“Stranger.”
“Why’nt you kilt him?”
“My rifle stovepiped another shell on me.” He looked back at Sam’s pistol. “This here’s Daddy Molton.”
“My guts burn.”
“You want water?”
“I’m afeared.”
“He says he ain’t gonna kill nobody.”
“What’s he want, then?”
“He come up askin’ about Uncle Jimmy.”
Molton tried to turn his head, but after two small jerks gave up. “Jimmy was kilt.”
“He knows that,” Box said impatiently.
“So what’s he want?”
Box looked at Sam and squinted.
“I want to know what you did about it.” Sam tried to control his voice, to filter all the disgust out of it.
“Did?” This time the head managed to turn. “Jimmy was the smartest one in the whole family. Could do numbers in his head. Could read and write like a schoolmaster. He was a travelin’ businessman. When somebody kilt him, we got word. We went ridin’.”
“My uncle told me you shot through the house two hundred times,” Sam hollered.
The head rose off the pillow, its spidered eyes glowing. “I won’t gonna risk gettin’ another of us dead.”
Sam placed his pistol behind Box’s ear. “You killed my daddy, mamma, brother, and sister.”
The elder Cloat took a gulp of air and said calmly, “I was there.”
“You old bastard. Your brother was a stupid drunk jerking the head off a good horse. My father gave him a little jolt with a switch and he fell off and hit his head on a step. My daddy never meant to kill him.”
“But he died anyways.”
“And you killed a whole family for it?”
Molton tried to speak, but began coughing. Sam hoped he might have said something that bore a hint of regret. When the words did finally roll out on a string of red phlegm, he said, “Appears I missed one.”
Box closed his eyes. “Daddy.”
Sam’s grip tightened on the Colt. The veins in his neck felt full of lead. “How many of you were there?”
“We was nine.”
“Where are they?”
“What?”
“Where are they?” he yelled.
“Lemme die in peace.”
“Batch, Slug, Grill, and Percy-were they there?”
“They was along but done gone on.” He drew up his legs and began to whine. “It hurts. Hurts like hellfire. Leave me be, damn you.”
“Who else? That’s only six.”
“Box, call me that woman.”
“Who else?”
“All right, damn it. Sim, my other brother; Loganthal, who used to run with us; and that woman’s daddy, Payette.”
“I want to talk to them.”
“That’d be kindly hard. They dead,” the old man groaned. “Dead,” he said again, as though the word were a delicacy to be enjoyed a long time.
“You’re lying.”
“Sim was kilt by the Rayville posse, strung up from the railroad trestle. Payette got on opium and died two year before he stopped breathin’.”
“What happened to the one called Loganthal?”
Molton squeezed his eyes shut. “I couldn’t say.”
Sam looked at Box, who shifted his gaze away and said, “I don’t rightly recall myself, but he’s dead as dirt, that’s for sure. Ease up on that grip, won’t you?”
Sam pushed Box onto the bed and a rancid stink rose from the blanket. “Tell me how he died.”
“I don’t know how to call it,” Box said.
“Was it a disease?”
“Won’t no disease. He started not talkin’ and about a year after that we’d hear him jabberin’ in the night. All night. Then he commenced hollering out of nightmares and Daddy like to went over and shut him up a bunch of times good. His woman lit out.”
A voice rose from the bed. “Then he shook for two year.”
“He what?”
“Like they was a rattlesnake in his bed. Like he seen the end and didn’t like it none. Now leave me be.”
“There wasn’t anybody else?”
“Nine of us,” Molton whispered. “By God, can’t you hear?”
“There wasn’t a Skadlock there?”
“Skadlock,” the man said slowly. “I knew that batch. Little steal-in’ folks. Not cut out for the big show. Stupid. Spent more on makin’ their liquor than they could get for it, most times. Ah, blazes, here come another.” He gritted his few yellow teeth, his lips drawn back, the enamel grinding, ric-ric.
