Authors: Tim Gautreaux
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 began 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.”
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.
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 decided 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.
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.”