Lonesome Dove

After she has been impregnated, Maggie is left by Call and she then dies in childbirth. She dies heartbroken. But then what is to become of the child? Although the child, a boy named Newt, is raised well by Gus and Call, he is kept in the dark about who his father is. Call does not want a child, he never has. Newt is left to crave a father’s love for his entire life. “‘A promise is a promise,’ Call said. ‘A promise is words - a son is life . . .’” are Clara’s wise words to Call as she tries to get him to claim Newt as his son (931). She tries to show him how ridiculous it is for him to carry Gus’s body back to the South but not to allow Newt to know of their kinship. He is willing to go to the ends of the Earth to appease a corpse, but he will
Gus and Clara have one of Lonesome Dove’s most heart-wrenching love stories. After being in love with Clara for fifteen years, Gus finally gets a chance to see her again and maybe even to settle down with her. The tragedy behind this is that Gus is willing to sacrifice everything for who she was fifteen years ago. A lot can change in a year, much less fifteen years, and she could have completely changed, leaving Gus hurt and heartbroken. Luckily enough, she is still the same, kind, respectable women he knew. On the other hand, he could have changed as well. In the fifteen years they were apart, he has had many-a-partner. These feelings might have altered him or his views on Clara, but Gus loves Clara so much that his final wish is to “...be buried in Clara’s Orchard . . . “(877). He loves her so much that his dying wish is to be buried close to where she is. They were able to harbor a nearly perfect environment for love to strive, but it is shattered by Gus’s sudden death, which is also cause for some of the “random violence, personal alienation, and wandering life-style” throughout the novel (166