by Bill Brooks
13
Toussaint said, “How you like this business?”
“Lawman? It isn’t my first choice of things to
do,” Jake said.
They’d been riding along the north road, back out
to the Swede’s place. It was decided a good place to
begin looking for the Swede.
“I don’t much care for horses,” Toussaint said.
“Riding them. It’s the thing Karen was always trying
to get me to do. Go in the horse-catching business and
I might have done it, except I don’t care for them
much—can’t trust them.”
“That why you ride a mule?”
“Mules are smarter than horses—they’ll never put
themselves into danger like a horse will. And if I have
to ride something, I’d just as soon ride a mule; gentler
ride.”
The sky to the north was scudding low with clouds.
“A storm is on its way,” Toussaint said.
The weather had turned churlish again, clouds
scooping in from the north, rolling like gray waves.
“One place we might look for him—a place where
a murdering man might try and hole up, is Finn’s
place,” Toussaint said.
Jake had heard of the outpost—a whiskey den, re-
ally, on the west road halfway between Sweet Sorrow
and the county line. But he’d never been there, had no
reason to go there, and had no official jurisdiction be-
yond the town’s limits.
“What makes you think so?” Jake asked.
“It’s a rough place, but a place where men don’t
ask any questions. Finn’s not choosy about who
comes around long as they have a few bits to spend
on liquor and that whore he keeps there.”
“Well, we may swing by there just to check it out.”
Then they saw something up ahead—a man stag-
gering afoot along the road, coming toward them.
“Maybe that’s him,” Jake said.
Toussaint watched for a moment as they slowed
their animals.
“No, that’s Otis Dollar.”
Jake spurred his horse forward and Toussaint fol-
lowed.
By the time they reached him, Otis had fallen. He
had ribbons of dried blood crusted down his face and
his hair was matted with it as well. He tried to stand
at the approach of the two figures, who he couldn’t
discern through his swollen eyes. He thought perhaps
it was the Swede coming back to finish him off. The
Swede and Martha.
“Martha!” he cried.
Jake and Toussaint dismounted and took him in
hand.
“What happened?” Jake asked.
Otis looked at him, then at Toussaint through his
bruised and battered lid; it looked like he had small
plums in place of eyes. He tried to touch their faces
with his trembling hands.
“Oh, god . . .” he said, then fainted.
They laid him out in the grass and Jake cleaned his
head wounds with water from his canteen spilled onto
a kerchief while Toussaint looked on.
“Somebody’s worked him over pretty good. He
may have a fractured skull.”
Fractured skull? Toussaint thought.
“You talk the same way old Doc Willis talked—
real medical.”
Jake ignored the comment. Toussaint couldn’t help
but wonder who Jake Horn really was.
“We need to get him to a bed. Where’s the closest
place around here?”
“It’s about twenty damn miles back to town, but
Karen’s is about six that way.” Toussaint pointed off
to the east.
“Then that is where we’ll have to take him.”
Karen was coming back to the house, a pair of rabbits
she’d shot hanging from her belt. She carried a needle
gun in her right hand—something Toussaint had
given her once. She hated goddamn rabbits. She hated
cleaning them and she hated eating them, but they
were the only living game she came across when she
went out that morning and so she’d had no choice but
to take them. And as she neared her house, she saw
the two riders, one of them riding a man double. And
then they all reached the house about the same time
and she saw who the two riders were and she wasn’t
pleased.
“Karen,” Jake said.
She looked at him, looked at Toussaint and Otis
Dollar riding double on the back of Otis’s mule. Lord,
she thought. Toussaint has finally lost his mind and
tried to kill Otis.
Jake explained the situation and Karen was re-
lieved that it hadn’t been Toussaint who had done
Otis the damage.
“I might as well open a hospital,” she said. “Or a
way station.”
They helped Otis into the house and onto Karen’s
bed. Toussaint looked on with a certain amount of
jealousy. He was wondering if this was the first time
Otis ever lay in Karen’s bed.
“How long you planning on me entertaining com-
pany?” Karen said looking down at poor Otis.
Twenty years had changed him from what he was on
that one particular day. He had a full head of dark
hair back then, and quite handsome—not at all the
way he was now.
“A day, maybe two at the outside. I’ve sent out a
burial party to the Swedes. I can have them stop by
on their way back and pick him up and take him into
town.”
“Lovely,” she said sarcastically. “I can’t tell you
what a pleasure it is to have such wonderful guests in
my house.” She said this more for Toussaint’s benefit
than anyone else’s.
