Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

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.

WILLA WHITE felt a duty to please her husband any way she could. She hired Vessy, the best cook she could find, and though the girl was coarse and simple, Acy enjoyed her meals. Willa considered herself two or three pounds overweight, so she traveled to the nearest big city to purchase exotic-colored foundation garments with brocaded straps and buckles that camouflaged her lushness and made Acy breathless with the effort of getting them off her in the dark. She wanted to entertain her husband with bright talk, so she subscribed to many magazines that digested the world’s complexities for her. Acy liked a dustless and orderly house, so she hired an excellent maid, the daughter of a woman that worked for the Calhoun family. The one thing she couldn’t supply Acy with was a child.

Usually Willa took a drink of wine after lunch and supper, along with an olive-colored pill the druggist, her first cousin, had given her. It was a cure for opium addiction in the old days, he explained, and would merely calm her nerves. She took another drink or two about eight o’clock, then another at bedtime, a whiskey, for her digestion.

One night around two o’clock she heard a sound like a mosquito whining in her ear and sat up, dizzy, to realize it was her Madeline crying in the next bedroom.

She sat in a brocaded chair next to the child and could see in the glow of the night-light that she was sweaty under the fine sheets and coverlet. “Here, honey, let’s get all this off of you. It’s okay to sleep just under a sheet when it’s warm.”

“Where’s my mommy and Gussie?” the child cried, her voice sleepy and thick.

“You’re just confused, Madeline. Your family got sick and passed away, remember?”

“No, they didn’t.”

“You were in the orphanage just one day when we picked you out to be our own little girl, precious.” She leaned over and began to stroke the girl’s hair. “I saw right away you were talented and pretty, not like those dirty, snotty children. Oh, you could sing like a bird.”

“My mommy taught me songs.”

“Well…” Willa straightened her back. “Didn’t I hire a trained musician to teach you better ones? He cost lots and lots of money, Madeline.”

“He didn’t like the song I sang for him.”

Willa looked toward the window and frowned. “‘Cleopatra’ is a nasty New York song from one of those tawdry revues.”

The child began to whimper. “Vessy said she liked it.”

“Vessy is an uneducated servant who barely knows how to wear shoes. She probably sleeps with hound dogs back in the woods.”

“I like her,” the girl said.

“Bless you, there’s not a thing you know about how people are. I’ll teach you, Madeline, the difference between good and bad people. All you have to do is listen to me and watch me.”

“Can I have a drink of water?”