Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

“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.