Half Moon Lake

by Kirsten Alexander

  How she tested him. ‘Next time, I promise. Is Mason –?’

  ‘New Orleans. Ties, socks, men’s what-have-yous.’

  ‘Ah. May I?’ Tom stepped inside. ‘Before we tell Mr Davenport I’m here, how is Mary? What about the boy?’

  Esmeralda shook her head. ‘Mr Davenport’s in his library.’

  After exchanging pleasantries, John Henry poured Tom whiskey and refilled his own glass, then the men sat angled in front of the fire.

  ‘I’m reading Emerson on self-reliance.’ John Henry used his glass to point to the book on the lamplit table beside him. ‘It’s lent perspective to our situation.’ He opened the book. ‘At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles.’

  Tom furrowed his brow. ‘This is no trifle, John.’

  ‘I’m aware of that.’ Tom sensed coolness in John Henry’s tone. ‘But the way your colleagues have been writing about our situation has, indeed, sought to reduce this to a trifle, a cartoon. Not you. But, let me use Emerson again.’ Tom watched John Henry as he searched the text. Had John Henry invited him here to complain about the behaviour of the press? Was he hoping Tom, a reporter, would sympathise with his situation and … fix it somehow, bring his ‘colleagues’ to heel?

  John Henry read, ‘Do not spill thy soul; do not all descend; keep thy state; stay at home in thine own heaven. Does that not seem like wise advice? That’s what I intend to do to cope with this scurrilous chatter: I’ll work, meet with lawyers when I must, enjoy the company of select friends, be at home with my wife and children.’

  ‘That’s one approach.’ Tom paused. ‘May I take it from this invitation into your home that I’m a select friend?’

  ‘However, staying in one’s heaven doesn’t stop the ceaseless gossip and printed lies.’ John Henry closed his book.

  ‘John.’ They’d been on a first-name basis for a long time, but it suddenly felt awkward to address John Henry this way. Tom had shared a drink with this man but he’d also crouched on the ground and spied on him through a window. And the conversation tonight was more scolding and aggrieved than Tom had anticipated. He struggled to find the right tone. He’d wanted to meet with John Henry as a confidant, a near-equal, not as the representative of the world’s reporters. ‘John, they – and I’m glad you’d not consider me among those reporters who are troubling you – they aren’t going to leave you in peace until Gideon Wolf’s trial is done. Not while he shouts his innocence of childnapping and this mysterious other mother is at large. If you want my advice –’ Yes, that was it. ‘I’d say you should come out of hiding, all of you. Show yourselves as happy, carefree, untouched by rumours since they are so patently untrue.’

  John Henry nodded. ‘I understand what you’re saying. I want every man on the jury to know that ours is the only truth. In fact, I want to know if we can count on you to continue to write articles that help our cause, to be the voice of reason, so the truth isn’t drowned in the swill the other newspapers are serving up.’

  So, Tom thought, he wants to check I’ll stay his advocate. Had anyone else asked this of him, he’d cite independence, objectivity, integrity. He might even remind them he’d been witness to Mary’s uncertainty, so he appreciated that reporters had some basis for doubt. But he’d come too far with this family to pretend to be neutral. ‘I’ll always speak in your favour, John. Mr Collins is scornful of ill-informed gossip, but I should tell you he’s worried we’re going to lose readers if we won’t explore –’

  ‘Exploring is what an amateur does in the wilderness, Tom. Your job is to put reality into words. Otherwise you’re no more than a mudslinger. And I know you’re not that. You’re a man of fact. And our friend.’

  John Henry seemed to be challenging Tom: a near-insult followed by a declaration of friendship, both uttered with self-interest in mind. Tom wasn’t stupid, but nor was he without his own goals. He stretched his legs out towards the fire, took a slow mouthful of whiskey and thought about how he might benefit from John Henry’s request.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Grace was cleaning the Cavetts’ dinner plates in the room adjacent to the kitchen when she overheard that Gideon Wolf had been arrested.

  ‘Y’all better find some other tramp to tune your old pile of wood. Wolf’s locked up in Opelousas,’ Matthew said to his mother.

  Grace stopped moving, her hands hovering, dripping lukewarm grey water into the tub. A thin wall divided her from the table where the Cavetts sat, but the door was half-open and she could hear them as clear as a bell.

