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Killing Mr. Sunday

Page 7

by Bill Brooks

missed and the man shot him through the rib meat and

  knocked him ass backward over the chair he’d been

  sitting on. He scrambled to try and get to his feet but

  another of them shot him somewhere high up be-

  tween his shoulder blades and knocked him to the

  dirty floor again. He pulled and pulled the trigger on

  that Deane Adams, shooting any goddamn thing he

  could see, but hell, before he knew it, they’d shot him

  to pieces.

  The Stone brothers moved in quick, shot him like

  he was one big fish in a barrel and they kept shooting

  him until he stopped moving. Zack kicked the Deane

  Adams out of his hand and waited for him to reach

  for it. And when he didn’t, Zeb stooped and picked

  the gun up and put it in his coat pocket, then

  thumbed back the eyelids and said, “He’s as dead as a

  tree stump.”

  The Stone brothers waited until the following day

  when there was an article written up in the Soda

  Springs Tribune about the shooting, complete with

  the dead man’s name and the names of those who had

  shot him. The man from the newspaper even took

  their photograph standing next to the dead man laid

  out in a lead-lined coffin in the local funeral parlor.

  They were more than happy to give their names, stat-

  ing clearly they were bona fide bounty hunters. They

  bought several copies to take back to Montana along

  with the spoils of victory: Fancher’s piebald gelding,

  his well-oiled, brass-fitted Henry rifle, two shirts and

  six pairs of socks found in his saddlebags, a razor,

  and a small shaving mirror. And oddly enough, a pair

  of lady’s stockings.

  And once the reward was collected for Fancher,

  they began in earnest to find the partner—one William

  Sunday who, it was said, was a very dangerous man.

  10

  Jake wondered what he’d do with the orphan

  once he got him back to Sweet Sorrow. The child

  sat quietly, but looking round every so often. Jake

  said, “Here,” and handed the boy the reins, fulfilling

  his promise to let the child handle the horse. The

  boy’s face lit up like it was Christmas. Jake looked

  over at Toussaint who seemed not to be paying any at-

  tention to the two of them.

  They rode at an easy trot, sun shattering in the

  water-filled pockmarks along the road, tufts of snow

  sparkling in the grasses.

  Finally they saw the buildings of Sweet Sorrow ris-

  ing up out of the grasslands, the sun glinting off some

  of the metal roofs, and for once Jake was glad to be

  returning to this place. It was beginning to feel like

  home in a way.

  They came first to Toussaint’s lodge and Toussaint

  pulled up, said, “You make up your mind what you’re

  going to do with that one?”

  “Not sure.” Then Jake said, “Son, slip on down

  and stretch your legs while I talk to Mr. Trueblood

  here.”

  Toussaint handed the boy his reins and said, “How

  about walking this animal over there to that water

  tank and giving him a drink. You think you can do

  that for me?”

  Without speaking the boy did as asked.

  “See, the thing is,” Jake said. “I could just take

  him down to that orphanage in Bismarck, but that

  would take about a week down there and back and I

  feel like that’s time better spent trying to catch the

  Swede before he decides to shoot anymore folks.”

  “Then that’s what you need to do.”

  “Yeah. I need to find him and I could use your help

  on this since I don’t know shit about tracking.”

  “And you think I do because I’m half Indian?”

  “I was hoping.”

  “I’m half French, too, don’t mean I like to eat

  frogs.”

  “You want to help or not?”

  “This a paying job or you asking me to volunteer?”

  “I can get the council to come up with some funds

  for it.”

  “Council,” Toussaint said derisively. “You mean

  the one was headed up by Roy Bean who left the

  other day for Texas? That group of paper collars who

  have a hard time agreeing on whether rain is wet or

  not?”

  “Their money is as good as anyone else’s. You sud-

  denly got particular about whose pocket you get paid

  out of?”

  “What the hell.” Toussaint had been pondering a

  pretty silver ring he’d seen down at the jeweler’s a

  month previous. Thought it might make a good peace

  offering if he was to give something like that to

  Karen. Till now he’d never had much need for money,

  just what little it took to get by. But silver rings just

  didn’t grow on trees. A job about now might not be

  such a bad idea. Long as it wasn’t long term and he

  wasn’t beholden to anyone. Besides, he told himself,

  that damn Swede had it coming for what he did.

  “I still need to find someone to watch the boy until

  we catch the Swede and I can take him to Bismarck,”

  Jake said.

  “There’s Otis’s wife, but I don’t know if she’d take

  to him. She doesn’t even take to Otis that well, much

  less strangers.”

  “Anyone else?”

  Toussaint looked over at the boy, said, “Might be

  some of these ranchers around here would take him in,

  except he looks too thin and little to get much work

  out of.”

