His father, Sam Morgan Holland, had been a drover and a Confederate soldier and a violent and drunken man with a homicidal temper who had watched his entire herd, two thousand head, spook in dry lightning and turn in to a brown river flowing over the Flint Hills outside Wichita, Kansas. He had cursed God for his bad fortune and stayed drunk all the way back to Texas, and joined those who sat on the mourners’ bench at the New Hebron Baptist Church, in despair and beyond the pale.
The terminology depended on a person’s education, but the characterization of hopelessness and irrevocable loss was always the same. Women who
killed themselves in sod houses in the dead of winter had “cabin fever.” Those who studied the mystics called it “the long night of the soul” or “a time in the Garden.” Others were simply called self-pitying drunks who were “weak” and would trade their souls for a half cup of whiskey.
Supposedly, Sam Holland found peace when he hung his guns on a peg in a brick jail on the border, and locked the iron door behind him, and rode away to become a saddle preacher on the Chisholm Trail. Hackberry had his doubts about the story. Blood didn’t rinse easily from a man’s dreams. Nor did memories of irreparable injury done to others.
Hackberry had experienced “spells” since he was a child. A spell could last fifteen minutes or days. The experience was the equivalent of weevil worms eating a hole through his heart while he watched a sky as blue and flawless as silk turn into a giant sheet of carbon paper.
Voices in his head. Night sweats in the middle of the day. Inability to breathe, as though someone had sifted a tablespoon of sand in each of his lungs. A sensation above the left ear that was like a banjo string being tightened around the scalp. People wondered why a man sat down on a stump and upended his shotgun and propped his chin on both barrels?
When he’d found Beatrice DeMolay’s bordello in the high desert of central Mexico, he had thought a deliverance was at hand. Instead, he was tortured by fire and in other ways he could not completely remember; he also littered the landscape with the bodies of his tormentors. Then the cup had come into his possession. Was it an accident? Or was there purpose in his discovering it ironically in a hearse filled with ordnance?
As the light died on the horizon and the air cooled and grew dense with a smell like old leaves in a rain barrel, he walked down to the river and sat once again by the tangle of rusted cables where he had buried the cup.
He had read in his encyclopedias about the Arthurian search for the Grail and the stories of Knights Templar who supposedly returned from the Crusades with the shroud and pieces of the cross. He set little store by any of it. The one reference that wouldn’t go away, however, was the name of the Grand Master of the Knights Templar. It was Jacques de Molay, burned at the stake in front of Notre Dame Cathedral at the close of the thirteenth century. With a minor contraction of the spelling, the name was the same as Beatrice DeMolay’s.
Maybe it was another coincidence. That wasn’t a word Hackberry’s murderous saddle preacher of a father had much tolerance for. He called coincidence “the Lord acting with anonymity.”
Could the cup be real, the one Jesus not only drank from but probably dipped bread in and gave to his disciples? The thought frightened Hackberry, not because the cup had been held by Jesus but because it had been entrusted to him, Hackberry Holland, whose record of chaos and mayhem and womanizing and bloodshed was legendary in the worst sense.
According to what he had read, Jacques de Molay had returned from the Holy Land with the shroud that had covered Jesus’ body and, some believed, the Holy Grail. He and his fellow knights were arrested en masse on Friday the thirteenth, tortured unmercifully for days and weeks, and sent to their death as idolaters.
Hackberry looked at the evening star winking just above the hill on the far side of the river. He pared his fingernails with a knife and tried to create a blank space in the center of his mind where he could hide and think about absolutely nothing.
Forget about all the great mysteries, he told himself. If anyone ever figured them out, he hadn’t seen the instance. What were the real problems confronting him? He had been lured into shooting and killing a man who was probably mentally impaired, someone who had been burned so badly he resembled a mannequin. Second, the issue with the cup was not about the cup but the fact that Arnold Beckman wanted it. And if Arnold Beckman wanted something, it was to make the earth a much worse place than it already was.
Hackberry rested his hand by the rusty coils of cable. What an unsuitable place for the cup, covered by the industrial detritus of the twentieth century. Time to move it. But where?
How did a cottontail elude his pursuers? He ran in a circle, then went down a hole or crossed water and left his enemy chasing a scent that had no end. A Comanche Indian up on the Staked Plains did the same: In blazing heat, in the midst of summer drought, he would put a pebble under his tongue to cause his mouth to salivate, then wander in circles and figure eights until the canteens of his pursuers were empty, and attack them at the end of a burning day. Hackberry would hide the cup in a place where Arnold Beckman’s people had already been. The cave. Strange. According to the legends recounted in his encyclopedias, the cup had been hidden in a cave in southern France or perhaps western England, the last redoubt of the Celts.
He went back to the barn for a shovel. He thought he heard the phone ringing inside the house but paid no attention to it. He pulled on his gloves and stripped the tangle of cable free from the ground and threw it down the slope into the shallows. The ground was as loamy and soft as coffee grinds when he pressed down on the shovel blade and eased it under the box he had wrapped with a tarp and a rain slicker.
Then a phenomenon took place that had to be the result of natural causes. He was almost certain of this. The full moon had just broken through the clouds, as bright as silver plate. As he dumped the dirt off the blade of his shovel, the ground and air sparkled as though he had dug into a pocket of pollen. Pyrite, he told himself. The same false indicator that had sent James Bowie chasing after legends and silver and gold in San Saba County. Hackberry picked up the box and refilled the hole, stamping it down, ridding himself of thoughts about ancient myths and Crusader knights on the road to Roncesvalles or wherever they could bloody a sword in the name of Christianity.
Once again, he heard the phone ringing.
RUBY GOT OUT of the policeman’s car and walked up the midway of the carnival. The hot-air balloon was now directly overhead, anchored by a rope, a man in a straw boater and a candy-striped coat tossing buckets of confetti and paper-wrapped taffy to the children below. But something was wrong. The people in the midway had divided into two groups. The larger crowd had gathered directly under the balloon, the children’s hands outreached toward the gondola. Others had formed a crowd in front of a cage. When a child wandered away from the larger group toward the cage, a parent would rush over to him and immediately drag him back, fighting.
Ruby tried to see over the shoulders of the crowd gathered in front of the cage, one with wire mesh and bars. “What’s happening up there?” she said to the man in front of her.
His teeth were the size of an elk’s, his eyes as small as dimes. “The geek show. He’s supposed to be the Missing Link. More like a rummy making a few dollars and having some fun.”
Through the heads and hats and bonnets and thick necks and broad backs, Ruby saw a man trying to get to his feet inside the cage, then slipping on his buttocks, his clothes and skin streaked with filth. She felt her heart knock against her ribs, her breath rush out of her throat.
She tried to push her way through the crowd. The people around her smelled of sweat that had dried inside wool, onions and greasy meat, malt, unwashed hair, decayed teeth, and deodorant compounds smeared under their armpits. A man hit her in the breast with his elbow; a woman screwed her face into a knot and said, “Be careful who you’re pushing, Swede.”
Ruby went back through the crowd into the midway and circled behind the game booths until she found the door of the cage. Three men were sitting at a wood table outside it, drinking Coca-Cola and smoking. They wore badges and suspenders without coats and hats that shadowed their faces. One was short and wore a piece of tape across his nose; there was blood on his collar and the front of his shirt. An ax handle lay by his foot.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“The law. What can we do for you?” the short man said.
“No, you’re not. You’re ginks. That’s my son in that cage. Did you put him in there?”
The tallest of the three put out his cigarette on the sole of his boot and took
a sip from his Coca-Cola, gazing at nothing. “He was drunk and started a fight. We put him in there for his own protection. The city police are going to pick him up.”