Book 98: Dead Man's Walk

Written by Larry McMurtry

I read Lonesome Dove last year and enjoyed it - although couldn’t shed the thought that compared to McCarthy’s best work, it lagged behind. Still, it was a pleasure to revisit Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call in Dead Man’s Walk - a novel that McMurtry wrote after Lonesome Dove but centers on his beloved characters in their youth. I plan to finish the four Lonesome Dove books next year and hopefully read some others by McMurtry.

Favorite Passages:

THE NORTH WIND BLEW harder, hurling the sands and soils of the great plain of Texas toward Mexico. It soon obliterated vision. Shadrach and Major Chevallie, mounted, could not see the ground. Men could not see across the campfire. Call found his rifle, but when he tried to sight, discovered that he could not see to the end of the barrel. The sand peppered them like fine shot, and it rode a cold wind. The horses could only turn their backs to it; so did the men. Most put their saddles over their heads, and their saddle blankets too. Matilda’s bloody turtle shell soon filled with sand. The campfire was almost smothered. Men formed a human wall to the north of it, to keep it from guttering out.

When the tired troop made its way into the village of Las Palomas, the doves for which the village was named were whirling over the drying corn, its shuck now brittle from the frost. An old man milking a goat at the edge of the village jumped up when he saw the strangers coming. A priest came out of the little church, and immediately went back in. In a moment, a bell began to ring, not from the church, but from the center of the village, near the well. Some families came out of the little houses; men and women stopped what they were doing to watch the dirty, weary strangers walk into their village. To the village people they looked like ghosts—men so strange and haggard that at first no one dared approach them. The Mexicans’ uniforms were so dirty and torn that they scarcely seemed like uniforms.

Gus was transfixed; he liked singing, himself, and could bawl out a tune with the best of them when he was drunk; but what he heard that day, as the bodies of his comrades were waiting to be loaded into an oxcart, was like no singing he had ever heard, like none he would ever hear again. The lady in black gripped the railing of the balcony as she sang. As she was finishing her song, the notes dipped down low—they carried a sadness that was more than a sadness at the death of men; rather it was a sadness at the lives of men, and of women. It reminded those who heard the rising, dipping notes, of notes of hopes that had been born, and, yet, died; of promise, and the failure of promise. Gus began to cry; he didn’t know why, but he couldn’t stop, not while the song continued.