***
THE NEXT MORNING at the breakfast table, taking his time, haltingly, he told his wife the truth. She was furious.
“Sam, how the hell could you do that?” She sat back hard in her chair and banged her hands on the table.
“Like I said, these people were so well off-”
“Since when is being well off a license to steal children?”
He winced, her words going in like pins. “I’m going to let Elsie know right now.”
She folded her arms. “Sam, you of all people.”
He looked away, stung to the heart.
“You had to hold your own child before you could understand what the Wellers were missing? I guess I can grant you some understanding there. But only some. Honey, what were you thinking when you walked away from that girl?”
He rolled his head back and stared at the ceiling. “Again, I thought she’d be better off.”
Linda began to speak with her hands. “Maybe you’d do what you did if Elsie and her boy were murderers or some other kind of terrible people. But they’re like us, for God’s sake, just struggling to get by.”
He turned his face toward her. “So what do I do?”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t want to be you for all the chicory coffee in Orleans Parish.”
“I’ve got to come up with a good story.”
“Baby, you’re a fool if you think a lie will fix things between you and them.”
“I guess I’ll have to go up there and tell them face-to-face,” he said.
She narrowed her eyes. Her voice was low and matter-of-fact. “And how will you buy the train tickets, and how will you pay to feed yourself? And what about hotel bills? My family’s helped us out too much already.”
“Well, what can I do?”
“Write a letter.”
He tilted his head. “A letter.”
“A good one. If I was Mrs. Weller, I’d rather have it laid out in print than look at your bumbling face trying to gild the lily on this one.”
He pulled close to the table as she stood up and got a tablet and an envelope. “I know you’ve got her address.”
“Somewhere.”
She left the room, and he wrote one full page, then tore it up. He began another, and then a second page began to flow under a freshly filled fountain pen. He got up and drank a tumbler of water from the tap, sat down, and wrote three more pages.
The sunlight was slanting through the kitchen window when Linda returned holding the baby. “You have it all worked out?”
“I think so. I’ll need an extra stamp, though.”
***
THE NEXT DAY he started for the post office but stepped into a tavern on Magazine Street for a beer, sitting under the moth-eaten deer head at the end of the bar and watching the silver chains of bubbles rise in his mug like bad ideas. Though he wondered if he was condemning Lily to a hard, dumb life by sending his letter, he was ashamed to acknowledge the chief reason for his worry, that Elsie and August would hate him body and soul for not telling them at once when he’d located the girl. He had a second beer, then walked into the poker game in the back room, sat down, and won thirty dollars playing spit.
He never made it to the post office and hid the letter in his sock drawer. Another day to think things over might help. Maybe events had gone too far for a letter to do any good. In his little parlor he played piano for an hour, working on embellishments, on forgetting.
***
THE NEXT MORNING there was a rude rapping at the front door, and on the porch he found a ruddy, birdlike man, vaguely familiar, a blunt stuck in the corner of his mouth. He wore a seersucker coat but no tie, and his straw boater was sliding off the side of his head in the sunny breeze. He made a motion with a stubby finger. “You the excursion-boat man?”
“I was.”
“My brother called me up and said you lived about four blocks away from me. Damned if you don’t.”
“Who’s your brother?”
“Station agent in Greenville. He sent you a telegram up to Evansville and wanted to know did you get it.”
The notion that someone else was concerned about his search made him take a step backwards in the door frame. “Yeah. I should’ve sent one back to thank him.”
The little man eyed him harshly. “Morris wants to know did the message help you any? He don’t burn much daylight helping folks out, you know. It’s not his nature.”
“Yes,” he said. “It helped a lot.”
“You find the little girl, did you?”
Sam looked at the brother, who seemed a bit concerned himself over a lost child he’d never seen or heard of before getting a phone call from the wilds of Mississippi. “Yeah, sure. Let him know she’s been found safe.”
The man removed his cigar and shook Sam’s hand. “All right, then. I’ll tell him that. Nice to meetcher.”
“Tell him I’m sorry I didn’t write him back.”
“That’s all right. He’s used to sorry.” He threw his cigar into the street and headed up the sidewalk at a brisk walk, his bright seersucker flapping in the breeze.
Sam went out to the end of his walk and watched Morris Hightower’s brother striding under the oaks, his jacket winking white in the sun. He decided it was a scary visit-that he’d somehow been called to accounts.
***
THAT WAS A TUESDAY, and he mailed the letter about noon. As soon as it whispered into the brass slot at the post office, he began worrying about the response, when it would come and in what form. He dreaded it until Saturday, when his phone rang with a collect call from Cincinnati, Ohio.
“Mr. Sam Simoneaux?” The voice was Elsie’s, sounding as flat as a skillet against the head.
“It’s me, Elsie,” he muttered.
After a pause, she said something that sounded much rehearsed. “I read your letter several times with all your reasons, and I’ve got a question for you.”
“What’s that?”
“You told me once you had a child.”
“Yes. I’ve got a new one now. A new baby boy.”
