House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (40 page)

“That’s exactly what he’ll do.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“Andre will be on his way in a few minutes.”

H
ACKBERRY CUT THROUGH
pasture to the back of Cod Bishop’s property, walking through the scarred area where Bishop had been recovering scorched bricks from the soil and scraping them clean with a trowel and stacking them as though reconstructing the past and undoing the harm he had visited upon the black people who were his charges. As Hackberry neared the main house, he saw the two motorcars parked by the barn. The red gelding Bishop had ridden that morning was in the lot, favoring one foot, half of the loose iron shoe visible beneath the horn.

Both barn doors were open wide. The dirt floor was broom-sweep-clean, the stalls free of manure, the baled hay still green and stacked both in the loft and high against the back wall, enclosed by a chain-latched chest-high slatted partition. Cod Bishop had always run a tight ship.

Darl was standing in front of an unlatched stall. Dr. Benbow, the part-time county coroner, was squatting next to Bishop’s body, touching the neck, the ribs, and the throat. He stood up and put a notebook in his shirt pocket and inserted a pencil next to it. He was a gangly man with iron-colored hair that grew over his collar, and he was dressed in a black suit. He had hung his coat on the side of the stall and rolled up his sleeves to his elbows. Even though the air was cool and a breeze was blowing through the shade, he had broken a sweat. He seemed to stare at Hackberry without seeing him. “What’s your opinion?”

“What’s
my
opinion?” Hackberry said.

“You knew him pretty well. Or at least you lived next door to him for a couple of decades. How he’d end up in this predicament?”

“The crack on his head would probably be enough to do him in,” Hackberry replied. “If that’s what you’re asking.”

“Any one of the blows would be enough. I think one of his ribs punctured his heart. His thorax is probably broken, too. Would you answer my question?”

“Cod wasn’t a careless man around horses. Also, he left them out most of the time. Sometimes in winter he’d put up the mares. I don’t know why he’d have the gelding in the stall.”

“Know anything about his state of mind? Has he been acting strange, behaving irrationally?”

“He was at my house this morning. I was fixing to call you, but he didn’t want me to.”

“Call me for what purpose?”

“I think he was having a mental breakdown. I believe his conscience was weighing heavily upon him.”

“Would he walk his horse into a stall to abuse him? Because his quirt is over there by the broom.”

“No, his livestock was his property. Cod did nothing that would devalue his property.”

“What do you think, Darl?” Dr. Benbow said.

“I think somebody flat put it to him,” the deputy said.

Hackberry and Dr. Benbow looked at him. “What do you base that on?” Dr. Benbow said.

“It’s not for me to say.”

“Yes, it is,” Hackberry said.

“He was a widower,” the deputy said.

“People have it in for widowers?” the coroner said.

“Mr. Bishop had an eye for the ladies. All kinds. Some with a wedding band on their finger.”

“So he was fooling around with the wrong man’s wife and got himself beaten to death?” Dr. Benbow said.

“I ain’t sure who stomped him. But that horse didn’t,” Darl said.

“Talking to you is like the Chinese water torture, son. Would you get to it?” Dr. Benbow said.

“The loose shoe on the gelding out yonder is on the back foot,” Darl said. “It looks like Mr. Bishop was hit several times. A horse pawing in the air might be able to do that. But most times a horse only gets you once when he kicks with his back feet, unless you’re boxed in the stall with him. That didn’t happen.”

“Tell your boss to give you a pay raise,” Dr. Benbow said.

“What for?” Darl said.

“You see beyond appearances. It’s a valuable asset,” the doctor said. “Wouldn’t you say so, Mr. Holland?”

Hackberry gazed across the river at the bushes that shielded the opening of the cave in the bluffs. He wondered how soon Beckman’s men would be there.

O
NE HOUR LATER,
Andre pulled up in the bright blue REO owned by Beatrice DeMolay, and got out and knocked on Hackberry’s front door. He removed his hat when Hackberry unlatched the screen.

