by Bill Brooks
dreams took him. She felt relieved, tired, and as was
her usual custom at such an hour, poured herself a
small glass of sherry and sipped it as she read from a
book of Shakespeare’s sonnets. One she liked espe-
cially—“Venus and Adonis”—helped relieve her of
her own troubles, made it possible for her to not think
so directly about Fallon and what he might do if he
ever found her.
How long she read she wasn’t sure, but when the
knock came at the door, she woke with a start, the
near-empty glass falling from her hand and shattering
against the puncheon floor. Her heart tripped rapidly
and fear gripped her. It had to be Fallon—he’d some-
how found her. She barely breathed. Then the knock
came again. She had nothing to defend herself with.
Again the knock, this time more urgent. She was
afraid the sound would wake the children. She’d as
soon they not see their father, it would only make
things worse.
She hurried to open the door before whoever it was
banged on it again, and cut her foot on a piece of the
broken glass. Ignoring the pain she opened the door a
mere crack, prepared to tell him to go away, prepared
to do whatever it took to run him off.
But instead of her husband, she saw a man she’d
not seen in years, whose unexpected appearance was
nearly as shocking as if it had been her husband.
This man wasn’t the same man in appearance she
remembered, not the same as the memory she’d held
of him all these years. For, the man standing at her
door was drawn and haggard in the face, and much
more terribly thin than she recalled. He looked ill,
broken.
“Clara,” he said.
“What are you doing here?”
He leaned heavily against one hand held flat
against the outer wall.
“May I come in?”
“It’s late,” she said, searching for any excuse not
to have to deal with him.
“I know it is,” he said. “Later than you can possi-
bly know.”
“There are children asleep. I shouldn’t want to
awaken them.”
“I won’t stay long . . . I promise.”
He closed his eyes briefly, and she could see just
how terrible he looked, that there was something very
wrong with him; she thought he might collapse.
She stepped aside and held the door for him to enter.
He wore a dark coat that seemed weighted in
places. His steps were halting.
“May I sit down?”
She nodded. He eased himself into the chair she’d
been sitting in, the broken glass crunching under his
boots. He looked at it.
“I dropped a glass,” she explained. “You startled
me.”
“Sorry,” he said and bent to try and pick the bro-
ken shards but she could see the pain coming into his
face when he did. He looked at her foot.
“You’re bleeding,” he said.
“It’s nothing,” she said and went and washed the
blood away and tied a strip of cloth around it.
He watched her the entire time.
“What?” she said, after sweeping the shards into a
dustpan, noticing that he’d not taken his eyes from her.
“Funny, but I remember you not as a woman, but
just a girl.”
“It’s been over fifteen years,” she said. “People
grow up.”
He sighed. She saw him take the medicine bottle
from inside his jacket, uncork it, and take a swallow.
The swallowing looked painful.
“What is that?” she said.
“Laudanum.”
“What’s it for, I mean, why are you taking it?”
He waved a hand, corked the bottle, and put it
away again.
She emptied the dustpan, then stood looking at him.
“What are you doing here?” she asked a second
time.
“I came to see you.”
“The question is, why?”
“It’s simple,” he said. “I’m dying.”
She wasn’t sure how to take the news, what she
was supposed to feel about it—sad or relieved? This,
the father she barely knew, and what she did know of
him, she’d mostly read in the newspapers or The Po-
lice Gazette; stories about shootings, his reputation as
a gunfighter. His infamy as a shootist was not a thing
she could relate to, nor a thing that did anything but
make her feel ashamed. She became known not as
who she was or wanted to be, but as the daughter of
William Sunday, the gun artist. Children would point
their fingers at her in the schoolyard and yell, “Bang!
Bang! We killed Bill Sunday’s kid!” And she was sure
that his choice of professions had in one way or an-
other contributed to her mother’s early death.
“I don’t want to know about this,” she said.
“It’s too late, you already know.”
“I mean I don’t want to be part of this.”
He nodded, said, “I didn’t imagine that you would.
You’re not the only one who wants nothing to do
with it. But you are my only kin, and you’ve no more
choice in the matter than I do. We can’t change cer-
tain facts even as much as we may want to.”
“Please,” she said. “I’ve enough problems.”
“I heard you married. Where is your husband?”
“It isn’t important. What is important is that I be
left alone to live my life and raise my children in
peace. Please, you have to leave now.”
He rose with great effort, his features knotted in
pain.
