Authors: Tim Gautreaux
Sam looked out into the field and the mule looked back, rolling his ears forward. “I rode a mule like him to school.”
The horse trader spat out the side of his mouth. “This one’ll take you to school, all right.”
They got a rain-hard saddle out of the barn, and Sam asked for a thick blanket when he saw it. He cinched it on, leaning against the animal while he worked, rubbing the mule over before clipping a cloth saddlebag on the back. The roller-mouthpiece bridle he passed slowly over the ears, which stayed relaxed, though the mule looked at him carefully. Sam talked to the animal and patted him. “You got a crupper for this saddle?”
“Naw. I got a old double rig in there somewheres if you’re scared of that one.” He motioned to his brokeback barn.
“Let me see something.” He walked to the fence and got a length of mildewed plowline hanging there and tied one end to the saddle horn and walked around behind the mule to the other side, pulling the rope and rolling it up the animal’s legs and quarters. The mule watched him but barely moved a hoof. Then he took the line off and put it back on the fence. He mounted up and started the mule off in a straight line, turned him, backed him, and made him trot a bit. Getting off, he left the reins on the ground and walked away. The mule looked at the gate and back at Sam, but didn’t move.
Sam climbed on the fence. “What’s wrong with him, then?”
“A man can’t get in that animal’s head. Some you can beat, some you can treat, but that one don’t respond to neither. To be fair, he’s done good for me, but everybody else tells me he’ll stop sometime and might as well be a stump. Worse, he’ll keep going even if you pull his head off. Just won’t stop for nothing.”
“Does he have good wind?”
“Oh, hell, yes. He’ll climb a tree and yodel at the top, but that might not be what you told him to do.”
“How much?”
“Ten dollars.” He spat. “Eleven if you bring him back.”
“How about the tack?”
“Now that’s worth money. That stuff’ll listen to you. I want it all back, and you leave me a ten-dollar deposit.”
“What’s his name?”
“Gasser. That’s what was wrote on the bill of sale I got. Came from over the river in Pointe Coupee Parish.”
They shook on it, and Sam rode the animal back to the store for a sack of food, a canteen, matches, oil of citronella, and a straw hat with a curled brim. He also bought a box of Quaker Oats. Starting out toward the south, he noticed Gasser’s gait was rough when he hurried him along. He slowed him to a walk, and the mule grew soft footed. Then he bumped him up with his heels, and the hard gait returned. “Damned if you don’t trot like you’re runnin’ on crutches.” In ten minutes they entered the trees at a fast walk.
The country south of the Skadlocks’ was a mix of dry and submerged cypress swamp, but this higher northern route showed hardwoods mixed with longleaf pine, the terrain choppy and bent as a run-over washboard. He was two miles south of Zeneau when the forest closed in completely, and the mule stalled against a wall of tallow trees and briars, refusing to budge. He turned the animal around and found a hogback ridge which he followed for a quarter-mile until it came to a point at a gulch full of fallen timber. He sat the animal and looked down into the tangle. Turning the mule again, he backtracked and crossed to the next ridge and rode along it until it also petered out, so he reversed tracks again, sidling west until he found a ridge that sloped down gradually into a mudbottom gorge. He tapped Gasser’s flanks to go down, but he just stood there looking from side to side. “Git up.” After half a minute the animal sidestepped to the bottom and walked south in a narrow ditch full of mudballs washed out of the ridges. Sam dodged vines as big as a man’s arm, and after a mile of riding in what felt like a long grave, he tried to urge the mule up a slope onto high land, but he just stopped and drank the opaque water.
“Aw, get up!” The mule continued to drink. He popped him with the reins and found himself carried along the ravine, still in its bottom. Reining to the side made the mule jam to a stop, sideways, his nose in the moss on one side, his rump imbedded in dirt on the other. He cursed the animal for a full minute and then straightened him out and waited in the slow moving current. He kicked his ribs and called out every command he knew, every curse and animal insult, finally resorting to the French of his childhood, calling him a maudit fils de putain, at which the mule rolled his ears back all the way, though he didn’t budge. Sam noticed the ears and thought a moment, sucking a tooth. “En avant!” he yelled, and the mule picked up his head and walked forward. Sam raised his hands and let them drop. “Eh bien, un mulet qui parle français!” The animal picked up speed, as if what he’d heard made him comfortable with the work at hand. Sam decided to give the mule his head and let him figure the woods out for himself. The light began to fade and he played with the name “Gasser,” trying to understand where that might have come from. Finally, he called out “Garde ça!” and the animal gave a jump and picked up his step, bobbing his head. “Garde ça!” Sam said again, remembering that every village had a garde ça, an old rascal who sat in front of a store begging tobacco and telling dirty jokes. “Regardez ça!” the women would exclaim, shaking their heads. “Look at that.”
