by Bill Brooks
ing skills. He didn’t know what white women said to
their men for providing them with food, whether or
not they praised them and as part of their praise of-
fered themselves in gratitude. He had it in mind that if
she offered herself to him, he would overlook the fact
she was white. A man couldn’t be too choosy when it
came to either food or women in such skinny country
as the grasslands.
“You might make a good wife,” he said. “I could
use a good wife. I’ve got three horses now and who
knows what else the Creator might give me. I never
planned on having another wife, but then I never
planned on being run out of Texas, neither. I had two
or three wives down there but the Rangers killed
them. They would have killed me too, but I was too
smart for them. Some day I might go back there and
rub out all the Rangers.”
Martha listened to the mumbo-jumbo talk. She
was cold and wet and the rain fell hard enough to put
out the fire, and once it was snuffed they sat there in
the darkness getting colder and wetter, the fat Indian
talking about something she didn’t understand, but
knowing how most men thought when it was dark
and there was a woman around who could keep them
warm and comfortable. She grew more nervous and
finally said, “ ’S’cuse me, but I got to go use the
bushes,” and stood up.
“Where you going?” Big Belly said when he no-
ticed the woman standing against the skyline, the rain
falling in his hair and in his eyes. “You and me better
get inside them horse blankets, eh?”
But then suddenly she wasn’t standing there any-
more and Big Belly said, “Hey! Hey!” calling to her.
“You better not go off, some bear might get you,
wolves maybe.”
But it did no good, his warnings. He waited a long
time, then curled up in the horse blankets with the
rain falling on his face and thought it was too dark
and wet to go chasing after a woman. I’d just as soon
stay dry. Besides, I still got my horses. He didn’t think
she’d go very far in the rain, that even though she was
white, she’d figure out how wet and cold it was and
come back to camp and get in the blankets with him.
He closed his eyes and waited.
She stumbled along in the dark, fear forcing her to
keep going and not turn back. She didn’t know what
was worse, catching her death from pneumonia, or
maybe getting eaten by a bear or wolves, or being at
the mercy of the fat Indian’s carnal desires. She may
not have understood his lingo, but she understood the
look in his eyes before the fire got doused. Lonesome
men always had that same lonesome look. And if she
hadn’t been a married woman, she might have used
her womanly charms and such lonesomeness to her
advantage. But she’d taken a vow to be faithful to
Otis, in spite of his sometimes pitiful behavior, and
faithful she’d be as long as she had a single breath left
in her. She’d rather get et by wolves than break her
wedding vows.
And on she stumbled into the long wet night, fear
and cold howling in her every fiber.
The storm swept over them and brought with it rain
and an early darkness.
Toussaint had been thinking about Karen; what he
would feel like if it was her instead of Martha they
were trying to rescue. He figured the first opportunity
he had, he’d go and ask Karen to marry him. He’d
give her the silver ring he had in his pocket. She’d
raise hell of course, refuse and tell him to get off her
land, threaten to shoot him maybe if he didn’t. Hell,
he didn’t care if she did shoot him just as long as she
agreed to marry him afterward. He missed her like he
never thought he would. He couldn’t even say why he
missed her exactly—maybe it was because he missed
the bad parts of being married to her as much as he
missed the good parts; she always made him feel alive,
even if at times miserable. She always kept his pot
stirred up real good. Making up with her was always
better than the fighting. Then, too, the rain made him
remember those good parts real well and he knew for
sure he missed those times when it rained—him and
her lying abed watching it before and after making
love. He reckoned he was somewhere around forty
years old. She was, too. They might just as well get
married again and grow old together rather than
grow old alone he reasoned. He knew Karen’s ways,
and she knew his, and he couldn’t see learning all that
stuff over again with a new woman.
Jake said, “We better find a place and make camp.”
“I know where there’s an old soddy nobody lives
in not too far from here,” Toussaint said. “Used to be
lived in by these two Irish brothers who thought
they’d come west to make their fortune. From Brook-
lyn, New York, I believe they said they were from.
Last time I came across them one had died of some-
thing and the other was nearly starved to death him-
self. I hunted him some dreaming rabbits and it saved
him, eating those dreaming rabbits. Anyway, the last
time I come out this way he was gone, the place about
ruined, the roof half caved in, but funny thing was all
the furniture was still there.”
“What are we waiting for, point the way,” Jake said.
