined; he had a bullet in his chest that made his breath sound like a snore. Yet he still wanted to kill. The sympathy Lorena had felt for him in his pain, went away. Not all of it, but much of it.

"You ought to think of a better reason to live than killing a boy," Lorena said. "If killing is the only reason you can think of to live, then you might as well die." Call was surprised by the anger in Lorena's voice.

Lorena was surprised by it herself. It came from memories and from times long past, from things she had felt about Gus, and things she had felt about Jake Spoon. The very man before her, Captain Call, the man with the ruined arm and leg and the deep chest wound, had himself hung Jake Spoon, his friend. If Gus McCrae hadn't killed to save her, she would have died alone at the hands of cruel men, long years before. She would have had no husband, no children, no pupils. Killing was part of the life they had all lived on the frontier.

Gus's killings had saved her, but Lorena still felt a bitterness and an anger; not so much at the old, hurt man laying by the campfire as at the brutal way of life in the place they lived.

She and Clara sometimes daydreamed of making a trip to England together to see civilization.

They meant to visit Shakespeare's birthplace, and to see a play. They had amused themselves in the Nebraska evenings by imagining what they would say if they happened to meet Mr.

Browning on the street, or Mr. Carlyle.

Yet here she was, not with Clara in a theater or a nice hotel in London, but on a bleak prairie, with not even one house within a hundred miles, caring for an old killer who wanted her to cut his ruined leg off so he could get well and kill again. She had studied and educated herself, but she had not escaped. When she looked around and saw where she was and remembered why she was there--because this man had taken her kind husband to help him kill a train robber--she felt a deeper anger still.

"I'm tired of it," Lorena said. "I'm tired of it, Captain! You oughtn't to have taken my husband. He's not a killer. You and Gus were the killers. I loved Gus McCrae, but not like I love my husband. Our children love him and need him. You oughtn't to have taken him from us." Call was sorry he had said anything; better to have stayed quiet until he died. Lorena was risking her life to help him, and Pea Eye was risking his life too; and yet he had angered her. There was justice in what she said, too. He shouldn't have taken her husband. He had taken him and wasted weeks of his time and put his life in jeopardy, and for nothing.

"The Garza boy is a killer," he whispered.

"I don't care," Lorena said. "There's killers and killers and killers out here. My husband's got nothing to do with that. You should have let him be." Call remembered the fury Clara Allen had directed at him in Nebraska, as he was leaving her ranch with Augustus's body to bring it back to Texas. Now another woman, and one who was putting herself to great trouble to save him, was just as angry, if not angrier. He didn't know what the flaw was in his speech or in himself that brought up such anger in women.

But the fury was up in Lorena. He saw it in her eyes, in the way her nostrils flared, in the stiff way she held herself.

"You remember what I was, Captain," Lorena said. "I was a whore. Two dollars was all I cost--a dollar on Sunday. I don't know how many men bought me. I expect if you brought them all here, they'd about fill this desert. I expect they'd nearly make an army." Call remembered well enough. Gus and Jake and Dish and many men in Lonesome Dove had visited Lorena. In those days, cowboys rode fifty miles out of their way to visit Lorena.

"But I'm not a whore now," Lorena said.

"I'm a married woman. I'm a mother. I teach school. I didn't stay what I was--can you understand that? I didn't stay what I was!

Clara cared for me, and she showed me a better way." Call didn't know what was wrong. Lorena had clenched her fist, and if he had been well she might have hit him. But the Garza boy was a killer, and a deadly one: he killed frequently and without pity, so far as Call knew. He had been hired to stop the boy's killing. That was his job. Getting well in order to do what he had been hired to do seemed a reason to live; though when he took stock of his actual condition, he knew it was unlikely that he would ever go on the hunt for a killer again. He probably wouldn't live anyway--why was the woman so angry?

"I'll cut your leg off!" Lorena said.

"I'll cut it off now! If you die, then you'll have been killed by a killer like yourself. But if you live, you oughtn't to stay a killer. I didn't stay a whore!" In her anger she thought she could just take the big knife and cut the ruined leg off. But when she actually prepared for the task, she cooled quickly.

Call was feverish and barely conscious. When he saw Lorena take the knife he wondered, in a dim, faraway state of mind, if he should have made the request. He and Gus together had a time getting Dillard Brawley's leg off, and they'd had a saw. A knife wouldn't cut bone.

If the joint was shattered, as it seemed to be, she might cut there. But she would have to nick the knife blade first to make a kind of saw.

"Hit the knife on a rock, hit hard," Call said, weakly. "You need to nick it a little, so it'll saw.

"Once you've nicked it, sharpen it," he added, in a whisper. "There's a whetstone in my saddlebags." Lorena found the whetstone. She hit the knife blade hard against a rock, again and again.

Finally she made a few small nicks along the blade. Then she sharpened the big knife for several minutes. Captain Call had his eyes closed. Lorena hoped he was unconscious.

She filled the coffeepot with water and heated it; then she poured the water over his knee until most of the black clot was gone. She knew she had to cut at the joint, and she wanted to see as clearly as she could.

"Captain, I oughtn't to do this," Lorena said.

"I don't know how to take a leg off." "If I die, it'll be the bullet that killed me, not the knife," Call whispered. "It won't be none of your fault." "That's how you feel, maybe," Lorena replied. "I'm the one that will be doing the cutting.

