92.

WHEN SALLY AND BETSEY asked her questions about her past, Lorena was perplexed. They were just girls-she couldn't tell them the truth. They both idolized her and made much of her adventure in crossing the prairies. Betsey had a lively curiosity and could ask about a hundred questions an hour. Sally was more reserved and often chided her sister for prying into Lorena's affairs.

"She don't have to tell you about her whole life," Sally would protest. "Maybe she can't remember. I can only remember back to when I was three."

"What happened when you was three?" Lorena asked.

"That old turkey pecked me," Sally said. "A wolf got him and I'm glad."

Clara overheard part of the conversation. "I'm getting some more turkeys pretty soon," she said. "Lorie's so good with the poultry, I think we might raise a few."

The poultry chores had been assigned to Lorena-mainly just feeding the twenty-five or thirty hens and gathering the eggs. At first it seemed that such a small household couldn't possibly need so many eggs, and yet they absorbed them effortlessly. July Johnson was a big egg eater, and Clara, who had a ferocious sweet tooth, used them in the cakes she was always making. She made so many cakes that everyone got tired of them except her.

"I got to have sweets, at least," Clara said, eating a piece of cake before she went to bed, or again while she was cooking breakfast. "Sweets make up for a lot."

It didn't seem to Lorena that Clara had that much that needed making up for. She mostly did what she pleased, and what she pleased usually had to do with horses. Housework didn't interest her, and washing, in particular, didn't interest her. That became Lorena's job too, though the girls helped her. They asked questions all the time they worked, and Lorena just gave them whatever answers came into her head-few of them true answers. She didn't know if the answers fooled them-the girls were smart. Sometimes she knew she didn't fool them.

"Are you gonna marry that man?" Betsey asked one day. "He's already got white hair."

"That's no reason not to marry him," Sally said.

"It is, too," Betsey insisted. "If he's got white hair he could die any time."

Lorena found that she didn't think about Gus all that much. She was glad she had stayed at Clara's. For almost the first time in her life she had a decent bed in a clean room and tasteful meals and people around who were kind to her. She liked having a whole room to herself, alone. Of course, she had had a room in Lonesome Dove, but it hadn't been the same. Men could come into that room-letting them in was a condition of having it. But she didn't have to let anyone into her room in Clara's house, though often she did let Betsey, who suffered from nightmares, into it. One night Betsey stumbled in, crying-Clara was out of the house, taking one of the strange walks she liked to take. Lorena was surprised and offered to go find Clara, but Betsey wasn't listening. She came into the bed like a small animal and snuggled into Lorena's arms. Lorena let her stay the night, and from then on, when Betsey had a nightmare, she came to Lorena's room and Lorena soothed her.

Only now and then did she miss Gus, though then she missed him with a painful ache and felt almost desperate to see him. At such times she felt cowardly for not having gone with him, though, of course, he himself had urged her to stay. She didn't miss the rest of it at all-the cowboys watching her and thinking things about her, the hot tent, the unpredictable storms and the fleas and mosquitoes that were always there.

She didn't miss the fear, either-the fear that someday Gus would be off somewhere and Blue Duck would come back. What had happened had been bad enough, but she knew if he ever got her again it would be worse. Fearing him and missing Gus were mixed together, for Gus was the only person who could protect her from him.

Unlike the girls, Clara seldom asked her any questions. Lorena came to wish that she would. For a while she had an urge to apologize to Clara for not having always been able to be a lady. It still seemed to her a miracle that she had been allowed to stay in Clara's house and be one of the family. She looked for it to go bad in some way, but it didn't go bad. The only thing that changed was that Clara spent more and more time with the horses, and less and less time in the house.

"You came at a good time," she said one day as Lorena was coming in from feeding the hens. It was a task Lorena enjoyed-she liked the way the hens chirped and complained.

"How's that?" Lorena asked.

"I nagged Bob to build this house, and I don't really care about a house," Clara said. "We needed it for the girls, but that wasn't why I built it. I just wanted to nag him into it and I did. The main reason was he wouldn't let me work with the horses, although I'm better with them than he ever was. But he didn't think it fitting-so I thought, All right then, Bob, build me a house. But I'd rather be down with the horses, and now there's nothing to stop me."

Two weeks later, Bob died in the night. Clara went in in the morning to change him, and found him dead. He looked exactly as he had: he just was no longer breathing. He weighed so little by then that she could lift him. Having long concluded that he would die, she had had Cholo bring a pine coffin from town. He had brought it in at night and hidden it from the girls. It was ready.

Clara closed Bob's eyes and sat with her memories for an hour. The girls were downstairs now, pestering Lorena and eating. Now and then she could hear their laughter.

They were happy girls; they laughed often. It pleased Clara to hear them. She wondered if Bob could hear his two lively daughters laughing, as he lay dying. She wondered if it helped, if it made up in any way for her bad tempers and the deaths of the three boys. He had counted so on those boys-they would be his help, boys. Bob had never talked much, but the one thing he did talk about was how much they would get done once the boys got big enough to do their part of the work. Often, just hearing him describe the fences they would build, or the barns, or the cattle they would buy, Clara felt out of sorts-it made her feel very distant from Bob that he saw their boys mainly as hired hands that he wouldn't have to pay. He sees them different, she thought. For her part, she just liked to have them there. She liked to look at them as they sat around the table, liked to watch them swimming and frolicking in the river, liked to sit by them sometimes when they slept, listening to them breathe. Yet they had died, and both she and Bob lost what they loved-Bob his dreams of future work with his sons, she the immediate pleasure of having sons to look at, to touch, to scold and tease and kiss.

It struck her that endings were never as you would expect them to be. She had thought she would be relieved when Bob finally died. She hadn't felt he was part of their life anymore, and yet, now that he was gone, she knew he had been. A silent part, an uncomfortable part, but still there, still her husband, still the girls' father. He had been changed, but not removed.

Now he had gone where her boys had gone. As well as she knew the boys, as much as she loved them, time had robbed her of them. At times she found herself mixing details and events up, not in big ways but in small. In dreams she saw her sons' faces, and when she awoke could not remember which son she had dreamed about. She wondered if she would dream of Bob, and what she would remember if she thought of him in ten years. Their marriage had had few high spots. She had often been happy during it, but not because of anything Bob did. She had had more happiness from horses than from her husband, though he had been a decent husband, better than most women had, from what she could judge.