House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (18 page)

Napoleon tumbled backward, wedging himself between two bales.

“See what you’ve gone and done, you silly puppy,” she said.

She heard her mother call again, louder this time, a thread of pain in her voice. Maggie climbed up on a bale, trying to reach down and catch her pup by the neck. Finally, she was able to get her hand under his stomach and lift him over the bale and skid down on the barn floor with Napoleon held against her chest. She brushed the straw off his face and set him on a folded tarpaulin and looked for a piece of twine to tie through his collar. “I’ll be there in a minute, Mommy,” she called through the barn door.

There was no reply. Napoleon took off running deeper into the barn. “Napoleon, you’re going to get a spanking with a newspaper,” she said.

But she didn’t spank him. Nor did she go in the house. She listened to the silence a moment, then sat down and resumed her game, bouncing the rubber ball off the plank floor and scooping up as many jacks as she could while the ball was in the air.

Her father returned from town a half hour later. She heard him cry out from inside the house, then he was at the barn door, his face like a collapsed balloon, both of his hands shiny with blood.

“Where have you been?” he said.

“Here, in the barn.”

“Doing what?”

“Guarding Napoleon, like you told me.”

“I told you to watch your mother.”

“No, you said not to leave Napoleon alone. You said the coyotes would eat him.”

“Your mother didn’t call you?”

“Napoleon fell between the hay bales.”

“You helped the dog but not your mother?”

“She didn’t call me anymore. What’s wrong, Daddy?”

“Your mother is dead.” He squeezed his temples with his thumb and the tips of his fingers, his face riven with either sorrow or wrath. “Oh, Maggie.”

She realized he was weeping, his back shaking. He put his hand down to hers. She stared at her jacks and rubber ball on the floor, and at Napoleon chasing a butterfly in the sunlight. She wanted her father to pick her up and hold her against him. She wanted to smell the warm odor of his skin, the cologne he put on his jaw and neck.

“Come inside,” he said. “The baby is stillborn. We need to wrap him in a sheet. Your mother needs to be washed, too. No one must see her like this.”

“Like what?”

“What do you think, girl?”

“She called me twice and—”

“
Twice?
”

She tried to think what she should say next. “It got quiet. Napoleon was whimpering. I thought Mommy was all right.”

He released her hand. “You
thought
?” He looked at her as though he didn’t know who she was. “Go on with you, now. Get the sponges and a pan of water from the kitchen. Get two sheets out of the closet.”

She began to sob, hiccupping, her shoulders jerking.

“It’s not your fault,” he said.

She lifted her face to his. She felt a breeze on her skin, a coolness around her eyes.

Then he said, “I should have known better. You were born selfish, just like your grandmother.”

He never spoke again of her failure, but sometimes he would look at her as though gazing at an instrument of the Creator’s punishment rather than a daughter. Never again did he set her on his knees, or play games with her, or take her with him to his land office in town. There was an unrelieved weariness in his face, like that of a man with a stone bruise forever inside his shoe.

He didn’t visit her on Christmas or Thanksgiving at the boarding school, and he didn’t attend her graduation when she was sixteen. His excuse was his lack of funds and the probability that his investment in cattle futures was about to send him into bankruptcy. When she was called to his deathbed, she refused to hold his hand or kiss his brow or acknowledge his attempt at an apology. The minister and physician in attendance were appalled. Maggie Bassett, age seventeen, could not have cared less about their condemnation.

T
HAT MORNING THE
mail carrier had delivered an envelope postmarked in Denver and addressed to Hackberry. The bright blue calligraphy obviously belonged to that poseur Ruby Dansen. Maggie steamed open the envelope and removed a single piece of folded paper. A lock of blond hair fell out. The note read, “Ishmael just had his first real haircut. He thought Big Bud might like this.”

The note was unsigned. Maggie picked up the lock of hair from the floor and replaced it inside the sheet of paper and stuck the paper back inside the envelope and resealed the envelope with paste. Then she propped it against a flower vase on the dining room table, wondering what she should do next. Unfortunately, when it came to future events, she had a trait that sometimes frightened even her. She did not make decisions based on the results of a conscious process. Instead, her decisions seemed made for her by someone else, perhaps a little girl who lived in a dark place inside her, a place where Maggie the adult would never go by herself.

