Colonel Rutherford's Colt Read Free Page A

Rutherford amassed considerable wealth and power; and in 1910, following hard upon his promotion to colonel, recognizing that his position required a suitable companion, he returned to his native Virginia and presented himself at the plantation home of Mr. Morgan Lisle—where his father had worked the fields as a sharecropper—pursuant to seeking the hand of the Lisle’s youngest daughter, Susan.
    Jimmy stretched out his legs, cradling the Colt on his belly, and stirring the possibilities around. He believed Colonel Rutherford should have some leverage over the Lisles—he wasn’t sure why yet, but the narrative absence where that leverage would fit felt like a notch in a knife-edge, a place that wanted grinding and smoothing. He did not use logic to resolve the problem, just kept on stirring and letting his thoughts circulate. The character of Susan Lisle pushed forward in his mind, shaping herself and her circumstance from the whirled-up materials of the story, and as she grew more clearly defined, he came to understand what the leverage should be.
    Mr. Lisle, a gentleman alcoholic renowned for his profligacy and abusive temper, had squandered most of the family fortune in a number of ill-considered business ventures, and the prospect of a marriage between Susan and Colonel Rutherford seemed to him, despite the colonel’s lack of pedigree, a fine idea in that it served to rid him of an expense and, most pertinently, because the colonel had offered substantial loans with which Mr. Lisle might renew his inept assault upon the business world. And so it was that the marriage was arranged and celebrated, whereupon the colonel then whisked Susan away to Havana, to an elegant two-story house of yellow stucco with a tile roof and an extensive grounds where flourished palms, hibiscus, bougainvillea, bananas, mangos, ceiba trees, and bamboo.
    At the age of twenty-four, Susan Lisle Rutherford was an extraordinarily beautiful woman with milky skin and dark hair and blue eyes the color of deep ocean water. She was also a woman for whom the Twentieth Century had not yet dawned, having been nurtured in a family who clung stubbornly to the graces, manners, and compulsions of the ante-bellum period. In effect, by marrying at the urging of her parents, she had merely exchanged one form of confinement for another, emerging from the cloistered atmosphere of the plantation only to be encaged in a luxurious prison of Colonel Rutherford’s design. Since the ceremony, she had not had a single day she cared to remember. The colonel was a stern, overbearing sort who kept her fenced in by spying friends and loyal servants and tight purse strings. She had not grown to love him, as her mother had promised she would, but to hate him. His demands of her in the marriage bed, though basic, had become a nightmarish form of duty. For nearly five years, she had been desperate, depressed, prone to thoughts of suicide. Not until recently had any glint of light, of life, penetrated the canopy of the colonel’s protective custody.
    Aside from the odd official function, Susan was permitted no more than three trips away from the house each week. Each Sunday she attended church in the company of the colonel’s housekeeper Mariana, a stately bulk of a woman with light brown skin. Tuesday afternoons she went to market with Porfirio, the colonel’s chef, and on Thursday evenings, escorted by the colonel’s driver, Sebastian, she would make an appearance at the weekly dinner given by the President’s wife for the wives of American and Cuban staff officers.
    The dinner was held in a small banquet room at the Presidential Palace and was sometimes attended by other family members—it was on one such occasion that Susan struck up a conversation with Arnulfo Carrasquel y Navarro, the nephew of General Oswaldo Ruelas, currently employed by the Banco Nacional but soon, he informed Susan, to become the owner of an export company