THE AMBASSADOR broke a paddlewheel shaft in St. Louis and laid up a week. Sam caught the Illinois Central to New Orleans and spent three days at home, playing with Christopher and taking Linda out one night just to ride the streetcar belt and eat beignets and coffee at the Morning Call. They sat on stools among leviathan sugar bowls and whorls of confectioner’s sugar spilled across the marble counter and talked a long time, but his mind was not always on their conversation.
“Lucky, what is it?” She put her cup down with a clack, unnoticed in the café, which was always racketing with stoneware.
He held his hand over his steaming mug. “I’ve been thinking about Uncle Claude. I don’t know why.”
She put a hand lightly on his arm. “Oh, you know why.”
“I thought he was my daddy for the first five or six years. But it’s something else.”
“What?”
“The attack.” He wouldn’t say “the killing.” It was too final a pronouncement.
She took her hand back. “I was wondering when this would come up. I mean, I’ve always admired the way you put that behind you. Other men would’ve gone crazy about it. I understand that.”
“I don’t know why, but I feel like it’s time to find out a little about it.”
“It’s because you’ve got your own family now.”
“I don’t know.”
She put her arm through his. “Lucky, you can catch the Texas and New Orleans train west in the morning.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
“It’s okay. You haven’t seen old Claude in a good long while.” She laughed. “I remember him at our wedding, wearing that gray-striped suit that made him look like a dominique chicken. Is his English getting any better?”
“Oh, he can speak it when he pays attention.”
“Honey.”
“What?”
“It’s okay if you speak French, you know. It doesn’t mean anything.”
He pushed his cup away and stood up, leaving a nickel on the counter for the boy. “The schoolteacher used to beat me with a stick of lath when I spoke French. Even one word. I got the idea real quick when I saw him whip the Abadie kids. He hit them like their French was a fire he was trying to beat out. And they didn’t know enough English to realize why he was mad or what he was yelling at them. I thought, who needs it? ‘I think’ works as well as ‘je pense.’” He took her arm and they walked out into the humid heat, the smell of fish drifting from the market downriver. “What time does the train leave?”
“They load it on the ferry at eight.”
“All right.”
“And call the store in Troumal to send a boy to tell Claude you’re coming.”
Here he laughed. “I remember one time a man delivered a telegram and Uncle tipped him with a sweet potato.”
THE NEXT MORNING the train was pulled off the lurching ferry by a switch engine, handed over to a greasy road locomotive, and proceeded west through poor, water-soaked farms into a reptile-laced swamp where virgin cypresses held up a cloud-dimmed sky. The timber was immense and close to the track. He watched out the window and imagined that from one of the new aeroplanes the railroad would look like a flaw in a vast green carpet. After an hour, one mildewed and rain-blistered town went by, and then they were in sugarcane fields, rainwater pooling silver in the long rows. Then thirty miles of timber, then sugarcane again, red-wing blackbirds flocking away from the train’s clatter, flashing their crimson badges. At noon he dug in a paper bag and ate a cold piece of chicken his wife had packed, washing it down with a cone of water from the coach’s fountain. There was no diner on the little consist, and the man next to him watched him closely as he ate, as if he were famished himself. The train switched off the main line and rolled to a stop in Petit Coeur and several people got off, including his seatmate. The feeling stirred in him that the train was going back in time to a place that didn’t exist anymore, that maybe never had existed at all, though he knew he’d come from there. The engine whistled off, and now the few villages provided intermittent relief from the fields and swamps that the train threaded through at twenty miles an hour for much of the afternoon. At a flagstop of ten buildings known as Prairie Amer, he waited on the wooden platform until the one-car train departed for Troumal on the branch line, its little nineteenth-century locomotive lisping steam northward through drowned cane fields.
From the depot in Troumal he was planning to walk to the store and wait for a ride, but the agent put a finger in his elbow and motioned with his head. “Ton cheval est là-bas.” Down the street, tied off to a railroad hydrant, was an oily-looking horse with a note pinned to the saddle, “Simoneaux” scrawled on the paper. He looked the horse over and shook his head.
