House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (12 page)

“Ruby and I have a little boy.”

“Out of wedlock, you do. I’m still your wife.” She put her arm through his.

“You shouldn’t have talked about Ruby that way,” he said, stepping away from her.

“I’ll be a good wife and a lover and a friend. We’re two of a kind. We can take on the whole world, Hack.” She looked into his face, biting down on her lip, her eyes brimming with certainty and promise. There was no question that she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever known. An empty hearse passed in the street, the rims of the wheels thick with mud and dung. Hackberry wiped his mouth with his wrist and widened his eyes and took a breath, staring into space.

“Atwood will go in front of the judge in the morning,” he said. “Maybe you can pay his fine and take him home with you.”

“Give me some credit.”

“I do, Maggie. That’s why you scare me.”

“I want you, Hack. Look into my eyes and tell me I’m lying.”

When she stepped closer to him, he felt a sense of arousal he thought he had gotten rid of long ago.

T
WO DAYS LATER
, he could not get Maggie’s words about Ruby out of his head. It was Sunday. The windows were open, the river green and smoking in the sunrise. Ishmael was playing by the fireplace with a toy wagon Hackberry had carved for him, the wheels grinding on the wood floor. Hackberry could not remember a little boy who laughed and smiled as much. Ruby came out of the bedroom, dressed for church. “I heard Cod Bishop talking at the grocery store last night,” she said. “He was telling people you whipped an unarmed man with a pistol.”

“Did Bishop mention that the unarmed man was a lowlife bucket of goat piss by the name of Romulus Atwood who was fixing to drop me with a hideaway?”

“Cod Bishop also said you were escorting Maggie Bassett across the street.”

“Cod Bishop says these things because he’s a liar. Liars tell lies. That’s why they’re called liars.”

“You were walking arm in arm?”

“No, I was not.”

“Ishmael, will you stop that grinding?” she said.

“I don’t want to criticize Maggie,” he said. “I didn’t do right by her. She’s what she is. But I was not walking arm in arm with her, or escorting her anywhere, or having any kind of conversation that protocol didn’t require.”

“Ishmael, I said to put your wagon away. You can play outside with it.”

“Don’t take it out on the boy.”

“Take out what?”

“You leave a teakettle on the stove, it boils over,” he said. “Don’t take your unhappiness out on others.”

“Your wife was a prostitute. You were seen coming out of a café with her. But I’m not supposed to bring up the subject.”

“Maggie was a schoolteacher when she was nineteen. She was a shootist in a Wild West show, too. She had some misadventures that put her in a bad way. I don’t think it’s fair for me to criticize her.”

“I wish I could have done those things instead of waiting on tables and cleaning fish and washing clothes for deckhands fresh off a shrimp boat.” She sniffed at her hand. “Maybe I should go scrub. Do I smell bad?”

“We don’t have to do this,” he said.

Ishmael scoured the wagon across the plank floor. “I told you to stop making that noise,” she said. She jerked the wagon out of his hands and slammed it down on the mantel, breaking off one of the wheels. She picked up the wheel and looked at it helplessly. “I’ll fix it. Stop crying,” she said to the boy.

“Give it to me,” Hackberry said.

“Don’t touch me,” she said.

“We’re fighting over nothing, Ruby.”

“Nothing, is it? You’re with
her
, but it’s nothing? Ishmael, be quiet.” She bent over to pick him up. Her shoulders were firm and wide, her dress tight across her rump, her hair falling loose on her neck. Even under these circumstances, he couldn’t ignore the level of desire he felt for her.

“Let me have him,” Hackberry said.

“Don’t you dare touch either one of us.”

“Ruby, it pains me something awful to hear you talk like that. I’m just no damn good at this.”

“Really? Will you be going to church with us this morning?” she said. “No? I guess I’ll just take myself. What a fine day it’s turning out to be, thanks to your former wife, schoolteacher and
shootist
.”

“Who said you have to die to go to hell?” he said to himself.

