“For a war veteran, you got a soft heart,” Sam said.
Duggs stepped into the street. “Sure.”
“Did you shoot anyone?”
“None of your business,” Duggs said. “Are you really a Catholic?”
“So, you don’t want to talk about it.”
“Just answer my question.”
They both turned to go up the church steps. “Well, ‘Introibo ad altare Dei.’”
Duggs pulled open the arched oak door on incensed air, stood aside, and bowed. “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meum.”
They sat in the rear of the echoing church, and after the priest sang the Gloria, Sam heard the door open and turned to see Mr. Brandywine and two busboys come in, one on each side, watchful, as though they’d been propping him up all the way there. Sam prayed for the Wellers and their little girl, and for the old pilot’s judgment. He then questioned his own reasons for going out on the great river grasping at straws. What propelled him, he wanted to believe, was the awful diminished feeling he suffered whenever he thought of his dead child or of his taken family. If he could make another family whole, maybe that would help. Help whom, though? Then he remembered that if he found the girl, he’d get his job back and once more cruise along the gleaming floors of the finest department store in New Orleans. Was that the main reason he was doing this? Was he just along to retrieve his floorwalker’s salary? On the walk down the hill to the boat, he shared these thoughts with Charlie, whose only response was, “Lucky, self-interest is better than no interest.”
Chapter Eleven
VESSY CLEARED the dishes after the noon meal and then brought the bedsheets and covers upstairs in her wiry arms. She was a mountain girl and used to steep walking, so at the top of the stairs she wasn’t winded at all. Mrs. White, in her bedroom pulling on fine gloves and checking items in her purse, didn’t look up when the cook came through the door, just said, “Mrs. Hall won’t be able to tend Madeline today. You’ll watch her for us.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Vessy had wanted to go to her rented one-room house to boil her own laundry in the yard. Usually she was off between one-thirty and four, when she came in to start supper.
“Did you hear Madeline singing with the music teacher this morning?”
“I was out back stackin’ stovewood.”
Mrs. White’s gloved hands worked like mourning doves as she picked at a spray of pills on her dressing table and placed them one by one into a little nickel-plated box she kept in her purse. “Well, this morning Mr. Stover said she sings just like a little bird and has a natural sense of timing.”
Vessy pursed her lips and slid them to one side of her face. “That so? Like she already been taught.”
Mrs. White gave her an appraising look. “Well, I’m going into town to shop at Welford’s.”
“Yep.”
“Listen for her when she gets up from her nap. Don’t let her over-sleep because she’ll be hard to put down at eight.”
Vessy placed the sheets in the bedroom armoire and listened to Mrs. White’s slow tread on the stairs. When the car started up in the drive and backed toward the street, she bent to pick up a cream-colored pair of gloves discarded in the wastebasket and pulled them on. They were a short style that betrayed her freckled skin. Vessy was twenty-seven years old, had taken care of herself, and still had her teeth, except for a molar knocked out when her father punched her for leaving a saddled horse in the rain. She’d wanted to get married more than anything, but being a bit plain and more than a bit plain-spoken, it took her a long time to get someone to court her. She might have stayed in the eastern Kentucky mountains forever, but one Sunday her mother served an old, undercooked pork roast and killed the whole family with food poisoning, except for her, and she lay on the back porch and puked for two days before a neighbor found and rescued her. The man courting her stopped the relationship, believing she was a bad-luck woman, and that had hardened her outlook on life. Vessy admired her hands for a moment, then pulled off the gloves, dropping them back into the can. She might ask for them later but couldn’t bear Mrs. White thinking that she’d been stealing out of the trash. Then again, what need did she have of dress gloves? To handle stovewood? She spat into the can and went down to wash the dishes.
At two she walked into the child’s room and frowned at the ruffled bed, the expensive small furniture, the assembly of dolls lined up against the wall. Pulling a chair next to the bed, she studied the girl, narrowing her eyes at the flawless pink fingernails that showed no splits or coarse cuticles, no signs of roughness. She turned the sleeping child’s palm into a beam of sunlight and examined the skin. She woke up and pulled her hand back to rub her eyes.
