Tom clicked his fingers and whistled to get Walter away from Esmeralda, but the dog ignored him. It wasn’t the departure Tom would’ve chosen.
“They’ve messed with God and Nature,” Esmeralda said, as Walter leaned against her leg. “The Davenport line from now till eternity will be stained by the crime those two committed.”
Tom whistled more insistently for Walter, then started to walk away in the hope he’d follow.
“The Devil will take them,” Esmeralda called out. “He’ll take John Henry and Mary Davenport. And the Devil will take you, too, Tom McCabe.”
Tom stopped and turned. “What did you say?”
Joe tugged hard at Esmeralda’s sleeve. “That is enough.”
“The Devil sees every choice you make, Tom McCabe. It’s not too late, though, never too late to stand up for the truth.”
Tom looked around for the nearest building she couldn’t enter. He marched toward the Opelousas Hotel saloon and pushed open the doors.
“Goodbye, rabbit-dog,” Esmeralda said quietly.
So he was going to Hell. Might as well go drunk. Tom downed his whiskey in one gulp, shoved his free hand in his pocket and felt the silky lining on his knuckles, wool on the heel of his palm. But his lucky pennies weren’t there. Which made some weird sense. His luck had dried up.
“Another,” he said to the barman. The whiskey was fire in his throat, and Walter was whining to get back outside. The bartender seemed decidedly disapproving, Tom thought. Maybe he’d heard Esmeralda. But who cared what a bartender thought? Tom was tired of other people’s opinions.
Even last night, in his own home, he’d been mocked by a man he’d never met. A poet, of all people. Tom had sat down happily enough to his book, Frost’s Mountain Interval, fresh off the presses. He’d heard the poems were uplifting, inspiring, and he was in need of that. But the first poem he read was nothing of the kind. It read like a personal attack. Had the writer watched him from afar? It was possible. Tom’s name had been on every story about the Davenports from the get-go. He’d even penned the celebratory piece that had appeared the day after they were awarded custody of the boy: “Pure Joy in All Our Hearts.” Good grief.
Frost wrote of a wanderer who, coming to a fork in the road, chose a path that set the course for his life. Tom heard no positive note in the poet’s surety that there was no going back, no chance to revisit the fork and choose differently. It was defeatist. He’d slammed the book shut.
Tom would never tell her as much, but Esmeralda was right. He’d walked the wrong road, left his integrity by the wayside, attracted by beauty and power and the possibility of small fame. He couldn’t rewrite his past, but he could back up and return to the place where his life had forked. He could. He knew which road he’d walk from here on in, and it sure didn’t end in leaping flames.
Tom slammed his glass on the bar and threw some money down. “C’mon, boy,” he said to Walter. “Let’s go.”
A half-dozen blocks away, Mrs. Billingham and Gladys were strolling back to their motor car through the city square. The square was more crowded than it would usually have been, since the last few children from the most recent orphan train were being auctioned off.
“Don’t gawp, Gladys. Do come along.”
But Gladys kept her eyes fixed on the auction block. She edged closer.
“Gladys, I am not staying for this spectacle. It’s charitable, I’m sure, but it’s not ours to watch.”
When her daughter didn’t reply, Mrs. Billingham followed Gladys’s gaze to the stage where a thin, bedraggled, fair-haired boy stood waiting to be bought. Crying, clipped on the head each time he tried to speak, though he seemed desperately to want to. “Impossible,” she murmured.
“You see it, too? Why, that boy is the very image of Mary. Mother, what if he’s—”
Mrs. Billingham grabbed her daughter’s arm in a hard pinch, making Gladys wince. “Ow!”
“Be quiet.” Mrs. Billingham glanced around to see if any of the men and women near them had registered Gladys’s words but they were craning forward, concentrating on the bidding.
“But if that’s their boy, then—”
“Then nothing. Absolutely nothing, Gladys. We go home and never speak of it.”
“Mother, if that’s Sonny, we can’t possibly let him be bought by a stranger. He’s a Davenport.”
“There are three Davenport boys and they’re safe at home. That child is an orphan. By tonight he’ll have a family and a new name. In any case, it’s been years. I doubt you paid enough attention even back then to recognize him for sure.”
Gladys stared at the boy. “Oh, but I am sure. Very sure. We must do something—tell the auctioneer, tell Mary.”
“We’ll do neither of those things. Can you imagine the trouble you’d cause John Henry and Mary, and everyone who stood by them? The public disgrace, the mayoral election. No, Gladys. We’ll not utter a word about this to anyone. We walk away.”
Acknowledgments
Thank you Dave, Liam and Milo for your love, support and patience. Writing a book takes years. This one felt like it took decades. And while it was thrilling for me to sit down day and night with my invented people, I know that made me unavailable to you for large chunks of time. I appreciate you tiptoeing around me, most likely wondering when I would ever finish, and why I was so intent on doing something that had delivered me no success. It must be strange to live with a writer…Thank you for accommodating the strangeness with such good humor.
