The Missing (33 page)

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 and 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.”

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 instruments 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 room was warm and smelled of sickness. Elsie lay on the bottom bunk, and he took the small chair between it and the sink. Even in the light of the dim bulb he could see that her complexion was dark. She breathed hard, her mouth open, and when he reached to her forehead, the fever scorched his palm. She opened her eyes and coughed, rivers moving in her chest. “Lucky,” she said breathlessly. “Can you help watch the kids till I get better?”

It broke his heart to see her like this, and he remembered her in the spotlight onstage, all beauty and talent and music. “That won’t be a problem, girl.”

Her head rolled away from him. “Hell of a mess.”

“You’ll be all right.”

“I guess this is one thing I can’t blame on you.”

He looked at the enameled deck. “You seen August?”

“He just left. I don’t want him in here too long.”

“He’s getting better with his horn every day.”

She seemed desperate for breath. A crescent of blood glowed in her right nostril. “If I can’t work this season.” She stopped and swallowed. “The only one who’ll take Lily is Ted’s brother.”

“You better rest.”

“No. Ted’s brother is a saloonkeeper. Bad, bad temper, Lucky. It’ll be terrible for the kids.”

He waited for her to go on, but she was completely exhausted and her eyes had drifted closed. A big tow went by the little window, the boat’s mast light winking like a shooting star, and the Ambassador started to rock slightly. After a few minutes he stood up, unsure of what to do, and in the dim room her voice came, all the music out of it.

“His name’s Bruton.”

He bent down over her face, appalled by what the sickness had done. “Who?”

“Don’t let him have them, Lucky,” she gasped.

“Okay,” he whispered.

Her eyelids parted like dark wounds. “Don’t let him have them.”

“Go to sleep.” He touched her forehead again, where the skin was as warm as a lamp shade. Glancing around the room, he searched for anything that might distract her from the suffering.

Suddenly, she arched her back and cried out, as from a dream, “It’s all your fault.”

* * *

HE WAITED at the rail outside her door until Gladys returned, and then he watched the river, still broken with the passing of the last boat, shattered like his feelings. He wondered if there was a physics to one’s mistakes, a chain of reactions that ran away toward infinity like waves or a sounding whistle chasing along a watercourse for miles and miles. And what could he do but make right his mistakes when he could, or unable to do that, catch some other fellow’s mistake and fix it? Across the river one of the last packet boats serving St. Louis rang its deck bell, the heavy notes skating across the water and up the sloped and cobbled bank into the city. He watched it leave, and then Gladys came out carrying a pail.

“What time will the ambulance come for her?”

“They said daybreak.”

“Will all three of them fit into it?”

She was walking away to the stern, but stopped and turned to him. “Two. The fireman’s done crossed over.”

* * *

THE NEXT MORNING started off warm and humid. The mates and kitchen staff still able to work disinfected the café, mopping everything down with bleach. The ambulance came and left while Sam was swabbing under the tables. Later, he went down to the bandstand and began playing the piano. August walked in with his hands in his pockets. He was letting his hair grow and it was oiled back out of his way and tucked over his pale ears.

Lily dawdled behind him, her face still four years old, oblivious, carrying a coloring book folded over a single-row box of crayons. She opened it on a table and pulled the chair out with both hands, then kneeled on its seat to begin coloring. “I don’t have a brown,” she complained.

“Use black,” Sam told her.

August leaned against the piano. “Lucky,” he whispered, “what do you think about Mom?”

“I think she should’ve gone to the hospital a couple days ago.”

“I know. I’m scared.”

The statement froze his fingers, and he put his hands in his lap. “You saying your prayers?”

“I’ve been praying for two days straight.”

Sam closed his eyes a moment. He wasn’t August’s father, and the Wellers weren’t his responsibility. He would help Elsie as far as he could, but ultimately that wouldn’t amount to much. “You want me to go up the hill with you to see her?”

He shook his head. “I’m scared I’ll catch it and give it to Lily. The cabin boy that died wasn’t but twelve years old, and strong as a country ox.”

“Zach?”

“Yes.”

“That’s kind of scary, all right. Scary as hell.”

“The captain says we won’t go anywhere for ten days, and that’s if nobody else comes down hard with it.”

“Good practice time, sounds like.”

August sat down on the bench beside him, facing away from the keyboard. “I don’t want Lily to wind up with Uncle Bruton.” He looked over at his sister. “I’ll kidnap her myself if it comes to that.”

“Your mom’s a tough lady. She’ll pull through.”

“God, I hope so.” He slumped forward and closed his eyes.