In the yard the woman threw something into the pen, and the hog grunted like fleshbound thunder.
“I want to know one more thing,” Sam said.
“Aw.”
“Did you see them dead?”
Molton gasped a breath. “Yeah.”
“What’d they look like?” He put the gun down at his side, and Box remained still.
“Look like? They was dead.”
“I want a picture. If you give me a picture, I’ll leave you alone.”
“Box’ll tell you. I’m give out.”
“I stayed with the horses, Daddy.”
“Tell me.”
One eye opened. “Then you’ll clear the hell out?”
“Tell me.”
The voice now was low, fired with a deep, anxious rasp. “They died all at once. Nobody was movin’ when we got in.”
“Go on.”
“The woman was on her stomach and the girl was under her left arm.”
“What color was their hair?”
“Damn it to hell, I can’t recollect that. Don’t you know?”
He got down on his knees and put the pistol on the edge of the blanket. “You’ve got to understand. That’s why I’m here. I never saw my mamma’s hair.”
Molton looked him in the eye. “It was brown,” he said. “Clean. And so was the little girl’s.”
“Where was the boy?”
“Agin the back door.”
“How was he dressed?”
The old man wet his lips. “I remember that. He had him on a new bandanna. A slug passed through it and broke his neck.” He looked up and focused. “He went quick, too, that one. Hardly any blood.”
“Broadcloth?”
“Striped broadcloth. We saw the loom out back.”
“My father?”
“He was the one we come to get.”
“Were you drinking?”
“Well, hell, yes. And I don’t guess we thought he was in there with nobody.”
“Where was he?”
He writhed. “I checked his damn eyeballs to make sure that one was dead. I remember he was startin’ to bald. Ain’t that picture enough for you?”
“Where was my father?”
“Dead agin the stove. We pulled him under a light, seen he was finished, then we rode off.” His eyes blinked and watered with the pain of telling.
Sam stood up and looked around at the filth in the room, at the walleyed son. He lowered the hammer on the pistol, knowing there was nothing he need do. The hog under the window, angry and wheezing, bumped against the house as if it wanted in for more slops.
“Where was you?” Molton asked, staring up now into Sam’s face.
He looked down at him and smiled.
“We saw a son-of-a-bitchin’ dog and heard a cat somewheres, but we didn’t see no baby. Where was you?”
He slipped the pistol into the hollow of his back. “I was somewhere biding my time. I didn’t know it, but I was already on my way to meet you.”
“Won’t worth the trip, was it?”
Sam’s eyes went from one man to the other. “I wouldn’t take a million dollars for it.”
Suddenly, the black hog scrabbled up against the house and put its hooves on the windowsill, its monstrous head filling the frame over the old man’s body. Sam backed away as Box gave it a punch in the snout, and it fell back with a splash.
The old man bega
n to shiver. “Great day, don’t let him get me.”
Box wiped his hand on the blanket. “Shit, Daddy, he’s just a huntin’ slops.”
“Is that feller left yit?”
“Naw.”
Molton’s head turned toward the center of the room. “You think I’m goin’ to hell, don’t you?”
“I don’t know where you’re goin’. You already put yourself and others through a ton of hell.”
“I say I ain’t goin’ no place.”
Sam turned for the door. “Well, you’ll find out.”
The old man’s voice came out as a growl. “There ain’t nothing to find out.”
Sam stopped at the door and looked back into the room. “That’s the one thing nobody can avoid. One way or the other, when you die, there’s always something to find out.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
HE STOOD BEFORE the husk of Babe Cloat, still sitting in the yard like an effigy of his clan. “So long,” he called.
“Twelve of ’em,” Babe Cloat said, his eyes vacant. “And a boat.”
At the edge of the compound he turned and looked back. The Indian woman shuffled toward Molton’s shack, dragging a blanket through the dust. Within a year or two the houses would be eaten by weeds and insects. An inevitable flood would reclaim the drift lumber and wash clean the land of any sign. What would last, as some believed, would be the long mystical tally of terrible acts done by loveless hearts. He watched a long time, confirmed in his belief that punishing the Cloats would be a waste of good revenge, if that quality could ever be called good. He found the horse and mounted, riding west without a backward glance.