Thank you, also, to the many friends and family members who continued to ask me how the book was going, long after politeness required. You’ve been unfailingly encouraging, even as I squirmed at the thought I would never live up to your kind words. To those friends who didn’t know I was writing a book, my apologies. I wasn’t sure it would see the light of day so it felt unwise to spread the word too confidently. And I wasn’t lying when I said I was a dog walker: I do that, too.
I’m hoping I don’t offend anyone by singling out two friends. Thank you Cathy Ford for being so smart, generous and empathetic, and showing me how a real writer conducts herself. I’ve benefitted from knowing you in ways I can barely articulate (while knowing it’s not your job to benefit me in any way). I’m terrified at the thought of you reading this book. I mean it when I say I can’t write as well as you, though it’s good to have a goal.
Martine Thompson, thank you for years of friendship. I treasure every moment of it. Thank you for sending me gum leaves when I was in Banff. And thank you for letting me finish this book in your home: it was a perfect sanctuary (except for the part where I scared your cats).
Writing is a solo activity but publishing is not. I’m grateful to the people who stepped up to do the things I cannot. My thanks to my agent, Jacinta di Mase. You didn’t throw me off your books even when my first manuscript was rejected by twenty-six publishers, though you could have. You calmly persisted and found a home for it and this one, simultaneously. I appreciate your hard work, dedication and talent.
Thank you to Penguin Random House publisher Beverley Cousins and editor Tom Langshaw. Beverley, I can only imagine how many manuscripts cross your desk. Thank you so much for choosing mine. Tom, I aspire to your impressive combining of wide vision and attention to detail. Both of you offered feedback and expertise that improved the manuscript immeasurably. (And offered it so diplomatically!) It’s been a pleasure to work with you.
Elizabeth Sheinkman wrote a report on an early version of this manuscript in which she suggested that my attempt to braid together an historical and modern telling of this story wasn’t working and that I had, in fact, two books on my hands. Her advice that I focus on the historical story first was right. And I thank her very much. The second book is in the offing. (A sidenote of gratitude for kind people who share their friends: thank you Joanna Hershon for introducing me to Elizabeth—and for your beautiful novels—and to Emma-Kate Croghan for introducing me to Joanna.)
Phil Dwyer gave detai
led legal advice in language I could understand, and in a warm and thoughtful manner, for which I am forever thankful.
And a sweeping but heartfelt thank-you to writers everywhere. Reading is life-changing. It has brought me joy, information, enlightenment and solace. At every difficult or confusing juncture, I’ve turned to the written word. Reading has taken me across the world, across time, to other planets, into people’s lives and minds. So, thank you to writers of fiction and nonfiction. You make humanity better. And to anyone aspiring to be published: please know the number of rejections I cited above is true, and only for that one manuscript. I’ve lost count of various other pitches that went nowhere. Rejection is awful, but readers like me are hoping you succeed. Please keep going.
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Reading
Group Guide
Discussion Questions
How do you think Mary Davenport’s disquieting upbringing—her mother’s miscarriages and sadness, her father’s coldness and Mary’s isolation on the plantation—has affected her role as a mother and wife?
The Boy Scout movement that John Henry Davenport so admires was founded in England in 1908. Baden-Powell wrote Scouting for Boys for use by existing youth groups, but his book was an immediate success and people set up Boy Scout troops across the world. What, do you think, was it about the Scouts that so appealed to people like John Henry during this era?
At Sheriff and Mrs. Bird’s house in Mobile, John Henry agrees when Mary declares the boy is theirs. Was he right to put his wife’s happiness and health above the truth? Was that, in fact, what he was doing?
George Davenport was seven years old and Paul was six when their brother went missing in the forest. How would this episode in their lives change the type of people they become? How do you think they understand the choice their parents have made?
What was it about John Henry’s deception in the library that spurred Esmeralda to take the enormous risk of traveling to the Pennys’ farm at night: her sense of justice, concern for the boy, identification with the mother or some combination of those things? Would you have done the same in her position?
In real life, the Orphan Trains movement transported an estimated 200–250,000 orphaned and homeless children from crowded and dangerous East Coast cities of the United States to rural parts of the Midwest and South, from 1854 to 1929. While Anne of Green Gables (1908) and Pollyanna (1913) offered up happy endings for rehoused orphans, the true stories weren’t all as cheery. Do you think this was a good approach to housing hundreds of thousands of homeless children? Was Mason right to suggest the Davenports take in a train orphan?
Mary and Grace Mill meet for the first time in the hallway outside the Opelousas courtroom. Do you imagine that moment might have gone differently had there been no other people there?
Ned Mill won’t be a child forever. Do you think that as a young man he might seek out his mother, despite what John Henry said about her not wanting him?
Do you think Grace and Sheriff Sherman might end up together? Would she be able to forgive him for not believing her earlier on?
