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

normalcy. I’ve always been drawn to women who probably left their bread in the oven too long. It’s a mystery I haven’t quite puzzled my way through.”
    She seemed to ignore his attempt at humor, if that’s what it was. “Why do you want me and not somebody else?”
    “Because you’re young. Because you represent the next century. Look at the hotel.”
    It was massive, undoubtedly the biggest building in Texas, hundreds of electric lights blazing with a coppery radiance.
    “The times I was born in are ending,” he said. “Thomas Edison is going to change the entire country. I don’t have illusions. My kind will be swept into a corner. I want somebody around who’s brighter and younger than I am. You have an extraordinary carriage. You have sand, too. I think you’re the one.”
    “Don’t ever raise your hand to me.”
    “I would never do a thing like that, not to you, not to any woman. A man who strikes a woman is a moral and physical coward.”
    “Don’t ever talk down to me, either.”
    “I won’t. I’ll get you your own gun. If you take a mind, you can shoot me.”
    “When would we leave?”
    “Tomorrow morning. Have you ever ridden on a train? It’s a treat.”
    She stared at the waves bursting on the beach and the stranded baitfish flipping on the sand. “I need to pack.”
    Hackberry looked at the evening star flickering in the west. He turned his face into the wind and filled his lungs with the vast density of the Gulf and all the inchoate life teeming under its surface. “Smell that?” he said.
    “Smell what?”
    “The salt, the rain falling on the horizon, the fish roe in the seaweed, the fragrance of the land, and the coldness of the wind, the way it all comes together like it’s part of a plan. It’s the first chapter in Genesis. It’s the smell of creation, Miss Ruby. We’re part of it, too.”
    “You make me a little nervous,” she said.

H IS HOUSE WAS on a breezy point overlooking a long serpentine stretch of the Guadalupe River and the cottonwoods and gray bluffs on the far side; he also had a grand view of his cattle pastures and the unfenced acreage where his ancestors were buried and where the grass was a deeper green in the spring and sprinkled with bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush. He had a wide front porch with a glider and lathed wood posts and latticework with vines to provide shade in summer, and a two-story red barn and roses and hydrangeas in his flower beds, and several acres dedicated to tomatoes, beans, cantaloupes, watermelons, okra, squash, and cucumbers. The house was part wood and part adobe and part brick, with a basement and a fireplace and chimney made out of river stone, cool on the hottest days and snug in a storm, the rifle loop holes from the Indian era still in the walls.
    He believed it was a fine place to bring a young woman. If people wanted to talk, that was their choice. “Spit in the world’s mouth,” he said. “Easy for you,” she answered.
    “They look at me funny,” she said on her third day at the house.
    “Who does?”
    “The grocer. A snooty woman in the milliner’s. People coming out of the church.”
    “That’s because you’re beautiful and most of the ladies at the church are homelier than a boot print in a pile of horse flop,” he said.
    “You said you didn’t use profanity in front of women.”
    “A truthful statement about the physiognomy of busybodies is not profanity.”
    “The what ?”
    “It’s from the Greek. It means ‘facial features.’”
    “Then why not say that?”
    “I just did.”
    “Is that why you keep encyclopedias and dictionaries all over the place, so you can use words nobody else knows?”
    “Drovers were paid a dollar a day to follow a cow’s flatulence through dust and hail storms and Indians all the way to Wichita. Know why?”
    “They were uneducated and dumb?”
    “You’re sure smart.”
    But what he called his irreverent sense of humor was a poor remedy for the problem