The road was so sloppy he switched to the edge of a sugarcane field, riding past little farmhouses washed gray by the weather, the Boudreauxs, the Patins, the white home of Mrs. Perriloux, his piano teacher. When he rode into his uncle’s yard, he was pleased to see the house looking good, with new chairs and rockers on the gallery, the yard inside the pickets clean and free of weeds and junk. His aunt came out as he tied the horse to the gate and gave him a long hug. She was a tall woman with a straight back and dark hair cut medium-length, and though her face was wrinkled, the skin was clear and the even color of cream. She started to rattle off questions in French, and he held up his hand.
“Aunt Marie, I don’t remember a lot of the old talk. Can you go in English?”
She put a finger up and touched her lips. “Ah, yes. You a bigshot city boy now. Me, I forgot that. Come on in and I’ll fix you a hot cup of coffee.”
Inside, nothing much had changed. Seated at the kitchen table he looked around to the whitewashed board walls and the pictures of the Blessed Virgin and Saint Martin. The stove was the same one for which he’d chopped tons of kindling. “Where’s the boys?”
“Nestor moved away to work on them oil field in Texas. Orillian married and has a place out near Petit Coeur. Arsène and Tee Claude stayed around to help with the farm.”
“Orillian found a girl to marry him?”
She poured a long rill of coffee into an ironstone mug. “Hard to believe.” They looked at each other and burst out laughing. Orillian was the smallest of all of them and famous parish-wide for his big ears.
“How’s Uncle Claude?”
“Oh, him, he’s fine as can be.”
They sat in the kitchen and traded news until it was time to begin supper, and without being told he stepped onto the back porch, bent to the right, and his hand found the hatchet handle as easy as finding his own forehead with the sign of the cross. He held the tool up and smiled at it. The kindling plinked against the house until there was enough to get the stove started. He noticed a kitchen chair resting against the back wall and looked long at it.
Aunt Marie used to tell him she could set her watch by Uncle Claude. Sam no longer had a watch, so he kept an eye on the kitchen clock on the shelf above the table, and when it said six o’clock he heard the jingle of mule harness. Through the window, he saw his uncle walk stiff-legged around the corner of the barn holding the singletree and reins, steering two big dark mules into the front bay. Claude had a thick shock of graying hair and muscled, sun-bronzed arms that rippled as he turned the animals into the barn. Sam walked out from the back porch to greet him, helped unbuckle and put up the tackle. Then a cast-iron handshake, a slap on the shoulders, and a sweaty hug and kiss on the cheek. “Comment ça va?”
“Ça va en anglais maintenant.”
The old man popped his fist on his forehead. “Oh, yeah, me, I forgot that. Let’s go on to the house.” He turned Sam by the shoulder and gave him a push in the back. “Go on, mule.”
They had coffee, and when his cousins came in they all ate supper, then drank more coffee. Aunt Marie lit the lamps and sat and talked with the men while they rolled cigarettes and drank blackberry wine dipped from a crock in the kitchen pantry. Arsène and Tee Claude were saving to buy the cane field next door and asked Sam for advice on how to deal with bankers. He understood they thought he was rich and wise about city things. After all, he didn’t wear overalls, had an education, lived in the big town, and worked in a suit. He thought of how they imagined him and of how wrong they were.
Arsène fell asleep in his chair, and by nine o’clock nearly everyone had gone to bed. Sam and his uncle stayed at the kitchen table on either side of a glass kerosene lamp, two jelly jars of dark wine between them. Every minute the tall windows flickered grayly, and out to the northwest a thunderstorm wandered about like bad luck looking.
He glanced at a window and then to his uncle, the smiling mustache, the wild eyebrows. “I have to ask you something.”
His uncle pulled in his chin. “I hope you don’t need no money.”
“This isn’t a joke.”
“Eh bien.”
He took a sip of the wine, thick as syrup. “It’s about those killers.”
Claude sat back slowly. “They’s a lot of things you better off not knowin’.”
He put a hand palm-up on the table. “Maybe I need to know more instead of less.”
“What, you gonna look for them people?”
