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Killing Mr. Sunday

Page 6

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

 

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