* * *
GARDE ÇA dug up a slope and got on top of a wooded promontory, where he stopped. Neither French nor English would get him going, so finally Sam dismounted and pulled on the bridle. The animal refused to take a step and bent to taste a weed. It was then he saw it, a wink of tin next to his brogan, and he looked out at the woods, knowing what it was before he picked it up: the can with the image of the red devil on its side. He called the boy’s name, his voice broken by the matrix of vines and trees. Putting his head down, he listened but heard only the mule’s rotary crunching.
He mounted and rode through a clattering brake of wild magnolias, then into a cloud of honeysuckle, and after a mile the mule again stopped dead for a long time, where the ridge started to descend. A good rein-whipping had no effect. He looked over the animal’s ears trying to imagine what he saw in the mat of pigweed woven with generations of wisteria and poison oak. He began to suspect a snake and got down to study the woods floor, then looked up to scan the trees for signs of a wildcat. He hoped they weren’t near a bear’s den, and the thought of a flying comb of claws made him tug on the mule’s bridle. “Allons!”
The mule closed his eyes and grew as still as a statue. Sam stepped back to give the bridle a jerk—to tear it off the sticker-matted head, if need be—and then he put his foot on something that was not solid ground. He looked behind him and jounced a bit, as if testing a gangplank for soundness, and the whole surface for fifty feet around moved up and down like a taut waxed tarpaulin. He dropped the reins, took another step, and his leg went through into nothing. Scrambling back to the mule’s hooves, he understood that a section of the ridge had washed out, leaving the forest floor of vines and leaves suspended over a chasm underneath. Both of them could have been killed had they tried to cross. Turning Garde Ça around, he opened a burlap pack and took out a round box of oats, feeding half of them to the mule in tribute.
Backtracking, he turned south down a trail of sorts. Near dark, Garde Ça stopped and looked off to his left. Sam listened to a hot breeze stir the tops of a line of sycamores, and in the distance saw a watchman crow give three caws and flit off a pine top like ink slung from a pen. Under him, the mule seemed to be holding his breath. Then he heard two metallic clicks and turned his head, knowing that hammers had been drawn back and fingers were tightening on the triggers. A dart of orange fire blasted out of the brush and the mule stood on his hind legs, braying. Sam slid behind the saddle and hung on until the forelegs slammed back down, then Garde Ça bucked and he arced over the long ears, impacting the trail like a mortar round. He lay there, his lungs flattened, his mouth open as if to ask why all the air had been sucked out of the world.
August stepped out of the brush while reloading a mottled double-barrel shotgun. “I want you to catch your animal and get back out of here.”
He tried to say something for a long time. His shoulder felt knocked out of its socket, and pinwheels of white fire spun through his vision. He wanted to say “Bastard!” but knew that wasn’t right, and that “Son of a bitch!” was even less true, so when he got a bit of wind he said, “I’m tryin’ to help, you fool.”
August stood over him, expressionless. “You can’t even help yourself.”
“Put up that gun. I didn’t come out here to hurt you.”
“I wasn’t sure who you were, exactly.” He brushed his hair out of his mosquito-stung face.
“Come on and pull this arm. It’s just out of its socket a little.”
August propped the shotgun against a sapling and grabbed Sam’s left hand. “You want me to yank on it?”
“Just turn it right when I tell you.” He took one breath, then another.
“Now?”
He nodded and cried out when the shoulder popped back in. “Damn it to hell!”
The boy took up his gun and stood in the trail. “Now you can ride.” He pointed down the trail to the mule, who stood sideways to the track, eating bright-green leaves of marsh alder.
“What you expect to do, boy?”
August’s face was still a child’s, but his eyes were fixed like a hawk’s. “I’m going to kill Mr. Ralph Skadlock, at the very least.”
Sam sawed his left arm gingerly, looking up at the boy, trying to figure how to reason with him. “I think you’ve heard this before, yeah, but if you do that, you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”
“I’ve got plenty to regret already, don’t you think?” He helped Sam to his feet.
