by Bill Brooks
with their unlearned looks. They didn’t understand
what was happening to their sister Gerthe or why
there was so much blood or what was in the towel
their ma had handed their pa or why she was so stern
with him.
He stood up from the table and said, “Olaf, come”
and the boy followed him out into the cold mixture of
snow and rain and they went to the shed and the man
said, “Olaf, get the shovel, yah.” And the boy got the
shovel and laid it across his shoulder and followed his
father out a short distance from the house until the
man stopped and turned back to look at how far
they’d come.
“You dig a hole here, yah.”
And the boy began to dig while the father stood
watching him and the house through the veil of rain
and snow. The digging went easy and several times
the boy stopped and looked at his pa and said, “This
deep enough, Papa?” and the man looked at the hole
and said, “A little deeper, Olaf. Dig a little deeper,
yah?”
And when the hole was about knee deep the man
said, “That’s enough,” and laid the towel in it with
the icy rain already building a puddle in the bottom,
and said to the boy, “Go on and fill it up, shovel the
dirt back in quick,” and watched as the boy did as he
was told. Then the man took hold of the shovel and
smacked down the wet lump of earth two or three
hard times and handled the shovel back to the boy
and they walked back toward the shed, the night sky
a muted dark reddish color.
It was on the way back that the man decided what
he’d do. It seemed like the only thing he could do to
alleviate his fret. Things had already gone too far for
any good to come of it. He kept thinking about
Gerthe, how he knew she was going to die and that
would be the end of everything. The last little pre-
cious thing he had in this world to ease the aching
loneliness and isolation he felt. Sometimes when he
was with her he thought of dark blue mountain slopes
rising from the silver fjords of another place that had
been his home when he was a boy, younger than her
even; when everything seemed so full of hope and
lacking in troubles.
He didn’t know why he was the way he was, what
caused him to do the things he did with her, his own
daughter. Twice she’d run away, once with that In-
dian’s boy. The last time the boy had been shot dead
by a stranger who must have wanted her more than
the Indian boy. That was the sort of thing she aroused
in men, even young men.
“I know what you do with them boys, yah,” he said,
getting her alone. “You just remember something.
You just remember who puts food in your belly and a
place to put your head down. It’s not those wild boys.
You should be grateful to me for these things, yah.”
Then not long after the men brought her back
from running away that last time she began to get sick
every day, eating her mush and throwing it up and he
knew why, because he’d seen the old woman do the
same thing each time she got with child. It was the
way women got. And he got her alone again and he
said, “You see. This is what happens when you don’t
obey your papa, when you go around laying with
every boy you can find. They get you like this, yah.”
The wet snowy rain fell into his eyes and dripped
from his hair and off his ears and soaked through his
shirt, the boy walking ahead of him, the shovel over
his shoulder, and when they got to the shed he said,
“You go on to the house, Olaf,” and the boy went. In-
side the shed he could hear the rain dripping off the
roof and it was a lonely sound and caused him to feel
like he had nothing else in his life—that the only
thing worth having was in the house dying.
He reached onto a shelf and took from it a piece of
burlap that smelled of machine oil and unwrapped it
and lifted free the pistol.
“There,” he said.
She had made him keep it out in the shed, saying
that one of the boys might fool with it and shoot him-
self or worse.
“They’re too young,” she said. “When they get
older, maybe.”
The rain going drip, drip, drip.
The boys were gathered there at the table when he
shot them. All except for Stephen, the youngest boy.
He wondered where Stephen was, but his mind was
too mad with the explosions to go and look for him.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Lord, Jesus!” the woman screamed coming out of
the girl’s room.
He aimed at her but she ducked back inside the
room.
“What is it, Mama?” the girl whispered as her
mother climbed into the bed with her and wrapped
her in her arms.
“Oh, Gerthe,” she said. “Oh, Gerthe,”
Then he was in the room with them and for a soli-
tary moment she thought he might not shoot her and
the girl.
“Lars . . .” she said. “Lars . . . what you do?”
He did not say anything, but raised the pistol once
more and shot her and she fell over still grasping the
girl whose fevered mind was already confused; she
thought she was having a bad dream, that she would
awaken from it.
“Mama!” she cried. “Mama!”
And he shot her, too.
