The Missing Read online

  The next morning at daybreak, a lean, sandy-haired man rode up on his mule to help his brother put in seed cane. Claude found them all and sat down on the one standing chair and bawled, looking at the forms on the floor and holding out a hand to each, crying out again and then hearing a miniature echo of his grief begin to rise out of the stove. He opened the door and saw the baby furry with ash, its face black but for the lightning strikes of its tears.

  Sam looked up out of the stove, stopped crying, and smiled at his uncle’s face caught in the square of light that was the world.

  Chapter Two

  THE BATTLEFIELD the next morning was silver plated with frost, and Sam woke shaking with cold. He and the other men stood next to the truck, chewing chalky bread and hiding from the wind before they set to work. By lunchtime he took a long look at the gutted land and understood that they were not making any headway at all and never would against four years’ worth of unexploded projectiles and weaponry. Each layer of dirt down to twenty feet was a meat loaf of munitions and the lieutenant told them that deeper still were big, fort-killing shells that no one would find for a hundred years. Sam shook his head and walked over to Robicheaux and told him a joke about a pelican and a duck, and that warmed them, reminding that they were not of this place. In the cold open country their laughter sounded like ice breaking.

  ***

  AT THE NORTH END of their quadrant they found a depot of large German artillery projectiles, thirty tons at least. They spent the morning working four men to a shell, stacking as many as they could, and when they finished, the pile was half the size of a railroad boxcar. The lieutenant looked behind him. “How much wire do we have left?”

  Dupuis rolled his eyes up to calculate. “Maybe two t’ousand feet, yeah. But if we string it that long and I hook up the right amount of caps, the burden might be too much for the machine. Might not light all them caps.”

  “Do we have enough fuse?”

  “You gonna light this thing and then run half a mile over all this mess?”

  The lieutenant folded his arms and slouched backwards. “You’re right. That wouldn’t work anyway. A long fuse would give someone a chance to wander up behind it.” He looked west, biting his lip. “There. We’ll post a lookout with a flag on that hill. Give him our good binoculars. When he raises the flag to let us know nobody’s nearby, we’ll push the plunger.”

  Dupuis sucked an eyetooth. “It’ll take me all day to rig the charge and get us far enough away. I got to put boosters in the line and sometimes they don’t work worth a damn.” He sucked the other eyetooth. “Anybody know how to work a cannon?”

  The lieutenant pulled out a tab of flesh under his tight chin. “Cannon?”

  “They’s a upside-down French 155 over there.” He pointed south. “In all that junk at the base of that burnt hill. Maybe eight, nine hundred yards.”

  Sam followed their line of sight down the gray land through a dusting of snowflakes. “You want to shoot the pile with a field gun?” Exhausted and cold, he turned and looked at the artillery shells a long time, a shiver of doubt crawling along his spine. He thought it a bad idea, but if they disposed of so much at once, they could go back to the truck, share the brandy, maybe get up a poker game under the canvas in the back. “Well, most of those rounds are fused. It might could work.”

  The squad moved down a hill toward the gun, each man watching where he stepped. It was a large piece, three-quarters turned over, but its breechblock was closed and a proper plug wedged in the muzzle. A metal limber spilled out shells, and the intact one next to it held dry bags of cordite. Two men walked to the truck for ropes, then saddled the horses and led them back along the ridges of shell craters. In a few minutes the animals managed to pull the cannon upright onto its wheels with a crash, clods tumbling from between the spokes. Comeaux, who had washed out of artillery school, selected a shell and two bags of powder as the lieutenant rotated the elevation wheel until the barrel seemed to point directly into the pile of shells on top of the knoll. He struggled with the sighting mechanism, which was caked with rusty mud.

  Comeaux looked down the side of the endless barrel. “Now, I can’t guarantee where this t’ing is gonna hit. I figure we should try to put one in the slope below them shells, and maybe that’ll tell us how to adjust.”

  Sam was twenty-three, an age when a man would just as soon do one thing as another without thinking about it much, but he was uneasy when he looked downrange. If they could figure an impact point with this test shot, he couldn’t imagine a miss with a second. Summoning within himself a dumb optimism for the perfect hit, he decided not to ask the lieutenant to reconsider. He even envisioned a commendation for developing a new technique for battlefield disposal. Suddenly, something big detonated two miles off, a cloud of black smoke rising like an Indian’s signal, and his confidence shrank. They glanced nervously at one another.

  “Be sure to aim low,” Sam told Comeaux, who turned the elevation wheel to lower the barrel and then pulled the plug out of the muzzle.

  “All right, all right!” Robicheaux hollered. “Let’s plow us a hole.”

  Comeaux held the lanyard tentatively in his hand as the lieutenant shooed the horses away, waving his billed cap and crying out like a schoolboy. Everybody except Comeaux crouched down behind a line of sandbags.

  Comeaux turned his back and squinted. “Fire?”

  “Check the lookout first,” the lieutenant told him.

  Comeaux raised his field glasses and saw the makeshift flag a thousand yards to the west, waving on the hill.

