Comanche Moon (59 page)

Evidence that Woodrow Call harbored no light feeling for Maggie was right before him: Call looked blank and sad, not unlike the way survivors looked after an Indian raid or a shoot-out of some kind.

"I suppose I am a fool," Call said.

"I would never have expected her to accept Jake Spoon." "Why?" Gus asked. "Jake ain't a bad fellow, which ain't to say that he's George Washington, or a fine hero like me." "He's lazy and will shirk what he can shirk," Call replied. "I will admit that he writes a nice hand." "Well, that's it, Woodrow--t's accurate," Augustus said. "Jake's just a middling fellow. He ain't really a coward, though he don't seek fights. He's lazy and he'll whore, and I expect he cheats a little at cards when he thinks he can get away with it.

But he helps ladies with their groceries and is handy at gardening and will even paint a lady's house for her if the lady is pretty enough." "Maggie's pretty enough," Call replied.

"She is, yes," Augustus said. "I will have to say I ain't noticed Jake doing too many favors for the ugly gals." "Damn it, he's taken advantage of her!" Call said. He could think of no other explanation for the situation.

"No, I don't think he has," Gus said.

"I think Jake's been about as good to Maggie as he's able to be." "Why would you say that?" Call asked--of course it was like Augustus to take the most irritating position possible.

"I say it because it's true," Gus said.

"He's been a damn sight more helpful to her than you've ever been." There was a silence between the two men. Neither looked at one another for a bit--both pretended they were watching Pea Eye, who had managed to get the gelding snubbed to the heavy post in the center of the corral.

Call started to make a hot reply, but choked it off. He knew he wasn't really much help to Maggie--z his duties as a ranger captain had increased, he had less and less time to devote to the common chores that Maggie, like everyone else, might need help with. He didn't carry her groceries or help her with her gardening; the fact was, rangering or no rangering, he had never felt comfortable doing things with Maggie in public. If they met in the street he spoke and tipped his hat, but he rarely strolled with her or walked her home. It was not his way. If Jake or Gus or any decent fellow wanted to do otherwise, that was fine with him.

But what Jake was doing now--or seemed to be doing--went well beyond giving Maggie a hand with her groceries or her garden. It bothered him, but he was getting no sympathy from Augustus; what he was getting, instead, was criticism.

"I have no doubt you think I'm in the wrong," Call said. "You always do, unless it's just rangering that's involved." "You're always fussing at me about my whoring and drinking," Augustus reminded him. "I suppose I have a right to fuss at you when the matter is crystal clear." "It may be crystal clear to you, but it's damn murky to me," Call said.

Augustus shrugged. He nodded toward Newt, who still sat on the fence, absorbed by the struggle between Pea Eye and the gelding. The boy loved horses. The rangers took him riding, when they could, and there was talk about finding him a pony or at least a small gentle horse.

"That boy sitting there is yours as sure as sunlight, but you won't claim him or give him your name and you've been small help with his raising," Augustus pointed out. "Pea Eye's more of a pa to him than you've been, and so am I and so is Jake. Maggie would like to be married to you, but she ain't. The only thing I don't understand about it is why she tolerates you at all. A man who won't claim his child wouldn't be sitting in my parlor much, if I was a gal." Call turned and walked off. He didn't need any more conversation about the boy; in particular he was sick of hearing how much the boy resembled him. The business about the resemblances annoyed him intensely: the boy just looked like a boy.

Discussing such matters with Augustus was clearly a waste of time. Augustus had held to his own view for years, and was not likely to change it.

He heard the whirl of a grindstone behind the little shed where the rangers did most of their harness repair and handiwork. Deets was there, sharpening an axe and a couple of spades. The cockleburs were bad in the river bottom where the horses watered --Deets sharpened the spades so he could spade them down and spare the rangers the tedious labor of pulling cockleburs out of their horses' tails, an annoyance that put them all out of temper.

"Deets, would you go get Newt and walk him to his mother?" Call asked. "It's a hot day, and he won't stay in the shade. He'll get too hot if he just sits there in the sun." "That boy need a hat," Deets observed.

