by Bill Brooks
He stared up at Jake with eyes so blue they could
have been pieces of the sky. He began to whimper.
“Shhh . . .” Jake said. “It’s all right.”
Jake touched him in a gentle way, stroked the
thatch of soft, unkempt hair out of his eyes.
“Pa,” he said. “Pa.”
“You hungry, son?”
The boy looked about, saw Karen standing by the
stove.
“Ma,” he said. “Ma.”
She looked at him, then looked away. Straight
through the kitchen window she could see the grave-
stone of her Dex gleaming wet in the morning light
with the sun on it. The boy’s words caused her a sor-
row she couldn’t define.
She pulled the pan of biscuits from the oven,
knocked them onto a tin plate, took down from a shelf
a jar of clover honey. Jake walked the boy outside, told
him to wash his face and hands in the water he pumped
up from the ground by jacking the pump’s handle. Tou-
ssaint was currying the horses, stopped long enough to
watch. The boy seemed lost in the doing, so Jake
showed him how to cup his hands and scoop the water
to his face, and when finished, he handed him the thin
towel that hung from a nail driven into a corner joist.
“Breakfast is ready,” Jake said to Toussaint. Tous-
saint set aside the curry brush and went and washed
and dried his own hands and followed them inside.
The four of them sat and ate the meager breakfast,
the boy dipping pieces of biscuit into his coffee until
he’d eaten three of them.
“I’m low on supplies or I’d have fixed you some-
thing more substantial,” Karen said.
“I could bring you some things back from town,”
Toussaint said.
“No thanks, I can do my own shopping,” Karen
said, that edge in her voice like a knife blade she held
between them as a way of protecting herself.
Karen turned her attention to the boy.
“What’s your name?” she said.
At first he simply stared at her.
“You deaf?”
He shook his head.
“I’ll give you another biscuit with honey on it if
you tell me your name.”
He looked at the biscuits, at the jar of honey.
“Stephen,” he said. She gave him the biscuit, split
it apart, and daubed honey onto it and watched him
eat it then lick his sticky fingers.
“What’s yours?” he said when he’d finished licking
the last finger.
She swallowed hard. She didn’t aim to get familiar
with this child.
He waited, refusing to take his eyes off her.
“Karen,” she said finally.
“Karen,” he said, repeating it. “You seen my ma?”
Jake could see the pain in Karen’s eyes. Toussaint
could see it, too.
“Time to go,” Jake said.
The boy looked from her to him then back at her.
“Come on,” Jake said, standing first, then lifting
the boy into his arms.
“No.”
“Have to take you into town.”
“No!”
He whimpered and started to squirm in Jake’s
arms, all the while Jake repeating that it would be all
right, telling him, “You be a good boy and I might let
you take the reins once we get started.”
This seemed to do the trick.
“I’m sorry I had to impose on you.” Jake set the
boy onto the saddle.
She didn’t say anything and he couldn’t read what
she was thinking.
“You sure you don’t want me to bring you back
some supplies?” Toussaint said, hoping she’d change
her mind, let him come back out again, just the two
of them so he could talk to her, see if he could start
building something with her again, start over, maybe.
“No, I don’t need anything, Marshal. I’m fine,”
she said, as though it was Jake who asked her and not
Toussaint. Toussaint felt the sting of her rejection and
didn’t say any more, but mounted up and turned his
mule’s head out toward the road.
She stood and watched them leave and it felt some-
how not what she wanted.
Karen saw the gray flycatcher sitting on the pump
handle as though lost.
9
They were three men with weary but similar trail-
worn features: Zack, Zebidiah, and Zane Stone.
Tennesseans by birthright, but long removed from
that place since the end of the war when they’d come
home as downtrodden rebels with naught but a single
mule and two muskets between them, thanks to the
good generosity of one General U.S. Grant, goddamn
him and his Union.
The farm they left to go off and fight in such places
as Day’s Gap and Hatchie’s Bridge and Bristoe Station
wasn’t much of a farm to start with—forty acres of
rocky hillside in the highlands of eastern Tennessee.
But whatever the little farm had been when they left
was a lot less now upon their return and they were
disinclined to be farmers having been soldiers. They
were none of them content to walk behind the mule
with a single-blade plow tearing up rocky ground just
to plant corn seed they couldn’t afford and live in a
leaky-roofed cabin that time and marauding Yankees
had misused. Such was the work of common men, of
men who didn’t know any better, who hadn’t gone
off to see the elephant. They had, all three, and they’d
liked what the elephant looked like.