“I’m not going anywhere. You mother told me to get you back safe.”
“Nobody’s stopping me.”
“One of the Skadlocks will put the brakes on you.”
August turned his back and walked off into the brush, and Sam tried to remember what he’d felt like at fifteen, when he’d already made up his mind to leave his uncle’s farm. Nothing would have changed his mind from the one thing it had focused on. He suspected such single-mindedness was both the best and the worst thing about youth.
Sam retrieved the mule and followed the boy to where he’d been building a campfire.
THE THREE OF THEM had arrived at the big house two nights before. Ralph was standing in the yard next to his brother, staring up at the roof.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Billsy said.
“You carry them shingles up to the window for her?”
“No. I guess she found ’em in the yard.” Billsy tilted his head like a dog. “She damn sure knows how to patch. Look how she’s lappin’ ’em.”
Vessy was on the roof in a worn pair of corduroys, copper nails stitching her mouth as she swung the hammer lightly to keep from splitting shingles.
Ralph nodded. “Makes me dizzy just watchin’ her.”
The men stood in the yard a long time. Now and then Vessy would call to the dormer window, and the child would put three or four shingles on the ledge.
“This one a whore?”
“Nope, just some kind of housemaid or cook.”
“How long you gonna let her hang around?”
Ralph spat. “Till we get rid of the kid.”
“I ain’t never seen a woman on a roof before. Not wearin’ pants, anyways.”
“You ready to hit the road?”
“I guess. You still want me to go all the way to New Orleans?”
“And use a coin phone to call Acy at night. I decided he better bring the money to us in Woodgulch.”
“What if he says he won’t pay?”
“Oh, he’ll pay, all right. I’ll keep that little girl and make a card-sharp out of her.”
“She’s bright as a cap pistol, all right.”
Ralph looked over at the tangle of trash woods behind the house. “We got to keep an eye out from now on.”
Billsy looked up in awe at the woman on the roof. “Breakfast was terrible good. I never knowed you could do that with cornbread.”
* * *
HE TOLD the boy to smear himself with citronella oil. They ate cheese and a potato roasted on the coals and said nothing for a long time until August looked at him over the flames, his eyes catching fire.
“Charlie Duggs told me about you.”
“That right? I hope it was an interesting story.”
“He said your whole family was murdered and you never even tried to find out who did it.”
“I think that must be the most interesting thing Charlie ever heard in his life. He never quits telling people about it.”
The boy’s face glowed with sullen disgust. “Well, why don’t you look them up?”
“Maybe I don’t want them to complete the job.”
“I’m not joking. Don’t you take anything to heart?”
“I take plenty to heart, you little shit. I was six months old when it happened. I never even knew anybody I lost.”
“That’s pretty heartless.”
Sam looked away from the fire, from the disturbing eyes. “My uncle told me it was in other hands.”
August tossed a stick onto the fire. “Other hands? You know, the Bible teaches justice along with everything else. Sam Simoneaux, you’re just a coward with all sorts of excuses, and your uncle’s next to worthless for not setting things right for your father. All he taught you is excuses.”
Sam stared at his feet, then turned his head sideways. “Maybe.”
“Tell me. You remember your father’s hands on you?”
He settled back against a fallen loblolly and looked up at the fire-coppered limbs. “I told you, I was a baby.”
“When I was old enough to make a chord on a piano, my father started teaching me. He’d sit behind me and tap my shoulders with his fingers, sort of playing the notes on me while I played them on the piano. I knew if I was lazy and delaying a note, or if I was rushing a run out of time. His fingers guided me in the rhythm, see. When I started the sax, he did the same thing, tapping out an improvised beat, hearing where I was going with the melody and telling me where I should go, where not. It was like he was passing himself into me through those fingers.” He looked up, and his eyes were yellow mirrors. “You can’t know what it’s like never to have that again.”
“Your old man made a good musician out of you. He wouldn’t want you to waste it.”
“I’m not wasting a damn thing.”
“You’re about to. When one of those Skadlocks knocks you down with a rifle bullet tomorrow, where will all that music learning be then? Dead as your smart-ass little carcass.”
“Skadlock’s just a hillbilly rummy. I can sneak up on him like I waylaid you.”
“Good lord, August. I’m a department-store floorwalker. These people live waiting to get waylaid. They’re not three miles from here, I’d bet, and probably can smell the smoke from the pine knots you built the fire with. Maybe even see the smoke. I wouldn’t be surprised if they step out into the light right now and do us in.”
