House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (10 page)

“The reason I’ve reached my present age is I know how to avoid getting sick or shot or having someone stick a knife in me,” he said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I’ve just never understood why unteachable people waste their money on books,” she said.

He draped a slicker over his head and carried the pail of soup and a wooden spoon through the rain into the tent. Aint Ginny was lying on one of the beds Felix had brought from the bunkhouse. Hackberry pulled up a chair to her bedside and filled the spoon and touched it to her mouth. “I’m going to have Felix carpenter a cabin with everything you need,” he said. “You can stay here long as you want.”

“That man gonna get you, Marse Hack. He’s the kind come up on you with a dirk when you ain’t looking.”

“Cod Bishop? I hope he tries.”

She opened her mouth as a tiny bird in a nest might, waiting for him to place the spoon on her lip.

“I was a little boy when we heard about the Surrender, but you saw it all, didn’t you?” he said.

“I seen the Yankees burn the big house and chop up a piano in the yard. I saw them dig up our smoked hams. They dug them out with their hands, they was so hungry.”

He stroked her forehead. “You go to sleep now.”

He saw a shadow fall across his arm. He turned and looked into Ruby’s face.

“The sheriff was at the door. He said Cod Bishop is filing assault charges against you.”

“Remind me to shoot the sheriff.”

“He said Cod Bishop is a sorry sack of shit and not to worry about it.”

“I’ve always said the sheriff had redeeming qualities.”

“Your supper is ready.”

“I’m going into town for a little while.”

“If you want to get drunk, do it here.”

“I never drink in my home.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Getting drunk doesn’t, either. That’s why people get drunk. They cain’t make sense of anything, least of all themselves.”

“Thanks for explaining that. I’ll throw your supper in the yard.”

T
HAT NIGHT HE
didn’t go into town; nor did he drink. Instead he wrote in his journal, at his desk, in the light of a brass oil lamp that had a green glass shade as thick as a tortoise shell. His journal entries often dealt with historical events or, rather, the consequences he believed would ensue from them: the populist movement, the stranglehold on the dollar by industrial interests, the theft of public lands by the railroads, anarchists throwing bombs, and company ginks shooting down strikers on picket lines. These observations and notations, however, were secondary in importance to his entries about the depression and murderous instincts that were bedfellows in the Holland family, passing from one generation to the next, perhaps unto the seventh generation.

He had read and reread many times Thomas Jefferson’s letter about the suicide of Meriwether Lewis and the fits of melancholia that Meriwether could avoid only by keeping his mind occupied. Jefferson, a child of the Enlightenment who believed the unexamined life was not worth living, looked upon melancholia and self-destructive thoughts as the inevitable products of a brilliant and curious mind when it became idle. While a dolt remained as happy as a cloth doll with a smile painted on its face—even when the dolt was about to fall off a precipice—an intelligent person suffered the pains of the damned simply because he paused long enough to hear his own thoughts.

“What are you writing?” Ruby said over his shoulder.

“I try to sort my head out by writing about the things that fret me. Most of the time it doesn’t work too well.”

“What things?”

“I lose time. I step into a windstorm that’s either outside or inside myself. Later I cain’t remember exactly what I did there. Then it comes back to me in a dream. Sometimes it scares the bejesus out of me. My father is the same way. His name is Sam Morgan Holland. A lot of men died in front of his guns, from here all the way to Wichita and Abilene.”

“He’s a gunslinger?”

“A Baptist preacher.”

“I’d like to meet him.”

“I wouldn’t wish my father on my worst enemy. If he gets sent to hell, I think the devil will quit his job.”

She placed her palm on the back of his neck. “You’re hot as a stove.”

“What you saw me do to Cod Bishop, that’s not me. It’s a sickness that lives in me, but it’s not who I am, at least not all the time. Maybe the Hollands got their bloodlust from the Indians. Or maybe we gave it to them. Whatever it is, we sure got it.”

She took her hand away and gazed at the wallpaper. It was printed with small roses. “Who was the woman who lived here?”

“She called herself my wife. I’d call her otherwise.”

“She hurt you?”

“I made my own bed. The fault is mine. I need to tell you something, Ruby. I made a mistake.”

“About what?”

“With you. I made a mistake.”

He saw the vulnerability, the flicker of injury, in her face before he had stopped speaking, and he hated himself for it. He set his pen down on the blotter and replaced the cap on the inkwell. “What I mean is I’m too set in my habits, too worn around the edges.”

“You hear me complaining?” she said.

“When a woman loves a man, she knows it, and the man does, too. It’s not a reasonable state of mind. It’s kind of like having influenza.”

“You think too much,” she said.

“No, I don’t. That’s my problem. I don’t think about anything. I just do it. Just like my father.”

“Where are you going?”

“To bed. I love the rain and the lightning in the clouds. I chased cows all over Oklahoma Territory in storms like this. All that’s ending. No one can know what that means unless he was there for it. It was a special time.”

“What about Aint Ginny?”

“What about her?”

“Is she going to be all right in the tent?”

“I already moved her into the back room. You thought I’d leave her outside? Jesus Christ, Ruby, what do you think I am?”

He turned down the wick in the lamp until the flame died and a tiny ribbon of black smoke drifted through the glass chimney. He rose from his desk and went up the stairs and undressed and pulled back the covers on his bed and lay down and stared out the window at the flashes of electricity rippling through the heavens, not unlike ancient horsemen in pursuit of a golden bowl that somehow, millennium after millennium, eluded their grasp.

T
HE STORM HAD
passed, and the thunder had rolled away and died in a diminishing echo among the hills, and the only sound in the house was the rain drumming on the roof when she undressed by his bedside and pulled back the covers and got in beside him. She laid her head on the pillow, her face pointed at his, her hair still up. “Do you want me to go?” she said.

