WOODGULCH WAS A TOWN of seventy buildings, the hub of small farms and two mills that made window frames and nail kegs. There was a brick courthouse surrounded by graded red lanes and the usual small businesses. They rode down the main street to the station, Sam feeling dumb and disconnected from the rest of the world as he tied the mule to a catalpa. It was three-thirty. He was nobody here.
August went in and used the restroom for a long time and came out and looked at him as if to say, “Now what?” His face and neck were red where he had scrubbed off the dirt and sweat. “You don’t know a soul around here, do you?”
“I’m thinking.”
“Nobody we can trust.”
“A connection,” he said. “We need a connection. Time to talk to the connection man.”
He found the station agent copying waybills, a youngish fellow with an untrimmed mustache who was quick with his pencil. “Can I help you?” he said.
“What’s the name of the local sheriff?”
He came over to the window and looked at Sam’s clothes and unshaven face. “Kyle Tabors.”
“I might need to talk with him about something.”
“You might?” The agent narrowed his eyes.
“Is he a pretty good fella?”
“Who are you, bud? I saw you come through the other day, but I ain’t seen you around here before.”
He told him his name and where he was from as patiently as he could stand to do it.
The agent looked him over again. “If you want to find out about the sheriff, I recommend you walk down the street and ask him.” He returned to his desk and sat amid the clutter of hand stamps and bundles of paper stuck on hooks.
“I just need a little information.”
“Sorry. I don’t know you.”
He walked out on the platform and the boy was laid out on the bench. He looked down the street to where the old idlers of the town sat on the low retaining wall at the edge of the courthouse lawn. He looked down the tracks lined by telegraph wire drooping between poles as if weighted with information and commerce. The lines made him remember the Greenville telegrapher, and he went back in.
“Hey.”
The agent looked up from a desk. “Sir?” The word was strained.
“Do you know Morris Hightower?”
He rolled back in his chair and returned to the window. “Yep. Do you?”
“I do. And he knows I’m looking for a little kidnapped girl, helping out her parents. You could telegraph him about me.”
“We get some Greenville freight back in here from time to time, and he contacts me about it. Sends Morse like a mouse runnin’ on tin. I used to take train orders from him in Jackson.” He put a pad and pencil on the little counter. “Write your name here and come back in a few minutes.” The agent opened his telegraph key and began sending an even stream of dots and dashes.
Outside, the mule was rolling the bit with his great tongue, so he sent the boy down the street with Garde Ça in tow to find water, telling him to wait at the station when he returned. By the time Sam went back inside, the agent was waiting at the window.
“You’re a pretty lucky man.”
He glanced out the door after the boy. “I’ve been told that.”
“Lucky we found him on shift, and lucky the dispatcher handled the relay up to Greenville. Have you found the baby?”
“I have. But I need a good lawman to help me.”
“Well, you know how the law is.” The agent sucked a tooth and studied him. “I’d suggest you go talk to Sheriff Tabors. I don’t know him that well, but I think he’s all right.” He bobbed his head. “You don’t believe me?”
“Why’d he hire that drunk down at Zeneau?”
“What? Nelson Watty? Oh, he’s all right. Just sick is all. He don’t make thirty dollars a month but he stays in that little box of an office and collects taxes and signs permits for folks. It’s not like they’s a lot to choose from in Zeneau.”
Sam looked up at the Seth Thomas clock. “What time does the passenger train come in?”
“The tri-weekly you rode in on yourself comes in at two-thirty more or less. It goes back about three. Took off a few minutes early today.”
He looked out into the dusty street and saw August stop a gray-bearded gentleman, who pointed down a side lane. “You see that boy with me?”
“Yes.”
“When he comes back, will you keep an eye on him?”
“As much as I can.”
“Well, here I go.”
HE HAD TO WAIT for the sheriff. He stood in the hall and watched the lawyers clop in from the broiling street onto the hardwood and take the stairs to the courtroom. A policeman hauled in a handcuffed vagrant and brought him past Sam to a heavy door and shoved him through it. In the rear of the building he heard the clang of cell doors and drunken hollering. He hoped he wasn’t making a mistake, that Tabors wasn’t a fat rummy who liked the taste of Skadlock whiskey. Or just a mean local who hated outlanders, or Catholics, or people from Louisiana, or Cajuns, or anybody not born inside the county.
The sheriff came in at four o’clock, and Sam stood up. He was in his early forties and wearing a suit and vest of no mean quality, a big star pinned under his right lapel. His blond hair was freshly trimmed, as was the mustache that ran straight across his face, as straight as his teeth.
“You look like you’re waiting for me.”
“I am.”
“Been rabbit hunting, have you?”
Sam looked down at his pants. “It’s a long story.”
“Well, come in, then, and have a seat.”
The walls of the office were cream-painted beaded board that ran floor to ceiling. A photograph of a woman unconscious of her good looks rested on the oak desk next to a box of pistol ammunition.
There are important starting points in serious conversations, and he paused a long moment to figure out the best way to begin. “Do you know Ralph Skadlock?”
The sheriff didn’t blink. “Who are you?”