“I won’t trouble you further tonight if you promise
to meet with me tomorrow.”
“I can’t.”
“You must.”
“Why must I? You haven’t been a father to me in
years and now suddenly you want to change all that,
you want me just to forget about the fact you weren’t
in my life when I might have needed you; that you
took up the profession of killing men over that of be-
ing a husband and a father? I can’t forgive you these
things. You’re who you are and I am who I am. I’m
sorry that you’re dying, but there is nothing I can do
about it.”
Her words were as painful to him as if someone
had unloaded a revolver in his chest.
“I didn’t come to ask your forgiveness,” he said as
his hand gripped the door’s knob. “I did come to ask
something of you in exchange for something. But it
can wait until tomorrow.”
She watched him limp away down the darkened
street toward the heart of town, knowing that he was
probably going to stay at the hotel. She waited until
his shadow became lost in deeper shadows, then
closed the door.
At least, she told herself, it wasn’t Fallon who’d
found her. And for that she was grateful. A dying fa-
ther of whom she knew so little, she reckoned she
could deal with.
A stiff wind kicked down from the nor
th, across the
benchlands and onto the grasslands; it had the feel of
Canada in it. Tall John rode next to Will Bird atop the
glass-sided hearse. Inside were five caskets of basic
pine, ropes, and shovels. It would be at best a pauper’s
funeral. The prairies were awash in the purple light of
evening. Way off in the distance from the height at
which they rode they could see the lone cabin.
“That’s it,” Tall John said.
Will Bird had recently arrived back in Sweet Sor-
row after nearly six months gone to Texas where he’d
worked as a helper building windmills in and around
Victoria. The days were nothing but hard hot work
under the stifling Texas sun and he would have quit
except the men he worked for said they wouldn’t pay
him until his contract was fulfilled. His bosses were a
pair of itinerate Germans named Meiss and Fiek—
hard, taciturn men who lacked humor and who could
outwork a mule. They ate liverwurst and onion sand-
wiches that caused their breath to stink worse than a
dung heap. They had big teeth and never laughed.
Will Bird’s last job had been building one of the
old Dutch-style windmills outside Goliad, as rough-
and-tumble a place as there ever was—where the
liquor was cheap and plentiful, the whores fat and
wicked, and the gamblers mostly cheats and back
shooters.
Tragedy struck the day he fell off one of the damn
platforms and landed on a rattlesnake that had curled
itself up under a mesquite bush. The snake bit him on
the hand and he grabbed it by the tail and cracked it
like a whip snapping off its head. But his hand
swelled to three times its normal size, turning black
in the process and causing the skin to split. He lapsed
in and out of a fever that had him talking to long-
dead kin.
Somehow he recovered and did not die himself.
And with the assistance of one of the Germans’ nieces
who’d been hired to feed the crew and wash their
clothes, he began to flourish. Her name was Hilde-
gard, whom he affectionately called Hildy. She
spoon-fed him soup and washed his bit hand in the
shade of a tent near where the Germans continued
their construction of the windmill, the ringing of
hammers and the groaning of timber a sort of sweet
symphony as Hildy ministered to him.
His hand went from black to bright red, and in a
week he could almost close it, but not enough to hold
a hammer or carry a bucket or even grip a ladder well
enough to be of much use to the windmillers. But a
snake-bit hand proved no impediment to his growing
desire for Hildy, a big strapping girl with yellow pig-
tails, rosy cheeks, and large bosoms. Will talked her
into following him down to a nearby creek with the
ruse they were going to collect drinking water.
But Meiss, the elder of the two, and uncle of the
girl, had his suspicions about the handsome but some-
what lazy and inept young westerner and had been
keeping a close eye on the doings between the two.
He, in fact, had long held something of a plan to
marry his niece once their work contracts were fin-
ished in Texas. Had set aside a certain amount of
money each job to pay for a wedding. He grew suspi-
cious when he saw her and Will Bird heading off into
the brush with a bucket. Jack and Jill, he thought
climbing down from the platform with growing anger
and jealousy.
What he found beyond the canebrakes unleashed
his fury.
He smacked Will off the girl with his large felt
hat— whap, whap, whap!
Will didn’t take the assault easy and laid into the
older German with lefts and rights, his arms flying in
windmill fashion, landing blows that drove the old
man to the ground. It wasn’t until the German was ly-
ing on his back, eyes rolled up in his head, that Will
felt the snake-bit hand burning as if it was on fire.