If this don't work, I'll be questioning my judgment for a long time." Time and again in her marriage, Lorena had watched Pea Eye put off decisions. He would hem and haw, and lean one way and then another, and try to weigh the pros of a given matter against the cons. Usually he would keep on weighing the pros and cons for several weeks, or even months, until one day Lorena would have had enough of his procrastination. She would whirl and make the decision herself, annoyed that she hadn't gone on and made it weeks before.

She was at such a point with the Captain. He was only just barely alive. His leg was ruined. Either she had to carry him on and hope she found a doctor before he died, or she had to cut.

Without speaking to Call again, she made her decision--she'd cut. She grasped his thigh with her left hand to hold it steady, and she cut.

Call moaned; he was too weak to manage a scream. He was in a hazy, hot state. He moaned twice, and then boiling red water seemed to settle over him.

Lorena was glad he was unconscious. She didn't want him looking at her with his feverish eyes while she labored to remove his leg. It was labor, too; the hardest, apart from childbirth, that she had ever done. In no time it seemed she had blood to her elbows. The knife became slippery, so slippery that Lorena had to wipe off the handle several times. The flesh cut, but the bone was unyielding. She sawed and sawed, but it seemed that she was only scraping the bone. The Captain was bleeding heavily again, and it seemed to Lorena that he must be almost drained. He might be bleeding to death even, as she cut.

Lorena became desperate. She began to saw with both hands, bearing down on the knife as hard as she could. Blood ran so thick that she couldn't see the groove where she had the knife. Her arms were weary up to the shoulders from pressing and sawing.

Once when she paused just a moment, the Captain rolled over. She had to turn him back and then wash the blood out and find the cut in the bone. She began to hate the blood: it was everywhere--on her, on her dress, on the Captain's shirt. It made the knife so slippery she couldn't hold it in the groove. She wanted to take a rock and smash the leg off somehow. Her shoulders ached, and a pain shot down her back from the effort of bearing down on the knife. She remembered Clara, and how she had worked when they were pulling a foal out of a young mare. Clara's arms would be red to the shoulder from reaching into the mare to turn the foal. She would go home bloody from her shoulders down, but she never quit and she rarely lost a foal. Lorena knew she couldn't quit, either. She had started and she had to finish. She sawed on and on, though she had little hope that she would succeed or that the Captain would live.

Then Lorena realized she was sawing dirt. It was dirt as soaked with blood as she and the Captain were, but it was dirt. The leg was off. Lorena was so exhausted that she couldn't move. She knew she would have to tear up a dress to make a bandage, for it was all she had. But she was too weak to move.

She didn't know what to do with the severed leg. She had cut it off, but she didn't want to touch it or even look at it. She didn't want to bury it or be near it. What she had done had been too hard. It had brought her so close to death that the thought of death was comforting. She had known that feeling before--life could be so harsh that the thought of death seemed to offer the only comfort. It wasn't good to be so close to death, because death might suck you in. She got to her feet finally, and walked away a few steps to be farther from the Captain.

She felt she wanted to be away from him and away from what she had done.

She walked some distance from the fire and sat down on a large rock. She was covered with the Captain's blood. She didn't know if he was even alive, and she would soon have to go find out. But for a moment she needed to stay apart, for if she didn't she might lose her mind. She had come so close to death that she had forgotten everything else, forgotten that she was a married woman with children to raise. She had to stay apart to remember who she was and what her life was.

She had to remember her children and her husband. She had to pull back from the place of blood and killing.

Lorena sat for nearly an hour, feeling empty. She knew the Captain might be dying-- bleeding to death as she sat--but she could not do a thing about it. She had done what the man had asked.

Most of her life she had struggled to do what some man asked, but she was through with that. She could do no more. Only Pea Eye, her husband, didn't ask her for things she had to strain to do. Pea Eye never asked for anything. Sometimes it irritated her that he asked for so little.

But when she calmed down some, what she felt was a great longing to see Pea, her husband. She needed to see him. Once she found him, then she could rest.

When Lorena stood up again, she found that she had hardly any strength in her legs. It was hard even to walk back to the campfire, but she did.

Captain Call was still alive and still unconscious. She didn't want to touch the severed leg. She pushed it away with a stick, tore up her spare dress, and bandaged Call's wound as best she could. Then she saddled the horses and packed the few things there were to pack. She went to the little creek and filled all the canteens, moving very slowly. She seemed to have no strength.

Getting the Captain on the horse was going to be hard. She began to wish he would just die, so she wouldn't have to bother. Lifting him was very hard, but the Captain roused a little once he was in the saddle.

He steadied himself, though he didn't speak and didn't seem to know where he was. Lorena was not sure he even realized she had cut off his leg.

The leg lay by the smoldering campfire where Lorena had pushed it. Captain Call's boot was still on it. Lorena started to mention the boot, but what good was a boot if you didn't have the leg?

She felt wrong; probably she should bury the leg. But she was too tired, too tired to bury it, or even to mention it. She barely had the strength to tie the duffle to her saddle. Pulling herself into the saddle was hard. When she reached over to take Blackie's reins, she felt a great urge just to put her head down on the horse's neck and go to sleep.

"We go south," Call barely whispered. He saw that Lorena was exhausted. He felt a throbbing pain, but it was less sharp than it had been.

"Captain, I left your leg," Lorena said, as they were starting.

Captain Call didn't hear, and didn't answer.