Tim Gautreaux: The Missing

The priest was a dour, half-senile man with no teeth or manners, an Estonian exiled to the Louisiana prairie. He stood in the high grass outside his little box of a rectory and yelled out, because he was mostly deaf, “Is the body Catholic?”

“Je crois que non,” the oldest Ongeron answered.

The priest cupped a hand behind an ear. “How did he die?”

Simoneaux stepped out of the mud sled and explained in French what had happened.

“Ah, violence. Simoneaux, will you confess this?”

“Mais oui. Quand tu veux.”

The priest shook his head slowly. “Well, he can’t be put inside the fence because he’s not Catholic and met a bad end, unconfessed. But you can put him outside the fence in the back.”

“All right.”

The priest held out a hand. “The plot costs a dollar.”

Sam’s father looked into his bag and fished out a silver coin. “Combien s’il est catholique?”

“Fifty cents.”

He looked sorrowfully at the coin and examined it front and back. “Tu peux pas lui baptiser?”

The priest gently took the dollar. “Simoneaux, you can’t buy a ticket after the boat has sailed.”

And Sam’s father knew this was right, that something had been done that could not be undone. He and the Ongerons silently went back to the saloon, loaded the body into the sled, and buried it behind the churchyard. The priest watched from the window but did not come out, only opened the door when one of the men returned his shovel. They removed the saddle and bloody bit from the horse and put him in the shed next to the priest’s mare, and then they all went home for supper.

THAT NIGHT, Sam’s father was the last one to bed, and for the first time he waited at the dark front window to listen for something other than the coarse respirations of his animals. It was like this every night from then on, watchfulness and worry after dark. Whether the song of a night bird or the breaking of a stick, he listened to every sound as if for the beat of a sick heart.

And two months later, when the three children were playing in the house and his wife was washing supper dishes in a pan at the kitchen window, the moonless night stirred with the sound of hooves. He expected to be called out, and maybe he thought for half a moment about seizing his three-dollar shotgun rusting behind the door, but as family stories let it be known in the years to come, there was only enough time for the thing to happen and none for preparation. The house was made of weatherboard nailed on studs, and the insect noise of gun hammers being set in the yard on shotguns loaded with double-ought buckshot, on long-barreled Colt.45 revolvers, on Winchesters and Marlins preceded the coming apart of the building in a splintering volley that swept the rooms with a swarm of deforming lead, the boy and girl killed outright, the mother running toward them knocked back into the next world, and he himself catching a slug under the rib cage that didn’t kill him at once, giving him a moment to reach the six-month-old baby lying on the floor, grab him by the foot, sling him through the open door of the cold potbellied stove, and bat it shut as the slugs sailed through the smokestack without even shaking it, rang against a skillet, exploded the mantel clock, pounded through Sam’s father’s skull, and beat that stove like an anvil until everyone in the dark yard had emptied magazines, breeches, and cylinders of their revenge. The door came off the hinges under the kick of a soggy boot, though the lock hadn’t been set in years. The overhead lantern had its globe shot out, but the flame still burned enough for them to check their work in its infernal glow, the assassins hearing in their ringing ears only the muffled mewing of the family cat. They prowled through the house like feral hogs, then mounted up to flee back to Arkansas or Mississippi or North Louisiana, from wherever these wronged blood kin had been drawn. No one afterward knew exactly who they were.

The next morning at daybreak, a lean, sandy-haired man rode up on his mule to help his brother put in seed cane. Claude found them all and sat down on the one standing chair and bawled, looking at the forms on the floor and holding out a hand to each, crying out again and then hearing a miniature echo of his grief begin to rise out of the stove. He opened the door and saw the baby furry with ash, its face black but for the lightning strikes of its tears.

Sam looked up out of the stove, stopped crying, and smiled at his uncle’s face caught in the square of light that was the world.

THE BATTLEFIELD the next morning was silver plated with frost, and Sam woke shaking with cold. He and the other men stood next to the truck, chewing chalky bread and hiding from the wind before they set to work. By lunchtime he took a long look at the gutted land and understood that they were not making any headway at all and never would against four years’ worth of unexploded projectiles and weaponry. Each layer of dirt down to twenty feet was a meat loaf of munitions and the lieutenant told them that deeper still were big, fort-killing shells that no one would find for a hundred years. Sam shook his head and walked over to Robicheaux and told him a joke about a pelican and a duck, and that warmed them, reminding that they were not of this place. In the cold open country their laughter sounded like ice breaking.

AT THE NORTH END of their quadrant they found a depot of large German artillery projectiles, thirty tons at least. They spent the morning working four men to a shell, stacking as many as they could, and when they finished, the pile was half the size of a railroad boxcar. The lieutenant looked behind him. “How much wire do we have left?”

Dupuis rolled his eyes up to calculate. “Maybe two t’ousand feet, yeah. But if we string it that long and I hook up the right amount of caps, the burden might be too much for the machine. Might not light all them caps.”

“Do we have enough fuse?”

“You gonna light this thing and then run half a mile over all this mess?”

The lieutenant folded his arms and slouched backwards. “You’re right. That wouldn’t work anyway. A long fuse would give someone a chance to wander up behind it.” He looked west, biting his lip. “There. We’ll post a lookout with a flag on that hill. Give him our good binoculars. When he raises the flag to let us know nobody’s nearby, we’ll push the plunger.”

Dupuis sucked an eyetooth. “It’ll take me all day to rig the charge and get us far enough away. I got to put boosters in the line and sometimes they don’t work worth a damn.” He sucked the other eyetooth. “Anybody know how to work a cannon?”

The lieutenant pulled out a tab of flesh under his tight chin. “Cannon?”

“They’s a upside-down French 155 over there.” He pointed south. “In all that junk at the base of that burnt hill. Maybe eight, nine hundred yards.”

Sam followed their line of sight down the gray land through a dusting of snowflakes. “You want to shoot the pile with a field gun?” Exhausted and cold, he turned and looked at the artillery shells a long time, a shiver of doubt crawling along his spine. He thought it a bad idea, but if they disposed of so much at once, they could go back to the truck, share the brandy, maybe get up a poker game under the canvas in the back. “Well, most of those rounds are fused. It might could work.”

The squad moved down a hill toward the gun, each man watching where he stepped. It was a large piece, three-quarters turned over, but its breechblock was closed and a proper plug wedged in the muzzle. A metal limber spilled out shells, and the intact one next to it held dry bags of cordite. Two men walked to the truck for ropes, then saddled the horses and led them back along the ridges of shell craters. In a few minutes the animals managed to pull the cannon upright onto its wheels with a crash, clods tumbling from between the spokes. Comeaux, who had washed out of artillery school, selected a shell and two bags of powder as the lieutenant rotated the elevation wheel until the barrel seemed to point directly into the pile of shells on top of the knoll. He struggled with the sighting mechanism, which was caked with rusty mud.