ALL NIGHT the crews dried the skylight roof with a wood-alcohol wash, then wiped, scraped, and repainted it. They turned on every light and washed soot, cinders, tobacco ash, spit, snot, chili, beer, moonshine, popcorn, and chicken salad off of everything, and either repaired the broken furniture or threw it overboard.
Sam got up for breakfast and sat with August in the restaurant for the morning potatoes and eggs.
The boy looked at Sam’s denim shirt and frowned. “You going somewhere?”
“Just want to check out something onshore. Where’s your mother?”
He rolled his eyes. “In bed with the headache. A woman she was waiting on last night didn’t like the food she brought and punched her. Knocked her down.”
“I didn’t hear about that.”
“You hear about the man chased the woman through the firing gallery?”
Sam grabbed a hot biscuit and pulled it apart. “Ah, no.”
“She picked up that hammer we use to bust apart the big coal pieces and laid him out. He was asleep in the coal pile till an hour or so ago. I’ve never seen such people.”
Sam slathered butter on the steaming biscuit. “Well, I’m about to meet some more of them.”
THE TOWN OF BUNG CITY had no automobiles for hire but still supported three liveries. Sam held the reins before a mellow, listing mare and resigned himself to another ride. The animal was long legged and he let her walk up the hill as he read Morris Hightower’s telegram again. He put it back in his pants pocket and surveyed the two blocks of gray storefronts faced with cupped pine boards bleeding nail rust. Behind these sat a line of whitewashed houses faded to the color of wood smoke. The street was full of animals, and his mare stepped on a chick, leaving behind a yellow hoofprint in the hot dust. At the edge of town he went into a swaybacked store to ask where Ferry Road was, and the proprietor took ten minutes to make sure Sam wasn’t a revenuer, bounty hunter, deputy, or Northerner before he answered.
He found the unmarked turn in the cottonwoods that was the start of Ferry Road and several miles later he saw a shiplap-siding farmhouse in the back of a field of green beans. The man at the store had told him that this was where Biff Smally lived. The thought occurred to him that he might have brought a pistol along. He sat the mare and looked for someone in the field. The place had good wire fences, he’d give him that. The roof was of painted iron and the porch had rails. He turned in at the gate and wished himself luck.
Before he could dismount at the front porch, a woman about thirty years old came out. She wore a sunbonnet and was smoking a pipe. “You come to bid on our beans, mister?”
“I was looking for Smally.” He saw twin girls around ten years old come out from behind her to stare at him.
“What for?”
He didn’t know how to explain and just said, “It’s about the new child.”
The woman let out a puff of smoke. She was not unpleasant looking, what he could see of her. She raised a rawboned hand over her eyes and peered to the west. “They’re off in the barn yonder, loadin’ stakes in the dray.” She stepped off the porch, the girls following like ducklings as she walked to the pump.
He touched the animal up and rode to the barn and got down. A man came out and took off his straw hat. “You come about the beans?”
“I ain’t after your beans, Mr. Smally. I’m trying to help some folks find their young child that was taken from them, and I heard one showed up here.”
Smally was a young man and fair skinned for a farmer. “Who told you I brung in a child?”
“A friend in Greenville. I was already in Bung City and decided to see about it.”
Smally threw a thumb over his shoulder. “Well, this here child wasn’t lost from nobody. He come off the orphan train that stopped in town from New York City. You know, they line ’em up on the station platform and you can take your pick.”
“He?”
“Yeah.” He turned to the hayloft and called, “Jacob.”
A dark-eyed boy who looked about seven stepped tentatively up to the loft gate, his head bristling with a two-inch growth.
“When we got him his scalp was buggy, so we had to shave his head.”
Sam touched his chin. “I was looking for a little girl,” he said absently. He looked up at the child. “You doing all right?”
“Yes,” the boy said. “I have my own clothes.”
“All right, you can start throwin’ down those sticks into the dray,” Smally told him. The child backed off into the dark loft. “Where was this little girl took from?”