  “I’m not looking for someone to take him on as a

  working hand.”

  “What about that new schoolteacher, Mrs. Mon-

  roe? I hear she’s a widow and she’s got a couple of lit-

  tle ones already. She might take him in on a temporary

  basis.”

  “I hadn’t thought of her.”

  “Well, you ought to give her a try since she’s used

  to handling kids.”

  “Can you be ready to leave in the hour?”

  “You still ain’t said how much it pays.”

  “How much you charge for tracking a man?”

  “I never tracked one before. How about twenty

  dollars for the whole job?”

  “Done.” Toussaint was surprised at the quick

  agreement, thinking he’d start at twenty dollars and

  let the lawman barter him down; twenty dollars was

  the price of the silver ring.

  “I’ll be ready when you come back around,” he

  said, thinking he’d just take a stroll down to the jew-

  eler’s and put his name on that ring before someone

  else did.

  Jake called the boy and set him up on the horse

  and said, “You ever been to school?”

  The boy simply stared at him. It seemed to be a

  trait of the Swedes—to stare at you when you asked

  them a question.

  Clara Monroe felt caught between the sense of safety

  of living in such a far-flung place as Sweet Sorrow,

  and the isolation that came with it. She’d arrived only

  two weeks earlier having responded to an advertise-

  ment she’d read in the Bismarck Tribune for a school-

/>   teacher. It seemed at the time a godsend to her. Fallon

  Monroe had become more and more abusive since his

  discharge from the army. He could only seem to find

  glory in the bottom of a whiskey bottle now that his

  Indian-fighting days were behind him. He’d tried his

  hand at various things but found them all too uninter-

  esting to suit him. He was a man riveted to his past,

  and could not, it seemed, adjust to his present circum-

  stances: that of an alcoholic ex-soldier who’d gotten

  the taste of war blood and now that there was no war,

  he felt lost. With the Plains Indians all whipped, the

  army had little use for men whose personal shortcom-

  ings and demons would not allow them to rise higher

  than the rank of a lieutenant. Finding himself out of a

  career only exacerbated his drinking, and his drink-

  ing led to being abusive. Clara found it a relief those

  nights when he did not find his way home. So too did

  her young daughters.

  And so when she’d seen the ad, she knew what she

  would do. Escape proved no problem, since Fallon

  was often passed out on the bed until midday and the

  stages leaving from Bismarck generally left at an early

  hour.

  But once upon the grasslands, Clara began to suf-

  fer doubts that nagged at her until each time she

  looked at her girls, April and May—Fallon’s insis-

  tence that they be named after the months they were

  born in. Still, Sweet Sorrow seemed as far removed

  from civilization as the moon, and she was struck by

  its stark placement in the world, by the vast emptiness

  they’d crossed to reach it. She could not imagine a

  more desolate place.

  Two weeks wasn’t very long to settle in, but she’d

  found a small house to rent, fortunately; the man

  who’d occupied it had died recently, she was told, and

  later heard via rumor he had died of gangrene from

  having lost a hand. She was not told the full details:

  that he’d chopped off his own hand after cleaving his

  wife’s head in with a hatchet—nor would she have

  wanted to know. It was enough to find a place for her

  and the children.

  Roy Bean, as he explained, was the self-appointed

  “temporary town’s mayor.” And he personally

  showed her around, took her out to the little one-

  room schoolhouse, saying as he did, “You’re very

  young and attractive, Miss Monroe, is it?”

  “Yes,” she lied.

  “But I see you have children?”

  “I’m widowed,” she said. “My husband was killed

  fighting Indians.”

  Roy Bean had offered the proper amount of condo-

  lences before asking her to join him for supper at the

  Fat Duck Café that evening. She politely declined. She

  did not want any possibility of personal involvement,

  not yet, and certainly not with a man of Roy Bean’s

  obvious reprobate character. She made sure that her

  rejection was most kind so as not to risk losing the job.

  Roy Bean hired her on the spot, saying, “Well, I

  suppose there is always time for suppers later on,

  once you’re settled in.”

  It hadn’t been easy, the adjustment, the fact that

  she had to school her own daughters into lying about

  the fate of their father. And at night she wept, but by

  morning she steeled herself and met her obligations—

  teaching arithmetic, reading, writing, and Latin to a

  roomful of children whose ages ranged from seven to

  fourteen. Boys and girls.

  The one saving grace of all this was that the

  weather was pretty that time of year: the sun yet warm

  with just a hint of the winter to come once the sun

  had set. Of course the locals warned her the weather

  was like a woman, highly changeable in her moods.

  She found nothing amusing in such references.