Where was Hackberry? He had been gone over two days. Did he get into it with Harvey Logan? She touched the burn on her chest. Had she made herself a widow? Maybe that prospect wasn’t entirely bad. She saw herself standing by an ornate coffin in the Holland family cemetery, bereaved, the mourners passing in review, squeezing her hand or patting her cheek. No, she must rid herself of thoughts like these. It was not her intention to have them or see these images. No, no, no, that was not she. The images were just a trick of the mind.

So much for that.

In the morning a boy on a mule delivered a telegram from the telegrapher’s office at the depot. The name “Holland” and the rural route number were written in pencil on the envelope. “Where might this come from?” Maggie asked, smiling at the boy.

“I wouldn’t know, ma’am.”

“You don’t think it’s bad news, do you? People always say wire messages contain notices of accidents and deaths and such.”

“The telegrapher listened to the tapping on the key and wrote out the message. He didn’t seem to give it much mind, if that he’ps you at all.”

“It certainly does. You’re a very nice boy. You’re a good-looking boy, too. You like lemonade?”

“Yes, ma’am. Everybody does.”

“Why don’t you come to see me sometime? We’ll have some.”

“If I’m out this way, yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

She gave him a dime and watched him climb up on the mule, waiting to see if he would look back. But he didn’t.
Innocent boy,
she thought.
Better to learn about the nature of the world from a gentle hand rather than a coarse one. I wish I had been so lucky.

Where was the telegram from? It could be from the Ranger Frontier Battalion in Austin. Her husband had talked of getting back his badge. Or it could be from Denver. She steamed open the envelope. The message read, “Yes, Yes, Yes.”

It was not signed. It didn’t have to be. It was from Denver, and it contained an affirmation to a question obviously asked by the addressee, Hackberry Holland. She folded the telegram and replaced it in the envelope and resealed the flap and set the envelope by the letter propped against the flower vase.

She sat on the porch most of the afternoon and into the evening, without eating supper, and watched the leaves toppling out of the trees onto the surface of the river, gathering into channels between the rocks, then eddying and sinking beneath the current as though they had never been part of a wooded hillside. The sky turned the color of torn plums. Just before the stars came out, she saw a mounted man approaching the front lane; he sat tall and erect in the saddle, the stirrups extended two feet below the horse’s belly.

She rose from the chair, her hands knotting and unknotting at her sides.
Destroy the letter and the wire,
a voice inside her said.

No, I’m not afraid of the dutchie, or whatever she is.

She stiffened her back and set her jaw and fixed her gaze on the horseman, determined not to be undone by self-doubt. The horseman rode by and disappeared into the dusk.

She woke at sunrise and began fixing breakfast. She heard the foreman and the hired hands driving the Angus across the river to a pasture that hadn’t been grazed during the summer. She heard the cook washing a bucket full of tin pans and forks and knives and spoons from the bunkhouse under the spigot on the windmill. Then someone hollered out, “By God, there he comes!”

To the waddies and farmhands and drifters who worked for him full-time or came and went with the season, he was a composite of Captain Bly and Saint Francis of Assisi and somehow always one of their own. Down at Eagle Pass, he had beaten two of King Fisher’s old gang almost to death with a branding iron. He had turned loose a caged cougar in a Kansas saloon that refused to serve Texans. On the Staked Plains, he froze to the saddle returning a kidnapped three-year-old Comanche girl to her parents. If he hadn’t been a drunk, he could have been a congressman or the owner of an internationally famous Wild West show. Why did she stay with him? The answer was not one she liked. He was wealthy, at least by the standards of the times, and second, when it came to adversarial and life-threatening situations, he never winced. When she was with him, no one short of Genghis Khan would bother her.