They found the place still standing, what there was
of it. One wall had collapsed and most of the roof as
well, but there was a bit of shelter nonetheless.
“I guess we should have come better prepared,”
Jake said.
“You thought we’d find them quick,” Toussaint said.
“I’m new at this.”
“I know it. Manhunting is something you learn as
you go.”
They sat in a pair of the chairs the brothers had left
behind, in under what was left of the roof. The hiss of
rain had to it a hypnotic effect.
“Can I ask you something?” Toussaint said.
The question came out of the shadows and was one
Jake hadn’t expected.
“Sure.”
“You ever bad in love with a woman?”
“I was.”
“I guess it didn’t work out or you wouldn’t be in
this country alone.”
“You’d guess right.”
“You mind me asking why it went wrong between
you and her?”
“There a reason you want to know about my love
life?”
“Yeah, figure you might know more’n me about
what’s in a white woman’s heart.”
“Karen, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a long sad story I’d have to tell you about the
woman I was in love with,” Jake said. “One I’d just as
soon not remember.”
“Sure, I understand,” Toussaint said. “None of
that stuff is easy for a man. Thing is, I�
��m thinking of
taking up with her again.”
“Good luck.”
“Some rain, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“You think we’ll find Martha alive out there
somewhere?”
“It’s hard country,” Jake said. “You’d know that
better than me.”
“This is hard country on a woman, for sure.”
“Hard country all the way around, the way I see it.”
“You think women have it in them to forget past
injustices?”
“Probably more so than most men.”
“I hope we find her alive.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
The sound of rain sang them to sleep.
22
Fallon Monroe saw the shadow of a shape that
looked like a shack and spurred his stolen horse to-
ward it. The rain had beaten his hat down and filled
his boots. It was a cold evil rain, he thought, like
something God would send to drown an evil man, or
at the very least punish him for his sins. Fallon wasn’t
a big believer in God or sins, but he was some because
his old man had been in the God business and some of
it had rubbed off.
He drew in at the ramshackle place, didn’t see a
light on inside, figured rightly it was vacant. He tied
off and went in slapping rain from his hat. He found
an old bull’s-eye lantern and lit it, looked around. It
was a bigger than usual shack with several cots in two
rooms, rusted cookstove with nickel-plated legs. And,
except for the loose floorboards and the strange smell
of the place, he thought to himself, it’s just like a fine
hotel. He found some canned goods and some mealy
flour and a chunk of salt-cured pork and within the
hour he’d eaten his fill. He pulled his tobacco from an
inside pocket along with his papers and fashioned
himself a shuck and smoked it sitting out of the way
of the leaky roof, then remembered how wet his feet
were and pulled off his boots and poured the water
from them out an open window. He carried the
lantern over to the large bed—it had an iron frame—
and was about to bunk down when he saw the stains
large as a pair of dinner plates. He held the light
closer. Bloodstains. He pulled back the blankets and
saw the stains had soaked into the tick mattress. It
made him feel a tad uncomfortable to think about ly-
ing down on a bloodstained bed and so he went out
again into the main room and chose one of the small
cots and lay down on it.
He’d checked out the first three stops the ticket-
master back in Bismarck had written down for him—
Bent Fork, Tulip, and Grand Rock. Just shitholes of
places and no Clara. The next place on his list was a
burg called Sweet Sorrow. The good news was, so far
there hadn’t been any law on his trail for the stolen
horse.
The night rain seduced his mind to thinking back
when he was a boy. It seemed like another lifetime.
Like it wasn’t him but someone else, a story he’d read
about a boy.
One thought led to another and eventually it all led
to his daddy. The old man had been a preacher back
there in Kentucky, would ride the circuit on a mule
back up in the hollows preaching to folks where there
wasn’t any church except the sky and the trees. When
he wasn’t preaching he was a sawyer and Fallon never
did conclude how the two went together. The old
man would be gone from Saturday night till Monday
morning and come home with chickens, eggs, butter,
and jams, all in a poke sack to go along with the little
bit of money he earned from his preaching; enough
food and money to keep the Monroe family—Fallon,
his ma, and his siblings—from starving. The old man
was hard and stern, seemed to be smoldering inside
all the time, hardly ever smiled.
One time he caught Fallon looking at a deck of
playing cards with sultry renderings of women on
them he’d gotten from a boy in town for a nickel. The
boy said he stole them off a gambler. The old man
belt-whipped him over it, saying how he was going to
“beat the devil out of him” and pretty much did.
