House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“These men are witnesses,” Bishop said. He had to cup his hand under his nose before he continued. “I’ve done nothing to provoke this.”

Hackberry pushed him backward into the smoke from the cabins. He tore open Bishop’s coat and pulled a five-shot nickel-plated revolver from his belt and threw it in the river. “Take off your clothes.”

“What?” Bishop’s face was trembling, his upper lip slick with blood.

“Strip naked and crawl into the ash.”

“Somebody do something about this.”

Hackberry knocked him to the ground and kicked him between the buttocks. When Bishop screamed, he kicked him again. Then a persona that invaded his dreams and shimmered in daylight on the edge of his vision stepped inside his skin and took control of his thoughts and feet and hands and the words that seemed released from a place other than his voice box. When these episodes occurred in his life, and always without expectation, he became a spectator rather than a participant in his own deeds. He saw his boot descend on Bishop’s face and the side of his head and his neck and mouth; he saw Bishop’s men trying to dissuade him, waving their hands impotently in the air, their mouths moving without sound, while Cod Bishop crawled for safety through hot ash like a caterpillar trying to crawl through flame. Someone was screaming again? Was it Aint Ginny or a child or Bishop? He didn’t know. Then he felt a hand seize his upper arm. He turned his head slowly, blinking, the world coming back into focus, as though someone had removed an ether mask from his face.

“Hack?” Ruby said. “Hack, it’s me. Enough.”

“Enough what?”

“He’s done.”

Hackberry looked down at Bishop. “Get up and stop groveling around like that. Tell your darkies you’ll make things right.”

“Come home with me, Hack,” Ruby said.

“What are you talking about, woman?”

“Let me drive the buggy. I’ve always wanted to drive one.”

“That would be fine,” he replied, widening his eyes. “Come along with us, Aint Ginny. The rest of y’all can come, too. Look at the rain and sunlight on the hills. I declare, if this world isn’t a frolic.”

Ruby held his arm tightly as they walked to the buggy, in a way she had not done previously.

A THUNDERSTORM STRUCK THAT night and lit the clouds with fireworks and filled the air with the smell of sulfur and mown hay and the fecund odor of spawning fish. It also pelted the fishing shack and the tent where Hackberry had quartered Aint Ginny and the other black people to whom he had given sanctuary. He went out on the porch and gazed down the slope at the tent swelling and flapping in the wind, an oil lamp burning inside. He went back in the house and began spooning soup from a kettle on the stove into a cylindrical lunch pail. Ruby watched him from the doorway. “I’ll do it,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Feed the old woman.”

“I think it’s tuberculosis, not croup.”

“Better I do it than you.”

“Why’s that?”

“You’re of an age when people catch germs more easily,” she said.

“The reason I’ve reached my present age is I know how to avoid getting sick or shot or having someone stick a knife in me,” he said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I’ve just never understood why unteachable people waste their money on books,” she said.

He draped a slicker over his head and carried the pail of soup and a wooden spoon through the rain into the tent. Aint Ginny was lying on one of the beds Felix had brought from the bunkhouse. Hackberry pulled up a chair to her bedside and filled the spoon and touched it to her mouth. “I’m going to have Felix carpenter a cabin with everything you need,” he said. “You can stay here long as you want.”

“That man gonna get you, Marse Hack. He’s the kind come up on you with a dirk when you ain’t looking.”

“Cod Bishop? I hope he tries.”

She opened her mouth as a tiny bird in a nest might, waiting for him to place the spoon on her lip.

“I was a little boy when we heard about the Surrender, but you saw it all, didn’t you?” he said.

“I seen the Yankees burn the big house and chop up a piano in the yard. I saw them dig up our smoked hams. They dug them out with their hands, they was so hungry.”