He patiently explained who he was, where he was raised, why he’d lost his job as floorwalker in New Orleans, how he’d been looking for a child named Lily while working on an excursion boat.
When he finished, the sheriff nodded. “All right, Mr. Simoneaux. As for Skadlock, I know of him, but I can’t do a thing about him.”
“You say that as though five people a week ask you to.”
“That’s about right. Including my mother-in-law. That place he lives on is probably in Louisiana. We are presently, as you realize, in Mississippi.”
Sam looked down at his dusty shoes and then up at the sheriff, who’d gotten up to take off his coat. He wore a tooled gunbelt and holstered on it was a Colt New Service revolver with pearl grips. “Nice gun.”
He sat down again. “Me and all the deputies switched to forty-fives last year. Our old thirty-eights wouldn’t shoot through car doors. Times are changing.”
Sam looked at Tabors’ eyes, wondering if he could trust him. Ultimately, he had no other choice, and had to take a leap of faith. “Well, that ought to solve that problem for you. Let’s see if you can do something about mine.”
“Let’s have it.” Then the sheriff did something that convinced Sam that he’d made the right decision. He pulled a pad in front of him and held a sharpened pencil at the ready.
It took ten minutes to explain the history between the Skadlocks and Acy White, the death of Ted Weller, and why he believed the child would be exchanged in Woodgulch.
The sheriff took notes all along, and after Sam finished, he sat back. “Son, you probably realize this already, but one crime was committed in Louisiana and the other in Kentucky. My jurisdiction is only this poor little Mississipppi county. Do you think they’ll trade money for the child at the station?”
“I don’t know.”
“If they did, I’d have reason to arrest everybody and wire for warrants from the other places. That is, if the child recognizes you.”
“She’ll know her brother.”
The sheriff put down his pencil. “She better. I can’t turn her over otherwise.”
“You’re telling me a four-year-old has to convince you of who she belongs to?”
The sheriff pulled the box of pistol shells toward him and placed it in a desk drawer. “Seems like she’s the one with the most to lose.”
Sam smiled. “Well, I guess that’s fair.”
The sheriff leaned back and pulled a folder from a different drawer, his body movement suggesting that the meeting was over. “What do you do on the excursion boat?”
“I play piano and bang around the rowdies when I’m not.”
“I like piano music and have a player piano at home. I took music appreciation, two courses worth, in college.”
“College? Where at?”
“Rutgers. On weekends I went into New York for the revues and plays. There’s a lot of music in that town.”
“Why’d you come back? Family?”
“Not really. I just came back because it’s so bad around here.” He gave Sam a smile and motioned to the door. “Come Friday we’ll help you out.”
HE FOUND THE BOY at the station and together they walked to a two-dollar-a-night hotel on Batson Street, a mildew-smelling place with tall windows covered with storm-belled screens, bathroom down the hall, and an old man somewhere on the third floor coughing deep and long. They cleaned up and walked downtown to a café, counted their money, and ordered ham sandwiches and tap water. The train would next rattle into town on Friday afternoon, and it was Wednesday.
The hotel room held two small iron beds and that night they lay in the hot, breathless room and tried to sleep.
August turned repeatedly, went down the hall to the bathroom, came back and began tossing again. “Lucky, you awake?” His voice was young again in the dark room.
“Yeah, I’m one hot dog.”
“I’m glad you made me put down that gun.”
He rolled on his back and tried to see the ceiling, which he knew was cracked like a map of desert rivers where the electric wire had been nailed to the plaster. His sore shoulder throbbed with his heartbeat. “Count sheep, and maybe you’ll drop off.”
“I’ve got to say it.”
“Go on, then.”
“If I hadn’t backed off, I’d have killed her.”
“All right.”
“No, I need you to know how I feel right now. I mean, I want to get her, but I’m mostly glad she’s alive. It’s like it’s okay if we don’t even find her, just so she’s, you know, still somewhere.”
Sam thought about that last phrase, “still somewhere.” “Aw, we’ll get her back when that old train rumbles in day after tomorrow. The sheriff said he’d sit in the waiting room with three of his deputies and hash it out with all concerned.”
“You sure they’ll bring her here?”
“I can’t imagine where else. I’d bet a month of piano playing that Billsy was coming back from setting up the meeting somehow. It makes sense they bring her in Friday, since the train won’t run again till Monday.”
August was quiet for a long time. “What if those people talk the sheriff out of it? Didn’t you say this Mr. White was a banker and his wife a proper lady? You think the sheriff will believe us over them?”
“Oh, maybe she was bred in old Kentucky, but she’s only a crumb down here.”
August laughed aloud, and it was the first time he’d laughed since before his father died. “I wish you could play piano as good as you tell jokes.”
“I’m getting better.”
