House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (9 page)

“How was I supposed to know about the intestinal problems of cattle?” she said. “Maybe I should read from some of your encyclopedias. Should I look under ‘B’ for ‘bloody’ or ‘S’ for ‘shits’?”

“Felix should have explained. It’s not your fault,” he said.

“You look worn out. You want me to heat water for your tub?”

“Why don’t we sit down and have a cup of coffee?” He waited, hoping she wouldn’t see the need in his eyes.

“I just had some,” she said.

She went into the backyard and stared into the distance, the wash flapping angrily on the line.

H
E DIDN’T SLEEP
that night. Maybe it was time to give up trying to alter his fate. Didn’t Jesus say some were made different by a hand outside themselves? Perhaps that meant living alone, at the mercy of one’s thoughts and the bloodlust that neither whiskey nor profligate women could satisfy. His dreams were often filled with the rumble of horses silhouetted against a red sky, their tails flagging, their nostrils breathing fire. There were worse images to live with, weren’t there? Solitude and the role of the iconoclast had their compensations.

Then an event happened that caused him to wonder at the great folly that seemed to govern his life, namely, his attempts to plan and control his future. Most of the events that changed his life had taken place without his consent and at the time had seemed of little consequence. Our destiny didn’t lie in the stars, he told himself, or even in our mettle. It lay in our ability to recognize a gift when it was placed in your hands.

The black woman’s name was Ginny Prudhomme, but everyone called her Aint Ginny. She had come to Texas from Louisiana as a slave with Stephen F. Austin’s colonists in 1821, and had picked cotton on the same plantation outside Natchitoches until the close of the Civil War, when she found herself destitute and without shelter or family. The grandson of her former owner was a Methodist minister who took her and several other former slaves with him to a farm he had bought on the banks of the Guadalupe. Aint Ginny lived in a cabin behind the main house and tended a vegetable garden and put up preserves in the fall and cared for the minister’s children and was a happy person, even though she had reached ninety and her eyes had turned to milk.

When the minister died and his children moved to cities in the North, Aint Ginny continued to live in her cabin. The new owner of the property, a man named Cod Bishop, who had made his money supplying Cantonese labor to the railroads in Utah and Montana, paid little attention to the black people living in the mud-chinked log cabins down by the river, in the way a person would not pay attention to the indigenous animals that came with a property deed. Sometimes the blacks saw him smoking a cigar by the waterside at sunset, gazing at his cattle and freshly painted outbuildings and farm equipment and, most of all, his pillared house with its dormers and wraparound veranda and ventilated shutters on the windows.

Cod Bishop was not a man whose image you easily forgot. He wore yellow coach gloves for no apparent reason, and he had a way of turning his head so people speaking with him had to address his profile. Coupled with this, his abnormally long back had an inverted bow in it, reminiscent of a coachman’s whip.

One evening he noticed a gopher mound and kicked at it with his shoe. He picked up a stick and jabbed it into a hole, then into another hole and another.

“How long has this been going on?” he said to a small black boy who was watching him.

“Suh?”

“These piles of dirt and rock, all this dead grass, the tunnels under the ground. How long have you people sat and watched this?”

“I don’t know nothing about it, suh.”

“Go get your mother.”

The boy left but didn’t come back. Cod Bishop threw his cigar into the river and walked up the slope to his house.

In the morning, he returned with two of his helpers, men with rolled sleeves and a determined look. Each was carrying a grub hoe in one hand and a bucket of coal oil in the other. One had a gunpowder horn hung from his neck. “Get started on this first one, and I’ll flag the ones in the pasture,” Bishop said. “Turn each mound into silt and ash. Kill every gopher that’s down there. You leave one, you leave a hundred.”

The workmen stuffed wads of paper down the holes and jabbed them deep into the burrows with sticks, then soaked the paper with oil and sprinkled gunpowder on it and dropped a lucifer match down the largest hole. The effect was instantaneous. Strings of smoke rose from the tunnels under the scarified ground and far out into the grassy perimeters. The air was filled with the smell of burning hair.

“Oh, what y’all doing?” a voice said.

Aint Ginny had come out of her cabin and was standing as small and frail as a stick figure behind the workmen, one hand gripped on a cane, her eyes the color of fish scale.

