Charles Portis - True Grit

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Table of Contents

TRUE PRAISE FOR TRUE GRIT

True Grit is when you are a 14-year-old girl from Yell County, Arkansas, and youve just shot a dangerous outlaw and the guns recoil has sent you backward into a pit, and you are wedged in the pit and sinking fast into the cave below where bats are brushing against your legs, and you reach out for something to hold on to and find a rotting corpse beside you and its full of angry rattlers, and then it turns out you didnt kill the outlaw, hes up at the rim of the pit laughing at you, about to shoot youand you dont lose your nerve. Thats True Grit.

ELIOT FREMONT-SMITH, The New York Times

Charles Portis is perhaps the most original, indescribable sui generis talent overlooked by literary culture in America.

RON ROSENBAUM, Esquire

As entertaining and original as any fiction of recent times.

St. Louis Dispatch

One of those rare secret delights... one can recommend to inveterate fiction readers and to those who read only one or two novels a year.

San Francisco Chronicle

Wonderful... a thoroughly engagingindeed a grippingbook and should be enjoyed by people of all ages.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

Its delightful, everything struck me as just right, from the marvelous title and the bulls-eye opening sentence clear through to the last spunky paragraph.

IRA LEVIN, author of Rosemarys Baby

A beautiful, funny, gripping story... True Grit is true genius.

DICK SCHAAP, Book Week

As delightful to a twelve-year-old as to a cultivated adult, True Grit is uproarious high adventure... wooly and credible as Bonnie and Clyde... a yarn with swagger, color, and song.

Saturday Review

True Grit is enthralling.

RICHARD CONDON, author of The Manchurian Candidate

It is a pleasure to be able to recommend a novel wholeheartedly regardless of age, sex, class, color, or country of origin... an instant classic... read it and have the most fun youve had in years, maybe decades.

VIRGINIA PASLEY, Newsday

True Grit is the best novel to come my way for a very long time. What book has given me greater pleasure in the last five years? Or in the last twenty? I do not know... What a writer!

ROALD DAHL

It is a delight. Mattie Ross from near Dardanelle, Arkansas, is here to stay, like Huck Finn.

WALKER PERCY

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Norwood
The Dog of the South
Masters of Atlantis
Gringos

For my mother and father

PEOPLE DO not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her fathers blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.

Here is what happened. We had clear title to 480 acres of good bottom land on the south bank of the Arkansas River not far from Dardanelle in Yell County, Arkansas. Tom Chaney was a tenant but working for hire and not on shares. He turned up one day hungry and riding a gray horse that had a filthy blanket on his back and a rope halter instead of a bridle. Papa took pity on the fellow and gave him a job and a place to live. It was a cotton house made over into a little cabin. It had a good roof.

Tom Chaney said he was from Louisiana. He was a short man with cruel features. I will tell more about his face later. He carried a Henry rifle. He was a bachelor about twenty-five years of age.

In November when the last of the cotton was sold Papa took it in his head to go to Fort Smith and buy some ponies. He had heard that a stock trader there named Colonel Stonehill had bought a large parcel of cow ponies from Texas drovers on their way to Kansas and was now stuck with them. He was getting shed of them at bargain rates as he did not want to feed them over the winter. People in Arkansas did not think much of Texas mustang ponies. They were little and mean. They had never had anything but grass to eat and did not weigh over eight hundred pounds.

Papa had an idea they would make good deer-hunting ponies, being hardy and small and able to keep up with the dogs through the brush. He thought he would buy a small string of them and if things worked out he would breed and sell them for that purpose. His head was full of schemes. Anyway, it would be a cheap enough investment to start with, and we had a patch of winter oats and plenty of hay to see the ponies through till spring when they could graze in our big north pasture and feed on greener and juicier clover than they ever saw in the Lone Star State. As I recollect, shelled corn was something under fifteen cents a bushel then.

Papa intended for Tom Chaney to stay and look after things on the place while he was gone. But Chaney set up a fuss to go and after a time he got the best of Papas good nature. If Papa had a failing it was his kindly disposition. People would use him. I did not get my mean streak from him. Frank Ross was the gentlest, most honorable man who ever lived. He had a common-school education. He was a Cumberland Presbyterian and a Mason and he fought with determination at the battle of Elkhorn Tavern but was not wounded in that scrap as Lucille Biggers Langford states in her Yell County Yesterdays. I think I am in a position to know the facts. He was hurt in the terrible fight at Chickamauga up in the state of Tennessee and came near to dying on the way home from want of proper care.

Before Papa left for Fort Smith he arranged for a colored man named Yarnell Poindexter to feed the stock and look in on Mama and us every day. Yarnell and his family lived just below us on some land he rented from the bank. He was born of free parents in Illinois but a man named Bloodworth kidnapped him in Missouri and brought him down to Arkansas just before the war. Yarnell was a good man, thrifty and industrious, and he later became a prosperous house painter in Memphis, Tennessee. We exchanged letters every Christmas until he passed away in the flu epidemic of 1918. To this day I have never met anybody else named Yarnell, white or black. I attended the funeral and visited in Memphis with my brother, Little Frank, and his family.

Instead of going to Fort Smith by steamboat or train, Papa decided he would go on horseback and walk the ponies back all tied together. Not only would it be cheaper but it would be a pleasant outing for him and a good ride. Nobody loved to gad about on a prancing steed more than Papa. I have never been very fond of horses myself although I believe I was accounted a good enough rider in my youth. I never was afraid of animals. I remember once I rode a mean goat through a plum thicket on a dare.

From our place to Fort Smith was about seventy miles as a bird flies, taking you past beautiful Mount Nebo where we had a little summer house so Mama could get away from the mosquitoes, and also Mount Magazine, the highest point in Arkansas, but it might as well have been seven hundred miles for all I knew of Fort Smith. The boats went up there and some people sold their cotton up there but that was all I knew about it. We sold our cotton down in Little Rock. I had been there two or three times.

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