“What about justice?”
“Justice works if it puts a dollar back in you pocket.”
“Punishment?”
His uncle turned toward the window as a tumble of thunder came out of the next parish. “What I always told you?”
He looked down. “What people do wrong is its own punishment.”
In the weak light his uncle’s face was brown and furrowed like a winter-killed field. “Listen to me. I rather be your dead papa for five minutes than one of them killers for a whole life.”
Sam looked at the lamp flame, which leapt for no reason and made a puff of smoke. He tried to imagine such people but couldn’t. “Maybe I could tell them something. If I could ever find even one of them, maybe there’s something I should say.”
“Something needs sayin’? You gonna find ’em to forgive ’em?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’ll say until I find them.”
“Then they’ll do you in.” With a forefinger his uncle drew a line across his throat.
“Don’t worry, Nonc. A little girl I met in France gave me my nickname. Lucky, she called me. Chanceux.”
“Chanceux so far,” he said.
“Come on. Tell me.”
Claude sniffed, then drank down his wine and pushed the little glass away. He shook his head. “They came in ridin’ double so the horses wouldn’t make plenty noise. I figured this out from the hoof-prints in the yard. I went over à pied-how you say, on foot?-to help him put in seed cane. The sun was just up, but me, I could see the door knocked down flat.” He spread his fingers in the air. “Holes in all the wallboard. One porch post was shot in two, yeah. I never seen nothin’ like that before, and I got scared. I walked around the whole house to make sure nobody wasn’t still there. Then I went in.” He raised a hand from the table and let it come down slowly.
“You found them.” Sam’s voice was a whisper.
“It’s funny what I thought. He was my brother and he had a hole in his head and it was floatin’ in a puddle of blood, and the first thing what come to me was I’d never hear him play a fiddle again.” He looked up. “You knew that? You papa could play the fiddle?”
“No.” A new door opened in Sam’s head, and through it came notes and rhythm flowing onto a cypress porch.
“Ay yi yi, I never told you that. That cuts me like a knife. He played waltzes his own papa taught him, waltzes and old fast-dance pieces could make a chicken two-step. It wasn’t what he played but how he did it that I remember, slick like lightning, you know? Sometimes smooth like moonlight.”
Sam nodded. “Like moonlight.”
“I looked down on him and thought about all the music wouldn’t never be heard. And that wasn’t all, he could shingle a roof tight as a boat’s bottom. His fields were plowed straight like lines on a tablet. I thought about that, too. All that was killed. Ah, Sammy, when a man kills somebody, the most important thing he takes away is all the things that person can do in a lifetime. Tu comprends ça?”
He nodded, understanding too well.
“And then I saw your mamma, she was shot in the chest, and I started cryin’ so much and shakin’ I didn’t see your brother and sister at first.” He shook his head. “All I can say is a big bullet kills a little child fast, fast. I can tell you at least nobody hurt for long.”
He put his head in his hands. “How many did it?”
Claude shook his head. “The house looked like a strainer. Maybe nine or ten.”
“I never heard a number.”
“Nine or ten. That afternoon the one lawman we had, that little stinking Thibodaux crook, he rode to the parish line and gave up. He said they out his territory. Me myself, I rode into the parish to the north and told the sheriff, and he sent a deputy with me down the one dirt highway they got to the edge of that parish. We found one ’tit neg said he saw a bunch ridin’ like a army north, so I went into that parish and found the red-face sheriff that said he didn’t chase nobody for no dumb coonass Catholic couldn’t talk good American.”
“Did you ever hear who they were, or where they were from?”
Claude got up and went to a dark corner of the kitchen. Sam could hear a cabinet door squeak open and the tap of a dipper. He came back with two glasses of wine and sat down again, the joints in his chair grinding like dry bones. “At first, no. Six month later, the priest come over with the saddle from the man you papa knocked off his horse. He said he found some papers in it. They didn’t say where the man was from. But from one of them we saw the man’s name was Jimmy somebody. I can’t remember that last name. I never heard that name before in my life parmi les américains autour d’ici.”
