by Bill Brooks
the house to a small lump in the earth no larger than
what you might plant a potted flower in, “is where I
buried the babe.”
She held up her fist to show him its size.
“I guess it should have had a name . . .” she said.
“But it was so small, hardly a child yet . . .”
He saw the snow mixing with the soft tears that
began to streak her cheeks.
“May I ask if you know whose child it was?” Jake
said.
She shrugged, still staring off toward the mound
with the snow landing on it, melting, more landing in
the melted snow’s place.
“I guess the boy she . . .”
Jake placed a hand on the woman’s shoulder.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “The only thing that
does is inside and at such a time, I’m sure she needs
you more than anything in this world.”
The woman turned and went back inside the cabin.
Jake saw the man looking out the small square of
oil-streaked glass. Jake had a feeling about the man
that made him feel colder than the wintry air ever
could.
He thought he would ride back to Toussaint’s place
and tell him what he knew.
Toussaint Trueblood was sitting outside his place
when Jake arrived, on a bench he’d built for the spe-
cific purpose of watching the sun come up. On the ex-
act opposite side he’d built another bench to sit and
watch the sun set.
He sipped tea he ordered special through Otis Dol-
lar’s mercantile that had a nice flowery scent to it and
held a stick of cinnamon he liked to nibble at. It was
midafternoon and no sun to be seen—either rising or
setting—but a gentle tumbling of first snow arrived
off the north plains. There was something about the
first snow that intrigued him as much as did the rising
and setting suns.
He watched with mild interest as Jake rode up,
halted his horse and dismounted.
“Mr. Trueblood.”
“Marshal.”
Jake stood holding the reins.
“You come see me for a reason, or can I mark this
down to social visit?”
“For a reason.”
“You want some of this tea? It’s pretty good.”
“I just came back from the Swedes’ place.”
Jake saw the way Toussaint’s eyes narrowed hear-
ing the reference. He’d held his tongue over the mur-
der of his boy, not placing any blame on the girl for
the murder of his son. She was just a sin, a tempta-
tion, one that any man young or old might fall victim
to. No, he never blamed her, but Karen certainly held
it against her—against all of them.
“What about them?” Toussaint said.
“The girl, Gerthe, is bleeding to death.”
Toussaint tossed the dregs that had grown cold
from his cup.
Whatever his thoughts were on the matter, he
didn’t say, but Jake could see the news was troubling
to him, even if in an oblique way.
“Why are you telling me this?” Toussaint said at
last.
“She had a child in her she lost—that’s why she’s
hemorrhaging. I think maybe the child might have
been Dex’s.”
Toussaint stood from his bench, looked down into
his empty cup.
“She tell you that?”
“No. But it seems reasonable to suspect who the
father would have been.”
“Could have been that young outlaw who killed
Dex, put that child in her.”
“It’s a possibility,” Jake said. “But I think maybe
there would have been signs if he had raped her. I
didn’t notice any when we found them.”
“Signs . . .” Toussaint said, almost derisively. “The
world is full of signs, Marshal.”
“It’s not going to matter much,” Jake said. “I just
thought I owed it to you to let you know.”
Toussaint hung his cup on a nail he’d hammered
for that purpose into the doorjamb.
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell this story to any-
one else,” is all Toussaint said. “I’d hate for Karen to
hear it through gossip.”
“You’ve got my word.”
Then there was just this long moment of silence
where neither of them spoke, and the silence of snow
falling all around them, but nothing that was going to
make a difference to the way of life on these
prairies—at least not yet, not this snow that would
start and stop and eventually give way to a cold sun in
another hour, and whatever had fallen would be com-
pletely gone and forgotten by the next day, except for
the foretaste it left in the mouths of those who’d win-
tered in this place before.
4
He hired a man to take him to the Dakotas.
“I need to get up north,” he said to the man.
The man, who owned a carriage factory, said,
“Why not go there the usual way, by train and coach?
I’m just a carriage maker.”
“Can’t,” he said. “I’ve got a condition that won’t
allow me to tolerate long scheduled rides on trains or
stages. I’ll need to stop when I need to stop.”
“What sort of condition?”
“Does it matter as long as I can afford to pay
you?”
The man said, “Why me? Why not someone else?”
“I’ve been looking over your carriages,” he said.
“I’ll need something with extra cushioning, springs,
and seat. You think you can arrange that?”
