by Bill Brooks
this. He said to tell you he loved you.” William Sun-
day never said those last words, but he may as well
have said them as far as Jake was concerned.
The tears brimming in her eyes spilled over the lids
and down her cheeks when she saw the drops of blood
staining the envelope.
She turned and went back inside and he followed
and saw the children all sitting at the kitchen table
looking at her and him, their faces full of questions.
With her back turned toward them all, she opened the
letter and read it.
Dearest Daughter, I leave to you my
worldly possessions—namely the money I’ve
saved over the years, several photographs of
your mother, along with her rosary. I am sorry
I could not have left you a better legacy. We
can’t always do what we want. I did the best I
knew how knowing now that it wasn’t good
enough. I hope that you’ll come to remember
me in a good light. I know I have no right to
ask you these things, but I’m down to just
words now—they’re all I have to try and con-
vince you no man lives a perfect life, just as
few live ones of total failure. Your father, Wm.
Sunday.
Jake watched as she quietly folded the letter before
turning to face him again.
“I must go and make arrangements,” she said.
“It’s already seen to,” he said.
“I must go anyway. He needs someone to look af-
ter him.”
“Go ahead,” Jake said. “I can watch the children.”
She came close and touched his hand.
“I won’t be long,” she said, then turned to the chil-
dren and instructed them to mind Mr. Horn and not
cause him any trouble while she was gone. The girls
wanted to know where she was going. She told them
she would explain it to them later. The Swede boy sat
watching with a somber face as though he knew all
about death and the demands it placed on those who
were its survivors.
Jake walked her to the door and told her that he’d
asked Tall John to see to her father and that it would
be best if she went to his place and waited there to
take charge of the rest of it. She nodded and touched
him again on the hands before hurrying off.
Jake went back and sat with the children.
“Somebody’s dead, ain’t they?” the boy said.
Jake saw it again in his mind: the shooting, the
look of near relief on William Sunday’s face; relief he
didn’t have to worry anymore about dying hard, eaten
up by something he couldn’t see and couldn’t shoot.
Two people were waiting for Tall John back in his
funeral parlor when he finished bringing in the dead
from the saloon: the schoolteacher, Mrs. Monroe,
and Emeritus Fly, the editor of the Grasslands
Democrat. Emeritus waited until the young woman
spoke to the undertaker, paying keen attention to
the exchange but not getting much information
since the woman had taken the undertaker discreetly
aside and spoke to him in whispers, Tall John nod-
ding to what she was saying. Then when she pre-
pared to leave, Emeritus said, “I was wondering if I
might have a word with you, Miss Monroe?”
“No, I think not, sir,” she said and left before he
could even ask her a single question about her rela-
tionship to the deceased.
Tall John explained as Emeritus took notes, formu-
lating the lead story in that afternoon’s special edition
in his thoughts:
Irony of ironies presented itself in the midst of our
community today when five men were slain—among
them none other than the notorious William Sunday—
in the once uproarious and raucous Pleasure Palace
that has long been out of business. How it has come
to pass that such violence could occur in a defunct
den of iniquity as opposed to one thriving, such as
the Three Aces, is but a grand and glorious mystery
that will be cleared up in the ensuing passages. Read
on dear reader! . . .
The editor’s only regret was that he wished now he
had invested in purchasing one of the cameras he’d
seen in the American Optical Company’s catalogue
from Waterbury, Connecticut. To have photographs
of the deceased—especially that of William Sunday—
to go along with his prose would be quite memorable.
33
Fallon saw her leaving the undertaker’s. He’d
drifted back into town like a skulking dog, his arm
as painful as if it had been horse bit. He’d decided af-
ter a cold and miserable night that he wasn’t going to
spend any more cold and miserable nights.
He caught up to her, took hold of her elbow, and
said, “Hello, Clara.”
She had been deep in thought about the events of
her father’s death and it took her a second to even be
aware of who this person was or what it was he
wanted. Then she saw who it was.
“Fallon!”
“That’s right, you remember me, don’t you, old girl,
your loving husband, the father of your children, the
man you left without so much as a goodbye note?”
“Fallon,” she repeated. “Please. Leave us alone.”
“No damn way. You’re coming with me. You and
the girls and we’re all going to be one big happy fam-
ily again.”
“What are you talking about? We were never one
big happy family. You abused me and left us when-
ever you wanted to. No, Fallon, you had your chance.
