The Last Westerner
by chilton williamson jr.
386 pages, st. augustine’s press, $19.95
In his dedication to The Last Westerner, Chilton Williamson Jr. remembers his friend Edward Abbey and hopes that he “would have enjoyed this book.” Abbey died in 1989, but if he had lived, he would have loved it. Not since Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, which I read several years ago, have I experienced this keen a sense of the American Southwest—both the characters suited to it and the land itself as a sculptor of souls. The descriptions in The Last Westerner are extraordinary, never static. Williamson has an acuity of observation that brings the mountains and deserts of the American Southwest fully inside the spell of romance. The pressure and anxiety of contemporary civilized time drop away as the story of fifty-one-year-old Jeb Stuart Ryder—a man not driven by vanity or epic ambition—begins to unfold at the pace of his romance with a beautiful rancher in her thirties, Jody James.
And romance is the word. Williamson takes his epigraph from the twelfth-century writer Chrétien de Troyes, whose Lancelot establishes the ideal of this novel: “He fares well who obeys the commands of love, and whatever he does is pardonable, but he is the coward who does not dare.” A few pages in, Jeb and Jody interrupt a workday to descend a sheer cliff face—the valley floor a thousand feet below—to a marvelous cave that she knows. On his way, Jeb takes his bearings without haste:
The cliff formed the headwall of a narrow box canyon arranged in levels of opposing terraces with box elder, scrub oak, and ponderosa pine growing close against the sheer rock walls. The canyon, cutting raggedly west, became lost in the maze of red and purple slickrock, swales and domes of yellow and white sandstone, and the wilderness of wild forms carved from the level plateau stretching along the horizon.
The reader must slow down to see as he sees—in fact, slow down enough to acknowledge, if only for a moment, the long epochs of wind and weather that did the carving in that “wilderness of wild forms” that also makes men like Jeb Ryder.
A month or so into his romance with Jody, Jeb begins to hope for marriage and children, a desire that she dodges. But just as the disagreement surfaces, someone at a horse show steals Jody’s prize stallion, a Peruvian Paso that Jeb has nicknamed Tortuga because of the odd, tortoise-like gait characteristic of the breed. Formerly a range detective in Wyoming, Jeb offers to find the horse and bring him back, a task complicated by the fact that she never branded the animal. Jeb quickly figures out that two Navajos whom he saw around the pen stole Tortuga, and it does not take him long to find the younger of the pair, the sixteen-year-old John-Wayne Bilagody, with whom Jeb immediately and unexpectedly bonds. Through John-Wayne, Jeb meets Shorty, the older and more criminal of the two, who knows what Jeb is after and spirits the horse away. Jeb recruits John-Wayne to help him find Tortuga, and the two set out together.
It’s part of the wry humor of Williamson’s novel that the young Navajo is named for the iconic hero of movie Westerns, because the real John Wayne’s greatest role as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers loosely maps onto the action of The Last Westerner: Instead of the girl (Natalie Wood) kidnapped by the Comanches, Jody’s show horse is stolen and sold and resold, eventually becoming part of a wild herd that gallops across the desert. A good romance needs a wandering knight, and the quest to recover Tortuga occupies Jeb and John-Wayne for the entire summer of 1999 and well into the fall. Jeb rides a borrowed horse, “a tall white gelding, part Arab, named Quixote.” As they navigate between rattlesnakes (Jeb talks to them, like Ike McCaslin in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses), Jeb and John-Wayne are, in one sense, the chivalric idealist and his canny sidekick.
Jody calls them Tonto and the Lone Ranger. But the parallel that most appeals to me is between Williamson’s Jeb and Twain’s Jim, between John-Wayne and Huck. The Last Westerner often reminds me of Huck and Jim in their great, lyrical descent of the Mississippi on the raft. After Tortuga escapes from confinement and joins the herd of mustangs, Jeb and John-Wayne track him for weeks, camping out at night under the stars, making coffee on the fire, frying up whatever they have to eat, bathing in the shrinking river, refilling their canteens wherever they can, drinking whiskey, telling stories, and talking about their girlfriends. During the chapter when Jeb is recovering from a particularly quixotic attack on some huge satellite dishes (a long story), Williamson gives us John-Wayne’s own Huck-like voice, misspellings and all, to keep the story going until Jeb recovers.