The man looked him over, saw that he was well
dressed, not a piker. In him, the carriage maker saw
an opportunity. His wife was the worrisome sort,
never quite content with the way things were, always
after him to do a little more, to make their life a little
more comfortable, and even though he’d worked hard
at making carriages, it still wasn’t enough to suit her
needs. She was always in need of a new hat or dress.
They worked out the arrangements. The man said
he’d need a day or two to add the extra springs and
cushioning to the seats and put his business affairs in
order.
William Sunday gave the man his room number at
the railroad hotel, saying, “A day would be better
than two if you can manage it.” He had his meals de-
livered up to his room and sat out on the veranda out-
side his third floor room in the evening and watched
the trains come and go, as well as the foot traffic up
and down the street. Life seemed normal in every re-
spect, except it was no longer normal at all for him
and each thing he watched felt to him like it would be
the very last time he was going to see it. He sent for a
bottle of whiskey and drank it without pleasure. And
when the pain stirred in him like something old and
terrible awakening from a drowse, he fought it down
with the laudanum. The drug and the whiskey put his
world out of focus as though he was looking through
a piece of curved glass. His limbs grew heavy as win-
dow sashes. The pain seemed to grow worse with the
coming of night.
The next day the carriage man came and knocked
on his door and said, “Mr. Sunday, I’m ready to travel
if you are.”
He looked the rig over, climbed up into its spe-
cially padded seat, six extra inches of horsehair
added, and said, “I think it will do, sir.”
The carriage maker beamed, said, “It’s a model
called a Phaeton, named after a mythological Greek
character said to have rode around so fast he almost
set the world on fire.”
“Let’s not waste any more time,” William Sunday
said, and retrieved his valise from behind the hotel’s
front desk, settling his bill.
“Should I hold your room, Mr. Sunday?” the clerk
asked.
“No, Harrison, I’ll not be needing it any longer.”
They took the north road and the carriage man kept
the team of horses at a steady but tolerable pace. Sev-
eral hours later the pain had grown up like a fire in
him and he didn’t know if he would make it to the
Dakotas alive. He figured out how much and how of-
ten to drink the laudanum to ease his misery and tried
hard not to think of every rut and bump in the road,
every rock and hole and root.
“My name’s Glass, by the way,” the carriage man
said. “Carl Glass.”
It didn’t matter too much to him, the man’s name,
but he tried to be cordial.
“William Sunday,” he said.
“Sunday,” the man said. “You wouldn’t be the
William Sunday?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’d be that William Sunday.”
Glass, he figured, like almost everyone else had
heard of him or read various accounts of him in The
Police Gazette, or, Harper’s Weekly, or any number
of local newspapers. It had gotten so journalists had
sought him out hoping to do a living history on him,
as one of them put it. A fellow from Boston had been
the latest. He turned them all down. He had no need
to be any more famous, or infamous than he was.
Such attention could only get a man in his profession
killed by someone who’d rather have your history a
lot more than their own. Then too there was that
boy—the one he tried not to think of, or dream about
because he was still ashamed about it.
They stopped whenever the pain got to be too
much, and at small communities along the way for
overnight rest, each going his separate way for the
evening with the understanding to meet first light for
an early start.
The carriage man talked about his days as a sur-
veyor in the army and how he’d once been chased by
a grizzly bear, and nearly killed by a small band of
roving Indians. He told stories, but told them in a flat
uninteresting way. William Sunday spent most of his
time taking in the landscape, the rivers and trees and
wildflowers—the birds and antelope herds he’d see
grazing off in the distance, anything to keep his mind
off his pain, off the future he didn’t have.
They saw wolves once on the opposite side of a
river, walking a ridge, and later they came across a rot-
ting carcass of a steer that had gotten tangled in a
fence of barbed wire. Shortly they came across an
abandoned homestead that the carriage man reckoned
was once the ranch the steer had belonged to.
“Abandoned,” he said. “Whoever those folks were
moved out and just left everything. They probably
were down to that one steer and couldn’t make it any
longer and had no heart to take it. Maybe it had
worms, or maybe they were going to eat that steer
and it realized it and ran off and got caught up in that
wire and they didn’t know it.” It was as though the
carriage maker had to talk just to hear himself, Sun-
day thought.
