Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“Hershel said you made him wear slippers at the public pool.”

She turned her head and looked at me like someone awakening from a dream. “What did you say?”

“I don’t think you know how he lost part of his foot. He and I walked in snow up to our knees in zero-degree weather. He carried Rosita in his arms while his right foot was so swollen with frostbite that he couldn’t unlace his boot.”

“He told you I asked him to wear slippers at the pool?”

“His feelings were hurt, Linda Gail.”

“I didn’t want the children staring at him. I didn’t want to correct them in front of him. So I tried to avoid an unpleasant situation that would embarrass him. Did that ever occur to you?”

“Did you tell him that?”

“What good would it do? Talking to either of you is a waste of time, particularly you, Weldon. Do you think it’s wrong to want a better way of life? I never want to go back to the house I grew up in. If you’d lived in my house, you wouldn’t want to, either. During the Depression, we glued cardboard soles on our shoes.”

“Hershel is a good man. I’m not sure what Roy Wiseheart is,” I said.

“I want to hit you. Instead, I’m going to forget everything you’ve said. I’m flying on a private plane tonight to Albuquerque. Tomorrow I’ll be on location, and none of this will have happened. Goodbye. Thank you for calling Roy.”

I wanted to tell her that Rosita’s family had been exterminated by the Nazis, and that I had pulled her from under a pile of corpses, and that Rosita didn’t feel the world owed her anything as a consequence. But I didn’t. For some reason I thought of Bonnie Parker and the way her smile reminded me of someone opening a music box. I guess I tried to remind myself that most people, no matter how offensive they might be, are doing the best they can at the time. It’s a hard precept to follow, and I was certainly not good at it.

So here’s to you, Linda Gail, I thought. You’ve wrecked three cars, struck a behemoth of a Houston policeman in the face with your bare hand, and are on the edge of entering an adulterous affair with a man married to probably one of the most vicious women in Texas, and it’s not even noon.

I COULD NOT GET the photograph of my dead father out of my mind. My father was an eccentric man who drank too much and wanted to be a journalist but instead went to work in the oil field. Every night he came home and washed his hands with a brush and Lava soap, as though trying to scrub the oil-and-natural-gas business out of his life. Aside from his drinking, he was good-natured and generous and treated all people equally; he was honest in his dealings with others and deserved better than dying in a bell hole explosion and having his remains disposed of anonymously, his family left to wonder what had happened to him.

Somebody owed me an answer. I wasn’t sure who. I’d learned a lesson in the Ardennes. When we went up against the panzer corps, we were not fighting only German armor. We had also taken on Stonewall Jackson. Erwin Rommel and his colleagues in martial mischief had studied Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley campaign and had used Tiger tanks in the same way Jackson used cavalry. How egregious can the ironies of history be? Out there in the snowy forests

south of the Belgian border, the right-hand man of Robert E. Lee was guiding the Waffen SS against his countrymen, some of them probably descendants of the Confederate soldiers who were with him when he died at Chancellorsville.

Jackson’s strategy, as he explained once, was simple: “Mystify, mislead, and surprise.” I thought I might give it a try. I drove back home and ate lunch on the screened porch with Rosita. It was Indian summer, the air tannic with the smell of burning leaves. “I’m going to the office of Dalton Wiseheart this afternoon, then I should head on over to Louisiana,” I said.

“Is that Roy Wiseheart’s father?” she asked.

“He’s supposed to be quite a character.”

“What are you doing, Weldon?”

“The detective who showed me a death photo of my father worked for him. Mr. Wiseheart needs to be made accountable.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“It’s better you don’t.”

“Try to stop me.”

The reddish-brown light that lived in Rosita’s eyes never changed. It didn’t diminish; it didn’t intensify. Every time I looked into her eyes, I thought about the light of the world that Jesus mentions in the Gospels. Dark memories never had their way with her; anger never made her its captive.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“I feel sorry for Hershel. I think Linda Gail is going to destroy both of them.”

“Whatever they do, they won’t destroy us,” she said. “Do you hear me, Weldon? That can’t happen.”

DALTON WISEHEART OWNED an office building in downtown Houston but did most of his business on the veranda of the Rice Hotel, where a personal bartender fixed mint juleps for him and his friends while they decided the future for arguably hundreds of thousands of people. His origins and background and education were at odds. He grew up on a large wheat farm on the Texas–New Mexico line, not far from the original XIT Ranch. Journalists liked to use terms such as “homespun” and “pioneer patriarch” in describing him. They took little note of his degrees from Georgia Tech and MIT. They also failed to remember a statement he made about his method of dealing with troublesome people. For clarity of line, it had no equal: “Make them wince.”

I don’t mean to fault journalists. Like most people who worked for others in that era, they did as they were told. Besides, Dalton Wiseheart’s appearance was deceptive. When we walked out on the veranda, he was dozing in a swayback straw chair, his booted feet up on the rail, a battered cowboy hat over his face, his body half in shadow. One of his aides touched him on the shoulder and told him we were there. His face was as plain as a bowl of porridge. The nose was bulbous and pitted, the teeth long, the bottom lip protruding, as though snuff were tucked inside it. He wore khakis and a long-sleeved denim shirt and wide suspenders, and he had a stomach that made me think of piled bread dough. He took a dark blue handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose in it. “I hate to sleep during the day,” he said. “I wake up with a head full of cobwebs. You’re Roy’s friend?”

“Weldon Avery Holland,” I said. “This is my wife, Miss Rosita.”