There was no congratulation in what she said next. “And of course you’re rich as can be and can give him everything in the world?”
It was as though she’d read his insides from across the country, knew him better than he knew himself. “No.”
“And you’ve got this big job, making maybe five hundred dollars a month?”
“I don’t have any job right now.”
“So, you must have this grand inheritance, and with it you’re going to send this boy to Harvard and Paris, or at least a private school somewhere.”
“Elsie, all I can say is I’m sorry.”
“You are. You really are. If you’d just done your floorwalker job like you were supposed to, none of this would’ve ever happened.” She began to cry now, and accusation began to pile on accusation until he took the candlestick phone off the table and sat on the floor, his legs drawn up, his back against the wall. Linda came out of the bedroom holding the baby and looked at him with no particular expression. Elsie ended her long recital with “And if it weren’t for you, Ted wouldn’t have died.”
“How’s August?” he ventured, his mind reeling with shame.
“How do you think?” she cried. “He’s not the same person. He never will be.”
“What do you want me to do?”
The response was quick. “I’ll tell you. I have no idea how to handle this, so I want you to figure out how we can get to that hick town and take my baby back from those people. You’ve got to come with me. All my relatives work for a living.”
“I can’t even afford the train ticket. I’m making a few dollars at odd jobs, but I can’t leave my family without any money in the bank.” He looked up at his wife. “It might take two weeks to straighten things out.”
The voice came back thin as a needle. “I don’t want to hear it. This will never be straightened out. Me and August have been eating potato soup and shivering for month
s. At least down where you are the river doesn’t freeze over.”
He closed his eyes and reached deep inside himself for the words. “Well, maybe we can try this.”
The phone call lasted ten more minutes. Later that afternoon, she called back. The Ambassador was coming out of winter quarters above Cincinnati and would run down to New Orleans light, making no stops, to get dry-docked, stocked, and take on crew and musicians before starting her initial upriver excursion schedule. Captain Stewart said she and August could deadhead free down to Graysoner and stay at the Wilson Hotel on the boat’s account if they promised to work the season. She would be there in seven days, waiting for him.
Sam hung up the phone and walked to his piano, a glossy red-mahogany Packard, a stolid instrument with bell-like upper notes and a booming bass. He opened the sheet music for “When My Baby Smiles at Me” and played it as written, but when he was finished he played it again, adding ragged filigree to the plain arrangement, then jazzed it up on a third run-through. He played ten other pieces in a row, feeling the ivory slide under his fingertips, and afterward he sat a long time staring at the fine wood until he saw his face reflected in the French polish. He got up and called a furniture store on Dryades Street, and in an hour the dealer arrived and bought his piano for seventy-nine dollars.
Chapter Twenty-four
SOME TIME IN MARCH, Ralph Skadlock had been hired by a Louisiana state legislator to steal a specially engraved and gold-inlaid Parker shotgun from the home of a plantation owner in Braithwaite. The day after he stole it, he pulled the double out of its gun bag and looked it over while sitting in his mildewed front parlor. The sidelocks showed bird dogs jumping a covey of quail, and he ran a sooty fingertip over the razor-sharp checkering on the swirling walnut stocks. He noted how it snapped shut, as though barrels and receiver suddenly became one piece of metal through the cold welding of expert craftsmanship. Still, to him, the piece was ridiculous. A gun was a wrench or a hammer. It did a job.
The next day he rode horseback to the depot and took the southbound to the Baton Rouge station, where he handed a smudged cardboard box to a corpulent, florid man dressed in a tailored suit.
“I think you’ll be happy with this here item,” Ralph told him.
The legislator gave him a look, paid him, and turned away without a word. Ralph held on to the envelope and watched him walk out into the sunlight, knowing for a fact that this fool couldn’t hit a quail exploding out of a dewberry bush to save his soul and probably not even a dove sitting on a branch outside his bedroom window. But he could show off the gun to men gathered in his parlor for drinks, the weapon suggesting how much better he was than they.
Skadlock went home and brooded about their meeting, how the man’s little sharp eyes looked at him, how he’d refused to give him a single word. He remembered the envelope coming over with a nasty flick of the wrist. Men had gotten killed for such manners.
A week later he crossed a long, apple-green lawn and climbed through the window of a many-columned house northeast of Baton Rouge. He stood under a high ceiling and smelled the furniture oil, the floor wax, the fresh paint of the place. The gun was conspicuously displayed in a leaded-glass case, and he took it, fading back out into the night, knowing that when the theft was discovered, the legislator wouldn’t report it, wouldn’t send any lawman against Ralph Skadlock, who might tell who had paid him to take the gun in the first place, along with a few other items he’d been hired to steal in the past. He walked two miles to a highway and crossed it into a stand of sycamores where his horse was tied. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of this double thieving before. On the long ride back, he made a mental list of all the haughty, weak men he could revisit, taking back animals, clocks, jewelry. It was then that Acy White came to mind.
