The Missing

direction of the property. “Last time I was here you mentioned a house. Is it still there?”

“Like I said, a cypress house. It’ll never go nowhere.”

“Can you tell me how to get to it?”

Claude made a face. “It’s all growed up.”

“I want to see it.”

“Well…”

“And I want the girl to see it with me.”

His uncle shook his head. “No you don’t.”

“I have my reasons.”

“Ain’t no good reason to show a kid that place.” He looked at Sam suspiciously. “What you gonna tell her?”

“What she needs to know about me.”

His uncle stared at him a long time, then gave an exaggerated shrug. “I never told you nothing till you was old enough. A child deserves a childhood.”

Sam folded up the deed and slid it into his shirt pocket. “She’ll understand, this one.”

***

THE NEXT MORNING was very cool when he saddled an old grease-black gelding and set out after breakfast riding double, Lily behind. They rode cross-country through thousands of acres of cut-over cane field, an ocean of blond stubble. Following Claude’s directions, he found the big cross-ditch and traced it to a plank bridge, and over that they were in the woods. He was glad it was winter, that some of the brush had died back so they could see.

The girl hung on to his belt and sat back in the saddle, staying balanced and keeping her feet away from the horse as she’d been told. She was quiet during the ride, but once they went among the bare trees, she said, “This doesn’t look like a farm.”

“Thirty-some years ago it was.”

She flinched at a branch that slid past his shoulder. “It just looks like nobody’s ever lived here.”

“Believe me, they did.” Fifteen minutes into the oaks and gum trees, he stopped and sat the horse. “I never came all the way out here, even to hunt. I don’t know where anything is.”

She looked around him. “Maybe we should get down and walk.”

They led the horse through a broad, shallow ditch, and on the other side the animal’s hoof clinked and Lily kicked the leaves off a chipped tin washbasin. She looked up at him and he nodded. He knew she was smarter but was surprised that she also had better instincts than he did. They moved on, watching the ground, and soon found an ox yoke, then looked up and saw something two hundred feet away that was the same color as the dun and frostbit woods but arranged in different form, and their brains told them it was the house though their eyes couldn’t yet see it. They walked up and stood in front, and even the horse raised its head and looked, its breath steaming. Frost-scalded vines ran up the sides and wisteria the size of a child’s arm had grown through the open front door, then curved around and grew back out onto the porch as though not liking what it found inside, the dearth of light, the drought. The house was four rooms and from the front porch a steep set of steps rose into an attic. The roof was high-pitched and some of the cypress shingles had taken flight in storms, but as a whole, the structure sat square and sound on its eroded brick piers.

“This is where you lived?” Her voice was respectful, as if in church.

The tree trunks hid the sun, and he shivered. “Until I was six months old.”

“Six months.” She said this slowly, as if tasting the words.

He watched her eyes take in the bullet holes, dime-sized punctures that stippled the front wall, splintered the window frames, door frames. “Those are from bullets.”

She kept looking. “I know what they are. Your mother and father, they were killed here. When you were six months old.”

“And my sister and brother.”

She caught her breath. “Did they catch who did this?”

So even she thought first of revenge, of justice. “No. They lived out their lives.”

She turned to him. “That’s not fair.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. What kind of life do you think they had?”

“What?”

“People who would do this, what kind of life do you think they had?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you’ve got a long time to think about it. I’m going in.”

“It’s scary.” Suddenly her voice was small.

“You can stay out here, then.” He tied the horse to a chinaball sapling and went up the pulpy steps to the porch. He looked inside, tested the floor, and slid a foot into the dim light, the sweet peppery smell of the cypress lumber making his head spin like a compass needle. The wood of the big room bore the brown-silver tint of the outside, but was less weathered. Nothing remained except a big potbellied stove, its pipe a streak of rust on the floor. Walking past without looking at it, he felt a shudder rise through his shoulders, and he quickly stepped into the kitchen, which held only low, warped cabinets and a broken spindle-back chair lying facedown. The window here was intact and outside of it was the tablet where his mother had washed dishes, as did every Frenchwoman in the region in the days before indoor plumbing. The rear bedroom was an empty box and some of the ceiling boards had come down, showing the joists. He passed through a door into the front bedroom, bare but for the dirt caused by newborn daubers breaking free of their mud. Maybe he was born in this room, saw his first dawn in the window, his first lamp flame, and he stood long and thought about what had happened here.

He heard the girl come into the house and he went to her. She turned and saw the bullet holes glowing like electric lights with the winter glare flowing through. She glanced down at the floor, and he was glad that it was dusty.

“This is where it happened?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t remember anything about them at all?”

He turned his head. “Not one second.”

Then she said something that was unusual for her. “I’m really sorry. It’s awful, isn’t it?”

The statement opened a door that had been locked between them, and he walked to where she was standing next to the stove. “I’d say so.”

“Is this rusty thing all that’s left?”

“Yes.”

Her face brightened. “We could take it back to New Orleans and put it in the backyard. Think how it would look with ivy growing out of the top and hanging down.”

When she reached to open the fire door, he bent over suddenly and pressed both hands against it. “I don’t think that would be a good idea,” he said, his voice trembling. He kept his hands on the metal as if testing it for warmth. She stepped away, her clear eyes watching him carefully, and after a moment she walked toward the back of the house. His hands still welded in place, he listened to her move through the place and realized that her guess was as good as his as to what life and death had happened inside these plain walls. When she had passed through all the rooms, he heard her push open the back door. Only when he heard her cry “Look!” was he able to move away from the stove.

She was on the back landing pointing up under its overhang. “Look at that. Could you get it down?”

He reached up with both hands and lifted a medium-sized washboard from a galvanized nail. His mouth fell open for a moment.

“You could take that home as a souvenir,” she said. He began walking slowly back inside, turning the washboard in his hands.

He paused by the stove again, aware that what he had in his hand his mother had held a thousand times, that his clothes had been scrubbed clean over its metal ridges, and he didn’t know whether he should smash it against