by Bill Brooks
late to take any of the words back.
“I figured he done something bad,” Otis said. “I
saw blood on his shirt cuffs just before he knocked
me on the head.” Then they fell to silence again, the
food and the very world itself seeming glum.
All the rest of that morning, Karen had sat in front of
the cabin watching for strangers while Otis lay in bed
mumbling in his sleep before she went in and woke
him for dinner. It was right after they finished eating
that she saw a strange-looking carriage approaching
from off in the far distance, two people riding atop.
“Get ready, we got company,” she said.
Karen took the needlegun Toussaint had once
given her and went outside with it and Otis followed
her. He squinted through swollen eyes to see who it
was, said, “If you give me a gun I’ll help you kill
him.”
“Go back inside, Otis. I only got this one gun and
I can shoot pretty damn good with it and if there is
any killing to be done on my property, I’ll be the one
doing it. Your head funny the way it is, I wouldn’t
trust you to protect me from a chicken thief.”
But when the contraption drew within better view,
Karen could see the two people riding atop it: Tall
John, the undertaker, and Will Bird, the lanky and
handsome young itinerant with dark curly hair
spilling from under his hat. It was a glass-sided hearse
they rode atop.
“Miss Sunflower,” John said as soon as he drew
reins and set the brake. “Marshal asked me to come
collect Otis from you.” He looked at the shopkeeper,
the bandaged head, the swollen black-and-blue eyes
that gave him the look of a wounded raccoon.
“We thought maybe you were that madman,” she
said.
“I don’t suppose you’d have any coffee with some
whiskey in it,” said Will Bird, his thirst for a drink
hard upon him now that he’d helped bury a bunch of
murdered people. The youngest woman’s face espe-
cially haunted him; she had probably been pretty
enough in life, but in death she was haunting.
“Coffee, no whiskey to go in it,” Karen said.
Both he and Tall John were sweaty and dirt
smeared.
Both men got down and John wiped his brow with
a large blue bandanna he pulled from his back
pocket.
“An onerous task burying those poor folks. Oner-
ous, indeed.”
“Damn mean work, too,” Will Bird said, not know-
ing what onerous meant, hopping down to stretch his
legs. “How you been Karen? It’s been a time since I
seen you last.”
“I’ve been okay,” she said. There had been a time a
few years back when she’d flirted with the idea of tak-
ing Will Bird into her bed. It was the summer before
Will went off to Texas and when he was roaming
around the county picking up whatever work he could
find locally. She’d hired him to repair her leaky roof for
her. It had been a week’s worth of work—what with
waiting for the rain to come again after he patched it to
see if it leaked still. And over that time they’d gotten to
know each other about as well as a woman without a
man and a man without a woman can in spite of the
difference in their ages and philosophies.
Will had even gone out one evening and picked
wildflowers and brought them to her. They’d eaten
their meals out of doors most evenings where they
could hear the meadowlarks singing in the dusk and
Will said, “It’s like they’re singing just for our bene-
fit,” and Karen did not disagree with such a notion.
Will Bird could be a terribly charming fellow and he
had a smile like beauty itself with his nice white teeth
set in his weather-darkened face. Then, too, he had a
pleasant singing voice, something she found out about
the night he brought her the wildflowers.
After it rained and they saw there were no leaks,
he’d said to her, “I’ve come to be awful fond of you,
Karen,” and she knew immediately what he meant
and was tempted to repeat those same words back to
him, but she didn’t because she knew where such
things could and would most likely lead and she just
wasn’t up to paying the price of another broken heart
so soon since her heart hadn’t yet mended all the way
from being broken over Toussaint. And so she’d paid
Will Bird his meager wages and watched him ride off
one purple evening and he looked like something that
artist that came through the area once might paint:
Will’s dark shape and that of his horse against a sor-
rowful but lovely sky.
Now they stood eyeing each other and remember-
ing those times until Karen said, “I’ll get you all some
coffee,” and went in and got it.
“Maybe you ought to ride into town with us,
Karen,” Tall John said as they got prepared to go
with Otis reclining in the back of the hearse.
“I’m not letting some mad Swede run me off my
land.”
“You want Will to stay with you for a while, until
the marshal and Toussaint catch that murdering old
man?”
She looked at Will who was looking at her and she
knew that the only thing more dangerous than having
a madman come around would be if she allowed Will
Bird to stay with her there alone.
“No,” she said. “I’ve got my gun and I can shoot as
good, and maybe better than Will can. You all go on.”