He talked to the boy a long time, easing him off to sleep. And then the image came to him of armed men waiting in the small depot for the likes of Ralph and Billsy Skadlock, and he thought of the possibility that something could go wrong, a gunfight and pursuit, slugs the size of bumblebees slamming through the flimsy pine walls, with a little girl in the middle of the fracas. Bullets didn’t seek out guilt or innocence; they were flying accidents of fate. He eventually fell asleep and began to dream of Lily in Ralph Skadlock’s arms, both of them turning to face a boy pointing a monstrous shotgun at them, and when that vision faded, he was in a hospital in France, and his wife was working on a needlepoint chair bottom, at one point holding it up to him and showing an image of a bombed-out house, a girl standing before the smoke and fire raising both hands, each finger made of khaki thread, nine in all, and a stitch of red for the bloody socket.
WHEN RALPH SKADLOCK got out of bed, Billsy was standing in the doorway scratching and yawning into the new day.
“You smell that?” Billsy asked.
Ralph had begun sleeping upstairs again now that the ceiling no longer leaked and Vessy had dried and turned the mattress. He pulled on his pants with a grunt, and they went down and out into the kitchen.
Vessy had fired the big stove, robbed eggs from the hens that were left, and cut up onions and cheese, making the men an omelette and floating it on a pad of grits and butter. The little girl was at the table penciling mustaches on photographs in an old newspaper. The men sat down and began to eat, their heads low over the plates, staring at the food as it disappeared. The girl dropped her pencil and bent under the table to reach for it, but banged her head when she came up and started crying. The men glowered at her and Billsy said, “Hey, shut that stuff up.”
Vessy picked up the pencil, gave it to the child, and brushed back her hair, kissing her forehead. She rubbed her back and found her a fresh page on which to draw. The child stopped wailing and began marking dark eyebrows on the image of a Baton Rouge debutante.
The men stopped eating and watched all of it, as if the notion of calming a child with anything other than a peppery slap or a whack with a piece of kindling had never occurred to them. Billsy put an elbow in his brother’s ribs and asked, “You remember the time I sassed the old woman while she was ironin’ and she threw that flat-iron down on my foot?”
Ralph made a face and took another bite. “What made you think of something like that?”
“You remember that?”
“Sure I do. I’m the one tended to your foot. Took off your shoe and had to shake it to make your little toe fall out.”
“Took all winter for my foot to heal up,” Billsy mumbled, watching the girl drawing.
Vessy came to the table with her plate and sat down. “I don’t guess you heathen ever say grace.”
Ralph looked at her, chewing slowly. “Grace who?”
AFTER BREAKFAST the brothers took a horse that was favoring a rear leg from the little wire trap of a paddock and checked its hooves.
The girl came out and pulled at Ralph’s pants.
“Can I ride?”
“Go buy your own horse.” He walked backwards toward the woods, leading the mare and watching its rear legs. Thirty feet into the long grass, he stopped and looked at the ground. The girl walked up and put a white hand on the horse’s knee. “Billsy!” Ralph hollered.
His brother came out and looked at the footprints in the mud. “Looks like two of ’em.”
“Town shoes. What the hell?”
“Can I ride?” the girl asked again.
Ralph circled her waist with his hands and lifted her onto the animal’s bare back. “Grab hold of her mane,” he told her, planting her hands in the coarse hair. “Come on.”
The three of them moved off into the brush, where they found animal prints and, off toward the river, the flattened weeds of a resting place.
“You reckon it’s somebody after the still or our reserves?” Billsy asked, pushing back his straw hat.
“Naw. None of them rascals wears shoes like that. Shallow heels and broad soles flat as a spinster’s backside.”
“Somebody’s been watchin’.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Giddyap!” the girl yelled.
Billsy spat. “We best change our plans a little.”
“One thing for sure. I ain’t ridin’ into Woodgulch in broad daylight with the kid.”
They turned back toward the house, the girl singing in her sweet voice the first two stanzas of “The Horse That Outran the Train.”
Billsy looked up at her admiringly. “Do you know ‘The Girl in the Window Above Alfred’s Saloon’?”
His brother reached over and knocked off his hat. “Damn it, Billsy!”
“Hey,” he hollered, swinging down for his hat, “everbody knows that one.”
Vessy was waiting for them in the rear of the great house, wearing a housedress she’d found and washed and ironed. “I figured you boys gone berry pickin’.”
Ralph told her what they’d found, and her eyes raked the woods. “We still turnin’ her over Friday, right?”
“I’ll have to do some figurin’, but you get her ready.”
“When can I get my part of the money?”
Suddenly, he looked down at the ground. “I have it and I’ll give it you.” He looked up and he was blushing.
Billsy rolled his eyes and walked past into the house, saying “I’ll be damned” under his breath.
“What’s that about?” She put her hands on her hips.
“Nothin’. I told him you could buy into the still if you wanted.”
She drew her lips together, vertical lines forming around her mouth as though she were figuring some great sum. “How much of a cut would that get me?”
“One part out of six.”
She looked at the house and back at him. “You don’t own none of this, do you?”
“We sort of found it.”
“What you really want is a house gal and now and then a free ride on me. Well, I’ve known women who traded for less.” She looked around again. “But I ain’t one of ’em.”
He looked at her walnut hair, then into her gray eyes. “What’s wrong with that deal?”
