The Missing

by Tim Gautreaux

  Christopher was a year and a half when Lisette was brought home, and though he looked up to August and tolerated Lily’s bossing, he seemed to sense the blood bond with his sister, and when she was in Sam’s lap, he wanted up on the other knee. When he was two, Sam found him on the bedroom floor, holding one of Lisette’s baby books upside down, pretending to read to her. He motioned for Linda to come out of the kitchen and see.

  “They’re just playing,” Linda said. Then she watched his eyes. “It’s what it’s like between brothers and sisters. It’s what you missed, honey, and now you can see it. All you want.”

  It was a blossoming year for August as well, who earned high marks in a school that was full of musicians, rawboned German kids playing accordions and Italians with their clarinets and drums, and when he was playing in the Sterling orchestra, the other musicians watched him during his solos, his animation and precision building fire under their own notes. He kept getting taller and began smoking cigarettes, but when Sam saw him slip a silver flask into his jacket one evening, he demanded that he hand it over. Though the boy was sullen about it for a few days, there was no rift between them that couldn’t be bridged by the music.

  Lily, though, by her fifth birthday had become an island unto herself. Through her sixth and seventh Sam taught her, treated her as his own, and paid for lessons when it became clear that she was an artist rising beyond what he knew. Sometimes when she was practicing, he would sit beside her and take over the left hand. Another child might have looked up and smiled, scooted closer or moved away to make room, but Lily treated him as if he were an anonymous brown sparrow that had landed on her bench, and she kept her eyes on the music, stretching her growing fingers out to the sharps next to his hand, but never touching him.

  His own children were slobbering babies crawling over him like puppies, and he took his time with them, but they needed no convincing that they were part of his life. Lily went wherever the family went, downtown for doughnuts, to church, out to the lake for a picnic and a swim. She played with the younger children and cared for them, but at any idle moment she would seem to be elsewhere in her thoughts, separate, more like a visiting child than a member of the family. Watching her, Sam would feel a subtle lack of connection. He was making decent money, August was contributing half his salary to the family, and things, he realized, were good for him. Really good. But sometimes when he looked into Lily’s blue eyes, he knew he’d never really found her.

  One night, when she was six, he was reading her a bedtime story and noticed she wasn’t paying attention. “What you thinking about?”

  “My parents.”

  “What about them?”

  “I’m praying for them.” She turned her sharp eyes on him. “Do you pray for your family?”

  He looked away, embarrassed. “You want to finish this story?”

  “I heard it already.” She turned toward the wall, but he knew her eyes were still open.

  ***

  OVER TIME, Sam settled into the rhythms of work and home, his salary covering food, rent, and all the other expenses of a family of six, but there was seldom much left over to place in savings. His life was running in a straight line with no surprises, and he was glad, as he’d had enough of them. Then, in October 1926, Linda handed him a letter postmarked from Lyon, France, addressed in an unassuming scrawl.

  He looked up from his newspaper. “What’s this?”

  His wife shrugged. “It was in with the rest of the mail. Who do you know in France?”

  He tore the letter open and inside were five pages written in sound English, and by the end of the first sentence he knew who it was from and sat straight up in his kitchen chair, holding the pages in both hands. It was signed Amélie Melançon. She was now eighteen and studying to become a teacher. She hadn’t been able to write him before because she’d been displaced for a long time and hadn’t lived at any permanent address until now. She’d stayed in her abandoned village for three months, then moved through a series of orphanage schools that American relief organizations had set up.

  “Who’s it from?” Linda turned from where she was cutting up onions for the noon meal.

  “That little girl I injured in France.”

  “My God. What’s she say?”

  “She wanted to thank me.”

  “For what? Blowing her finger off?” She banged a spoon on the edge of her skillet.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was something I told her? Who knows? Anyway, she seems to be surviving all right.”

  Her sentences were densely packed with both information and feeling, painstakingly composed. He read the letter through three times. Near the end she wrote:

  When I think of that final blast, I marvel that it was followed by a messenger who tried to comfort me. I think often that is the way it ought to be. If each artillery shell had an escort, each bullet, each aerial bomb was followed by a soldier who would arrive and look around and ask “Is everyone all right? How can I help?” then war would not last so long or be so bad. When I look at my right hand today, I could feel sorry to be maimed, but instead I have nine reasons for gratitude. Monsieur Chanceux, if you had not blown apart my house, I might have starved or lost heart. I’ve learned to take the good with the bad and want to thank you again, not for the explosion, but for your wonderful visit.

  That night the boat whistles down on the riverfront moaned through the fog, keeping him awake, so he got out of bed and planned the letter he’d write back. He would tell her how often he’d worried about her over the years, and about how his life had veered so far away from where he thought it would go. He sat there at the kitchen table until one o’clock, then returned to bed and dreamed he was in France again, walking down a frozen road in a feathery snowfall. He came to a plastered house with a thatch roof and left the lane to knock at its door. Amélie answered, still eleven years old, and held out her hand. He took it slowly, his forefinger joining the place where her little finger had been, settling there as if it completed her-then he woke up, startled at her touch still trembling on his skin. He turned on the bedside light.