She stepped out on the porch and saw him at the bottom of the lane, his hat tilted back, the sunset on his face, a bouquet of flowers propped across the pommel. He was wearing a dark suit and a blue silk vest, clothes he must have bought in San Antonio. She went back into the house and ripped pages from a Sears, Roebuck catalog and stuffed them among a pile of kindling. Her hand was trembling when she lit the paper. She stood back as the fire caught the draft and twisted into a yellow handkerchief through the chimney. She dropped the telegram and letter from Denver and the lock of Ishmael’s hair into the flames and watched them blacken and curl and dissolve into carbon and then into ash, her face glowing from the heat.

H
E REMOVED HIS
hat when he entered the house, and tossed his saddlebags onto the divan. The boards under the carpet creaked with his weight. “I almost forgot how beautiful you always are, regardless of the hour,” he said.

“Did you make a side trip somewhere?” she said. “Maybe to Canada?”

“If that’s what you call falling into a bathtub full of whiskey.”

“I thought we were done with that.”

“
You
were.
I
wasn’t. Now I am. I think.”

“You found Sundance and Harvey?”

“I wouldn’t call either of them the thinking man’s criminal. I just had to knock on one door in the brothel district. Fannie Porter’s place.”

Her gaze left his. “You came home to shame me?”

“I never held your past against you. I’m just telling you where I went. I didn’t accomplish much by it, either.”

“Much of what?”

“Logan and Longabaugh said they didn’t hurt you. Later I saw Logan burn a roach to death with his cigar. So I knew he’d burned you, too.”

“You didn’t call him out?”

“No.”

“That doesn’t sound like you.”

“I was drunk. I looked for Logan after I slept it off. He and Longabaugh had both left town. I feel like somebody spit in my face.”

“You tried. That’s all that counts.”

“You told me the truth, didn’t you, Maggie? Please say you told me the truth.”

“I won’t discuss this anymore. You use the whip and rub salt in the cut.”

“That’s not my intention.”

“I kept the white cake in the icebox. I’m glad you weren’t hurt. Do you want coffee?”

He looked at the dining room table and flower vase on it, the place where each put mail addressed to the other. “I didn’t get no mail?” he said.

“We got an invitation to a garden party at the mayor’s house. I think we should go, don’t you?”

“I thought I might hear from the Ranger Frontier Battalion in Austin.”

“Were you expecting something from Ruby?”

“Not necessarily,” he said. “I need to lie down. It’s been a long trip.”

“You don’t want any cake?”

“Maybe not right now.”

“Undress and I’ll bring it to you in bed.”

“I’m plumb wore out, Maggie.”

“You’re glad to see me, aren’t you? That’s what you said. Let me take care of you.”

He went upstairs and sat down on the side of their bed and gazed out the window at a cloud in the west, one that was bottom-lit a bright gold by the late sun and swollen with rain and trailing horsetails across the sky. For just a moment he wanted to drift away with the cloud and break apart in a shower over a wine-dark sea filled with cresting waves that never reached land.
Yes, to simply slide down the shingles of the world,
he thought,
and be forever free, swimming with porpoises and mermaids. What’s wrong with that?

He heard Maggie coming up the stairs, saucers and cups and silverware clinking on a tin tray. He lay down and turned his head toward the window and placed the pillow over his head, pretending to be fast asleep.

E
VERY DAY FOR
a week he went to the post office, but there was no letter from Ruby. He also went to the telegraph office at the depot. The regular telegrapher was down with influenza. His replacement told Hackberry that no wire had come for him since he had taken over the key.

“The other man didn’t receive one?”

“I’ll look through his carbon book,” the replacement said. “No, sir, I don’t see it. ’Course, he’s been ailing awhile. I can telegraph your party and check it out.”

“Let’s give it a try.”

Hackberry wrote out a message similar to his first telegram, asking Ruby if she wanted for him and Ishmael and Ruby to be a family again.

A week passed with no response from Ruby. When Hackberry returned to the telegraph office, the same telegrapher was still on the key.

“Nothing came in for me?” Hackberry said.

“No, sir. We would have delivered it.”

Hackberry sat down in a wicker chair by the telegrapher’s desk. The window was open, the breeze warm and drowsy and faintly tannic with the smell of fall. A passenger train was stopped on the tracks, the people inside it stationary, like cutouts. “The season is deceptive, isn’t it? It sneaks up on you. You turn around and it’s winter.”