“It ain’t a deal.” She turned away. When she turned back, her face was composed, the corners of her mouth in their habitual downturn. “I got used to livin’ with electricity and a store down the road where I can walk and buy a pork chop. What you got here’s no better than that mountain shack I was raised in. I can’t live on saltmeat and sardines ever day.”
“My line of work kind of needs some distance between me and a town.”
“Where at you live before?”
“Arkansas.”
“And the feds busted you out, right?”
He took a step back. “How’d you guess that?”
“And before?”
“Around Longview.”
“Who got you there?”
He shook his head. “The Babtist fire department came down on my cooker with their axes. After they finished, you could’ve drained spaghetti with the thing.”
“How long you reckon before some dollar-a-day feds come through them weeds and chops you out of business? And you want me to invest in that? Include me out.”
He slowly reached for his wallet. “What you plan on doin’?”
“Goin’ back toward the mountains. Maybe over the hump into Virginia. No offense, but it’s like living in a croup tent down here, and these is the ugliest woods I ever been dragged through in my life. You got weeds that would poison a wild Indian to death and mosquitoes to carry off his corpse. And if Woodgulch is your example of a town, I seen better-lookin’ places drew with a burnt stick by an idiot child.”
He counted out the money into her red palm. “Like you say, I ain’t stayin’ here forever.”
She folded the bills and stuck them down her bodice. “I know you’re in the business of turnin’ things over for profit. You understand what things is worth in dollars and cents. For about six weeks up in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, I worked in a pawnshop addin’ up accounts in a ledger before the owner’s wife run me off ’cause I wasn’t ugly as she was. Lord, if that wasn’t a place that had a license to steal I don’t know what one looks like. You ever been in a pawnshop?”
“I sold to a few of ’em.”
“All you got to do is go somewhere there ain’t a warrant on you yet, maybe in east Tennessee or North Carolina, and rent a store. A feller walks in with a pistol worth two dollars and you loan him twenty cents on it. If he comes back to claim it you charge him twenty cents interest. If he don’t, then it’s yourn and you put it on sale for three dollars.”
He put his billfold back in his pocket. “I get run off from here, I’ll consider it.”
She reached out and put a forefinger in one of his belt loops and tugged it. He wobbled as if he suddenly were dizzy, and her voice softened. “Don’t you wait too long. I’ll start out in Bristol but there ain’t no tellin’ where I’ll be in six months.” She turned and went into the kitchen, where she’d sent the girl to cut out biscuits with the mouth of a jelly glass.
Ralph went into the house and stopped inside the door, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. The walls showed flowering spills of mildew and cumulus blooms of lime dissolved out of the plaster by rainwater. The next room was a great hall hung with dangling leeches of paint. Billsy sat in a velour chair with the stuffing leaking out under his legs.
“You pop the question?”
“Shut up.”
“All right, bud. Let’s talk business. We goin’ into Woodgulch with the kid?”
“I said not, but now I don’t know.”
“We could take the skiff across the river.”
Ralph looked through the clouded glass over the broad gallery toward the fungus-haunted live oaks hiding the west. “Just who in hell was watchin’ us?”
THE TWO OF THEM ate breakfast at the Woodgulch Café, a plain-wood room painted from floor to ceiling the gray of a rainy dawn. Sam counted their money together and figured they could afford something for supper but not much else until they got back to New Orleans.
August thumbed his empty plate away. “Can we trust him?”
“Well, I’m as sure as I can be.” He knew that when outlanders passed through a community like Woodgulch they touched on old biases and blood alliances going back generations, considerations that were complex and far beyond right and wrong. “He said he’d show up at train time with some deputies.”
“I hope there’s no shooting.”
“Look, there’s no telling what’ll happen. Just try to stay in the clear. Get hold of Lily and stay in the clear.”
“What exactly do you want me to do?”
He took the last bite of egg and stared at his empty plate. “When you’re playing ‘Sweet Sue’ and the trombone gives it over to you to build the song, do you stop the band and ask what they want you to do?”
“No.”
“You just rip into her with that alto sax and play between the notes until it’s right with what the band’s doing. If everybody’s jumping and the dancers are springing the floorboards, you just cut up like crazy, you step all over the clarinet and make him wait for the next turn. On the other hand, if the band is tired and just plugging along, you take your turn and sort of match. It’s like that with everything.”
“Keep my ears open and watch the room.”
“That’s the ticket.”
THEY PASSED THE DAY wandering the aisles of the hardware, walking the town’s six gravel streets, sitting on the one public bench in front of the courthouse. They arrived at the bench about two o’clock, and after an hour of watching a few Fords, mule-drawn wagons, two delivery trucks, and one buggy with a rotted top come and go on their errands, the boy shook his head. “Not much to do, is there?”
“If you lived here you’d be working at something.”
He thought about this. “I’d be working at moving away.”
A man wearing a flannel shirt buttoned up wrong rode a little quarterhorse past them. Across the street a baker came out and, with floured hands, turned the crank that lowered an awning against the westering sun; he looked at them and dusted his hands one against the other, then turned inside. Behind them, the courthouse door rattled and they turned to see the sheriff come out into the heat and start toward them.
“How are you?” Sam called out.