***
HE FIGURED he could make it back to Soner’s place by dark, and on the way he did visitation, examining the details he’d found out about his family until like seeds they began to sprout memories he never had, or would’ve had, and he was glad of that. “Anything more than nothing,” he said to the constable’s mare, “is something.”
***
HE WAS PUTTING the horse up when Soner came out with a lantern.
“Are you hurt?”
“Nope.”
The constable stared at him. “Then you didn’t find them.”
“Oh, I found them, all right.”
He raised the lantern high so Sam could replace the saddle on its board. “Then you must have killed them all, because I don’t see a bullet hole in you anywhere.”
“There’s not but one whole man back in there, and he’s about blind. Will be soon. You can start unloading your gun collection.”
Soner studied Sam’s face as if suspecting a lie. “You didn’t find the ones who killed your family?”
“Two of them were there.”
“You’re a fool if they’re still alive.”
“Well, then.”
Soner put down the lantern. “Come in and tell me about it. I’d appreciate it if you could spend another night.”
“I guess I’d appreciate it myself.” They began walking across the lot. Sam felt a lightness in his arms, as though finally he’d put down a weight he’d been carrying for years. Suddenly he stopped and turned toward Soner. “Say, did I catch sight of a piano in the front room, left of the stairs?”
“Yes. It was my wife’s. It hasn’t been played in years.”
“Fix me a sip of something, and I’ll let you hear some real music.”
He opened the door and motioned Sam in ahead of him. “Why, that’ll be fine. You’ll want a bite of food, too.”
Soner lit the table lamp and the men sat and talked over bread and ham and the contents of an old jug of wine.
When they were finished, he asked, “What brand of piano is it?”
“I forget, but it’s a good one. My wife…” his voice trailed off.
Sam stood up and stretched. “Let’s take a look, then.”
And later that night, a boy out on horseback could have seen all the constable’s windows yellow with light high up, where they weren’t boarded. He could’ve taken in the tinkling of an out-of-tune piano as if it were his first sip of fine bourbon. A little girl wandering home late from berry picking could have heard the music and wished she had a piano and the time to learn it. A husband and wife could have been passing through on a journey, lingering there to listen and grateful for the pianist’s fine technique. A murderer crouching in the wind-rattled weeds could have been distracted from his plans, envious of the good time.
Within an hour, the men were singing, their voices wavering and sailing across the empty land. It was something to hear, this sound of profound release. But out in that darkness, nobody heard, and this vacancy would go on forever, a painful void Sam would feel later that night as he came out onto the porch, emptiness falling like a schoolboy’s rock into the well of his heart.
***
THE NEXT MORNING he left the holstered pistol on the bed upstairs, had breakfast with Soner, then drove back to Helena. After turning in the muddy Ford, he walked down to the wharfboat. No upbound steamer was expected that day, and from his splintered desk inside the freight house door the agent asked him where he was going.
“Memphis.”
“And after that?”
“New Orleans.”
“Well, hell, the Kate Adams is makin’ a New Orleans run. Why don’t you take her all the way down?”
He looked out toward the river and noticed a big wooden crate outside on the dock. “All in all, the train ride’ll be quicker.”
“The America might stop northbound tonight, if it don’t sink from old age first.”
Sam cocked his head. “Wasn’t that crate here when I got off the other day?”
“Yes, by damn. The lady ordered it didn’t come get it when she should, and it rained before she finally did show up with a dray. Said she didn’t want no piano been left out in a thunderstorm.”
“A piano. What’ll happen to it?”
“The shipper’s insurance already paid off. The agent sent me a wire to sell it for sixty bucks, but hell, I don’t have no way to sell it, and I ain’t about to drag it inside my warehouse. They’ll probably send me a note in a month to ship it off somewheres.”