  “What is it?” Linda said.

  He stared at his right hand and rubbed it with his left. “I was having a dream.”

  She yawned and turned toward him. “What about?”

  He opened his mouth, but he couldn’t turn such a dream into words. Finally he said, “About coming full circle.”

  Chapter Forty-one

  AT EIGHT YEARS OLD, Lily was an indifferent helper around the house, though she watched Christopher and Lisette carefully and worked with Linda in the kitchen without being asked. She would seldom speak with Sam, and when she did answer a question, he felt a subtle edge of resentment bordering everything she told him. She treated him like a landlord more than a father, demanding, for example, that the piano be tuned once every three months, that he hire a tutor for technique she felt she had to know, that he buy new music for her monthly. This pattern of distance might have continued permanently but for two things that happened.

  The first was that Linda demanded that they buy a house, a larger place. In January 1927 after a long search, she found a rambling cypress bungalow two blocks away, four bedrooms, big yards and porches, for two thousand dollars. She had to have it. Among her reasons, Lily had just turned nine and wanted her privacy. Even though they had no savings to speak of and owned nothing that would secure them a loan, Linda wanted that house more than the next gulp of air. She told Sam she could get a few hundred from her folks as a loan and that he should try to borrow something from his uncle.

  The second thing that happened was that Lily was cleaning out mildew from the closets, a chore she undertook once every two months, going over all leather shoes and belts with a cloth soaked in a weak bleach solution, when she happened to open a sack containing a fiddle and a bow.

  That afternoon Sam came in about four o’clock from playing a morning wedding at the Sterling ballroom. Lily sat next to him on the sofa and showed him the fid
dle. “What can you tell me about this?”

  He watched her carefully, checking her eyes for deceit. “It belonged to my daddy. You tune it G-D-A-E.”

  “I know. I tuned it against the piano. Where does your father live?”

  “What?”

  “Your father. I know Linda’s but never met yours.”

  He made a face. Somehow she didn’t know and he became aware of the few links he’d built between them. He put a hand on her blond curls. “He’s not alive anymore.”

  She flicked the E string with a little finger, then brushed away his hand, but not roughly. “Did he teach you about music?”

  “I didn’t know him. He died when I was a baby.”

  She looked at him, her eyes wide. “You didn’t know him at all?”

  “I think I told you about this years ago.”

  “Maybe I wasn’t paying attention.” The way she said this, with a whiff of sarcasm, let him know she couldn’t possibly remember what people had told her years before. “What did you tell me?”

  He was tired and felt a headache coming on. “That at least you had your parents for a few years, and I never had any at all.”

  She gave him a hard look. “I know what I’m missing, then,” she said. “You don’t.”

  That made him angry, and he went into the kitchen to chip a cup of ice and drink a glass of sweet tea and lemon. He’d always considered Lily a fellow orphan and thought they could imagine each other’s pain, but it wasn’t that way. Someone else’s pain is just that. A fiddle note came from the front room, then others. She was playing scales, and in five minutes was testing minors and feeling her way through “Oh! Susanna.” A single double-string drone convinced him it was time to take her to meet Uncle Claude, to show her where he’d come from. He stood in the doorway, sipping his tea, watching. “Bend your wrist,” he told her.

  ***

  THE TRAIN STOPPED on the branch line at Prairie Amer, where they got off and stood out of the chilly wind in the little waiting room, waiting for the bus. The tracks to Troumal had been taken up the year before, but there was a road of sorts and a bus of sorts that rattled down to the village twice a week.

  Lily looked through a station window at the fields of sugarcane, the crossroads store, the handful of cypress buildings. “Is the town we’re going to bigger than this?”

  “Smaller. You’re way out in the country, city girl. Are you afraid?”

  “No.” She watched a cow dreamwalking across a fenced lot. “I like it. It’s different. Quiet.” Her hair was cut short and Linda had sewn her a stylish drop-waist dress.

  The little gray bus crawled down a poorly graveled road and stopped for them. The ride was slow and noisy, the bus creaking down into ruts and stuttering over cattle guards in a way that made the girl laugh.

  His aunt Marie was waiting near the station in a Ford pickup, its wooden bed holding spools of fence wire. “Mon Dieu,” she called out. “Une jolie blonde.”

  “You bought yourself a truck?”

  “Oh, yes. So this is Lily?”

  The girl opened the door and climbed onto the seat, Sam following after. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You ready for supper, you?”

  She looked from one to the other. “I’m more than ready.”

  By the time they got to the house, everyone had come in from the fields and washed up. Uncle Claude pushed open the screen door to greet them. “Eh, Sam, why didn’t you bring the whole bunch?”

  He exchanged a handshake and shoulder slaps. “We’ll do that this summer.”

  “When you called me on the phone I told you bring everbody you want.”

  “Well, I had my reasons for coming alone with the girl.”

  “Yeah, je sais. So she won’t get lost in the shuffle, hanh?”

  “Something like that. I wanted to show her around.”

  His uncle cocked an eyebrow at Lily. “Ain’t much to see, but look all you want.”

  Aunt Marie began herding them inside. “Come on, come on. Wash you hands and both of you can help me set the table.”

