“It certainly does. You’re a very nice boy. You’re a good-looking boy, too. You like lemonade?”
“Yes, ma’am. Everybody does.”
“Why don’t you come to see me sometime? We’ll have some.”
“If I’m out this way, yes, ma’am. Thank you.”
She gave him a dime and watched him climb up on the mule, waiting to see if he would look back. But he didn’t. Innocent boy, she thought. Better to learn about the nature of the world from a gentle hand rather than a coarse one. I wish I had been so lucky.
Where was the telegram from? It could be from the Ranger Frontier Battalion in Austin. Her husband had talked of getting back his badge. Or it could be from Denver. She steamed open the envelope. The message read, “Yes, Yes, Yes.”
It was not signed. It didn’t have to be. It was from Denver, and it contained an affirmation to a question obviously asked by the addressee, Hackberry Holland. She folded the telegram and replaced it in the envelope and resealed the flap and set the envelope by the letter propped against the flower vase.
She sat on the porch most of the afternoon and into the evening, without eating supper, and watched the leaves toppling out of the trees onto the surface of the river, gathering into channels between the rocks, then eddying and sinking beneath the current as though they had never been part of a wooded hillside. The sky turned the color of torn plums. Just before the stars came out, she saw a mounted man approaching the front lane; he sat tall and erect in the saddle, the stirrups extended two feet below the horse’s belly.
She rose from the chair, her hands knotting and unknotting at her sides. Destroy the letter and the wire, a voice inside her said.
No, I’m not afraid of the dutchie, or whatever she is.
She stiffened her back and set her jaw and fixed her gaze on the horseman, determined not to be undone by self-doubt. The horseman rode by and disappeared into the dusk.
She woke at sunrise and began fixing breakfast. She heard the foreman and the hired hands driving the Angus across the river to a pasture that hadn’t been grazed during the summer. She heard the cook washing a bucket full of tin pans and forks and knives and spoons from the bunkhouse under the spigot on the windmill. Then someone hollered out, “By God, there he comes!”
To the waddies and farmhands and drifters who worked for him full-time or came and went with the season, he was a composite of Captain Bly and Saint Francis of Assisi and somehow always one of their own. Down at Eagle Pass, he had beaten two of King Fisher’s old gang almost to death with a branding iron. He had turned loose a caged cougar in a Kansas saloon that refused to serve Texans. On the Staked Plains, he froze to the saddle returning a kidnapped three-year-old Comanche girl to her parents. If he hadn’t been a drunk, he could have been a congressman or the owner of an internationally famous Wild West show. Why did she stay with him? The answer was not one she liked. He was wealthy, at least by the standards of the times, and second, when it came to adversarial and life-threatening situations, he never winced. When she was with him, no one short of Genghis Khan would bother her.
She stepped out on the porch and saw him at the bottom of the lane, his hat tilted back, the sunset on his face, a bouquet of flowers propped across the pommel. He was wearing a dark suit and a blue silk vest, clothes he must have bought in San Antonio. She went back into the house and ripped pages from a Sears, Roebuck catalog and stuffed them among a pile of kindling. Her hand was trembling when she lit the paper. She stood back as the fire caught the draft and twisted into a yellow handkerchief through the chimney. She dropped the telegram and letter from Denver and the lock of Ishmael’s hair into the flames and watched them blacken and curl and dissolve into carbon and then into ash, her face glowing from the heat.
HE REMOVED HIS hat when he entered the house, and tossed his saddlebags onto the divan. The boards under the carpet creaked with his weight. “I almost forgot how beautiful you always are, regardless of the hour,” he said.
“Did you make a side trip somewhere?” she said. “Maybe to Canada?”
“If that’s what you call falling into a bathtub full of whiskey.”
“I thought we were done with that.”
“You were. I wasn’t. Now I am. I think.”
“You found Sundance and Harvey?”
“I wouldn’t call either of them the thinking man’s criminal. I just had to knock on one door in the brothel district. Fannie Porter’s place.”