Then in his madness he placed the end of the barrel
against his temple. It was like a hot kiss against his
skin. He smelt the cordite and machine oil even as his
hand trembled. He closed his eyes and saw the fjords,
the icy steel-blue waters that were depthless under a
muted sun, and pulled the trigger, biting the inside of
his cheek with anticipation of the shattering explo-
sion that did not happen. The hammer fell with a
snap. He could not believe it. His hand shook so terri-
bly he nearly dropped the gun. What’s wrong, he
wondered. Then he saw looking into the cylinders
that there were only five of them—five shots was all
he had to destroy them all and it wasn’t enough.
He retched and dropped the gun and went out into
the other room where his sons lay slumped over the
table as though asleep. What he saw chased him back
inside the room where the women were and he
snatched up the empty gun without rhyme or reason,
but hoping somehow the fear in him would subside if
he had the gun.
“Stephen,” he said softly. “Stephen.” Calling the
boy to come. The murder out of his heart now. The
madness gone completely. “Stephen . . .”
But the boy did not come, and soon the fear set
into the man and he knew he must run and hide or
they would find him and hang him and the fear of
hanging scared him worse than anything he could
think of.
He swallowed hard as though the rope was already
tightening around his neck, packed a valise with a
few clothes, then paced the room where he and his
wife had slept every night together. They would not
sleep together anymore. It felt to him a relief in a
strange way.
Methodically his mind began to function again and
he went out into the main room carrying his valise
and his empty gun and set them on the table, then
gently lifted each of his sons and placed them side by
side on the floor face down, next to one another and
could not look into their dead eyes as he did, but in-
stead looked at the walls through teary eyes.
And when he finished, he stepped back into the
girl’s room and looked at them lying there, mother
and daughter, clutching each other in death, their
heads thrown back, their mouths agape, their eyes
open and staring off into the void. He gently took the
coverlet and spread it over them up to their necks,
then went out into the cold rain that was partially
snow, too, and hitched the horse to the wagon and
rode away without looking back.
The boy Stephen had been in the privy when he heard
the shots. At first he thought it was the thunder, but it
didn’t sound like thunder exactly. He buttoned up his
pants and crept from the privy and began to go to the
house when he heard the two more shots and saw
flashes of light through one of the windows—Gerthe’s
little window. Instinct told him to hide and hide he
did under the house in a little space he and his broth-
ers had made for just the purpose of hiding from one
another when playing.
He squeezed in there and waited. Above him he
heard heavy footsteps. Papa had always warned them
about the dangers of strangers coming to the house,
especially in the night, like it was now.
“You must be careful of strangers, Willy and Tom
and the rest of you,” his papa would say. “There are
bad men out there” and his papa would fling his arm
toward the outer world. “And sometimes they think
you got something they want, yah, and they come and
bash in your brains and shoot you in the heart and
take whatever it is . . .”
So that is what he thought had happened: that a bad
man had come and was up there now taking what he
wanted from them and that he had shot his papa
maybe and maybe Willy and Tom and the others—his
mama, too.
He didn’t want to breathe for fear the bad man
might hear him. Lying there in the damp cold dark-
ness, the drip of rain, the footsteps of someone walk-
ing around right above his head. It was all he could do
to keep himself from crying out.
Then he heard the door open and close. Mama was
always complaining about the squeaky door. And
pretty soon he heard the tread of a horse’s hoofs
against the wet ground. Someone riding away, and the
rattle of the wagon, too.
The boy squeezed his eyes tight and did not move.
He was afraid.
6
The door to Jake’s hotel room rattled hard under
the knocking. His pocket watch lay face open on
the stand next to his bed. The light in the room was
spare, gray as an old cat’s fur. The watch read 5:30.
He sat up still shaking loose from the dream that had
gripped him: Celine sitting on the side of a bed in a
room full of hot white light rolling up her stockings,
her husband lying dead on the floor between them.
She was smiling up at him, giving him that notorious
look she had a way of perpetuating. He felt frozen,
unable to move or speak. A silver pistol lay on the
carpet next to the dead husband. Then just as sud-
denly she was pointing the pistol at him, saying,
“Now your turn, Tristan, to join the dead . . .”
He felt a shock of relief that it had only been a
dream.
The door rattled again, He answered it.
Toussaint Trueblood stood there, his eyes dark and
brooding.
“You going to go out to the Swede’s and check on
the girl?”