And so the eldest of them, Zeb, said, “Guddamn,
what if anything has this war taught us but the power
of a gun and to be men who ain’t afraid to use it? A
gun and each other is about all any of us can count on
in this old life and I’m ready to head on out to Texas
where men such as we can make a go of it. And you
all can by gud join me or stay here and fit your hands
to that plow yonder, and that mule, too. You can eat
brittle corn till it comes out your ears and asses and sit
around here and get old and wait for something to
happen: gud’s grace or the whatnot, but by gud, not
me. I done seen the elephant and you boys have, too,
and we all lived to tell about it.”
“What you have in mind?” the youngest, Zane,
asked. “Once’t we get to Texas? Becoming highway-
men? Because all we know put together you could put
in a snuff can. Hell we can’t even raise corn if’n some-
one was to stick a gun in our ear and say ‘grow corn
or else.’ ”
“No sir, we ain’t gone be no guddamn highway-
men unless’n we have to; and I ain’t saying it might
not come to that someday. But our folks taught us
better’n to be robbers and thieves.”
“Then what is it you’re planning?” Zack, the mid-
dle boy, said, “if’n not farmers and not highwaymen?”
“I reckon there’s by gud rewards to be collected on
lawbreakers is what I’m thinking. Bounty hunters is
wh
at I’m thinking.”
“You mean manhunters?” Zack asked.
“By gud, that’s what I mean. It’d beat shit out of
working a farm or selling dry goods, or begging in the
streets. Shit fire, ain’t nothing here for us’ns now that
the Yanks have come through. Why I wouldn’t even
screw these wimmen round here for knowing the
Yanks has been at them. You see anything here worth
staying for?”
They looked upon the homestead, the leaning old
buildings, the weeds grown high as a man’s belly, the
distant blue hills, the empty sky, an old rusted pail,
and shook their collective heads.
“How we find these lawbreakers with rewards on
’em?” Zane wondered aloud as they headed west af-
ter scratching the initials gtt (gone to texas)—on
their front door, the three of them riding in a buck-
board pulled by the one war mule between them.
“Shit fire, all we have to do is stop at any United
States Federal Marshal’s office and ask, I reckon.”
And so that’s what they did soon as they reached
Fort Smith and were told there’d be plenty of law-
breakers the other side of the Arkansas River, but
duly warned not to interfere with the legal law.
“The Nations is full of bad actors,” the marshal
said. “But by God don’t you ever get in the way of one
of my men or I’ll have you standing before Judge
Parker. He is known about these parts as the Hanging
Judge. I ’spect you’ve heard about him, ain’t you?”
“Fucken Yankee, from what I know,” Zeb said.
“But don’t worry about us none, we’re just looking to
make a go of it doing what we do best.”
Zeb took a handful of dodgers and stuffed them
inside his shirt.
They caught their first man—a rapist named Fair-
pond—shot and killed him in a tavern in Poteau when
he tried to put up a fuss, and delivered him to the
Western District Marshal’s office back in Fort Smith,
his corpse so stinking ripe by the time they arrived,
they were given the one hundred dollar reward money
without an argument and an extra ten if they agreed
to bury the fellow quick and not bring any more
stinking corpses into town.
“Shit fire, dead stink don’t bother us none,” Zeb
said, taking the reward money in hand. “We spent
three years smelling that particular stink—from
Ezra’s Church to Fort Pulaski. We was oft on burial
details, my brothers and me. July and August, was the
worst. Heat will turn a human ripe in no time.”
They’d slowly and inexorably worked their way
farther and farther west over the next several years,
crossing Indian Territory and into the pistol barrel be-
fore crossing the border into Texas. Texas proved to
be fruitful for quite some time: plenty of badmen with
rewards on their heads, many of them ex-Confederates
like themselves, busted and down on their luck and
knowing only one thing: how to use a gun.
“One,” a man named Albert Bush said, “you all
sound Southern, like myself,” and asked if they had
served in the war and they said they had, and he said,
“Then you understand how it is,” and they said they
did but it didn’t make a shit of a bit of difference to
them and for him to throw his hands up or make his
play.
Several years came and went as they scoured the
state, sometimes running into what Zeb called “the
nigger police” and once they nearly shot it out with
that bunch, but tempers got cooled in time. And after
they got most of the big fish—Emmitt Brown, the
Pecos Kid, and Sam Savage—and collected the money
on them, there wasn’t much but little fish left and they
grew weary of chasing all over the endless Texas for
as sometimes as little as fifty dollars and decided that
the north country might suit them better. One thing
they heard that attracted them was that a fellow could
buy good land cheap; land with grass and good water
if a fellow wanted to say go in the cow business.
