“What about justice?”

“Justice works if it puts a dollar back in you pocket.”

“Punishment?”

His uncle turned toward the window as a tumble of thunder came out of the next parish. “What I always told you?”

He looked down. “What people do wrong is its own punishment.”

In the weak light his uncle’s face was brown and furrowed like a winter-killed field. “Listen to me. I rather be your dead papa for five minutes than one of them killers for a whole life.”

Sam looked at the lamp flame, which leapt for no reason and made a puff of smoke. He tried to imagine such people but couldn’t. “Maybe I could tell them something. If I could ever find even one of them, maybe there’s something I should say.”

“Something needs sayin’? You gonna find ’em to forgive ’em?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’ll say until I find them.”

“Then they’ll do you in.” With a forefinger his uncle drew a line across his throat.

“Don’t worry, Nonc. A little girl I met in France gave me my nickname. Lucky, she called me. Chanceux.”

“Chanceux so far,” he said.

“Come on. Tell me.”

Claude sniffed, then drank down his wine and pushed the little glass away. He shook his head. “They came in ridin’ double so the horses wouldn’t make plenty noise. I figured this out from the hoof-prints in the yard. I went over à pied-how you say, on foot?-to help him put in seed cane. The sun was just up, but me, I could see the door knocked down flat.” He spread his fingers in the air. “Holes in all the wallboard. One porch post was shot in two, yeah. I never seen nothin’ like that before, and I got scared. I walked around the whole house to make sure nobody wasn’t still there. Then I went in.” He raised a hand from the table and let it come down slowly.

“You found them.” Sam’s voice was a whisper.

“It’s funny what I thought. He was my brother and he had a hole in his head and it was floatin’ in a puddle of blood, and the first thing what come to me was I’d never hear him play a fiddle again.” He looked up. “You knew that? You papa could play the fiddle?”

“No.” A new door opened in Sam’s head, and through it came notes and rhythm flowing onto a cypress porch.

“Ay yi yi, I never told you that. That cuts me like a knife. He played waltzes his own papa taught him, waltzes and old fast-dance pieces could make a chicken two-step. It wasn’t what he played but how he did it that I remember, slick like lightning, you know? Sometimes smooth like moonlight.”

Sam nodded. “Like moonlight.”

“I looked down on him and thought about all the music wouldn’t never be heard. And that wasn’t all, he could shingle a roof tight as a boat’s bottom. His fields were plowed straight like lines on a tablet. I thought about that, too. All that was killed. Ah, Sammy, when a man kills somebody, the most important thing he takes away is all the things that person can do in a lifetime. Tu comprends ça?”

He nodded, understanding too well.

“And then I saw your mamma, she was shot in the chest, and I started cryin’ so much and shakin’ I didn’t see your brother and sister at first.” He shook his head. “All I can say is a big bullet kills a little child fast, fast. I can tell you at least nobody hurt for long.”

He put his head in his hands. “How many did it?”

Claude shook his head. “The house looked like a strainer. Maybe nine or ten.”

“I never heard a number.”

“Nine or ten. That afternoon the one lawman we had, that little stinking Thibodaux crook, he rode to the parish line and gave up. He said they out his territory. Me myself, I rode into the parish to the north and told the sheriff, and he sent a deputy with me down the one dirt highway they got to the edge of that parish. We found one ’tit neg said he saw a bunch ridin’ like a army north, so I went into that parish and found the red-face sheriff that said he didn’t chase nobody for no dumb coonass Catholic couldn’t talk good American.”

“Did you ever hear who they were, or where they were from?”

Claude got up and went to a dark corner of the kitchen. Sam could hear a cabinet door squeak open and the tap of a dipper. He came back with two glasses of wine and sat down again, the joints in his chair grinding like dry bones. “At first, no. Six month later, the priest come over with the saddle from the man you papa knocked off his horse. He said he found some papers in it. They didn’t say where the man was from. But from one of them we saw the man’s name was Jimmy somebody. I can’t remember that last name. I never heard that name before in my life parmi les américains autour d’ici.”

“Do you have the papers?”

His uncle blinked and looked up. “I think so.”

He rose, took the lamp, and went into the front room. In the dark kitchen Sam heard him open a locker and begin to shuffle through papers. He imagined him squinting, running his eyes into the musty cabinet, trying to remember, maybe trying not to. When his uncle came back he held a hardback supply catalog with a few outsized pages stuck in the middle.

Sam took the book and opened it. Inside were two handwritten contracts for small timber leases, and the agent was the hard-drinking horse torturer, Jimmy Cloat. “Well, well.”

His uncle’s eyebrows went up. “You know this name?”

“It’s a little world for sons of bitches. I believe that. They get found.”

“You know you ought to go back to New Orleans and forget about it.”

“I know that.”

“But you won’t, you.”

“Probably not.” Sam held the papers up in the yellow glow.

His uncle sat back just out of the lamplight, diminished to an amiable smudge. “Aw, Sam.”

He stood up, holding the papers. “Bon soir, mon oncle.”

BREAKFAST WAS AT FIVE-THIRTY, and when Sam sat down Arsène came in with a gap-toothed smile and threw a patched pair of Headlight overalls at him. “Hey, boy, I hear you stayin’ here all day. We gonna get some work outa you, hanh?”

Sam plucked the overalls off his shoulder and looked at them. “Well, the train don’t go back till tomorrow, so I guess you got me.”

Aunt Marie put on the table a plate of rolled flapjacks stacked like cordwood and they grabbed the syrup pitcher and went at it, slathering on butter and pouring coffee. He looked around the table. But for the fact that two of his cousins had gone off, it was as if he’d never left. He imagined what a kitchen table would have been like in that other life, the one that stopped twenty-seven years before in a sideways rain of lead. What father would have sat at the head of the table, what mother, sister, brother, what empty chair promising a future child? And when he thought of all these meals that had not happened, he saw a whole world of life broken, gone. He dropped his fork, and his uncle looked up at his face.

“You all right, you?”

“I’m okay,” he said, looking at no one.

“You don’t have to work with us.”

“I’m all right.” But he knew he looked as though he’d been conversing with ghosts of the unborn. He also felt he had to put something back together, and he had no idea how.

THEY STARTED by hitching the mules and running the rattling cultivators through the young cane. After the dew burned off, they sent Sam to the barn to shovel the manure pile into the spreader and haul that out with the mare, Tante Sophie. He covered an acre his uncle intended for late-season tomatoes and then dropped the spreader off at the barn, washed it out with buckets he hand-pumped at the well, and hitched Tante Sophie up to a small plow to turn up another part of the field. By noon he was aching and sunburned, the sun straight over his head and as worrisome as the headlight of an oncoming train. His aunt brought out cornbread and buttermilk and pistolettes stuffed with ham along with a cool pitcher of homemade root beer with slices of lemon floating in it. They sat under the green, heart-shaped leaves of a tallow tree, eating and looking out over their work.