House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“Don’t make up stories that hurt you,” she said.

“A man with a hole in his forehead standing by your bed is hardly a story. You haven’t lived long enough. The dead don’t let go of the world. That’s why we put big stones on their graves. To hold them down.”

“I think I should get back to my room.”

He turned on his side and held his eyes on hers. “A girl like you is a gift. A rowdy man such as me is not. A few years with me and your youth would be gone. Not in a good way, either.”

“Worry about yourself,” she replied. She got up on her knees. “Look the other way a minute.”

“What for?”

“Because I told you to.”

When she took down her hair, it sifted across her face and shoulders. Her nipples were pink, the color and shade of the roses on the wallpaper.

“I told you not to look.”

“I’m only human,” he said. “Okay, whatever you say.”

He turned his head and gazed out the window at the rain blowing across the yard. She spread her knees on his thighs and leaned down and kissed him on the mouth. She lifted his hand and placed it on her breast. “Feel that?”

“It’s your heart.”

“No, it’s the way I feel about you.”

“Let me up,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

He sat on the side of the bed, in a male state, his hands propped on his knees. “I won’t allow this of myself. You’re a good girl. If we’re going to be together, it’ll be as man and wife. I’ll go before the court and straighten out my marital status. I’ll do the proper thing.”

He was speaking with his back to her. She came around the side of the bed and stood in front of him. “You don’t have to make promises or protect me.”

“I certainly do, missy.”

“I told you not to talk to me like that,” she said.

“I never slept with a woman and went my own way in the morning. At least not when sober.”

She placed her hand on his forehead and tilted his face up toward hers.

“I’m not a cow with a brand on it. You think I’d give myself to any man?”

“No.”

“Then shut up.”

She mounted him and placed him inside her, her eyes closing, her mouth opening in a large “O.” The shadow of the rain on the window glass resembled ink running down her skin.

“Oh, Hack,” she said. “Hack, Hack, Hack.”

Even though the countryside looked as cold as pewter in the dark, he could smell the sun’s warmth in her skin and hear her labored breathing on the top of his head and the blood whirring in her breasts.

NINE MONTHS AND eight days later, Ishmael Morgan Holland was delivered by a midwife on a cold winter morning that combined a flawless blue sky and sunshine blazing on the fields with a blanket of fog so thick on the river, Hackberry couldn’t see the water or the giant boulders in the center of the stream. The midwife was a half-black and half-Mexican conjurer who blew the fire out of burns and cured snakebites in cattle by tying a piece of red string above the bone joint on the stricken limb. She had only one eye and was probably the ugliest woman Hackberry had ever seen. She told him she had seen Ishmael in the womb a week before the delivery, and a voice had told her he would be a king one day, unless he was betrayed by a man he dearly loved.

“Who’s this betrayer you’re talking about?” Hackberry said.

Her good eye bore into his face, vitriolic, glimmering in its socket. Her breath was as dense and fetid as a cave full of bats. “Eres un Judas hacia tus hijos.”