“Do you have the papers?”
His uncle blinked and looked up. “I think so.”
He rose, took the lamp, and went into the front room. In the dark kitchen Sam heard him open a locker and begin to shuffle through papers. He imagined him squinting, running his eyes into the musty cabinet, trying to remember, maybe trying not to. When his uncle came back he held a hardback supply catalog with a few outsized pages stuck in the middle.
Sam took the book and opened it. Inside were two handwritten contracts for small timber leases, and the agent was the hard-drinking horse torturer, Jimmy Cloat. “Well, well.”
His uncle’s eyebrows went up. “You know this name?”
“It’s a little world for sons of bitches. I believe that. They get found.”
“You know you ought to go back to New Orleans and forget about it.”
“I know that.”
“But you won’t, you.”
“Probably not.” Sam held the papers up in the yellow glow.
His uncle sat back just out of the lamplight, diminished to an amiable smudge. “Aw, Sam.”
He stood up, holding the papers. “Bon soir, mon oncle.”
***
BREAKFAST WAS AT FIVE-THIRTY, and when Sam sat down Arsène came in with a gap-toothed smile and threw a patched pair of Headlight overalls at him. “Hey, boy, I hear you stayin’ here all day. We gonna get some work outa you, hanh?”
Sam plucked the overalls off his shoulder and looked at them. “Well, the train don’t go back till tomorrow, so I guess you got me.”
Aunt Marie put on the table a plate of rolled flapjacks stacked like cordwood and they grabbed the syrup pitcher and went at it, slathering on butter and pouring coffee. He looked around the table. But for the fact that two of his cousins had gone off, it was as if he’d never left. He imagined what a kitchen table would have been like in that other life, the one that stopped twenty-seven years before in a sideways rain of lead. What father would have sat at the head of the table, what mother, sister, brother, what empty chair promising a future child? And when he thought of all these meals that had not happened, he saw a whole world of life broken, gone. He dropped his fork, and his uncle looked up at his face.
“You all right, you?”
“I’m okay,” he said, looking at no one.
“You don’t have to work with us.”
“I’m all right.” But he knew he looked as though he’d been conversing with ghosts of the unborn. He also felt he had to put something back together, and he had no idea how.
***
THEY STARTED by hitching the mules and running the rattling cultivators through the young cane. After the dew burned off, they sent Sam to the barn to shovel the manure pile into the spreader and haul that out with the mare, Tante Sophie. He covered an acre his uncle intended for late-season tomatoes and then dropped the spreader off at the barn, washed it out with buckets he hand-pumped at the well, and hitched Tante Sophie up to a small plow to turn up another part of the field. By noon he was aching and sunburned, the sun straight over his head and as worrisome as the headlight of an oncoming train. His aunt brought out cornbread and buttermilk and pistolettes stuffed with ham along with a cool pitcher of homemade root beer with slices of lemon floating in it. They sat under the green, heart-shaped leaves of a tallow tree, eating an
d looking out over their work.
Arsène nudged Tee Claude. “I bet Sam’s gonna run all the way to that damn department store when he gets back.”
Tee Claude closed one eye. “How’d you wind up on that dancin’ boat, anyway? I thought you wanted to stay in the city.”
“The department store didn’t want me back.”
Tee Claude had a round, rascal’s face, and when he pursed his lips it grew even rounder. “I read in one of you letters that you’d get you job back if you fount that li’l girl.”
Sam swallowed a wonderful rush of cornbread and buttermilk. “It’s all right. The boat’s paying all right.”
Arsène shook his head. “Damned if I’d live in a big city where they go back on their deals. I’d of threw that evil fils de putain out his office window.”
Sam bit his pistolette and chewed on the comment. “He thought I took too long to find the girl and bring her back.”
“Well, hell, you got her back, didn’t you?”
