Half Moon Lake Read online

  Mary stood at the bedroom window, resting her forehead on the glass. The clouds obscured whatever stars there might have been, and the fires were wet ash. There wasn’t enough light for her to tell if any men were out in the rain. But the longer Mary stared, the more she saw pulsing dark spots, inexplicable movement. Was Sonny watching from afar, teaching his brothers a lesson for some infraction they were refusing to admit? It wasn’t as though she hadn’t grilled George and Paul. And unless Sonny was injured or trapped, it wasn’t too far from forest to house. Where was he?

  When he could, John Henry read aloud to distract his wife. Mary enjoyed reading but now couldn’t muster the concentration, and her eyes stung from crying. At first, he read from the Clarion about the Gettysburg reunion, which had brought Fifty-Thousand Men to the Site. But Mary curled into a ball on her bed and sobbed that Sonny would have loved that tale. So John Henry abandoned the newspaper in favour of Muir’s The Yosemite, hoping the steady describing of rocks and streams, irised waterfalls, forests of silver fir would soothe her as it did him. ‘And from the eastern boundary of this vast golden flower-bed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, and so gloriously colored and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with light, but wholly –’

  ‘How long until they find him, John? It’s been seven days.’

  John Henry placed his book on the side table. ‘Soon, my love. There’s no chance he’ll remain undiscovered for much longer.’

  As he pushed himself up from the chair, Mary lurched across the bed.

  ‘He’s alone.’ She gripped his arm. ‘Seven days alone!’

  Once John Henry had coaxed his wife to sleep, with the aid of the doctor’s alkaloids, he sat, again, in the nearest armchair to watch her. He rested one hand on the books piled next to him. Thoreau, Longfellow, Emerson. If he could choose, he’d summon Emerson for company. Thoreau was an impressive naturalist, and John Henry could almost admire the rigour he showed in abstaining from tobacco, alcohol and meat (and salt!), but Thoreau’s rejection of companionship was troubling. The man was a misanthrope, and he had no children. Best he remain on the page. Longfellow was too emotional to give sturdy comfort to another. Emerson would understand. Devastated by the deaths of his first wife and one of his sons, he’d emerged wise and empathetic. Emerson was a man John Henry would like to sit with now. In reality, though, he was as good as alone.

  John Henry was aware that his readings and the doctor’s medicines could only do so much for his wife. He sent for Father Clement. Mary had never warmed to the priest (‘He barely notices I’m standing beside you’), but John Henry knew he’d deliver assurance of a kind no one else could. And since the Davenports had unfailingly attended his ten o’clock Mass for years, married in his original church and contributed generously to the building of its impressive replacement, he assumed his request would not go ignored. He was right. Father Clement arrived at Half Moon Lake the same day he was bidden.

  Mary tolerated several hour-long visits before imploring her husband to keep the priest away. ‘He speaks nothing but platitudes.’

  ‘He speaks God’s word.’

  ‘I pray every day for God’s help. My palms are all but welded together. Can I not speak with Him directly? I’m unconvinced Father Clement prays as urgently as I or –’

  ‘Mary, stop.’

  ‘You know he wants more money for his German stained-glass windows.’

  ‘He did mention that.’

  ‘I don’t need him as emissary of my message, John. If he’ll pray for Sonny’s return, then good. I beg he asks the entire congregation to do so as well. But let me pray on my own.’

  Mrs Billingham and Gladys ministered to Mary, too, under instruction from John Henry not to offer opinion or update. Gladys brushed Mary’s hair, and chatted about the interesting items in her magazines. Mrs Billingham rang the bell for dry pillowslips and sweet tea, scented Mary’s handkerchiefs with lavender oil, and ensured the servants didn’t become lazy.

  The women listened as, during her lucid moments, Mary worried about how hungry Sonny would be, how frightened, then railed against Nanny Nelly’s thoughtlessness.

  ‘For her to have spent the night away when you needed her, it’s appalling.’ Mrs Billingham sniffed. ‘Why haven’t you dismissed her?’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t do without her. No, I need to remind her that her loyalty is to us. That’s what I need to do.’

  Mrs Billingham examined an itchy spot on her thumb. ‘If you think that’s best.’

