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

Austin’s colonists in 1821, and had picked cotton on the same plantation outside Natchitoches until the close of the Civil War, when she found herself destitute and without shelter or family. The grandson of her former owner was a Methodist minister who took her and several other former slaves with him to a farm he had bought on the banks of the Guadalupe. Aint Ginny lived in a cabin behind the main house and tended a vegetable garden and put up preserves in the fall and cared for the minister’s children and was a happy person, even though she had reached ninety and her eyes had turned to milk.
    When the minister died and his children moved to cities in the North, Aint Ginny continued to live in her cabin. The new owner of the property, a man named Cod Bishop, who had made his money supplying Cantonese labor to the railroads in Utah and Montana, paid little attention to the black people living in the mud-chinked log cabins down by the river, in the way a person would not pay attention to the indigenous animals that came with a property deed. Sometimes the blacks saw him smoking a cigar by the waterside at sunset, gazing at his cattle and freshly painted outbuildings and farm equipment and, most of all, his pillared house with its dormers and wraparound veranda and ventilated shutters on the windows.
    Cod Bishop was not a man whose image you easily forgot. He wore yellow coach gloves for no apparent reason, and he had a way of turning his head so people speaking with him had to address his profile. Coupled with this, his abnormally long back had an inverted bow in it, reminiscent of a coachman’s whip.
    One evening he noticed a gopher mound and kicked at it with his shoe. He picked up a stick and jabbed it into a hole, then into another hole and another.
    “How long has this been going on?” he said to a small black boy who was watching him.
    “Suh?”
    “These piles of dirt and rock, all this dead grass, the tunnels under the ground. How long have you people sat and watched this?”
    “I don’t know nothing about it, suh.”
    “Go get your mother.”
    The boy left but didn’t come back. Cod Bishop threw his cigar into the river and walked up the slope to his house.
    In the morning, he returned with two of his helpers, men with rolled sleeves and a determined look. Each was carrying a grub hoe in one hand and a bucket of coal oil in the other. One had a gunpowder horn hung from his neck. “Get started on this first one, and I’ll flag the ones in the pasture,” Bishop said. “Turn each mound into silt and ash. Kill every gopher that’s down there. You leave one, you leave a hundred.”
    The workmen stuffed wads of paper down the holes and jabbed them deep into the burrows with sticks, then soaked the paper with oil and sprinkled gunpowder on it and dropped a lucifer match down the largest hole. The effect was instantaneous. Strings of smoke rose from the tunnels under the scarified ground and far out into the grassy perimeters. The air was filled with the smell of burning hair.
    “Oh, what y’all doing?” a voice said.
    Aint Ginny had come out of her cabin and was standing as small and frail as a stick figure behind the workmen, one hand gripped on a cane, her eyes the color of fish scale.
    “Go back inside,” one of them said.
    “Y’all burning out their caves? You cain’t do that, suh.”
    “Watch.”
    “They God’s creatures. I feed them. I give them all names, too. They make their li’l squeaking noise when they hear me coming.”
    “You do what ?” Cod Bishop said, approaching her, half of a smile on his face. He wore a tight-waisted coat and polished knee-high riding boots, his pants tucked inside them.
    “The gophers ain’t hurt nothing, suh. My grandson say there ain’t none in the pasture. They got their li’l town down under the ground here.”
    “Go back into your cabin,” Bishop said. “Don’t try to intervene in the operation of my farm. You should know better than