The Good Life Theme Analysis

The funny thing about Woodrow Call was how hard he was to keep in scale. He wasn’t a big man—in fact, he was barely middle-sized—but when you walked up and looked him in the eye it didn’t seem that way. Augustus was four inches taller than his partner, and Pea Eye three inches taller yet, but there was no way you could have convinced Pea Eye that Captain Call was the short man. Call had him buffaloed, and in that respect Pea had plenty of company. If a man meant to hold his own with Call it was necessary to keep in mind that Call wasn’t as big as he seemed. Augustus was the one man in south Texas who could usually keep him in scale, and be built on his advantage whenever he could.

The business with the Comanches had been long and ugly—it had occupied Call most of his adult life—but it was really over. In fact, it had been so long since he had seen a really dangerous Indian that if one had suddenly ridden up to the crossing he would probably have been too surprised to shoot—exactly the kind of careless attitude he was concerned to guard himself against. Whipped they might be, but as long as there was one free Comanche with a horse and a gun it would be foolish to take them lightly.

He tried to keep sharp, but in fact the only action he had scared up in six months of watching the river was one bandit […]

Even though he still came to the river every night, it was obvious to Call that Lonesome Dove had long since ceased to need guarding.

The Captain was seldom really harsh with him unless he made a pure mess of some job, but the Captain never passed him a kind word, either. The Captain did not go around handing out kind words—but if he was in the mood to do so Newt knew he would be the last to get one. No compliment ever came to him from the Captain, no matter how well he worked. It was a little discouraging: the harder he tried to please the Captain, the less the Captain seemed to be pleased. When Newt managed to do some job right, the Captain seemed to feel that he had been put under an obligation, which puzzled Newt and made him wonder what was the point of working well if it was only going to irritate the Captain. And yet all the Captain seemed to care about was working well.

In fact, though, Gus McCrae was a cool customer—perhaps the coolest Call had ever known—and he had known many men who didn’t scare easily. His disregard of danger was so complete that Call initially thought he must want to die. He had known many men who did want to die—who for some reason had ended up with a dislike of life—and most of them had got the death they wanted. […]

But Gus loved to live and had no intention of letting anyone do him out of any of his pleasures. Call finally decided his coolness was just a byproduct of his general vanity and overconfidence. Call himself spent plenty of time on self-appraisal. He knew what he could certainly do, and what he might do if he was lucky, and what he couldn’t do barring a miracle. The problem with Gus was that he regarded himself as the miracle […].

He didn’t tell Newt all he knew. He didn’t tell him that even when life seemed easy, it kept on getting harder. Deets liked his work, liked being part of the outfit and having his name on the sign; yet he often felt sad. His main happiness consisted of sitting with his back against the water trough at night, watching the sky and the changing moon.

He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness from just the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.

Those feelings hadn’t come to the boy yet.

They had unpacked in the dark and made a mess of it. […] It was plain camping wasn’t a neat way of life. There was no place to wash, and they were carrying very little water, which was the main reason she had refused Jake. She liked a wash and felt he could wait until they camped near a river and could splash a little of the dust off before bedding down.

Augustus watched them eat the poor burned breakfast. It was eternally amusing to him, the flow of human behavior. Who could have predicted Jake would be the one to take Lorena out of Lonesome Dove? She had been meaning to leave since the day she arrived, and now Jake, who had slipped from the grasp of every woman who had known him, was firmly caught by a young whore from Alabama.

“I hope this is hard enough for you, Call,” he said. I hope it makes you happy. If it don’t, I give up. Driving all these skinny cattle all that way is a funny way to maintain an interest in life, if you ask me.”

“Well, I didn’t,” Call said.

“No, but then you seldom ask,” Augustus said. “You should have died in the line of duty, Woodrow. You’d know how to do that fine. The problem is you don’t know how to live.”

“Whereas you do?” Call asked.

“Most certainly,” Augustus said. “I’ve lived about a hundred to your one. I’ll be a little riled if I end up being the one to die in the line of duty, because it ain’t my duty and it ain’t yours, either. This is just fortune hunting.”

“Well, we wasn’t finding one in Lonesome Dove,” Call said.

“Well, I’ll say a word,” Augustus said. “This was a good, brave boy, for we all saw that he conquered his fear of riding. He had a fine tenor voice, and we’ll all miss that. But he wasn’t used to this part of the world. There’s accidents in life and he met with a bad one. We may all do the same if we ain’t careful.”

He turned and mounted old Malaria. “Dust to dust,” he said. “Let’s the rest of us go to Montana.”

He’s right, Call thought. The best thing to do with a death was to move on from it. One by one the cowboys mounted and went off to the herd, many of them taking a quick last look at the muddy grave under the tree.

“Yes, that’s your problem,” he said. “You don’t like buttermilk, or nothing else. You’re like a starving person whose stomach is shrunk up from not having any food. You’re shrunk up from not wanting nothing.”