“Cow business?” Zane said incredulously when
Zeb came up with the idea. “Hell, that’s like being a
farmer, ain’t it?”
“No, you don’t do nothing with cows but get you a
bull to screw ’em and sit back and watch ’em have
more cows. It’s a easy living,” opined Zeb, who had
assumed the natural role of leader. Land was cheap in
Texas, too, but it was mostly scrub and prickly pear
and too many snakes. Zeb hated snakes worse than
he hated Yankees. So they decided to ride north.
It was in Montana when they first heard the name
William Sunday. He and a fellow named Fancher had
shot and killed a man and his boy—a local pair from
Miles City who had been well thought of in the com-
munity. Were told this by a rancher, that the man and
his boy had been just out hunting antelope when
someone shot them.
“Shot the boy off a fence he was sitting on,” they
were told. The man who told them, a cattleman in a
big soft hat, said it was probably a case of mistaken
identity, that due to the territory filling up with
rustlers it was not unusual for some cattlemen such as
himself to hire stock detectives to take care of the
rustlers. Though, he said, he had not personally so far
hired such men. The cattleman said a reward had been
taken up by the community to track down the killers.
“And exactly how much would that reward be?”
Zeb asked.
“Two hundred and fifty dollars for each, five hun-
dred for the pair, and we don’t care if you bring them
back to stand trial or not. Just bring proof they won’t
be causing anymore heartache to any others—a news-
paper clipping of their demise would do.”
“Hell, we’ll see her done, their demise.”
They found Fancher in Idaho because Fancher was a
loose talker who told everyone everywhere he stopped
to drink a beer and take a piss who he was, calling
himself a “stock detective” and bragging about how
when he got hired to clean out rustlers, he by god
cleaned them out guaranteed and was anyone looking
to hire a stock detective?
Fancher, they were told, was easy to spot, he had a
white streak running down through the center of his
black hair: “Like he was wearing a skunk on his head.”
The found the skunk-headed man sitting in a
whiskey den in Soda Springs. He was drinking but-
termilk laced with rum and eating a plate of boiled
potatoes.
The brothers came in casual as though just travel-
ers passing through, had their handguns tucked away
in their coat pockets. They stood at the bar watching
the skunk-headed man by way of the back bar mirror.
They talked among themselves how they were going
to do it.
Zeb said, “I don’t feel like wasting no guddamn
time
here, boys. We still got that other’n to catch as well.”
His brothers nodded. By now they were practiced
at the art of killing.
“Zack, you drift over toward the piana. Zane, you
sidle in best you can behind him. I’ll approach him
head on, get his attention. Soon as he makes his move
blow out his brains.”
It seemed simple enough. But Fancher was wary of
strangers and had been keeping an eye on the three
fellows at the bar because they looked like they could
be trouble, possibly federal marshals, whereas the
others in the place looked like simple miners, loggers,
and ranchers. But these three were rough trade; any-
body could see that.
He continued to fork potatoes into his mouth, but
he slipped his free hand down under the table to reach
the Deane Adams inside his waistband, took it out,
and held it in his lap.
What was it old Bill Sunday used to say: Sooner or
later they’ll come for you—men you don’t know and
who don’t know you except by reputation, and they’ll
want to kill you not because they dislike you or be-
cause you killed their kin or robbed them or some
other injustice. They’ll kill you because there is money
on your head and they are bold enough to think they
can.
Well, come on you sons a bitches if that’s what its
going to be, he thought. Let’s get this fucken show
started.
He saw them move away from the bar, fanning out
to his left and right and he cocked the hammer of the
Deane Adams about as slow as he ever cocked it be-
fore hoping the sound got muffled by the locals chat-
tering about the weather and this that and the other
thing and kept forking the potatoes into his mouth
because they tasted good and warm and if it was by
god going to be the last meal he ate, he was going to
eat it all because he’d paid a dollar for it.
He waited and waited as they moved cautious in a
circle around him. Then just as he was about to kick
over the table and see which of them was the best
shootist in the bunch, a kid came running in carrying
an empty beer pail and calling to the bartender he was
there to get his pa a bucket of beer. He walked right
between the three and Fancher.
That was all she wrote, enough to distract, and he
came up fast firing the Deane Adams at the lanky son
of bitch coming up on him from his right, only he