The wind was kicking hard now, bucking against
the sides of the house, rattling windows.
Karen started a fire in the stove to set water to boil.
She saw Toussaint looking at the carcasses of the dead
water and began to wash Otis’s face, the crusted
blood, tenderly and with all mercy.
“Hell,” Jake muttered over the news that the Swede
was not only a murderer but now a kidnapper, too.
Karen looked up.
“If he comes round here, I’ll be forced to shoot
him,” she said. “I won’t be fooled with or raped and
murdered.”
“I’d hope that you would shoot him if it comes to
that,” Jake said. “I’d consider him very dangerous.”
She wasn’t sure if she could shoot a man or not,
even if he was a killer and kidnapper. It was one of
those times when she wished she didn’t have to go it
alone. A man in the house to shoot murdering Swedes
would be a nice thing to have about.
Toussaint came back in the house.
“You want, I’ll cook them,” he said.
“Be my guest,” Karen said.
“You got flour, some salt?”
“What I’ve got’s in the cupboard.”
He opened the cupboard doors, saw the canned
goods that only reminded him of the visits by Otis that
fateful winter before Dex was born. But for the time
being at least, he put such thoughts out of his mind. It
d
idn’t do any good to haul over the past; nothing he
could do to change whatever may have happened.
They ate as the sky outside grew the color of galva-
nized tin.
“I’m surprised to see you fooling with rabbits,”
Toussaint said halfway through the meal.
“Beggars can’t be choosers and I’d eat a turtle or a
snake if I had to.”
“Pretty good ain’t they?”
Karen looked at him. Toussaint did not try overly
hard to hide his pleasure at eating a meal at her table
again.
Otis ate very little, such was his appetite. His stom-
ach felt queasy as he swallowed the few bites of rab-
bit. It felt to him as though he was standing on the
rolling deck of a ship tossed in bad seas. He thought
he might pitch out of his chair and he had to con-
stantly grip the sides of the table.
Jake asked him about the event that led to his
beating.
He wept telling about how the Swede had come
upon them and threatened to kill them and how he
tried to save Martha. “Then when I fought him to
protect her, he clubbed me with his pistola and left
me for dead. When I come round again, he was gone
and so was Martha. I fear terrible for her having
fallen into the hands of that devil. I should have been
more a man . . . I should have protected her.”
Toussaint met Karen’s gaze.
“You weren’t armed and he was,” Jake said. “You
couldn’t be expected to do more than what you
did.”
“I don’t know why he just didn’t shoot you,” Tous-
saint observed.
“I couldn’t say, either.”
Then Otis swooned and nearly fell over and Jake
with Toussaint’s help carried him back to the bed and
laid him down in it. He moaned and tossed, then fell
silent. Jake checked the pulse in his wrist, said, “His
heart’s strong at least.” Toussaint didn’t fail to notice
this, either.
Then, except for Otis’s moaning, there was naught
but an embarrassed silence around the table until
Toussaint said, “I’ll go and check on the animals.”
Karen said, “I need to pump water” and followed
Toussaint out.
Jake placed his hands upon the table and looked at
them. Useless he thought.
Outside Karen approached Toussaint.
“You seem to be spending more time out here now
than you did when we were married, why is that?”
He shrugged as he took the saddles off the mounts.
“Just poor luck on my part, I guess.”
“You mean on mine.”
“I’d just soon not quarrel with you.”
“Then quit coming around.”
He stood for a moment, knowing as he did about
the small silver ring he’d bought that morning. He’d
wanted to ride out as soon as he bought it to give it to
her, but he knew he had to wait until the exact right
minute when she’d be open to such a proposal. He
didn’t know when that time would be, but he knew
now wasn’t it.
“Karen, in spite of what you think, I’m not here to
make you miserable. I’m sorry as hell it didn’t work
out between us and all the rest of it. I can’t even tell
you how sorry I am, especially about what happened
to Dex and all. But I was a different man back then
than I am now and I can see the parts of it I was
wrong about.”
She wasn’t quite sure what to say to that, she
hadn’t expected any sort of apology from Toussaint
Trueblood, a man whom she never heard apologize to
anyone.
“I’ve been thinking of pulling up stakes and leav-
ing this place,” she said, not sure why she felt com-
pelled to tell him this except to test his reaction.
She saw the look of surprise as he finally turned his
full attention to her instead of that mule he seemed to
favor.
