House of the Rising Sun

by James Lee Burke

“Then drink from your bottle. All of it.”

  “No. Not unless you will join me. We are both soldiers.”

  “Look at the evening star. Right above the hills. It always winks, like a faithful girlfriend. In the summertime, on the Guadalupe, it rises into a lavender sky about nine o’clock. You can pert’ near set your watch by it.”

  “See, you are like me, a man of intelligence. There should not be these difficulties between us. Down there in the village, the people live as ants, as Indios. They appreciate nothing.” He pointed. “The women are good for chingada, but what good are the others? I am glad that—”

  After it was over, Hackberry threw the hatchet in the fire and peeled off his bloody coat and wiped his face and hands on the liner, and rolled it as he would a cloak and dropped it into the flames, then walked up the slope to the place where Traveler waited for him.

  LATER HE WOULD remember little of his ride back to the border. He knew he was drunk part of the time; he suspected he had an attack of food poisoning and was delirious for a night and a day; he thought he and Traveler rode in a boxcar in which the chaff spun like dust devils; he bathed in a gush of ice-cold water he released from a chute under a tower by train tracks; he saw bodies floating in a river at sunset, their clothes puffed with air. He was sure of almost all these things, at least for a few moments. Then he would remember the peyote buttons he ate in an Indian’s hovel, the rum he drank for breakfast, the fear he saw in the eyes of everyone he passed, and the voice of Wes Hardin whispering, You’re mine forever, Holland, a killer like myself, odious in the sight of God and Man. How does it feel?

  Then one bright morning Hackberry found himself on the banks of a river bordered with willow trees that had turned yellow with the end of summer. The air smelled of rain and schooled-up fish and a farmer on the far side of the river plowing under his thatch with a steam tractor. In the distance he could see cattle on a hillside and a white ranch house with a red tile roof, and a single oil derrick and poplars planted along a driveway that led to a rural church.

  Was it Sunday? He couldn’t remember. He paid a ferryman to take him across the river. On the landing a man reading a newspaper under a pole shed set aside his paper and got up and put on his hat and walked toward Hackberry, a revolver hanging on his hip like a pocket watch swinging on the vest of a blind man. “American citizen?” he said.

  “Do I look or sound like a Mexican?”

  “It’s just a question. You don’t have to act smart.”

  “My name is Hackberry Holland and this is my horse, Traveler. I’m a Texas Ranger. He’s not. I’m a citizen. He is not. Is there a town up there where we can get something to eat?”

  “Yes, sir, about three miles.”

  “Can I come inside my country now?”

  “It’s nothing personal, Mr. Holland, but maybe somebody ought to tell you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You don’t look half human.”

  “That’s because I’m not,” Hackberry replied.

  1891

  HER NAME WAS Ruby Dansen. Some said her parents came from Amsterdam and died in a circus fire set by the mother. Others said she was a foundling left in a shoe box on a sidewalk in Houston. Hackberry met her in 1890 at a Texas Ranger gathering in a deluxe hotel on Galveston Island, where a drunken United States congressman tried to feel her up and she threw a cherry pie in his face.

  “Do you know who that man is, dutchie?” Hackberry asked.

  “A potbellied old gink who just cost me my job. Call me ‘dutchie’ again and I’ll give you some of the same.”

  He looked her up and down. “Doing anything later?”

  That was how it began. She was twenty-two, she said. Then she confessed she was only nineteen. After dinner in the restaurant of the massive hotel on the beach, she changed her mind again and said she wasn’t sure how old she was. She was from either Germany or Denmark. She had been a waitress and a laundress since at least age thirteen. She also cleaned fish in the open-air market by the pier. What else did he want to know?

  “You don’t remember where you grew up?” he said.

  “What difference does it make? I don’t sell my cuny on Post Office Street, like some others I know.”

  “You’re a pretty girl. Why do you want to talk rough like that?”

  “What’s being pretty got to do with it? Don’t put on airs. You’re not in Galveston to milk through the fence?”

  He gazed out the window at the green waves cresting and breaking on the beach, the foam sliding back into the surf. “I have a ranch up on the Guadalupe. I live there by myself.”

  “You’re not married?”

  “It depends on who you talk to.”

  She looked sideways, then back at him. The room was filled with diners, most of them in evening dress, candles burning inside glass chimneys on their tables. “I’m sure what you just said makes sense to somebody, but it’s lost on me.”

