The Missing

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. Arsène and Tee Claude were at table along with a hand named Beaupré, and they made a game of teaching Lily the fu

“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 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 go

“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.