House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

Hackberry let his gaze rove over Atwood’s face. It looked as hard and carved as knotty pine, the eyes shiny, floating in their own liquid, as though diseased.

“I’ll put it this way,” Atwood said. “I lost my virginity a second time. I got over the notion that a troublesome woman deserved special consideration because of her gender.”

“You lynched a woman?”

“It was a collective endeavor.”

Hackberry drank from his mug and looked in the mirror. “Tell me what’s on your mind or get out of my sight.”

“Five hundred dollars and you won’t see Maggie Bassett again. I’ll buy her a train ticket. The two of us will just go away. Probably out to San Francisco or up to Alaska. The gold fields are booming. She won’t be back. That’s guaranteed.”

“On the train? Maggie will just go away?”

“That’s it.”

Hackberry nodded. “She throw you out?”

“What do you care?”

“I was just speculating. Maggie was always good about taking in strays. She usually kept them around. You must have done something pretty rank.”

“You could say I wasn’t in accordance with her conjugal ways, if you get my drift.”

“I’m going to use the jakes,” Hackberry said. “Don’t be here when I come back.”

“It’s not me who has a woman problem, Marshal,” Atwood replied, rolling a cigarette. “I went looking for you at your ranch earlier today. That old nigress there said Miss Ruby and the boy went down the road to the Baptist church. She thought you might be joining them. When I got to the church, there wasn’t anybody around, not unless you count your son, who was playing by himself in the backyard of the parsonage.”

“Ishmael was by himself?” Hackberry said, not looking up from his drink.

“That’s what I said. I asked him where his mama was at. He said, ‘Inside making lemonade with the reverend.’ I took a look through the back bedroom window. Ruby and the preacher were going at it like two beavers chewing on a log.”

Atwood crimped the ends of a cigarette and stuck it into his mouth and lit it with a match he scraped along the underside of the bar.

“You tell quite a story,” Hackberry said.

“I’m just passing on information, one pilgrim to another.”

“That’s thoughtful of you, Dr. Atwood. Excuse me a minute.”

Hackberry walked through the saloon, past the billiard table, and out the back door into the wind and drizzle, his ears filled with sounds like an avalanche sliding down a mountainside. He went into the outhouse and closed the door and set the wood peg in the hasp and urinated through the worn, smooth-edged, beveled hole on which hundreds of men had squatted since the 1870s, depositing the only contribution to the earth they would ever make. That’s why they scratched their names on walls and carved them on trees and rocks, why they hung their bodies with weaponry and scalps and rode their horses along the edges of precipices in electrical storms. They wanted to deny the reality of their short duration from their mothers’ birth pains to the day someone placed pennies on their eyes, the insignificance of their daily preoccupations, the fact that the imprint of a leaf in an ancient riverbed had more permanence than they.

These were things he had learned not to speak about, in the way a blind man does not try to tell the sighted that vision has little to do with light. But who was he to think himself superior to others? Whatever wisdom he possessed always seemed to come from a bitter cup. The only real lesson he had learned in life was that a man’s greatest gift was his family. Now he was about to lose it.

Was Atwood lying? A man could conceal love, but a woman could not, no more than a tropical flower could refuse to bloom. Only a fool would deny the obvious effect the minister had on her. Hackberry had become a spectator in the hijacking of his wife’s affections. The image of the minister’s beardless face floated before his eyes.

He buttoned his fly and washed his hands in water he dripped from a wood bucket and dried them on a towel hanging on a nail by the back door. Then he sat down on the stoop and listened to the rain tinkling on the tin roof, his mind too tired to think. “Marshal Holland,” he heard a voice say.

The black man who had been sweeping the sidewalk was standing in the alley at the corner of the saloon, his hair beaded with raindrops, his trousers held up by rope.

“What is it, Markus?” Hackberry asked.

“The man in there with the bandage on his hand? He told Mr. Bill he’d work behind the bar so Mr. Bill could be with his sick wife.”

“Good for him.”

“He said something behind your back. He called you a bad name.”

“Like what?”