  “He says it’s clear.”

  “Then fire,” the lieutenant said, squatting low behind the sandbags.

  Comeaux opened his mouth wide, bent his knees, then gave the lanyard a jerk.

  The gun bucked back with a head-flattening concussion. Sam thought that his soft palate had fallen down his throat, and his ears strummed as though struck by lightning. They all hugged the ground, Comeaux dove under the gun’s axle as it rocked back and forth, everyone preparing, as the shell screamed downrange, for the second explosion to fall on them like a mountain.

  They heard nothing. Sam looked up and saw the pile was intact. Stunned, Comeaux unlocked the gun’s breach and looked into the smoky hole, as if convinced the shell hadn’t been launched. He turned slowly and raised his shoulders. Then, far off, they heard it: a dull and profound whomp, maybe five miles away.

  “We missed,” Sam announced, and his voice sounded tinny in his singing ears. He knew then he should have stopped the whole thing and that for the rest of his life, whenever he performed some stupid action to save time or inconvenience, he would feel the way he did now, like a lazy, rash fool.

  “Oh, my,” the lieutenant said.

  They all looked at one another, frozen, knowing.

  Sam began running toward one of the horses.

  “Where are you going?” the lieutenant shouted.

  “I’ve got to see where that damn thing came down.”

  The officer ran after him for a few yards, gesturing wildly, but Sam had jumped on the scarred bay and booted him off. “Stop, private! That horse might step on a shell.”

  The animal, confused at first, gradually fell into a rough gallop around the stumps, craters, and islands of wire to the ruined road that ran up a slope in the direction the shell had flown. When Sam looked back, the men stood watching him, motionless, the thin lieutenant now waving as if to a relative on a departing train. Then he went round a bend and they were gone. He charged on over dry ruts and through the wrecked lorries and tanks and a burned-up aero-plane, reining the horse in when the road veered off in the wrong direction. Praying for luck, he soon found an old stone pasture wall and trotted along that, the horse kicking up rifles in its wake. Hundreds of German Mausers lay abandoned along the fence, and he imagined the fight, the assassination of troops approaching the wall, the bayonet-driven countercharge, the panicked retreat up the hill, the screaming slaughter. In a defile between two long hi
lls he turned the bay through a blasted gap in the stone, but the animal stopped dead. Sam kicked away at its flanks, but the big horse took it and stood like a pillar. He looked around, wondering if the animal remembered what had happened here, and dismounting, he looked into the liquid eyes, which seemed deliberately unfocused. He put a hand on its neck and the muscles were taut as fence wire, and he saw that its legs were trembling. He led it back through the wall by its bridle, remounted, and then put the animal forward along the stones, moving away from the place where twenty shattered limbers and many swollen horses lay about as if rained down from a murdering sky.

  He studied the land ahead of him, and within a mile he rode into a squad stacking bags of cordite for demolition and reined up. A lanky private told him that he’d heard a shell rocket overhead. “They ain’t startin’ up again, is they?”

  “No.”

  “I’m glad of it. After I seen all this mess I’m glad I missed the big ruckus. We just turnt over a steam tractor and found two skeletons from Alabama.”

  Sam started the horse through a shell crater the size of a city fountain, rode into a dry canal and out again over a dike. Rising in the distance was a plume of white smoke. He whipped the bay with the reins and got up as much speed as he could, riding through a hedge and out into a mud lane, expecting to be blown up at any second. Suddenly he was in a village, coursing among sheds and small houses of bullet-pocked stucco and a large barn missing half its roof. A quarter-mile on, at the edge of an open field, sat the remnants of a small stone house, its blocks dispersed over an acre, its thatch roof on fire. In the dirt lane out front lay a girl, her long hair splayed on the ground as by an electrical charge. He jumped off the horse and carried her away from the flames, propping her against a low stone wall. No one else was around.

  She appeared to be about eleven, but when she opened her eyes they were watery and old.

  He asked her in French if anyone else had been in the house.

  “Non, monsieur.” She seemed alarmed by his voice and asked where he was from, but he ignored her.

  “Où sont tes parents?”

  “Je ne sais pas.” She raised her right hand and it was streaming blood, the little finger cut off cleanly at the base. Then she told him she thought her parents were in heaven, and that everyone in the village had been killed or driven away. Suddenly she winced, grabbed her arm, and began to sob.

  “Quel est ton nom?” he said, trying to distract her as he sat her up on the stone wall.

  “Amélie,” she cried.

  He pulled out his canteen, washed the wound, poured in disinfectant powder from a kit in his belt pack, and applied a rude bandage meant for gunshot wounds. Leaving her clutching her hand in the folds of her heavy skirt, he walked a circuit through the nearby buildings, all of them empty, though in one house there was a meal on the table, the food dried like scabs on the plates, as though every-one had fled months before and never come back. At the open rear door he looked across a steep field covered with frostbitten weeds, imagining the panicked family running away from an incoming barrage, hoping to reach safety behind the next hill. He knew the girl was alone and would probably starve to death.

  He went back and asked her full name.