“I might. I feel bad sometimes for not doing anything. I know the law can’t help. It’s been, what, twenty-seven years?”
His uncle took a breath so deep a spindle in his chair popped. “If you lookin’ to get back at these people, you can’t do that. You can kill ’em dead with a axe and they won’t even understand why you doin’ it.”
“What about justice?”
“Justice works if it puts a dollar back in you pocket.”
“Punishment?”
His uncle turned toward the window as a tumble of thunder came out of the next parish. “What I always told you?”
He looked down. “What people do wrong is its own punishment.”
In the weak light his uncle’s face was brown and furrowed like a winter-killed field. “Listen to me. I rather be your dead papa for five minutes than one of them killers for a whole life.”
Sam looked at the lamp flame, which leapt for no reason and made a puff of smoke. He tried to imagine such people but couldn’t. “Maybe I could tell them something. If I could ever find even one of them, maybe there’s something I should say.”
“Something needs sayin’? You gonna find ’em to forgive ’em?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’ll say until I find them.”
“Then they’ll do you in.” With a forefinger his uncle drew a line across his throat.
“Don’t worry, Nonc. A little girl I met in France gave me my nickname. Lucky, she called me. Chanceux.”
“Chanceux so far,” he said.
“Come on. Tell me.”
Claude sniffed, then drank down his wine and pushed the little glass away. He shook his head. “They came in ridin’ double so the horses wouldn’t make plenty noise. I figured this out from the hoof-prints in the yard. I went over à pied-how you say, on foot?-to help him put in seed cane. The sun was just up, but me, I could see the door knocked down flat.” He spread his fingers in the air. “Holes in all the wallboard. One porch post was shot in two, yeah. I never seen nothin’ like that before, and I got scared. I walked around the whole house to make sure nobody wasn’t still there. Then I went in.” He raised a hand from the table and let it come down slowly.
“You found them.” Sam’s voice was a whisper.
“It’s funny what I thought. He was my brother and he had a hole in his head and it was floatin’ in a puddle of blood, and the first thing what come to me was I’d never hear him play a fiddle again.” He looked up. “You knew that? You papa could play the fiddle?”
“No.” A new door opened in Sam’s head, and through it came notes and rhythm flowing onto a cypress porch.
“Ay yi yi, I never told you that. That cuts me like a knife. He played waltzes his own papa taught him, waltzes and old fast-dance pieces could make a chicken two-step. It wasn’t what he played but how he did it that I remember, slick like lightning, you know? Sometimes smooth like moonlight.”
Sam nodded. “Like moonlight.”
“I looked down on him and thought about all the music wouldn’t never be heard. And that wasn’t all, he could shingle a roof tight as a boat’s bottom. His fields were plowed straight like lines on a tablet. I thought about that, too. All that was killed. Ah, Sammy, when a man kills somebody, the most important thing he takes away is all the things that person can do in a lifetime. Tu comprends ça?”
He nodded, understanding too well.
“And then I saw your mamma, she was shot in the chest, and I started cryin’ so much and shakin’ I didn’t see your brother and sister at first.” He shook his head. “All I can say is a big bullet kills a little child fast, fast. I can tell you at least nobody hurt for long.”
He put his head in his hands. “How many did it?”
Claude shook his head. “The house looked like a strainer. Maybe nine or ten.”
“I never heard a number.”
“Nine or ten. That afternoon the one lawman we had, that little stinking Thibodaux crook, he rode to the parish line and gave up. He said they out his territory. Me myself, I rode into the parish to the north and told the sheriff, and he sent a deputy with me down the one dirt highway they got to the edge of that parish. We found one ’tit neg said he saw a bunch ridin’ like a army north, so I went into that parish and found the red-face sheriff that said he didn’t chase nobody for no dumb coonass Catholic couldn’t talk good American.”
“Did you ever hear who they were, or where they were from?”
Claude got up and went to a dark corner of the kitchen. Sam could hear a cabinet door squeak open and the tap of a dipper. He came back with two glasses of wine and sat down again, the joints in his chair grinding like dry bones. “At first, no. Six month later, the priest come over with the saddle from the man you papa knocked off his horse. He said he found some papers in it. They didn’t say where the man was from. But from one of them we saw the man’s name was Jimmy somebody. I can’t remember that last name. I never heard that name before in my life parmi les américains autour d’ici.”