Her gaze left his. “You came home to shame me?”
“I never held your past against you. I’m just telling you where I went. I didn’t accomplish much by it, either.”
“Much of what?”
“Logan and Longabaugh said they didn’t hurt you. Later I saw Logan burn a roach to death with his cigar. So I knew he’d burned you, too.”
“You didn’t call him out?”
“No.”
“That doesn’t sound like you.”
“I was drunk. I looked for Logan after I slept it off. He and Longabaugh had both left town. I feel like somebody spit in my face.”
“You tried. That’s all that counts.”
“You told me the truth, didn’t you, Maggie? Please say you told me the truth.”
“I won’t discuss this anymore. You use the whip and rub salt in the cut.”
“That’s not my intention.”
“I kept the white cake in the icebox. I’m glad you weren’t hurt. Do you want coffee?”
He looked at the dining room table and flower vase on it, the place where each put mail addressed to the other. “I didn’t get no mail?” he said.
“We got an invitation to a garden party at the mayor’s house. I think we should go, don’t you?”
“I thought I might hear from the Ranger Frontier Battalion in Austin.”
“Were you expecting something from Ruby?”
“Not necessarily,” he said. “I need to lie down. It’s been a long trip.”
“You don’t want any cake?”
“Maybe not right now.”
“Undress and I’ll bring it to you in bed.”
“I’m plumb wore out, Maggie.”
“You’re glad to see me, aren’t you? That’s what you said. Let me take care of you.”
He went upstairs and sat down on the side of their bed and gazed out the window at a cloud in the west, one that was bottom-lit a bright gold by the late sun and swollen with rain and trailing horsetails across the sky. For just a moment he wanted to drift away with the cloud and break apart in a shower over a wine-dark sea filled with cresting waves that never reached land. Yes, to simply slide down the shingles of the world, he thought, and be forever free, swimming with porpoises and mermaids. What’s wrong with that?
He heard Maggie coming up the stairs, saucers and cups and silverware clinking on a tin tray. He lay down and turned his head toward the window and placed the pillow over his head, pretending to be fast asleep.
EVERY DAY FOR a week he went to the post office, but there was no letter from Ruby. He also went to the telegraph office at the depot. The regular telegrapher was down with influenza. His replacement told Hackberry that no wire had come for him since he had taken over the key.
“The other man didn’t receive one?”
“I’ll look through his carbon book,” the replacement said. “No, sir, I don’t see it. ’Course, he’s been ailing awhile. I can telegraph your party and check it out.”
“Let’s give it a try.”
Hackberry wrote out a message similar to his first telegram, asking Ruby if she wanted for him and Ishmael and Ruby to be a family again.
A week passed with no response from Ruby. When Hackberry returned to the telegraph office, the same telegrapher was still on the key.
“Nothing came in for me?” Hackberry said.
“No, sir. We would have delivered it.”
Hackberry sat down in a wicker chair by the telegrapher’s desk. The window was open, the breeze warm and drowsy and faint
ly tannic with the smell of fall. A passenger train was stopped on the tracks, the people inside it stationary, like cutouts. “The season is deceptive, isn’t it? It sneaks up on you. You turn around and it’s winter.”
“I’d be happy to send off another message,” the telegraph operator said.
“It wouldn’t do any good. She’s a union woman. She moves around a lot. I’ll try again directly.”
The telegrapher nodded to show he understood. “It’s a mighty nice day, isn’t it?”
Hackberry didn’t go home. Instead, he rode into the country, out where the train tracks followed the river through limestone bluffs and cottonwoods whose leaves trembled with the thinness of rice paper. He tethered his horse and lay down in the shade of the trees, in the coolness of the wind off the water, in the moldy smell of leaves and night damp that never dried out during the day. It was a fine spot for a rest, to close one’s eyes and let go of the world and abide by the rules of mortality; in effect, to let the pull of the earth have its way, if only for a short while.
