by Bill Brooks
were necessary.
The weather itself mournful, it seemed.
Then Jake stiffened.
“What is it?” Toussaint said.
“I counted three.”
“Three what?”
“Boys. There were four.”
They fanned out, walking cautious, because the
mist had closed in upon them to the point they could
barely see the outbuildings.
Toussaint heard it first.
“Coming from back toward the house,” he said.
It sounded like the mewing of a cat.
They stopped at the back wall, saw the loose board
along its base.
Jake went back inside, got the lantern, lowered it
to the base as Toussaint drew back the board.
A pair of eyes shone in the dark recess when the
light reached them.
It took some time, but Jake coaxed the boy out. He
was muddy and shivering, his face streaked where
he’d been crying. He stood about as high as Tous-
saint’s hip, disheveled dirty blond hair.
“You think he saw it, don’t you?” Toussaint said.
“He knew to hide,” Jake said. “He saw something
that scared him.”
“Man like that who’d . . .”
Jake warned his partner to silence with a look.
Toussaint went inside and tore down the door blan-
ket and brought it out and wrapped the kid up in it.
The weather had turned even more bitter, the rain
to snow, the wind driving it into their faces. The sky
lay so low out across the grasslands a man afoot
would walk right through it.
“This is going to get worse before it gets better,”
Toussaint warned.
“Karen’s,” Jake said, setting the boy on the front
of his horse and swinging up behind him. “We’ll ride
to Karen’s and wait it out.”
“Hell, she’ll be doing cartwheels she sees me.”
“You mean the boy, don’t you?”
“Him, too.”
And the boy rode silent in the cradle of the law-
man’s arms.
7
They reached the outskirts of Bismarck and
William Sunday told Mr. Glass rather than skirt
the town as they often did, that this time they were
to go on in.
“You’re calling the shots,” Glass said, privately
glad not to have to spend another night sleeping on
the prairie. Hadn’t been a night gone by since he’d
left Denver that he didn’t miss his wife and home-
cooked meals and all the rest of what having a wife
offered a man. All her demands for him to do better
had been pushed aside by the loneliness he felt. He
thought that when they reached their final destination
he’d sell the carriage and catch whatever stages and
trains he could to return home again as quickly as
possible. Women were a premium and highly prized
in the West and he’d not want to take a chance that
his might find herself a new man, one who was more
enterprising and could afford to give her all the things
she wanted, like the hats she saw the French women
were wearing in Paris as advertised in the fashion sec-
tion of the newspapers.
Such worries were something he wouldn’t have
minded discussing with his employer: women in gen-
eral. But his employer was a quiet man who did not
engage in idle conversation. Glass had tried various
subjects to interest him, thinking it would make the
journey a little less onerous, the time pass a little more
quickly.
“What do you think about President Garfield get-
ting shot?” he tried at one point.
“He was a damn fool to just let a man walk up and
shoot him.”
Well, what was there to say to that?
Then he asked whether or not he thought Mr. Bell’s
telephone would ever reach as far west as Denver.
“I heard it is quite something,” Glass said, to
which William Sunday did not reply. “Don’t even
need to be in the same building, much less the same
room to talk to a fellow.”
But William Sunday was not a man to look beyond
the next few months knowing as he did that he’d never
use a telephone or know a world where such inven-
tions would come into existence, and so he did not care
to think about such things, nor comment on them.
With the sun near set by the time they arrived in
Bismarck, the sky to the west was a haze of purple
and William Sunday did not fail to take notice of it,
for each sunset was precious to him now, each
minute, hour, day. Every tree and flower and bird, it
seemed, had a certain importance now.
“Pull up to that drugstore,” he said.
Glass waited while his employer went inside and
came back out again.
“Find us a hotel, Mr. Glass.”
They registered at the Bison Inn, two rooms ad-
joining and a bath down the hall. It seemed like lux-
ury and it was.
“Early start as usual tomorrow?” Glass asked.
William Sunday leaned heavily against the door to
his room as he inserted the key.
“Maybe not so early, Mr. Glass,” and opened his
door and went in.
He barely made it to take his clothes off, his back
ached so bad he could not bend, and the fire in his
groin caused him to bite the inside of his cheek. He’d
run out of laudanum two days before and they hadn’t
come across a settlement or a village large enough to
have a pharmacy until now. He uncapped the bottle
and took two large swallows and waited.
He could hear Glass moving around in his room.
