Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

The Bird of Dawning: A Christmas Story

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colorado-996174_640I wrote this short story last week, when I felt like writing something and knew that it had to be a Christmas story…and perhaps in order to revel in a little vicarious snow and ice. I had run across a favorite passage from Shakespeare quoted in Washington Irving’s Old Christmas, and it inspired me to do a little brainstorming. A Western Christmas story, because I’ve never really tried that before…drawing on that quotation. I decided I’d share it here, even though it’s rather longer than any fiction I usually post on my blog…because it’s Christmas.

As of 2020, this story and four more are now available in the collection Outlaw Fever: Five Western Stories.

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A million diamonds glinted in the smooth, untouched white curve of snow in the basin, struck out by the sun that pierced the bright silver-white sky. The bitter wind whisked across it, kicking up little powdery swirls. Cal Rayburn turned up the collar of his sourdough coat with one hand, hunching his shoulders a little so the collar half covered his ears. He squinted at the blinding-bright landscape, and one side of his cold-numbed lips twisted back a little in a half-smile. Not another human being for miles, but still he fancied he could feel an odd festivity in the air. What did it come from, he wondered? The fields and mountains looked the same as they did every day. If he had not known it was Christmas Eve day, would he still have felt it?

Cal reined his horse to a stop at the crest of a white rise, and looked back over his shoulder toward the rampart of mountains that towered over the line camp. Their white peaks were seamed with black and silver where the wind scoured the snow from the rock faces, their lower slopes heavy with snowy pines. As he looked, a wind roused among the trees of the nearest slope, blowing clouds of snow like white smoke shot with crystal from their laden branches. The beauty of it caught in Cal’s chest and almost hurt. It was moments like these that he didn’t mind being alone out here.

His horse stood hock-deep in the trampled snow, its head tucked down a little against the wind. Cal scanned the empty, untracked basin again—no sign of cattle; they would all be back in the shoulder of some sheltering hill, or deep under the pines. No sign of anything. He smiled, and his lips formed the words softly aloud: “Here shall he see no enemy…but winter and rough weather.”

His horse swiveled a blue-dun ear backward, inquiringly. It was a habit that had grown on Cal from his grandfather. Gramps had always been a well of quotations: poetry, Shakespeare mostly, bits of psalms and other scriptures—an apt phrase for any occasion, and some things that sounded surprising coming from a little dried-up old man who’d been a farmer and blacksmith all his life; but the beauty of them you couldn’t deny. Gramps had set store by that.

“When you got some beauty in your mind, boy,” he would say, “it don’t matter how ugly a place you’re in. You get by.”

Well, there was nothing ugly here…except the aloneness.

[Read more…]

My Darling Clementine (1946)

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In all my years of watching Westerns, this one was somehow inexplicably the one that got away. Honestly, how did it take me this long to get around to watching a 1940s John Ford Western with a cast full of familiar faces? But now that I think of it, perhaps I wouldn’t have appreciated it as much years ago; I think I watched it at just the right time.

This isn’t really a formal review; it’s more of a rambling appreciation—perhaps that suits better, because the film has a rambling, hard-to-identify quality of its own. The basic premise is simple: after the murder of his youngest brother, Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) takes a job as marshal of Tombstone, with his brothers Morgan (Ward Bond) and Virgil (Tim Holt) as his deputies. They form an unlikely alliance with melancholy, alcoholic gambler “Doc” Holliday (Victor Mature), and eventually evidence about the murder leads them into the famous showdown with the Clanton family, led by sinister Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan) at the OK Corral.

If you’ve done any amount of reading about the historical OK Corral shootout, which I haven’t, you’ll know right away that the characters and events presented in this version are largely fictional. And I didn’t mind that. Taking it as fiction frees you to simply enjoy it as such.

I don’t know whether My Darling Clementine is a film that would appeal to every viewer. It’s a surprisingly quiet film, in that it has a rather slow, measured pace; it’s made up of a series of small scenes and incidents that connect loosely to each other. The style reminded me a little of They Were Expendable, another Ford film I love, though the latter has a much stronger thread of actual historical events holding it together. (There’s some visual similarity too—the likeness between these two shots jumped out at me right away.) Much of the dialogue is brief and spare; there is a good amount of time spent in silence, simply observing the actions of the characters. And yet at the same time, it takes the time for a full rendition of Hamlet’s soliloquy, begun with pathetic dignity by an inebriated traveling actor (Alan Mowbray) atop a table in a smoky saloon, and quietly finished by Doc Holliday, in a scene that somehow tells us everything we know or need to know about Holliday himself. (It was a curious coincidence that I had just finished reading Hamlet the very day I watched My Darling Clementine.) The inevitable confrontation with the Clantons is always coming, always hanging in the background, though it’s put aside for quite a while to focus on Holliday and his own troubles.

Yet in spite of its understatedness, or perhaps because of it, the film can still hit hard when necessary. There’s perhaps one of the most shocking murders you’ll ever see on film—not shocking in a graphic sense but simply in its jump-out-of-your-seat unexpectedness and cold-bloodedness (and I even knew that that particular character was going to die; I just didn’t know how and when). The two most tragic moments are silent, framing striking, wordless shots that convey the stunned grief of the characters involved.

