House of the Rising Sun

by James Lee Burke

  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.

  HACKBERRY 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.

  HACKBERRY 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.

  “The reason I’ve reached my present age is I know how to avoid getting sick or shot or having someone stick a knife in me,” he said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I’ve just never understood why unteachable people waste their money on books,” she said.

  He draped a slicker over his head and carried the pail of soup and a wooden spoon through the rain into the tent. Aint Ginny was lying on one of the beds Felix had brought from the bunkhouse. Hackberry pulled up a chair to her bedside and filled the spoon and touched it to her mouth. “I’m going to have Felix carpenter a cabin with everything you need,” he said. “You can stay here long as you want.”

  “That man gonna get you, Marse Hack. He’s the kind come up on you with a dirk when you ain’t looking.”

  “Cod Bishop? I hope he tries.”

  She opened her mouth as a tiny bird in a nest might, waiting for him to place the spoon on her lip.

  “I was a little boy when we heard about the Surrender, but you saw it all, didn’t you?” he said.

  “I seen the Yankees burn the big house and chop up a piano in the yard. I saw them dig up our smoked hams. They dug them out with their hands, they was so hungry.”

  He stroked her forehead. “You go to sleep now.”

  He saw a shadow fall across his arm. He turned and looked into Ruby’s face.

  “The sheriff was at the door. He said Cod Bishop is filing assault charges against you.”

  “Remind me to shoot the sheriff.”

  “He said Cod Bishop is a sorry sack of shit and not to worry about it.”

  “I’ve always said the sheriff had redeeming qualities.”

  “Your supper is ready.”

  “I’m going into town for a little while.”

  “If you want to get drunk, do it here.”

  “I never drink in my home.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Getting drunk doesn’t, either. That’s why people get drunk. They cain’t make sense of anything, least of all themselves.”

  “Thanks for explaining that. I’ll throw your supper in the yard.”

  THAT NIGHT HE didn’t go into town; nor did he drink. Instead he wrote in his journal, at his desk, in the light of a brass oil lamp that had a green glass shade as thick as a tortoise shell. His journal entries often dealt with historical events or, rather, the consequences he believed would ensue from them: the populist movement, the stranglehold on the dollar by industrial interests, the theft of public lands by the railroads, anarchists throwing bombs, and company ginks shooting down strikers on picket lines. These observations and notations, however, were secondary in importance to his entries about the depression and murderous instincts that were bedfellows in the Holland family, passing from one generation to the next, perhaps unto the seventh generation.

  He had read and reread many times Thomas Jefferson’s letter about the suicide of Meriwether Lewis and the fits of melancholia that Meriwether could avoid only by keeping his mind occupied. Jefferson, a child of the Enlightenment who believed the unexamined life was not worth living, looked upon melancholia and self-destructive thoughts as the inevitable products of a brilliant and curious mind when it became idle. While a dolt remained as happy as a cloth doll with a smile painted on its face—even when the dolt was about to fall off a precipice—an intelligent person suffered the pains of the damned simply because he paused long enough to hear his own thoughts.

  “What are you writing?” Ruby said over his shoulder.

  “I try to sort my head out by writing about the things that fret me. Most of the time it doesn’t work too well.”

  “What things?”

  “I lose time. I step into a windstorm that’s either outside or inside myself. Later I cain’t remember exactly what I did there. Then it comes back to me in a dream. Sometimes it scares the bejesus out of me. My father is the same way. His name is Sam Morgan Holland. A lot of men died in front of his guns, from here all the way to Wichita and Abilene.”

  “He’s a gunslinger?”

  “A Baptist preacher.”

  “I’d like to meet him.”

  “I wouldn’t wish my father on my worst enemy. If he gets sent to hell, I think the devil will quit his job.”

  She placed her palm on the back of his neck. “You’re hot as a stove.”

  “What you saw me do to Cod Bishop, that’s not me. It’s a sickness that lives in me, but it’s not who I am, at least not all the time. Maybe the Hollands got their bloodlust from the Indians. Or maybe we gave it to them. Whatever it is, we sure got it.”

  She took her hand away and gazed at the wallpaper. It was printed with small roses. “Who was the woman who lived h
ere?”

  “She called herself my wife. I’d call her otherwise.”

  “She hurt you?”

  “I made my own bed. The fault is mine. I need to tell you something, Ruby. I made a mistake.”

  “About what?”

  “With you. I made a mistake.”

  He saw the vulnerability, the flicker of injury, in her face before he had stopped speaking, and he hated himself for it. He set his pen down on the blotter and replaced the cap on the inkwell. “What I mean is I’m too set in my habits, too worn around the edges.”

  “You hear me complaining?” she said.

  “When a woman loves a man, she knows it, and the man does, too. It’s not a reasonable state of mind. It’s kind of like having influenza.”

  “You think too much,” she said.

  “No, I don’t. That’s my problem. I don’t think about anything. I just do it. Just like my father.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To bed. I love the rain and the lightning in the clouds. I chased cows all over Oklahoma Territory in storms like this. All that’s ending. No one can know what that means unless he was there for it. It was a special time.”

  “What about Aint Ginny?”

  “What about her?”

  “Is she going to be all right in the tent?”

  “I already moved her into the back room. You thought I’d leave her outside? Jesus Christ, Ruby, what do you think I am?”

  He turned down the wick in the lamp until the flame died and a tiny ribbon of black smoke drifted through the glass chimney. He rose from his desk and went up the stairs and undressed and pulled back the covers on his bed and lay down and stared out the window at the flashes of electricity rippling through the heavens, not unlike ancient horsemen in pursuit of a golden bowl that somehow, millennium after millennium, eluded their grasp.

  THE STORM HAD passed, and the thunder had rolled away and died in a diminishing echo among the hills, and the only sound in the house was the rain drumming on the roof when she undressed by his bedside and pulled back the covers and got in beside him. She laid her head on the pillow, her face pointed at his, her hair still up. “Do you want me to go?” she said.

  “No,” he said.

  “I don’t mean go from your room. From your house.”