“No,” he said.

“I don’t mean go from your room. From your house.”

“No, I don’t.”

Her arm lay across his bare chest. “You’re not interested in me?”

“How could I not be?”

“Then why do you stare at the ceiling?”

“I’m too old for you. I took advantage of your situation when you lost your job. You’re poor and I’m prosperous.”

“You get those notions out of your head.”

“That I’m older than you? That I didn’t make overtures to you when you were in a desperate situation?”

“That I’m a charity case.”

“I said no such thing.”

“There’s a revolver sticking out from under your pillow.”

“That’s where I keep it when I sleep.”

“What for?”

“My conscience bothers me. The men I’ve slain visit my bedside. Most of them are still in a bad mood.”

“Don’t make up stories that hurt you,” she said.

“A man with a hole in his forehead standing by your bed is hardly a story. You haven’t lived long enough. The dead don’t let go of the world. That’s why we put big stones on their graves. To hold them down.”

“I think I should get back to my room.”

He turned on his side and held his eyes on hers. “A girl like you is a gift. A rowdy man such as me is not. A few years with me and your youth would be gone. Not in a good way, either.”

“Worry about yourself,” she replied. She got up on her knees. “Look the other way a minute.”

“What for?”

“Because I told you to.”

When she took down her hair, it sifted across her face and shoulders. Her nipples were pink, the color and shade of the roses on the wallpaper.

“I told you not to look.”

“I’m only human,” he said. “Okay, whatever you say.”

He turned his head and gazed out the window at the rain blowing across the yard. She spread her knees on his thighs and leaned down and kissed him on the mouth. She lifted his hand and placed it on her breast. “Feel that?”

“It’s your heart.”

“No, it’s the way I feel about you.”

“Let me up,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

He sat on the side of the bed, in a male state, his hands propped on his knees. “I won’t allow this of myself. You’re a good girl. If we’re going to be together, it’ll be as man and wife. I’ll go before the court and straighten out my marital status. I’ll do the proper thing.”

He was speaking with his back to her. She came around the side of the bed and stood in front of him. “You don’t have to make promises or protect me.”

“I certainly do, missy.”

“I told you not to talk to me like that,” she said.

“I never slept with a woman and went my own way in the morning. At least not when sober.”

She placed her hand on his forehead and tilted his face up toward hers.

“I’m not a cow with a brand on it. You think I’d give myself to any man?”

“No.”

“Then shut up.”

She mounted him and placed him inside her, her eyes closing, her mouth opening in a large “O.” The shadow of the rain on the window glass resembled ink running down her skin.

“Oh, Hack,” she said. “Hack, Hack, Hack.”

Even though the countryside looked as cold as pewter in the dark, he could smell the sun’s warmth in her skin and hear her labored breathing on the top of his head and the blood whirring in her breasts.

N
INE MONTHS AND
eight days later, Ishmael Morgan Holland was delivered by a midwife on a cold winter morning that combined a flawless blue sky and sunshine blazing on the fields with a blanket of fog so thick on the river, Hackberry couldn’t see the water or the giant boulders in the center of the stream. The midwife was a half-black and half-Mexican conjurer who blew the fire out of burns and cured snakebites in cattle by tying a piece of red string above the bone joint on the stricken limb. She had only one eye and was probably the ugliest woman Hackberry had ever seen. She told him she had seen Ishmael in the womb a week before the delivery, and a voice had told her he would be a king one day, unless he was betrayed by a man he dearly loved.

“Who’s this betrayer you’re talking about?” Hackberry said.

Her good eye bore into his face, vitriolic, glimmering in its socket. Her breath was as dense and fetid as a cave full of bats. “
Eres un
Judas
hacia tus hijos.
”

“Ride your broom out of here,” he said.

After she left, he thought better of his words and tried to catch her and apologize, but she was gone.

“Why did you talk to her like that?” Ruby said.

“She said I was a Judas unto my children.”

“Why would she say a thing like that?”

“How would I know? She’s a crazy woman.”

“Somebody is in a bad mood,” Ruby said.

Four years later, he sued his estranged wife, Maggie Bassett, for divorce on grounds of infidelity. Not her infidelity. His. The inside of the courtroom smelled of cigars and unemptied cuspidors. The judge wore a gray-streaked black chin beard and had a large, deeply pitted, veined nose on which his spectacles perched like magnifying glasses on an owl. Hackberry could not stop staring at the strange optical effect created by the magnification. The judge’s eyes reminded Hackberry of giant bugs trying to swim underwater.

“In the state of Texas, you cannot petition the court for the dissolution of your marriage because you, the plaintiff, have committed adultery,” the judge said.

“I was trying to be gentlemanly,” Hackberry said. “Discussion about marital congress is not something I normally engage in.”

“Would you address the court in formal fashion, please?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The point is you cannot sue yourself. Is that too difficult to understand?”

Hackberry gazed out the window as though perplexed, unsure of the right answer.

“You’ve submitted a list of your infidelities,” the judge said, his finger pinched on a sheet of paper in his hand. “I cain’t believe you’ve gotten this mess on the docket. What the hell is the matter with you?”

“Can I change the nature of my suit?”

“Can you
what
?”

Hackberry looked across the room at Maggie Bassett and her male companion, who had a shock of white hair like John Brown’s in a windstorm, and a profile that matched, snipped out of tin, his eyes lead-colored. He wore button shoes and a bloodred silk vest and a tall collar and a black rain slicker he hadn’t bothered to remove, glazed with sleet melting on the floor.