Sam told him the story, and the farmer listened to all of it patiently. He motioned for Sam to walk over a few yards by a heart-pine corncrib that might have been sitting there for a hundred years. “Unless you foolin’ me, you look like a good feller and I don’t talk to no other kind. My daddy was a peace officer got shot out of the saddle for doin’ the right thing. He raised me to not let the bad stuff go on.” He looked behind him and lowered his voice. “What I’m gettin’ to is that I didn’t fetch that boy off the orphan train myself. A old boy three mile from here you don’t need to know the name of got him off that train some time ago and brought him home like a bought tool and made him chop firewood till doomsday. Beat him when he fell out.” Smally looked right into Sam’s eyes. “At night he’d come get in the bed with the boy and fool with him. His hired man told me that because he saw what was goin’ on.” Smally’s eyes drew up tight, and wrinkles blossomed around his eye sockets. “Men in these parts don’t mess in each other’s business, but we know what’s happenin’ just the same. Most of us work like a pump handle all our lives, hard and hot work all of it, but we never forget those five years or so when we’re kids. When we’re looked after, I guess. Not hurt by our elders unless we do somethin’ to deserve it.” He looked back to the barn, and Sam thought for a moment that Farmer Smally was about to shed tears. “When we’re little shavers we don’t think there’s nothin’ bad in the world, and nothin’ that can make us hurt. If we do get a little pain we kin put our face on our daddy’s shirt or momma’s dress and it’ll go away, sure. I hope that’s what it’s like again after I die.” He turned back. “Them that takes that from children are robbin’ heaven from earth.”
Sam looked up at the barn loft. “How’d you get him away?”
“Some of my neighbors paid that man a visit, and I understand he pulled out a shotgun from behind his door.”
“What’d he say?”
“I don’t know. He don’t say much of nothin’, anymore.”
Sam watched a crow light on the edge of the bean field. “They ran him out of the country?”
“You could say that,” Smally said softly, but in a way that told Sam not to ask further.
He looked over at the rented mare, which was cropping grass by a fence where he’d tied her off. The boy came again to the loft opening and looked out at them. Here was another one with no parents or siblings. “They just give those kids away like calendars at the drugstore?”
Smally turned and followed his gaze. “Yep. Some of ’em go to bad folks all right, but Jacob, he’s safe now. He’ll make a good hand in a few years. He just does chores now. I wouldn’t put a little bitty like that in the field.”
“You say your daddy was the law?”
“He was. Dollar a day and all the trouble you’d want in a lifetime on Saturday night.”
Sam took a breath, and the air came in as heavy as mercury. “When I was a baby, as far as I can tell my whole family was killed by a clan from south Arkansas.”
Smally acted as though he’d heard such news every day. “Your family must of kilt one of them.”
“I guess.”
“All rode down there together and did everbody in, did they?”
“You ever hear of something like that?”
“More’n I like to. There’s no lack of wild clans in this or any other country. There’s even whole families that’ll give humans in general a sorry name. There’s the Kathells and the Blankbulls just to start with. It was Blankbulls killed my daddy.” He shook his head. “The Luthlows specialized in killin’ preachers. But about forty, fifty mile from here’s a bunch by the name of Cloat. They’re worse than worst.” He spat next to his boot. “My daddy used to tell me they thought ridin’ horseback two hundred miles to kill somebody was like goin’ to the state fair. They just lived to get angry. I hadn’t thought about ’em in years, but if you wanted to find a murderin’ bunch from around this part of the world, I’d start with them Cloats.”
“Do they live near a town?”
“Not hardly.”
“How do people find them?”
Smally gave him a long, baleful look. “People don’t.”
RIDING BACK to the boat, he spotted the railroad station, more of a raw pine booth with a semaphore bolted outside and telegraph wires running in through a gnawed hole. He sent a note to agent Morris Hightower at Greenville: THANKS FOR LEAD. CHILD WAS BOY. KEEP EARS OPEN. THANKS. SAM SIMONEAUX.
THE AMBASSADOR’S calliope started up as he was turning in the horse, and by the time he got to the landing Mr. Brandywine was hanging on the roaring whistle. Sam jumped aboard across five feet of muddy water, ran to his cabin for his uniform, and turned out for the one o’clock ride.
He met August coming forward, an alto sax under his arm and a grin on his face. “The captain said I could play this trip.” He had scrubbed the coal dust out of his hair, and Sam turned him around, wondering how he could get so clean.
“Hey, knock ’em dead, kid. The captain payin’ you?”
“I guess not. Experience is like money, he said.”
Sam bit his cheek. “Well, there might be something to that.”
“I’ll have to make up the time I missed in the boiler room, but that’s all right.”
“Captain tell you that too, did he?”
“Did you find out anything about Lily or Dad?”
He shook his head. “I heard about a kid, but it was a boy. You go on and join the band. Keep your ears open. If Mr. Gauge has been drinking, he’ll be slow an eighth beat or so. Don’t get ahead of him and he’ll be your friend for life.”
The boy’s feet were dancing when Sam waved him off, watching him run, trying to remember the last time he’d felt that excitement boiling in his own feet, so happy at fitting in and doing well that the future seemed to promise just one long, ecstatic performance. He went back into his cabin and found Charlie Duggs’s quart of Canadian whiskey, poured a shot into a tall glass and a couple slugs of warm pitcher water on top of that, and took it down like a purge, then had another, rinsed his mouth, and bit a nip of Sen-Sen.
He found the captain walking the restaurant with his hands behind his back, and he went up behind him. “Hi, Cap.”
“Lucky. Glad you made it back.”
“How’d we do last night?”
The captain leaned toward him. “Son, we made the money. It was rough going but those chuckleheads had silver in their overalls.”
“You make enough to give August a couple bucks for playing this trip?”
The captain pulled back, then studied the deck as though checking the quality of its varnish. “He ought to pay me. I’m training him.”
Sam took a breath. “To do what? Be a slave?”
Captain Stewart let a waiter breeze by. “I have to watch every nickel, you know that.” He hazarded a glance at Sam’s face to see what he thought of this statement, and after a moment threw up his hands. “Damn it, all right. You’re holding me up, but I’ll slip him something. Now check out the main-deck lounge.”
Sam gently pinched the captain’s left lapel between thumb and forefinger. “He’ll tell me what you gave him.”
“I said all right. You trying to make me feel like a crook?”
THEY TOOK on a flat of new coal better than the last, and after the sober church excursion the Ambassador escaped Bung City running on a full bell upriver toward Memphis. Plowing through the afternoon, the old boat followed the channel in Mrs. Benton’s brain, working hard through Sunflower Cutoff, then around Island Number Sixty-three, and fighting upbound for Miller’s Point. The riverside was all of it a grit-banked lowland of bleached sandbars and willow brakes too flood-prone even for wild animals, land passed over by early explorers and Indians alike, who knew it for the dangerous fen that it was. Meanwhile, the crew waxed the monstrous dance floor and hung new broad-striped material under the skylight roof. At dusk Mrs. Benton pulled the whistle ring, letting it slide out of her fingers. Sam heard the short whoop and intercepted the porter bringing up a cup of coffee. He found her in one of her thin, dark dresses, sending a half-speed bell to the engine room and squinting over the breast board to starboard.