log walls sagged from where the lower ones had rot-
ted away, and pieces of the roof were missing, the rest
caved in a heap on the floor at one end. Weeds had
grown up through the curled gray floor planks. He
leaned with one hand against the rough bark of an
outer wall and made water as best he could—the act
like a hot poker stirring in him.
They traveled on and saw other abandoned home-
steads all across Nebraska—places just left when the
people fled. Land settled in high hopes of good things
ahead, followed by defeat of one sort or another: sick-
ness, drought, death.
He felt similarly abandoned, a collapsing shell of
the man he had once been—his soul departing. And
when it was over, there would be nothing for others
to see, to know of, except possibly his name, his rep-
utation as a gunfighter and a killer. If he was remem-
bered at all, it would most likely be for the men he’d
killed: Luke Hastings (Santa Fe), Jeff Swift (Tulsa),
Charley Shirt (El Paso) . . . and many many others.
But, too, there was one name he hoped no one
would remember in that litany of names: Willy Blind.
A sixteen-year-old boy shot off a fence outside Miles
City, Montana. Some say he did it. He couldn’t be
sure if he had or not. He liked to believe it wasn’t his
hand in it, that it was Fancher who shot the boy, and
him that shot the boy’s old man. It could have been
just the opposite. It was a long ways away with the af-
ternoon sun in their eyes—late autumn, like the very
one now, both of them close together—the boy sitting
the fence, the man standing next to him.
He and Fancher had fired at the same time meaning
only to kill the man. But both the boy and the man
toppled a second later, one falling atop the other, and
lay there without moving.
Fancher had said, “Goddamn,” like that, and
William Sunday couldn’t tell if he was surprised or
pleased. And that was all either of them said. But the
shooting raised so much hell among the locals that he
and Fancher had to flee the territory without getting
paid by the man who’d hired them—a neighbor dis-
puting over water rights.
It was the first and last time he’d taken a job with a
partner. He heard afterward that Fancher got gunned
down in a saloon in Idaho while drinking a beer and
all he thought about it at the time he heard the news
was that Fancher probably deserved it.
As far as he knew, he and Fancher were still
wanted, probably a reward to go along with it.
He cut away his thoughts of such when they
stopped for the evening near a stream that ran bright
and clear in the last of the day’s sunlight. A stream,
that according to the maps Glass carried, was on the
border of South and North Dakota. With no town in
sight, they found the mystery of an old stone founda-
tion in one wall of some dwelling that had once
stood, all but the foundation missing now, and made
camp near it with still half an hour’s worth of day-
light left.
William Sunday took a walk to stretch his legs,
ease the pain of sitting and take in the general lay of
things, then went over to where Glass had been sitting
with his boots crossed at the ankles eating an apple
and said, “Let’s get going extra early in the morning,
Mr. Glass.”
The carriage maker saw something in William
Sunday’s eyes—a sort of desperation—that gave him
no reason to quarrel. And once it grew dark, they
rolled up in their blankets and fell asleep under the
stars.
5
The Swede fretted. The Swede thought about the
girl and the thing Inge had carried out of her room
wrapped in a bloody towel and had said to him, “You
go and bury this away from the house, a nice deep
hole, eh, so the wolves can’t dig it up. You do that,
okay?” It wasn’t so much a question as a command,
and when he looked into her ice-blue eyes he saw
there was accusation, too.
“What I got to do with any of this, yah?”
“You got plenty, mister. I got no time to quarrel
with you. You go do it.”
He looked at what she held in her hands and it sent
a chill into him.
“I didn’t do nothing with this,” he said, taking it
from her. His sons sitting there simply stared at him
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