“Go back inside,” one of them said.

“Y’all burning out their caves? You cain’t do that, suh.”

“Watch.”

“They God’s creatures. I feed them. I give them all names, too. They make their li’l squeaking noise when they hear me coming.”

“You do
what
?” Cod Bishop said, approaching her, half of a smile on his face. He wore a tight-waisted coat and polished knee-high riding boots, his pants tucked inside them.

“The gophers ain’t hurt nothing, suh. My grandson say there ain’t none in the pasture. They got their li’l town down under the ground here.”

“Go back into your cabin,” Bishop said. “Don’t try to intervene in the operation of my farm. You should know better than that.”

“They suffering down there, suh.”

“I’ve tried to be patient, Aunty. You’re forcing my hand.”

“Where Reverend Jasper at?”

“I suspect he’s still in his grave. He’s been there eighteen months.”

“I seen him three days ago,” she said.

Cod Bishop put on a world-weary face, then balled his fists and placed them on his hips, his coat stretching across his back, like a man lost in the most profound of thoughts. He studied the ducks pecking at their feathers among the flooded reeds, his cows grazing among the buttercups, the lovely green knoll that backdropped a collection of hovels. He turned to his workmen. “Get everybody out and soak it,” he said.

“The other mounds?” one of them asked.

“All this,” Bishop said, waving his finger at the cabins. “The privies, too. Rake the embers into the river. I don’t want them blowing onto my rooftop.”

“You’re telling them to burn our cabins?” Aint Ginny said.

“I’m going to give each of you two silver dollars. I’ll tell the colored preacher in town about your situation. There’s a workhouse for colored in San Antonio. You’ll be a lot better off there.”

“I got the croup in my lungs, suh. They ain’t gone take me. Where Reverend Prudhomme at?”

“The Prudhommes are not here anymore. That’s one more reason you should seek help among your own people. But try to remember this, Aunty. You mustn’t sass a white person again. I let it pass because of your age. Others may not be so kind.”

She began to cry, tears running straight down her face onto her dress. He put his gloved hand on her arm and led her to the pasture fence. “Hold on to the rail till we bring the wagon down,” Bishop said. “I don’t want you getting hurt.”

In minutes her cabin and the cabins of her neighbors were blazing, the flames flattening and whipping across her vegetable garden, curling and dissolving everything that grew there.

H
ACKBERRY SAW THE
fire from his porch. He went into the house and came back out with his brass field binoculars. “What is it?” Ruby said from the doorway.

“Cod Bishop is burning out his darkies,” he replied.

“Why would he do that?”

“Because he’s a son of a bitch.” The binoculars made a plopping sound when he dropped them back in their leather case.

“Where are the colored people?” she asked.

“Watching the fire.”

“That’s terrible.”

“I’ll be back in a little while.”

“Where are you going?”

He seemed to consider the question. “I thought I’d throw a line in the river. It’s not too late in the morning to catch a catfish or two. Tell Sid to clean up my fishing shack and put up the trail tent.”

“What are you doing, Hack?”

“You got me. I’ve never been good at specificity.”

“At
what
?”

“It means why worry about what hasn’t happened yet,” he replied.

He put a lead on a horse in the lot and led it to the shed where he kept his buggy. After he harnessed the horse, he got up on the buggy seat and picked up the reins.

“I’m going, too,” she said.

H
ACKBERRY DROVE THE
buggy up the county road and under the arch that gave on to Cod Bishop’s property. By the time he reached the cabins, the logs had collapsed into mounds of flickering charcoal and soft ash. Except for Aint Ginny, the black people were climbing onto a flat wagon that would take them to town. Hackberry got down from his buggy. He was coatless and wearing a tall-crown Stetson that had sweat stains above the band, and a shirt with no collar. Bishop stared at him, his eyes dropping briefly to Hackberry’s waist.

“This is not an official visit,” Hackberry said.

“Then state your purpose.”

“Aint Ginny has nursed half the white children in this county, including a few woods colts whose fathers wouldn’t recognize them.”

“I’m not a particular admirer of you, Mr. Holland,” Bishop said. His eyes drifted to Ruby Dansen. “Nor do I approve of the way you conduct your personal life.”