Tabors walked up and put a foot on the bench. “I’ve been on the telephone finding out about your story. Called down to New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and everything checks out. I talked to a Muscarella at the French Quarter precinct and he read me the report.” He looked at August. “Called a lot of people. I hear you play on a big dance boat.”
“Yessir.”
“That jass music or what?”
“Yessir, we try to make people want to dance.”
The sheriff looked at both of them, as though trying to divine their characters. “If that little girl shows up tomorrow, I have to be satisfied about her identity. Do you have a photo?”
“I don’t.”
“No, sir, not on me.”
“Well, if we wind up with her, I’ll have to perform an interview before I can turn her over, you understand. I can’t just go around giving away children.” He put a hand on August’s shoulder for a moment, and Sam saw how large it was, thick in the palm. The sheriff was a big man, his size partially concealed by his suit, a mild gray pinstripe. He took off his fedora to wipe his forehead, revealing a big, straightsided head, the close-cropped blond hair free of gray. He was built of preventative muscle that would make those he dealt with think about the gravity of their actions and words, or else.
“You have things set up?” Sam asked him.
“Everything’s ready,” the sheriff said.
LATE THAT NIGHT in the hotel, they again talked across the dark, their voices boxy in the plank-walled room. One side of Sam’s bed was against a low window, and a wet breeze seeped through the screens but did little to allay the breathless heat.
“Lucky, you think we should’ve sold the shotgun? We could have traded it for a little pistol.”
Sam turned over on his side, the springs squalling under his weight. “Bud, a pistol in the pocket changes the way a man thinks. Without it, he might not take certain chances. With it, he goes where he shouldn’t or does something that’s not a good idea. He thinks it’s a free pass, but it isn’t.”
“But it’s kind of a life preserver, isn’t it? A safety device?”
“If you can’t swim, best not go near the water.”
“I can see how sometimes one might come in handy, though. Like when a robber comes at you.”
“Listen, unless you’re trained or some kind of natural-born killer, a criminal will get the best of you every time. You’re surprised, and he’s not, that’s all there is to it. He’ll shoot you through the heart before you get a finger on your pistol.”
They lay there in silence, the little town as quiet as a shadow. After a while, through the screen came the dull aeolian hum of a steamboat whistle several miles off.
“What about tomorrow?”
“It’ll get here, won’t it?”
“I mean, do you think everything will turn out all right?”
He knew August understood that in fact things were not that simple. Many things had recently not turned out all right. Sam guessed August wanted what every boy did-assurance, a good night’s sleep, someone on his side. “Everything’s going to be fine,” he said, turning his face to the window and looking down to where a black horse stood in the middle of the street, facing west, untethered and lost and asleep.
THE NEXT MORNING they could afford only toast and coffee for breakfast. They washed up and straightened their clothes as best they could, wiping down their shoes with the only cloth in the room. Walking to the edge of town they sold the mule for six dollars and fifty cents to a liveryman who spoke a little French and wanted him as a pet.
At two o’clock they walked through the sun to the station and waited inside on one of three varnished benches. The agent nodded as though he’d expected them. Fifteen minutes before train time the sheriff came in and sat next to the door, wearing a different suit than the day before, no badge visible. After him, a beefy man dressed like a farmer came in and sat by the other door to the platform, a pistol-shaped bulge in his overalls pocket. The sheriff nodded to him, and they both bent to stare across the street where a man sat on a doorstep looking back at them. After a while, he raised his arm, and the farmer waved back.
Sam stood up and walked out onto the platform, looked over at the dusty town, and read the train board. South of Woodgulch were three flag stops named Fault, Lacy Switch, and Stob Mill, then the main line interchange at Gashouse. The tri-weekly mixed train was the only one scheduled. He expected that the train was close and thought of the picture that still flashed in his mind, sometimes in his dreams, sometimes when he was trying to remember why he wasn’t with his wife and child in New Orleans. He wanted to fasten in his imagination the little girl’s face, and closing his eyes for a moment saw the familiar cameo and next to it the image of his new son, and then from out of nowhere the girl in France whose house he’d leveled with the errant artillery shell and next to her a dim painful image of his first child. He opened his eyes and tried to remember everything Elsie and August had told him about Lily, the pitch of her voice, the precise color of her hair, and then he heard the train whistle, hoarse and foreboding, and his heart stumbled. He walked inside, and the sheriff told him to stand in the back corner.
The locomotive was followed by one passenger car and five red, sun-dulled boxcars. The train stopped and the fireman cut off the locomotive and it pulled ahead past a switch, then backed into a siding and ran alongside the train, where it went through another switch and then came forward to pluck the five boxcars away from the coach, chuffing backwards through town to distribute them on sidings. The conductor opened the vestibule door and put down his stepstool, handing the passengers down to the platform. Twelve men got off, local men, the sheriff nodding to each in turn as they walked down the platform to be greeted by those picking them up in Fords or buggies. After the last man was off, the sheriff boarded and walked through the coach. When he came back into the station, he shook his head. “Maybe they’ll come Monday.”
“We shouldn’t have sold the mule,” August said, his voice cracking. “We’re stuck here.”