Sam told him the story, and the farmer listened to all of it patiently. He motioned for Sam to walk over a few yards by a heart-pine corncrib that might have been sitting there for a hundred years. “Unless you foolin’ me, you look like a good feller and I don’t talk to no other kind. My daddy was a peace officer got shot out of the saddle for doin’ the right thing. He raised me to not let the bad stuff go on.” He looked behind him and lowered his voice. “What I’m gettin’ to is that I didn’t fetch that boy off the orphan train myself. A old boy three mile from here you don’t need to know the name of got him off that train some time ago and brought him home like a bought tool and made him chop firewood till doomsday. Beat him when he fell out.” Smally looked right into Sam’s eyes. “At night he’d come get in the bed with the boy and fool with him. His hired man told me that because he saw what was goin’ on.” Smally’s eyes drew up tight, and wrinkles blossomed around his eye sockets. “Men in these parts don’t mess in each other’s business, but we know what’s happenin’ just the same. Most of us work like a pump handle all our lives, hard and hot work all of it, but we never forget those five years or so when we’re kids. When we’re looked after, I guess. Not hurt by our elders unless we do somethin’ to deserve it.” He looked back to the barn, and Sam thought for a moment that Farmer Smally was about to shed tears. “When we’re little shavers we don’t think there’s nothin’ bad in the world, and nothin’ that can make us hurt. If we do get a little pain we kin put our face on our daddy’s shirt or momma’s dress and it’ll go away, sure. I hope that’s what it’s like again after I die.” He turned back. “Them that takes that from children are robbin’ heaven from earth.”
Sam looked up at the barn loft. “How’d you get him away?”
“Some of my neighbors paid that man a visit, and I understand he pulled out a shotgun from behind his door.”
“What’d he say?”
“I don’t know. He don’t say much of nothin’, anymore.”
Sam watched a crow light on the edge of the bean field. “They ran him out of the country?”
“You could say that,” Smally said softly, but in a way that told Sam not to ask further.
He looked over at the rented mare, which was cropping grass by a fence where he’d tied her off. The boy came again to the loft opening and looked out at them. Here was another one with no parents or siblings. “They just give those kids away like calendars at the drugstore?”
Smally turned and followed his gaze. “Yep. Some of ’em go to bad folks all right, but Jacob, he’s safe now. He’ll make a good hand in a few years. He just does chores now. I wouldn’t put a little bitty like that in the field.”
“You say your daddy was the law?”
“He was. Dollar a day and all the trouble you’d want in a lifetime on Saturday night.”
Sam took a breath, and the air came in as heavy as mercury. “When I was a baby, as far as I can tell my whole family was killed by a clan from south Arkansas.”
Smally acted as though he’d heard such news every day. “Your family must of kilt one of them.”
“I guess.”
“All rode down there together and did everbody in, did they?”
“You ever hear of something like that?”
“More’n I like to. There’s no lack of wild clans in this or any other country. There’s even whole families that’ll give humans in general a sorry name. There’s the Kathells and the Blankbulls just to start with. It was Blankbulls killed my daddy.” He shook his head. “The Luthlows specialized in killin’ preachers. But about forty, fifty mile from here’s a bunch by the name of Cloat. They’re worse than worst.” He spat next to his boot. “My daddy used to tell me they thought ridin’ horseback two hundred miles to kill somebody was like goin’ to the state fair. They just lived to get angry. I hadn’t thought about ’em in years, but if you wanted to find a murderin’ bunch from around this part of the world, I’d start with them Cloats.”
“Do they live near a town?”
“Not hardly.”
“How do people find them?”
Smally gave him a long, baleful look. “People don’t.”
RIDING BACK to the boat, he spotted the railroad station, more of a raw pine booth with a semaphore bolted outside and telegraph wires running in through a gnawed hole. He sent a note to agent Morris Hightower at Greenville: THANKS FOR LEAD. CHILD WAS BOY. KEEP EARS OPEN. THANKS. SAM SIMONEAUX.
THE AMBASSADOR’S calliope started up as he was turning in the horse, and by the time he got to the landing Mr. Brandywine was hanging on the roaring whistle. Sam jumped aboard across five feet of muddy water, ran to his cabin for his uniform, and turned out for the one o’clock ride.
He met August coming forward, an alto sax under his arm and a grin on his face. “The captain said I could play this trip.” He had scrubbed the coal dust out of his hair, and Sam turned him around, wondering how he could get so clean.
“Hey, knock ’em dead, kid. The captain payin’ you?”
“I guess not. Experience is like money, he said.”
Sam bit his cheek. “Well, there might be something to that.”
“I’ll have to make up the time I missed in the boiler room, but that’s all right.”