The grindstone was the kind that operated with a pedal, but the pedal had a tendency to stick. He had a cramp in his calf from working the old sticking pedal most of the day; but he had an impressive pile of well-sharpened tools to show for his effort: four axes, seven hatchets, an adze, five spades, and a double-bladed pickaxe. Walking a little with Newt would be a nice relief. Captain Call had promised to get him a better grindstone at some point, but so far the money for it hadn't been made available. Captain Augstus said it was the legislature's fault.

"That legislature, it's slow," Augustus often said.

Deets thought probably the reason the legislature was so slow to provide a grindstone was because so many of the senators were drunk most of the time. Deets had had one or two senators pointed out to him and later had seen the very same man sprawled out full length in the street, heavily drunk. One senator had even lost a hand while sleeping in the middle of the street on a foggy morning. A wagon came along the street and a rear wheel passed over the senator's wrist, cutting off his hand as neatly as a butcher or a surgeon could have. Deets had been struggling to extract a long mesquite thorn from the hock of one of the pack mules at the time: he still remembered the senator's piercing scream, when he awoke to find that his hand was gone and his right wrist spurting blood into the fog. The scream had such terror in it that Deets and most of the other people who heard it assumed it could only mean an Indian attack. Men rushed for their guns and women for their hiding places. While the rushing was going on the senator fainted. While the whole town hunkered down, waiting for the scalping Comanches to pour in among them, the senator lay unconscious in the street, bleeding. When the fog lifted, with no one scalped and no Comanches to be seen, the local blacksmith found the senator, still fainted, and, by that time, bled white. The man lived, but he soon stopped being a senator. As Deets understood it, the man decided just to stay home, where he could drink with much less risk.

Now the Captain was wanting him to carry Newt home to his mother, a task he was happy to undertake. He liked Newt, and would have bought him a good little hat to shade him on sunny days, if he could have afforded it. Mainly, though, Deets was just given his room and board and a dollar a month toward expenses--in his present situation he could not afford to be buying little boys hats.

The boy still sat on the fence, watching Pea Eye trying to rope a second gelding, the first one having been firmly snubbed to the post. Call stood watching--not at the boy or the roper; just watching generally, it seemed to Deets.

"Newt wishing he could be a roper," Deets said. "A roper like Mr. Pea." Call had just watched Pea Eye miss the skinny gelding for the fourth time; he was not pleased.

"If he ever is a roper, I hope he's better at it than Pea Eye Parker," he said, before he walked away.

"Yes, he stays here, when I can keep him out of the saloons," Maggie said, when Call asked her if Jake was sleeping at her house.

She didn't say it bashfully, either. Newt had an earache; she was warming cornmeal in a sock, for him to hold against his ear. Graciela had told her she ought to drip warm honey in Newt's ear, but Maggie didn't think the earache was severe enough to risk making that big a mess. In fact, she wondered if it was an earache at all, or just a new way Newt had thought of to get himself a little more attention. Newt enjoyed his minor illnesses. Sometimes he could persuade his mother to let him sleep with her when he was a little sick, or could pretend to be. Maggie suspected that this was only a pretend earache, but she warmed the cornmeal anyway. She did not appreciate Woodrow Call's question and didn't bother to conceal how she felt. For years she had concealed most of what she felt about Woodrow, but she had given up on him and had no reason to conceal her feelings anymore.

"Well, I am surprised," Call said cautiously. He felt on unfamiliar ground with Maggie; possibly infirm ground as well.

She didn't look up when she informed him that Jake was sleeping there.

"I ain't a rock," Maggie said, in reply, and this time she did look up.

Call didn't know what she meant--he had never suggested that she was a rock.

"I guess I don't know what you're trying to say," he said cautiously. "I can see you ain't a rock." "No, I doubt you can see it," Maggie said.

"You're too strong, Woodrow. You don't understand what it's like to be weak, because you ain't weak, and you've got no sympathy for those who are." "What has that got to do with Jake bunking here?" Call asked.

Maggie turned her eyes to him; her mouth was set. She didn't want to cry--she had done more than enough crying about Woodrow Call over the years. She might do more, still, but if so, she hoped at least not to do it in front of him. It was too humiliating to always be crying about the same feeling in front of the same man.