“Come in,” Hackberry said.

“Miss Beatrice said I’m to bring you directly to her apartment, if you have no objection.”

“I want to talk to you first. Come in and sit down.”

“Where?”

“On a chair, where do you think?”

“I prefer to stand.”

“That’s fine. The last time you were here, I told you to go in the kitchen and he’p yourself to the icebox. I also told you where your supper ware was at. You and Miss Beatrice thought I was telling you to use only the dishes and forks and knives and such reserved for the he’p, namely Mexicans and people of color. That was not the case. My mother died in childbirth when I was a little boy, and her china has remained unused in the cabinet ever since. I don’t eat off it, and I don’t let anybody else eat off it, either.”

Andre’s face was impassive, his cobalt-blue eyes never leaving Hackberry’s, his skin so black it glowed with the clean radiance of freshly mined coal.

“Here’s the other thing I wanted to say,” Hackberry continued. “If you choose to he’p me, you’ll be at risk. That means dangerous men might be a stone’s throw from us right now. Are you troubled by any of this?”

“No, I am not.”

“You don’t address other men as ‘sir’?”

“If they request that I do.”

“You’re a regular blabbermouth, all right. Okay, here’s what has occurred. My neighbor, Cod Bishop, was in the employ of Arnold Beckman. I believe Mr. Bishop saw me up in the cave in those bluffs across the river and told Arnold Beckman I had probably hid something there. Mr. Bishop was found dead in his barn this morning. This was after he tried to quit Beckman.”

“Miss Beatrice has said I should do whatever you tell me.”

“What I’m telling you right now, Andre, is to listen. I don’t want you hurt. This is Texas. While you’re working with me, you do not lay your hand on a white man.”

“Why do white people always think black people want to put their hands on them?”

“I didn’t say ‘put.’ I said— Never mind. If we have trouble with somebody and he needs shooting, I’ll do it. Clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“A breakthrough,” Hackberry said.

“Arnold Beckman sent someone to throw acid in Miss Beatrice’s face. If I meet him, it will not matter if he is white or black.”

“I spoke too soon. So be it. Better a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.”

“What does that mean?”

“Don’t worry about it. We need to cross the river and go to the cave.”

“If Beckman’s men are watching, they will see us.”

“That’s the point, partner.”

H
ACKBERRY AND THE
Haitian chauffeur crossed the river and climbed the trail to the cave’s opening. Down below, the long knifelike yellow leaves from the willow trees drifted in the riffle, steam rising off the boulders inside the shade. Hackberry was carrying a two-gallon fuel can, a hand-notched wood plug in the spout, the coal oil sloshing inside.

“I’d like for you to stay out here, Andre, and have a smoke,” he said. “Pay no mind to what I do in the cave. We’re going to take our friends on a snipe hunt.”

“What is a snipe hunt?”

“It means you convince a fellow he can catch all the snipe he wants if he holds a flashlight in front of an open gunnysack by a barbed-wire fence between the hours of eleven and midnight.”

“Who would be so stupid?”

“It’s a metaphor. It means you confuse and mislead and mystify your enemy. Stonewall Jackson said that.”

“The general who fought for the preservation of slavery?”

“Not everyone is perfect. Anyway, if you glance to the north, you’ll see the sunlight reflecting off a glassy or metallic surface. I have a feeling that’s Mr. Beckman’s people.”

“Do you believe in the unseen world?” Andre said.

“I never had a choice.”

“I don’t understand.”

“If I didn’t believe somebody was up there, I’d be forced to believe in myself. For me, that’s a horrible thought.”

“You have tiny filings in the handles of your pistol.”

“This is an 1860 Army Colt, converted for modern cartridges. Changing the grips won’t bring back the men I killed. Plus, every one of them had it coming, and the world is better off without them.”

“Do they visit you in your sleep?”

“You know the answer to that one.”

Andre gazed at the willow leaves floating between the boulders, dipping in the chuck, disappearing in the sunlight.