“Little miss, you want to put on your nice new sundress?”
The girl sat up and smiled at her. Vessy pulled off her short stockings and ribboned pinafore. The child’s knees were what she wanted to see, and the skin there was smooth and white as milk. She dropped the sundress over her easy as a lampshade and then sat her on the bed to buckle on a pair of brown sandals, cupping the feet in her rough palms and feeling the soft bottoms. “Let’s see those toes.” Vessy flashed a playful smile and the girl giggled, drawing back her feet and sitting on them.
“I bet you want Vessy to play little piggy with them tootsies?”
“No,” the girl said, but she still held out her feet for the sandals.
Vessy wiggled the big toe and saw not a callus, dirt stain, or crookedness. She examined her ankles for scuffs and little scars. She held and turned the feet the way she would examine sweet potatoes at the market. Then she put on the sandals and led the girl downstairs for a glass of milk and a slice of sugar bread. They sat at the little porcelain breakfast table set by a window, where Vessy usually enjoyed the view down the hill toward the river. But now her eyes took in every detail of this child, sensing that something was badly wrong. Suddenly, she jerked up her right arm and feinted at the girl’s head as though she would strike her. Madeline looked up at the open fingers, but did not flinch.
“Orphanage my foot,” Vessy said under her breath. She knew orphans, white and black, and every one would jerk back and cower if anybody raised a hand to them. Orphans wore no shoes, or wrong-sized shoes in which their feet grew crooked. Their feet bore calluses, craters of sores, bite scars, toenails stobbed black, orange dirt stain, ankle meat clipped to white bone. Knees were crosshatched from working in crops or playing in common dirt, fingers stretched out by bucket or firewood chores. When Vessy rested her hand down on the fine hair, the child leaned into her touch and smiled. “Sweet Jesus,” Vessy whispered. “Where’d they find this baby?”
Chapter Twelve
SAM FOUND the Wellers outside their cabin and explained what he had learned from the Skadlocks and what kind of people they were, how they lived, that he was certain of their guilt.
As Ted Weller listened, his face turned to match the hard red surface of the shore pavings. “Why in hell didn’t you tell us this yesterday?”
“You know how it was. We had twenty-five hundred passengers last night.”
He raised both arms from his sides and let them drop. “Why didn’t you threaten them? They’re criminals.”
“I wasn’t exactly in a position to put any pressure on them. As far as the law is concerned, these people own their own country.”
Ted grabbed him by the arm and wedged him against a bulkhead. “You tell me how to get back in there and they’ll tell me something.”
Sam read his eyes and found them a mix of rage and fear. “Ted, I think they’ll kill you.”
His eyes flew wide and Elsie turned her face away. “They didn’t kill you!” Ted hollered. “You think I’m just big soft Ted the dumb German who all he can do is pound a piano. Let me tell you, I’m plenty tough. I grew up in a saloon.”
Sam pointed downriver. “Back in there where I went ain’t Cincinnati. There’s no law at all.”
“I don’t need law when my baby’s missing.”
/> Sam looked south along the bank understanding that Ted was going to do something stupid, and the sad part of it was that he agreed with his feelings. “You don’t know how to get back in there,” he said softly.
“I got a mouth to ask.”
Elsie put a hand on his shoulder. Sam imagined she was going to try to calm him, but instead she said, “I’ll get you money from the boat and you can ask directions at the station.”
“This is a bad idea.”
Ted glowered at him, his mustache blooming under his red nose. “You tell me where this place is. Right now.”
“No. I won’t be responsible.”
Ted slammed him against the bulkhead, hard. “Tell me or I’ll break you open like a dollar fiddle, damn you.”
Sam stared him in the eye. Ted was hoping for at least a chance of finding his family’s future, of gathering in his blood, but Sam remained silent, to keep him from getting hurt. He himself had been called Lucky so many times that he was beginning to believe the name fit, but Ted might not share his good fortune. Then he remembered the child’s face, floating in the folds of his brain like an ivory pendant. A child alive. Out there somewhere. His thoughts changed course, and he decided that luck couldn’t manifest itself unless a man took a chance. Feeling sad to the bone, he raised his open palms above his waist. “Well, to start with, there’s this murderous dog.”
