The Missing

Chapter Thirty-four

THE AMBASSADOR broke a paddlewheel shaft in St. Louis and laid up a week. Sam caught the Illinois Central to New Orleans and spent three days at home, playing with Christopher and taking Linda out one night just to ride the streetcar belt and eat beignets and coffee at the Morning Call. They sat on stools among leviathan sugar bowls and whorls of confectioner’s sugar spilled across the marble counter and talked a long time, but his mind was not always on their conversation.

“Lucky, what is it?” She put her cup down with a clack, unnoticed in the cafe, which was always racketing with stoneware.

He held his hand over his steaming mug. “I’ve been thinking about Uncle Claude. I don’t know why.”

She put a hand lightly on his arm. “Oh, you know why.”

“I thought he was my daddy for the first five or six years. But it’s something else.”

“What?”

“The attack.” He wouldn’t say “the killing.” It was too final a pronouncement.

She took her hand back. “I was wondering when this would come up. I mean, I’ve always admired the way you put that behind you. Other men would’ve gone crazy about it. I understand that.”

“I don’t know why, but I feel like it’s time to find out a little about it.”

“It’s because you’ve got your own family now.”

“I don’t know.”

She put her arm through his. “Lucky, you can catch the Texas and New Orleans train west in the morning.”

“I don’t want to leave.”

“It’s okay. You haven’t seen old Claude in a good long while.” She laughed. “I remember him at our wedding, wearing that gray-striped suit that made him look like a dominique chicken. Is his English getting any better?”

“Oh, he can speak it when he pays attention.”

“Honey.”

“What?”

“It’s okay if you speak French, you know. It doesn’t mean anything.”

He pushed his cup away and stood up, leaving a nickel on the counter for the boy. “The schoolteacher used to beat me with a stick of lath when I spoke French. Even one word. I got the idea real quick when I saw him whip the Abadie kids. He hit them like their French was a fire he was trying to beat out. And they didn’t know enough English to realize why he was mad or what he was yelling at them. I thought, who needs it? ‘I think’ works as well as ‘je pense.’” He took her arm and they walked out into the humid heat, the smell of fish drifting from the market downriver. “What time does the train leave?”

“They load it on the ferry at eight.”

“All right.”

“And call the store in Troumal to send a boy to tell Claude you’re coming.”

Here he laughed. “I remember one time a man delivered a telegram and Uncle tipped him with a sweet potato.”

***

THE NEXT MORNING the train was pulled off the lurching ferry by a switch engine, handed over to a greasy road locomotive, and proceeded west through poor, water-soaked farms into a reptile-laced swamp where virgin cypresses held up a cloud-dimmed sky. The timber was immense and close to the track. He watched out the window and imagined that from one of the new aeroplanes the railroad would look like a flaw in a vast green carpet. After an hour, one mildewed and rain-blistered town went by, and then they were in sugarcane fields, rainwater pooling silver in the long rows. Then thirty miles of timber, then sugarcane again, red-wing blackbirds flocking away from the train’s clatter, flashing their crimson badges. At noon he dug in a paper bag and ate a cold piece of chicken his wife had packed, washing it down with a cone of water from the coach’s fountain. There was no diner on the little consist, and the man next to him watched him closely as he ate, as if he were famished himself. The train switched off the main line and rolled to a stop in Petit Coeur and several people got off, including his seatmate. The feeling stirred in him that the train was going back in time to a place that didn’t exist anymore, that maybe never had existed at all, though he knew he’d come from there. The engine whistled off, and now the few villages provided intermittent relief from the fields and swamps that the train threaded through at twenty miles an hour for much of the afternoon. At a flagstop of ten buildings known as Prairie Amer, he waited on the wooden platform until the one-car train departed for Troumal on the branch line, its little nineteenth-century locomotive lisping steam northward through drowned cane fields.

From the depot in Troumal he was planning to walk to the store and wait for a ride, but the agent put a finger in his elbow and motioned with his head. “Ton cheval est la-bas.” Down the street, tied off to a railroad hydrant, was an oily-looking horse with a note pinned to the saddle, “Simoneaux” scrawled on the paper. He looked the horse over and shook his head.

The road was so sloppy he switched to the edge of a sugarcane field, riding past little farmhouses washed gray by the weather, the Boudreauxs, the Patins, the white home of Mrs. Perriloux, his piano teacher. When he rode into his uncle’s yard, he was pleased to see the house looking good, with new chairs and rockers on the gallery, the yard inside the pickets clean and free of weeds and junk. His aunt came out as he tied the horse to the gate and gave him a long hug. She was a tall woman with a straight back and dark hair cut medium-length, and though her face was wrinkled, the skin was clear and the even color of cream. She started to rattle off questions in French, and he held up his hand.

“Aunt Marie, I don’t remember a lot of the old talk. Can you go in English?”

She put a finger up and touched her lips. “Ah, yes. You a bigshot city boy now. Me, I forgot that. Come on in and I’ll fix you a hot cup of coffee.”

Inside, nothing much had changed. Seated at the kitchen table he looked around to the whitewashed board walls and the pictures of the Blessed Virgin and Saint Martin. The stove was the same one for which he’d chopped tons of kindling. “Where’s the boys?”

“Nestor moved away to work on them oil field in Texas. Orillian married and has a place out near Petit Coeur. Arsene and Tee Claude stayed around to help with the farm.”

“Orillian found a girl to marry him?”

She poured a long rill of coffee into an ironstone mug. “Hard to believe.” They looked at each other and burst out laughing. Orillian was the smallest of all of them and famous parish-wide for his big ears.

“How’s Uncle Claude?”

“Oh, him, he’s fine as can be.”

They sat in the kitchen and traded news until it was time to begin supper, and without being told he stepped onto the back porch, bent to the right, and his hand found the hatchet handle as easy as finding his own forehead with the sign of the cross. He held the tool up and smiled at it. The kindling plinked against the house until there was enough to get the stove started. He noticed a kitchen chair resting against the back wall and looked long at it.

Aunt Marie used to tell him she could set her watch by Uncle Claude. Sam no longer had a watch, so he kept an eye on the kitchen clock on the shelf above the table, and when it said six o’clock he heard the jingle of mule harness. Through the window, he saw his uncle walk stiff-legged around the corner of the barn holding the singletree and reins, steering two big dark mules into the front bay. Claude had a thick shock of graying hair and muscled, sun-bronzed arms that rippled as he turned the animals into the barn. Sam walked out from the back porch to greet him, helped unbuckle and put up the tackle. Then a cast-iron handshake, a slap on the shoulders, and a sweaty hug and kiss on the cheek. “Comment ca va?”

“Ca va en anglais maintenant.”

The old man popped his fist on his forehead. “Oh, yeah, me, I forgot that. Let’s go on to the house.” He turned Sam by the shoulder and gave him a push in the back. “Go on, mule.”

They had coffee, and when his cousins came in they all ate supper, then drank more coffee. Aunt Marie lit the lamps and sat and talked with the men while they rolled cigarettes and drank blackberry wine dipped from a crock