Tim Gautreaux: The Missing

“Who’s it from?” Linda turned from where she was cutting up onions for the noon meal.

“That little girl I injured in France.”

“My God. What’s she say?”

“She wanted to thank me.”

“For what? Blowing her finger off?” She banged a spoon on the edge of her skillet.

“I don’t know. Maybe it was something I told her? Who knows? Anyway, she seems to be surviving all right.”

Her sentences were densely packed with both information and feeling, painstakingly composed. He read the letter through three times. Near the end she wrote:

When I think of that final blast, I marvel that it was followed by a messenger who tried to comfort me. I think often that is the way it ought to be. If each artillery shell had an escort, each bullet, each aerial bomb was followed by a soldier who would arrive and look around and ask “Is everyone all right? How can I help?” then war would not last so long or be so bad. When I look at my right hand today, I could feel sorry to be maimed, but instead I have nine reasons for gratitude. Monsieur Chanceux, if you had not blown apart my house, I might have starved or lost heart. I’ve learned to take the good with the bad and want to thank you again, not for the explosion, but for your wonderful visit.

That night the boat whistles down on the riverfront moaned through the fog, keeping him awake, so he got out of bed and planned the letter he’d write back. He would tell her how often he’d worried about her over the years, and about how his life had veered so far away from where he thought it would go. He sat there at the kitchen table until one o’clock, then returned to bed and dreamed he was in France again, walking down a frozen road in a feathery snowfall. He came to a plastered house with a thatch roof and left the lane to knock at its door. Amélie answered, still eleven years old, and held out her hand. He took it slowly, his forefinger joining the place where her little finger had been, settling there as if it completed her-then he woke up, startled at her touch still trembling on his skin. He turned on the bedside light.

“What is it?” Linda said.

He stared at his right hand and rubbed it with his left. “I was having a dream.”

She yawned and turned toward him. “What about?”

He opened his mouth, but he couldn’t turn such a dream into words. Finally he said, “About coming full circle.”

AT EIGHT YEARS OLD, Lily was an indifferent helper around the house, though she watched Christopher and Lisette carefully and worked with Linda in the kitchen without being asked. She would seldom speak with Sam, and when she did answer a question, he felt a subtle edge of resentment bordering everything she told him. She treated him like a landlord more than a father, demanding, for example, that the piano be tuned once every three months, that he hire a tutor for technique she felt she had to know, that he buy new music for her monthly. This pattern of distance might have continued permanently but for two things that happened.

The first was that Linda demanded that they buy a house, a larger place. In January 1927 after a long search, she found a rambling cypress bungalow two blocks away, four bedrooms, big yards and porches, for two thousand dollars. She had to have it. Among her reasons, Lily had just turned nine and wanted her privacy. Even though they had no savings to speak of and owned nothing that would secure them a loan, Linda wanted that house more than the next gulp of air. She told Sam she could get a few hundred from her folks as a loan and that he should try to borrow something from his uncle.

The second thing that happened was that Lily was cleaning out mildew from the closets, a chore she undertook once every two months, going over all leather shoes and belts with a cloth soaked in a weak bleach solution, when she happened to open a sack containing a fiddle and a bow.

That afternoon Sam came in about four o’clock from playing a morning wedding at the Sterling ballroom. Lily sat next to him on the sofa and showed him the fiddle. “What can you tell me about this?”

He watched her carefully, checking her eyes for deceit. “It belonged to my daddy. You tune it G-D-A-E.”

“I know. I tuned it against the piano. Where does your father live?”

“What?”

“Your father. I know Linda’s but never met yours.”

He made a face. Somehow she didn’t know and he became aware of the few links he’d built between them. He put a hand on her blond curls. “He’s not alive anymore.”

She flicked the E string with a little finger, then brushed away his hand, but not roughly. “Did he teach you about music?”

“I didn’t know him. He died when I was a baby.”

She looked at him, her eyes wide. “You didn’t know him at all ?”

“I think I told you about this years ago.”

“Maybe I wasn’t paying attention.” The way she said this, with a whiff of sarcasm, let him know she couldn’t possibly remember what people had told her years before. “What did you tell me?”

He was tired and felt a headache coming on. “That at least you had your parents for a few years, and I never had any at all.”

She gave him a hard look. “I know what I’m missing, then,” she said. “You don’t.”

That made him angry, and he went into the kitchen to chip a cup of ice and drink a glass of sweet tea and lemon. He’d always considered Lily a fellow orphan and thought they could imagine each other’s pain, but it wasn’t that way. Someone else’s pain is just that. A fiddle note came from the front room, then others. She was playing scales, and in five minutes was testing minors and feeling her way through “Oh! Susanna.” A single double-string drone convinced him it was time to take her to meet Uncle Claude, to show her where he’d come from. He stood in the doorway, sipping his tea, watching. “Bend your wrist,” he told her.

THE TRAIN STOPPED on the branch line at Prairie Amer, where they got off and stood out of the chilly wind in the little waiting room, waiting for the bus. The tracks to Troumal had been taken up the year before, but there was a road of sorts and a bus of sorts that rattled down to the village twice a week.

Lily looked through a station window at the fields of sugarcane, the crossroads store, the handful of cypress buildings. “Is the town we’re going to bigger than this?”

“Smaller. You’re way out in the country, city girl. Are you afraid?”

“No.” She watched a cow dreamwalking across a fenced lot. “I like it. It’s different. Quiet.” Her hair was cut short and Linda had sewn her a stylish drop-waist dress.

The little gray bus crawled down a poorly graveled road and stopped for them. The ride was slow and noisy, the bus creaking down into ruts and stuttering over cattle guards in a way that made the girl laugh.

His aunt Marie was waiting near the station in a Ford pickup, its wooden bed holding spools of fence wire. “Mon Dieu,” she called out. “Une jolie blonde.”

“You bought yourself a truck?”

“Oh, yes. So this is Lily?”

The girl opened the door and climbed onto the seat, Sam following after. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You ready for supper, you?”

She looked from one to the other. “I’m more than ready.”

By the time they got to the house, everyone had come in from the fields and washed up. Uncle Claude pushed open the screen door to greet them. “Eh, Sam, why didn’t you bring the whole bunch?”

He exchanged a handshake and shoulder slaps. “We’ll do that this summer.”

“When you called me on the phone I told you bring everbody you want.”