August gazed to his left into the dark and smiled. “I don’t think they’re as sharp as you think.”
“Listen. If you believe you know more about hurting people than they do, go back to town and talk to some of the locals.”
“I’ll do what I need to.”
“Boy, this doesn’t have a thing to do with your father. You just want to think of yourself as important. A show-off is all you are.”
The boy stood up and grabbed the old shotgun by the barrels. “Take that back.”
“That’s what revenge is, kid. You’d like to think you’re going to help your mamma or provide justice for the world, but you really just want to kill somebody to make yourself feel big.”
“That Ralph Skadlock might kill someone else.”
“I got news for you. I don’t know for a fact that he’s ever killed anybody. He didn’t kill your father, either. Ted got an infection in a Cincinnati hospital and died of blood poisoning.”
August’s face convulsed. “He wouldn’t have been there if it hadn’t been for Skadlock,” he yelled, his eyes welling with tears.
“If Skadlock wanted him dead he’d of killed him out here and thrown him in the river with a sack of bricks tied to his neck. You’re not thinking straight.”
“It’s not right,” he cried. “If people don’t get what they deserve for killing somebody, it’s just not right.”
“I agree with you. But trying to shoot ’em up with a six-dollar shotgun ain’t the way to do it.”
“It feels right to me.”
“Feeling’s got nothing to do with it. But what’s true does have something to do with it. The truth is, your daddy never taught you to go out and gun anybody down. He taught you to make music for the rest of your life.”
August sat in the dirt next to the fire and let his hand slide down the shotgun. “Just shut up.”
“After you sprinkle Skadlock with that Parker, what’ll you do about his brother?”
“He has a brother?”
“And a mother, who I’m pretty sure is never more than three feet from a pocket pistol. They run a still back in there, and I’ve never seen moonshiners who didn’t have more guns than a hardware store.”
He looked over when he heard a sniff and saw the tears shining down August’s face. “Lucky, for a second I thought I believed you, but just as soon as I did I could feel my father’s hands on my shoulder. I’ve got to make it right.”
Sam nodded once. The matter was past arguing that night. When someone is struck, the first mindless impulse is to strike back. After reflection, sometimes that impulse fades. He knew the boy needed time to calm the notion of revenge. Or an alternative. “August,” he began, “once those people see you armed on their place, they’re going to protect themselves. They’ll hurt you real bad, maybe even kill you, because you’ve made them believe they have to. I’m not going to bring that news to your mother. No way in hell. If you’ll just listen to me, maybe there’s a way we can capture Skadlock and bring him to the law in Zeneau.”
The boy lay the shotgun down on a blanket before the fire and stretched out next to it, his hand on the walnut wrist. “I already talked to the deputy.”
This surprised him. “The hell you say.”
“Yeah. He’s Ralph Skadlock’s second cousin.”
That night he lay on a mound of leaves listening to spiders grinding away in the weeds. His arm and shoulder seemed to glow with dull pain. Sometime in the night he fingered citronella into his ears to scent out the keening mosquitoes. He dozed when the fire burned down, but soon woke up imagining how the boy would blunder onto the homesite full of confidence and catch lead like an animal drawn to a baited field. Nobody should let this happen to a child, even one big enough to be a man and already smarter than most. August still lived in the one-dimensional world where he couldn’t understand how the irreversible can happen, drawing your final breath or watching someone else do it. In the morning he’d do what needed to be done, even if it meant the boy would need stitches or to have a bone set. First thing, he’d break the shotgun to pieces.
* * *
AT DAWN the temperature came up and the trees began to tick with dew, a glossy magnolia leaf dripping into his face and waking him. The boy was gone. He sat up and whirled around but saw only the hobbled mule, staring at him knowingly. He brushed off his shirt, stretched out his arm, which hurt worse than the night before, and saddled Garde Ça, reining him out onto the narrow ridge. The lead-colored sky revealed nothing of the time, and he stared up as he rode, trying to figure out how long past daylight he’d slept and wondering if the boy was dead yet. The mule shambled along, shaking his head as though Sam had started the whole series of sad events that would end with Elsie’s losing the only child she had left.
