The Missing Read online

  “You with a disposal unit?” Sam called.

  The man was coated with mud and his helmet was missing. “What’s left of one. Two of us were killed outright this morning when they kicked over grenades. Another caught a bullet in the ass, and we don’t even know who did it.”

  “I been sure of my backdrop when I took a shot.”

  The man held his arms up against the sky and let them drop. He looked behind him into his own sector and then back at Sam. “Nobody’s ever done anything like this before.” Bareheaded, sickly small, he seemed lost and befuddled.

  Sam spat into the ravine. “It’s a bitch, all right.”

  “A trainload of bitches,” the infantryman said, turning back down the hill.

  It took them all afternoon to build a stack of German three-inch shells to the size of a cord of wood, set the dynamite charges, and pay out wire to the detonating machine. They had no idea how far to back off. The lieutenant found a long trench a hundred yards away, and the ten of them piled into it. After Dupuis wired the machine, the lieutenant pushed the plunger. The explosion was astounding, and at the end of the row a man from Lafayette cried out when a chunk of shell came down and fractured his collarbone. Sam crawled through a rain of falling dirt and found that the man’s heavy coat had saved his shoulder from being cut off, but that some terrible wound was bleeding under the cloth.

  He laid him flat in the trench and as gently as he could, pulled his arm straight down by his side. The soldier roared at the hot star of pain in his shoulder, and Sam, who had never seen such hurt, felt foolish and near tears himself. He turned to the lieutenant. “What can we do for him?”

  The lieutenant’s voice rose half an octave. “Well, I don’t know.” He looked up over the lip of the trench. “We’re not supposed to get hurt.”

  Sam opened his canteen and tilted it toward the injured man’s white, clenched lips. “Maybe you could send somebody to that other bunch in the northwest. Maybe their truck works and they can come get him.”

  The lieutenant remained silent. Dupuis volunteered to climb over the ridge to find another unit, and the man from Lafayette began screaming about his bones grinding together.

  “What can I do, bud?” Sam asked.

  The soldier’s eyes opened wide and looked past Sam out of a narrow, stubbled face wrinkled even in youth. “Hit me in the head with somethin’,” he rasped.

  The rest of the men gathered close, as though the heat of their bodies would collect and offer comfort. The wounded soldier began to fill the trench with his moans, and Sam sensed how minuscule this pain was compared to the vast agonies of the death field they were in. He looked out and saw half a million soldiers going at each other in a freezing rain, their bodies shredded by artillery, their faces torn off, their knees disintegrated into snowy red pulp, their lungs boiled out by poison gas, and all of this for four years, spread out as far and wide as the continent itself.

  That night, after the wounded man had been picked up by an ambulance wagon, the rest of them bedded down around their ruined truck. Robicheaux had hobbled the horses but they shuffled among the men all night and one of them stepped on Sam’s hand as he slept. In the morning his wrist was swollen and stiff, and he had trouble unbuttoning his trousers. The men washed their rations down with water and started out again, shooting not only at hand grenades, but also a certain type of four-and-a-half-inch shell that would explode if hit near the nose. For these, the lieutenant ordered them to lie flat at least seventy-five yards away before firing so the shrapnel would fly over their backs. They shot until a man named LeBoeuf was hit in the elbow by a fragment and had to be hauled hollering out to the road to wait for the ambulance. The remaining seven continued, gamely picking up grenades now and arranging them like ducks in a shooting gallery. They shot ineffectively at mortar rounds, and even large artillery duds. The sky faired off late, and they went on firing until sundown, their faces smudged gray with gunpowder. Between explosions they could hear teams in other sectors shooting as well, blowing up large caches, all of it a silly echo of the war itself. When the light gave out, Sam’s ears were ringing like struck anvils. Taking one last look at the darkening land, he felt fortunate and, at the same time, deeply saddened.

  Robicheaux had found a crock jug of brandy in the cellar of a destroyed house, and after everybody finished eating, he brought it from under the truck and passed it around, the men taking swallows with trembling hands and savoring the fine liquid heat. One by one, five of them fell asleep in their blankets. A half-moon came up, glazing the high points of the frost-struck battlefield, the stumps and armaments taking on the muted glow of tombstones. Sam and his friend sat back against the front tire, watching the field gradually luminesce.

