Ticket master wrote them down: Bent Fork, Tulip,
Grand Rock, Sweet Sorrow, Melon, Grass Patch, and
Hog Back.
“She turns around in Hog Back,” the ticket master
said.
Fallon took the list, went to the door, opened it,
looked both ways up and down the street. He didn’t
see Harry Turtle or any of his known associates. But
he did see a piebald tied up in front of the hotel.
The son of a bitch looks like it wants to be stolen,
Fallon told himself.
15
Jake and Toussaint arrived at the Swede’s while
the sun was still trying to lift its fat white belly out
of the cold fog. Five fresh graves nearly dug several
yards from the cabin. Tall John stood leaning on a
shovel wiping sweat from his face with a silk scarf.
Will Bird sat on a pile of dirt smoking a shuck, hav-
ing just said to John, “I never done such hard work,
not even building windmills in Texas is this hard.”
Five caskets lay in a row waiting internment.
“Marshal,” John said as a way of greeting when
Jake and Toussaint rode up.
Jake nodded, looked toward the house. Thank-
fully, a stiff northerly wind dragged away the smell of
death.
“You close to finishing up here?” Jake asked.
“Pert’ near. Soon as we finish up this last grave,
we’ll put them to rest.”
Will Bird called to Toussaint from where he sat
smoking.
“I don’t reckon you got any liquor with you?”
Toussaint cut his gaze to the younger man. He
knew Will Bird only slightly from his itinerant visita-
tions to Sweet Sorrow, had heard through rumor that
Will was once the lover of the late prostitute Mistress
Sheba, killed by Bob Olive. Had heard more recently
he was courting the young woman who’d started a
hat shop in town. Toussaint didn’t know why any
town needed a hat shop for women; such was the
foolishness of white folks. Such information of course
meant little to him. It certainly wasn’t enough for
Toussaint to pass judgment on Will Bird one way or
the other. The boy was like a lot of other shiftless
white men he’d come across on the prairies: not all
bad, not all good.
Toussaint stood in his stirrups to relieve his back-
side.
“No, I’ve got no liquor,” he said.
Will Bird looked at the last of the shuck held be-
tween his fingers then took a final draw from it before
stubbing it out in the dirt. Standing, he took his
shovel in hand and said, “Mr. John, let’s get this fin-
ished up. I’d like to get my day’s pay and treat myself
to a whiskey or two.”
Jake said to the undertaker, “When you’re finished
here, I’d appreciate it if you stopped by Karen Sun-
flower’s place and pick up Otis Dollar and take him
back into town with you.”
“Why, whatever is wrong with Otis?”
Jake explained it, as much as he knew.
“Why, that Swede is becoming a regular villain of
the prairies,” Tall John said. “Poor Martha . . .”
The stiff wind ruffled their clothes.
Toussaint said, “We ought to cut sign around this
cabin. Each ride out in a wide circle see if we can pick
up which way that crazy old man went.”
“See,” Jake said. “I knew you knew more than I
did about tracking.”
“Well, unless he grew wings and flew away, he’s
probably left a footprint or something. That recent
rain has made the ground soft.”
Will Bird watched Jake and Toussaint as he lifted out
another shovel of dirt and flung it up onto the pile al-
ready dug. He envied them their work much more
than that of his own. He dreaded having to go inside
the house and carry out the dead and bury them. He
didn’t like anything that was dead—not horses, or
cows, or even dogs, and especially not humans. The
first person he ever saw dead was his granddad when
Will was probably five or six years old—laid out in
the parlor of his aunt’s house in Kentucky. It was late
autumn he remembered—like it was now. The old
man was laid out with a thin piece of cheesecloth cov-
ering his face to keep the flies off; because of the cold
nights, the flies came into the house. There were folks
weeping, adults, mostly women, but some men, too.
A man came and played mournful tunes on a fiddle
for a time there in the parlor. His fiddle playing only
seemed to make things sadder, the women cry louder.
The kids mostly were shuttled outdoors where they
played as though death did not exist. Will was told to
join them but he couldn’t get the thought of his
granddad out of his mind and instead of playing, he
stood outside looking in through the parlor’s window.
Later they brought up a wagon pulled by a mule and
put the casket with his granddad in it and took him
off to a small cemetery on a knobby rise overlooking