  “I jumped the broomstick with an Indian girl up on the Staked Plains when I was seventeen. I think I got married once in Juárez. That was about the same time I discovered peyote and talking in tongues. I also entered into a couple of common-law situations the state of Texas may not recognize. My last marriage was in front of a preacher, but later my wife said it wasn’t legal because of my other marriages. I got tired of trying to sort it out and wrote the whole mess off.”

  “All those marriages, you wrote them off?”

  “Thinking about it hurts my head. Let’s go out on the beach.”

  “What for?”

  “To talk about our possibilities. You got something else to do?”

  “I don’t like the way you’re talking to me.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “There’s no ‘our’ between us. I’m not a possession.”

  “I bet you could pick up a hog and throw it over a fence. Men rate physical strength in a woman a lot higher than we let on.”

  She looked around at the other tables. “I think someone put you up to this.”

  “If I make a mess, it’s usually of my own doing, Miss Ruby. Let me be honest with you. What you’re looking at is what you get. Unfortunately that means you won’t be getting too much.”

  She put down her fork, blinking. “You behave like you’re not right in the head.”

  “That’s a matter of perspective,” he said. “I never use profanity in front of a woman. I don’t smoke or chew tobacco in the house. What’s mine, I share with the woman who can abide a pitiful wretch such as myself. On occasion I attend services at the New Hebron Baptist Church. I was baptized by immersion in the Comal River on September 8, 1879, by a minister who fought at the Battle of San Jacinto. I was friends with Susanna Dickinson, the only adult white survivor of the Alamo. I read the encyclopedia for one hour every night.”

  “Do you always wear a gun inside your coat?”

  “No, I usually wear it on my hip, at least when I work. I’m not a full-time Ranger anymore. I’m city-marshaling right now. I suspect one day I’ll go back to full-time rangering.”

  “Rangering? Have you killed anyone?”

  “Nobody who didn’t deserve it.”

  “I know a horny old bastard when I see one.”

  “Number one, I’m not old, and number two, I’m not a bastard. I cain’t deny the other part. It’s how human beings get born,” he said. He stood up and removed several bills from his wallet and dropped them on the table. “Are you coming or not? You’re one of the most beautiful creatures I ever saw, Miss Ruby. That’s not a compliment. It’s a natural fact.”

  “A ‘creature’?” she said.

  THEY WALKED OUT on the beach. She was an erect and tall girl, wearing a full-length dress, sleeves to the wrist, and a short-brim, flat-topped straw hat with cloth flowers sewn on it. She didn’t have a coat but seemed to take no notice of the chill in the wind or the sand that stuck to her shoes and stockings. The sky was maroon and ink-stained, the waves crashing five feet high on the beach, f
illed with seaweed and tiny crabs and the bluish-pink sacs of ­Portuguese man-of-wars. In his boots, he could hardly keep up with her.

  “I’d get you your own buggy and horse,” he said. “We can visit San Antonio. Or take a boat to Veracruz and see Mexico.”

  “What would be my obligations?”

  “He’p me run the ranch. Take care of the books. Shoo varmints out of the yard.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I’d like your company. It’s no fun living by myself.”

  “Then why didn’t you keep one of your wives around?”

  He seemed to study the question. “I think the problem is I’ve never had high regard for normalcy. I’ve always been drawn to women who probably left their bread in the oven too long. It’s a mystery I haven’t quite puzzled my way through.”

  She seemed to ignore his attempt at humor, if that’s what it was. “Why do you want me and not somebody else?”

  “Because you’re young. Because you represent the next century. Look at the hotel.”

  It was massive, undoubtedly the biggest building in Texas, hundreds of electric lights blazing with a coppery radiance.

  “The times I was born in are ending,” he said. “Thomas Edison is going to change the entire country. I don’t have illusions. My kind will be swept into a corner. I want somebody around who’s brighter and younger than I am. You have an extraordinary carriage. You have sand, too. I think you’re the one.”

  “Don’t ever raise your hand to me.”

  “I would never do a thing like that, not to you, not to any woman. A man who strikes a woman is a moral and physical coward.”

  “Don’t ever talk down to me, either.”

  “I won’t. I’ll get you your own gun. If you take a mind, you can shoot me.”

  “When would we leave?”