***
HE AND BILLSY were looking the gun over the next day in the big kitchen house, debating where they could sell it, when they heard a spatula hit the floor. Their mother, cooking breakfast, had slumped down on the floor planks with a wheeze, and they went and stood over her, nudging her arms with their brogans and then kneeling down and trying to talk her upright. Ninga would have none of it. One eye rolled toward the window and the other toward the door, signals that everything in her had suddenly quit, muscles turned loose, breaths escaped, thought gone out like a wick. After ten minutes of staring and cajoling, the men understood that she was dead, but could not imagine what might happen now. A vast emptiness grew up around them, and Billsy stood to turn off the aromatic stove, not sure which way to twist the valve handle.
They laid her out straight on the floor, so she would cool in a decent posture, and stood around outside the kitchen eating slices of white bread, wondering what to do next. Neither of them had been to a family funeral, and they couldn’t remember what had been done to their father after his still had exploded when they were four and five years old. They weren’t sure where any relatives lived over in Arkansas, as the clan tended to move around.
There was a magnolia-haunted graveyard a hundred yards to the rear of the mansion bearing several humpbacked markers and a stone cross crenellated with lichen. The men scratched out a vacant space at the rear of the highborn dead and dug her hole. Wrapping her in her own quilts, they set her in the ground and covered her up, then stood looking down at the soppy mound. Ralph felt a thickness in his throat he thought might be some words coming up, but he didn’t say anything. No one in the family had ever read a Bible or stepped foot in a church one time, and both men were too primitively formed to deal even in the clichés of Christianity, having no more notion of a hereafter or its price of admission than lizards stunned asleep in the noon sun.
Billsy looked around at the other weed-wracked headstones bearing inscriptions in French. “She needs her a marker.”
Ralph looked up. “Like what?”
“Just a second.” He turned back to the kitchen house. Ralph walked the dirt down around the edge of the grave until his brother returned holding a stamped skillet with a long handle. “This here’s the ticket.”
Ralph took it from him, turned it front and back several times as if he were inspecting it for purchase, then stuck the handle in the earth at the head of the grave. “That there about says it, all right.”
***
THEY ATE potted meat and sardines, then rode several miles toward a ferry landing upriver. Turning onto a road leading to the water, they rode against automobiles coming off the boat. Near the bank they reached a roughboard roadhouse fronting three mildewed tourist cabins strung out along a raw red ditch. Upstairs, the dark, low-ceilinged bar served skin-peeling moonshine in jelly glasses, and after an hour of it they both were ready for whores.
Ralph leaned over the counter and put a hand on the ample arm of the barmaid. “Is Suzy servin’ tonight?”
She fixed a lead ball eye on him. “Ruttin’ season, is it?”
“Is she still three dollars?”
“Ralph, a good-lookin’ man like you, I’m surprised you ain’t married.”
“Costs more than three dollars. Is she seein’ fellers?”
The barmaid put a finger in an ear and scratched. “In cabin two, at the back.” She slid her gaze past Ralph’s dark bulk to round-shouldered Billsy, who’d been here dozens of times but was still shy about it. “You want a good pokin’?”
“I reckon so.”
“Who you want?”
Billsy thought for a moment. “This time I want a gal with teeth.”
***
THE DOOR to cabin two swung open to reveal Suzy Kathell, long-waisted and long-faced, fifty years old with orange hair. Swaying in a lime green negligee, she held a drink and a cigarette in one hand and tugged him into the light with the other. “Hello, opportunity,” she said, and laughed like a horse. “How the hell you doin’?”
Ralph stared at her bodice. “All right.”
“How’s your bashful brother?”
“He’s all right, I reckon.”
“Is your mother st
ill kickin’?”
“Naw. She died.”
“She did? When was that?”
“This morning.”
She turned her head at an angle. “Well, damn it to hell, you need some cheerin’ up,” she said, shucking her negligee.
Ralph was near senseless from the moonshine, and it took a while for the woman to get finished with him. After it was over, he said, “Would you come live with me on salary?”
She gave his face a playful slap. “Hell, that almost sounds like a proposal. Or will I have to do Billsy too?” She guffawed at this, blowing smoke in his face.
“Do us or not, we need a woman out at the place.”
Suzy Kathell took a sizzling drag on her Picayune. “Lambchops, I don’t think you can afford help like me. Plus I done tried domestic bliss before and it didn’t work out. I like my fancy drawers and my automobile I can drive anywhere I want. You got a automobile out at your place?”
Ralph admitted that he didn’t even have a road.
She gave his stubbly cheek an enormous pinch. “Sweetie, you straight in the back, you got all your teeth, and you got that scary look that drives dumb women off their nut. You look around good and you’ll have that old cookstove hot in no time. Now if you’ll put your clothes on and excuse me, I got to call my next case.”
***
THE BROTHERS SAT in the bar and drank from the same jar of shine. “I think my eyeballs is switched sockets,” Billsy said.
Ralph reached over and jerked a button off his brother’s shirt pocket and threw it at him. “Wake up and listen.”
Billsy looked stricken. “Who’s gonna sew that son of a bitch back on?”
“How much is that racehorse worth you took over in Carencro?”
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