  When Mary did take the doctor’s formulations she slept, but woke hot and bilious, and suffered baffling dreams of the bayou near her childhood home. Not Half Moon Lake in the sunshine, not her favourite picnic spot near Spearmint Pond, not the banks of the Mississippi, not any other pleasing or relevant body of water. Not a reunion with Sonny. Asleep, her mind clawed and yowled.

  She dreamed she sat on the slippery red leather seat of her family’s buggy, next to her black-clad mother and facing her glowering father, as they rolled down the long road away from Arlington Grove Plantation. She felt the cool shadows as the buggy passed beneath thick trees, then the slowed trot of the horses – the horses slowing, though Thomas never asked them to – as they entered the bayou, a place so different from the airy flats around their plantation. Here the greens were darker, the plants gnarled. The cypress trees in the bayou were draped with moss. Algae and reeds fringed the edges of the water. Armies of insects buzzed loudly enough to be heard over the rattling wheels.

  Mary wished her father would stop the buggy and let her go to the soupy water’s edge, where the alligators lived. She’d seen a quick whip of tail going under water, marble eyes floating on the surface, but never the whole creature. She’d heard their bellow and hiss. The idea of an animal so hideous thrilled her. But neither in life nor in her dreams did she ask her father to stop.

  When Mary dreamed of this swampland, so many years and miles away, she woke gulping for air. Lying in the dark, she tried to take her mind elsewhere, to muster the quiet resolve her husband prized and needed from her. Because who did he have, who did she have, if they were to fail one another?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  On day eight, John Henry and Sheriff Sherman drove to the nearby cotton mill.

  ‘What we want to check,’ the sheriff explained, ‘is that Jack Knowles hasn’t scooped him up and put him to work.’

  ‘He’s four years old.’

  But as John Henry walked the aisles of Knowles Mill, between rows of deafening steel machinery – all moving at rapid-fire speed, and without guardrails or shields – he understood the ignorance of his remark. There were dozens of children working in the hot, airless factory, and few of them had been alive long enough to hit double digits.

  ‘How is he getting away with this?’ John Henry asked, his booming voice rising above the clatter. ‘These children are far too young for factory jobs.’

  ‘Not uncommon, though I share your opinion,’ the sheriff answered loudly in kind. ‘Ten-hour days are too long. And this is dangerous work.’

  ‘Can’t you do something to stop it?’ John Henry watched as a slip of a boy – six at most – climbed on a spinning frame to grab at a flapping broken thread, his blackened fingers darting in and out between the metal rollers.

  The sheriff guided them towards a quieter section of the plant. ‘We’ve cleared out the youngest ones three times in as many months. Did the same in the mine, the wood mill. But the minute we leave they flood right back in again. It’s like sweeping water out of a river.’ He stopped. ‘How do you run your factory?’

  ‘I’d never dream of employing children this young.’

  ‘Well, poorer folks around here encourage it. It gets harder to judge when you know some of these young’uns are supporting their whole family.’ He bent down to pick up a shard of green glass. ‘You didn’t work when you were a boy?’

  John Henry blushed.

  ‘Huh. Lucky you.’

  The two men passed spinners, ravelle
rs, loopers, doffers removing bobbins and spindles from whining frames, children working barefoot and bandaged, but none of them was Sonny. And each of the children said the same thing: they’d seen no unfamiliar boy, accompanied or otherwise, in the mill.

  ‘Most likely a tramp took him,’ a young girl offered, her patched pinafore straining across her chest, her hair in a thin braid that hung between her shoulderblades. ‘Most likely.’ A tall boy in too-short pants next to her agreed.

  Sheriff Sherman assured John Henry there was no ‘most likely’ about anything. ‘Problem is, if anyone does see a tramp with your boy it might not register. Hobos make use of strays all the time – having a child in tow makes folks more inclined to open their barn for the night.’ He pushed on the heavy factory door, letting in a welcome gust of fresh air. ‘Decent folks, that is.’

  Their time in the cotton mill rattled John Henry, not only because some of the children were Sonny’s age but also because he felt naive. His extensive reading and solid education were not enough to overcome the limitations of his life experience. And he could think of no quick fix or pithy quote to reduce his discomfort.