He closed his eyes and silently counted backward.
The drug usually began taking effect around the
count of fifty. This time he counted all the way down
to a hundred and started again before its soothing
warmth coursed his veins and eased his pain.
Goddamn, goddamn, what a way to go out—slow
like this.
He tried to sleep but kept waking up. Every time
he shifted in the bed it was a knife going through him.
He reached for the bottle and nursed it until the pain
and the night went away and did not awake again un-
til he heard knocking at his door. He pulled out his
pocket watch and checked the time. Both hands were
resting on twelve.
“Mr. Sunday!”
“Yes,” he muttered.
“You okay in there?”
He cleared his throat, said, “I’m just getting
around, be ready to leave in half an hour.”
“Yes sir.”
Then he heard Glass’s footsteps going down the
hall. His body felt heavy as a sandbag. He moved
slowly, dressed, then rested after he had. It was
while struggling to get into his coat that the thought
occurred to him again. The weight of the pistols
resting inside their custom-sewn pockets caused him
to consider a thing he never thought he would until
that day in the doctor’s office.
He took one out. A seven-shot Smith & Wesson
>
with yellowed ivory grips and a three-inch barrel. He
favored it for close work. Well, what could be closer
than putting it to his own head and pulling the trig-
ger? He’d done it to other men. It had never been a
problem. It would sure enough end his misery. He
wouldn’t have to end up like some old wounded buf-
falo the wolves tracked. Man always had a choice
about how he lived and how he died, whereas lesser
animals did not.
He thumbed back the hammer cocking the trigger.
It would just take an instant. Sweat beaded his fore-
head and a drop of it fell onto the pistol’s barrel. The
sweat drop turned into a daughter’s tear. But would
she really cry for him once she heard of his demise, or
would she think good riddance? It was something he
needed to find out. A last act, so to speak. The pistol
would always be available to him.
Ride it out, he told himself ten times over until he
lowered the hammer and slipped the pistol back into
his pocket.
Glass was waiting for him out front. Sunlight daz-
zled in wet puddles in the street. It had rained the
night before; he hadn’t remembered hearing it.
“You look ailing, Mr. Sunday.”
He climbed aboard the carriage with difficulty and
eased himself down to a position he thought he could
tolerate, patted his jacket pocket for reassurance of
the bottle of laudanum that had become more impor-
tant to him than his pistols.
“I need you to drive with all due haste, Mr. Glass,
but take it gentle as you can, if you understand my
meaning.”
The road out of Bismarck looked hard and smooth,
a road they could make good time on. Glass thought
he understood what the man was asking him.
“I’ll do my best, Mr. Sunday.”
And snapped the reins over the rumps of the two-
horse team.
8
On a late afternoon that was more like evening
because of the dark brooding weather, their hands
nearly frozen, they made Karen Sunflower’s place;
she, the ex-wife of Toussaint Trueblood.
They dismounted and Toussaint said, “I’ll take
care of the horses. Maybe I’ll just sleep in the stables
till morning.”
Jake lifted the boy down from the horse.
“Don’t be foolish,” he said. “We have to eat and
get something warm in us. I doubt Karen’s going to
turn you away.”
“You don’t know Karen.”
“Sometime you’ll have to tell me why, but right
now I’ve got to get this child inside.”
Karen opened the door when Jake knocked, looked
at the boy in his arms, her gaze narrowing.
“It’s one of the Swedes,” he said. He knew her feel-
ings toward that family, but it didn’t matter. She
stepped aside and let him enter.
“I hate to impose upon you,” Jake said, setting the
boy at the kitchen table close to the stove. “But we
need to get something warm in us and I need to take a
look at this boy once he’s warmed up to make sure he
isn’t hurt.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“I’ll explain it soon as we eat and I have a look at
him.”
Karen set two plates—her supper already eaten an
hour earlier. She’d been preparing for bed even
though it was early. Ever since her son, Dex, had been
killed, she preferred lying in bed it seemed more than
not. At least asleep, she told herself, she didn’t have to
think about how much she missed him. Now here was
the marshal bringing one of the Swede boys to her
home—one of the very boys who’d tossed clumps of
dirt at her horse one day and almost unseated her.
One of the boys who was blood kin to the girl Dex
had been with the day he was shot, no doubt over her,
by another boy. It felt like an intrusion upon her sen-
sibilities until she looked closer at his small face and
saw that whatever his older sister had been, he surely
was innocent of her sins.