Hackberry set the coal oil can on the floor of the cave and worked his way deeper inside, where the walls narrowed and the crevice in the roof allowed a glimmer of sky when the trees were not in leaf. He felt along a shelf until he touched a rock he had wedged in a hole and then covered with a huge rat’s nest. He pulled the box, still wrapped in a rain slicker, from inside the wall. He knelt on one knee and unwrapped and opened the rosewood top and touched the smooth onyx of the cup with his fingertips.

Lord, they got my boy. They want your cup, too, but they’ll have to kill me first and pry it out of my hands. I have to move us. I hope I am doing the right thing. I would like to drill a hole between the eyes of every one of those sons of bitches, but anger only clouds my reason and empowers my enemies. Be my light, my sword, and my shield.

Sorry for swearing.

For just a moment, he was certain he had taken leave of his senses. A voice outside himself, one he had never heard and loud enough to echo inside the cave, said,
I think I’ll survive it.

He stood up, the rosewood box still open in his hands. “Say again, please?”

There was no response. He was sweating even in the dampness of the cave, his ears popping in the silence. He heard a noise behind him.

“Did you want me, Mr. Holland?” Andre said.

“No.”

“I heard you talking.”

“I’m getting old. I talk to myself sometimes.”

The Haitian looked up at the ceiling of the cave and at the pale glow from the crevice that operated like a flume. “Who was the other person?”

“What?”

“I heard someone speak to you.”

“That must have been an echo. I told you not to pay me no mind.”

“Do you want me to wait outside?”

“Yes. I’ll be along shortly,” Hackberry said, his hands cold and strangely dry on the box, his throat clotted with phlegm. “Come back here.”

“What is it you want?” Andre said, frozen against the circle of blue beyond the cave’s entrance.

“What did the voice say?”

“I’m not sure,” Andre replied.

“That’s what I thought. It was probably a rock tumbling down the hillside.”

“Something about surviving.”

Hackberry shook his head in denial. “That was me,” he said. “People my age are always studying on mortality. It makes you a little crazy. You talk to yourself and don’t remember what you said.”

“Yes, sir,” Andre said. He turned to go.

“We’re not on the plantation. You don’t have to call me ‘sir.’ I cain’t stand servility. We taught it to y’all, and now it’s the bane of your race and the disgrace of ours.”

“Let me know if you need anything, Mr. Holland.”

Hackberry watched Andre exit the cave, stooping slightly, his suit coat tightening across his back, his hands as big as frying pans. Hackberry lifted the cup from the green velvet cushion, wrapped it in the slicker, and replaced it inside the wall, then refitted the rock in the hole.

Why do you fear me?
a voice said.

I didn’t mean to give that impression. Please he’p me get Ishmael back. I don’t care what happens to me. That boy has been paying my tab all his life. It bothers me something awful. I don’t get no rest.

But the voice no longer had anything to say.

Hackberry pulled the wood plug from the spout on the fuel can and poured a zigzag pattern of coal oil along the floor of the cave, sloshing it on his chair and writing table. He threw the empty can outside the cave and heard it clatter in the rocks. “Confuse, mislead, and mystify,” he repeated to himself. He latched the rosewood box and carried it outside and set it on top of a boulder, then rolled a newspaper into a cone and popped a match alight with his thumbnail and lit the paper and tilted the cone down until the flame almost touched his fingers. Then he tossed the paper into the cave.

Black smoke corkscrewed along the ceiling through the crevice at the back of the cave, rising in curds through the natural chimney into the trees atop the bluffs. Hackberry’s chair and writing table crawled with fire, and the rats’ nests in the cave’s corners glowed and winked inside the smoke, but the flames on the floor were of low intensity and short duration, and other than blackening the walls, they had little appreciable effect.

“Why have you done all this, Mr. Holland?” Andre said.

“The men watching us are primitive people. As such, they believe that all other people act and think in the way they do. They think we’re done with the cave and whatever it contained.”