I’m not going back with you and neither are the
girls.” She tried to pull free of his grip but his good
hand was still strong and he was at least a foot taller
than she.
“I saw you the other night,” he seethed. “Got
yourself another man and you ain’t gone from me
three weeks. What law would blame me for taking
what’s mine and getting revenge on him that tried to
steal it from me . . .”
“Please, let me go!”
She pulled and tugged but he was a big man with a
strong grip.
“I’m warning you, gal. You give me grief, those
darling daughters of ours will have to learn to get
used to a new mother, for I’ll kill you here and now
and I’ll kill your lover, too.”
The mention of her girls took all the struggle out
of her. She would do whatever it took to protect them.
“Okay,” she said quietly. “I’ll go with you.”
“Good, that’s the way I like it to be with us: I want
something, you go along with it.”
They walked down into the alley. Then he pressed
himself against her and said, “How about you show-
ing me how much you missed me?” He put his face up
close to hers and she instinctively turned her head to
avoid the taste of his mouth.
“No,” she murmured. “Don’t do this, Fallon.”
He slapped her. Not hard, just hard enough.
“
We ain’t going to be about arguing over every lit-
tle thing anymore,” he said. “You understand me?”
She closed her eyes. Felt his hard dry mouth press
against hers.
That’s when a voice said, “Step away from her, you
son of a bitch.”
Toussaint and Karen had just turned onto Main Street
when he saw something up ahead about a block’s dis-
tance that shuddered through his senses. He halted
the wagon.
“What are we stopping in the middle of the street
for?” she said.
“Go see if you can find Jake Horn,” he said.
“And tell him what?”
“Tell him to meet me up in that alley that runs
alongside of the undertaker’s.”
“What’s going on?” she said as she watched him
step down from the wagon, reach under the wagon
seat for the shotgun, and hurry up the street.
Fallon was a seasoned fighter, and as soon as the voice
called a warning to him, he grabbed Clara and put
her between himself and whatever danger had pre-
sented itself. What he saw was a swarthy man stand-
ing at the head of the alley holding a shotgun.
“Go on and get your ass out of here,” he called to the
man. “Unless you want to end up something the dogs
chew on.”
Toussaint saw the situation was a bad one, that the
alley was narrow and there hadn’t been any way just to
sneak up on the man and bash in his brains with the
stock of the shotgun or otherwise cut him down. But if
he hadn’t interceded, who knew what the man was
planning on doing to the woman? He could see that the
arm the man held around the woman was bandaged.
“I’m not leaving here without her,” Toussaint said.
“Shit, you want her, come on and get her, then.”
Fallon was gunman enough to know that beyond
twenty paces you were lucky to hit your target with a
pistol. Whereas a shotgun’s pattern spread out the far-
ther it went. ’Course, he’d have to kill the woman to
get to him if that’s what he wanted and he doubted
the man would do that—kill the woman to get to him.
“You know anything about Indians?” Toussaint
said.
“I know the only good ones are all rotting atop
lodge poles.”
“Yeah, I figured that was what you knew about
them. But there’s something else you should know
about them, too.”
“What the hell would that be?”
“We’re good at waiting. I can stand here all day
and all night and all the next day if I have to and if you
want out of here, you’re going to have to get past me.”
“You think so, huh?” Fallon had been gauging the
distance between them carefully. The longest kill shot
he’d ever made was maybe thirty feet and had more
luck to it than skill. He figured it was forty at least to
where the Indian stood. But what the hell, that god-
damn Indian wasn’t going to shoot Clara just to kill
him. At least he didn’t think he was. Still, the thought
of getting shotgunned wasn’t a pleasant one. He’d
seen men ripped apart by shotguns; some died in-
stantly, others didn’t, their middles or legs shredded.
He glanced behind him, saw there was an escape
route, and said to Clara, “Don’t pull away from me.
We’re going to back up. If you try and run, I’ll shoot
you and go tell our girls about how you died.”
She felt sick.
He turned his attention again to the man in the
mouth of the alley.
“Hey, Chief,” he said. Then fired and saw the man
stumble backward. “Come on,” he ordered Clara,
tugging her with him toward the rear of the alley.
But just then he felt something press into the back of
his skull. Something hard and cold and small. And he
didn’t have to turn and look to see what it was, be-
cause he heard what it was when the pistol’s hammer
got thumbed back.
“Turn her loose.”
He swallowed hard. Where were all these sons a
bitches who wanted to be heroes coming from?
