The Missing

night.”

“I guess I’d appreciate it myself.” They began walking across the lot. Sam felt a lightness in his arms, as though finally he’d put down a weight he’d been carrying for years. Suddenly he stopped and turned toward Soner. “Say, did I catch sight of a piano in the front room, left of the stairs?”

“Yes. It was my wife’s. It hasn’t been played in years.”

“Fix me a sip of something, and I’ll let you hear some real music.”

He opened the door and motioned Sam in ahead of him. “Why, that’ll be fine. You’ll want a bite of food, too.”

Soner lit the table lamp and the men sat and talked over bread and ham and the contents of an old jug of wine.

When they were finished, he asked, “What brand of piano is it?”

“I forget, but it’s a good one. My wife…” his voice trailed off.

Sam stood up and stretched. “Let’s take a look, then.”

And later that night, a boy out on horseback could have seen all the constable’s windows yellow with light high up, where they weren’t boarded. He could’ve taken in the tinkling of an out-of-tune piano as if it were his first sip of fine bourbon. A little girl wandering home late from berry picking could have heard the music and wished she had a piano and the time to learn it. A husband and wife could have been passing through on a journey, lingering there to listen and grateful for the pianist’s fine technique. A murderer crouching in the wind-rattled weeds could have been distracted from his plans, envious of the good time.

Within an hour, the men were singing, their voices wavering and sailing across the empty land. It was something to hear, this sound of profound release. But out in that darkness, nobody heard, and this vacancy would go on forever, a painful void Sam would feel later that night as he came out onto the porch, emptiness falling like a schoolboy’s rock into the well of his heart.

***

THE NEXT MORNING he left the holstered pistol on the bed upstairs, had breakfast with Soner, then drove back to Helena. After turning in the muddy Ford, he walked down to the wharfboat. No upbound steamer was expected that day, and from his splintered desk inside the freight house door the agent asked him where he was going.

“Memphis.”

“And after that?”

“New Orleans.”

“Well, hell, the Kate Adams is makin’ a New Orleans run. Why don’t you take her all the way down?”

He looked out toward the river and noticed a big wooden crate outside on the dock. “All in all, the train ride’ll be quicker.”

“The America might stop northbound tonight, if it don’t sink from old age first.”

Sam cocked his head. “Wasn’t that crate here when I got off the other day?”

“Yes, by damn. The lady ordered it didn’t come get it when she should, and it rained before she finally did show up with a dray. Said she didn’t want no piano been left out in a thunderstorm.”

“A piano. What’ll happen to it?”

“The shipper’s insurance already paid off. The agent sent me a wire to sell it for sixty bucks, but hell, I don’t have no way to sell it, and I ain’t about to drag it inside my warehouse. They’ll probably send me a note in a month to ship it off somewheres.”

Sam pointed behind the agent. “Let me see your little crowbar there.” He walked over and read the shipping label. The piano was a high-grade Knabe. He pried up one of the top planks and saw a full upright sheathed in heavy waxed paper, and the little rip he made in the covering showed a golden oak veneer. He banged the board back in place and ran his hand carefully over the rough-cut poplar case.

That afternoon found him standing on the forecastle of the Kate Adams as the sidewheeler huffed southbound. Behind him was the new Knabe, and he fought the urge to uncrate it and play right there in the open afternoon. He stayed out until they passed Island Sixty-five, the domain of the infirm and mind-darkened Cloats. He stared at the river-thrown sand and twisted willow brakes, trying to imagine how those people came to be. He thought about it until sundown and he could come to grips with snakebite, random illness, war, lightning strikes, and the death of loved ones, but the Cloats remained for him a mystery. Then he remembered what Constable Soner had said two nights before: the worst thing that ever happened to them was each other.

Chapter Forty

BY EARLY NOVEMBER he had gotten a steady, contracted job playing downtown in the orchestra of the Hotel Sterling. The Sterling was an impressive venue, and its ballroom showed off the plasterwork of a Viennese opera house across its high ceilings. By the end of the month he managed to get August hired to play three nights a week for the supper-and-dance crowd until eleven o’clock, and each day after school they spent an hour going over new music, learning the grand sound of a sixteen-piece group playing tight fox-trot and one- step rhythms for the city’s smart dancers. During the first month, August had written quick and playful alto-sax duets into a dozen existing arrangements that earned the respect of the other musicians. Sam noticed a change in his own playing during the first two months at the Sterling, and decided it was working with August that made his fingers limber, his timing more on the mark.

He encouraged Lily to sing, but whatever spark she’d had for that was gone. She willingly played simple tunes on the oak Knabe every day, and he half expected to come home and find her working patiently through a more complicated fox-trot. What he did hear as he was coming up the walk one afternoon was a simple Chopin waltz. The piano bench had come loaded with a beginner’s set of classical music, and Lily treated the pages as her private treasure. The simplest Bach pieces soon began coming together under her fingers. When August pointed out the classical structure of piano rags, she started to practice a few basic ones, and “Dill Pickles” mixed with the first Bach Two-Part Invention in her morning sessions.

One day in mid-February of 1923 he handed Linda an envelope full of five-dollar bills for the month’s household expenses, and she took it and pressed it against her stomach.

“You might have to start including an extra fiver.”

“How’s that?”

“I’m pregnant.”

He pulled her close. “You can have whatever I’ve got.”

“I know.”

“Don’t worry about anything. We’re doing swell.”

Lily walked in leading wobbly Christopher by the hand and looked up at them. “Why’re you hugging?”

He put a hand on top of her braided hair. “You’re going to get a new sister or brother, kiddo.”

She gave them each in turn a distant look, then dropped Christopher’s hand and walked out of the room without a word.

“So, it’s like that,” Linda said. “It’s going to take years.”

He stepped back and looked into the other room, where Lily sat holding a doll on the piano bench. It was an old doll dressed in seersucker. “She’s ours now.”

“She might understand it, but she doesn’t feel it. You of all people should know.”

“What?”

“Can you speak German to her? Are you a cheerleader for smart and funny music who can make her love singing so much she couldn’t imagine doing anything else?”

***