“Captain tell you that too, did he?”
“Did you find out anything about Lily or Dad?”
He shook his head. “I heard about a kid, but it was a boy. You go on and join the band. Keep your ears open. If Mr. Gauge has been drinking, he’ll be slow an eighth beat or so. Don’t get ahead of him and he’ll be your friend for life.”
The boy’s feet were dancing when Sam waved him off, watching him run, trying to remember the last time he’d felt that excitement boiling in his own feet, so happy at fitting in and doing well that the future seemed to promise just one long, ecstatic performance. He went back into his cabin and found Charlie Duggs’s quart of Canadian whiskey, poured a shot into a tall glass and a couple slugs of warm pitcher water on top of that, and took it down like a purge, then had another, rinsed his mouth, and bit a nip of Sen-Sen.
He found the captain walking the restaurant with his hands behind his back, and he went up behind him. “Hi, Cap.”
“Lucky. Glad you made it back.”
“How’d we do last night?”
The captain leaned toward him. “Son, we made the money. It was rough going but those chuckleheads had silver in their overalls.”
“You make enough to give August a couple bucks for playing this trip?”
The captain pulled back, then studied the deck as though checking the quality of its varnish. “He ought to pay me. I’m training him.”
Sam took a breath. “To do what? Be a slave?”
Captain Stewart let a waiter breeze by. “I have to watch every nickel, you know that.” He hazarded a glance at Sam’s face to see what he thought of this statement, and after a moment threw up his hands. “Damn it, all right. You’re holding me up, but I’ll slip him something. Now check out the main-deck lounge.”
Sam gently pinched the captain’s left lapel between thumb and forefinger. “He’ll tell me what you gave him.”
“I said all right. You trying to make me feel like a crook?”
THEY TOOK on a flat of new coal better than the last, and after the sober church excursion the Ambassador escaped Bung City running on a full bell upriver toward Memphis. Plowing through the afternoon, the old boat followed the channel in Mrs. Benton’s brain, working hard through Sunflower Cutoff, then around Island Number Sixty-three, and fighting upbound for Miller’s Point. The riverside was all of it a grit-banked lowland of bleached sandbars and willow brakes too flood-prone even for wild animals, land passed over by early explorers and Indians alike, who knew it for the dangerous fen that it was. Meanwhile, the crew waxed the monstrous dance floor and hung new broad-striped material under the skylight roof. At dusk Mrs. Benton pulled the whistle ring, letting it slide out of her fingers. Sam heard the short whoop and intercepted the porter bringing up a cup of coffee. He found her in one of her thin, dark dresses, sending a half-speed bell to the engine room and squinting over the breast board to starboard.
“Gonna cross the channel?” he asked.
She didn’t turn around. “Captain demote you?”
“Elsie was just curious about when we’d get into Memphis.”
“Captain Stewart thinks this stretch can be run in jig time, but the water’s down a little. Can’t take a chance with this old chicken coop.”
He watched her read the water’s surface, saw her steer the boat away from lines of ripples. When, after five minutes, she turned to him, he handed her the mug of coffee.
“Y’all hear from Ted?”
“We’re hopin’ he’ll show up next stop.”
“And you didn’t hear anything about his little girl?”
He shook his head, and she turned back to the river. “Maybe Ted’s found out something,” he said, desperate for a cheerful statement.
Mrs. Benton squinted and pressed a hip against a steering lever. “It’s a terrible thing to lose one of your own. That way, especially.” She took a long swallow of coffee. “When they pass away from us, we believe they’ve gone somewhere good, don’t you know? But the way little Lily’s gone, you hate to think about it.”
He moved up beside her and studied the long shadows arrowing from the west bank. The deep water she was following was in her fingertips, for it all looked the same to him. “I’m doing the best I can.”
“Are you?”
He met her glance. “I lost a boychild myself. I kind of know what people go through.”
“Sickness?”
“Yes.”
“I lost two to scarlet fever and one to diphtheria.”
“Good lord, I’m sorry…”
She gave him a sharp glance. “It’s not a contest, you know, to see who’s got it hardest. Everybody’s got it hard. If they don’t, they’re not alive.” She drained her cup and swung it out to him, hitting him in the chest.
“Were they young?”