Sam pointed behind the agent. “Let me see your little crowbar there.” He walked over and read the shipping label. The piano was a high-grade Knabe. He pried up one of the top planks and saw a full upright sheathed in heavy waxed paper, and the little rip he made in the covering showed a golden oak veneer. He banged the board back in place and ran his hand carefully over the rough-cut poplar case.
That afternoon found him standing on the forecastle of the Kate Adams as the sidewheeler huffed southbound. Behind him was the new Knabe, and he fought the urge to uncrate it and play right there in the open afternoon. He stayed out until they passed Island Sixty-five, the domain of the infirm and mind-darkened Cloats. He stared at the river-thrown sand and twisted willow brakes, trying to imagine how those people came to be. He thought about it until sundown and he could come to grips with snakebite, random illness, war, lightning strikes, and the death of loved ones, but the Cloats remained for him a mystery. Then he remembered what Constable Soner had said two nights before: the worst thing that ever happened to them was each other.
Chapter Forty
BY EARLY NOVEMBER he had gotten a steady, contracted job playing downtown in the orchestra of the Hotel Sterling. The Sterling was an impressive venue, and its ballroom showed off the plasterwork of a Viennese opera house across its high ceilings. By the end of the month he managed to get August hired to play three nights a week for the supper-and-dance crowd until eleven o’clock, and each day after school they spent an hour going over new music, learning the grand sound of a sixteen-piece group playing tight fox-trot and one-step rhythms for the city’s smart dancers. During the first month, August had written quick and playful alto-sax duets into a dozen existing arrangements that earned the respect of the other musicians. Sam noticed a change in his own playing during the first two months at the Sterling, and de
cided it was working with August that made his fingers limber, his timing more on the mark.
He encouraged Lily to sing, but whatever spark she’d had for that was gone. She willingly played simple tunes on the oak Knabe every day, and he half expected to come home and find her working patiently through a more complicated fox-trot. What he did hear as he was coming up the walk one afternoon was a simple Chopin waltz. The piano bench had come loaded with a beginner’s set of classical music, and Lily treated the pages as her private treasure. The simplest Bach pieces soon began coming together under her fingers. When August pointed out the classical structure of piano rags, she started to practice a few basic ones, and “Dill Pickles” mixed with the first Bach Two-Part Invention in her morning sessions.
One day in mid-February of 1923 he handed Linda an envelope full of five-dollar bills for the month’s household expenses, and she took it and pressed it against her stomach.
“You might have to start including an extra fiver.”
“How’s that?”
“I’m pregnant.”
He pulled her close. “You can have whatever I’ve got.”
“I know.”
“Don’t worry about anything. We’re doing swell.”
Lily walked in leading wobbly Christopher by the hand and looked up at them. “Why’re you hugging?”
He put a hand on top of her braided hair. “You’re going to get a new sister or brother, kiddo.”
She gave them each in turn a distant look, then dropped Christopher’s hand and walked out of the room without a word.
“So, it’s like that,” Linda said. “It’s going to take years.”
He stepped back and looked into the other room, where Lily sat holding a doll on the piano bench. It was an old doll dressed in seersucker. “She’s ours now.”
“She might understand it, but she doesn’t feel it. You of all people should know.”
“What?”
“Can you speak German to her? Are you a cheerleader for smart and funny music who can make her love singing so much she couldn’t imagine doing anything else?”
***
LATE SUMMER of 1923 saw the birth of Lisette, fair-skinned with a healthy shock of fine black hair. Because he was home now, he could hold the child every morning and watch her blossom day by day through the subtle changes: the strengthening of her eyes, the discovery of her own fingers. He had missed much of this with Christopher, and giving her her afternoon bottle was a daily marker that made him feel even more of a father. He bought a camera and recorded the first smiles, the first time she chose a toy and grabbed it up, and as he reviewed the photographs taken over the spread of months, he was always surprised at where she’d started and how much she’d changed.
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