Sam tried to remember if he had ever been that worried. When he thought of the sickness that took his first child, the baby’s trembling eyelids, his blue lips, he knew that he had.

“You go on and take a walk. Get your mind on something else.”

August stood up. “Can you watch her?”

“Well, I guess so.”

He walked forward toward the main stairs and Lily saw him go, then turned to Sam, a crayon bearing down on a page. “I’m hungry.”

The piano key cover snapped down like a fact. “Let’s get you a sandwich in the café.”

“It smells bad.” She pinched her nose.

“That smell is medicine to get rid of the sickness.”

“It always smells bad.”

He took her by the hand, which was sticky and soot-smudged. “We’ll wash our hands and go get a sandwich.”

“I don’t want to wash my hands.”

“Come on and let me show you how it’s done.”

* * *

BEFORE SUPPER, they left Lily with Gladys and walked to the hospital, and at the main desk, when they asked to see Elsie, the receptionist called someone on the phone. When they saw a tall nurse walk down the hall toward them, a woman with iron-gray hair and a solemn stride, when they looked at her eyes and the way she held her hands, one over another in front, when they saw her face, a face good at telling the worst, they knew Elsie was dead.

August collapsed in a chair and covered his face with his hands. Sam spoke with the nurse for a few moments, then stood staring down the long hall after her retreating steps. He remembered visiting Elsie sick in bed, and that was hard enough. He didn’t want to see her now. When he asked August if he wanted to, the boy trembled and shook his head.

“I’m scared.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No, I don’t want to.”

For himself, he chose to remember her in a close-fitting gown the color of pearl, bouncing the notes of “Painting the Clouds with Sunshine” as the hundreds on the dance floor quick-stepped and the river breeze streamed through the windows and the shoreline moved past like the dreary real thing it was, the thing made of smokestacks and shabby houses and overworked souls, all gilded by Elsie’s gliding voice, her flash of blond hair, the spark of hard work showing in her song, in her eyes. He wanted to dwell in the remembering, but he was obliged instead to turn to August and pull him out of the chair. “I’m sorry, Gussie. Cry all you want.” And the boy did, against Sam’s cheap second-mate coat. After a while he walked him down the echoing hallway, trying hard to think of something to say, and in the entry, he pulled him aside and told him, “Never forget that you had her for fifteen years. A lot of kids never had anything like those fifteen years.”

Captain Stewart paid the expenses for the body to be shipped to Cincinnati. Sam went up with August and Lily, who had cried a little without understanding why. After the burial Mass, there was a family meeting, some shouting on August’s part, bitter accusations and dismissals from Ted’s brothers, quiet resignation from Elsie’s aged parents, and the result was that when Lucky got off the train days later, broke and hungry in St. Louis’s grand station, August stepped off behind him, Lily asleep in his arms.

* * *

IN MID-JUNE the boat was far north of Hannibal playing an isolated town, a place of machine shops and foundries stretching up the mountainside. The afternoon crowds were mostly families of running and screaming children, and Sam had to keep an eye on Lily to make sure she wasn’t knocked down a stairway. He played piano for the two o’clock and convinced her to sit beside him on the bench and turn pages, though he knew the music, and it didn’t matter if she turned two pages at once. Sometimes she wandered away in the middle of a song, and he’d have to play looking over his shoulder, and one time when she’d wandered out among the dancers and gotten bumped to the floor, he had to stop playing and charge out to drag her back up onto the bandstand as she bawled and rubbed her calf.

For the night trip, the boat filled up with local men and their women. Sam worked the stage plank asking for weapons and surveying the crowd. The men were all muscle from working ten-hour shifts wrestling cylinder heads and piston rods, but only two surrendered anything, a jackknife and a dollar pistol. The ones who strutted onto the dance deck either took seats at tables or leaned against the bulkheads, all of them staring grimly at the band. When Sam came up and looked around, the hair rose on his neck. The crowd stared as if they’d never seen Negroes holding anything other than a shovel or a wrench. He guessed they hadn’t heard much jazz and distrusted any music that didn’t sound like the conventional tunes played on their Victrolas. The orchestra was playing a grinding rendition of “Sud Bustin’ Blues,” and no one was dancing. It wasn’t clear that anyone knew how.

He walked over to the trumpeter when the piece was over. “Hey, we got a boatload of rubes tonight,” he said, his back to the floor. “Can you do your hotel stuff?”

The man nodded, wiped his face with a voluminous white handkerchief, and scanned the crowd. “They don’t look like no dance club, do they?”