  “Tomorrow morning. Have you ever ridden on a train? It’s a treat.”

  She stared at the waves bursting on the beach and the stranded baitfish flipping on the sand. “I need to pack.”

  Hackberry looked at the evening star flickering in the west. He turned his face into the wind and filled his lungs with the vast density of the Gulf and all the inchoate life teeming under its surface. “Smell that?” he said.

  “Smell what?”

  “The salt, the rain falling on the horizon, the fish roe in the seaweed, the fragrance of the land, and the coldness of the wind, the way it all comes together like it’s part of a plan. It’s the first chapter in Genesis. It’s the smell of creation, Miss Ruby. We’re part of it, too.”

  “You make me a little nervous,” she said.

  HIS HOUSE WAS on a breezy point overlooking a long serpentine stretch of the Guadalupe River and the cottonwoods and gray bluffs on the far side; he also had a grand view of his cattle pastures and the unfenced acreage where his ancestors were buried and where the grass was a deeper green in the spring and sprinkled with bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush. He had a wide front porch with a glider and lathed wood posts and latticework with vines to provide shade in summer, and a two-story red barn and roses and hydrangeas in his flower beds, and several acres dedicated to tomatoes, beans, cantaloupes, watermelons, okra, squash, and cucumbers. The house was part wood and part adobe and part brick, with a basement and a fireplace and chimney made out of river stone, cool on the hottest days and snug in a storm, the rifle loop holes from the Indian era still in the walls.

  He believed it was a fine place to bring a young woman. If people wanted to talk, that was their choice. “Spit in the world’s mouth,” he said. “Easy for you,” she answered.

  “They look at me funny,” she said on her third day at the house.

  “Who does?”

  “The grocer. A snooty woman in the milliner’s. People coming out of the church.”

  “That’s because you’re beautiful and most of the ladies at the church are homelier than a boot print in a pile of horse flop,” he said.

  “You said you didn’t use profanity in front of women.”

  “A truthful statement about the physiognomy of busybodies is not profanity.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s from the Greek. It means ‘facial features.’”

  “Then why not say that?”

  “I just did.”

  “Is that why you keep encyclopedias and dictionaries all over the place, so you can use words nobody else knows?”

  “Drovers were paid a dollar a day to follow a cow’s flatulence through dust and hail storms and Indians all the way to Wichita. Know why?”

  “They were uneducated and dumb?”

  “You’re sure smart.”

  But what he called his irreverent sense of humor was a poor remedy for the problem besetting him. He thought that somehow their age and cultural differences would disappear, and in an unplanned moment, perhaps while walking under the bluffs along the river where she picked wildflowers among the rocks, she would glance up into his face and see the man who was like her father or the father she should have had, and the thought He’s the one would echo inside her head.

  That moment did not come. She seemed vexed by roosters that crowed at dawn, hogs snuffing in the pen, the absence of neighbors and electricity, the men who wore spurs into the house or sat on the porch and poured their coffee into the saucer and blew on it before they drank. When Hackberry went to Austin on business for a week, the wind died and the air shimmered with humidity and the smell of cattle in an adjacent field became insufferable, to the point where she closed all the windows and thought she’d die of heat exhaustion. She ordered Felix, the foreman, to move the cattle into a field farther down the river. “That’s all red clover down there, Miss Ruby,” he said.

  “I don’t care what color the clover is. Get those animals downwind from the house. The inside of my head feels like a combination of hairball and dried manure.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I understand. Maybe you should let me explain something.”

  “Do it!”

  “I’ll get right on it. I knew it had been too quiet around here.”

  “Take the mashed potatoes out of your mouth.”

  “Hackberry is always saying he just wants a little peace and quiet in his life. It never works out that way. Search me as to the reason.” He looked at her expression. “Yes, ma’am, as you say.”

  When Hackberry returned from Austin, he stared out the side window at his cattle grazing in the pasture downstream. “Felix told you about the red clover down there?”

  “What is all this about clover? It’s what cows eat, isn’t it? Clover is clover. I hope the bees don’t sting them.”

  “You have to ease Angus into red clover. Otherwise they get the scours.”

  “What are the scours?”

  “The bloody shits.”

  “What a lovely term. Thank you for telling me that.”

  “The bloody shits are the bloody shits. What else are you going to call them?”

  “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.

  HE 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 w
orse 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.