by Bill Brooks
derly in the big war. For real problems, he suggested
they travel to Bismarck for care. Few saw the reason
to go that far as long as the marshal showed the con-
fidence he did in setting their broke legs, and stitching
up their bad gashes and taking saw blades out of the
gullets of stupid men. Quite a few of them even called
him Doc Horn.
But he disapproved of such appellation and dis-
couraged them from referring to him in that manner.
It didn’t seem to matter to them much if he was a
real doctor or not. They offered him cash money, he
refused. They offered him chickens and baked pies,
some of which he accepted. They offered him to
come to dinner, which he also accepted. He estab-
lished the boundaries of the care he’d provide them,
and rarely broke those boundaries.
Now the Swede woman was in need of him, her
daughter bleeding out, it sounded like, from aborting
a child. He didn’t know if he could save her. Hemor-
rhaging was an evil thing that took the lives of too
many frontier women during or after childbirth. But
he had no choice except to try and save her.
He rented a horse from Sam Toe and rode hard
with the medical bag hooked over the horn of his sad-
dle, met the Swede woman along the road and passed
her without looking back. The homestead was ten or
so miles from town.
He’d asked Sam Toe for his best horse, a racer, as
it turned out, that Sam had just recently purchased
from a Montana cowboy who said he’d made a pretty
good living with that horse running him in stakes
races all over Montana and some into Wyoming. But
the cowboy admitted to having an addiction to
women and liquor and was down on his luck what
with winter coming on and no races to be found and
so sold his fine horse to Sam Toe for fifty dollars, sad-
dle tossed in.
It was a midnight-black stallion with a white star
on its face.
The son of a bitch can outrun the wind, the cow-
boy had bragged and Sam Toe passed on the brag to
Jake when he climbed aboard.
Jake tugged his hat down hard when it proved to
be true and made the Swede’s in under an hour.
2
William Sunday knew even before the physician
told him, that he was dying.
“How long?” he said, pulling up his trousers.
The physician Morris said, “You might make it till
winter, but most likely not till spring.”
“That’s damn hard news to take.”
“I’ve no doubt.”
“If I had come to see you sooner would it have
made any difference?”
Doc Morris shook his head.
“It wouldn’t have made any difference. The kind
of cancer you got is about like getting gut shot. Not
much anybody can do.”
“You’re sure that’s what it is?”
“Yes, I’m sure. But there are other doctors you
could go see. Here, I’ll write the name of the best one
I know and you go see him. Always best to get a sec-
ond opinion.”
William Sunday waved a hand.
“Not necessary,” he said. “I sort of known it was
bad for some time now. There were signs. Your word
is good with me.”
Doc Morris held forth the piece of paper he’d writ-
ten the name on and said, “You take it anyway in case
you change your mind.”
Sunday slipped on his coat, the one with the spe-
cial pockets sewn on the inside to hold his custom-
made pistols.
“You know who I am?”
“I’ve heard of you, Mr. Sunday.”
“Then you know I’m probably lucky to even be
walking around at my age.”
Doc Morris washed his hands and dried them on a
towel.
“Stop by a pharmacy and get yourself some of
this,” he said, writing something else on a second
piece of paper.
“What is it?”
“Laudanum. It will take the edge off the pain—at
least until it gets real bad.”
“And when it gets real bad?”
Doc Morris shrugged.
“There’s no easy answer to it, Mr. Sunday. But a
man of your profession I’m sure can figure out what
your options are when that time comes.”
Sunday patted the front of his coat, could feel the
shape and heft of the pistols on the inside.
“Yes, I’ve already thought about it.”
“You run out of this, you can always get more.
Might pay to keep an extra bottle on hand . . .” Doc
said, handing him the note for laudanum.
William Sunday took the paper, looked at it. He
couldn’t read, never had learned, regretted now that
he hadn’t learned, along with regretting several other
things he’d ignored in his now too short life.
“I’d appreciate it much if you didn’t tell anyone
about this,” he said.
Doc Morris looked at him over the tops of the
spectacles that had slid down his nose.
“You don’t have to worry about that,” he said.
“Mine is not the business of gossip.”
Sunday reached into his trouser pocket and took
out a wallet, opened it and took out several bills and
laid them on the desk.
“It’s October now,” he said, as much to himself it
seemed as to the physician. “The leaves have already
started changing in the high country. It won’t be long
till winter.”
