House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

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?”

“How was I supposed to know about the intestinal problems of cattle?” she said. “Maybe I should read from some of your encyclopedias. Should I look under ‘B’ for ‘bloody’ or ‘S’ for ‘shits’?”

“Felix should have explained. It’s not your fault,” he said.

“You look worn out. You want me to heat water for your tub?”

“Why don’t we sit down and have a cup of coffee?” He waited, hoping she wouldn’t see the need in his eyes.

“I just had some,” she said.

She went into the backyard and stared into the distance, the wash flapping angrily on the line.

HE DIDN’T SLEEP that night. Maybe it was time to give up trying to alter his fate. Didn’t Jesus say some were made different by a hand outside themselves? Perhaps that meant living alone, at the mercy of one’s thoughts and the bloodlust that neither whiskey nor profligate women could satisfy. His dreams were often filled with the rumble of horses silhouetted against a red sky, their tails flagging, their nostrils breathing fire. There were w

orse images to live with, weren’t there? Solitude and the role of the iconoclast had their compensations.

Then an event happened that caused him to wonder at the great folly that seemed to govern his life, namely, his attempts to plan and control his future. Most of the events that changed his life had taken place without his consent and at the time had seemed of little consequence. Our destiny didn’t lie in the stars, he told himself, or even in our mettle. It lay in our ability to recognize a gift when it was placed in your hands.

The black woman’s name was Ginny Prudhomme, but everyone called her Aint Ginny. She had come to Texas from Louisiana as a slave with Stephen F. Austin’s colonists in 1821, and had picked cotton on the same plantation outside Natchitoches until the close of the Civil War, when she found herself destitute and without shelter or family. The grandson of her former owner was a Methodist minister who took her and several other former slaves with him to a farm he had bought on the banks of the Guadalupe. Aint Ginny lived in a cabin behind the main house and tended a vegetable garden and put up preserves in the fall and cared for the minister’s children and was a happy person, even though she had reached ninety and her eyes had turned to milk.

When the minister died and his children moved to cities in the North, Aint Ginny continued to live in her cabin. The new owner of the property, a man named Cod Bishop, who had made his money supplying Cantonese labor to the railroads in Utah and Montana, paid little attention to the black people living in the mud-chinked log cabins down by the river, in the way a person would not pay attention to the indigenous animals that came with a property deed. Sometimes the blacks saw him smoking a cigar by the waterside at sunset, gazing at his cattle and freshly painted outbuildings and farm equipment and, most of all, his pillared house with its dormers and wraparound veranda and ventilated shutters on the windows.

Cod Bishop was not a man whose image you easily forgot. He wore yellow coach gloves for no apparent reason, and he had a way of turning his head so people speaking with him had to address his profile. Coupled with this, his abnormally long back had an inverted bow in it, reminiscent of a coachman’s whip.

One evening he noticed a gopher mound and kicked at it with his shoe. He picked up a stick and jabbed it into a hole, then into another hole and another.

“How long has this been going on?” he said to a small black boy who was watching him.

“Suh?”

“These piles of dirt and rock, all this dead grass, the tunnels under the ground. How long have you people sat and watched this?”

“I don’t know nothing about it, suh.”

“Go get your mother.”

The boy left but didn’t come back. Cod Bishop threw his cigar into the river and walked up the slope to his house.

In the morning, he returned with two of his helpers, men with rolled sleeves and a determined look. Each was carrying a grub hoe in one hand and a bucket of coal oil in the other. One had a gunpowder horn hung from his neck. “Get started on this first one, and I’ll flag the ones in the pasture,” Bishop said. “Turn each mound into silt and ash. Kill every gopher that’s down there. You leave one, you leave a hundred.”

The workmen stuffed wads of paper down the holes and jabbed them deep into the burrows with sticks, then soaked the paper with oil and sprinkled gunpowder on it and dropped a lucifer match down the largest hole. The effect was instantaneous. Strings of smoke rose from the tunnels under the scarified ground and far out into the grassy perimeters. The air was filled with the smell of burning hair.

“Oh, what y’all doing?” a voice said.

Aint Ginny had come out of her cabin and was standing as small and frail as a stick figure behind the workmen, one hand gripped on a cane, her eyes the color of fish scale.