"I need somebody here at night," Maggie said. "Not every night, but sometimes. I get scared.

Besides that, I've got a boy. He needs someone around who can be like a pa. You don't want to stay with me, and you don't want to be a pa to Newt." She paused; despite her determination to control herself, her hands were shaking as she spooned the hot cornmeal into the old sock.

It always seemed to come back to the same thing, Call thought. He wasn't willing to be her husband and he wasn't willing, either, to claim Newt as his son. He knew that might give him a limited right to criticize, and he hadn't come to criticize, merely to find out if his suspicion about Maggie and Jake was true. It seemed that it was true; he had merely been honest when he said the fact surprised him.

"If it makes you think the less of me, I can't help it," Maggie said. "Jake ain't my first choice--I reckon I don't have to tell you that. But he ain't a bad man, either. He's kind to me and he likes Newt. If I didn't have someone around who liked my son, I expect I would have given up the ghost." "I don't want you to give up the ghost," Call said at once; he was shocked by the comment.

"The rangering does keep me busy," he adding not knowing what else to say.

"You wouldn't help me if helping me was the last thing in the world you had to do," Maggie told him, unable to hold back a flash of anger. "You don't know how to help nobody, Woodrow--at least you don't know how to help nobody who's female.

"You never have helped me and you never will," she went on, looking him in the eye.

"Jake wants to help me, at least. I try to give him back what I can. It ain't much, but he's young. He may not know that." "Yes, young and careless," Call said. "It would be a pity if he compromised you." Without hesitating Maggie threw the panful of hot cornmeal at him. Most of it missed but a little of it stuck to the front of his shirt. Woodrow looked as startled as if an Indian with a tomahawk had just popped out of the cupboard; as startled, and more at a loss. An Indian he could have shot, but he couldn't shoot her and had no idea what to say or do. He was so surprised that he didn't even bother to brush the cornmeal off his shirt.

Maggie didn't say anything. She was determined that he would at least answer her act, if he wouldn't answer her need. She set the pan back on the stove.

"Well, that was wasteful," Woodrow Call said finally. He recovered sufficiently to begin to brush the cornmeal off his shirt. Maggie didn't seem to be paying much attention to him.

She dipped a cup into the cornmeal and scooped out enough to replace what had been in the pan.

Graciela had been dozing on her little stool at the back of the kitchen--she was often there, making tortillas, such good ones that Newt was seldom seen without a half-eaten tortilla in his hand or his pocket. Something had awakened Graciela, Call didn't know what, for Maggie had not raised her voice before she threw the cornmeal.

Graciela looked shocked, when she saw him with cornmeal on his shirt--she put a hand over her mouth.

"I see that I have upset you," Call added, perplexed and a good deal shocked himself. One reason he had grown fond of Maggie Tilton, and a big reason he stayed fond, was that she behaved so sensibly. In that respect he considered her far superior to Gus's old love Clara, who never behaved sensibly and was rarely inclined to restrain her emotions. Certainly Clara had been competent at arithmetic--he had never caught her in an error on a bill--but that didn't keep her from being prone to wild rages and fits of weeping. Maggie had always been far more discreet about her feelings; she had mainly managed to keep her sorrows and even her annoyances to herself.

Now, though, she had done something foolish, and, to make matters worse, had done it in front of Graciela. He knew that Mexican women were prone to gossiping--white women, of course, were hardly immune to such activity--and he was vexed to think that the story of what Maggie had just done, an act most uncharacteristic of her, would soon be talked about all over town.

But the fact was, she had; the deed was done.

Call picked up his hat and sat a coffee cup that he had been holding on the counter.

"I regret that I upset you," he said. "I suppose I had better just go." He waited a minute, to see if Maggie would apologize, or explain her action in any way; but she did neither. She just went on with her task. Except for a spot of red on each cheekbone, no one would suppose that she was feeling anything out of the ordinary. Call had rather expected that she would quickly regret her action and come over and brush the cornmeal off his shirt and trousers; but she showed no inclination to do that, either.