Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“Those are burial or ceremonial mounds. There were fisher people here before Indians had tribal names. Maybe the fisher people weren’t even Indians. Maybe Semitic explorers were here thousands of years ago, men in boats made from papyrus reeds.”

She wasn’t listening. Sometimes a look came into Rosita’s eyes that I could not undo, any more than I could erase the memories that lived in both her conscious and unconscious. Those who had stood in front of the ovens and chimneys and scaffolds were never the same, and no power on earth could change that.

We were almost to the edge of the swamp. I squatted by a mound and picked up a handful of sandy soil and broken seashells and let them slide off my palm. “See? This was probably a hummock, the kind you see in the Florida Everglades today. They were peaceful people who lived in groups of twenty-five or thirty. They lived almost idyllic lives.”

“Where did they go?” she asked.

“They were infected with European diseases. Some were enslaved.” I stood up, my knees creaking. I looked back at the house. The wind had dropped, and the smoke from the chimney was rising straight into the sky. “I’ll go back to the highway and get us some food. We’ll be fine.”

My words were a vanity. I was looking at the remains of people who probably thought the same way I did, people who one bright morning saw sails on the southern horizon and walked into the water to welcome the strange-looking men who had hair on their faces. Rosita clutched my arm and rested her head on my shoulder. “Oh, Weldon,” she said.

That’s all she said. Just that. Oh, Weldon.

AFTER DARK, I drove back to the two-lane and found a small grocery store and bought milk and coffee and sugar and lunch meat and bread and eggs and two steaks and packets of Kool-Aid and a quart of peach ice cream. I fixed a fine meal for us. In the warmth of the fire, my sense of apprehension began to fade. I had heard and seen nothing out of the ordinary at the grocery. Nor did I see any police presence on the road. It was Christmas night and the stars were bright over the Gulf, the moss in the cypress trees straightening against the moon, the smell of the garbage fire gone. There were no electric lights out in the woods or on any of the land that adjoined Fincher’s property. Tomorrow would be a new day, I told myself. We had survived a war that was the worst in human history. One way or another, as we approached the year 1948, we would prevail.

We found blankets and sheets and a quilt in a closet and slept on the floor in front of the fire. I slept without dreaming, with Rosita’s body molded into mine. I heard rain tinking on the roof in the middle of the night, and I was sure that when I woke in the morning, the grass would be greener and spangled with dew in front of Fincher’s house, the wind blowing fresh and cool off the Gulf, the world filled with promise.

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

THERE’S A GROUP of men in Texas you have probably never met. I hope you never do. Contrary to the biblical admonition, you will not know them by their deeds but by their western dress and coarse speech, their nativism and misogyny. They often wear long mustaches and do not shave for several days at a time. The decals on their vehicles proclaim their politics and might contain a message of warning to the incautious. They may be as lithe as a buggy whip or as unhealthy in appearance as a washtub of clabber milk. The reality is they’re poseurs and thespians. With rare exceptions, they’ve never busted broncs, ridden drag on a cattle herd, shoved their hand up to the armpit in a cow’s uterus, gone eight seconds to the buzzer at a fairground, roofed a house in an electrical storm, been stirrup-drug through a dry riverbed, or huddled in a cellar while a tornado ripped the house off its foundation and funneled livestock into the sky. Their symbols of power are their trucks and their firearms. They shoot deer at salt licks and on game farms and take enormous pride in the trophies they hang on their walls, all of which assure them they are the givers of death and will never be its recipient.

They came at dawn, perhaps twenty of them, armed with shotguns and lever-action Winchesters, fanning out from their vehicles, the ground fog puffing whitely around their knees, some of them with badges of auxiliary lawmen clipped on their hand-tooled belts. I wondered if they had any idea how many tactical errors they committed, slamming truck doors, calling out to one another, approaching an adversary with the sun in their eyes, their chrome-plated belt buckles glinting like the crossed bandoliers on the British Redcoats our ancestors potted from two hundred yards away.

I was barefoot when I went outside, unprepared, stunned, and angry at myself for having trusted Lloyd Fincher. As I stared at the men approaching me, I felt like the Dutch boy who had stood in front of the dike while fissures spread outward from a single hole he tried to plug with his thumb. I could have stuffed the Luger in the back of my belt, but it would have done no good and perhaps would have provided this fraudulent collection of tobacco-chewing nativists with the excuse they needed to kill Rosita and me. I don’t remember w

hat I said to them. It was probably not a rational statement. I know I hated them as much as I had hated the Waffen SS or any group who preys upon the weak or the outnumbered. I know that whatever I said was greeted with a rain of blows that knocked me to the ground. I know that for a few seconds I could see only the billowing fog and the dampness of their cowboy boots and tight jeans. I know that when I rose into the sunlight again, I was trying to get my Queen knife free of my pocket. My design was simple. I was going to spill their entrails in the dirt, lay open their unshaved faces, and leave at least one of them with a carotid artery pumping a bright red jet all over his shirt.

That was not what happened. I was shoved facedown in the dirt and handcuffed with my wrists behind me while a stick was tied in my mouth. My Hebrew warrior woman from the House of Jesse was paraded off the porch and locked inside a white restraint jacket, one made out of double-stitched canvas-like cloth that tinkled with straps and buckles, the kind a medieval court jester might wear.

I thought of my mother and the day she was taken away to the psychiatric ward at Jeff Davis Hospital in Houston. I thought about killing people and in large numbers. I saw a filmstrip in my mind that showed me doing things I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of.

Chapter

27

LINDA GAIL CALLED Roy Wiseheart at his office and was told he would not be in during the holidays. “Has he left for Los Angeles?” she asked.

“If you’d like to leave a message, I’ll make sure he gets it,” the receptionist said.

“I’ve already done that.”

“Who’s calling, please?”

“That’s a good question.”

“Pardon?”

“I said I’m not sure who is calling,” Linda Gail said, and hung up.

She fixed a sandwich and a glass of milk for Hershel and turned on the radio for him, then put on her sheerest stockings, a black suit, high heels, long white gloves, and a purple pillbox hat with a veil, and drove in her Cadillac to Roy Wiseheart’s home. Two automobiles she didn’t recognize were parked in front. The columned porch was brightly lit by the carriage lamps. Clara Wiseheart answered the door.

“I need to see Roy, Mrs. Wiseheart,” Linda Gail said.

“My impression is you have seen quite a lot of him.”

“Great injury has been done to Hershel. I won’t take much of Roy’s time.”

“Hershel? Oh, yes. Sorry, I’m forgetful with names. And what does Roy have to do with Hershel?”