House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (14 page)

H
E DIDN’T COME
home for two days. When he did, she was in the bedroom, packing her trunk. “Stop by to use our indoor plumbing?” she said without looking up.

“Where are you going?”

“California. Or somewhere out
there
.” She lifted her face toward the window. “Don’t come after us.”

“
Us?
”

“You think I’m leaving without Ishmael?”

It was early morning, the flowers in the garden blue with shadow, the windows closed. He could smell his odor in the closeness of the room. “I have to know the truth.”

“About what?”

“Before I killed him, Romulus Atwood said he looked through the parsonage window and saw you and the minister going at it. He described the rose tattooed on your shoulder.”

She turned around. “Ishmael climbed through a fence and chased a white-tail. I went after him and caught my blouse on the wire and tore the buttons. Reverend Levi gave me a shirt to wear.”

“He he’p you put it on?”

She folded one of her dresses and placed it in the trunk, her back stiff with anger. She said something to herself.

“I didn’t catch that,” he said.

“I said I feel sorry for you. Leave us alone, Hack. It didn’t work out. End of our romantic tale on the Guadalupe.”

“Don’t leave me, Ruby. I won’t drink no more. Or at least I’ll try.”

“You know what Reverend Levi said about you? You have the capacity to show love and mercy but not the will to sustain it. He said his father was the same kind of man. You grew up in a time when mercy was an extravagance. I thought that was well put.”

He opened a window. The coolness of the morning had died; the sun’s heat was already rising off the lawn. “Where’s Ishmael?”

“He had croup all night.”

“Respiratory illness runs in my family.”

“So does insanity,” she said.

“I cain’t see anything straight, Ruby. I got something on my conscience, too. I don’t do well with problems of conscience.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“I blew Atwood apart a piece at a time. While I did it, I think I wanted to put the minister’s face on his. In spirit, I was killing a man of the cloth. I cain’t make that go out of my head.”

She closed the trunk. There was neither anger nor sympathy in her expression. She was wearing an ankle-length dress with puffed white sleeves. “I’ll write.”

“Remember when we first met. I called you ‘dutchie.’ I thought you were going to give me a slap across the head. That’s when I knew you were the girl for me.”

“We weren’t meant to be together,” she replied.

He looked into the emptiness of her eyes and knew that no power on earth could change what was about to happen. Atwood may have been a liar; Ruby may have told the truth about the torn blouse; the minister may have been innocent of guile or design; but there was no denying the fact that her love for Hackberry had taken flight, in the way that ash rises from a dead fire and breaks apart in the wind and is never seen again.

“You meeting him out west?” he said.

“I haven’t told him where I’m going.”

“But you will.”

“A boy needs a father.”

He felt his face flinch. “Get out of my house,” he said.

It wasn’t over. Sick and hungover, he followed her outside as she and Ishmael got into her hired carriage. Unable to control his despair, repelled by the funk in his clothes and the stink of his breath, he waved his arms lunatically in the middle of the road. Inside the dust, he saw Ishmael looking back at him from the carriage seat, his mouth forming an “O” that made no sound.

Nor was Hackberry done two hours later when he saddled his horse and rode to the train depot and saw the locomotive and string of boxcars and two Pullman sleepers and a caboose head out of the station into a wide bend by a river where cottonwoods shaded the tracks. Like the pitiful fool he was, he spurred his horse along the tracks, whipping it with the reins, ignoring the wheeze in the animal’s lungs, the labored effort over rocks as sharp as knives. He didn’t give it up until he had blown out his horse, one he loved, and was left standing by the tracks, his horse heaving on its side, its tongue out, the train disappearing between hills in the middle of which a rainbow arched out of the sky, as though heaven and earth were mocking him in his defeat.

He pulled loose the marshal’s badge from his shirt and flung it into the deepest part of the river, then sat down on a rock and wept.

