Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

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.”

IN NEW ORLEANS he relaxed for a few days, played with Christopher, repaired a broken pipe under the bathroom, and went on long walks with the baby and Linda. She asked him to quit the boat several times, but he told her he was afraid to give up a job when he had no other prospects. He didn’t tell her that his playing was much better because he was working with a good group of musicians.

When he got off the train in St. Louis, he found the boat tied up below the Eads Bridge and half the crew down with influenza. The captain, his face compressed with worry, pulled him aside as soon as he stepped off the stage. “Sam, you stay in your cabin and don’t mix in. We’re trying to keep the sickest folks to the back of the boat.”

“All right. How’s Charlie?”

“He had a case in 1918 and says he can’t catch it again. But the cook staff and the café help are knocked down bad.” The captain squeezed his shoulder. “A cabin boy died yesterday, and the day before that, Maude Schull.”

“Big Maude in charge of the linen?” He pictured her going through the cabins, jerking sheets off their flimsy bunks.

“She’d been with us five years.”

“How’s Elsie doing in all this?”

“The captain lowered his voice. “She’s had the fever three days and is out of her head.”

Sam took a step back and looked aft down the rail. “Is there anything I can do for her?”

“You’d best try to keep well. We’ve canceled four days’ worth of trips, and when we start up again we’ll need every hand.”

He watched the captain pull himself up the stairs. Sam remembered the epidemic two or three years before. He’d gotten a skull-cracking case of it himself, but made it through. Six employees at Krine’s weren’t as lucky.

Later that afternoon, he met with the day band and they went over new arrangements, playing them out on the forecastle deck in safe, open air, the music running up the riverbank into town. Two black clarinetists, Will Williams and Louis LaBorde, their forearms resting on a deck rail above, listened and watched. Felton Bicks, the cornetist, called up. “Hey, get your instruments and come on down. Teach these sight-readin’ dandies a few licks.” In a few minutes they appeared and everybody started up “Clarinet Marmalade,” and not far in, Sam noticed how the music got set free by the clarinet improvisations. August sat to his right in a deck chair, and when the clarinetists dropped out, he slid right in and embroidered a new edge onto the melody, the rest of the band setting a stage for his wandering sax. Sam was playing on the downstairs upright, which they’d pushed out into the sunshine, and he could feel the band get good and tight as they doubled the song, playing it right out of the end and into the beginning, turning the tune inside out and running it over the water. He looked at August, and the boy was pure music, eyes closed and sax waving like a flag at a parade.

He fell into his bunk at ten o’clock, and Charlie came in and sat in the chair, looking old and tired, his shoulders curled forward. “Lucky, they just brought a cook up the stage plank. He didn’t make it.”

“Who was it?”

“The little Swenson guy.”

“Why didn’t they bring him to the hospital?”

Charlie looked at the palms of his hands. “Nobody thought it was that bad, I guess.” He pulled off his cap and hung it on his knee. “They’re taking out three by ambulance in the morning, though. Unless they improve.”

“How’s Elsie doing?”

“She’s one of the three. Her and a fireman and the purser.”

“I’d better go down and see her.”

“You had the flu yet?”

“Yeah.” He pulled his mate’s cap off a nail and settled it square on his head.

“It’s a bad dose she’s got.”

“I just want to see her a minute.”

He walked toward the rear of the Texas, where most of the women had their cabins. Lily was staying with another waitress farther forward while her mother was ill. He knocked, and Gladys, a ruddy pastry cook from Minnesota, opened the door for him.

“How’s she doing?”

“You just set with her a minute while I get a snack. You’ll get the picture.”

The room was warm and smelled of sickness. Elsie lay on the bottom bunk, and he took the small chair between it and the sink. Even in the light of the dim bulb he could see that her complexion was dark. She breathed hard, her mouth open, and when he reached to her forehead, the fever scorched his palm. She opened her eyes and coughed, rivers moving in her chest. “Lucky,” she said breathlessly. “Can you help watch the kids till I get better?”

It broke his heart to see her like this, and he remembered her in the spotlight onstage, all beauty and talent and music. “That won’t be a problem, girl.”

Her head rolled away from him. “Hell of a mess.”

“You’ll be all right.”

“I guess this is one thing I can’t blame on you.”

He looked at the enameled deck. “You seen August?”

“He just left. I don’t want him in here too long.”

“He’s getting better with his horn every day.”

She seemed desperate for breath. A crescent of blood glowed in her right nostril. “If I can’t work this season.” She stopped and swallowed. “The only one who’ll take Lily is Ted’s brother.”

“You better rest.”

“No. Ted’s brother is a saloonkeeper. Bad, bad temper, Lucky. It’ll be terrible for the kids.”

He waited for her to go on, but she was completely exhausted and her eyes had drifted closed. A big tow went by the little window, the boat’s mast light winking like a shooting star, and the Ambassador started to rock slightly. After a few minutes he stood up, unsure of what to do, and in the dim room her voice came, all the music out of it.