“Yes, I’d thought that I would, though there is little
more I can do for her.”
“I want to go with you.”
“I’m not sure she will tell you what you want to
know.”
“I can ask.”
Jake nodded.
“I guess you have that right. Give me a few min-
utes, okay?”
“I’ll be outside waiting.”
In ten minutes they were moving along the north road
under a steady drizzle, a mixture of snow and rain
that lent the air a foggy quality. They could see their
breath, like steam, and they could see the breath of
their animals as well. All those weeks of summer
drought now forgotten; the rains started in early au-
tumn, continuous, and the fear became that they
weren’t ever going to stop. Men in the saloons and the
barbershop joked about building arks. Several streams
had flooded, including Cooper’s Creek, which swelled
over its banks twice, and residents discovered which
had leaky roofs and which didn’t.
Now the rain was mixed with snow and soon
enough it would be all snow, the very thing that Roy
Bean and others like him had forecast.
They skirted wide of Karen Sunflower’s place at
the suggestion of Toussaint.
“I thought maybe I’d tell her myself once I talked
to the girl,” he said. “But not now.”
They rode on in silence except for the creak of sad-
dle leather, the sloshing of rain, their heads down
against it, their hands numbing.
*
*
*
At last they saw the ramshackle homestead of the
Swedes. It stood almost ghostly in the gray mist.
Toussaint said, “It don’t feel right.”
They saw no smoke curling from the stovepipe, no
light on in the windows. Then they saw a thing that
was most disturbing: the Swede’s underfed hound lay
dead, its skull crushed, its fur wet and half frozen
with the sleet in it.
Jesus, Jake thought. He sat a moment listening.
Taking the medical bag in one hand, he shifted the
Schofield from his pocket to his waistband. The small
hairs on the back of his neck prickled as he got down.
Toussaint didn’t say anything, but followed his lead.
Jake called to the house and was answered by
nothing but silence.
Toussaint untied the shotgun that hung from his
saddle horn by a leather strap; it was cut off short in
both stock and barrels. They approached cautiously,
Jake calling out one more time as he stepped in under
the overhang. Toussaint stood off a ways watching
the house from a more distant angle.
“Hello in there, it’s Marshal Horn. Anyone home?”
Nothing.
He removed the pistol from his waistband, thumbed
back the hammer, pushed open the door that was
&n
bsp; slightly ajar already and resting on leather hinges. The
sound it made when it swung open was like a moan.
No light on inside the house as there should be on
such a dreary day. It felt cold and damp. Not even a
fire in the stove that he could see from the angle at
which he stood. He called once more, and again no
answer. He looked back at Toussaint.
Then, he stepped inside even though his instinct
told him not to.
They were there stretched out on the floor. Three
boys lying facedown, side by side as though they’d
simply lain down and gone to sleep. Jake found a
lantern and lit it and the warm light chased off some
of the darkness.
Toussaint came to the door, looked in without go-
ing in. He saw the dead children, too.
“Son of a bitch.” It was more a soft utterance of
pain than a declaration.
Jake knelt by the bodies, held the light close. Each
had been shot in the head with what must have been a
small bore pistol judging by the lack of damage, even
though there was a copious amount of blood. Jake
closed his eyes as though to shut out the macabre
scene. Then he stood.
“Where’s the girl?” Toussaint said.
Jake looked toward the hanging blanket.
“You got my back on this?”
Toussaint nodded and Jake drew aside the blanket
with the barrel of his pistol and looked in. The girl
and her mother lay together on the bed. Jake stepped
close and touched their faces and felt how cold they
were, then withdrew his hand.
“Goddamn it.”
Toussaint followed him back outside, and they
stood outside the cabin in the damp chill with the rain
dripping down from the overhang. Jake took in two
or three deep breaths. He’d seen all sorts of death in
his time as a physician, even the deaths of women and
children. But never so much slaughter of innocents in
one place. Death by murder was a different sort of
death than any other.
Toussaint cradled the shotgun in the crook of his
arm.
“I didn’t see the man,” he said.
“He did this.”
“Looks like.”
“Question is why?”
“Men go crazy sometimes. Lots of reasons. None
of them good.”
“But not like this.”
“No, not like this, till now.”
No words seemed to fit anything they were feeling.
No words were going to fix anything, or bring any of
those children or that woman or girl back. No words
