House of the Rising Sun: A Novel by James Lee Burke Page B

the fecund odor of spawning fish. It also pelted the fishing shack and the tent where Hackberry had quartered Aint Ginny and the other black people to whom he had given sanctuary. He went out on the porch and gazed down the slope at the tent swelling and flapping in the wind, an oil lamp burning inside. He went back in the house and began spooning soup from a kettle on the stove into a cylindrical lunch pail. Ruby watched him from the doorway. “I’ll do it,” she said.
    “Do what?”
    “Feed the old woman.”
    “I think it’s tuberculosis, not croup.”
    “Better I do it than you.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “You’re of an age when people catch germs more easily,” she said.
    “The reason I’ve reached my present age is I know how to avoid getting sick or shot or having someone stick a knife in me,” he said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
    “I’ve just never understood why unteachable people waste their money on books,” she said.
    He draped a slicker over his head and carried the pail of soup and a wooden spoon through the rain into the tent. Aint Ginny was lying on one of the beds Felix had brought from the bunkhouse. Hackberry pulled up a chair to her bedside and filled the spoon and touched it to her mouth. “I’m going to have Felix carpenter a cabin with everything you need,” he said. “You can stay here long as you want.”
    “That man gonna get you, Marse Hack. He’s the kind come up on you with a dirk when you ain’t looking.”
    “Cod Bishop? I hope he tries.”
    She opened her mouth as a tiny bird in a nest might, waiting for him to place the spoon on her lip.
    “I was a little boy when we heard about the Surrender, but you saw it all, didn’t you?” he said.
    “I seen the Yankees burn the big house and chop up a piano in the yard. I saw them dig up our smoked hams. They dug them out with their hands, they was so hungry.”
    He stroked her forehead. “You go to sleep now.”
    He saw a shadow fall across his arm. He turned and looked into Ruby’s face.
    “The sheriff was at the door. He said Cod Bishop is filing assault charges against you.”
    “Remind me to shoot the sheriff.”
    “He said Cod Bishop is a sorry sack of shit and not to worry about it.”
    “I’ve always said the sheriff had redeeming qualities.”
    “Your supper is ready.”
    “I’m going into town for a little while.”
    “If you want to get drunk, do it here.”
    “I never drink in my home.”
    “That doesn’t make sense.”
    “Getting drunk doesn’t, either. That’s why people get drunk. They cain’t make sense of anything, least of all themselves.”
    “Thanks for explaining that. I’ll throw your supper in the yard.”
    T HAT NIGHT HE didn’t go into town; nor did he drink. Instead he wrote in his journal, at his desk, in the light of a brass oil lamp that had a green glass shade as thick as a tortoise shell. His journal entries often dealt with historical events or, rather, the consequences he believed would ensue from them: the populist movement, the stranglehold on the dollar by industrial interests, the theft of public lands by the railroads, anarchists throwing bombs, and company ginks shooting down strikers on picket lines. These observations and notations, however, were secondary in importance to his entries about the depression and murderous instincts that were bedfellows in the Holland family, passing from one generation to the next, perhaps unto the seventh generation.
    He had read and reread many times Thomas Jefferson’s letter about the suicide of Meriwether Lewis and the fits of melancholia that Meriwether could avoid only by keeping his mind occupied. Jefferson, a child of the Enlightenment who believed the unexamined life was not worth living, looked upon melancholia and self-destructive thoughts as the inevitable products of a brilliant and curious mind when it became idle. While a dolt remained as happy as a cloth doll with a smile painted on its face—even when