Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“Is something bothering you?” I asked.

“Those machines have blood on them.”

“They’re just machines. They’re neither good nor bad.”

“You’ve given up your plans to enter graduate school, haven’t you?”

I didn’t answer.

“You have the soul of a poet,” she said. “You’d be a wonderful teacher.”

“The GI Bill pays eighty-five dollars a month for a married man. Can you imagine living in New York on that?”

“We can move to Austin. You can attend the state university.”

“Hershel and I are going to see my uncle Cody tomorrow afternoon. I want you to come with us.”

“You don’t need me for this.”

“I want you to understand my family. Some of them have led violent lives. I’m not like them, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love and admire them. Uncle Cody left home when he was twelve years old and became a vagabond. In a freight car outside St. Louis, he offered to share his food with two drifters. They thanked him by taking his food and trying to rape him. He killed both of them with a pocketknife. In New York, he was a bodyguard for Owney Madden, the man who owned the Cotton Club. Today he’s a wealthy oilman. I’m going to ask him what he thinks of Hershel’s plans.”

“Why are you telling me all these things?”

“I’m not sure, Rosita. My family is different. We were never spectators.”

She turned on her side, her back to me, her hip rounded under the sheet. Her shoulders were white and as cool and smooth to the touch as marble.

“You’re not going to say anything?” I asked.

“You don’t realize the gift you have.”

She reached out and clicked off the lamp.

CODY HOLLAND’S RANCH, one of several he owned, was a long drive, almost to the Gulf of Mexico, a spot he’d obviously chosen to create the home and the life he had never enjoyed as a boy. It was almost dark when we passed Goliad, the site of the execution of 350 Texas soldiers under the command of James Fannin on Palm Sunday, 1836. A winter storm was building in the south as we pulled up to a brightly lit diner on the highway, within sight of Matagorda Island. The palm fronds down by the beach were whipping in the wind against a black sky that rippled with electricity.

My uncle had not invited us to his home. He was an untrusting man, unpredictable, sentimental, often controlling and quick to anger. He was also feared. Oddly, though, I had never felt uncomfortable around him. I think I saw the orphan in his eyes, because like my mother, Cody was one of the children Grandfather had let founder by the wayside.

Rosita and I and Hershel and my uncle sat in a cigarette-burned red vinyl booth in back and drank long-necked Jax beer and avoided talking business until after we had finished eating. Hershel’s level of ill ease was palpable. His face had an oily shine; he constantly touched at his mouth with a folded paper napkin and rubbed his neck, as though he wore a serf’s collar. “Is the fishing right good down here?” he said.

“Speckled trout and gafftop catfish, mostly,” Cody said. He was built like a door. His hair was wavy and black, silver in places; he looked directly into people’s faces whether they were offended or not.

“I’d like to get in on that,” Hershel said. He stared down at the steak gravy and blood and pink-edged remnants of the T-bone on his plate, unable to think of anything else to say.

The waitress put the check on the edge of the table. It stayed there, absorbing the wet rings left by our beer bottles.

“What’s this pipeline venture you’ve got in mind?” Cody asked.

In the background, somebody dropped a nickel into the jukebox. Harry Choate’s famous recording of “La Jolie Blon” began playing.

“I’ve got a way to put pipe in the ground that will stay there a hundred years without a leak,” Hershel said. “I’m talking about the same weld that held the King Tiger tank together. I was doing both tack and hot-pass welds when I was sixteen years old, Mr. Holland. It’s something I always had a talent for.”

“Is that a fact?” Cody said.

“Yes, sir, you can take it to the bank,” Hershel said.

There was a pause. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

Hershel’s passion was that of a true believer, in the same way that the Puritans saw work as a virtue and idleness as sin and failure as a preview of perdition. Hershel had probably never heard of Cotton Mather, but in a large crowd, one quickly would have recognized the other.