Both important female characters are entirely fictional. I really loved the character of Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs)—a young woman from the east, a friend and it is implied once a sweetheart of Holliday’s, who comes looking for him to try and persuade him to return home. She’s sweet and serene (in the loveliest of simple, period-correct hats and dresses, no less) but also quietly practical; she understands people better than her seemingly innocent appearance suggests. She’s not overwhelmed by the roughness of Tombstone, and has sense of humor enough to appreciate Wyatt Earp’s painfully awkward attempts at expressing his admiration for her. I was a bit puzzled at first by the character of Chihuahua (Linda Darnell), who seemed meant to be part Mexican or Indian or both, but whose mannerisms and accent were entirely American. But I thought Darnell did a good job conveying her wistful, jealous love for Doc Holliday, which is evidently not returned in the way she wishes, and her distress and indecision in the scene where Wyatt questions her insistently about an important piece of evidence in the murder case is well done too.

But the real star of My Darling Clementine is the visuals. It’s probably the most beautiful black-and-white cinematography I’ve ever seen (where in the world was the Oscar nomination?). The opening shot of the cattle coming up over the hill with Monument Valley in the background almost literally took my breath away, and throughout the whole movie I just loved looking at it. The atmosphere of the Tombstone scenes is crammed with detail—the night scene where the Earp brothers first ride into town, for instance, the streets seething with activity and raucous with music and voices. Then by contrast, a bright, quiet morning with crowds of the more upstanding settlers walking, riding and driving into town to attend a social on the site of the town’s first church. Every shot is framed in a way that makes you pay attention to detail.

When I finished watching the movie, one of the things it left me wondering was exactly how I would describe it to someone…and yet here I’ve apparently spent a number of paragraphs trying to do just that. Like They Were Expendable, it has a lot of those little moments that get under your skin and make you think about them again afterwards. I can say one thing pretty definitely, though: if you’re a serious Western fan and My Darling Clementine has escaped you for as long as it did me, I certainly recommend giving it a try.

This post is a contribution to Legends of Western Cinema Week, hosted at A Lantern in Her Hand and Meanwhile in Rivendell, so be sure to hop over there and see what movies other participants are talking about!

The Western and an Element of Humanity

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The other day, I was considering the question of why I like some of Louis L’Amour’s books very much, yet others of his leave me fairly unenthused. Mentally comparing a few titles, I recognized a pattern in the ones I found less satisfying: after setting up an interesting situation in the first half or two-thirds of the book, the final section is almost entirely devoted to a long running fight, usually with the book’s hero trying to escape rather large odds of villainy. Any questions or mysteries involved in the plot have either been summarily solved or put aside, and the only question left is one of will-they-escape.

For instance, the last L’Amour I read, The Man Called Noon, started off with a fascinating premise: in the opening sentence the protagonist regains consciousness after a fall to find that he’s lost his memory…and he’s being hunted without his knowing why. The first half of the book, as he tries to piece together the clues to his own identity and stay a step ahead of whoever wants to kill him, is well-constructed and compelling. Then about midway through, the focus of the story shifts a little to a cache of money that the villains of the book are out to get. The young woman who is the rightful heir to the money is unaware of its existence, and when she does find out, doesn’t care greatly about having it; all she wants is her ranch free of the outlaws who have seized control. And that right there is as deep as L’Amour goes—he doesn’t explore in the least the drama inherent in the idea of a girl being unaware of her inheritance, or the moment of her discovering it, or why she doesn’t care about it. The only real reason the hero is fighting from then on is to keep the money away from the villains, who obviously shouldn’t have it, and of course to keep himself and the heroine from getting killed by the villains in the process.

The Man Called Noon was an entertaining read, and yet for me it lacked a certain something that I’ve found in other books, even other books by the same author. And pondering why crystallized some ideas about the Western in my mind. I like Westerns, and I’m no snob about the tropes of the genre—I’ll enjoy a good sharp fight or a suspenseful chase scene as much as anyone, provided it’s not overdone. But for a Western story to really draw me in and make me care about it, there has to be a strong human story underpinning whatever familiar tropes are used. The question of the plot can’t be as simple as whether we’re going to get the stolen money back from the bank robbers, or catch the outlaw who shot a man, or whether the cattle drive will get to Abilene. Who does the theft of the money or the death of the murdered man affect—why—how? Why are the pursuers bent on catching the criminals—simply for justice, or are there personal reasons? Who stands to lose if the cattle drive doesn’t get to Abilene, and what will they lose? Who feels the responsibility for getting it there, and why?

And I realize it doesn’t just work for me this way as a reader; that’s the way my mind works when I’m inventing a story of my own. I instinctively grab hold of the end of it that involves people first. If you can get this kind of thing in your story, and make the reader really care about the characters involved, then I don’t think you have to worry about situations being clichéd. Human nature is capable of infinite variations, and when a gunfight or a chase becomes the stage on which those variations are played out, then a Western can be as compelling a drama as any other genre.

image: Maynard Dixon illustration for The Texican by Dane Coolidge (1911)