H
IS INSOMNIA AND
depression and lassitude and devotion to whiskey went on for a year. Ruby sent him a postcard from New York City. On the postcard was an artist’s sketch of a Ferris wheel and the pier at Coney Island. The card read, “It’s not your fault, Hack. A leopard cannot change its spots. I hope you are well—Ruby.” At Christmas she mailed him a photograph of her and Ishmael, who was sitting on her knee in a sailor suit. There was no inscription on the photo and no note in the envelope. Nor was there a return address. The minister had left town three weeks after Ruby did, destination unknown. A parishioner said, “I never saw a man go downhill so fast. You’d think Old Nick was riding on his shoulder.” Hackberry contracted a private investigation agency in Brooklyn. The investigative report read:

A woman named Ruby Dansen worked briefly as a cook in a foundling home located in the Five Points area. Her companion, name unknown, was apparently a consumptive who sold bread rolls door-to-door. He claimed to be a minister but was asked not to visit the foundling home, lest he infect the children with his illness. Ruby Dansen often had a child with her. Supposedly Irish hooligans in her building tried to extort her wages and she beat one of them nearly to death with a piece of iron pipe.

Three months ago she did not show up for work. Neither she nor her companion nor her child has been seen since.

Please let us know if we can be of any further service.

Hackberry got put in jail twice on drunk and disorderly charges and sank into all the solipsistic pleasures of dipsomania, a state of moral insanity that allowed him to become a spectator rather than a participant in the deconstruction of his life. Also, if he wished, he could visit the path up Golgotha without ever leaving his home. Who needed nails and wooden crosses and the Roman flagella and the spittle of the crowd when an uncorked bottle of mescal or busthead whiskey was close by? The normalcy of the elements, a restful night’s sleep, rising to meet a new day, the journey of the sun from east to west, all of these were replaced by delirium tremens, flashes of light behind the eyes, blackouts, obscene memories, and a thirst in the morning as big as Texas.

Abnormality became his norm. The man he once knew as Hackberry Holland mounted his horse, bade the world a fond farewell, and went somewhere else. The wretch he left behind was hardly recognizable. The aforesaid were the words he used to describe his own descent into the abyss, as though he took solace in being the architect of his own destruction.

That was when Maggie Bassett came back into his life. She threw out his whiskey and cleaned and scrubbed his house and washed his clothes and put his employees on a regular schedule and balanced his books and wrote letters of goodwill to friends he thought he had lost. She cooked for a bunkhouse full of men, broke hardpan prairie with a single-tree plow, bucked bales and gelded and branded his livestock, and in calving season shoved her hand up to the armpit in a cow’s uterus with the best of them. She took credit for little and did not demean or judge, and when his mind finally cleared, he admitted she had probably saved him from the asylum or drowning facedown in a mud puddle behind a saloon.

There was only one problem about living with Maggie Bassett: In his wildest imaginings, he could not guess what went on in her head. He suspected it would take two or three centuries to decipher who she was—in large part because she didn’t know, either.

Seven months after Maggie moved into the house, Hackberry received a letter from Ruby Dansen. He read it, put it back in the envelope, and set it on a table in the living room. He said nothing of the letter to Maggie. That evening, at dinner, Maggie said, “I have a confession to make.”

“What’s that?”

“I helped rob a bank.”

“You were bored and the Dalton gang needed an extra hand?”

“You know who Harry Longabaugh is?”

“A tall, self-important pissant with a lopsided head who never had a job other than slopping hogs? Calls himself the Sundance Kid?”

“Harry is handsome and a gentleman. I had the good fortune to know him several years ago. ‘Know’ in the biblical sense,” she said. “How do you like that?”

His pale blue eyes were flat, his mouth dry. “At Fannie Porter’s cathouse in San Antonio?”

“No, Harry and I went to the opera together, then to a very elegant restaurant, Mr. Smarty-Pants. He asked if I’d ever stopped a train or a held up a bank. He said you really hadn’t lived till you’d stuck a gun in a bank president’s face or blown open a safe full of John D. Rockefeller’s money.”

“You did not rob a bank, Maggie. Do not mention robbing banks to me again. Do you understand me?”

“I was trying to be honest with you. I saw Harry on the street yesterday. I don’t think he saw me. I just wanted you to know.”

He set down his knife and fork. “You saw him
here
?”

“His back was to me. Harvey Logan was with him. Believe me, it was Harvey. Nobody ever forgets Harvey Logan.”

