The Missing (38 page)

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 fiddle. “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.

“This is where you lived?” Her voice was respectful, as if in church.

The tree trunks hid the sun, and he shivered. “Until I was six months old.”

“Six months.” She said this slowly, as if tasting the words.

He watched her eyes take in the bullet holes, dime-sized punctures that stippled the front wall, splintered the window frames, door frames. “Those are from bullets.”

She kept looking. “I know what they are. Your mother and father, they were killed here. When you were six months old.”

“And my sister and brother.”

She caught her breath. “Did they catch who did this?”

So even she thought first of revenge, of justice. “No. They lived out their lives.”

She turned to him. “That’s not fair.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. What kind of life do you think they had?”

“What?”

“People who would do this, what kind of life do you think they had?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you’ve got a long time to think about it. I’m going in.”

“It’s scary.” Suddenly her voice was small.

“You can stay out here, then.” He tied the horse to a chinaball sapling and went up the pulpy steps to the porch. He looked inside, tested the floor, and slid a foot into the dim light, the sweet peppery smell of the cypress lumber making his head spin like a compass needle. The wood of the big room bore the brown-silver tint of the outside, but was less weathered. Nothing remained except a big potbellied stove, its pipe a streak of rust on the floor. Walking past without looking at it, he felt a shudder rise through his shoulders, and he quickly stepped into the kitchen, which held only low, warped cabinets and a broken spindle-back chair lying facedown. The window here was intact and outside of it was the tablet where his mother had washed dishes, as did every Frenchwoman in the region in the days before indoor plumbing. The rear bedroom was an empty box and some of the ceiling boards had come down, showing the joists. He passed through a door into the front bedroom, bare but for the dirt caused by newborn daubers breaking free of their mud. Maybe he was born in this room, saw his first dawn in the window, his first lamp flame, and he stood long and thought about what had happened here.

He heard the girl come into the house and he went to her. She turned and saw the bullet holes glowing like electric lights with the winter glare flowing through. She glanced down at the floor, and he was glad that it was dusty.

“This is where it happened?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t remember anything about them at all?”

He turned his head. “Not one second.”

Then she said something that was unusual for her. “I’m really sorry. It’s awful, isn’t it?”

The statement opened a door that had been locked between them, and he walked to where she was standing next to the stove. “I’d say so.”