True Grit - Charles Portis [76]
I said, “Where can I find this Rooster?”
Movie fans will call to mind the aging John Wayne, who famously portrayed Rooster Cogburn on the screen, but the Rooster of the novel is somewhat younger, in his late forties: a fat, one-eyed character with walrus mustaches, unwashed, malarial, drunk much of the time. He is a veteran of the Confederate Army; and, more particularly, of William Clarke Quantrill’s bloody border gang, notorious in American history for the massacre at Lawrence, Kansas, and also for launching the careers of the teenaged Frank and Jessie James. Mattie runs Rooster to ground in his squalid rented room at the back of a Chinese grocery store. “Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone,” she remarks, disapprovingly and he’s happy enough to take Mattie’s money to ride out after her father’s killer—but not to let Mattie come along.
He sat up in the bed. “Wait,” he said. “Hold up. You are not going.”
“That is part of it,” said I.
“It cannot be done.”
“And why not? You have misjudged me if you think I am silly enough to give you a hundred dollars and watch you ride away. No, I will see the thing done myself.”
Mattie is not the only party after Tom Chaney; so is a vain, good-looking Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf who has already tracked Chaney over several states. LaBoeuf (whose name is pronounced “La Beef,” and who is somewhat overly proud of his membership in the Rangers) wants to team up with Rooster to bring Chaney back alive and collect the bounty. But the dandy LaBoeuf, clanking along in his “great brutal spurs” and “Texas trappings,” is no more interested than Rooster in allowing a fourteen-year-old girl to tag along on a manhunt; moreover, LaBoeuf’s intent is to bring Chaney back to Texas to hang for shooting a Texas state senator in a dispute over a bird dog, a claim which Mattie hotly disputes:
“Haw, haw,” said LaBoeuf. “It is not important where he hangs, is it?”
“It is to me. Is it to you?”
“It means a good deal of money to me. Would not a hanging in Texas serve as well as a hanging in Arkansas?”
“No. You said yourself they might turn him loose down there. This judge will do his duty.”
“If they don’t hang him we will shoot him. I can give you my word as a Ranger on that.”
“I want Chaney to pay for killing my father and not some Texas bird dog.”
“It will not be for the dog, it will be for the senator, and your father too. He will be just as dead that way, you see, and pay for all his crimes at once.”
“No, I do not see. That is not the way I look at it.”
Not surprisingly, Rooster and LaBoeuf contrive to slip away from Fort Smith without Mattie. But she strikes out after them; and as hard as they ride, they cannot lose her. (“What a foolish plan, pitting horses so heavily loaded with men and hardware against a pony so lightly burdened as Blackie!”) Finally, when they cannot get Mattie to turn back, they accept her: first, in anger, as a worrisome tagalong; then, grudgingly, as a mascot and equal of sorts; and at last—as she stands among them and proves herself—a relentless force in her own right.
Like Huckleberry Finn (or The Catcher in the Rye, or even the Bertie and Jeeves stories for that matter) True Grit is a monologue, and the great, abiding pleasure of it that compels the reader to return to it again and again is Mattie’s voice. No living Southern writer captures the spoken idioms of the South as artfully as Portis does; but though in all his novels (including those set in the current day) Portis shows his deep understanding of place, True Grit also masters the more complicated subtleties of time. Mattie, having survived her youthful adventure, is