  Supper was rabbit stew on rice, drop biscuits, mustard greens, smothered okra, and fried apple pies. Arsène and Tee Claude were at table along with a hand named Beaupré, and they made a game of teaching Lily the funny French words for “bullfrog,” “wet hen,” and “coot.” Afterward, Claude and Sam took glasses of blackberry wine out to the front porch to sit for a minute in the cool weather, the wind having died off.

  “So, Linda found her a house she likes?”

  “She’s set on it for sure.” He looked around the farm, everything showing hard work and wear. The thought of asking for money pained him.

  His uncle told him about his own house, where the lumber had come from, how long it took him to build it with a handsaw and hammer. He listed all the storms it had survived. For Claude, the matter at hand was always surrounded by narrative, placed in a frame of family history. After half an hour, Claude was quiet for a full minute, then asked, “So, combien?”

  He told him how much he could get by with, and his uncle made a face. “Whatever I give you, I’m takin’ away from the boys and Marie. And the farm. That fence wire in the truck? We borrowed money ourselves for more land next to us.”

  “I understand. But it would be a loan. We’d pay you notes.”

  Claude waved the back of his hand at him. “Hey, don’t get all excited. I knew this day was comin’, yeah. I knew you’d need money for enfants or the hospital or a business, someday. When I heard you voice on that telephone, I knew. It’s time, I told myself.”

  “Time for what, Nonc?”

  Claude leaned over and clamped a hand down hard on Sam’s arm and shook it. “To give you your farm.” With his other hand he pulled a folded document from his overalls bib and handed it over. Sam could see in the light falling through the door that it was a deed.

  “What’s this?”

  “Can’t you read?”

  “This is my daddy’s farm?” He stood up, amazed. “I didn’t think he ever owned anything.”

  “Mais yeah. I had it put in you name a long time ago. The tax ain’t nothin’ at all, and I been payin’ it along the way.”

  He held the document out to his uncle. “Why didn’t you tell me?” He remembered sitting on this very porch as a teenager, unable to imagine how anyone could progress to the point of owning anything except clothes and a name.

  “Sammy, I never thought you was no farmer. Didn’t think you’d want to spend you life on that place.”

  He looked at the paper, still holding it in both hands. “How big is it?”

  “Fifty acres.”

  He looked toward the north into the deep dusk, where bats were harvesting insects in the glow above the trees. “How much do you think I can get for it?”

  “It needs clearin’ again. Quick sale, maybe eighteen hundred.”

  He sat down. “Linda will dance on the ceiling when I tell her.” He looked out into the dusk again, in the direction of the property. “Last time I was here you mentioned a house. Is it still there?”

  “Like I said, a cypress house. It’ll never go nowhere.”

  “Can you tell me how to get to it?”

  Claude made a face. “It’s all growed up.”

  “I want to see it.”

  “Well…”

  “And I want the girl to see it with me.”

  His uncle shook his head. “No you don’t.”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “Ain’t no good reason to show a kid that place.” He looked at Sam suspiciously. “What you gonna tell her?”

  “What she needs to know about me.”

  His uncle stared at him a long time, then gave an exaggerated shrug. “I never told you nothing till you was old enough. A child deserves a childhood.”

  Sam folded up the deed and slid it into his shirt pocket. “She’ll understand, this one.”

  ***

  THE NEXT MORNING was very cool when he saddled an old grease-
black gelding and set out after breakfast riding double, Lily behind. They rode cross-country through thousands of acres of cut-over cane field, an ocean of blond stubble. Following Claude’s directions, he found the big cross-ditch and traced it to a plank bridge, and over that they were in the woods. He was glad it was winter, that some of the brush had died back so they could see.

  The girl hung on to his belt and sat back in the saddle, staying balanced and keeping her feet away from the horse as she’d been told. She was quiet during the ride, but once they went among the bare trees, she said, “This doesn’t look like a farm.”

  “Thirty-some years ago it was.”

  She flinched at a branch that slid past his shoulder. “It just looks like nobody’s ever lived here.”

  “Believe me, they did.” Fifteen minutes into the oaks and gum trees, he stopped and sat the horse. “I never came all the way out here, even to hunt. I don’t know where anything is.”

  She looked around him. “Maybe we should get down and walk.”

  They led the horse through a broad, shallow ditch, and on the other side the animal’s hoof clinked and Lily kicked the leaves off a chipped tin washbasin. She looked up at him and he nodded. He knew she was smarter but was surprised that she also had better instincts than he did. They moved on, watching the ground, and soon found an ox yoke, then looked up and saw something two hundred feet away that was the same color as the dun and frostbit woods but arranged in different form, and their brains told them it was the house though their eyes couldn’t yet see it. They walked up and stood in front, and even the horse raised its head and looked, its breath steaming. Frost-scalded vines ran up the sides and wisteria the size of a child’s arm had grown through the open front door, then curved around and grew back out onto the porch as though not liking what it found inside, the dearth of light, the drought. The house was four rooms and from the front porch a steep set of steps rose into an attic. The roof was high-pitched and some of the cypress shingles had taken flight in storms, but as a whole, the structure sat square and sound on its eroded brick piers.