***
TED WALKED to the Y &MV station, bought a ticket, and boarded a mixed train going out at four to St. Frank. It was a bone-rattling ride in a wooden coach through cut-over land and weed-wracked farms. Two hours later the train jammed on its brakes at a dusty board-and-batten station and he stepped off into the still air and asked the agent for directions to the livery.
The little agent sized him up. “This here’s the last train tonight, so if you wait a bit I’ll give you a lift in my flivver.” He waited under the station overhang until the agent came out in the slanting light and turned the oily crank on his Ford. At the livery Ted got the owner up from supper and asked to rent a horse.
“Well,” the liveryman said, “I like your looks so I’ll let you have my wife’s mare, Sooky.”
Ted shook his head. “No thanks. I want the one called Number six.”
The liveryman fished a set of spectacles from his pocket, put them on, and looked at Ted more closely. “That’s not a good horse for a big fellow like yourself.”
“A man who rented it before says it’s what I need.”
“You can suit yourself, but that horse will try to gallop through a parked locomotive, it’s that stupid.” The man stalked off toward his sun-bleached barn.
Ted rode across the stream before full dark, then sat the horse on the far bank, reading a compass by the light of a match. The liveryman had explained where to go and to wait for the moon to come up, and after half an hour it began to rise above the line of cypresses, shining like a communion wafer. Ted put the horse forward, keeping the moon between the animal’s ears. He carried his pistol in one pocket, his big folding knife in the other, and his little girl in his thoughts. In the swamp he lost sight of the sky and became lost. He spilled his matches into the mud and couldn’t read his compass, but he kept moving, hoping he would blunder his way to the river, deciding that nothing could stop him. Number 6 brushed against a locust tree and Ted felt the thorns rake his calf, but he didn’t so much as turn his head at the pain.
***
THE NEXT DAY Sam was rushing through his lunch before the loading of the two o’clock crowd when Captain Stewart walked up to the table and asked, “Have you seen Mr. Weller?”
“I thought he’d asked you for the day off.”
The captain’s white eyebrows seemed to double in size as he leaned down. “He sent me a note to that effect but evidently did not wait for a reply. Who’s supposed to play for the two o’clock trip?”
Sam swallowed slowly, looking at his fingers. “Aw, I’ll cover it for him. It’s a church group, isn’t it? How much dancing are they going to do?”
“No offense, son, but I’ve heard you play. You’ve got to practice to get the stiffness out of your wrists.” He went upright, his back straight as a broom handle. “But go down and get ready while Fred Marble plays everybody on board with the calliope. And I’ll keep an ear on you.”
After a minute Elsie came over and refilled his coffee cup. “Is he awful mad?”
“He ain’t happy. When’s Ted coming back?”
“He told us he’d return on this afternoon’s train.”
“I hope he finds out more than I did.”
“Who’s going to cover for him, the colored pianist?”
“Yours truly.”
“Oh.”
He smiled at her. “Don’t worry. I’ll play like it counts.” Up on the roof Fred began to run scales of weeping notes, the whistles rising in pitch as they warmed in the blasting steam.
About one-thirty he got down to the hot dance floor and put up the lid on the piano, a six-foot-eight George Steck, a tough, loud instrument tolerant of the river’s dampness. As the first ticket holders began to roam the big boat he warmed up, playing “Nola” at a moderate tempo and nodding to the five other band members as they walked up: Zack Stimson, the banjo player; Mike Gauge, the clarinetist; Freddie Peat, drummer; Felton Bicks, cornetist; and tuba player Jackie van Pelt. The men fell into the song one at a time and swapped the lead around for fifteen minutes, letting Sam have the fancy ending to himself.
The band checked their instruments, getting ready for the long haul. Zack leaned over and asked politely, “Where’s Ted?”
“He’s laying out today. Going for some information on his little girl.”
