out in Texas, bring Maria and them brats with me,
and become a settled-down man. I could get a bear
coat and wear it and not go out when the weather
turns freezing . . .”
“Maybe,” Jake said.
The two men walked to the double doors together,
Roy carrying his grip under his arm. It was snowing.
“Look it,” Roy said. “Ain’t it what I said? Early
snow, just a foretaste of things to come. You’ll see.”
It was hardly a real snow; just a few flakes tum-
bling from a gray sky that reminded them of an old
rumpled blanket.
“Taste that air,” Roy said. “Like the taste of a
metal pail: cold and hard. Them wooly worms was
right, and so were them chickens and spiders. Crea-
tures know things humans can’t. The geese has all
flown south and I intend to be flying south, too. Stick
my feet in the Rio Grande and wash my hair in it, too.
I miss my sweet Maria, that plump brown body of
hers and all it offers a man. I even miss my brats a lit-
tle, Octavio and them.”
Jake walked across the street with Roy Bean, to
the front of Otis Dollar’s mercantile where the noon
stage would stop. Otis’s wife was out front standing
under the overhang watching it snow. Her pinched
face was nearly hidden by the poke bonnet. She wore
a dark blue capote around her shoulders. What they
could see of her eyes showed a contempt for the
weather.
“Morning, Missus Dollar,” Roy Bean said touch-
ing the brim of his broad sombrero. She could see he
was about drunk, the way he walked uncertain. She
did not care for the man, and made no pretenses that
she did. She looked at him, then went back to looking
at the falling snow.
“Now you don’t have to wonder why Otis is as
nervous as a whipped mule,” Roy Bean said softly
and out of earshot he hoped of the woman. “Otis
needs to take charge of that, set her to right thinking
again or else he’s going to live out whatever life he has
left in him feeling like every day somebody’s hammer-
ing his brains out.”
It was while waiting for the stage that they spotted
the Swede’s woman riding atop the rickety seat of a
weather-beaten buckboard whose sides rattled with
every turn of the wheels. The rig was pulled by a
sorrowful-looking old animal whose hipbones slid
back and forth under its motley hide as it walked.
“That’s that Swede’s woman, ain’t it?” Roy said.
“One whose daughter was fooling with Toussaint’s
boy when that wild kid shot him to pieces?”
“Inge Kunckle,” Jake said. He’d been with Tous-
saint the day they’d found his son shot dead and lying
in grass whose stems were blood splattered. The girl,
Gerthe Kunckle, had been taken by the boy after the
shooting. Jake and Toussaint had caught up with
them a short time later and took him and her under
their command. Toussaint’s ex-wife, Karen Sun-
flower, had suffered the news hard.
“Wonder why she’s alone and not with that man
and them brood of kids?” Roy wondered aloud,
watching the woman steer her wagon toward them.
She seemed to know right where she wanted to go,
and stopped there in the street dead in front of them.
“I like to speak to you, Marshal.”
Jake walked over, placed a hand atop the wheel.
“What is it?”
“My Gerthe,” she said.
“What about her?”
“I think maybe she’s dying.”
“I’m not a doctor, you understand.”
She nodded.
“I think maybe she’s passed a child out of her.”
“You mean she aborted?”
“Just a little bloody thing you can’t tell nothing
much about. I wrapped it in a towel and buried it, but
Gerthe, she’s still bleeding. All her color is gone. She
don’t eat. I think maybe another day or two and I
have to bury her, too.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Jake said, telling her to turn
her wagon around and head back.
She did so without another word.
“What’s shaking?” Roy said.
“I’ve got to go,” Jake said.
“You be careful around that old man,” Roy said.
“Some say he’s crazy as a bedbug. I don’t know it to
be true, but if enough say a thing about a person, you
can pretty much bet there’s some truth to it in there
somewhere.”
“Have a good trip back to Texas,” Jake said. They
shook hands and parted ways, both men believing
they’d never see the other again, but without any real
sentiment, either.
Jake got the medical bag, property of the late Doc
Willis. Until another physician decided to settle in
Sweet Sorrow, Jake figured to make use of Doc’s med-
icines and equipment. The house Doc lived in stood
vacant, waiting to be sold, but nobody in Sweet Sor-
row could afford such a manse, and so it stood, fully
