Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

“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.”