  Robicheaux took off his helmet, hung it on the bumper, and adjusted his wool cap. “I’m glad we missed the big dance.” He was a robust man, all muscle, a high-school footballer who’d also worked the New Orleans docks unloading sacks of coffee.

  “Ain’t you cold?” Sam asked.

  “It’s all right. The house I grew up in had so many cracks in the wallboards you could read a newspaper by the sunlight leakin’ in.”

  “You married?”

  Robicheaux started to answer in French, but Sam waved him off. “Talk American.”

  “Pourquoi?”

  “I moved to the city so I could learn to talk better, pronounce my words, dress nicer, you know. I don’t talk like some college boy, but at least people don’t think I’m a fool. If you talk French in town people look at you like you’re stupid. You notice that?”

  Robicheaux nodded. “You want a indoor job.”

  “You got that right.”

  “Your old man, he’s tanned like a brick from workin’ a cane farm, right?”

  “I was raised by my uncle Claude and he farmed sweet potatoes.”

  “Patates douces,” Robicheaux said dreamily.

  “Sweet potatoes.”

  “I am.”

  “What?”

  “Married. I got two little boys up in Baton Rouge. You?”

  “Yes.”

  “Kids?”

  Sam took a pull of the brandy and set the jug down between them. “I had a son. Oscar. He got a bad fever about two years old and didn’t make it.”

  Robicheaux turned his head away. “That’s rough.”

  “Plenty rough. My uncle came to town for the funeral. He told me he’d lost a boy and a girl before the rest of us came along. He was trying to give me some comfort, I guess. Came to New Orleans and sat in my little rent house and talked, talked, talked. Damned if in the middle of all that comforting he didn’t start crying himself about the babies he’d lost, my cousins. Then he starts telling me about his brothers and sisters he’d never seen, about my own brother, sister, mother, and father, people I never knew.”

  Robicheaux stretched his legs out over the ground. “They say mosquitoes cause most of that fever. You got to screen in your cistern. Pour oil in the ditches.”

  “I do now. And we got city water.”

  “You’ll just have to make some more, you and your wife.”

  Sam looked up at the craters in the moon and buttoned his tunic and then his overcoat. “They’re not like loaves of bread you give to a neighbor. You remember them.”

  Robicheaux put the cork in the jug. “I know. One minute they’re here and the next they ain’t, but they don’t go away. They’re in your head.”

  Sam briefly raised an arm. “I’m looking out at this chopped-up place they sent us. I’m glad I don’t know anybody that got killed here, because I’d feel like I was walking on his grave.” He stood up and gathered his blanket from the truck, then knocked the dried mud off his boots and climbed onto the front seat. He wondered briefly how much of the mud was composed of atomized blood and shell-fractured bone, how much was relic of a cause made sacred for no reason other than the sacrifice itself. He thought of how the dead men’s families were maimed by the loss that for some would surely grow larger ov
er time, the absence more palpable than the presence. He remembered his dead child and cast a long look over the dim killing fields.

  He began to think of his uncle Claude back on the sweet-potato-and-sugar-cane farm, promising himself he’d go way out in the country to see him when he returned. It was a long trip over swampy roads, but he would make it to sit in the kerosene-smelling kitchen and tell him how it was over here, how it wasn’t like they’d expected, that the dead men were heroes but also pieces cut forever out of the lives of their families. He thought of his uncle’s simple kitchen table, purchased along with six chairs, how he’d moved one chair out to the back porch when Sam had left the farm so they could remember him by its absence.