  It was during recess that she saw the rider ap-

  proach, saw the boy being held by the man.

  He introduced himself to her as Jake Horn, and the

  boy as Stephen Kunckle.

  The boy was fair and frail, the man was not. She

  saw he wore a lawman’s badge and her heart jumped

  a little figuring his business had to do with her, that

  somehow Fallon had set the law to find her and that

  this man was going to arrest her and take her back to

  Fallon and back to a life she dreaded.

  “Why don’t you go and play with the other chil-

  dren,” Jake said to the boy, who did not have to be

  asked twice before he was off.

  “I’ve got a situation,” Jake said.

  She listened with dread.

  But rather than say he’d come to arrest her for de-

  sertion of her husband, he told her about the murders

  of the boy’s family.

  “I just need someone to watch after him until I can

  find his father.”

  She felt deeply relieved that the lawman’s business

  was not about her.

  “Why me?” she said. “I hardly know anyone here

  and I’m sure there are others much more capable of

  caring for that poor child.”

  He explained he knew of no one else he could call

  on, that he was fairly new to the territory himself. She

  appeared reluctant.

  “I’ll be happy to see you’re paid for his upkeep and

  your troubles. It shouldn’t be for more than a few

  days until I can arrange to take him to the orphanage

  in Bismarck.” She flinched when he said that, for she

  could easily imagine her girls in an orphanage if any-

  thing was to happen to her—knowing as she did that

  Fallon was incapable of caring for them. The thought

  of that child losing his entire family, of living out his

  childhood in an orphanage, tugged at her emotions.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Jake liked what he saw in this woman. She was nei-

  ther young nor old. She wasn’t beautiful or plain. He

  couldn’t define it, exactly, but there was something

  extraordinary about her that showed through her or-

  dinariness, even though she tried hard not to show it.

  He looked over to the boy who was busy running

  around in circles with other children. He wondered

  how much the murders would haunt the child, or if

  they would at all. Children were resilient, this much

  he knew from having treated so many of them as a

  physician.

  “I appreciate it,” he said.

  He stood there for a moment longer than was neces-

  sary, then said, “I’ll come back just as soon as I can cap-

  ture the father. Not longer than a week at the outside.”

  She thought he seemed terribly sure of himself, and

  that bothered her a bit. Fallon had been terribly sure

  of himself as well when he was an army officer. He

  wasn’t anymore, however. She knew that men like

  Fallon, and possibly this lawman, were men who

  could fall far when they fell. She told herself to be

  wary of him. But then she saw what he did and it

  caused her to have doubts about her own judgment.
/>
  He walked over to the boy and knelt down in front of

  him and spoke to him, then put a comforting hand on

  the child’s shoulder and the boy suddenly hugged him

  and the lawman returned the gesture and in seeing it,

  she was touched again.

  Otis Dollar had taken the occasion of the sunny day to

  propose to his wife they ride out to Cooper’s Creek.

  “Whatever for?” she’d said.

  “It’s been a very long time since you and me did

  anything saucy,” he said.

  “Saucy? Have you been drinking?”

  “No, but I’m about to start if you don’t find a way

  in your heart to forgive me and getting us back to reg-

  ular man and wife again.”

  She knew what he wanted forgiveness for—his af-

  fection and undying love for Karen Sunflower. She

  could never prove it, but she was positive that twenty

  years ago he and Karen had had an assignation. And

  though she’d confronted him, he never would admit

  to it. It had started what was to become twenty years

  of icy tolerance between them. They worked the mer-

  cantile together, they ate together, and they slept in

  the same bed. But rarely were they intimate with each

  other, and when they were it was always at Otis’s in-

  sistence even though he knew she could barely tolerate

  it; he could almost see in the darkness her squeezing

  her eyes shut as though it was the worst kind of pain

  she could suffer.

  He’d often considered just leaving her. It was true,

  he still carried a torch for Karen Sunflower, and it was

  true there had been one occasion when he and Karen

  had relations—this, during that winter Toussaint had

  gone off somewhere to see his people and had not re-

  turned till spring. And yes, there was even some un-

  certainty as to whether Dex had been Toussaint’s son

  or Otis’s. The boy had the strong looks of his mother,

  but his eyes could have been either man’s and his

  ways were strange because he’d been born a bit daft.

  So there was no clear indication one way or the other

  who his daddy was.

  Otis had thought and thought about the situation

  and had come most recently to conclude either he had

  to leave his wife, or try one more time to mend their

  differences. After all, he told himself, I’m almost fifty.

  So when he saw the weather break clean and clear the

  day after the snow and rain, he had a sudden thought

  and made some sandwiches and had taken from a

  shelf a bottle of blackberry wine and put everything

 

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