“Better make it another plate,” Jake said, remov-
ing his mackinaw and hanging it over the back of a
chair. Karen looked at him questioningly.
“Toussaint’s with me.”
He saw the way that hit her.
“Please,” he said. “It’s just for the night. We’ll be
moving on first light if the snow has quit.”
Toussaint knocked and waited. Karen opened the
door and stood there looking at him directly in the
eyes.
“I know,” he said. “I ain’t wanted, and I can sleep
in the stable, like I told the marshal,” and started to
turn away, for he had told himself he would not quar-
rel with her no matter what the situation. They’d quar-
reled enough for a lifetime. In fact quarreling with her
was the exact opposite of what he’d had in mind for
months now.
She stepped aside and said, “You might as well
come in since you’re already here. I wouldn’t turn
even a dog away on a night like this.”
“Thank you very much,” he said, trying hard to
keep most the sarcasm out of his voice.
They ate in silence, Karen sipping coffee watching
them.
Three men at my table, she thought, certain memo-
ries trying to flood their way back into her mind. But
she would not let them. She watched most especially
her ex-husband sitting there, his black hair damp
against his head, his square face with its sharp fea-
tures of his mixed blood eating like she’d remem-
bered him before things went bad between them.
The boy fell asleep eating. Karen made him a pallet
on the floor by the stove and Jake carried him to it.
He did a quick check to see if there were any wounds,
saw none, and started to draw the blanket over him.
“Take off his shoes, at least,” Karen said, kneeling
and untying the boy’s shoes and pulling them off. She
shook her head when she saw the state of his socks,
damp and with holes in them. She took them off as
well and rubbed his feet with a dry towel then cov-
ered him with the blanket. This, too, caused certain
memories to try and come back to her, but she shut
them off quickly.
Then they sat back down at the table where Tous-
saint sat finishing the last of his food, swiping up the
stew gravy with another of Karen’s biscuits. He didn’t
realize how much he missed her damn biscuits until
now. Woman makes the best damn biscuits a man
could put in his mouth, he thought. Just one more rea-
son I ought to try and make amends with her, get her
back.
“You want to tell me the story now?” Karen said to
Jake, trying her best to ignore Toussaint altogether.
So Jake explained it and when he finished she sat
back with a dour look on her face, shaking her head.
“That family . . .” she said.
“It was the hus
band,” Toussaint said. “I don’t
suppose we can blame them all for how they were
with a man like that running herd over them.” This
surprised Karen, for she thought Toussaint be-
grudged them as much as she, had hoped that he did,
for Dex was his son, too.
“When in the world did you find compassion in
you?” she said.
He shrugged, said, “Don’t know that I have. I was
just saying.”
“He’s right,” Jake said. “The sins of the father and
all that.”
“Philosophers,” Karen said. “You want more cof-
fee?” Toussaint held out his cup and Karen looked
at him.
Karen provided them more blankets with which to
make pallets, then without saying so much as good-
night retired to her room there at the back of the
house. The cherry glow from the wood stove felt com-
forting in ways more than just the heat it provided.
“What you going to do with that boy?” Toussaint
asked, the two of them lying in the near darkness.
“I don’t know. I heard there is an orphanage down
in Bismarck. Take him there, I guess.”
“And that crazy bastard Swede?”
“Get the boy settled in town, first, then go after
him.”
“That was a bad thing he did to them.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “I know it was.”
Toussaint lay there thinking about Karen, about
how many times he’d slept on this same floor during
their short but tumultuous marriage—whenever they’d
argue and if the weather was bad, otherwise he’d sleep
outdoors under the wagon, or just on the ground. The
nice thing was when they made up. He wished they
could make up now, wished he could go and join her
in her bed and curl up next to her.
The wind moaned along the eaves.
The next morning, the sun was out in full force,
sparkling off the snow that lay in patches.
A gray tyrant flycatcher flew against the window,
its wings fluttering furiously, tried several times in
confused effort to enter the house, and when it could
not, flew off again.
Jake had been sitting at the table having a cup of
Karen’s coffee. Toussaint was already out with the
horses. A pan of powdered biscuits was turning
brown in the oven and their smell filled the cabin. The
Swede boy tossed and turned restlessly upon the bed.
“We should wake him,” Karen said. “He’s having
dreams, probably bad ones.”
Jake went over and shook the little fellow awake.