She saw the disappointment on Will’s face but he
didn’t say anything. Instead he just looked off toward
the distance as though distracted by the emptiness. He
still had Fannie waiting for him, he reasoned.
She watched them go with some little regret. It
seemed ages since she’d known the comfort of a man
in her bed and it was all that damn Toussaint True-
blood’s fault and if he ever showed his face around
her again, she’d by damn sure let him know how she
felt.
21
“Well, what the guddamn hell are we to do
now?” Zeb said to his brothers.
“Storm’s coming,” Zack said.
“Where?” Zane said.
“Yonder.” Zack pointed off to the northwest where
a wall of brooding clouds seemed to be advancing like
the Devil’s army.
“It hits, we’ll be wet as dogs without no horses to
outrun it.”
“Who the hell was supposed to watch them cayuses,
anyway?” the elder brother said. Zeb could be more
ill tempered than the other two combined. He was al-
ways the one quickest to fight and once even knocked
a tooth loose from a prostitute’s mouth in a Goldfield
bordello because she giggled when he took his off his
pants. He got thrown in jail for it, too. The local law-
man had not taken kindly to having his wife’s tooth
knocked out, said: “You just lowered her going rate�
��
who’s going to want to pay her five dollars without a
front tooth?” The lawman did more than jail him. He
took him out back of the jail with the assistance of a
couple of deputies and pummeled him good, breaking
several ribs and knocking out one of Zeb’s own teeth.
“An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, ain’t
that what the Bible says?” the lawman said, rubbing
his bruised and scraped knuckles. Zeb doubted the
lawman had any Bible in him.
Zeb spat blood and said, “ ’At fat bitch ought not to
laugh at a man’s fireworks,” and the lawman hit him
again so hard he thought he’d been shot dead. He woke
up tied to the back of his own horse, it running wild
with bean cans tied to its tail so it would be spooked
and run till exhausted. Riding slung over its back like
that, every step was pure hell from the broken ribs Zeb
suffered from being stomped by the deputies after the
lawman knocked him cold. He coughed up blood for
nearly a month after and swore vengeance on the law-
man, but his brothers talked him out of it.
“We go back they’ll kill us all,” the youngest, Zane
said.
“Hell, I’d rather be dead than humiliated by that
big-nosed bastard and his ugly wife.”
“Ain’t worth it,” said Zack.
Truth be told, Zeb was a little afraid of the man af-
ter what he’d done to him. Confronting him again
wasn’t really something he wanted to do but said he
did out of false bravado and so had let his brothers talk
him out of seeking revenge, knowing they were proba-
bly right: the lawman would kill him and them, too.
Now the trio stood in the waist-high grass with a
chill wind snaking through it and the bruised sky
closing in on them.
“Well, unless we grow wings, we ain’t going to get
nowhere but we walk there,” Zeb said.
“Which way?” Zane asked.
“Hell, does it look like it makes a difference? Any-
where but in the direction of that storm seems to be
about right,” Zeb said.
“Let’s head the way we were going when we met
that wagon full of whores,” Zane said at last, leading
out, his brothers falling in a sober line behind him.
Zane was the youngest and the most impatient.
By dusk the first few raindrops struck them in the
face.
“Guddamn, but that’s a cold rain,” Zane said.
“Guddamn, but it sure is,” said Zack.
“Stop your whining,” Zeb said. “You sound like
wimmen.”
By the time they saw the light of the house, they
were soaked through to the skin. The rain so miser-
able cold and bad it felt like it had reached down into
their bones, like their very blood had turned to rain,
and every step was one of misery. Rain sluiced off
their hat brims and down their faces and down the
back of their necks and Zeb cussed his brothers for
not being vigilant and letting a fat Indian steal their
horses.
“One guddamn Indian!” he kept repeating. “One
fat guddamn Indian snookered us!”
Then Zack said, “Hey, they’s a light.”
They all three looked and surely there in the dis-
tance, through the curtain of rain they could see a
light.
“Sweet Jesus,” Zack said.
Karen was just about to turn in. It had been a long tir-
ing day she’d spent keeping an eye out for the mad-
man. She was glad he hadn’t shown himself. She did
not want to kill anyone—even a mad Swede, even if
he had murdered his whole family. She did not want
to have to deal with murder or death anymore. The
rain, when it came, made things seem more lonesome
than usual. And every time it rained, day or night, she
couldn’t help but think of her past romantic liaisons
with Toussaint, how he used the rain as an excuse not
to do any work, and instead would talk her into bed
where they played like children—very wicked but
happy children.