He fell asleep and awoke in the gloaming of the day, the air dense, like the smell of heavy stone prized from a riverbed or the smell of a cave crusted with lichen and guano and strung with pools of water. At first he didn’t remember where he was; then he saw the train wobbling around the bend, its passenger cars fully lighted, not unlike an ancient lamplit boat crossing a dark lake. He could see the figures inside the passenger car clearly: a conductor in a stiff cap and buttoned-down uniform similar to that of a ship’s captain; a teenage girl who seemed to smile from the window; a nun wearing a wimple and gauzy black veils that accentuated the pallor of her skin; a man in a plug hat with buckteeth and greasy hair that was the color and texture of rope, all of them moving irrevocably down the track into hills whose lines were dissolving into nightfall.
What was the destination of all those people? Why did he have the feeling their journey was a statement about his own life? He got to his feet unsteadily and mounted his horse as though drunk. The evening star was rising, like a beacon to mankind, but it brought him little comfort. Was there any doubt why men killed one another? Not in his opinion. It was easier to die in hot blood than to watch your death take place incrementally, a day or a section of railroad track at a time.
When he arrived at his house, Maggie was waiting for him in the doorway. “I was worried,” she said.
“You thought I was in the saloon?”
“You could have been hurt, or worse. How was I to know? I care about you, whether you’re aware of that or not.”
He walked past her into the living room. Wet leaves were pasting themselves against the windows. He had not slept with Maggie since returning from Colorado. She seemed to read his thoughts.
“Am I your legally wedded or not?”
“You are indeed that,” he said.
“Then treat me in an appropriate fashion.”
“You once said we’re two of a kind. That’s not true.”
“You want to explain that?”
“I’m not deserving of you. You’re a far better person than I am, Maggie. You tolerate the intolerable. You’re a remarkable woman.”
“I think that’s the finest compliment I’ve ever had.”
He put his hat on the rack and rubbed one eye with the back of his wrist, the floor shifting under his feet. “We got anything to eat?”
“I fixed you a steak sandwich and potato salad. Go upstairs. I’ll bring it to you. This time you’d better not go to sleep on me.”
“I won’t,” he said.
“We were meant to be together, Hack. It’s the two of us against the world. We’ll have a grand time of it. I promise.”
On the Marne,
1918
WHEN ISHMAEL WOKE, the walls of his trench were seeping water and the dawn was colder than it should have been, the sky an unnatural and ubiquitous pale color that had less to do with the rising of the sun than the passing of the night. The terrain was cratered and devoid of greenery or vegetation, glistening with dew and in some places excrement, the root systems of grass and brush and trees long since ground up and pulped and churned by the treads of tanks and wheeled cannons and the boots of men and the hooves of draft animals and marching barrages that exploded holes so deep into the earth, the tons of dirt blown into the air were dry and eclipsed the sun at high noon and robbed men not only of their identities but their shadows as well.
Except for their uniforms, the men of color Ishmael commanded could have been mistaken for the French Zouaves and other colonials on their flank. Most of them were asleep, wrapped in their blankets or greatcoats, some with their rifles and packs on the fire steps that ascended to the top of the trench. Their Adrian helmets were strapped under their chins, their putties stiff with mud, their faces soft inside dreams, their arms crossed peacefully on their chests. They made him think of sleeping buffaloes, humped up against one another, each trying to avoid the telephone lines and pools of dirty water strung through the bottom of the trench and the constant ooze from the basketlike weave of sticks holding the trench wall in place. In the soup of animal and human feces and the offal of war, they made him think of children, in the best possible way. In moments such as these, he tried to suppress his affection for them, lest he become too attached.
Most of them were former National Guardsmen from New York and in peacetime had been porters and draymen and scullions and hod carriers and janitors. They loved their uniforms and marching on parade and seldom complained about the food or verbal abuse from white soldiers. They loved the army in spite of the fact that the army and the country sometimes did not love them. Their courage under fire left Ishmael in dismay and unable to explain how men could continue to give so much when they had been given so little.