“No, it won’t,” the physician said.
“I don’t know if I should thank you or not,” Sun-
day said.
Doc shook his head.
“There’s nothing to thank me for, sir. Mine is of-
ten a thankless task and I’m sorry as hell whenever I
have to give someone bad news.”
Sunday took his pancake hat from the peg on the
wall and settled it on his head. He was a striking figure
of a man—six feet tall, long reddish locks that flowed
to past his broad shoulders, well dressed in a frock
coat, bull-hide boots. He could have been a banker or
a successful businessman by the looks of him. But he
was neither.
What he was, was as a pistolero—a gun for hire. A
man whose profession was taking lives for money, and
he had not regretted that very much until now that he
realized his own life would be taken. There was one
that troubled him, one he did not know how to make
up for, a boy. He thought of him now, how that still
haunted him.
He would be dead by the winter, before the spring.
In a way, he told himself, he was lucky; he had time to
put his affairs in order, to plan his exit, unlike those
he’d killed.
Outside in the crisp sunny air of Denver, death
seemed quite impossible. The city was alive with com-
merce, people laughed, children played, women smiled
at him as he passed them on the street, and he touched
the brim of his hat out of old habit.
In a way, nothing seemed changed at all. Hell, he
didn’t even feel particularly sick at the moment, ex-
cept for the shadow of an ache in his loins from hav-
ing sat too long.
But everything had changed.
And this time next year . . . Well, he did not want
to think of this time next year.
And that night, he got very drunk and cursed and
wept at the crushing sorrow that caught up with him
the way a wolf catches up to an old buffalo. His time
was finished, the world would go on without him and
it would be just as if he never existed at all—except of
course to those men he had killed—to that one boy
whose death still nagged at his conscience.
He paid a hundred dollars to a bordello beauty to
spend the night with him. She was sweet and young
and reminded him in a way of another young woman.
And in his broken state of mind he told her he was
dying, for he needed to tell someone and thought she
had a kindness about her that would let her under-
stand. But he could see in her eyes that she could not.
She stayed with him until dawn, then slipped away
and he awakened alone and knew that there was yet
one thing he needed to do before winter set in, before
spring came.
He sold his horse and saddle, closed his consider-
able bank account.
There was a young woman he meant to see.
Her name was Clara.
She was married—the last he heard to an Army of-
ficer named Fallon Monroe—and he had heard they
had two small girls.
But before she married, her name had been Clara
Sunday.
His daughter and only living kin.
The last word he’d gotten of her, she lived in Bis-
marck with her soldier husband.
She was his legacy. His only legacy.
He bought two bottles of laudanum and steeled
himself for the journey.
Each day was to be a blessing, and a curse.
The leaves were changing in the high country. Au-
tumn was a fine time of year.
3
The girl was wan, skin the color of candle wax.
She looked at Jake with a fevered uncertain gaze.
He pulled a chair up close to her bed, laid the back of
his hand on her forehead. The skin was dry, warm.
“Your mother says you were with child?” he said
softly.
She twitched.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m not here to judge you,
just to help you if I can.”
A single tear slipped from her right eye, the one
closest to the pillow as she lay looking at him. Her
hair was damp and clung to her scalp and the sides of
her face.
“I’m just going to pull back the covers and have a
look,” he said. “Is that okay with you?”
He thought she nodded.
He drew back the covers. What he saw was dis-
couraging. The girl was hemorrhaging badly.
“I’m going to give you something to ease the dis-
comfort,” he said, then rose and went to what stood
for a doorway and drew back the blanket. The man
and his boys were still sitting there at the table, a
flame guttering in the glass chimney of a lamp threw
shadows across their faces, for the light within the
room was dim to near darkness even though it was
only midday.
“Do you have a spoon?” he said.
The man looked up.
“A spoon,” Jake repeated. “I need a spoon.”
The man nodded at the boy and said something to
him in Swedish and the boy rose and went to a wood
box there in the corner of the room and took from it
a large tarnished silver spoon and brought it to Jake.
Jake used the spoon to pour some absinthe and
held it to the girl’s pale and quivering lips.
“It’s going to taste bitter at first,” he warned. “But
once it gets down it should help the fever.”
She made a face when she swallowed it.
She was as frail as a milk-sick newborn kitten, he
thought.
