A Texan Came Riding by Frank O’Rourke

 

The fresh smell of mint was in the air. Kearney had crushed some between his fingers as he rose from drinking, and he lingered in the juniper shade with lemon sunlight filtering through the branches across his face, remembering other years when fresh, bright smells brought a surge of fresh joy to life. What was it about mint, and mown hay, and honey and apples and spice, that made happiness grow stronger? Was it the simple joy of living fully, or the senses reacting with typical human greed to rich smells? He did not know and he could never make the spent pilgrimage again; youth’s fine-honed edge of enjoyment was dulled beyond full repair.

O’Rourke is easily one of my favorite western authors, yet I must profess an odd relationship with his work.

The opening passage embodies so much of what I love about his work: deeply and richly observed with full sensory involvement.

Add to that the soul of a wistful poet, a man who seems to always remind us, “This moment is all we got, don’t take it for granted.”

The first third of this novel is simply extraordinary, far above formula fare—the problem, and this holds for many of his novels, there comes a point when the author seems to say, “Well, I guess I gotta speed this thing up and get all about the plot.”

It is this rushed feel that disappoints [this reader at least.] Too bad--he plots well, perhaps he simply required longer than the usual 170 pages to say what he really wanted.

With that said, the novel is a fine one, but I prefer the more measured tone that begins it.

Now, let’s forget my quibbles and close with another of his remarkable passages fraught with insight.

Eating, Kearney saw the blindness in the man across the table. Living was nothing more than making the shift from one kind of existence to another. He’d done it, others had, but it seemed that Malcolm cheated because he carried his own personal being from place to place. And that was worse in many ways than such men as Shaffer who, going broke, just picked up the scraps, moved on to another existence, broke completely with the past and made the best of the present. Malcom’s life was empty because Malcolm brought his own world into the personal existence of others and, instead of accepting and respecting their world at least on the surface, laughed at them and imposed his own while making them dry. Malcolm was cheating the world but, ironically, he was cheating himself worst of all. He always had, he always would, and one day when he was an old, old man—if he survived—he would find life so bleak and thin and lonely that his hell on earth would encircle him, and make him yearn for death. And that was just when nature played her trump card on such a man, kept him dangling by one weak heartbeat, one half-ruptured blood vessel, one soft blood clot, until he felt transparent as glass and received less from life for all his fat years than the saddest, poorest man in the world.