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

building a campfire? The dry washes are full of fuel.”
    “There’s nothing like splitting your own wood,” Hackberry said, rising to his feet, the room tilting sideways. “Oh, Lordy, I’m getting too old for this.”
    T HE PRIEST PUT him in the back of a wagon full of corncobs and drove him up the trail to a shack in the hills where a goatherd lived. Hackberry retrieved his horse in back and thanked the priest and the goatherd and tried to give them money, which they refused.
    “It will be dark in two or three hours,” the priest said. “If I were you, I’d leave now, while Miguel and his friends are in the cantina, and not rest until sunrise.”
    “That’s good advice,” Hackberry said.
    “Why is it that you look away from me when you speak?”
    “Because I didn’t tell you the entire truth about something. I said I didn’t loot churches. I have some artifacts in my saddlebags that may have come from one.”
    “What do you plan to do with them?”
    “I haven’t thought about it. Sell them, maybe.”
    “They’re not yours.”
    “They’re not anybody else’s, either.”
    “I hope you have a good life, Mr. Holland.”
    “Your second meaning isn’t lost on me. I’ve asked the Man Upstairs for he’p in finding my son, but all I hear is silence. Maybe it’s different for you.”
    “Not entirely.”
    “I’ll have to study on that one,” Hackberry said.
    For the first time since they met, the priest smiled.
    H ACKBERRY WENT NO more than five hundred yards farther up the incline, then turned the horse down an arroyo onto a flat bench that looked out upon the village and the milky-brown river and the low hills in the distance and a volcano from which a thin column of smoke rose into a turquoise sky. “You’ve been a loyal horse, and I know you’d like to skedaddle for Texas, but there’s a mean huckleberry down there in the cantina we just cain’t let slide. No, sir. What’s your opinion on that?”
    His horse looked at him, one ear forward and one ear back.
    “Those are exactly my thoughts,” Hackberry said. “It’s not honorable and it’s not Christian. You do not let the wicked become the example for the innocent and uninitiated. Is that the way you see it?” He patted the horse on the neck. “Forget my teasing. It’s about time we give you a name. How about Traveler? That was the name of Robert E. Lee’s horse. Look at that sunset, Traveler. The sky is on fire in the west, and the rest of it is as green and vast as the ocean. Don’t let anybody tell you there’s no God, old pal.”
    But he could not hold on to his ebullient mood. The curse of his family, the one that caused him to curve his palm around the grips of an imaginary revolver in his sleep, was always with him. Sometimes his eyes did not go with the rest of his face, and those who knew him well would separate themselves from him. His mother had been a loving woman, his father sometimes stern and inflexible but fair in his business dealings and protective of children. Some in the family had a bad seed, some didn’t. Those who had it found or created situations that allowed them to do things others preferred not to hear about.
    Hackberry hadn’t simply knocked John Wesley Hardin out of the saddle and stomped his face in. He’d nailed him to the bed of a wagon with chains and kicked him between the buttocks with the point of his boot and thrown him headlong into the sheriff’s office, hoping all the while that Hardin would fight back and get his hand on a weapon so Hackberry could finish the job and purge the earth of a man whose merciless glare reminded him of his own.
    As the sky turned from green to purple, he peered through his spyglass and saw the executioner, Miguel Ordoñez, and his five compatriots exit the cantina and ride single-file through the revelers and along the banks of the river, which they crossed on the wood bridge held together by rope. The executioner was slumped in the saddle, half asleep, a