House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“Give it to me,” Hackberry said.

“Don’t touch me,” she said.

“We’re fighting over nothing, Ruby.”

“Nothing, is it? You’re with her, but it’s nothing? Ishmael, be quiet.” She bent over to pick him up. Her shoulders were firm and wide, her dress tight across her rump, her hair falling loose on her neck. Even under these circumstances, he couldn’t ignore the level of desire he felt for her.

“Let me have him,” Hackberry said.

“Don’t you dare touch either one of us.”

“Ruby, it pains me something awful to hear you talk like that. I’m just no damn good at this.”

“Really? Will you be going to church with us this morning?” she said. “No? I guess I’ll just take myself. What a fine day it’s turning out to be, thanks to your former wife, schoolteacher and shootist.”

“Who said you have to die to go to hell?” he said to himself.

“I heard that,” she said. “Say it again and see what happens.”

HE EXPECTED HER to return from church by one P.M. He fixed lunch and set out plates and silverware and a pitcher of lemonade on the table, and put three encyclopedias on the chair where Ishmael sat when he ate with his parents. Hackberry shaved and brushed his hair and put on the suit he usually wore to church and town council meetings, then waited on the porch rocker. One o’clock came and went. At two-thirty he saddled his horse and rode north along th

e river, across the bottom of Cod Bishop’s property, past the scorched remains of the cabins. Then he caught the road that led to the New Hebron Baptist Church, built on a rise just above the river bend. His heart was tripping as he hoped against hope he would see a picnic in progress, tablecloths and blankets spread on the grassy banks, or any other kind of normal event that would explain Ruby’s failure to return home with their son.

But there were no horses or buggies tethered in front of the whitewashed building with the small stained-glass windows and the tiny bell tower tacked like an afterthought on the roof. He rode along the river’s edge, past the frame house the minister called his “parsonage.” The river was dark and swollen with rain in the shade and running swiftly beneath the bluffs and rocks on the opposite shore, creating a sound like a sewing machine, the riffle in the center flecked with tendrils of light and foam. Only three days ago hail had bounced all over the countryside. Now the trees were in full leaf, stiff against the blue sky, the pebbled bottom of the Guadalupe spangled with all the colors of the rainbow. This was the country that Sam Houston once called a fairyland, so verdant and cool and sprinkled with wildflowers in the spring that it seemed fashioned by a divine hand. It was a grand place, even though it was soaked in blood and haunted by the spirits of murdered Indians, many of them killed by Texas Rangers. Somehow the earth always cleansed itself of man’s inhumanity, and if that was the case, he told himself, wasn’t there an opportunity for the human family to do the same?

He rode slowly toward the arbor where the minister and Ruby and Ishmael were sitting at a plank table, the three of them reminiscent of a mythic family at peace with one another, the minister reading from a book that had a gold cross embossed on its black leather cover. Hackberry pushed his palms down on the pommel of his saddle, tightening his shoulders, straightening a crick out of his back. No one at the table bothered to look in his direction.

The minister, whose name was Levi Hawthorne, had been widowed the previous year at age twenty-five. His cheeks were rosy in spite of the ascetic nature of his face, his hair jet black and curled in locks on the back of his neck, like a painting of a British poet Hackberry had seen in a New York City museum. The members of his congregation said he had been inconsolable after his wife was struck by lightning while pulling wash off the clothesline behind the parsonage.

“There’s Big Bud,” Ishmael said, pointing.

“You call him Father. ‘Big Bud’ is a nickname,” Ruby said. She stroked his head and pushed a strand of hair out of his eye. “You do not call your father a nickname.” She turned her glare on Hackberry.

“I’m not supposed to worry about you or Ishmael?” he said.

Levi Hawthorne rose from the plank bench. He wore a dark suit that had been brushed to thinness and a white shirt with too much starch in it and cuffs too big for his wrists. “I’m glad you could join us, sir,” he said.

“I don’t join in where I’m not invited, Reverend.”

“We were studying some passages from St. Paul’s epistles to the Colossians,” Levi said. His eyes went away from Hackberry’s, then returned.

“Doesn’t Colossians advocate restraint on sensual indulgence?”

“Why, yes, it does.”

“That yonder is the woman I call my wife.”

“Yes, she certainly is,” Levi said.

“Even though some people would say otherwise,” Hackberry said.

“It’s not our province to judge others,” Levi said.

“That yonder is my little boy.”

“He’s a mighty good one, too,” Levi said.

“That’s why I experienced a deep level of anxiety when he and his mother didn’t come home for the lunch I set on the table.”