“Old enough that every time I walk into a kitchen, they’re at the table.” She threw the levers over to cross the river and reached up to pull the whistle cord. “Dead or alive, they never go away. But if I had a living child out there I couldn’t get my hands on, it’d drive me crazy.”
THE BOAT PADDLED in to Memphis the next morning in time to board two thousand Masons lined up on the levee for the eleven o’clock ride. As soon as the Ambassador bumped the dock, the advance man leapt aboard with bills, a few pieces of mail, and several telegrams, and when Sam came down he saw Elsie standing at the forecastle rail opening a note. Her mouth slowly fell open as he walked up.
“What is it?”
“It’s Ted. He’s up the hill in the hospital.”
He looked down on a group of rousters struggling to place the balky stage. “Let’s find the captain and lay off the eleven o’clock. You want to take August?”
She began to tear up. “Oh, I don’t think so. We don’t know how badly he’s hurt.”
They walked up into the city through the hot morning and found the hospital, a broad marble-faced building roamed by smells of ether and alcohol. They found Ted in a small, stuffy room on the fourth floor. He was bruised all over and didn’t answer Elsie when she touched his shoulder and said his name. Sam had seen a survivor of a boiler explosion once, and he’d looked like the bandaged form lying crookedly on the thin bed.
Ted didn’t even turn his head to speak. “I’ve been here since yesterday,” he told them, his voice like a dry hinge. “They cut on me twice and set the bones in my hand.” He held up a mittenlike bandage with three drain tubes snaking out of it.
Elsie kissed him on the small patch of unbruised skin below his nose. Sam took in the bandages, the casts, the wormlike black rubber tubes. The Skadlocks hadn’t seemed the type to hurt a man this badly, but he’d misjudged them.
Ted explained what had happened, as much as he could remember. Looking at a long drain leading into a bottle on the floor, Sam thought of riding again to the Skadlocks’ place.
For all of Ted’s trouble he had found out nothing. He’d called his relatives in Cincinnati that morning, and as soon as he could travel he would go to his aunt’s. The doctors told him his left hand might regain strength, but it would take a year and a long regimen of exercises.
Elsie placed a hand on the bandage covering his forehead. “August and I, we’ll go with you.”
Ted shook his head, and it cost him to do so. “No. You both need to work and save every penny. I’ve run up a bill here, and I pay my bills. You know that.” He turned his head again to bring Sam into view. “I want to talk to you alone for a minute.”
“Ted?” Elsie put a hand on his arm.
“Go on. It’ll just take a minute.”
When she closed the door behind her, Ted asked for a drink of water. Sam helped him with the glass straw swinging in the hospital tumbler. “Lucky, I’ve been thinking. I have to talk to you about Elsie.”
“What about her?”
“I know you’ll keep an eye on her for me, won’t you? I mean, she’s very good-looking, don’t you think so?”
“Hey, I better not answer that one.”
He coughed and Sam helped him take another sip of water. “Sam, I know you miss your missus, and Elsie will miss me. She’ll be lonely.”
Sam placed the glass on a side table. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
“Lucky, she’s comfortable around you. She relies on you. I don’t want to make you angry about this, but I know how things go sometimes.”
“I told you. You don’t need to worry about me.” But as he said this, he knew why Ted was concerned.
“Lucky, you know the way she looks all dressed up.” Ted rolled his eyes upward. “I know how I’d feel about her if I was some other man. You’re not being honest if you tell me you don’t find her attractive.”
“Now, look-”
“You don’t have to say anything.” He tried to raise his right hand, then realized that arm was in a cast. “I’m asking you to watch yourself is all. Try to think of her as your sister, I guess. Remember you’re a married man.”
“All right.”
“Don’t get close to her, Lucky. And for God’s sake, if the captain lets her sing with the band, don’t watch her.”
“All right.” He knew Ted didn’t trust him, and he looked away toward the window.
“Don’t get sore. You’re helping us with our little girl. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that. You’re better at finding than I am. Look at me, busted up like a run-over dog. I won’t be able to turn a nickel for a year. You think a woman wants to put up with that?” His eyes began to fill. “What if they can’t fix this hand? I won’t be able to work.”
“Those Yankee doctors’ll fix it.”
“But if they don’t?”
“Just tell her, and she’ll help you figure it out.”
“Tell me what?” Elsie swept into the room along with an orderly.
“How to hit a high note,” Sam told her, edging past into the echoing hall.