House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (8 page)

“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.

H
ER 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.

T
HEY 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, filled 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.

H
IS 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?”