“Where would you go?”
“Back east somewhere, where I could make a living
without having to struggle so damn hard every single
day of my life. I still got kin in Iowa—a cousin.”
He said, “That’s funny, I was thinking about the
same thing—going somewhere else, I mean. Maybe
west. I’d sort of like to see the ocean once.”
“I guess we’ve both had it with this place, and no
wonder,” she said, and turned back toward the house.
“Karen.”
“What?” she said, pausing without turning round
to face him.
“I know this is going to sound funny to you, and I
don’t mean to upset you, but I mean to win you
back.”
She started to turn, to light into him for such as-
sumptions that he could just do whatever the damn
hell he wanted whether or not she wanted it, too. But
instead she said above the rising wind, “You won’t
win me back, Trueblood. Not in a million years,” and
went on into the house.
They stayed the night, Jake and Toussaint sleeping
on the floor with the glow of the stove’s fire between
them and the wind scraping along the eaves. Karen
slept in a chair.
*
*
*
The next morning Jake and Toussaint set out for the
Swede’s, the dawn a cold gray, the morning sun like a
blind eye behind the gray, the wind rushing over the
grasses flattening them near to the ground. Karen did
not go to the door to see them off, but instead stood
at the window and watched. She saw Toussaint look
back at the house just once before he turned his mule
out toward the road. She remembered the last thing
he’d said to her: “I mean to win you back . . .”
Damn crazy Indian, she thought, and never gave it
anymore consideration the rest of that day until Otis
said that evening, “That’s a pretty song you’re hum-
ming. I only wish my spirits were as high.”
Martha could hardly sleep that night for the cold
wind in spite of the Swede having wrapped himself
up against her. She’d made it a point to keep her back
to him the whole time. What had begun as a pleasant
picnic had now turned into a cold nightmare of a
time. She could feel the Swede’s warm but sour breath
on the back of her neck as they sat awkwardly in the
cab. His snores seemed like a danger and twice he
muttered in his sleep before calling out: “Stephen!
Stephen!” and when he did, his body trembled and
shook. She knew nightmares were running through
him like wild horses through the night and it scared
her that they were. She would have run and taken her
chances out on the prairies, knowing wolves and pos-
sibly bears roamed out there in the dark. But the
Swede had made sure she would not get such foolish
thoughts in her head by tying her to him with a length
of rope. She considered the odds: what it would be
like to freeze to death, against getting et by a wolf or
a bear.
Either seemed preferable to being molested by
the crazy Swede. She fretted over the fate of Otis,
thinking him probably dead from having his brains
bashed in by the Swede.
And she tried not to think about the future—of liv-
ing with a madman on some far-flung frontier, possi-
bly eating grasshoppers and crickets and drinking
dirty creek water, all the while aware that at any given
moment he might take it in his head to kill her. It
nearly drove her crazy thinking about it and shivering
from the cold.
Lord, what had she done so terrible as to deserve
such a fate?
At one point she thought she heard footsteps out
there in the darkness. She was too afraid to look to
see who would be walking around on such a miser-
able cold night such as this. She closed her eyes and
waited to be et.
She thought of her girlhood, of a time of inno-
cence, and wondered what it was the Lord had against
her to deliver her into the hands of this madman.
Was she now paying for her sins of being dry and
distant from her husband, of not serving him as a
wife should, of the sin of jealousy? She wondered, she
wept, she prayed.
The nasty old Swede snored and dreamt his mur-
derous dreams and she felt his fingers play along her
body, feeling first here, then there, even though he was
asleep, he felt to her the most dangerous creature on
earth.
The footsteps ceased and there was just the wind.
14
Fallon Monroe had last served in the United
States cavalry during the Plains Wars, killing
Cheyenne and Comanche everywhere he could find
them. And before that, he had been a very young
brevet lieutenant in the Civil War, earning his battle-
field commission at Petersburg.
Peace came shortly after, but unlike everyone else
he did not welcome it. For the peace proved worse
than war and he grew restless and volunteered to fight
Indians on the Plains. And almost at once he felt more
at ease with his troopers in the field than his young
wife at home.
Whiskey and squaws fed his appetite for the
killing.
And when the killing was finished, when the Indi-
ans had been all but defeated, he once more lost his
way, became an angry middle-aged man with a wife
he did not understand and children he felt no kin to.
He left her for a time in Oklahoma saying he would go
and find a suitable profession for a man of his skills.
“What skills are those?” she said.