  ‘Opelousas?’ Mr Cavett said. ‘Opelousas, Louisiana?’

  ‘What’s he gone and done?’ Mrs Cavett asked.

  ‘Stole a boy, that’s what,’ Matthew replied.

  ‘What did he want with another boy? What’d he do with Grace’s boy?’ Mr Cavett asked.

  Grace inched closer to the doorway.

  ‘He took Grace’s boy? Then it’s the boy they’re talking about,’ Matthew said. ‘It’s in all the newspapers.’

  ‘Could be he ran away,’ Mr Cavett said.

  ‘Nobody ran anywhere,’ Matthew said.

  ‘Though where –’

  ‘Never mind about that,’ Mrs Cavett interrupted. She could see Matthew was growing exasperated. ‘Tell us more about this unguent of yours. Will it help with this?’ She pointed at a burn mark on her arm.

  ‘Probably, yes.’

  ‘How much will I need to buy?’

  Matthew sat up straight, suddenly energised. ‘Do you know, just last week I met a man who hadn’t been able to stretch out his arm in a year. Used this Simms’ unguent for a month – every day, mind, that’s the key, and don’t be scared to slather it on thick – and now he’s chopping his own wood.’

  Mrs Cavett made an ooh sound and Mr Cavett nodded appreciatively.

  Grace stayed awake through the night, breathing warm puffs of air into her cold room. She needed to go to Opelousas. But what if Matthew was wrong? What if Gideon wasn’t locked up or even in Louisiana? Maybe if she pleaded with the Cavetts they’d help her get to Ned and speak out for a wrongly imprisoned man whom they seemed to like well enough, or simply ask Matthew for more information. But the instant these thoughts occurred to her, Grace knew the Cavetts would be no help. She couldn’t continue to simply wait here for Gideon, not now she knew he might be locked away with her son. And if not in Opelousas, at least that would be a starting point.

  After a few hours’ sleep, having nursed Lily so she’d be dulled and agreeable, Grace pulled her bedding into order, placed her few belongings – clothes, underclothes, Lily’s baby blanket, her Bible – on a piece of cut cotton sheet, and brought the four corners of cloth together into a knot. She nestled Lily in a sling across her chest, hung her rudimentary sack on her forearm, and left the Cavetts’ house before sunrise.

  She walked down the same dirt road Gideon and Ned had, heading, like them, for Magnolia. There’d surely be someone there who’d be willing to read her the story in the newspaper. Then she’d use what money she had to catch a train. Grace tried not to think about how long the journey might be, to where, or how she would manage to feed or shelter herself and Lily. Each step she took brought her closer to Ned.

  In the Davenport house, the three boys sat at their desks in the room Madame Caron called their salle de classe. It was a cold November morning and though crunchy frost had covered their lawn, John Henry insisted one of the ‘classroom’ windows remain open to assist the boys’ health and mental sharpness. Mary, separately, insisted fires be lit throughout the house. Currents of warm and cold air circled the boys as they read, bringing with them scents of coffee, burning spruce, winter honeysuckle and baking bread.

  ‘Shall cut class,’ Paul had muttered. ‘Stinky, wet grass. No thanks, I’ll pass.’ He’d tried to raise a laugh from George, but the only person who seemed to hear him was Madame.

  Paul slouched in his chair and stared out the window at a car puttering up the street. He�
��d felt annoyed even before Madame caught him out. George was ignoring him again. His brother and the interloper were still heads down over the same picture book, while Madame had Paul conjugating verbs on his slate. George had repeatedly told Paul that helping the boy learn to read and write was good for them.

  ‘How else are we going to know where he came from? He can draw, but that’s not so useful sometimes.’

  ‘One of us doesn’t care where he’s from,’ Paul sulked. ‘And that one is me. I don’t care.’

  Now, seeing his brother was again in a funk, George waited until Madame wasn’t watching and slipped him a note: You said it’d be good to have three for games. What are you whining about?

  Paul scrunched the note and threw it at George. ‘I said four.’

  Madame Caron looked up at Paul. ‘Four what, mon petit unhappy Davenport?’

  ‘For as in forget it.’