Jeb is escaping like Twain’s Jim, escaping from a culture that he finds increasingly repellent with its consumerism, its shallowness, its judgmental ideologies, its reduction of the wilderness to commodity. Though he does not acknowledge it, he is also escaping from Jody herself, whose modern assumptions and predictable infidelity he has begun to glimpse, though his chivalry—learned from the Arthurian tales he read as a child—will not let him abandon his duty to her. His Guinevere, whom he discovers midway through the action, is a beautiful, strong-willed, upper-class revolutionary named Carmen, whose band of followers has Tortuga in its possession.
Carmen and Jeb fall in love—yes, at first sight. Her beauty and ferocity, not to mention her flamenco-dancing, evoke Bizet’s opera, Federico García Lorca’s duende, and the world of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls in the Spanish Civil War. Slowly and unobtrusively, in good time, through respectful delay in the developing romance of Jeb and Carmen, the deeper themes of the novel develop: the efficacy of politics and institutions, the nature of courage and loyalty, the roots of hatred, the power of love, the difference that a border makes. For much of the second half of the novel, Carmen and her band of revolutionaries try to get back to Mexico from Arizona—that is, to escape from the United States (dodging the border patrol) and cross the border into Agua Prieta, where new rules and other liberties come into play.
The beauties and pleasures of this novel are deep. Alcohol, shall we say, does not fall under reprobation: Hardly a page goes by without a little whiskey to enliven it, and Jeb does not hesitate to share his bottle with John-Wayne after discovering that the boy has been drinking “ever week” with his cousin. The descriptions of music are moving, from Jeb’s harmonica-playing and singing to the wild performance of a strange, hare-lipped, mentally damaged young man named Albert Orsino. Albert plays his guitar and sings to a young girl named Doe, a wild, beautiful thing who appears out of the mountain woods like a nymph and turns out to be his lover. Albert’s singing is “full of defiance and lamentation, brave and joyful and at the same time achingly sad and tragic, with all the suffering of unredeemed nature in it as well as the agony of man.” Doe, deaf and dumb, sits on the bed through it all, “her hands folded decorously in her lap,” before she strips off her smock and lies back “in the altogether.” As Jeb later explains to John-Wayne, “It isn’t that she’s shy or not shy, she’s simply innocent. Completely, utterly innocent.”
Other characters lodge just as vividly in the reader’s memory: a white preacher, utterly corrupt, who runs revival meetings on the reservation; a giant Wild Man who lives alone in the ancient stone houses at the back of a shallow cave and tells the searchers his story; a politician named Quantrill (part of the “Confederate” theme of the novel that includes Jeb’s namesake); the bruja or witch, whom Jeb sees at least three times, though John-Wayne never does.
And rattlesnakes. John-Wayne calls Jeb “the One Who Talks With Snakes” because—well, because he talks to them, even addressing one of them as “Grandfather,” as Ike does in Go Down, Moses. The danger, though, is part of the romance. Albert dies from the bite of a huge rattler that crawled into his sleeping bag.
It’s a rare thing in my experience of contemporary fiction to find myself wanting to reread a novel, but with The Last Westerner I look forward to deepening the first experience, even dipping at random into sections of it. Why “Westerner” instead of, say, “cowboy”? Williamson points to themes that go deep into what we mean by “the Western world.” Allusive and wry, both funny and deeply serious (like Don Quixote), it reaches back through converging traditions to the roots of the novel in medieval romance, while treasuring the world as it is. Who would think that crossing Interstate 10 on the way to Douglas, Arizona, could be full of high drama and chivalry? Williamson mourns our departures—from grace, from decorum, from the respect of form—but even more, he revives what we had taken for lost.