The man wearing overalls stood up. “Sheriff?”
“You can go back to the office. I know those hogwashers you’re wearing are hot.”
The man jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “What about Mike?”
“Bring him with you. Tell him we’ll try the same thing on Monday.”
Sam walked out on the platform and stared down the track. He could hear the locomotive huffing around in the yard of the window-frame factory. “I don’t know.”
Tabors looked in the same direction. “What do you think?”
“Once they start something, the Skadlocks don’t strike me as the kind that waste time.” Sam turned to the train board. “What’s Fault?”
“Just a flag stop right over the Louisiana line, though nobody seems to know exactly where that line is. There’s still two farmers that ship a few cans of milk, and a little shop that sends out a half-car of cypress shingles every week. Plus a little barrel operation. There’s just one road that runs through the area and crosses by the station.”
Sam looked down the crooked rails again. “Where’s the road go?”
The sheriff squinted an eye. “From the prison on one end to a gate five or six miles miles east of the railroad, where it reaches the highway.”
“I rode the mule across a straight gravel road when I went down to the Skadlocks’. Was that it?”
“Had to be.”
He stared at the board, then walked into the station, where the conductor was taking an order from the agent. “Excuse me, but did you let off two passengers at Fault?”
The conductor was an old man who arched a thick eyebrow. “And who might you be?”
“He’s all right, Sidney.” The agent shoved his orders at him under the window grate.
“As a matter of fact, we did. A gentleman and a lady.”
“Well dressed? Maybe thirty-five years old?”
“I’d say so. The lady was taking from a flask right on the aisle and I had to ask her to go to the restroom if she wanted a sip.”
Sam glanced at the sheriff and August walked up and stood between them.
“Is there an agent there or what?”
“Yeah,” the conductor said. “On the days the train comes.”
Sam shook his head. “Hell, they’re down there right now waiting for the train to come back.”
The sheriff crossed his arms and looked at his boots. “If they are, well, I’d like to help you, but I can’t. Not my jurisdiction.”
“Could you telegraph the Louisiana sheriff?”
“It wouldn’t do any good. I don’t like to talk about the man. Let’s just say he’s never been to Fault.”
Sam turned to the agent and paid two fares to Fault.
August watched the agent retrieve the tickets. “You think she’s down there, sure enough?”
“I can’t take a chance on thinking otherwise.”
The locomotive turned on the wye in the mill and drifted back to the station with three empty flatcars and coupled to the coach.
August boarded ahead of Sam and they chose the first seats on the left. “Well, we’ll find out soon enough, won’t we?” the boy said.
Then Sheriff Tabors stepped on and sat behind them. “Don’t look at me like that. I had the agent write me a pass.”
“How’ll you get back to town?”
“My brother-in-law lives at Gashouse. He can ride me up here in his Ford after supper.”
The whistle let out a growl and the train jerked into motion, swaying and rattling over the branch-line track toward Fault, six miles away. Sam counted telegraph poles and figured they were going twenty miles an hour. The train went past a pasture full of milk cows and plunged into a brake of old-growth pine for a mile or so.
August looked up at him. “How’s your shoulder?”
“I try not to think about it.”
“You won’t do much in a fight.”
“I don’t guess so.”
They passed a clearing and he saw a small barrel factory, nothing more than a shed covering an undulating machine and a mud yard stacked with blond-wood kegs bound with metal hoops. A switch ran into the yard, and two flatcars sat loaded in the sun. A mill hand waved and waved like he’d never seen a train before, but the little engine kept on puffing south, leaking steam and wobbling along the kinked rails.
Snaking out of the pines, the railroad traversed three miles of scrub country, cut-over land crowded with brambles and trash-wood saplings. Soon the engineer was blowing the whistle for the little wooden station, and Sam felt the air brakes grab. He looked at August.
“Showtime,” the boy said.
They got up and stepped off onto the platform. A man wearing a tailored suit was standing next to the bench outside the station, a streamer of tickets in his hand. A woman was struggling with Lily, who was angry at being held and kicking her legs, her face red and running tears. “I want Vessy,” she wailed. “Where’s Vessy gone?”
“Oh, hush up,” the woman snapped. “Aren’t you glad to see us? What’s the matter with you?”
Sam and August walked up, the sheriff dawdling behind as if he didn’t know anyone there. Sam looked around but saw only an old Ford and no horses. “Where’s Ralph Skadlock?”
The man looked at him blankly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
August drew close and looked at Lily, smiling.
“Get away,” the woman told him, a shining alarm rising in her eyes. “What do you want?”
“That’s my sister. Let her look at me.” And when the child did turn around, she gave him the look of a baby who hadn’t seen her brother in many months. She wriggled out of the woman’s grasp and stood there on the rough planks. Lily shaded her eyes and peered up at him but said nothing. The sheriff made a clucking noise in the back of his mouth and looked away.
“I know who you are,” Sam said. “You’re the Whites from Graysoner, Kentucky, and that girl was stolen from Krine’s department store in New Orleans.”
Acy White looked at the conductor, who had his watch in his hand. “Will you board us?”