“I did that. But she changed while she was taken.”
Uncle Claude stuck out his thick legs and crossed his boots. “That age, babies change day by day. Me, I’m not surprised one kid got took and another got brought back.”
“The rich people that stole her taught her things.”
Arsène laughed. “What a pile of cowshit. I wish some rich folks would steal me, yeah. Teach me how to sleep past six o’clock.”
Tee Claude drained his buttermilk and belched. “Who the hell’d steal you?”
“All right, shut your traps,” the old man said. “Time to get after them potato. Sammy, you go bust up some stovewood.”
“How much?”
“Well, the stove ain’t never gonna stop burnin’.”
***
SAM FELL ASLEEP in his chair at supper and woke when everyone began laughing at him, and he thought there was nothing better than a tableful of blood kin laughing at his expense. Nothing better than the chicken gumbo over fat pearls of rice and a tongue-popping potato salad on the side and a mug of hot coffee with fresh cream and three spoons of sugar in it. Nothing better and at the same time nothing sadder.
Everyone on the screened porch was telling stories. Arsène about a train wreck he’d been in. Tee Claude about a fistfight he’d started over a Duvillier girl. Sam about the girl in France he’d shot with a cannon.
“You shot a cannon and hit somebody?” Tee Claude made a terrible face. “What an idiot!”
Sam straightened his back in his rocker. “It was an accident!”
“Mais, who gave you a cannon to shoot with?”
“We just found it.”
Tee Claude shook his head. “Hell, Sam, remember when you couldn’t hit that rat in the outhouse with a rifle.”
Everybody laughed, and Sam stood up. “It was running around and around. You ever try to aim a rifle inside an outhouse?”
Arsène told about a live rabbit in an icebox, and the tales went on toward the deep dark of eight-thirty. Aunt Marie talked about her sister’s operation, how her appendix was the size of a bell pepper and how mad she was when the doctor told her he’d thrown it away. She’d wanted it in a jar, a trophy to show the ladies at the Altar Society meeting. Uncle Claude told about a great-uncle who’d drowned, a man no one had heard of before, and everybody on the porch wanted to know what he was like and what he did with his short life. The old man tried his best at reincarnation and the night ended in stories about other drownings and near-drownings, floods, roof leaks, baptisms, an accordion played in the rain.
***
THE HOUSE WAS EMPTY when Sam got up the next morning. They’d let him sleep out of understanding. All his bones hurt with yester-day’s work, and he winced as he raised a cup of coffee to his mouth. He was packed and standing on the porch when his aunt and cousins came out of the fields to say goodbye.
His uncle rode up from the barn on horseback, and the cousins walked out into the sun and left for the fields.
“Just leave him tied at the station,” Uncle Claude said, getting off. “We’ll get him when we go in for feed this evening.”
“All right.” Sam took a long look at the house.
His uncle waited for his gaze to come around. “You goin’ to look for those people?”
“I think so.”
“And if you find where they at?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well. What you do will say who you are.”
He looked at the dust rising in the road. “I guess so.”
His uncle’s eyes were full of thought. Finally, he said, “The house, it’s still there, all growed up.”
“House?”
“You know. Where it happened. It was cypress all of it, so it’s still there. Six mile away.”
“It’s been there all along and you never told me?”
His uncle dismissed his voice with a wave of his hand. “I found somethin’ else in the cabinet you can have. It’s in a sack on the saddle.”
“What is it?”
“Violon. A fiddle. It belonged to you daddy.”
He looked toward the horse. “Another thing you never told me. I knew there was a fiddle in the cabinet, but I never thought anything about it.” He suddenly felt as if he’d lived a thousand years on this farm, and he turned around, staring.
“It was too sad to tell you what it was.” His uncle looked away and put his hands in his pockets. “He played that thing all the time we grew up. What I think of when I look at it is the music it’s not making. Tu sais ça?”
