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.
August seemed confused. “You think he’s shaking down the Whites?”
“They’re shaking down somebody. Why else would they take her again?” He looked around and lowered his voice. “When they first made off with your sister, the old woman took care of her. They need that Vessy woman to do the same.”
“The Whites are as much at fault as anybody,” the boy mumbled.
“More. And you just think about that.”
August jerked his head sideways. “You think they’re going to deliver her?”
“Where, and to who, that’s the question. I know it won’t be in Kentucky. Ralph’s liable there, even though the Whites probably won’t risk setting the law on him.”
“It could be anywhere.”
“I don’t know about that. Let’s ride back to Zeneau and hang around the store, maybe find something out by accident.” He stood and looked up at the sky. “Come on.”
The boy remained on the ground, sitting cross-legged. “Lucky, I’m sorry.”
Sam studied a cumulus shaped like a horse, a blue hole about where the heart would be. “So far, there’s nothing to be sorry about.”
DOUBLED UP on Garde Ça and backtracking north, they spent the afternoon losing and finding the trail in the vine-tortured gullies. For a whole hour, the mule stood like a steaming boulder in the middle of a washout for no reason they could discern. They dismounted and sat on the ground, watching him shake off flies.
The sun was low in the sky when they broke out of the woods and rode up the one street that was Zeneau. At the store they greeted the same old men and chatted their ears off until they rose one at a time and went home for supper. Sam bought two bottles of soda and pigs’ feet wrapped in wax paper, and they lounged on the front landing, eating and looking around at the board-and-batten buildings as if they’d grown up in this sorry place and knew every tick-haunted dog under every porch in town.
The storekeeper came out shortly before sundown and padlocked an iron bar across the slantboard doors. “You boys goin’ to ride the station truck out tomorrow?”
Sam took a draw of soda. “If the driver’ll let us and we can sell the mule.”
“They’s no place to take a room here. If you want, spend the night up on these cotton bales like the boy done before. Just don’t smoke if you do.”
“All right. Does that deputy make rounds?”
The storekeeper put on his fedora. “When he’s chasin’ his tail. He won’t bother you.”
“Drinks a bit?”
“A bit.”
“His cousin keep him supplied?”
“You know Ralph?”
“We’re not exactly friends, but I’ve dealt with him.”
“I’m sorry for you.”
Sam was waiting for such a signal. “Seen his old mom lately?”
The man put a hand against a post. “She comes in town maybe four times a year, loads up two horses, and heads back south. I was kind of expectin’ her last week when the weather wasn’t so hot.” He spat and looked them over. “You didn’t get down as far as the old house?”
“We did. Nobody was there.”
“The hell you say. I saw ’em all, even Billsy, plus a woman and some little cousin’s child. They rode down there four, five days ago.”
Sam turned his head toward August. “We didn’t stay around there long. When’s the last time you saw the old woman?”
“Like I said. Maybe three, four months.” He hitched his baggy pants up over his belly and cinched his belt.
“You see her pass through here last year with her little niece a second time? Comin’ out?”
“Cousin’s child,” the storekeeper said. “Told me later it was her cousin’s child from over in Arkansas. Pretty kid to spring out of that bunch.”
“Where were they going from here?”
The storekeeper shrugged and seemed aggravated. “This is last year, and they was headed north to Woodgulch. There’s a train there, as you know.”
THEY SMEARED themselves with citronella, Sam slapping it in his armpits and on the backs of his hands.
The boy watched, then took the offered bottle.
“Damned if I don’t smell like a sardine,” Sam said, climbing up on the third layer of bales on the broad front porch. He stretched out under the roof tin, listening to it pop in the cooling air.
August lay against the board wall down below. “They’ll take Lily right past here, won’t they, Lucky?”
“Only way to the rest of the world.”
“And meet the Whites in Woodgulch?”
“If I had to bet.”
“And we won’t be able to do a thing about it.”
He tried to focus on a red-wasp nest a few feet above his head, a dim copper disk promising pain. “Now you gonna kill the Whites?”
A single pained word-“Don’t”-drifted up from the darkness of the porch. It sounded like the last plea he would make as a child in this life.
“All right. It’s all right. I’ll try to figure something out.”
Sam tried to sleep, and did, but was awakened by a dim flash on the Louisiana side of the river followed a long time later by a low stumble of sound, a thunderstorm walking toward them on legs of lightning. He wondered how the girl was doing with her third set of caretakers and thought about when he was four, remembering nothing at all, neither face nor hurt or anything else, which maybe was a blessing. The next day they would go to Woodgulch and wait in sight of the little tall-windowed railroad station. Wait for what he wasn’t exactly sure, but maybe the Whites would show, arriving on the wobbly train and leaving on the return half an hour later. But what could he and the boy do to the Whites? Take the girl away and ride along with them back to Baton Rouge on the same train? Try to get the law to help? Woodgulch was a Mississippi county seat, where the high sheriff had his office, the man who probably let the Skadlocks sell whiskey and steal whatever they wanted, who hired Ralph Skadlock’s second cousin as the Zeneau deputy. There was no chance anyone there would believe two outlanders.
At daylight Sam woke and found the boy grim-faced and sitting with his arms crossed next to the locked door, his legs stretched out toward the west. When the storekeeper unlocked the building, he went in and sold the dew-rusted shotgun for a dollar less than he’d paid for it. Sam bought a tin of Vienna sausages and one of peaches in syrup. They went outside and sat on the porch like useless vagrants of a century before, hanging around to await some accident of good fortune. After he finished eating, Sam counted his money.
“You can sell the mule for something,” the boy told him.
“The old fellow told me he wouldn’t take him back. Said it cost money to hang on to it and that the ten-dollar bill I gave him didn’t eat. If I keep the animal, I’ll keep the tack.”
“Where’s that station you were talking about?”
“Woodgulch. Maybe ten miles.”
“We could ride there in two hours.”
“Let’s see.” He walked into the aromatic store and offered the animal and tack to the storekeeper, who laughed at him. Back out on the porch he looked down at August, who sat slumped against a post pulling apart a wad of cotton. “Let’s ride.”
They went out back and saddled Garde Ça and got on. The mule stood like a piano bench. They remained still on his back, waiting. Sam dropped the reins on the animal’s neck and crossed his arms. After five minutes, Garde Ça looked back at them, then began a drunken walk to the road, where he paused, looked both ways, and turned right toward Woodgulch. After a while, Sam picked up the reins and said, “Dépêchetoi, lambin,” and the mule evened its gait, his ears turning like ventilators on a ship’s deck.
They met five automobiles on the way to Woodgulch. Sam looked carefully at the faces in the machines, and some stared back at his rudeness. He watched the road in the distance as well, and suddenly he pulled the bit sharply to the right and they rode off a hundred yards into a stand of cypresses.
“Stay here,” he told August, sliding off. Stooping in a berry patch, he watched Billsy ride by on a small horse the color of axle grease. He was wearing a new tan fedora and glossy boots.
“What?” the boy asked, when Sam remounted.
“Skadlock’s brother. I’m not sure what that means.”
“He’s probably bringing news.”
“What kind of news?” He turned the animal’s head.
“I don’t know.”
When they got back on the road, he said, “News?”