Will looked at the old man, looked at Hildy, saw
her chubby bare legs still exposed, said, “What the
hell!” and finished up what they’d started prior to
the arrival of the German uncle, then rode away on
the same piebald mare he’d come to Texas with in the
first place. He didn’t see no true future in being a
windmiller and he sure wasn’t looking to become no
bridegroom, neither.
Of course, he never planned on returning to Sweet
Sorrow to become some grave digger’s helper, neither.
Yet here he was, working for Tall John the under-
taker. At least temporarily, he told himself, until
something more befitting of his talents came along.
There was one other thing that kept Will Bird from
leaving: Fannie Jones.
He met her at the café and he liked what he saw,
and he guessed she did, too, and he’d been sparking
her regular ever since. He wasn’t a hundred percent
sure she was the gal for him in the long haul, but in
the short haul she’d do just fine.
Will looked toward where Tall John pointed. The
cabin looked lifeless and lonely, as if it, too, had died.
“I got to tell you, I don’t much crave this sort of
work,” he said.
“Few men do,” the undertaker said. “But it is a
job that must be done and it’s God’s work you’ll be
doing.”
“God and me never were on the same road to-
gether.”
“Not too late to start,” John said.
They could smell the death as they halted several
yards away from the cabin.
“Might be best we cover our faces with kerchiefs,”
John said.
“It’s near dark,” Will Bird said. “We can’t bury
’em in the dark.”
Tall John nodded.
“You’re right, it would be onerous work at night.”
“Couldn’t we just set fire to the place?”
Tall John took a deep breath, let it out again.
“We could, yes sir, we surely could, but we ain’t
going to. Have you no compassion?”
“Just think of the time we could save, and it sure
ain’t gone make no difference to them folks inside.”
“No, the marshal asked that they be buried. He
didn’t say anything about burning them. If he had, I
might have considered it.”
Will thought about what it felt like when he fell off
the windmill and onto the snake and how the snake
bit him—the fear that went through him with the poi-
son in his blood—and the suffering that followed. He
told himself he’d just as soon fall off ten windmills
and get bit by ten snakes as he would to go inside that
cabin and deal with the dead folks in there. “Kids,
too,” Tall John had said on their way out. Kids!
“Buck up,” John said. “It won’t be nearly as bad
as you think.”
“I reckon it will be worse,” Will Bird said.
“Yes, you’re right,” John said.
“But I find it is best
not to think about how worse things can be. Worse
would be me or you lying in there instead of them.
What say we drive off a little upwind and have our
supper and get started first light?”
“ ’At suits me just fine.”
Later, lying in the dark, John said, “How you and
Miss Jones getting along, Will?”
“Fine,” Will said.
“She’s a nice-looking young woman to be sure.
Smart, too, I’d say; saved her enough money from her
waitress job to start that little hat shop.”
Will could see the moon reflected in the glass sides
of the hearse, could hear the horses cropping grass.
“You planning on marrying her, Will?”
“I ain’t the marrying kind,” Will said. “Though if I
was to get married to anyone it would probably be
someone like Fannie.”
John was sorry to hear such news.
“But you ain’t the marrying kind, as you said,” John
replied. “So I don’t imagine that you’d even marry
someone like Miss Jones, even if she was to ask you. ”
“I don’t reckon,” Will said.
He’d finished rolling himself a cigarette and now
struck a match off his belt buckle and the flame leapt
up showing his handsome dark features and John felt
envious of him for being such a handsome man and
having himself a sweetheart like Fannie.
“No, Will, life is too short for a man to tie himself
down to one woman. Why I bet you ain’t seen half the
country you aim to see before you get old, have you?”
Will shrugged.
“And I bet you still got a eye for the young ladies,
Miss Jones notwithstanding.”
Will smoked in silence, thinking about how maybe
John was right about him not being ready to settle
down, that even though Fannie was a fine enough
woman, there might be finer women still out there
somewhere. He heard wolves howl, the yip of a coy-
ote off somewhere in the dark. He looked up and saw
a thousand stars to go along with the moon that was
shining down and showing in the hearse’s glass.
“I reckon a young fellow like you still has plenty of
plans,” John said. “I know I was your age, wouldn’t
be nothing to tie me down. Hell, I’d at least want to
see one of the two oceans, wouldn’t you, Will?”
Will closed his eyes.
“Maybe so,” he said.
John felt hope rising. A smart feller could talk a
less smart one into or out of almost anything.