  Rather than making Paul write lines or sit in the corner, Madame Caron moved her finger like a hook, beckoning him to her. Even an occasional visitor to the house could see the unhealthy dynamic between the boys, she thought. Three was such an awkward number, and to her eye George wasn’t trying to disguise who was his favoured brother. Although Paul was misbehaving, George’s was the greater crime: the failure to be discreet. But that was beyond her scope. With Paul standing in front of her, Madame Caron reached into her beaded bag, a Votes for Women badge pinned to the lining, a copy of Gombo Zhebes: Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs given to her by her mother inside, and presented Paul with a mandarin. ‘For humour in the face of adversity. Pauvre ti bête.’

  None of the boys was sure what she meant, but she’d singled Paul out for a treat and in so doing reproved George and baffled the boy. Without any discussion, each of them shifted on their axis enough that peace was restored.

  Later that afternoon, between lessons, George sat next to the boy on the rug in front of the fireplace. He told Paul to quit moping and join them.

  ‘I need your help.’ George tapped the boy’s left hand. ‘You like using this one better than the one the teachers make us use, don’t you?’

  The boy nodded.

  ‘I’m good at spelling, but Paul knows how –’

  ‘I can use both.’ Paul plopped down on the carpet, the three of them forming a circle.

  George put his arm around Paul’s shoulder. ‘That’s why we need you. I’ve been trying to get him to hold the crayon like this, but –’

  ‘Give it to me. Here.’ Paul took the boy’s hand and, together, they wrote.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Sheriff Sherman found the farmhouse where Grace Mill had lived, though Gideon Wolf’s directions had sent him off-course several times along the way.

  By the time the sheriff arrived on the Cavetts’ unswept porch, his car covered in dust, his back aching from so many hours driving, Grace had gone. Mrs Cavett said in no uncertain terms she knew neither where nor why nor exactly when Grace had gone. She wasn’t too upset, though: the girl wasn’t worth a hill of beans. Mrs Cavett stayed close-lipped about Grace’s boy, saying only she had a boy. She’d squinted at the photograph the sheriff showed her, a fresh one taken in Opelousas, saying she’d had as little as possible to do with the child, might not recognise him in a crowd of three. ‘Could be him. Wouldn’t like to say.’

  The sheriff frowned at her. ‘You wouldn’t like to say?’ He’d travelled all this way to hear the same thing the Conroys’ manager had said. What was it with people not wanting to ‘say’?

  ‘I’m an honest woman that deserves no trouble with the law. That girl showed up here with a boy and claimed he was hers. How am I to know if that’s the truth? Maybe he’s the child you’re chasing after, maybe not.’ And yes, she’d had her piano tuned by a tramp, and he’d stayed around to do other jobs. Yes, more than once. ‘But why should I be expected to remember every stranger’s name? Seems you’re asking an awful lot of a woman whose help has run away and left her with more work than any one person can do.’

  Mrs Cavett let the sheriff search Grace’s room for clues as to where the girl had gone, watching from the doorway in case he found something she might claim. The sheriff wondered if Grace had heard about Wolf’s use of her as an alibi and headed for Opelousas. It seemed she had no life outside this dingy farmhouse, and no kin known to Mrs Cavett, so it was possible. Having seen the woman’s spartan living quarters and met both the Cavetts, the sheriff was amazed Grace Mill had stayed as long as she had. In answer to his question about whether Grace could read, Mrs Cavett had snorted. But news travelled all sorts of ways. With a newborn babe, though, little money and no car, it was a heck of a journey.

  As Sheriff Sherman walked down the dirt path to his motor car, Mr Cavett scampered down from the barn. ‘I’ll tell you something else, I never thought he looked that much like her.’

  The sheriff drove away, troubled by the seeds of doubt the Cavetts had scattered in his mind. He felt certain now there was some truth in Wolf’s account, that he’d taken off from this God-awful farm with a boy who had a scar, around Sonny’s age but most likely not Sonny. Or maybe Sonny had ended up with Grace Mill somehow, after being taken? He needed to talk to her.