“I heard that,” she said. “Say it again and see what happens.”

H
E EXPECTED HER
to return from church by one
P.M.
He fixed lunch and set out plates and silverware and a pitcher of lemonade on the table, and put three encyclopedias on the chair where Ishmael sat when he ate with his parents. Hackberry shaved and brushed his hair and put on the suit he usually wore to church and town council meetings, then waited on the porch rocker. One o’clock came and went. At two-thirty he saddled his horse and rode north along the river, across the bottom of Cod Bishop’s property, past the scorched remains of the cabins. Then he caught the road that led to the New Hebron Baptist Church, built on a rise just above the river bend. His heart was tripping as he hoped against hope he would see a picnic in progress, tablecloths and blankets spread on the grassy banks, or any other kind of normal event that would explain Ruby’s failure to return home with their son.

But there were no horses or buggies tethered in front of the whitewashed building with the small stained-glass windows and the tiny bell tower tacked like an afterthought on the roof. He rode along the river’s edge, past the frame house the minister called his “parsonage.” The river was dark and swollen with rain in the shade and running swiftly beneath the bluffs and rocks on the opposite shore, creating a sound like a sewing machine, the riffle in the center flecked with tendrils of light and foam. Only three days ago hail had bounced all over the countryside. Now the trees were in full leaf, stiff against the blue sky, the pebbled bottom of the Guadalupe spangled with all the colors of the rainbow. This was the country that Sam Houston once called a fairyland, so verdant and cool and sprinkled with wildflowers in the spring that it seemed fashioned by a divine hand. It was a grand place, even though it was soaked in blood and haunted by the spirits of murdered Indians, many of them killed by Texas Rangers. Somehow the earth always cleansed itself of man’s inhumanity, and if that was the case, he told himself, wasn’t there an opportunity for the human family to do the same?

He rode slowly toward the arbor where the minister and Ruby and Ishmael were sitting at a plank table, the three of them reminiscent of a mythic family at peace with one another, the minister reading from a book that had a gold cross embossed on its black leather cover. Hackberry pushed his palms down on the pommel of his saddle, tightening his shoulders, straightening a crick out of his back. No one at the table bothered to look in his direction.

The minister, whose name was Levi Hawthorne, had been widowed the previous year at age twenty-five. His cheeks were rosy in spite of the ascetic nature of his face, his hair jet black and curled in locks on the back of his neck, like a painting of a British poet Hackberry had seen in a New York City museum. The members of his congregation said he had been inconsolable after his wife was struck by lightning while pulling wash off the clothesline behind the parsonage.

“There’s Big Bud,” Ishmael said, pointing.

“You call him Father. ‘Big Bud’ is a nickname,” Ruby said. She stroked his head and pushed a strand of hair out of his eye. “You do not call your father a nickname.” She turned her glare on Hackberry.

“I’m not supposed to worry about you or Ishmael?” he said.

Levi Hawthorne rose from the plank bench. He wore a dark suit that had been brushed to thinness and a white shirt with too much starch in it and cuffs too big for his wrists. “I’m glad you could join us, sir,” he said.

“I don’t join in where I’m not invited, Reverend.”

“We were studying some passages from St. Paul’s epistles to the Colossians,” Levi said. His eyes went away from Hackberry’s, then returned.

“Doesn’t Colossians advocate restraint on sensual indulgence?”

“Why, yes, it does.”

“That yonder is the woman I call my wife.”

“Yes, she certainly is,” Levi said.

“Even though some people would say otherwise,” Hackberry said.

“It’s not our province to judge others,” Levi said.

“That yonder is my little boy.”

“He’s a mighty good one, too,” Levi said.

“That’s why I experienced a deep level of anxiety when he and his mother didn’t come home for the lunch I set on the table.”

“If there is anyone to blame, it’s me, Mr. Holland.”

Hackberry’s eyes were dead, fixed on the minister’s. “Did I say anyone was to blame?”

“No, sir, you didn’t.”