  On day nine, John Henry and the sheriff drove even further, out to the Conroy brothers’ sawmill.

  ‘If someone stole your boy or persuaded him to travel with them, fifteen miles is not so far. And like Knowles, the Conroys aren’t strangers to trouble.’ The sheriff steered the car off the main road onto a rutted track that ran parallel with the train line.

  Neither of the Conroy brothers was at their mill, but the site manager perched on a stool in the shack said the sheriff and John Henry could talk to the men, so long as they didn’t keep them from their work. He whistled out the open window for a boy, then sent him to find out if anybody knew the whereabouts of the Mr Conroys.

  ‘In town, I’d guess,’ the manager said to the sheriff and John Henry. ‘Though I couldn’t say for sure.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to take a wander around while they’re doing their window-shopping and what have you,’ the sheriff said.

  While Sheriff Sherman stood in the entrance to the lot, hands on hips, considering which part of the mill to check first, John Henry walked towards the wide muddy river, having been alerted to a passing steamboat by a sounding call. The Negro leadsman’s plangent call to the pilot was functional, singing the depth of the water. But the slow, low voice stirred John Henry, tugged at a buried memory. Mark Four-or-or. Deep water, the safest kind. His father had taught him that, if little else.

  He gazed across the yard, noticing that here, too, young children in dirty clothes skittered in and out of buildings, carrying heavy buckets, working in pairs to push full wheelbarrows. What different lives they had from his own boys.

  John Henry hadn’t wanted to tell the sheriff that although he’d never been to the mill, he was familiar with the Conroy name, had purchased from them. He and his business partner, Hank, bought their wood clean and planked at the market. To see it here, though, was something else. Even given the reason for their visit, and trusting the sheriff’s judgement about the Conroys, John Henry couldn’t help feeling some exhilaration. The sawmill was noisy and bustling, and the smell of fresh-cut wood was enlivening. He stopped at a towering pile of logs: virgin longleaf pine, heavy and durable. These were logs harvested from old-growth forests, stands treasured for their purity. He placed a hand on the coarse bark and felt a push of anger: so often he’d had to compete with Northern buyers for this beautiful wood. They bought down here now, outbidding him, driving up the prices because they’d stripped bare their own forests. John Henry thought that if he owned this wood he’d keep it in the South, yes he would.

  Wanting to hear what the men were saying, John Henry joined the sheriff as he walked around the mill, talking with workers at the dipping station and in the drying yard, men on breaks smoking or whittling or sharing chunks of sausage and bread. The sheriff spoke easily with them, making jokes at the Conroys’ expense then at his own uncallused hands and starched shirt (the men wearing overalls, britches, unpolished boots without laces), growing serious when he explained John Henry’s situation. When the sheriff told him to, John Henry held up the pamphlet that bore Sonny’s picture, and when he spoke, he did so slowly for those he suspected were feeble-minded or foreign. The men seemed interested enough, but none of them knew anything about Sonny.

  On day ten, John Henry and Sheriff Sherman visited the clutch of cabins where the Negroes lived, near the rank swamplands where no one else would make a home.

  While the sheriff hadn’t let the reporters follow him to the mills, he did today. ‘They might learn something,’ he’d said to John Henry.

  The group roamed from one flimsy shack to the next, through patches of fleabane and foxtail grass, around puddles. At each house, the newsmen stood on their toes to see past the sheriff through opened doorways, keen to include details of interiors. They would describe the smell of red beans and rice (onion, pepper), catfish frying in oil, the lack of furniture, so their story would stand out from the others.

  At the start of the day, Sheriff Sherman had stood on a stump to tell the newsmen what he knew so far. ‘Listen up, ladies, because I don’t want you stopping me every twenty yards with your questions. And Tom McCabe, quit jangling those coins. I can’t think with that everlasting noise.’

  ‘Seconded,’ Max from the Bugle had shouted, and they’d all laughed.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Tom, as Eddie patted him on the back, a gesture of camaraderie rather than comfort since anyone could see the reporters liked Tom.

