THE TOWN OF BUNG CITY had no automobiles for hire but still supported three liveries. Sam held the reins before a mellow, listing mare and resigned himself to another ride. The animal was long legged and he let her walk up the hill as he read Morris Hightower’s telegram again. He put it back in his pants pocket and surveyed the two blocks of gray storefronts faced with cupped pine boards bleeding nail rust. Behind these sat a line of whitewashed houses faded to the color of wood smoke. The street was full of animals, and his mare stepped on a chick, leaving behind a yellow hoofprint in the hot dust. At the edge of town he went into a swaybacked store to ask where Ferry Road was, and the proprietor took ten minutes to make sure Sam wasn’t a revenuer, bounty hunter, deputy, or Northerner before he answered.
He found the unmarked turn in the cottonwoods that was the start of Ferry Road and several miles later he saw a shiplap-siding farmhouse in the back of a field of green beans. The man at the store had told him that this was where Biff Smally lived. The thought occurred to him that he might have brought a pistol along. He sat the mare and looked for someone in the field. The place had good wire fences, he’d give him that. The roof was of painted iron and the porch had rails. He turned in at the gate and wished himself luck.
Before he could dismount at the front porch, a woman about thirty years old came out. She wore a sunbonnet and was smoking a pipe. “You come to bid on our beans, mister?”
“I was looking for Smally.” He saw twin girls around ten years old come out from behind her to stare at him.
“What for?”
He didn’t know how to explain and just said, “It’s about the new child.”
The woman let out a puff of smoke. She was not unpleasant looking, what he could see of her. She raised a rawboned hand over her eyes and peered to the west. “They’re off in the barn yonder, loadin’ stakes in the dray.” She stepped off the porch, the girls following like ducklings as she walked to the pump.
He touched the animal up and rode to the barn and got down. A man came out and took off his straw hat. “You come about the beans?”
“I ain’t after your beans, Mr. Smally. I’m trying to help some folks find their young child that was taken from them, and I heard one showed up here.”
Smally was a young man and fair skinned for a farmer. “Who told you I brung in a child?”
“A friend in Greenville. I was already in Bung City and decided to see about it.”
Smally threw a thumb over his shoulder. “Well, this here child wasn’t lost from nobody. He come off the orphan train that stopped in town from New York City. You know, they line ’em up on the station platform and you can take your pick.”
“He?”
“Yeah.” He turned to the hayloft and called, “Jacob.”
A dark-eyed boy who looked about seven stepped tentatively up to the loft gate, his head bristling with a two- inch growth.
“When we got him his scalp was buggy, so we had to shave his head.”
Sam touched his chin. “I was looking for a little girl,” he said absently. He looked up at the child. “You doing all right?”
“Yes,” the boy said. “I have my own clothes.”
“All right, you can start throwin’ down those sticks into the dray,” Smally told him. The child backed off into the dark loft. “Where was this little girl took from?”
Sam told him the story, and the farmer listened to all of it patiently. He motioned for Sam to walk over a few yards by a heart-pine corncrib that might have been sitting there for a hundred years. “Unless you foolin’ me, you look like a good feller and I don’t talk to no other kind. My daddy was a peace officer got shot out of the saddle for doin’ the right thing. He raised me to not let the bad stuff go on.” He looked behind him and lowered his voice. “What I’m gettin’ to is that I didn’t fetch that boy off the orphan train myself. A old boy three mile from here you don’t need to know the name of got him off that train some time ago and brought him home like a bought tool and made him chop firewood till doomsday. Beat him when he fell out.” Smally looked right into Sam’s eyes. “At night he’d come get in the bed with the boy and fool with him. His hired man told me that because he saw what was goin’ on.” Smally’s eyes drew up tight, and wrinkles blossomed around his eye sockets. “Men in these parts don’t mess in each other’s business, but we know what’s happenin’ just the same. Most of us work like a pump handle all our lives, hard and hot work all of it, but we never forget those five years or so when we’re kids. When we’re looked after, I guess. Not hurt by our elders unless we do somethin’ to deserve it.” He looked back to the barn, and Sam thought for a moment that Farmer Smally was about to shed tears. “When we’re little shavers we don’t think there’s nothin’ bad in the world, and nothin’ that can make us hurt. If we do get a little pain we kin put our face on our daddy’s shirt or momma’s dress and it’ll go away, sure. I hope that’s what it’s like again after I die.” He turned back. “Them that takes that from children are robbin’ heaven from earth.”
Sam looked up at the barn loft. “How’d you get him away?”
“Some of my neighbors paid that man a visit, and I understand he pulled out a shotgun from behind his door.”
“What’d he say?”
“I don’t know. He don’t say much of nothin’, anymore.”
Sam watched a crow light on the edge of the bean field. “They ran him out of the country?”
“You could say that,” Smally said softly, but in a way that told Sam not to ask further.
He looked over at the rented mare, which was cropping grass by a fence where he’d tied her off. The boy came again to the loft opening and looked out at them. Here was another one with no parents or siblings. “They just give those kids away like calendars at the drugstore?”
Smally turned and followed his gaze. “Yep. Some of ’em go to bad folks all right, but Jacob, he’s safe now. He’ll make a good hand in a few years. He just does chores now. I wouldn’t put a little bitty like that in the field.”
“You say your daddy was the law?”
“He was. Dollar a day and all the trouble you’d want in a lifetime on Saturday night.”
Sam took a breath, and the air came in as heavy as mercury. “When I was a baby, as far as I can tell my whole family was killed by a clan from south Arkansas.”
Smally acted as though he’d heard such news every day. “Your family must of kilt one of them.”
“I guess.”
“All rode down there together and did everbody in, did they?”
“You ever hear of something like that?”
“More’n I like to. There’s no lack of wild clans in this or any other country. There’s even whole families that’ll give humans in general a sorry name. There’s the Kathells and the Blankbulls just to start with. It was Blankbulls killed my daddy.” He shook his head. “The Luthlows specialized in killin’ preachers. But about forty, fifty mile from here’s a bunch by the name of Cloat. They’re worse than worst.” He spat next to his boot. “My daddy used to tell me they thought ridin’ horseback two hundred miles to kill somebody was like goin’ to the state fair. They just lived to get angry. I hadn’t thought about ’em in years, but if you wanted to find a murderin’ bunch from around this part of the world, I’d start with them Cloats.”
“Do they live near a town?”
“Not hardly.”
“How do people find them?”
Smally gave him a long, baleful look. “People don’t.”
RIDING BACK to the boat, he spotted the railroad station, more of a raw pine booth with a semaphore bolted outside and telegraph wires running in through a gnawed hole. He sent a note to agent Morris Hightower at Greenville: THANKS FOR LEAD. CHILD WAS BOY. KEEP EARS OPEN. THANKS. SAM SIMONEAUX.
