House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“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.

HIS 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.”