  John Henry’s and Tom’s eyes had met, and they’d both smiled. John Henry was grateful for a moment’s levity. Tom was glad of connection, but unnerved by the depth of sadness in John Henry’s face. Without any desire to do so, since a reporter’s purview was fact not emotion, Tom felt a stab of pain knowing how much the loss of his son would wound this man. Tom wondered about John Henry’s upbringing, whether he had a cruel or kind father, a warm or distant mother, siblings. John Henry wondered at Tom’s combination of slouching looseness and razor-sharp attentiveness.

  Sheriff Sherman told the men to keep a respectful distance. Still, they inched forward when they thought they could and then back, forward and back in waves.

  ‘These ramshackle houses disturb me,’ John Henry whispered to the sheriff. ‘So many people in one small room, and that tar-black woman suckling a baby – she was barely clothed …’

  ‘I’m sure they’d live in palaces if they could.’

  ‘They’d be better off outdoors. Stale air poisons the blood.’ John Henry looked behind him to check the reporters weren’t listening in. ‘Do you ever question our wisdom in having brought these people to American soil? I have no desire to vilify Negroes, but if they’re not going to improve their lives now they’re free they may as well live in any country.’

  Sheriff Sherman stepped onto the next weatherworn porch. ‘You’d send them back?’ He knocked on the door.

  ‘That’s not a terrible idea, is it, to be with one’s own kind?’

  ‘Certainly not an original idea, though even Lincoln abandoned it. Guess you’d need to do the same with the Irish, the Italians, the French. The Spanish and Germans, too. The Scots. Mexicans.’ He glanced back at John Henry. ‘There’d be nobody home but us and the Indians. And you know they don’t want us here.’

  A young Negro woman opened the door, a bug-eyed girl dressed in rags slung around her hip. The woman looked at the photograph and shook her head. But the sheriff asked if she could show it to the others inside. He rested against the doorjamb while she did so.

  ‘Davenport. That’s English?’

  ‘Yes, long ago. I had ancestors land at Plymouth Rock.’

  ‘You know where I’m going with this.’

  When the woman returned, the sheriff dug into his pocket and handed her little girl a wrapped candy.

  ‘A pioneer and a slave aren’t remotely the same,’ John Henry said. He knew that God had authored
mankind’s character, and created the world’s hierarchy in which some taught and some learned, some led and some laboured. But at a certain point the onus must be on the individual to improve their circumstances.

  ‘No argument there.’

  ‘I suppose that Negro child’s life isn’t much worse than the children at the mill,’ John Henry said as they walked to the next lean-to. ‘Any one of them might choose to lead a worthier life than their parents.’

  The sheriff sighed. ‘Choice is a rich person’s word, John.’ He turned to the reporters and raised his voice. ‘We’re done here.’

  After fourteen days of searching, the Davenports headed back to Opelousas, despite Mary’s foggy protestations, George’s uncontainable tears and Paul’s violent tantrums. Gladys and Mrs Billingham were driven home the same afternoon. The searchers and newsmen left, too.

  Life around the lake quieted. There’d been no sightings of the boy, and no further trace of his presence. There’d been no ransom note. And if it wasn’t a kidnapping, an alligator, a wandering gone wrong, if he’d not been taken in by Negroes or Italians, the Knowles or the Conroys, then – people said – he must have been taken by a tramp. And if that were the case, he could be almost anywhere.

  PART TWO

  TRACKING AND ENDURANCE

  CHAPTER SIX

  Opelousas woke early, not only on rice, cotton and tobacco farms, not only where cattle, roosters and horses demanded it, but also in the town centre. On this warm September morning, seven weeks to the day after Sonny Davenport went missing, as John Henry and Mary ate breakfast in silence and Esmeralda remade beds, Main Street bustled. Horses pulled buggies past the stately bank and lawyers’ offices, fragrant French bakeries, outdoor markets, the Methodist, Baptist and Catholic churches, sharing the street with bicycles and the increasing number of motor cars. Ben Fleury opened the doors to his haberdashery store and paused to stretch his arthritic fingers. Barber Smith tightened the holdbacks on his shutters. The breeze smelled of hair cream, fresh bread, horse droppings and trash.