  “Amélie Melançon.” She squinted up at him. “Et le vôtre?”

  “Sam Simoneaux.”

  She repeated his name, her eyes growing round. “Il y a des français en Amérique?”

  He explained where he lived and that there were indeed French people in the countryside to the west of there. He described New Orleans and asked if she had heard of it.

  “Mais oui, monsieur.” She bent over as another spasm traveled up her arm.

  He listened to her shuddering intake of breath and stared at the flames until her pain seemed to lessen. Then he told her he would find her a doctor, though he had no idea of where to start looking. He sat down and comforted her as best he could, asking her to talk about the vanished people of her village.

  Staring at him intently, she asked, “Combien de temps avez vous été en France?”

  “Je suis arrivé le jour la guerre était finie.”

  She sniffed and gave him a fragment of a rueful smile. “Eh bien, Monsieur Sam, votre nom devrait être Chanceux.”

  “My name should be Lucky? Me? I don’t know about that.”

  He heard a sputtering engine and stood as a muddy, open car with British markings came up the road, a one-armed captain sitting behind the driver in the wide rear seat. The captain leaned out and observed the girl now rocking back and forth on the wall, then the blown apart building, then Sam, who saluted. The captain made a face and said, as if to no one, “American.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Was anyone else hurt?”

  “Not that I could find, sir.”

  “I see. Shooting at pigeons, I suppose?”

  “No, sir. We were trying to detonate a pile of artillery rounds.”

  The captain studied him for a long time, as if trying to gauge the workings of a mind accustomed to vast, empty American spaces where one could fire a howitzer all day long and hit nothing of consequence.

  “Sir, the little girl was in the house alone and I think she’s probably an orphan. What can we do for her?”

  The captain seemed amazed by this question. “Private, how long have you been over here?”

  Sam shrugged. “Maybe a couple months.” He looked helplessly around, feeling bereft of some essential common experience. The driver sniffed.

  “I see.” The nub of the captain’s arm twitched under the pinned sleeve, a phantom motion. “Do you know how many orphans are wandering the roads? Living in what forests are left? They are roaming about looking for relatives who are already dealing with children from every other branch of the family. Many of them wind up in orphanages. Do you really want her in one of those?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  He looked again at the girl. “How bad is her hand?”

  “She’s got a finger off.”

  “Clean wound?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “My advice is to leave her here, then, if that’s what she wants. Somebody she knows will drift back, and she can fit in with them. This is my district. Tell her she can walk the five miles to Pilars to see the army medic if her hand doesn’t heal.”

  “Leave her?”

  The captain raised his chin and looked around. “There, that house has a roof on it. She can stay there.” He tapped the driver on the shoulder, and the big car heaved up out of a rut and left them.

  Sam looked down at the girl and asked if she wanted to stay in that house.

  “C’est la maison de mon oncle,” she said. “Il est mort.”

  He asked if it would frighten her to stay in the house of her dead uncle.

  She looked up at him with her pained eyes and said that a live person was more frightening than a dead one. It was a live person who blew up her house.

  He looked again at the burning thatch roof. “C’était un accident,” he said. “La guerre est finie.”

  “Non,” she said. The girl told him that it was not over for her, and she began weeping again, thrusting her bloody bandage up at him.

  He sat down next to her on the stone wall and pulled her head against his chest. She smelled unwashed, and a louse came up between his fingers, but he held her close, repeating “It’s over, it’s over,” as she shook her head, and keened, “Jamais, jamais pour moi.”

  ***

  HE SPENT the rest of the day preparing the house, boarding up a blown-out window, remounting the front door, and as he worked he told her about his childhood, and where he lived now. He showed her how to make fires, though she assured him that she was wise to the chore, and he explained how to clean and rebandage her wound. When the daylight began to fade he told her he was sorry for what happened to the other house, and she gave him a worried look and asked if he was going to shoot his cannon again. He said no, that they’d made an experiment that had fail
ed.

  “Bon. Si la fusillade a enfin arrêté, peut-être mes voisins seront de retour.”

  He set a plate on the rough kitchen table in front of her, and began rummaging for something to put on it, wondering how she would manage until someone showed up to help. She had lost everyone. He asked her if she knew how to read.

  “J’étais la première dans ma classe,” she said, throwing her head up.

  In a cabinet in another room he had found a small library, and he brought a few books out for her, setting them next to her plate. She brushed her dark hair back and picked one of them up. There was a translation of Dickens and another of Twain, and editions of Flaubert and Stendhal, names he didn’t recognize. “Peut-être ceux-ci peuvent t’aider à passer le temps.”

  She opened the book with her bloody hand. “Monsieur Chanceux, ma mère m’a dit que le temps passe sans notre aide.”

  ***

  THAT EVENING he rode the bay back to his unit, arriving well after dark and reporting what he’d discovered, that he’d left a child with candles and eight shriveled potatoes and some rations from the horse’s saddlebags. The men were glad the stray shell hadn’t done even more damage, but Sam saw nothing to be happy about. His uncle had taught him that what he did in life, good or bad, could seldom be undone.