“Do you have the papers?”
His uncle blinked and looked up. “I think so.”
He rose, took the lamp, and went into the front room. In the dark kitchen Sam heard him open a locker and begin to shuffle through papers. He imagined him squinting, running his eyes into the musty cabinet, trying to remember, maybe trying not to. When his uncle came back he held a hardback supply catalog with a few outsized pages stuck in the middle.
Sam took the book and opened it. Inside were two handwritten contracts for small timber leases, and the agent was the hard-drinking horse torturer, Jimmy Cloat. “Well, well.”
His uncle’s eyebrows went up. “You know this name?”
“It’s a little world for sons of bitches. I believe that. They get found.”
“You know you ought to go back to New Orleans and forget about it.”
“I know that.”
“But you won’t, you.”
“Probably not.” Sam held the papers up in the yellow glow.
His uncle sat back just out of the lamplight, diminished to an amiable smudge. “Aw, Sam.”
He stood up, holding the papers. “Bon soir, mon oncle.”
BREAKFAST WAS AT FIVE-THIRTY, and when Sam sat down Arsène came in with a gap-toothed smile and threw a patched pair of Headlight overalls at him. “Hey, boy, I hear you stayin’ here all day. We gonna get some work outa you, hanh?”
Sam plucked the overalls off his shoulder and looked at them. “Well, the train don’t go back till tomorrow, so I guess you got me.”
Aunt Marie put on the table a plate of rolled flapjacks stacked like cordwood and they grabbed the syrup pitcher and went at it, slathering on butter and pouring coffee. He looked around the table. But for the fact that two of his cousins had gone off, it was as if he’d never left. He imagined what a kitchen table would have been like in that other life, the one that stopped twenty-seven years before in a sideways rain of lead. What father would have sat at the head of the table, what mother, sister, brother, what empty chair promising a future child? And when he thought of all these meals that had not happened, he saw a whole world of life broken, gone. He dropped his fork, and his uncle looked up at his face.
“You all right, you?”
“I’m okay,” he said, looking at no one.
“You don’t have to work with us.”
“I’m all right.” But he knew he looked as though he’d been conversing with ghosts of the unborn. He also felt he had to put something back together, and he had no idea how.
THEY STARTED by hitching the mules and running the rattling cultivators through the young cane. After the dew burned off, they sent Sam to the barn to shovel the manure pile into the spreader and haul that out with the mare, Tante Sophie. He covered an acre his uncle intended for late-season tomatoes and then dropped the spreader off at the barn, washed it out with buckets he hand-pumped at the well, and hitched Tante Sophie up to a small plow to turn up another part of the field. By noon he was aching and sunburned, the sun straight over his head and as worrisome as the headlight of an oncoming train. His aunt brought out cornbread and buttermilk and pistolettes stuffed with ham along with a cool pitcher of homemade root beer with slices of lemon floating in it. They sat under the green, heart-shaped leaves of a tallow tree, eating and looking out over their work.
Arsène nudged Tee Claude. “I bet Sam’s gonna run all the way to that damn department store when he gets back.”
Tee Claude closed one eye. “How’d you wind up on that dancin’ boat, anyway? I thought you wanted to stay in the city.”
“The department store didn’t want me back.”
Tee Claude had a round, rascal’s face, and when he pursed his lips it grew even rounder. “I read in one of you letters that you’d get you job back if you fount that li’l girl.”
Sam swallowed a wonderful rush of cornbread and buttermilk. “It’s all right. The boat’s paying all right.”
Arsène shook his head. “Damned if I’d live in a big city where they go back on their deals. I’d of threw that evil fils de putain out his office window.”
Sam bit his pistolette and chewed on the comment. “He thought I took too long to find the girl and bring her back.”
“Well, hell, you got her back, didn’t you?”
“I did that. But she changed while she was taken.”
