House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“Doing what?”

“Guarding Napoleon, like you told me.”

“I told you to watch your mother.”

“No, you said not to leave Napoleon alone. You said the coyotes would eat him.”

“Your mother didn’t call you?”

“Napoleon fell between the hay bales.”

“You helped the dog but not your mother?”

“She didn’t call me anymore. What’s wrong, Daddy?”

“Your mother is dead.” He squeezed his temples with his thumb and the tips of his fingers, his face riven with either sorrow or wrath. “Oh, Maggie.”

She realized he was weeping, his back shaking. He put his hand down to hers. She stared at her jacks and rubber ball on the floor, and at Napoleon chasing a butterfly in the sunlight. She wanted her father to pick her up and hold her against him. She wanted to smell the warm odor of his skin, the cologne he put on his jaw and neck.

“Come inside,” he said. “The baby is stillborn. We need to wrap him in a sheet. Your mother needs to be washed, too. No one must see her like this.”

“Like what?”

“What do you think, girl?”

“She called me twice and—”

“Twice?”

She tried to think what she should say next. “It got quiet. Napoleon was whimpering. I thought Mommy was all right.”

He released her hand. “You thought?” He looked at her as though he didn’t know who she was. “Go on with you, now. Get the sponges and a pan of water from the kitchen. Get two sheets out of the closet.”

She began to sob, hiccupping, her shoulders jerking.

“It’s not your fault,” he said.

She lifted her face to his. She felt a breeze on her skin, a coolness around her eyes.

Then he said, “I should have known better. You were born selfish, just like your grandmother.”

He never spoke again of her failure, but sometimes he would look at her as though gazing at an instrument of the Creator’s punishment rather than a daughter. Never again did he set her on his knees, or play games with her, or take her with him to his land office in town. There was an unrelieved weariness in his face, like that of a man with a stone bruise forever inside his shoe.

He didn’t visit her on Christmas or Thanksgiving at the boarding school, and he didn’t attend her graduation when she was sixteen. His excuse was his lack of funds and the probability that his investment in cattle futures was about to send him into bankruptcy. When she was called to his deathbed, she refused to hold his hand or kiss his brow or acknowledge his attempt at an apology. The minister and p

hysician in attendance were appalled. Maggie Bassett, age seventeen, could not have cared less about their condemnation.

THAT MORNING THE mail carrier had delivered an envelope postmarked in Denver and addressed to Hackberry. The bright blue calligraphy obviously belonged to that poseur Ruby Dansen. Maggie steamed open the envelope and removed a single piece of folded paper. A lock of blond hair fell out. The note read, “Ishmael just had his first real haircut. He thought Big Bud might like this.”

The note was unsigned. Maggie picked up the lock of hair from the floor and replaced it inside the sheet of paper and stuck the paper back inside the envelope and resealed the envelope with paste. Then she propped it against a flower vase on the dining room table, wondering what she should do next. Unfortunately, when it came to future events, she had a trait that sometimes frightened even her. She did not make decisions based on the results of a conscious process. Instead, her decisions seemed made for her by someone else, perhaps a little girl who lived in a dark place inside her, a place where Maggie the adult would never go by herself.

Where was Hackberry? He had been gone over two days. Did he get into it with Harvey Logan? She touched the burn on her chest. Had she made herself a widow? Maybe that prospect wasn’t entirely bad. She saw herself standing by an ornate coffin in the Holland family cemetery, bereaved, the mourners passing in review, squeezing her hand or patting her cheek. No, she must rid herself of thoughts like these. It was not her intention to have them or see these images. No, no, no, that was not she. The images were just a trick of the mind.

So much for that.

In the morning a boy on a mule delivered a telegram from the telegrapher’s office at the depot. The name “Holland” and the rural route number were written in pencil on the envelope. “Where might this come from?” Maggie asked, smiling at the boy.

“I wouldn’t know, ma’am.”