He wondered if the child she’d aborted was that of
Toussaint Trueblood’s boy, wondered if he should tell
Toussaint and even more so if he should tell Karen
Sunflower, the dead boy’s mother, that there had been
a child of that union between the boy and this poor
girl.
He went out again and said to the man, “Where’s
your pump?”
The man looked toward the door that was barely
held in place by worn leather hinges.
“I show you,” he said, almost wearily, and rose
and went outside without bothering to put on a coat,
the wind tousling his rooster hair. A few snowflakes
swirled in the cold air as though lost in their journey
and fell scattered to the ground. The pump stood
around the side of the house—beyond it a privy and
some other outbuildings, one, a chicken coop with a
red rooster strutting around in the yard looking con-
fused, and two or three skinny chickens pecking the
ground.
Jake pumped water into the pail hanging from the
spout and carried it back inside.
“I’m going to light a fire in your stove,” he said,
and without waiting for an answer, began to feed kin-
dling from a small stack piled next to iron legs into
the dying fire that lay inside the stove. He stirred and
poked the fire back to life and set the pail atop a
burner plate.
The man and the boys watched him as though he
were inventing something. The room smelled of old
grease and sweat and foods the woman had cooked
over the long days—wild onions, rabbits, breads. The
walls were lined with old newspapers and pages from
magazines and here and there, where the paper was
torn away, Jake could see mud had been daubed into
the space between boards that had settled free from
one another with time and weather. The stovepipe ran
straight up through the roof like a fat black arm and
where it went into the ceiling there was an uneven
patch of black soot, and soot along the wall nearest
the stove.
As the water heated he went in and removed one of
the sheets—a worn rectangle of muslin that had
turned gray with age, and now bloody from the girl’s
body. He took it out and set it in the water and al-
lowed it to stay there until the water began to boil,
having to feed more kindling into the stove to keep it
going.
All the while the man never said anything and nei-
ther did his three young sons who sat lined up like
stairsteps, Jake thinking she must have had one every
year for three years running.
By the time he had boiled the sheet and lifted it out
again with a stick of kindling, he took it outside and
squeezed out the excess water, the snow falling against
his hands. It was then he saw the woman turning her
wagon into the lane off the road.
She got down without a word and seemed to know
&nb
sp; exactly what he was doing.
“Do you have any fresh bedding?” he said.
She nodded and he followed her inside, carrying
the balled-up damp sheet.
She removed a trunk from under the high bed and
took from it a lace tablecloth and said, “It will have
to do.”
She stripped the bed of the old bedding, all but the
heavy quilt that was only slightly tinged with the girl’s
blood, and replaced the bottom sheet with the table
cloth and set about making the girl comfortable. Then
she took the freshly washed sheet and hung it be-
tween two chairs by the stove, even as the others con-
tinued to watch, not volunteering to help.
“She’ll need fresh changing,” Jake said. “As often
as you can.”
The mother’s eyes asked the question.
“I don’t know what else I can do for her,” he said.
“This is a serious matter and . . .”
He instructed her to give the girl a spoonful of the
absinthe every few hours, and, “If the pain—her
cramping gets very worse, you can give her some of
these,” he said, handing her a tin of cocaine tablets.
He looked once more into the girl’s eyes, then went
to the door of the cabin with the woman following
him outside.
The sun burned dully behind the pewter sky,
promising, perhaps, that the weather might yet clear.
“I have no money,” the woman said.
“None required,” Jake said. “I didn’t do much.”
He felt helpless and even though he told himself
that there wasn’t a hell of a lot he could do for a girl
hemorrhaging from an aborted fetus—for such was a
common killer of women—it still had made him feel
weak and ineffectual, a failure to his training and
knowledge.
Then the woman asked him the question that had
been burning in her mind: “Is my Gerthe going to
die?”
“Yes, probably so,” Jake said. He believed it was
also part of the oath he’d taken to tell the patient, or
in this case, the patient’s family, the truth—to not
lead them to false hope.
“I could be wrong, sometimes these things stop on
their own . . .”
He saw no brightening of hope in her eyes when he
added this last comment, nor had he expected to. It
was plain to see that these were people who lived
without comfort or hope—that somehow they’d man-
aged to make it this far and realized that they might
not make it any farther.
“Over there,” the woman said, pointing away from