The Missing

impulse is to strike back. After reflection, sometimes that impulse fades. He knew the boy needed time to calm the notion of revenge. Or an alternative. “August,” he began, “once those people see you armed on their place, they’re going to protect themselves. They’ll hurt you real bad, maybe even kill you, because you’ve made them believe they have to. I’m not going to bring that news to your mother. No way in hell. If you’ll just listen to me, maybe there’s a way we can capture Skadlock and bring him to the law in Zeneau.”

The boy lay the shotgun down on a blanket before the fire and stretched out next to it, his hand on the walnut wrist. “I already talked to the deputy.”

This surprised him. “The hell you say.”

“Yeah. He’s Ralph Skadlock’s second cousin.”

That night he lay on a mound of leaves listening to spiders grinding away in the weeds. His arm and shoulder seemed to glow with dull pain. Sometime in the night he fingered citronella into his ears to scent out the keening mosquitoes. He dozed when the fire burned down, but soon woke up imagining how the boy would blunder onto the homesite full of confidence and catch lead like an animal drawn to a baited field. Nobody should let this happen to a child, even one big enough to be a man and already smarter than most. August still lived in the one- dimensional world where he couldn’t understand how the irreversible can happen, drawing your final breath or watching someone else do it. In the morning he’d do what needed to be done, even if it meant the boy would need stitches or to have a bone set. First thing, he’d break the shotgun to pieces.

***

AT DAWN the temperature came up and the trees began to tick with dew, a glossy magnolia leaf dripping into his face and waking him. The boy was gone. He sat up and whirled around but saw only the hobbled mule, staring at him knowingly. He brushed off his shirt, stretched out his arm, which hurt worse than the night before, and saddled Garde Ca, reining him out onto the narrow ridge. The lead-colored sky revealed nothing of the time, and he stared up as he rode, trying to figure out how long past daylight he’d slept and wondering if the boy was dead yet. The mule shambled along, shaking his head as though Sam had started the whole series of sad events that would end with Elsie’s losing the only child she had left.

Inexplicably, he came to a straight, one-lane gravel road running east-west. He sat the mule in the middle trying to comprehend this connection to the known world. Then he crossed over and continued south through the woods. In less than an hour the trail ran parallel to the mile-wide river, and he knew he was close when the mule’s hoof clanked down on the lip of an inverted sugar vat, a huge cast-iron kettle shaped like his wartime helmet. In a collapsed shed he saw a litter of dove-colored shingles covering two other kettles, remnants of a batterie where slaves boiled sugarcane juice down to blackstrap. He reined into the marsh alder and cattails here, knowing the house was perhaps a mile or less away. When they reached the tree line the going was easier, and he turned south and stopped, keeping the animal’s head up so he wouldn’t pull and grind grass. Garde Ca’s breathing calmed, and he listened. To the southwest a steam towboat was making a racket, fighting upstream in the high river, and the covering noise allowed him to move through the brush up to the house. He tied the mule off and went on foot until he could see the dark planks of the belvedere rise above the willow saplings. Passing through the graveyard, he crept along until he spotted the fawn cloth of August’s vest. The boy slowly turned his face as if expecting him, and Sam dropped down on his knees, water seeping through to his skin. Sixty yards or so in front of them was the board walkway that ran between the kitchen and the big house, and a woman stepped out of a door, gathered a small bundle of shingles, and walked back in.

“You don’t want to do this,” he whispered.

The boy fixed his wounded eyes on him. “You don’t know what I want.”

“What are you planning to do?”

“I saw him walk into the house. The split second he comes out again, he’s a dead man.”

“You’ll be nothing more than a murderer. You can think you’re a musician all you want to, but for the rest of your life you’ll look back on this here with nothing but shame.” Sam saw that the hammers were drawn, the boy’s fingers set on both triggers, and he imagined the buck and roar, the stink of smoke and the twin pattern of coarse shot splintering apart the door frame and anyone in it.

“I’m no murderer,” August said, his voice trembling. “I’m getting even for my father.”

With a glance Sam saw there was no way he could wrest the ten-gauge away without it discharging. “Look,” he whispered, “Skadlock’s maybe fifty years old. He smokes, he drinks rotgut, God knows what kind of women he goes with.” Sam scanned the rear of the house, deperate to think of the right thing to say. “He drinks cistern water full of bugs. He probably won’t be around another five or six years. You won’t be taking much from him, and you’ll be giving up a whole lot more.”

“Just shut up,” August hissed.

“And down the line, when he does die, he’ll have to pay up then. I don’t know what will happen, exactly, but it probably ain’t good.”

“I don’t care about that stuff.”

“Well, you’d better care, because when you die you’ll have to answer for this. You might not believe that, either, but consider if you’re wrong, boy. Consider if you’re wrong. And you know what else? Whatever you say about Ralph Skadlock, he let your father live after he came here against him with a pistol and knife.” He kept his eyes on the door frame, praying for it to stay empty. “Another thing, I’ll bet Skadlock never hid in a bush and killed another man.” Watching the boy’s eyes, he saw something there that made him go on. “Believe me. You’re not doing this for the reason you think you are.”

August turned to him as though he’d suddenly appeared out of thin air, then looked back at the house and down at the shotgun. The plum-brown hammers reared back like snake heads, but he let down the left and then the right, and lowered the gun, defeat he didn’t understand showing on his face.

At that moment the side door to the big house squalled on its hinges and Ralph Skadlock stepped through, carrying a child on his right arm as his boot heels knocked along the walkway. The steamboat blew its whistle, and he stopped and pointed in that direction. When the child turned its head to look, both Sam and August could see who she was.

After the kitchen door closed behind them, Sam laid a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s back off a little.” The boy’s face contorted toward crying, and Sam pulled him along.

They found the mule and led him north along the tree line, then turned into a blackberry thicket and stopped. The boy was mortified, unable to speak, but Sam finally got him to look up.

“I almost-”

Sam took him by the shoulders. “Shut up. Knock that out of your head.”

“She would’ve-”

He pushed him, and the boy fell in a heap. “You can beat yourself up later. Right now we got to think about this from every angle.”

He tramped down a flat spot and they sat and ate crackers out of the saddlebags, washing them down with coppery water from the canteen. They talked a long time and sweated in the noon sun, trying to understand what Lily was doing here. Sam kept after the boy with questions, not letting him think about what he’d almost done. After nearly an hour, they decided it was all about transit. Skadlock hadn’t taken her out of loneliness, and the cook wasn’t running off to start an instant family in the hulking mansion. Given what he’d seen in the graveyard, Sam guessed the old woman was dead.

August seemed confused. “You think he’s shaking down the Whites?”

“They’re shaking down somebody. Why else would they take her again?” He looked around and lowered his voice. “When they first made off with your sister, the old woman took care of her. They need that Vessy woman to do the same.”

“The Whites are as much at fault as anybody,” the boy mumbled.

“More. And you just think about that.”

August jerked his head sideways. “You think they’re going to deliver her?”

“Where, and to who, that’s the question. I know it won’t be in Kentucky. Ralph’s liable there, even though the Whites probably won’t risk setting the law on him.”

“It could be anywhere.”

“I don’t know about that. Let’s ride back to Zeneau and hang around the store, maybe find something out by