One day, Famous Shoes decided to approach Pea Eye, who was outside mending a stirrup.
'I want to go to the Madre and visit the eagles,' Famous Shoes told him. 'If you don't want to pay me my wages in money, I will take the great eye instead.' 'The great what?' Pea Eye asked.
'The great eye that Joey used,' Famous Shoes replied. 'It is tied to his saddle.' 'Oh, that old spyglass,' Pea Eye said.
'Nobody's using it--I sure don't want to drag that thing around. I guess you can just have it, if that's what you want.' Famous Shoes could scarcely believe his good fortune. Billy Williams was at the cantina.
Lorena had gone to the river with Rafael and Teresa to wash clothes. He went at once to the little shed and took the great eye.
Captain Call had his eyes shut, and he breathed hard, like a sick calf. White men had the habit of staying alive too long, in Famous Shoes' opinion. Captain Call ought to send his spirit on, now. It was time for him to visit the other place. He might find his leg and his arm, if he went there.
Without delay Famous Shoes left for the Madre, carrying the great eye. Now he would be able to see as well as the eagles; now he could track them through the sky.
Pea Eye was through with his crutch before the Captain attempted to use his for the first time.
Call was so sad that it was hard to be around him.
Lorena finally cleaned out the little room that had been Maria's, and made him a bed in there. Too much had to be done, in the other room. She had to cook and clean, tend to the two children, feed Billy and Pea and the Captain--when the Captain would eat.
Having to walk around the silent, suffering old man every time she needed to do something was beginning to get on Lorena's nerves. When they got him home to the farm, Pea would have to build him a room of some kind, away from the house. With two more children in their home, there would have to be some expansion anyway. Lorena accepted that they would have to care for Call--he had no one else--but she didn't want him sitting in her kitchen, hour after hour every day, looking as if he hated life. It would be bad for her children, and her own nerves couldn't take it. She ran a happy household, usually; she was not going to dampen her children's liveliness because of Captain Call's grief.
Once she installed him in Maria's bedroom, things were better. Teresa became his sole attendant: she didn't like for anyone but herself to go into Call's room, and Call didn't welcome others, either. Pea Eye would come in once in a while and attempt to talk to him, but Call scarcely responded. The events of the past weeks were twisted in his mind, like a rope that had not been coiled properly. He wanted to remember things clearly, to backtrack through the pursuit of Joey Garza until he located the moment of failure. But the effort was discouraging; he had followed up the available clues and deployed his resources in what seemed like an intelligent way. Perhaps he should not have let himself be distracted by Mox Mox. If he hadn't, though, Jasper Fant's two children would have died, and others as well, very likely. By most reckonings, Mox Mox was worse than Joey Garza had been.
What it came down to, Call concluded, was this: on the morning when he was injured, his eyesight had failed him. He hadn't once suspected that the buckskin horse was hobbled. He ought to have been alert to that possibility, but all he had seen were two horses grazing. His eyes had simply failed him. Horses moved differently, when they were hobbled. Earlier in his life, his eyes would have detected the difference. As it was, they hadn't.
He should have had spectacles, but it had never occurred to him that his vision had fallen off so. He had always trusted his senses and had not expected any of them to fail him. To reflect that a cheap pair of spectacles might have prevented the loss of his arm and his leg was bitter knowledge, and he could not stop himself from brooding about it. His eyes had cost him himself: that was how he came to view it.
Because of his untrustworthy eyes, he had been reduced to what he was now, a man with two crutches, a man who could not mount a horse.
Some days, all the Captain did was wait for Teresa. When she was with him, he sometimes stopped thinking about his mistakes. Teresa would be outside with the goats and the chickens, and would come back to him with news of their activities. The old hen with the broken beak had caught a large lizard. One of the little goats had stepped in a hole and a snake had bitten it. Now, they were waiting to see if the kid would live or die. Rafael was upset, and they listened to his moaning through Call's little window.
'Do you think it will die?' Teresa asked him.
She had brought him his coffee.
'Probably it will, if it was small,' Call said.
'If it dies, I hope it will see my mother,' Teresa said. 'She is with the dead. My mother will take care of Rafael's goat.' 'I expect she will,' Call replied.
It was almost another month before Captain Call became strong enough to travel the rough wagon road to Fort Stockton. Pea Eye was in a fever of impatience to get home to his children. In all his years with the Captain, he had never known him to be sick. Of course, he realized that being shot three times with a high-powered rifle would set a person back considerably; he had been shot himself and knew what it was to feel poorly. But he was so accustomed to seeing the Captain well and hardy that it was difficult for him to accept the fact that Call simply would not become hardy again.
Pea Eye asked Lorena so often when she thought the Captain would be ready to travel that she finally lost her temper.
'Stop asking me that!' she snapped. 'You ask me that five or six times a day and I've been telling you five or six times a day that I don't know. I don't have any idea when he can travel. All you have to do is look at him to know he's not able, yet. When that will change I don't know!' 'I won't ask no more if I can help it, honey,' Pea Eye replied, meekly.
'You'd better help it!' Lorena told him.
The thought of taking the old, ruined man into her household worried her more and more. Teresa cared for him almost entirely. Call made it clear that he didn't welcome anyone else's help. Her boys were no respecters of others' wishes, though --they had always been curious about Captain Call, and they were not likely to be easily shut out. They would have to build Call a room of his own --but where the money would come from, Lorena didn't know.
Rafael had been more affected by Maria's death than the little girl seemed to be. Lorena had taken a liking to