The third time he was about to go over the top, he said a prayer that became his mantra whenever his mind drifted into thoughts about mortality and the folly and madness and grandeur of war: Dear Lord, if this is to be my eternal resting place, let me be guarded by these black angels, because there are none more brave and loving in your kingdom.
He gazed through a periscope that gave on to an immense stretch of moonscape chained with flooded shell holes and barbed wire that was half submerged in mud six inches deep that never dried out. In the distance he could hear the dull knocking of a Maxim, similar to the sound of an obnoxious drunk who taps a bony knuckle on a locked door after he has been expelled from a party. The fog from the river was white on the ground, puffing like cotton on the floor of a gin, shiny on the tangles of wire, sometimes breaking apart in the breeze and exposing a booted foot or a skeletal hand or a face with skin as dry and tight as a lampshade protruding from the soggy imprint of a tank tread.
“We going this morning, Captain?” a voice behind him said.
Ishmael lowered the periscope. It was Corporal Amidee Labiche, a transplant from Louisiana who had moved his family to the Five Points area in New York.
“Hard to tell,” Ishmael said. “Have you eaten yet?”
“No, suh.”
“It’d be a good idea.”
Labiche’s greatcoat was buttoned at the throat. He had a small head and big eyes and gold skin dotted with moles that resembled bugs or drops of mud. “Why’s it cold, Captain? It’s summer. It ain’t supposed to be cold, no.”
“We’re not far from the river. The clouds are low, and the heat from the sun doesn’t get through.”
“It ain’t natural, suh. Nothing about this place is natural. We’re going, ain’t we?”
High overhead, Ishmael saw three British planes headed toward the east, straining against the wind, their engines barely audible. “Most likely,” he said.
“I wrote a letter to my wife and daughter. I’d like you to keep it for me.”
“You’re going to come through fine. You’ll mail it later yourself.”
“I’d feel better if you kept my letter, Captain.”
Ishmael placed his hand on Labiche’s shoulder and smiled. “Listen
to me,” he said. “You’ve been over the top six times. You’re going to make it. The Germans are through and they know it.”
“I feel like somebody struck a match on the inside of my stomach. I never felt this way.”
“Fix us some coffee, Corporal.”
Labiche breathed through his mouth as though catching his breath. “What time we going, suh?”
“Who knows? Maybe after the planes come back. Maybe the Huns will throw it in.”
“I don’t know why I cain’t get warm, suh.”
Ishmael tapped him on the chest with a fist. “See the light in the east? It’s going to be a grand day.”
“Yes, suh.”
“Now, let’s be about it. Let’s show them what the Harlem Hellfighters can do.”
“It ain’t supposed to be cold. That’s what I cain’t figure. That’s all I was saying.”
“Start getting them up.”
“The letter is in my back pocket, suh.”
Ishmael went to his dugout, one whose walls were held in place by sandbags and planks from a barn, whose only light came from a candle that burned inside a tin can. He opened the leather case in which he kept his notebook, his stationery, a calendar on which he marked off the days, a copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and letters from his mother. In the same leather case, he had placed a letter that he had just received and for which he had no adequate response or means of dealing with, as if he’d discovered the return of a lump a surgeon had removed from his body. It was dated June 3, 1918, and began with the words “Dear son.” Those two words had not only drained his heart but filled him with a sick sensation for which he didn’t have a name. It wasn’t revulsion or anger; nor was it the loss and abandonment that had characterized much of his childhood as he and his mother moved from one mining town or logging camp to the next. The sickness he felt was like a cloud of mosquitoes feeding on his heart. The only word for it was fear, but it was not of an ordinary kind. It had no face. He feared not only that the words written on the paper were full of deceit but that he would fall prey to them and be forced back into the past and become once again the little boy who believed his father would keep his word and return home to his family.
House of the Rising Sun Page 14