William Sunday thought it as good a theory as any,
but it didn’t matter very much what had happened to
the folks who’d once lived here. He simply didn’t care
what happened to them. The only thing that mattered
was the little amount of time he had left, and the stabs
of pain when they came and couldn’t be dulled for a
time by the laudanum.
They stopped and rested in the shade of the old
place and silence surrounded them except for a hum-
mingbird that appeared just in front of their faces for
a moment, hovering as though to inspect them and
show them its iridescent green body before it flew off
again, showing off like one of God’s own creatures.
“Hummingbirds mean good luck,” Glass said.
“Not to me they don’t,” William Sunday said.
He wandered around and looked inside the empty
windows. Saw not so much as a stick of furniture or a
rusted can inside. Some old wallpaper pasted to one
wall had faded and hung loose, thin as butterfly
wings, most of its print of roses washed away. The
log walls sagged from where the lower ones had rot-
ted away, and pieces of the roof were missing, the rest
caved in a heap on the floor at one end. Weeds had
grown up through the curled gray floor planks. He
leaned with one hand against the rough bark of an
outer wall and made water as best he could—the act
like a hot poker stirring in him.
They traveled on and saw other abandoned home-
steads all across Nebraska—places just left when the
people fled. Land settled in high hopes of good things
ahead, followed by defeat of one sort or another: sick-
ness, drought, death.
He felt similarly abandoned, a collapsing shell of
the man he had once been—his soul departing. And
when it was over, there would be nothing for others
to see, to know of, except possibly his name, his rep-
utation as a gunfighter and a killer. If he was remem-
bered at all, it would most likely be for the men he’d
killed: Luke Hastings (Santa Fe), Jeff Swift (Tulsa),
Charley Shirt (El Paso) . . . and many many others.
But, too, there was one name he hoped no one
would remember in that litany of names: Willy Blind.
A sixteen-year-old boy shot off a fence outside Miles
City, Montana. Some say he did it. He couldn’t be
sure if he had or not. He liked to believe it wasn’t his
hand in it, that it was Fancher who shot the boy, and
him that shot the boy’s old man. It could have been
just the opposite. It was a long ways away with the af-
ternoon sun in their eyes—late autumn, like the very
one now, both of them close together—the boy sitting
the fence, the man standing next to him.
He and Fancher had fired at the same time meaning
only to kill the man. But both the boy and the man
toppled a second later, one falling atop the other, and
lay there without moving.
Fancher had said, “Goddamn,” like that, and
William Sunday couldn’t tell if he was surprised or
pleased. And that was all either of them said. But the
shooting raised so much hell among the locals that he
and Fancher had to flee the territory without getting
paid by the man who’d hired them—a neighbor dis-
puting over water rights.
It was the first and last time he’d taken a job with a
partner. He heard afterward that Fancher got gunned
down in a saloon in Idaho while drinking a beer and
all he thought about it at the time he heard the news
was that Fancher probably deserved it.
As far as he knew, he and Fancher were still
wanted, probably a reward to go along with it.
He cut away his thoughts of such when they
stopped for the evening near a stream that ran bright
and clear in the last of the day’s sunlight. A stream,
that according to the maps Glass carried, was on the
border of South and North Dakota. With no town in
sight, they found the mystery of an old stone founda-
tion in one wall of some dwelling that had once
stood, all but the foundation missing now, and made
camp near it with still half an hour’s worth of day-
light left.
William Sunday took a walk to stretch his legs,
ease the pain of sitting and take in the general lay of
things, then went over to where Glass had been sitting
with his boots crossed at the ankles eating an apple
and said, “Let’s get going extra early in the morning,
Mr. Glass.”
The carriage maker saw something in William
Sunday’s eyes—a sort of desperation—that gave him
no reason to quarrel. And once it grew dark, they
rolled up in their blankets and fell asleep under the
stars.
5
The Swede fretted. The Swede thought about the
girl and the thing Inge had carried out of her room
wrapped in a bloody towel and had said to him, “You
go and bury this away from the house, a nice deep
hole, eh, so the wolves can’t dig it up. You do that,
okay?” It wasn’t so much a question as a command,
and when he looked into her ice-blue eyes he saw
there was accusation, too.
“What I got to do with any of this, yah?”
“You got plenty, mister. I got no time to quarrel
with you. You go do it.”
He looked at what she held in her hands and it sent
a chill into him.
“I didn’t do nothing with this,” he said, taking it
from her. His sons sitting there simply stared at him