The sack hung off the pommel like a sad thought. “Oui. Je sais.”
“La seule chose plus triste qu’une chanson triste est aucune chanson du tout.”
Sam put an arm on his uncle’s shoulder, the muscles oakey and warm. “C’est vrai, ça.”
The old man turned his face. “True too much.”
Chapter Thirty-five
IN NEW ORLEANS he relaxed for a few days, played with Christopher, repaired a broken pipe under the bathroom, and went on long walks with the baby and Linda. She asked him to quit the boat several times, but he told her he was afraid to give up a job when he had no other prospects. He didn’t tell her that his playing was much better because he was working with a good group of musicians.
When he got off the train in St. Louis, he found the boat tied up below the Eads Bridge and half the crew down with influenza. The captain, his face compressed with worry, pulled him aside as soon as he stepped off the stage. “Sam, you stay in your cabin and don’t mix in. We’re trying to keep the sickest folks to the back of the boat.”
“All right. How’s Charlie?”
“He had a case in 1918 and says he can’t catch it again. But the cook staff and the café help are knocked down bad.” The captain squeezed his shoulder. “A cabin boy died yesterday, and the day before that, Maude Schull.”
“Big Maude in charge of the linen?” He pictured her going through the cabins, jerking sheets off their flimsy bunks.
“She’d been with us five years.”
“How’s Elsie doing in all this?”
“The captain lowered his voice. “She’s had the fever three days and is out of her head.”
Sam took a step back and looked aft down the rail. “Is there anything I can do for her?”
“You’d best try to keep well. We’ve canceled four days’ worth of trips, and when we start up again we’ll need every hand.”
He watched the captain pull himself up the stairs. Sam remembered the epidemic two or three years before. He’d gotten a skull-cracking case of it himself, but made it through. Six employees at Krine’s weren’t as lucky.
Later that afternoon, he met with the day band and they went over new arrangements, playing them out on the forecastle deck in safe, open air, the music running up the riverbank into town. Two black clarinetists, Will Williams and Louis LaBorde, their forearms resting on a deck rail above, listened and watched. Felton Bicks, the cornetist, called up. “Hey, get your instrument
s and come on down. Teach these sight-readin’ dandies a few licks.” In a few minutes they appeared and everybody started up “Clarinet Marmalade,” and not far in, Sam noticed how the music got set free by the clarinet improvisations. August sat to his right in a deck chair, and when the clarinetists dropped out, he slid right in and embroidered a new edge onto the melody, the rest of the band setting a stage for his wandering sax. Sam was playing on the downstairs upright, which they’d pushed out into the sunshine, and he could feel the band get good and tight as they doubled the song, playing it right out of the end and into the beginning, turning the tune inside out and running it over the water. He looked at August, and the boy was pure music, eyes closed and sax waving like a flag at a parade.
He fell into his bunk at ten o’clock, and Charlie came in and sat in the chair, looking old and tired, his shoulders curled forward. “Lucky, they just brought a cook up the stage plank. He didn’t make it.”
“Who was it?”
“The little Swenson guy.”
“Why didn’t they bring him to the hospital?”
Charlie looked at the palms of his hands. “Nobody thought it was that bad, I guess.” He pulled off his cap and hung it on his knee. “They’re taking out three by ambulance in the morning, though. Unless they improve.”
“How’s Elsie doing?”
“She’s one of the three. Her and a fireman and the purser.”
“I’d better go down and see her.”
“You had the flu yet?”
“Yeah.” He pulled his mate’s cap off a nail and settled it square on his head.
“It’s a bad dose she’s got.”
“I just want to see her a minute.”
He walked toward the rear of the Texas, where most of the women had their cabins. Lily was staying with another waitress farther forward while her mother was ill. He knocked, and Gladys, a ruddy pastry cook from Minnesota, opened the door for him.
“How’s she doing?”
“You just set with her a minute while I get a snack. You’ll get the picture.”
The Missing Page 35