“I won’t ask again,” the voice said. “You’re an
ounce of pull away from dying.”
He released his grip and she turned on him and spit
in his face as she brought the flat of her hand hard
across his cheek. It sounded like someone snapping a
belt.
“Back away, Clara,” Jake said. “Go see to Tous-
saint.”
She stood there for a short moment, her face
flushed with anger at the threats Fallon had put
against her, her children. The pistol dangled from his
hand and she grabbed for it and when he tried to pull
it from her Jake shot him.
34
In two days time there had been six funerals—four
hasty ones and one of distinction—followed by a
wedding. And the weather had seemed to know which
to present for death and which for the promise of life,
for on the day of their wedding, the sun washed over
Toussaint and Karen, the wound to his upper leg
hardly enough to keep him from the ceremony.
Practically the whole town had shown up for the
wedding, performed by one Reverend Elias Poke. His
missus, Birdy Pride Poke, had offered herself as a
bridesmaid. Karen thought it all a bunch of foolish-
ness that such a fuss was made over something as sim-
ple as pledging to love, honor, and cherish a man she
had known for over twenty years and had already
been married to once before. But Birdy and Elias in-
sisted the couple do it up right, and privately Karen
felt a flood of emotional happiness that anyone would
care so much as to go to all the trouble.
Even Otis Dollar and Martha attended, Otis feel-
ing the need to contribute to the pair’s wedding by
selling Toussaint a nice suit of clothes at cost and on
credit of “. . . say, how would a dollar a week work
for you until it’s paid?” Toussaint wasn’t inclined at
first to become indebted to a man he once considered
a rival, but then Otis extended his hand and said,
“Congratulations, Mr. Trueblood. Karen truly de-
serves a man of your caliber, and no hard feelings, I
hope.”
Jake accompanied Clara Fallon and her two
daughters to the services and the Swede boy, Stephen,
was asked to stand up at the altar with his new folks.
He stood there looking up at them with wonderment.
She seemed to be a nice ma and he a nice pa. They said
they’d teach him to ride horses and give him one of his
own and other things—it all sounded pretty good.
He’d nearly forgotten the sound of gunfire and hear-
ing his father’s voice calling to him in the darkness.
Of course when Toussaint and Karen and the boy
came out of the church folks threw rice at them—
which made Karen blush and Toussaint mutter:
“White folks . . .” then grin.
And someone had tied a string
of tin cans to the
back of Toussaint’s wagon so that when they rode off
the cans rattled and clanged together much to the
Swede boy’s delight as he rode in the back of the
wagon.
Jake walked Clara back to her place “I’m sorry I
had to get you involved in all this,” she said.
“Not to fret. I’m sorry I had to . . .” he looked to
the girls, April and May, walking ahead of them. “He
didn’t leave me any choice, you know that.”
“Yes,” she said, “I know.”
“Oh, and one other thing,” Jake said, handing her
a thick fold of papers. “You’ve got a permanent home
here now if you want it . . . Doc’s place. I made the
arrangements your father asked me to with the attor-
ney for its purchase. He wanted to make sure you and
the girls had a good home.”
She swallowed down her emotions.
“And of course, there’s a little money left over he
wants you to have. I took the liberty of putting it in
the bank in your name.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment.
“You don’t have to keep the house, of course, the
attorney said he’d help you re-sell it if you didn’t want
it . . .”
Then he touched her wrist and added, “But, I think
this is a good town and it could use a good school-
teacher.”
“And what about you, Mr. Horn? Will you be
staying, too?”
It was a good question, one he didn’t have an im-
mediate answer to.
“Well, at least for a time,” he said.
“For a time?” she said.
“There are lots of considerations I need to weigh,
Clara. It isn’t as easy for me as it might seem.”
“You’ve someone waiting for you somewhere?”
“Not in the way you think. No woman, nothing
like that.”
“Then I’ll give it consideration myself, about stay-
ing, I mean.”
“Good. I’d like it if you did decide to stay.”
“Would you?”
“Yes, I would.”
Sunlight stood along the west side of the town’s
buildings and threw their shadows long over the
streets. Farther out, the grasslands bent under the
wind giving it its due, yielding to greater forces, as all
things must, but maintaining its resilience when the
wind let go its grip the grass once more stood tall, a
ritual of nature that would repeat itself for all time.
And a man and a woman stood together, wordless,
waiting for something that was beyond their capacity
