Old West by Richard Bausch
"Old West" by Richard Bausch presents a reinterpretation of the iconic Western narrative surrounding the character Shane, as recounted by Joey Old West Starrett, the last living witness of the pivotal gunfight depicted in the 1953 film "Shane." The story unfolds when an elderly Joey looks back on his childhood memories of Shane, who returns to the valley after many years. This time, however, Joey learns that the heroic image he held of Shane is a façade; Shane is now a disheveled bounty hunter, struggling with his past and seeking a preacher who may be a fraud.
As Joey navigates his disillusionment, he encounters the Reverend Bagley, whose sermons reflect the moral decay of society, further complicating Joey’s understanding of truth and heroism. The narrative climaxes in a chaotic gunfight, where Joey witnesses the grim reality of violence—contradicting the glorified tales he had spun. Ultimately, Joey confronts the painful realization that his memories and stories of Shane were exaggerated, leading him to embrace a more authentic narrative that acknowledges the true cost of violence and the complexities of human experience.
On this Page
Old West by Richard Bausch
First published: 1989
Type of plot: Psychological
Time of work: 1950
Locale: Somewhere in the United States, probably the West
Principal Characters:
Joey Starrett , an octogenarian storytellerShane , a gunfighter in a filmThe Right Reverend Bagley , the drunken preacher-gunfighter whom Shane kills
The Story
Joey Starrett is more than eighty years old, and has been telling a version of the story of Shane for many years. The film Shane came out in 1953, three years after Joey narrates his story. Joey's version is a correction of the well-known story. What follows is the real story of Shane, told by the only living witness of the famous gunfight dramatized by Alan Ladd and Jack Palance. It did not happen that way, Joey reveals in Richard Bausch's "Old West." First of all, Shane came back to the valley twelve years after he rode out of it, wounded, with little Joey shouting, "Come back, Shane." When Shane comes back, Joey's father is already dead of cholera, and his mother is living with Joey in their now-broken-down homestead. Joey is twenty-one; his mother is crazy and a bit deaf.
A preacher has recently arrived—the Reverend Bagley—who mesmerizes the folk who hang around Grafton's saloon with his sermons about damnation and salvation. Joey's mother is fascinated by Bagley and cherishes a gift from him, significantly, a six-shot Colt. Then Shane rides into town, his buckskin clothes transformed by the years into stinking rags. Shane is fat and bald. He has become a bounty hunter and is looking for a phony preacher who might be Bagley. Shane admits to Joey that since he rode out of the valley he has been living all these years in the next town, only a few hours away. He has been married as well, unsuccessfully. Joey's disillusion is complete.
Joey rides into town and sees Bagley preaching in Grafton's. Bagley is a gifted talker, a role model for Joey, who already is telling people the story of the heroic, younger Shane of the time when Joey was a child. Bagley's sermon warns of evils to come that sound surprisingly like ones that have already come: "Miseries and diseases we ain't even named!" preaches Bagley, half-drunk. "Pornography and vulgar worship of possessions, belief in the self above everything else, abortion, religious fraud, fanatic violence, mass murder, and killing boredom, it's all coming, hold on!" Bagley suggests that Joey's tale of Shane is an exaggeration, that Wilson, the gunfighter whom Shane had fought years earlier, did not have two guns, but only one stuck out of sight in his pants. Bagley throws doubt on the details of the gunfight Shane won when Joey was seven, and seems to know something of gunplay himself. He certainly knows something of wordplay.
Later, Joey drives his mother in to see Bagley, with Shane riding his decrepit horse alongside the buckboard. They ask for Bagley at Grafton's, and the saloon-keeper obligingly directs them to the barn where Bagley is sleeping off another drunk. As they arrive at the barn, Bagley opens fire on everyone, missing Joey and his mother and killing Grafton and Shane, but is killed by Shane. Joey and his mother are unharmed, but Joey, crouching in the wagon, has seen a terrified Shane, ducking bullets like anyone else. The random shots and meaningless violence have made Joey see that his earlier tale of Shane was a lie. It did not happen as it was shown in the film Shane: The hired Wilson did not have two guns, but only one, and he wore it in his pants, as Bagley had said. There was no glory or heroism after all in Shane's fight with Wilson. It was no more heroic than this second gunfight—fatal for Shane—which the disillusioned elderly Joey admits was nothing more than a "stupid, fumbling blur of gunfighting."
Joey survives the gunfight but not his disillusionment, which he has kept at bay through all these years of telling a false version. He now realizes that while he was in the wagon with all of those bullets flying around and thinking he was about to die any second, a small truth came to him: "The story I'd been telling all my life was in fact not true enough—was little more than a boy's exaggeration." Had he told it truer or at least true enough, he would have dispensed with the heroic overlay to Shane's killing of Wilson and concentrated on the terrible cost of such violence. Now, for once, Joey can tell the truth.