“Hack, we’re going home now,” Ruby said. “Get in the buggy, Ishmael.”

Hackberry dismounted and lifted Ishmael in the air and set him on the saddle, then swung up behind him. He picked up the reins and stared at Ruby. “Think this is a peaceful stretch of country? Bill Dalton and his gang rode down that arroyo across the river not more than one year ago. They robbed the bank at Longview. How’d you like a bunch like that to get their hands on you?”

The blood had drained from around her mouth, to the point that she could hardly open her lips to speak. “Liar,” she said. “Bully and cheap fraud. Murderer with a badge.”

“I’m sorry for this, Mr. Holland,” Levi said.

“You don’t have anything to do with this, Reverend. I told you that,” Hackberry said. “Go back to your biblical studies.”

The minister sat back down at the picnic table, hanging his head, the back of his neck as red as sunburn. Hackberry felt Ishmael twist in the saddle. “Why’s Mommy running away, Big Bud?” he asked. “Why’s everybody mad?”

H
ACKBERRY’S BELLIGERENCE AND
harsh words to the young minister were like an anchor chain he dragged with him through the rest of the day. He had another problem on top of it, one he hated to concede. Of the seven deadly sins, why was it he had to fall prey to the only one that had no trade-off? Unlike other sins, such as lust and gluttony and even sloth, jealousy brought no pleasure and instead, night and day, fed the fires of self-loathing and need and resentment of others. He could not get the minister’s youthful face out of his mind, nor forget the reverential glaze in Ruby’s eyes while the minister read aloud from his Bible.

The next night he rode into town under a sky veined with lightning that made no sound. The saloon was almost empty, its stamped tin ceiling pinging when the wind blew, the polished bar and the creosote-stained floor pooling with light that was the color of lead when trees of electricity exploded against the sky. A man was sleeping on his hands at a poker table in back. The bartender was eating a bowl of pinto beans with a spoon and reading a copy of the
Police Gazette
. A black man was cleaning the cuspidors with a rag. Dr. Romulus Atwood was standing at the bar, a shot glass of whiskey and a glass of beer in front of him, one pointy-tipped boot propped on the rail. His hand was wrapped with a fresh bandage.

Atwood touched his hat brim with one finger. His coat was pulled back over the pearl handle of a holstered revolver. “Just the man I wanted to see,” he said.

“Get away from me,” Hackberry said.

“I want to talk a business proposition. A smart man don’t let his anger get in the way of his betterment.”

“Who said I’m smart? Stay downwind from me, Atwood.”

Atwood raised his beer glass and stared over the top of it as he drank, his eyes smiling.

Hackberry stood at the end of the bar, by the bat-wing doors, and ordered four fingers of whiskey in a beer mug. The wind filled the room with the smells of rain and ozone. He tilted the mug to his mouth and swallowed until it was empty, his eyes closed, the warmth of the whiskey spreading from his stomach into his viscera and genitals and arms and hands, driving the shadows from his mind, lighting places in his soul that, for good or bad, he seldom visited.

He called the bartender back three times. Maybe he drank half a quart. He wasn’t sure. What did it matter? Was there any greater misery than living in the same home, in constant eye contact, with someone who had come to despise him? How had it happened? The answer wasn’t complex. A young woman might be in need of a father on occasion, but that was not whom she dreamed about. Ruby had found a kindred spirit in the young minister, his fingernails as clean and pink as seashells on the cover of his Bible, his hair tousling in the breeze, his clean-shaven cheeks bladed with color, while at home she had to contend with a man who slept with a gun and believed specters stood by his bedside.

“Looks like you got an edge on, Marshal,” Atwood said, pushing his glass along the bar as he approached Hackberry.

“You still here?” Hackberry said.

Atwood looked over his shoulder. The bartender had gone to the outhouse. The man sleeping at the table had been taken home by two of his friends. The black man was sweeping the sidewalk outside the bat-wing doors. “I’ll keep it short,” Atwood said.

“Say it and be done, because right now I’m of a mind to shoot you.”