The conductor looked at the sheriff and the child. “I can’t stop you from getting on if you got a ticket.”
“Well, come on, then.” He made a move toward the coach.
Sam grabbed his arm. “We’ve come for the girl.”
“Get your hands off me. I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is our daughter, Madeline.” He grabbed Lily by the hand but Sam pulled him away from the train and the two of them stumbled backwards across the platform and fell against the bench. Lily began to shriek and August kneeled next to her as Sheriff Tabors went over and began to separate the men.
The agent dashed outside, shouting, “Everbody calm down. What’s this all about?”
Sam had banged his shoulder against the bench, but even the pain couldn’t overcome his worry that the Whites would get Lily on the train and slip away with her. He couldn’t show up empty-handed in New Orleans and have to tell Elsie they’d lost her again. He got untangled and stood up. “You’re not getting away with this. I know what you did, and I’ll follow you until you’re both in the jailhouse.”
At the word “jailhouse,” Mrs. White reached into her purse and brought out a nickel-plated revolver and pointed it at Sam, her mouth open and trembling.
“Take it easy,” Sheriff Tabors said. “Let’s sort this thing out.”
She shifted her aim to the lawman’s forehead. “You stay on the platform, whoever you are, or I’ll blow your brains all over this god-forsaken station.” She was sweating and didn’t look at all well, more like a woman who’d made a monthlong journey on foot.
“Damn it,” Acy White said. “Let’s just get on.” He grabbed Lily and took his wife by the arm, and they stepped up into the coach.
Before getting on, the conductor turned around and faced the platform. “I wouldn’t board if I were you.”
“I sort of have to,” the sheriff said, pushing back his coat and putting a big hand on his revolver. His face was flaming, and his eyes showed he was furious.
Sam put a hand on his shoulder. “Step over here a minute.” He motioned to the station agent to join them. “Why didn’t this crew pick up those two flatcars of barrels about three miles back?”
The agent’s eyes moved off, as though he’d been caught in a lie. “It don’t really matter none. They’ll get ’em Monday for sure.”
“When we passed the switches, those boys in the yard were waving for your train to stop. Can you cut the crew an order to back to that switch and get their cars?”
The agent pulled his watch. “I reckon. It ain’t like this outfit runs on a tight schedule, if you know what I mean.” He looked at August and the sheriff. “What’s this all about with children and barrels?”
“I think I just figured it out myself,” the sheriff said. “Just write the order and hand it up to the engineer. It’s Ned running the engine today, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Never mind the conductor, he’s occupied. Come on.” The sheriff motioned them along to the engine and they climbed into the cab. Soon the agent came running alongside and handed up a new flimsy. The engineer pulled the Johnson bar into reverse, tugged three short blasts from his whistle, and began backing the train hard.
The three of them stood behind the engineer, staying out of the fireman’s way as he shoveled a thin layer of coal on the boiler’s grates. Over the engine noise Sam hollered, “What you gonna do about her pistol?”
“I think she was just trying to scare us off,” the sheriff told him. “I’d bet she wouldn’t use it.” About three miles from the station, as the barrel mill came into view, he leaned over and hollered something to the engineer above the hiss and chuff of the locomotive. The old man stopped the train, and the three of them slid down the grab irons and walked back to the coach. The sheriff went up first and walked the aisle to where the Whites were sitting with Lily jammed between them, crying silently, her nose running, her eyes cloudy with confusion and grief. He looked around at the five other passengers and told them to stay in their seats.
“Who are you?” Acy White said with the calm assuredness of one who thinks he’s in charge.
“These two men say that little girl isn’t yours.”
The wife began to stand, but the sheriff held up his hand. She looked at it and kept rising, lifting her chin as well. “You three men are the abductors.” She turned to the other passengers. “They’re trying to steal my baby,” she said, her voice nearly screaming. The three farmers and two drummers watched placidly, their heads moving from the sheriff to the finely dressed woman.
“We need to talk to the little girl,” the sheriff said, reaching for the child.
Acy White said, “Don’t,” but it was unclear whom he was addressing, and in the next instant the nickel-plated revolver came up in her hand, aimed at the sheriff’s head, and went off. An orange dart of fire and rotten-smelling smoke bloomed into the aisle as the bullet went through a clerestory above a farmer’s head, and the startled sheriff backhanded the gun out of her grasp, sending it over the next seat, where it clattered to the floor.
“Lady,” he told her, his voice shaking, “assault with a deadly weapon is a felony in Mississippi.” He spread his coat and both Whites focused on the sizeable badge pinned on his vest.
“But we’re in Louisiana,” Acy White protested, his eyes suddenly sick and weak.
“Not anymore. I figure we’re a mile inside the state line.” He pulled back his coat on the other side to show his gleaming Colt. “And you’re both under arrest on that charge. Now let me see that child.”
Sam turned to August. “You’re on, boy.”
He stepped around the sheriff and pulled her gently into the aisle. “Hey, Lily.”
The girl looked at him hard and said nothing.
“Oh, this is ridiculous,” Acy White said. “Conductor, I insist you get this train moving in the direction it’s supposed to. She’s our child. She doesn’t know this young man.”