Uncle Claude stuck out his thick legs and crossed his boots. “That age, babies change day by day. Me, I’m not surprised one kid got took and another got brought back.”
“The rich people that stole her taught her things.”
Arsène laughed. “What a pile of cowshit. I wish some rich folks would steal me, yeah. Teach me how to sleep past six o’clock.”
Tee Claude drained his buttermilk and belched. “Who the hell’d steal you?”
“All right, shut your traps,” the old man said. “Time to get after them potato. Sammy, you go bust up some stovewood.”
“How much?”
“Well, the stove ain’t never gonna stop burnin’.”
SAM FELL ASLEEP in his chair at supper and woke when everyone began laughing at him, and he thought there was nothing better than a tableful of blood kin laughing at his expense. Nothing better than the chicken gumbo over fat pearls of rice and a tongue-popping potato salad on the side and a mug of hot coffee with fresh cream and three spoons of sugar in it. Nothing better and at the same time nothing sadder.
Everyone on the screened porch was telling stories. Arsène about a train wreck he’d been in. Tee Claude about a fistfight he’d started over a Duvillier girl. Sam about the girl in France he’d shot with a cannon.
“You shot a cannon and hit somebody?” Tee Claude made a terrible face. “What an idiot!”
Sam straightened his back in his rocker. “It was an accident!”
“Mais, who gave you a cannon to shoot with?”
“We just found it.”
Tee Claude shook his head. “Hell, Sam, remember when you couldn’t hit that rat in the outhouse with a rifle.”
Everybody laughed, and Sam stood up. “It was running around and around. You ever try to aim a rifle inside an outhouse?”
Arsène told about a live rabbit in an icebox, and the tales went on toward the deep dark of eight-thirty. Aunt Marie talked about her sister’s operation, how her appendix was the size of a bell pepper and how mad she was when the doctor told her he’d thrown it away. She’d wanted it in a jar, a trophy to show the ladies at the Altar Society meeting. Uncle Claude told about a great-uncle who’d drowned, a man no one had heard of before, and everybody on the porch wanted to know what he was like and what he did with his short life. The old man tried his best at reincarnation and the night ended in stories about other drownings and near-drownings, floods, roof leaks, baptisms, an accordion played in the rain.
THE HOUSE WAS EMPTY when Sam got up the next morning. They’d let him sleep out of understanding. All his bones hurt with yester-day’s work, and he winced as he raised a cup of coffee to his mouth. He was packed and standing on the porch when his aunt and cousins came out of the fields to say goodbye.
His uncle rode up from the barn on horseback, and the cousins walked out into the sun and left for the fields.
“Just leave him tied at the station,” Uncle Claude said, getting off. “We’ll get him when we go in for feed this evening.”
“All right.” Sam took a long look at the house.
His uncle waited for his gaze to come around. “You goin’ to look for those people?”
“I think so.”
“And if you find where they at?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well. What you do will say who you are.”
He looked at the dust rising in the road. “I guess so.”
His uncle’s eyes were full of thought. Finally, he said, “The house, it’s still there, all growed up.”
“House?”
“You know. Where it happened. It was cypress all of it, so it’s still there. Six mile away.”
“It’s been there all along and you never told me?”
His uncle dismissed his voice with a wave of his hand. “I found somethin’ else in the cabinet you can have. It’s in a sack on the saddle.”
“What is it?”
“Violon. A fiddle. It belonged to you daddy.”
He looked toward the horse. “Another thing you never told me. I knew there was a fiddle in the cabinet, but I never thought anything about it.” He suddenly felt as if he’d lived a thousand years on this farm, and he turned around, staring.
“It was too sad to tell you what it was.” His uncle looked away and put his hands in his pockets. “He played that thing all the time we grew up. What I think of when I look at it is the music it’s not making. Tu sais ça?”
The sack hung off the pommel like a sad thought. “Oui. Je sais.”
“La seule chose plus triste qu’une chanson triste est aucune chanson du tout.”
Sam put an arm on his uncle’s shoulder, the muscles oakey and warm. “C’est vrai, ça.”
The old man turned his face. “True too much.”