  Once he was out of the Cavetts’ sight, the sheriff pulled off the road, spread his map out on the passenger seat and used a pencil to draw the ways a woman without a car could get from here to Opelousas. It was a challenging journey: if she’d gone by train – the best way, if she had the funds – Grace would’ve had to walk nine miles to Magnolia station, catch the train south, maybe as far as New Orleans, to change to the track that ran through Jefferson on the other side of the Mississippi, head south-west to Berwick and change lines again, travel north-west through Patterson, Franklin, New Iberia, on foot a fair ways after that … He’d travel roughly the same route back in his car and hope he could find her. Whatever the truth of the story, Grace Mill had pluck.

  The morning after the Davenports had taken the young boy home, Gideon Wolf was scuttled unceremoniously from the Opelousas train station to Sheriff Sherman’s stationhouse, where he was to be held until put on trial for the childnapping of Sonny Davenport. The locals told their children to stay away from the barred window that let air into the sheriff’s single cell. The lay of the land, however, offered a direct view of Wolf through the window. The youngest Opelousans could see in with the help of an upturned apple crate.

  Within days, Gideon Wolf became a local attraction for young and old. He neither shouted at nor scared his observers, was in fact friendly. When people came to ogle, Wolf didn’t shy away or cower in the corner of his cell, but instead made conversation. He’d ask what they thought the coming day’s weather might be, would comment favourably on ladies’ hats or the flattering hue of their eyes. With his male visitors, Wolf shared his card tricks, stories about his years working in Merrimack Mill, and tales of the strange things he’d seen during his travels: a cemetery with caged graves to keep vampires from escaping at night, the ghost of Crazy Horse, a coyote that spoke.

  Those not taken with his stories were charmed by his fiddle. He’d played it since he was a lad, so long that he’d worn a groove in his jaw. Wolf coaxed sounds from the instrument that made people stop and listen. Children could hear Wolf’s fiddle from the schoolyard, and more than once the teacher raised a finger to silence the class so they could listen to the music. Tom and Clara could hear it from her mother’s porch.

  Gideon Wolf didn’t strike the people of Opelousas as a villain. He was polite, clean enough and articulate.

  Even Mrs Billingham and Gladys went to the sheriff’s office to stare through the bars.

  ‘He seems harmless enough.’ Mrs Billingham adjusted her sable fur as the pair walked back to their car.

  ‘Rather dull, though,’ Gladys replied. ‘I thought he’d play his fiddle for us.’

  Wolf went to great lengths to explain the details of his trouble to his visitors: he told them how long he’d been travelling with the boy, how he wa
s a caretaker not a childnapper, and how it was wrong to keep an innocent man in a damp cell, one far too poky for a man of his height. He asked after the boy and wanted to know about these people who’d wrongly laid claim to him. He asked his visitors to help find Grace.

  Aside from repeatedly proclaiming his innocence, Wolf made himself an agreeable prisoner to the guards. He never complained about the bland and meatless meals. Once he realised there was no other, larger cell, he simply asked for more blankets, a request easily granted.

  ‘Humouring the tramp is ludicrous,’ Mrs Billingham said as she stroked the unsullied leather seat of her new Ford. ‘The boy is at home with a good family. Who could deny that’s better than sending him to live with a hobo or an unwed mother? A mother, if the story is to be believed, who gave her child to a stranger.’

  ‘That’s to say there is an unwed mother,’ Gladys said. ‘The boy might be an orphan, no one. Or his son, the tramp’s.’

  ‘I do worry that the child was in unsavoury hands for so long, though. Young minds can be tainted. Mary has a job ahead of her to recivilise him.’ On that, Gladys and Mrs Billingham agreed. Given the right circumstances, any sweet person could become a beast.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The arrival of Gideon Wolf’s lawyer in Opelousas caused a lot of talk. The scruffy tramp who people – for or against – dismissed as poor and luckless had secured impressive legal counsel from out of state. His lawyer, a tall olive-skinned Italian man from California, was part of the powerful Gabino family, whose Bank of Italy had bought Fresno National and the People’s Savings Bank, a background which made him impressive and suspect. Both the lawyer and his assistant were expensively suited and impeccably coiffed.

  ‘It’s the brother,’ Judge Roy explained to John Henry, making a whirlpool of his port as he swirled his glass. ‘He can’t have it. No good for his standing.’