“I want to get to San Francisco,” Lorena said. “It’s cool, they say.”

“You’d be better off if you could just enjoy a poke every once in a while,” Augustus said, taking one of her hands and smoothing her fingers. “Life in San Francisco is still just life. If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.”

Lorena didn’t answer. She shut her eyes and let Gus hold her hand. She was afraid he would try more […] but he didn’t. It was a very still morning. Gus seemed content to hold her hand and sit quietly.

The thought that Gus was dead began to weigh on Call. It came to him several times a day, at moments, and made him feel empty and strange. They had not had much of a talk before Gus left. Nothing much had been said. He began to wish that somehow things could have been rounded off a little better. Of course he knew death was no respecter. People just dropped when they dropped, whether they had rounded things off or not. Still, it haunted him that Gus had just ridden off and might not ride back. He would look over the cattle herd strung out across the prairie and feel that it was all worthless, and a little absurd. Some days he almost felt like turning the cattle loose and paying off the crew. He could take Pea and Deets and maybe the boy and they would look for Gus until they found him.

“Because of Jake we lost ’em both, I guess,” Dish said. “Jake is a god-damn bastard.”

It was painful to Newt to have to think of Jake that way. He still remembered how Jake had played with him when he was a little child, and that Jake had made his mother get a lively, merry look in her eyes. All the years Jake had been gone, Newt had remembered him fondly and supposed that if he ever did come back he would be a hero. But it had to be admitted that Jake’s behavior since his return had not been heroic at all. It bordered on the cowardly, particularly his casual return to card playing once Lorena had been stolen.

It occurred to her that she had taken a hard route, just to escape July Johnson. Her own folly amused her: she had one thought of herself as smart—but look at where she was. If Dee Boot could see her he would laugh his head off. Dee loved to laugh about the absurd things people did for bad reasons. The fact that she had done it because she wanted to see him would only amuse him more. Dee would tell her that she ought to have gone back to Dodge and asked one of the girls to get her work.

Instead, shew as driving a mule wagon across northern Kansas. They had been lucky and seen no Indians, but that could always change. Besides, it soon developed that Luke was going to be as much trouble as an Indian.

And, as in the rainstorms, his misery increased to a pitch and then was gradually replaced by fatigue and resignation. The sky had turned to grasshoppers—it seemed that simple. The other day it had turned to hailstones, now it was grasshoppers. Al he could do was try and endure it—you couldn’t shoot grasshoppers. Finally the cattle slowed, and Mouse slowed, and Newt just plodded along, occasionally wiping the grasshoppers off the front of his shirt when they got two or three layers deep. He had no idea how long a grasshopper storm might last.

In this case it lasted for hours. Newt mainly hoped it wouldn’t go on all night. If he had to ride through grasshoppers all day and then all night, he felt he’d just give up. It was already fairly dark from the cloud they made, though it was only midday.

And the thing she most wanted to do was plant flowers—flowers that might bloom in the light. She did plant them, ordering bulbs and seeds from the East. The light brought them up, and then the wind tore them from her. Worse than the dirt she hated the wind. […The] wind was endless and fierce. It renewed itself again and again, curling out of the north to take her flowers from her, petal by petal, until nothing remained but the sad stalks. Clara kept on planting anyway, hiding the flowers in the most protected spots she could find. The wind always found them too, in time, but sometimes the blooms lasted a few days before the petals were blown away. It was a battle she wouldn’t give up on: every winter she read seed catalogues with the girls and described to them the flowers they would have when springtime came.

“You beat any woman I ever saw for talking the starch out of a man,” he said, a little perplexed. Despite all the complication, he felt his old love for her returning with its old power. So much feeling flooded him, just looking at her, that he felt shaky. It was a puzzle to him that such a thing could happen, for it was true she had become rather boney and her face had thinned too much, and certainly she was as taxing as a woman could be. And yet the feeling made him shaky.

“Think I’m rough, Gus?” she asked with a smile.

“I ain’t been scorched by lightning, but I doubt it could be hotter than being scorched by you,” he said.

“Still think you’d have been up to being married to me?”

“I don’t know,” he said truthfully.

“I like to keep Woodrow feeling that he’s caused a peck of trouble,” Augustus said. “I don’t want him to get sassy. But I wouldn’t have missed coming up here. I can’t think of nothing better than riding a fine horse into a new country. It’s exactly what I was meant for, and Woodrow too.”

“Do you think we’ll see Indians?” Newt asked.

“You bet,” Augustus said. “We might all get killed this afternoon, for all I know. That’s the wild for you—it’s got its dangers, which is part of the beauty. ’Course the Indians have had this land forever. To them it’s precious because it’s old. To us it’s exciting because it’s new.”

Newt noticed that Mr. Gus had a keen look in his eye. His white hair was long, almost to his shoulders. There seemed to be no one who could enjoy himself like Mr. Gus.