But now, alone as she was, with naught to keep her
company but the grave of her one and only child, all
she could feel was the deep lonesomeness of it all.
Somehow the rain made the prairies seem even more
empty than they were, made a body seem more iso-
lated from any other form of life, made the rest of the
world seem more distant—as distant as the moon and
stars.
She undressed and slipped on her nightgown,
stood in front of the mirror, and brushed through her
short thick hair and thought, I’ve become almost like
a man over these years. Plain as the land, no beauty to
me whatsoever. No wonder I lost my husband. What
man would want a woman who looked so plain? She
turned in profile, this way and that. What man could I
hope to get looking as I do: square of shoulder, small
of breasts, thick of waist? There ain’t a lovely bone in
me. The only man who’d want me would be wanting
a woman for the sum total of ten minutes; a man like
a dog who’d hump anything female. She fought down
the emotions of sadness, of beauty once possessed but
now lost.
She told herself she was too old to concern herself
with such vanity, that even if she had wanted, she
could not have held onto the way she once looked be-
fore the hardships of living on the plains stole from her
her youth and beauty. No woman could. Then tears
spilled down her cheeks in spite of her resolve not to
cry, but she stiffened and wiped them away with the
back of her wrist and turned out the lamp. Darkness
fell into the room immediately and she did not have to
look at the unbeautiful reflection of herself.
She lay abed trying not to think, but the more she
tried not to, the more she did.
There were a few dollars left in the sugar bowl.
Money she meant for buying necessities. She was low
on flour and canned goods and sugar and coffee. And
though she didn’t want to ask him for it, she had had
it in mind to ask Otis for an extension on her line of
credit, knowing full well he’d give it to her and gladly
so. For she knew that Otis Dollar was still in love with
her even after all these years and even in spite of the
fact she was no longer an attractive woman. The only
reason she could think of was that he’d fallen in love
with her when she still had some beauty to her twenty
years earlier, and that was what he was still in love
with, that image of her back then. Nothing she could
do about it. And maybe she didn’t really want to do
anything about it, in spite of the fact Otis was obvi-
ously back in love with Martha. But was it so bad to
have someone love you and know that they loved you
even if you didn’t them?
By god, I’ll buy myself a dress, she thought sud-
denly. I’ll ask Otis to extend my line of credit and buy
; a dress and I’ll go to the dance Saturday night at the
grange hall and I’ll dance with any man who asks me
and drink my share of punch and whatever might
happen will just have to happen. And come Sunday,
I’ll start looking for horses again and catch me
enough to pay back Otis and keep me through the
winter, and if things go well and I catch me enough
horses, I’ll sell this place and go somewhere exciting,
Europe maybe, England, see Queen Victoria. Maybe
I’ll even take an Englishman for a beau.
Her heart beat rapidly at the excited notions that
filled her head. Too long she’d been as fallow as an
unattended field . . . too many days and weeks and
months had gone by, filled with only hard work and
trying to raise a child by herself, and all it had gotten
her was grief and sorrow. Now she was alone, com-
pletely and utterly and she’d grown tired of it. She
imagined herself in the dress she was going to buy
from Otis. She imagined men asking her to dance and
how she wouldn’t turn any of them down. She imag-
ined . . . oh, my, Will Bird escorting her home after-
ward, coming to the door with her . . . and, perhaps
even inviting him to come in. The two of them stand-
ing in the darkened little house late at night, flush
with the evening’s revelry . . . his mouth on hers . . .
knowing it wouldn’t last more than a single night . . .
knowing she’d not want it to. A single night of pas-
sion would be enough. Just one single night.
Then she heard a noise. Something that wasn’t sup-
posed to be there. And her romantic notions exploded
from her head like a covey of quail flushed from the
brush.
*
*
*
The prairie dog tasted like charred wood. It was
bony, too. Little bones Martha had to gnaw on to get
the least little bit of meat off of. Still, she was so hun-
gry it could have been a Delmonico steak she was eat-
ing instead of a measly little prairie dog.
“What you think, sister?” Fat Belly said to her in
Comanche.
Martha wasn’t sure what he was saying, so she just
sort of smiled around her piece of the prairie dog. She
didn’t know how an Indian could get fat eating such
small creatures; this fellow must have eaten a terrible
lot of the little things.
“I wish this was a steak,” she said, feeling some-
what compelled to say something to him.
He wondered if she was praising him for his cook-
