Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“I have none.”

“I had three children. They died without baptism.” He looked toward the west and the heat lightning pulsing in the sky just above the hills. “Sometimes I think their souls are out there, outside their bodies, lost in the darkness, not knowing where they’re supposed to go. You think that’s what happens after we’re dead? We don’t know where to go until someone tells us?”

“How did your children die?”

“They were killed by a helicopter in front of the clinic where they were playing.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“You can baptize them, china.”

“Do not call me that.”

“It wasn’t their fault they weren’t baptized. They call you La Magdalena. You can reach back in time before they were dead and baptize them.”

“You should talk to a priest. He will tell you the same thing I do. Your children committed no offense against God. You mustn’t worry about them.”

“I can’t see a priest.”

“Why not?”

“I killed one. I think he was French, maybe a Jesuit. I’m not sure. We were told he was a Communist. I machine-gunned him.”

Her eyes left his face. She remained motionless inside the pattern of shadow and light created by the moon. “Whom do you work for?” she asked.

“Myself.”

“No, you don’t. You’re paid by others. They use you.”

“Conejo, you are much woman.”

“You will not speak to me like that.”

“You didn’t let me finish. You are much woman, but you’ve lied to me. You’ve given Communion to the people who come here, just like a priest. But you turn me away.”

“I think you’re a tormented man. But you won’t find peace until you give up your violent ways. You tortured and killed the man down south of us, didn’t you? You’re the one called Krill.”

His eyes held hers. They were pale blue, the pupils like cinders. In silhouette, with his long knife-cut hair and torso shaped like an inverted pyramid, he resembled a creature from an earlier time, a warrior suckled in an outworn creed. “The man I killed in the south did very cruel things to my brother. He had a chance to redeem himself by being brave. But he was a coward to the end.”

“Others are with you, aren’t they? Out there in the hills.”

“Others follow me. They are not with me. They can come and go as they wish. Given the chance, some of them would eat me like dogs.”

“When you were a coyote, you raped the women who paid you to take them across?”

“A man has needs, china. But it wasn’t rape. I was invited to their beds.”

“Because they had no water to drink or food to eat? Do not come here again, even if you’re badly hurt or starving.”

The man watched the heat lightning, his hair lying as black as ink on his shoulders. “I can hear my children talking inside the trees,” he said. “You have to baptize them, señora. It doesn’t matter if you want to or not.”

“Be gone.”

He raised a cautionary finger in the air, the shadow of the windmill blades slicing across his face and body. “Do not treat me with contempt, Magdalena. Think about my request. I’ll be back.”

THREE DAYS LATER, on Saturday, Hackberry rose at dawn and fixed coffee in a tin pot and made a sandwich out of two slices of sourdough bread and a deboned pork chop he took from the icebox. Then he carried the pot and sandwich and tin cup down to the barn and the railed pasture where he kept his two Missouri foxtrotters, a chestnut and a palomino named Missy’s Playboy and Love That Santa Fe. He spread their hay on the concrete pad that ran through the center of the barn, and then he sat down in a wood chair from the tack room and ate his sandwich and drank his coffee while he watched his horses eat. Then he walked out to their tank and filled it to the rim from a frost-proof spigot, using his bare hand to skim bugs and dust and bits of hay from the surface. The water had come from a deep well on his property and was like ice on his fingers and wrist, and he wondered if the coldness hidden under the baked hardpan wasn’t a reminder of the event waiting for him just beyond the edge of his vision—an unexpected softening of the light, an autumnal smell of gas pooled in the trees, a bugle echoing off stone in the hills.

No, I will not think about that today, he told himself. The sunrise was pink in the east, the sky blue. His quarter horses were grazing in his south pasture, the irrigated grass riffling in the breeze, and he could see a doe with three yearlings among a grove of shade trees at the bottom of his property. The world was a grand place, a cathedral in its own right, he thought. How had Robert Frost put it? What place could be better suited for love? Hackberry couldn’t remember the line.