“Is your name Lily?” The sheriff bent over her like a cloud of dark cloth, and she said nothing.
August seemed to show his panic. “Sure it is. Come on, Lil. Tell them who I am.” He stared at her, seemingly frightened by the blankness in her eyes.
The sheriff stood up and frowned. “If your name isn’t Lily, what is it?”
In a small voice she said, “Madeline.”
“I told you,” Willa White cried.
“Wait a minute.” Sam stepped up and put his hand on August’s neck. “Little girl, do you know what this fellow told me?”
The girl shook her head slowly, on the verge of tears.
“He said he taught you a tune from the Sinbad revue in New York and that you could sing the whole thing through.”
“This is ridiculous,” the wife said. “The child knows proper ballads and some hymns. Do you think she’s a little tramp?”
Sam held up a hand and backed the sheriff and August away a bit, creating a little stage in the aisle. “I told him I didn’t believe it one bit.”
“It’s true,” the child said, slowly raising her head.
“I don’t believe it. Bet you can’t sing a single word of ‘Cleopatra.’”
Her eyes flashed over at the Whites; then she held her right arm out, looked at the coach’s ceiling, and began singing in a schooled, vibratoless voice:
You’ve heard of Cleopatra
Who lived down along the Nile.
She made a “Mark” of Anthony
And won him with her smile.
Her feet began a matching dance step, and the other arm went out.
They say she was Egyptian
But I’ve reason to construe
She was Jewish and Hawaiian
With a dash of Irish too.
The sheriff was smiling broadly as if he’d heard the tune many times and thought it the best thing ever written. The child paced up the aisle and kept singing, stepping out of her captivity into her gift, no longer in the aisle of a sooty train but onstage in her mind, the one she’d been born to.
When she strolled with bold Mark Anthony
On Egypt’s yellow sands
You could see that she was Jewish
By the motion of her hands
She would shake her hands and shoulders off-
Lily gave her shoulders a shimmy, and an old farmer down the aisle guffawed and clapped his hands.
“All right, all right,” the sheriff said. “Who taught you that Jolson song, little girl?”
She stopped and pointed dramatically at August. “Gussie. My brother there.”
THE CONDUCTOR allowed the train to back the rest of the way to Woodgulch. The Whites were taken off the coach against their loud, wailing protests and threats, and many townspeople turned out to see the splendidly dressed couple led through the streets in handcuffs.
Before the train left again, a sheriff’s deputy boarded the coach and walked up to where the three of them were seated. “Sheriff said he’s calling for warrants in New Orleans and Kentucky both, that whoever wants ’em most can have ’em. After he gets through with ’em, of course. He’ll get in touch so’s y’all can be deposed down the line.”
Sam relaxed against a window and said, “Good news.”
The deputy leaned down, smelling of Old Spice and sweet chew. “Did that crazy woman really take a shot at our high sheriff?”
“That’s a fact, yeah.”
“Damn. That’ll be a lively trial.”
The whistle blasted a farewell to Woodgulch, and the deputy lumbered down to the vestibule. In seconds the coach jerked forward and Sam glanced over at August and then down at Lily, who was sitting between them eating a sandwich the agent had given her out of his lunchbox. He gazed out the window glad for each foot of travel the train was making toward home. The longer he looked, the more he imagined that he could see his wife and child, and past them Elsie Weller and, all the way downtown, Krine’s vast store. He relaxed for the first time in months, but as the engine pulled into the inter-change at Gashouse, where they would switch trains, Lily sat up straight, looked at August, and asked, “Why didn’t Father come to get me?”
Her brother turned his head toward the aisle, the finality of the gesture proof that the news would not come from him.
Sam bent over and said, “Your mother will explain that, darling.”
“But why did you come, and Gussie, but not my daddy?”
He gave her shoulder a squeeze, surprised by how small it was. He’d been looking for her for so long he expected her to be larger than life. She was just a baby. “Hey, we’ll travel down to New Orleans and your mother will tell you everything you need to know. We’ll go down to the Café du Monde and eat some of those square doughnuts buried in confection sugar. You’ll like that.” He kept talking to keep her mind on the future, but he and August had been so busy in the act of finding her that they’d forgotten what she didn’t know. He hoped she was too young to take it as hard as August had. He hoped she was like him, with no memory whatsoever of a father, but he knew that wasn’t true. Lily would see an empty chair at her mother’s table for the rest of her life, a space lacking words and songs that were her birthright.
They changed trains at the junction, riding to Baton Rouge, then catching another for New Orleans. It was dark on this last leg, and Sam slept with Lily in his lap, the smell of soft coal blowing through the windows and a scrim of cypresses sailing by. In his dream, he himself was in someone’s lap, a man, judging from the smell of kerosene and wood smoke and a little gale of beer breathed over his head; his stomach felt full, and a callused hand pressed down on it as though holding a jewel secure.
When he woke up, the conductor was walking the aisle announcing New Orleans. August looked at him closely.
“What is it?” Sam asked.
“Your eyes are wet. Smoke bother you that much?”