Inexplicably, he came to a straight, one-lane gravel road running east-west. He sat the mule in the middle trying to comprehend this connection to the known world. Then he crossed over and continued south through the woods. In less than an hour the trail ran parallel to the mile-wide river, and he knew he was close when the mule’s hoof clanked down on the lip of an inverted sugar vat, a huge cast-iron kettle shaped like his wartime helmet. In a collapsed shed he saw a litter of dove-colored shingles covering two other kettles, remnants of a batterie where slaves boiled sugarcane juice down to blackstrap. He reined into the marsh alder and cattails here, knowing the house was perhaps a mile or less away. When they reached the tree line the going was easier, and he turned south and stopped, keeping the animal’s head up so he wouldn’t pull and grind grass. Garde Ça’s breathing calmed, and he listened. To the southwest a steam towboat was making a racket, fighting upstream in the high river, and the covering noise allowed him to move through the brush up to the house. He tied the mule off and went on foot until he could see the dark planks of the belvedere rise above the willow saplings. Passing through the graveyard, he crept along until he spotted the fawn cloth of August’s vest. The boy slowly turned his face as if expecting him, and Sam dropped down on his knees, water seeping through to his skin. Sixty yards or so in front of them was the board walkway that ran between the kitchen and the big house, and a woman stepped out of a door, gathered a small bundle of shingles, and walked back in.
“You don’t want to do this,” he whispered.
The boy fixed his wounded eyes on him. “You don’t know what I want.”
“What are you planning to do?”
“I saw him walk into the house. The split second he comes out again, he’s a dead man.”
“You’ll be nothing more than a murderer. You can think you’re a musician all you want to, but for the rest of your life you’ll look back on this here with nothing but shame.” Sam saw that the hammers were drawn, the boy’s fingers set on both triggers, and he imagined the buck and roar, the stink of smoke and the twin pattern of coarse shot splintering apart the door frame and anyone in it.
“I’m no murderer,” August said, his voice trembling. “I’m getting even for my father.”
With a glance Sam saw there was no way he could wrest the ten-gauge away without it discharging. “Look,” he whispered, “Skadlock’s maybe fifty years old. He smokes, he drinks rotgut, God knows what kind of women he goes with.” Sam scanned the rear of the house, deperate to think of the right thing to say. “He drinks cistern water full of bugs. He probably won’t be around another five or six years. You won’t be taking much from him, and you’ll be giving up a whole lot more.”
“Just shut up,” August hissed.
“And down the line, when he does die, he’ll have to pay up then. I don’t know what will happen, exactly, but it probably ain’t good.”
“I don’t care about that stuff.”
“Well, you’d better care, because when you die you’ll have to answer for this. You might not believe that, either, but consider if you’re wrong, boy. Consider if you’re wrong. And you know what else? Whatever you say about Ralph Skadlock, he let your father live after he came here against him with a pistol and knife.” He kept his eyes on the door frame, praying for it to stay empty. “Another thing, I’ll bet Skadlock never hid in a bush and killed another man.” Watching the boy’s eyes, he saw something there that made him go on. “Believe me. You’re not doing this for the reason you think you are.”
August turned to him as though he’d suddenly appeared out of thin air, then looked back at the house and down at the shotgun. The plum-brown hammers reared back like snake heads, but he let down the left and then the right, and lowered the gun, defeat he didn’t understand showing on his face.
At that moment the side door to the big house squalled on its hinges and Ralph Skadlock stepped through, carrying a child on his right arm as his boot heels knocked along the walkway. The steamboat blew its whistle, and he stopped and pointed in that direction. When the child turned its head to look, both Sam and August could see who she was.
After the kitchen door closed behind them, Sam laid a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s back off a little.” The boy’s face contorted toward crying, and Sam pulled him along.
They found the mule and led him north along the tree line, then turned into a blackberry thicket and stopped. The boy was mortified, unable to speak, but Sam finally got him to look up.
“I almost—”
Sam took him by the shoulders. “Shut up. Knock that out of your head.”
“She would’ve—”
He pushed him, and the boy fell in a heap. “You can beat yourself up later. Right now we got to think about this from every angle.”
He tramped down a flat spot and they sat and ate crackers out of the saddlebags, washing them down with coppery water from the canteen. They talked a long time and sweated in the noon sun, trying to understand what Lily was doing here. Sam kept after the boy with questions, not letting him think about what he’d almost done. After nearly an hour, they decided it was all about transit. Skadlock hadn’t taken her out of loneliness, and the cook wasn’t running off to start an instant family in the hulking mansion. Given what he’d seen in the graveyard, Sam guessed the old woman was dead.