“Miss Ruby is my bookkeeper,” Hackberry said. “She also takes care of my house. I’d like to call her my companion, but she’s not. If you allude to her in a disrespectful way again, I’ll bury you up to your neck in an ant pile.”

“I’m sure you would, Mr. Holland. At least if you were drunk enough.”

Hackberry scratched at his eye and gazed at the river. It was coppery green in the early sunlight, a long riffle undulating through gray boulders in the deepest part of the current. “Did you know Aint Ginny prepared breakfast for Davy Crockett and his Tennesseans on their way to the Alamo?”

“No, I didn’t. And I don’t care. She sassed me. Do you allow your servants to sass you?”

“I don’t have servants. I’ll take these people with me, though.”

“Then your niggers await you, sir.”

“We’re not quite finished here.”

“Stand back from me,” Bishop said.

“I heard popping sounds on the road. I bet those were her preserve jars blowing up.”

“I’m armed, Mr. Holland. I won’t hesitate to defend myself.”

Hackberry slapped him across the face. Bishop stumbled backward in shock, one hand rising to protect himself. Hackberry struck him again, harder, using his knuckles. “Apologize.”

“I’m a white man, sir. I do not apologize to niggers.”

“Don’t address me as ‘sir.’”

“What?”

“‘Sir’ from a man of your ilk implies we belong to the same culture. We do not.”

“You cannot behave like this. You’re an officer of the law.”

This time Hackberry broke his nose.

“These men are witnesses,” Bishop said. He had to cup his hand under his nose before he continued. “I’ve done nothing to provoke this.”

Hackberry pushed him backward into the smoke from the cabins. He tore open Bishop’s coat and pulled a five-shot nickel-plated revolver from his belt and threw it in the river. “Take off your clothes.”

“What?” Bishop’s face was trembling, his upper lip slick with blood.

“Strip naked and crawl into the ash.”

“Somebody do something about this.”

Hackberry knocked him to the ground and kicked him between the buttocks. When Bishop screamed, he kicked him again. Then a persona that invaded his dreams and shimmered in daylight on the edge of his vision stepped inside his skin and took control of his thoughts and feet and hands and the words that seemed released from a place other than his voice box. When these episodes occurred in his life, and always without expectation, he became a spectator rather than a participant in his own deeds. He saw his boot descend on Bishop’s face and the side of his head and his neck and mouth; he saw Bishop’s men trying to dissuade him, waving their hands impotently in the air, their mouths moving without sound, while Cod Bishop crawled for safety through hot ash like a caterpillar trying to crawl through flame. Someone was screaming again? Was it Aint Ginny or a child or Bishop? He didn’t know. Then he felt a hand seize his upper arm. He turned his head slowly, blinking, the world coming back into focus, as though someone had removed an ether mask from his face.

“Hack?” Ruby said. “Hack, it’s me. Enough.”

“Enough what?”

“He’s done.”

Hackberry looked down at Bishop. “Get up and stop groveling around like that. Tell your darkies you’ll make things right.”

“Come home with me, Hack,” Ruby said.

“What are you talking about, woman?”

“Let me drive the buggy. I’ve always wanted to drive one.”

“That would be fine,” he replied, widening his eyes. “Come along with us, Aint Ginny. The rest of y’all can come, too. Look at the rain and sunlight on the hills. I declare, if this world isn’t a frolic.”

Ruby held his arm tightly as they walked to the buggy, in a way she had not done previously.

A
THUNDERSTORM STRUCK THAT
night and lit the clouds with fireworks and filled the air with the smell of sulfur and mown hay and the fecund odor of spawning fish. It also pelted the fishing shack and the tent where Hackberry had quartered Aint Ginny and the other black people to whom he had given sanctuary. He went out on the porch and gazed down the slope at the tent swelling and flapping in the wind, an oil lamp burning inside. He went back in the house and began spooning soup from a kettle on the stove into a cylindrical lunch pail. Ruby watched him from the doorway. “I’ll do it,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Feed the old woman.”

“I think it’s tuberculosis, not croup.”

“Better I do it than you.”

“Why’s that?”

“You’re of an age when people catch germs more easily,” she said.