with the laudanum. The drug and the whiskey put his
world out of focus as though he was looking through
a piece of curved glass. His limbs grew heavy as win-
dow sashes. The pain seemed to grow worse with the
coming of night.
The next day the carriage man came and knocked
on his door and said, “Mr. Sunday, I’m ready to travel
if you are.”
He looked the rig over, climbed up into its spe-
cially padded seat, six extra inches of horsehair
added, and said, “I think it will do, sir.”
The carriage maker beamed, said, “It’s a model
called a Phaeton, named after a mythological Greek
character said to have rode around so fast he almost
set the world on fire.”
“Let’s not waste any more time,” William Sunday
said, and retrieved his valise from behind the hotel’s
front desk, settling his bill.
“Should I hold your room, Mr. Sunday?” the clerk
asked.
“No, Harrison, I’ll not be needing it any longer.”
They took the north road and the carriage man kept
the team of horses at a steady but tolerable pace. Sev-
eral hours later the pain had grown up like a fire in
him and he didn’t know if he would make it to the
Dakotas alive. He figured out how much and how of-
ten to drink the laudanum to ease his misery and tried
hard not to think of every rut and bump in the road,
every rock and hole and root.
“My name’s Glass, by the way,” the carriage man
said. “Carl Glass.”
It didn’t matter too much to him, the man’s name,
but he tried to be cordial.
“William Sunday,” he said.
“Sunday,” the man said. “You wouldn’t be
William Sunday?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’d be that William Sunday.”
Glass, he figured, like almost everyone else had
heard of him or read various accounts of him in
of local newspapers. It had gotten so journalists had
sought him out hoping to do a living history on him,
as one of them put it. A fellow from Boston had been
the latest. He turned them all down. He had no need
to be any more famous, or infamous than he was.
Such attention could only get a man in his profession
killed by someone who’d rather have your history a
lot more than their own. Then too there was that
boy—the one he tried not to think of, or dream about
because he was still ashamed about it.
They stopped whenever the pain got to be too
much, and at small communities along the way for
overnight rest, each going his separate way for the
evening with the understanding to meet first light for
an early start.
The carriage man talked about his days as a sur-
veyor in the army and how he’d once been chased by
a grizzly bear, and nearly killed by a small band of
roving Indians. He told stories, but told them in a flat
uninteresting way. William Sunday spent most of his
time taking in the landscape, the rivers and trees and
wildflowers—the birds and antelope herds he’d see
grazing off in the distance, anything to keep his mind
off his pain, off the future he didn’t have.
They saw wolves once on the opposite side of a
river, walking a ridge, and later they came across a rot-
ting carcass of a steer that had gotten tangled in a
fence of barbed wire. Shortly they came across an
abandoned homestead that the carriage man reckoned
was once the ranch the steer had belonged to.
“Abandoned,” he said. “Whoever those folks were
moved out and just left everything. They probably
were down to that one steer and couldn’t make it any
longer and had no heart to take it. Maybe it had
worms, or maybe they were going to eat that steer
and it realized it and ran off and got caught up in that
wire and they didn’t know it.” It was as though the
carriage maker had to talk just to hear himself, Sun-
day thought.
William Sunday thought it as good a theory as any,
but it didn’t matter very much what had happened to
the folks who’d once lived here. He simply didn’t care
what happened to them. The only thing that mattered
was the little amount of time he had left, and the stabs
of pain when they came and couldn’t be dulled for a
time by the laudanum.
They stopped and rested in the shade of the old
place and silence surrounded them except for a hum-
mingbird that appeared just in front of their faces for
a moment, hovering as though to inspect them and
show them its iridescent green body before it flew off
again, showing off like one of God’s own creatures.
“Hummingbirds mean good luck,” Glass said.
“Not to me they don’t,” William Sunday said.
He wandered around and looked inside the empty
windows. Saw not so much as a stick of furniture or a
rusted can inside. Some old wallpaper pasted to one
wall had faded and hung loose, thin as butterfly
wings, most of its print of roses washed away. The