But then one day a woman from the hollows
showed up with her young daughter—a girl not much
older than Fallon, fourteen or fifteen—both women
barefoot and looking like scarecrows except for the
daughter’s round belly. The older woman came right
up to the house and yelled for him to come out—
“Preacher Monroe! Y’all better get on out here now!”
This, on a Good Friday when they’d all just sat
down to a nice chicken dinner with the old man giv-
ing his usual long prayer before eating.
And when the old man came out of the house to
confront the crone, so, too, did the rest of the Mon-
roes and stood there on the porch behind the old man
as the hollow woman announced about how the old
man had put his seed in the girl and it was plain as
hell looking at her that somebody sure had.
“What you gone do about it, Preacher?”
“I had no hand in it,” the old man said with a
wobbling voice, for Fallon’s ma and his siblings were
all staring at him; the wattle on his neck quivered.
“It ain’t a goddamn hand that caused this—it was
your straying and unholy pecker!” the woman decried.
Fallon remembered looking up at the sky thinking
it was going to split in half. The old man run the hol-
low woman and her child off by invoking the wrath of
God on her for such false accusations, telling her she
would burn in a lake of fire and so on and so forth,
raining brimstone from the heavens on her, and if that
didn’t by god work he’d get his gun, until she shrank
and fell back, then turned running up the road, the
girl in tow screaming, “The Devil! The Devil”
It made for a long hard rest of the day, the old man
about half wild and Fallon’s ma equally so, for the
truth could not be denied no matter how much the
old man tried denying it. It was the most terrible event
that could have befallen them all—the hollow woman
and her pregnant child.
Late that evening the old man said, “I’m going to
prove to you, Hettie, I didn’t have a thing to do with
that girl getting knocked up,” and went out and came
back with a big timber rattlesnake long as his arm and
stood in the yard with the red sky behind him invok-
ing the name of Jesus and Jehovah, shouting “Lord, if
I have sinned then let this serpent strike me dead.”
And that’s exactly what happened. The snake struck
him twice in the face. The old man lingered through
the night but was dead by dawn, his face swollen and
red like a rotted melon. It didn’t even look like him
when they buried him.
Fallon heard his ma telling the girls: “The wages of
sin is death. Your pa thought he could kiss
and fool
with that girl and get away with it the same as he
thought he could kiss and fool with that old snake
and get away with it, but he couldn’t.”
It was a week later that Fallon found the same deck
of playing cards the old man had whipped him over
hidden in the top rafter of the outhouse and realized
why the old man made so many night trips out there
late at night, a lantern in his hand.
He thought now about women in general and those
on the back of playing cards and thought how it was
women who brought as much pain to men as they did
pleasure and how it been that way since the beginning
of time when Eve tempted old Adam with that apple
and got them both kicked out of Eden, just like that
hollow woman and her girl got his old man bit by that
big snake, and, now, just as his wife Clara had by
leaving him and taking their children—leaving him as
though he didn’t mean a thing to her.
He was half asleep when he heard the door open.
Quick as a flash he had his gun cocked and aimed,
thought he saw the shadow of someone there in the
room. Rain hissing like a thousand angry snakes.
Thought at first he was dreaming, that it was the old
man come back from the grave, come back to belt-
whip him for fooling with those card women.
“Easy, now,” he said. “I’ve got my gun on you and
I’ll sure as damn shoot a hole in you.”
The voice of a woman startled him.
“Don’t shoot, mister,” the woman’s voice said.
Fallon’s fingers found the matches, struck one and
touched it to the lantern’s wick and the room filled
with a nice warm light. The woman was wet and
bedraggled, her dress torn and muddy. She wasn’t a
young woman by any means. She wouldn’t remind a
man of the women on the back of a deck of playing
cards, not by a damn sight.
“I’m about froze to death,” Martha said. “I was
near killed by a savage and had to run for my life . . .”
“Then you better shuck them duds and crawl up in
these blankets with me,” Fallon said. She wasn’t
young, but she was a woman and it had been a long
time since he’d been with one. “It’s the only safe place
I know of on a terrible night such as this.”
“I’m a married woman, mister . . .” Martha said
through chattering teeth. “I hope you’ll be gentleman
enough to respect that.”
He looked her over good, decided it wasn’t worth