At the end of the novel Tom decides he can do better—be better—and leaves the bar with a head full of steam. Where do you think he goes, and why?
On April 6, 1917, America joined the Great War. How do you think that might affect the characters in Lost Boy Found? Would Tom, Eddie or the sheriff have signed up? How would it have changed the lives of the women, if at all?
In the true story of Bobby Dunbar, the lost boy’s descendants conducted a DNA test in 2004. It revealed that the boy had been given to the wrong family. How would you react if you discovered your ancestors had effectively kidnapped another woman’s son?
Author Essay
on Inspiration
and Research
LOST BOY FOUND is a novel, but it was inspired by a true story I encountered on a podcast. “The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar” originally aired as an episode of NPR’s This American Life in 2008. I didn’t hear it when it first aired, but the episode was popular enough that they rebroadcast it in 2012. That was my introduction to the story of the four-year-old lost-then-found Louisiana boy who was claimed by two mothers in the mid-1910s.
The story is fascinating, but it raised questions for me: How could a woman not recognize her own son? Why didn’t the boy tell them who he was? The podcast also delved into how the family’s descendants were dealing with the discovery that, thanks to a DNA test in 2004, their ancestors had essentially kidnapped another woman’s child, which raised both ethical and personal identity issues.
The NPR podcast creators Tal McThenia and Margaret Dunbar Cutright wrote a nonfiction book on the Bobby Dunbar story called A Case for Solomon. While I enjoyed it, it left me wondering. My head wanted to work with the gaps in the story to imagine what might happen if I put some extra characters in the mix, moved the story a little closer to the start of the First World War, and talked about some of the other issues that were important at that time. What I really wanted to do was combine fictional versions of the past and present stories—the vanishing, the rediscovery, a town divided over which mother was telling the truth, and the modern-day discovery of what had been willfully lost over the years…
I tried, and I failed. Annoyingly, everyone agreed that I’d failed. My agent didn’t think it was working, a freelance editor didn’t think it was working, and then a savvy American friend-of-a-friend told me I had two books on my hands and that I should begin by telling the historic tale on its own. So, I took my braided 80,000-word manuscript and pulled it apart into two separate documents, strand by strand. I put the modern story (about 40,000 words long and smattered with song lyrics, photos, obscure pithy quotes) to one side and set about telling the historical story from the beginning, reading and researching along the way, reimagining the characters and the place, until it felt like its own novel. I hadn’t set out to write a purely historical book, but the American reader’s advice was right: This was its own story.
I made a conscious decision not to travel to Louisiana. Lost Boy Found begins in 1913, and I worried that seeing the modern-day Opelousas, New Orleans, and its surrounds would obscure the historical image I held so clearly in my head.
Instead, I researched intensively. The years from 1890 to the early 1920s are labeled the Progressive Era because so much changed. It was an incredibly significant time, with massive social and cultural shifts, the First World War (1914–1918, with the US entering it in 1917), the beginning of many technologies we now take for granted…
These things were invented during the Progressive Era: airplanes, crossword puzzles, stainless steel, zippers, bras, mousetraps, assembly lines, windshield wipers, electric blankets, parachutes, Formica, the Model T Ford, and traffic lights.
Music of the time included ragtime, Tin Pan Alley songs, the earliest versions of Jazz. There was a fledgling and overdue recognition of African-American musicians and gospel music in the South (though much of it was never recorded). It was an incredibly inventive time for traditional music including classical (the audience in Paris rioted when Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” was first performed there in May 1913) and opera.
I read widely about topics from the Civil War to the bird life of Louisiana, from Jim Crow laws to women’s suffrage, from the early years of the First World War to Southern music and cuisine.
I read fiction from the time: Edith Wharton, D.H. Lawrence, Jack London, Beatrix Potter and Mark Twain. I also read plenty of nonfiction: Scouting for Boys, John Muir’s nature tracts, and books about the era such as Florian Illies’s 1913: The Year Before the Storm. I read old newspapers and magazines that I found online, too. (I cannot recommend this enough, just for fun.)
Films of the time featured Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Buster Keaton, with directors including Cecile B. de Mille and D.W. Griffith. I watched more s
ilent films than I needed to and revisited Gone with the Wind with freshly critical eyes.
And though I know the internet can be terrible, I can’t imagine how much more difficult it would have been to research what people wore and drove in 1913 America, how much they earned, and what the laws of the day were without it. I spent hours learning about things that amounted to no more than a single line in the book, and I don’t regret a minute of it.
I didn’t give up on the modern story, by the way. There’s something too interesting in the idea of discovering an entirely different version of one’s family history and having to consider what it means for the here-and-now. Are we responsible for the actions of our forebears? Do their choices change who we are?
To my mind, the human experience makes no sense without exploring the stories from our past, imagining those from our future, and being clear-eyed and honest about our present.
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