The Missing

dollars. She had to have it. Among her reasons, Lily had just turned nine and wanted her privacy. Even though they had no savings to speak of and owned nothing that would secure them a loan, Linda wanted that house more than the next gulp of air. She told Sam she could get a few hundred from her folks as a loan and that he should try to borrow something from his uncle.

The second thing that happened was that Lily was cleaning out mildew from the closets, a chore she undertook once every two months, going over all leather shoes and belts with a cloth soaked in a weak bleach solution, when she happened to open a sack containing a fiddle and a bow.

That afternoon Sam came in about four o’clock from playing a morning wedding at the Sterling ballroom. Lily sat next to him on the sofa and showed him the fiddle. “What can you tell me about this?”

He watched her carefully, checking her eyes for deceit. “It belonged to my daddy. You tune it G-D-A-E.”

“I know. I tuned it against the piano. Where does your father live?”

“What?”

“Your father. I know Linda’s but never met yours.”

He made a face. Somehow she didn’t know and he became aware of the few links he’d built between them. He put a hand on her blond curls. “He’s not alive anymore.”

She flicked the E string with a little finger, then brushed away his hand, but not roughly. “Did he teach you about music?”

“I didn’t know him. He died when I was a baby.”

She looked at him, her eyes wide. “You didn’t know him at all?”

“I think I told you about this years ago.”

“Maybe I wasn’t paying attention.” The way she said this, with a whiff of sarcasm, let him know she couldn’t possibly remember what people had told her years before. “What did you tell me?”

He was tired and felt a headache coming on. “That at least you had your parents for a few years, and I never had any at all.”

She gave him a hard look. “I know what I’m missing, then,” she said. “You don’t.”

That made him angry, and he went into the kitchen to chip a cup of ice and drink a glass of sweet tea and lemon. He’d always considered Lily a fellow orphan and thought they could imagine each other’s pain, but it wasn’t that way. Someone else’s pain is just that. A fiddle note came from the front room, then others. She was playing scales, and in five minutes was testing minors and feeling her way through “Oh! Susanna.” A single double-string drone convinced him it was time to take her to meet Uncle Claude, to show her where he’d come from. He stood in the doorway, sipping his tea, watching. “Bend your wrist,” he told her.

***

THE TRAIN STOPPED on the branch line at Prairie Amer, where they got off and stood out of the chilly wind in the little waiting room, waiting for the bus. The tracks to Troumal had been taken up the year before, but there was a road of sorts and a bus of sorts that rattled down to the village twice a week.

Lily looked through a station window at the fields of sugarcane, the crossroads store, the handful of cypress buildings. “Is the town we’re going to bigger than this?”

“Smaller. You’re way out in the country, city girl. Are you afraid?”

“No.” She watched a cow dreamwalking across a fenced lot. “I like it. It’s different. Quiet.” Her hair was cut short and Linda had sewn her a stylish drop-waist dress.

The little gray bus crawled down a poorly graveled road and stopped for them. The ride was slow and noisy, the bus creaking down into ruts and stuttering over cattle guards in a way that made the girl laugh.

His aunt Marie was waiting near the station in a Ford pickup, its wooden bed holding spools of fence wire. “Mon Dieu,” she called out. “Une jolie blonde.”

“You bought yourself a truck?”

“Oh, yes. So this is Lily?”

The girl opened the door and climbed onto the seat, Sam following after. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You ready for supper, you?”

She looked from one to the other. “I’m more than ready.”

By the time they got to the house, everyone had come in from the fields and washed up. Uncle Claude pushed open the screen door to greet them. “Eh, Sam, why didn’t you bring the whole bunch?”

He exchanged a handshake and shoulder slaps. “We’ll do that this summer.”

“When you called me on the phone I told you bring everbody you want.”

“Well, I had my reasons for coming alone with the girl.”

“Yeah, je sais. So she won’t get lost in the shuffle, hanh?”

“Something like that. I wanted to show her around.”

His uncle cocked an eyebrow at Lily. “Ain’t much to see, but look all you want.”

Aunt Marie began herding them inside. “Come on, come on. Wash you hands and both of you can help me set the table.”

Supper was rabbit stew on rice, drop biscuits, mustard greens, smothered okra, and fried apple pies. Arsene and Tee Claude were at table along with a hand named Beaupre, and they made a game of teaching Lily the funny French words for “bullfrog,” “wet hen,” and “coot.” Afterward, Claude and Sam took glasses of blackberry wine out to the front porch to sit for a minute in the cool weather, the wind having died off.

“So, Linda found her a house she likes?”

“She’s set on it for sure.” He looked around the farm, everything showing hard work and wear. The thought of asking for money pained him.

His uncle told him about his own house, where the lumber had come from, how long it took him to build it with a handsaw and hammer. He listed all the storms it had survived. For Claude, the matter at hand was always surrounded by narrative, placed in a frame of family history. After half an hour, Claude was quiet for a full minute, then asked, “So, combien?”

He told him how much he could get by with, and his uncle made a face. “Whatever I give you, I’m takin’ away from the boys and Marie. And the farm. That fence wire in the truck? We borrowed money ourselves for more land next to us.”

“I understand. But it would be a loan. We’d pay you notes.”

Claude waved the back of his hand at him. “Hey, don’t get all excited. I knew this day was comin’, yeah. I knew you’d need money for enfants or the hospital or a business, someday. When I heard you voice on that telephone, I knew. It’s time, I told myself.”

“Time for what, Nonc?”

Claude leaned over and clamped a hand down hard on Sam’s arm and shook it. “To give you your farm.” With his other hand he pulled a folded document from his overalls bib and handed it over. Sam could see in the light falling through the door that it was a deed.

“What’s this?”

“Can’t you read?”

“This is my daddy’s farm?” He stood up, amazed. “I didn’t think he ever owned anything.”

“Mais yeah. I had it put in you name a long time ago. The tax ain’t nothin’ at all, and I been payin’ it along the way.”

He held the document out to his uncle. “Why didn’t you tell me?” He remembered sitting on this very porch as a teenager, unable to imagine how anyone could progress to the point of owning anything except clothes and a name.

“Sammy, I never thought you was no farmer. Didn’t think you’d want to spend you life on that place.”

He looked at the paper, still holding it in both hands. “How big is it?”

“Fifty acres.”

He looked toward the north into the deep dusk, where bats were harvesting insects in the glow above the trees. “How much do you think I can get for it?”

“It needs clearin’ again. Quick sale, maybe eighteen hundred.”

He sat down. “Linda will dance on the ceiling when I tell her.” He looked out into the dusk again, in the