can get to that hick town and take my baby back from those people. You’ve got to come with me. All
“I can’t even afford the train ticket. I’m making a few dollars at odd jobs, but I can’t leave my family without any money in the bank.” He looked up at his wife. “It might take two weeks to straighten things out.”
The voice came back thin as a needle. “I don’t want to hear it. This will never be straightened out. Me and August have been eating potato soup and shivering for months. At least down where you are the river doesn’t freeze over.”
He closed his eyes and reached deep inside himself for the words. “Well, maybe we can try this.”
The phone call lasted ten more minutes. Later that afternoon, she called back. The
Sam hung up the phone and walked to his piano, a glossy red-mahogany Packard, a stolid instrument with bell-like upper notes and a booming bass. He opened the sheet music for “When My Baby Smiles at Me” and played it as written, but when he was finished he played it again, adding ragged filigree to the plain arrangement, then jazzed it up on a third run-through. He played ten other pieces in a row, feeling the ivory slide under his fingertips, and afterward he sat a long time staring at the fine wood until he saw his face reflected in the French polish. He got up and called a furniture store on Dryades Street, and in an hour the dealer arrived and bought his piano for seventy-nine dollars.
Chapter Twenty-four
SOME TIME IN MARCH, Ralph Skadlock had been hired by a Louisiana state legislator to steal a specially engraved and gold-inlaid Parker shotgun from the home of a plantation owner in Braithwaite. The day after he stole it, he pulled the double out of its gun bag and looked it over while sitting in his mildewed front parlor. The sidelocks showed bird dogs jumping a covey of quail, and he ran a sooty fingertip over the razor-sharp checkering on the swirling walnut stocks. He noted how it snapped shut, as though barrels and receiver suddenly became one piece of metal through the cold welding of expert craftsmanship. Still, to him, the piece was ridiculous. A gun was a wrench or a hammer. It did a job.
The next day he rode horseback to the depot and took the southbound to the Baton Rouge station, where he handed a smudged cardboard box to a corpulent, florid man dressed in a tailored suit.
“I think you’ll be happy with this here item,” Ralph told him.
The legislator gave him a look, paid him, and turned away without a word. Ralph held on to the envelope and watched him walk out into the sunlight, knowing for a fact that this fool couldn’t hit a quail exploding out of a dewberry bush to save his soul and probably not even a dove sitting on a branch outside his bedroom window. But he could show off the gun to men gathered in his parlor for drinks, the weapon suggesting how much better he was than they.
Skadlock went home and brooded about their meeting, how the man’s little sharp eyes looked at him, how he’d refused to give him a single word. He remembered the envelope coming over with a nasty flick of the wrist. Men had gotten killed for such manners.
A week later he crossed a long, apple-green lawn and climbed through the window of a many-columned house northeast of Baton Rouge. He stood under a high ceiling and smelled the furniture oil, the floor wax, the fresh paint of the place. The gun was conspicuously displayed in a leaded-glass case, and he took it, fading back out into the night, knowing that when the theft was discovered, the legislator wouldn’t report it, wouldn’t send any lawman against Ralph Skadlock, who might tell who had paid him to take the gun in the first place, along with a few other items he’d been hired to steal in the past. He walked two miles to a highway and crossed it into a stand of sycamores where his horse was tied. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of this double thieving before. On the long ride back, he made a mental list of all the haughty, weak men he could revisit, taking back animals, clocks, jewelry. It was then that Acy White came to mind.
HE AND BILLSY were looking the gun over the next day in the big kitchen house, debating where they could sell it, when they heard a spatula hit the floor. Their mother, cooking breakfast, had slumped down on the floor planks with a wheeze, and they went and stood over her, nudging her arms with their brogans and then kneeling down and trying to talk her upright. Ninga would have none of it. One eye rolled toward the window and the other toward the door, signals that everything in her had suddenly quit, muscles turned loose, breaths escaped, thought gone out like a wick. After ten minutes of staring and cajoling, the men understood that she was dead, but could not imagine what might happen now. A vast emptiness grew up around them, and Billsy stood to turn off the aromatic stove, not sure which way to twist the valve handle.
They laid her out straight on the floor, so she would cool in a decent posture, and stood around outside the kitchen eating slices of white bread, wondering what to do next. Neither of them had been to a family funeral, and they couldn’t remember what had been done to their father after his still had exploded when they were four and five years old. They weren’t sure where any relatives lived over in Arkansas, as the clan tended to move around.
There was a magnolia-haunted graveyard a hundred yards to the rear of the mansion bearing several humpbacked markers and a stone cross crenellated with lichen. The men scratched out a vacant space at the rear of the highborn dead and dug her hole. Wrapping her in her own quilts, they set her in the ground and covered her up, then stood looking down at the soppy mound. Ralph felt a thickness in his throat he thought might be some words coming up, but he didn’t say anything. No one in the family had ever read a Bible or stepped foot in a church one time, and both men were too primitively formed to deal even in the cliches of Christianity, having no more notion of a hereafter or its price of admission than lizards stunned asleep in the noon sun.
Billsy looked around at the other weed-wracked headstones bearing inscriptions in French. “She needs her a marker.”
Ralph looked up. “Like what?”
“Just a second.” He turned back to the kitchen house. Ralph walked the dirt down around the edge of the grave until his brother returned holding a stamped skillet with a long handle. “This here’s the ticket.”
Ralph took it from him, turned it front and back several times as if he were inspecting it for purchase, then stuck the handle in the earth at the head of the grave. “That there about says it, all right.”
THEY ATE potted meat and sardines, then rode several miles toward a ferry landing upriver. Turning onto a road leading to the water, they rode against automobiles coming off the boat. Near the bank they reached a roughboard roadhouse fronting three mildewed tourist cabins strung out along a raw red ditch. Upstairs, the dark, low-ceilinged bar served skin-peeling moonshine in jelly glasses, and after an hour of it they both were ready for whores.
Ralph leaned over the counter and put a hand on the ample arm of the barmaid. “Is Suzy servin’ tonight?”
She fixed a lead ball eye on him. “Ruttin’ season, is it?”
“Is she still three dollars?”
“Ralph, a good-lookin’ man like you, I’m surprised you ain’t married.”
“Costs more than three dollars. Is she seein’ fellers?”
The barmaid put a finger in an ear and scratched. “In cabin two, at the back.” She slid her gaze past Ralph’s dark bulk to round-shouldered Billsy, who’d been here dozens of times but was still shy about it. “You want a good