He picked up his knife and fork again, his forearms resting on the edge of the table. “I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t care if you do or not.”

“You think I’m jealous of a man like Longabaugh? I wouldn’t cross the street to watch a rabid dog rip out his throat.”

“Did you know your knuckles are turning white?”

“Because I’m wondering if I’m married to a crazy woman. Have you heard what cowpokes say about the women at Fannie Porter’s brothel? ‘Their homeliness is never held against them.’ You take pride in knowing the clientele of a place like that?”

“You have the cruelest mouth of any man I’ve ever met.”

“I saw you looking through the mail this morning. I think you read Ruby’s letter. I think that’s what this Longabaugh thing is all about.”

“You left it open on the table. How could I not see it? She’s using the child to extort you.”

“I guess you didn’t read the whole letter. The preacher was hit by a tram. He’s dead. She’s a good young woman who doesn’t deserve the hardships of widowhood.”

“You concede I saved you from destitution, yet you sit at our table, eating the food I prepared for you, and praise the merits of a girl who deserted you when you needed her most. Does that strike you as a bit unusual?”

“Maybe it explains my problems with women. I’ve always been a poor judge of character.”

She threw her glass of sun tea in his face.

H
E SLEPT LITTLE
that night and woke at dawn and reread Ruby’s letter. She was in Trinidad, Colorado, with Ishmael, working for an organization he had never heard of. He shaved, put on a suit, strapped on a money belt, and wrote Maggie a note:

I hope to be back home in ten days. I have to ensure my son is provided for. I’m sorry about last night. The next time I act in a willful or vain manner, you have my permission to put poison in my food, if you are not already planning to do so. Were you actually involved in a bank robbery? I think one of us is crazy. It’s probably me. Take care.

Your loving husband,

Hack

He tilted his note into the light and reread it, wondering what his words actually meant. How could he communicate with a person who changed personalities the way other people changed their underwear? Sometimes during their most intimate moments, when he was convinced she was not acting, he would look into her eyes and take away only one conclusion: She could hold two contrary thoughts simultaneously with complete comfort. How many men could say that about their wives?

T
HE TRAIN RIDE
to Trinidad took three days and required two transfers. It was a strange journey. At dawn, the train entered the Great American Desert, a pre-alluvial world of mesas and dry streambeds that antedated the dinosaurs and remained untainted by the Industrial Age. Far up the track, after sunset, he could see the glow of the firebox when the train arched around a bend, smoke and sparks blowing back from the locomotive, and men the conductor called “hoe boys,” for the grub hoes they carried, running along the tracks, trying to grab a boxcar on the fly. Where did they come from? Why weren’t they working and taking care of their families instead of racing on foot, grabbing on to a steel rung that could tear an arm from the socket?

Hackberry had seen mountains before, in Mexico and Southwest Texas, but they were little more than piles of crushed rock compared to the South Colorado Plateau. The peaks of the mountains disappeared into the clouds, their slopes so immense that the forests in the ravines resembled clusters of emerald-green lichen on gray stone. In the early morning, when he stepped down on the platform in Trinidad, the air was as cold and fresh as a block of ice, white strings of steam rising off the locomotive, baggage wagons rattling past him, the streets lit by gas lamps, and behind the city, a mountain as flat-sided and blue as a razor blade soaring straight up into the sky, touching the stars. He felt he had arrived at a place he might never want to leave.

He had telegraphed his arrival time to Ruby but had not asked that she meet him at the station. Regardless, there she was, in a frilly white dress that went to her ankles, a thin pink sash around the waist, a flat-topped, narrow-brimmed straw hat with a black band set squarely on her head. Ishmael was perched on a bench, wearing a suit and a matching cap and shiny black shoes with silver buckles. “There’s Big Bud!” he shouted.

“How you doin’ there, little pal?” Hackberry said. He scooped up Ishmael and bounced him up and down and whirled the two of them in a circle. “My heavens, what a powerful little fellow you are. I declare, you’re a grand little chap. Isn’t he, Ruby?”

She beamed at the two of them, as though a family picture that had broken on the floor had been picked up and glued together and replaced on the nail.