  He settled across the seat, closed his eyes, and began to piece together the many missing parts of his childhood-father, mother, brother, and sister. The details of stories he’d heard whispered around him since infancy formed a whole mural in his mind, a speaking picture-words above everyone’s head. His people were from southwest Louisiana and had run cattle there since the 1700s, after the Attakapas cannibals had been civilized. These Acadian vachers knew animals well and valued trained beasts as minor souls among them. Sam’s father raised and trained oxen and leased the teams to lumber companies in Texas that were beginning to clear out the big stands of longleaf pines in the low country where only an animal could go. One day, this father he never met was waiting outside a saloon in the village of Troumal on the Texas border with his cousins the Ongerons, waiting with two teams he would turn over to lumbermen. They were smoking, sitting on a mud sled, their willow ox whips wedged upright in the box, chatting in French and waiting for drovers to show up, when a drunk little timber-lease buyer came out through the swinging doors and stood staring at them. A week of black stubble ran up to his eye sockets, and his teeth were little yellow stones. An ox shifted his head toward his greasy trousers, took a sniff, and turned away, blowing the stink out of his snout. The man leaned against a porch post and scratched his rear with his gun hand. After a moment he spat on the nearest ox and snapped, “Why don’t you mushmouths talk American? You sound like a bunch of pigeons in a tub.”

  The Ongerons had seen him once before and were too smart to fight him. Sam’s father had no interest in the bluster of an Arkansas drunk, yet he was the one to answer. “What you want to know, you?”

  “I want some sharp spurs with big rowels. Where do they sell such as that in this shithole town?”

  The father’s eyes went to the flanks of the drunk’s horse, which were scuffed raw and hairless. Around Troumal no one made spurs or anything else. The general store sold what a man could put in his stomach or under a plowshare, but little else. Ten miles away was a poor excuse for a railroad that could take him somewhere, but none of them had ever seen it, though they’d heard the whistle when the wind was out of the south. “Maybe in Beaumont.”

  “That’s a forty-mile ride, you idjet.”

  The Ongerons were looking at the drunk’s horse, which was well formed and bright eyed, though muddy and cut in several places as if forced to jump barbed wire. One of them said, “Sharp spurs won’t work on a smart horse, no.”

  The Arkansas man stepped down into the ankle-deep slop surrounding the porch and untied his animal. Sam’s father saw the rusty, long-spined Mexican rowels, and he watched the horse’s eyes roll in expectation. The man got up and doubled the reins in a gloved fist. The oxmen regarded his movements closely, waiting for him to lean rearward in the saddle and back the animal away from the porch. What he did instead was to give a neck-twisting haul on the reins, bringing the horse’s head all the way up, and the backwards stumbling and rearing was hard for them to tolerate. The drunk cursed and rattled the bit in the horse’s mouth, jerking the reins high again and again, and the animal began to whinny and lower its hindquarters like a whipped dog. At this point Sam’s father reached out with his ox twitch and stung the Arkansas man on the back of his crosshatched neck for being the dumb brute he was. The drunk dropped the reins in surprise, lost his balance as the horse gave a leap, and tumbled backwards out of the saddle, doubling his neck on the edge of the porch.

  The saloonkeeper had seen what happened and pushed through the door. Sam’s father and the Ongerons, five brothers, joined in a circle and bent down to where the man was quivering toward death. One of them pinched the mud out of the drunk’s nose, and two others jiggled his shoulders with their open palms, as if he were hot to the touch. Finally the saloonkeeper jerked down the drunk’s collar for a look, and they all straightened up.

  “Eh bien,” one of the Ongerons said.

  “Quel est son nom?” Sam’s father asked.

  “I don’t know,” said the saloonkeeper, who understood but didn’t speak the local dialect. “I think he was buying timber rights for some people in Arkansas. But his business ain’t around here. I guess he was just passing through.”

  The Ongeron brothers were indistinguishable except by age. Their mother made their clothes on a house loom, and they wove their own hats out of palmetto leaves. The youngest asked if someone should go for the sheriff. They all agreed it would be a good idea, but the sheriff was a day’s ride and the messenger would have to swim his animal across three bayous. Another Ongeron pointed out that the sheriff wouldn’t give a damn since the drunk wasn’t from the parish.

  Just then five men rode out of the woods on mules, not arriving on the road but struggling out of the tallow trees and stickers on the west side of the saloon. These were the Texans coming for the eight oxen.

  One wore store-bought clothes and was obviously in charge. He glanced at the dead man, then up at the saloon. “Is these ox ready to be bought?”

  Sam’s father walked over and cast his gray eyes up to him. “I’m Simoneaux.”

  “Here.” The man tossed down a tobacco sack. “Count your money. Just lookin’, I can see these animals is made right. They look like they could pull down a courthouse. Can I have your twitch?”