Zack shook his head and bent down to tune his banjo. “We could use her right about now.”
Sam frowned at the remark. “Well, how’m I doing?”
“Doin’ okay, but I can tell you mostly play by yourself. No offense. Ted and us, we’re used to each other.”
The big whistle hollered up the Natchez bluff, and four young couples walked up, looking expectantly at the band, so Zack started strumming “Nobody but You” and the others landed on the melody like bees on a daisy. Captain Stewart skirted the edge of the dance floor, listened to three measures, and kept walking. When Sam had to fake a section, he heard Freddie Peat laugh out loud. He remembered the melody and what was coming up and relaxed, glancing now and then through an open door at shoreline willows flowing past along with the smokestacks of tugboats and ferries. When Mrs. Benton blew the whistle again and turned out for the main channel, the breeze began to pour in through the dance floor’s many windows and this, too, was what the customers were here for, escape from the soul-melting heat onshore. Twelve couples danced right in front, and a steward walked by sprinkling dance wax at their feet. Soon more dancers came out, the shy ones and the young ones, their steps melding with the music and the scenery passing by in the windows as if it were all part of the same song. He watched the back of a woman who’d begun two-stepping by herself, but when she turned Sam spotted the three-year-old she was holding, his arm high in his mother’s hand. He dropped a beat when he saw that and heard Zack call out, “Steady.” It’s what parents did, teach their kids to dance. He shouldn’t have been surprised. But for much of the song his timing was imperfect as he kept his attention on her, an ordinary-looking woman made distinctive by her eyes as she watched the boy feel her movements and learn that music and motion belonged together. He wondered if his own son would have learned to dance or sing, and he guessed probably so. His wife would’ve taught him, and at the thought of Linda he was filled with longing for the feel of her in his arms on a big dance floor. This pained him but the music moved him on, his fingers climbing an arpeggio so hard to execute it hurt him out of remembering and drew him back into the song. He turned his head, and Zack nodded.
***
FOR THE NIGHT TRIP, the black orchestra wore new tuxedos. Some dancers who’d never heard the New Orleans sound stayed back for a f
ew tunes, leaning on roof supports or window frames trying to figure if it was all right to have fun with the band’s efforts. But the younger ones, or those who’d gone out on excursion boats earlier in the season or last year, they knew what to expect and stretched their steps. Pulled by the music, they walked on the notes, the women turning and shimmying, throwing the spangled tassels on their dresses straight out until their youth sparked like struck flint on the rumbling dance floor. Sam kept watch at the edge of the crowd, shaking his head at how much better this band was than the daylight group. When the clarinetist went off the page into his own riff some dancers stopped to listen and bounce in place, it was that good.
Elsie came down to check tables for burning cigarettes and brushed by him, pulling at his coat. “Lucky, he didn’t come back.”
“What?” He took her arm and walked her to the outside rail just as the boat shaved by the point of a big island.
“Ted told me he’d come into the station on the three-thirty train. August went up the hill to meet him, but he wasn’t on the coach.”
“Was that the last train?”
“Yes.” She balled up a fist and held it against her lips.
“That country’s slow going on a horse. The trip just took longer than he thought it would, that’s all.” He could tell she wasn’t fooled, and wished he were a better liar.
“We’re pulling out for Vicksburg after this trip.”
“He’ll know that. He’ll come up there on tomorrow’s train.”
“You think so?” He saw in her worried eyes how much she loved Ted.
“Aw, yeah. Now you go walk those tables on the other side before the captain comes along.” He watched her push through the doors and then looked down the roiling river, thinking about the Skadlocks, the dark woods, and the dog. “Lord,” he said aloud. The dog. He tried to imagine what experience in Cincinnati would prepare the musician for Louisiana swamps and the Skadlocks. He wished he had gone back with him, for Ralph Skadlock in particular had seemed a maimed soul capable of anything. He remembered that the outlaw knew where Troumal was, that speck of a place down on the Texas line. Was the slaughter of his family some sort of legend among the cutthroats of Arkansas?
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