  Sam’s father looked at the slender rod in his hand for a moment and then handed it up. The man tapped the left ear of the near ox yoked in a pair, and the animal stepped left. “All right.”

  The Texans got down, mounted the porch, and sat on the bench. They were all the color of schoolhouse brick. The head man looked over the hitch rail. “Why’s he sleepin’ in the road?”

  “He fell off his horse and died,” the saloonkeeper told him. “You know him?”

  The man turned his head sideways and studied the body’s face. “Naw. And I’m glad of it. You got beer?”

  “It’s warm.”

  “It’s still beer, ain’t it?”

  After the men went inside, the Ongerons and Sam’s father stood talking above the dead man and decided they should ride to the priest’s house and ask him what to do. They all got in the traneau, and the two dark mules lunged into their collars to free the runners and began pulling down the mud path to the south.

  The priest was a dour, half-senile man with no teeth or manners, an Estonian exiled to the Louisiana prairie. He stood in the high grass outside his little box of a rectory and yelled out, because he was mostly deaf, “Is the body Catholic?”

  “Je crois que non,” the oldest Ongeron answered.

  The priest cupped a hand behind an ear. “How did he die?”

  Simoneaux stepped out of the mud sled and explained in French what had happened.

  “Ah, violence. Simoneaux, will you confess this?”

  “Mais oui. Quand tu veux.”

  The priest shook his head slowly. “Well, he can’t be put inside the fence because he’s not Catholic and met a bad end, unconfessed. But you can put him outside the fence in the back.”

  “All right.”

  The priest held out a hand. “The plot costs a dollar.”

  Sam’s father looked into his bag and fished out a silver coin. “Combien s’il est catholique?”

  “Fifty cents.”

  He looked sorrowfully at the coin and examined it fr
ont and back. “Tu peux pas lui baptiser?”

  The priest gently took the dollar. “Simoneaux, you can’t buy a ticket after the boat has sailed.”

  And Sam’s father knew this was right, that something had been done that could not be undone. He and the Ongerons silently went back to the saloon, loaded the body into the sled, and buried it behind the churchyard. The priest watched from the window but did not come out, only opened the door when one of the men returned his shovel. They removed the saddle and bloody bit from the horse and put him in the shed next to the priest’s mare, and then they all went home for supper.

  ***

  THAT NIGHT, Sam’s father was the last one to bed, and for the first time he waited at the dark front window to listen for something other than the coarse respirations of his animals. It was like this every night from then on, watchfulness and worry after dark. Whether the song of a night bird or the breaking of a stick, he listened to every sound as if for the beat of a sick heart.

  And two months later, when the three children were playing in the house and his wife was washing supper dishes in a pan at the kitchen window, the moonless night stirred with the sound of hooves. He expected to be called out, and maybe he thought for half a moment about seizing his three-dollar shotgun rusting behind the door, but as family stories let it be known in the years to come, there was only enough time for the thing to happen and none for preparation. The house was made of weatherboard nailed on studs, and the insect noise of gun hammers being set in the yard on shotguns loaded with double-ought buckshot, on long-barreled Colt.45 revolvers, on Winchesters and Marlins preceded the coming apart of the building in a splintering volley that swept the rooms with a swarm of deforming lead, the boy and girl killed outright, the mother running toward them knocked back into the next world, and he himself catching a slug under the rib cage that didn’t kill him at once, giving him a moment to reach the six-month-old baby lying on the floor, grab him by the foot, sling him through the open door of the cold potbellied stove, and bat it shut as the slugs sailed through the smokestack without even shaking it, rang against a skillet, exploded the mantel clock, pounded through Sam’s father’s skull, and beat that stove like an anvil until everyone in the dark yard had emptied magazines, breeches, and cylinders of their revenge. The door came off the hinges under the kick of a soggy boot, though the lock hadn’t been set in years. The overhead lantern had its globe shot out, but the flame still burned enough for them to check their work in its infernal glow, the assassins hearing in their ringing ears only the muffled mewing of the family cat. They prowled through the house like feral hogs, then mounted up to flee back to Arkansas or Mississippi or North Louisiana, from wherever these wronged blood kin had been drawn. No one afterward knew exactly who they were.