The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

What His Hands Had Been Waiting For by Beth Ann Fennelly and Tom Franklin

FROM Delta Blues

July, 1927

THEY LEFT THE DEAD LOOTERS in the house and were striding toward their horses, Ham Johnson reloading his.30-.30, when they heard what sounded like a cat.

"Ain't no cat," said Ingersoll.

"Naw." Ham clicked a cartridge into the port of his rifle. He clicked in another.

They followed the squawling past the house's slanted silhouette-the owners smart enough to leave the doors and windows open, which had let the floodwaters swirl through. Behind the house, a shade tree, now like something dipped in batter halfway up. Snagged in the top branches, a coop filled with dead chickens.

Anyway, Ingersoll was right about it not being a cat. It was a baby.

The men stared. A bushel basket on a low branch held the red-faced thing. In the mud, beneath the basket, a shred of blanket it'd kicked away.

"Mother of God," Ingersoll said.

"Wasn't nothing of God about this one's mother," Ham said. He raised his right arm, aiming his shotgun at the door of the house, and closed one eye. "She was the one. Got damn it. When she heard us coming she must've up and left this one here and hid herself in the house."

Ingersoll considered the baby. It wore a gnarl of diaper and was impossible to name boy or girl. It was bald. Red from crying and he realized they'd been yelling above its noise.

"You better off," Ham told it. "Take a chance with the current elements. Maybe a gang of coyote'll take you in. Isn't that what happened to you, Ingersoll? Band of coyotes found you in the tundra and raised you as their own?"

Ham shoved the silver tray they'd taken from the looters into his saddlebag. A white man just over six feet tall with a red face and bright red hair he kept cut short, Ham wore muttonchops (also red) he called burnsides, and a belly nutria derby that he was slightly vain about and endeavored to keep clean. Ingersoll's hat was bigger and more practical, a black Stetson Dakota.

"Ain't no coyotes this far south," he said.

"Is too," Ham said. He kicked his leg to flap his boot sole down-the leather wet so long it'd rotted-and fitted his boot into his stirrup and swung onto his saddle.

"It's wild dogs a-plenty, Ham. But it ain't no coyotes."

Ingersoll was looking beyond the house, studying the inland sea of dried and drying mud where cotton plants had once been, the horizon unrelenting brown, flat and cracking like so much poorly thrown pottery. Twice he had seen arms of the dead reaching out of it.

The levees had ruptured back in April, and even here, twenty-five miles southeast of the Mounds Landing crevasse, the waves had surged six feet. Thunderous breakers of coffee-colored froth had flattened near every tree and building, then just wiped them all away, like something out of Revelation. Ingersoll recalled the buried road to Yazoo City, a bloated mare and in front of its muzzle a bloated Bible as if the horse were verifying the events of the end time when they befell him.

"Tell Junior goodbye," Ham said.

"What you mean?"

"I mean it's somebody'll come along sooner or later and get this damn baby's what I mean. We got to skedaddle." He looked over his shoulder at the basket, now swaying in the breeze. "What's that lullaby? 'When the bow breaks, the cradle will fall, and down will come baby, cradle and all.'"

"Ham-"

"C'mon," Ham said. "Let's get to New Orleans, spend some of this looter loot. I got me a mind for a foreign girl. Russian if we can find one. Get a steak and lay some pipe. Then buy me a new pair of boots."

"I can't leave no baby, Ham."

"Well we ain't bringing it, Ing."

The foul wind from the east moaned through the leaning mule barn.

"Adios, Junior," Ham said, and gigged his sorrel with his heels. "Vaya con dios."

Ingersoll stared down at the kicking baby like maybe he'd had a baby himself long ago. And a wife.

But he hadn't. He was twenty-seven years old. He had no living family anywhere. He'd never even touched a baby.

"Ah, hell," he said and looked at the pewter sky, which gave a chuckle of thunder.

Wild dogs following. Or coyotes if you asked Ham. Ingersoll rode a quarter mile behind his partner and figured the big man wouldn't hear the thing fussing in his arms. It smelled like piss and flung its fists out and kicked. As he rode it was the beating and kicking that impressed Ingersoll. Little dickens had some fight.

In an hour the baby had lulled to a hiccupping sleep and Ingersoll let the horse follow the deeply etched tracks Ham's sorrel was carving. Ingersoll had learned to trust Ham's lead after Ham had spotted and dispatched two of the saboteurs back in Marked Tree, Arkansas. Their next orders, sent via telegram by Coolidge's men, had brought them to the Old Moore plantation near Greenville, Mississippi, where they were told to monitor local Negroes, some growing seditious, planning to head north, put the lapping Mississippi far behind them. But the landowners-and the officials the landowners elected-couldn't allow the Negroes to leave. Who would pick the cotton then?

But the cotton hadn't mattered. They were perhaps a dozen miles from Mounds Landing, searching for runaway Negroes, when that levee had burst. As if from the sky they heard it, heard the terrible roar, like a twister first but then an earthquake, it seemed, coming from beneath the horses. "Go," Ham had yelled. They spurred their mounts to a gallop and within minutes the floodtide was upon them, washing trees and bodies past, brown water splashing over the horses' hooves first, then quickly over their withers to the riders' legs and then the horses were careening and swimming and the men fighting to stay on, the land gone behind them, there passing in the current a church steeple, there a wagon still hitched to a pair of kicking mules, there a schoolhouse desk.

Now Ingersoll's horse gave a lurch. He grasped the baby, which startled it awake, its arms flying outward, and set it to crying. The horse's back legs had sunk, stuck again. Ingersoll would have to dismount and wrench its hooves free. But what to do with the baby?

"Ham?"

He heard a horseshoe clip a rock behind him and lowered his head and shook it.

"I told you about that damn baby," Ham Johnson shouted at his back. "Look where your instincts are."

"It's my decision," Ingersoll called over his shoulder. "I'll ditch it first people we find."

Ham skidded to a stop beside Ingersoll's horse, wiggling its rump and straining its neck and rolling its eyes in panic. Ingersoll slid off, clutching the squalling baby. It was horribly red in the face and its tears left tracks in its coat of dust.

"I think it's hungry," Ingersoll said.

Ham leaned and spat. "So am I." He spurred his horse, which threw beads of mud on Ingersoll's neck as it trotted away.

Ingersoll looked before him, behind. His own feet were heavy with mud and he saw nothing to do but set his upended Stetson in the mud and place the wailing baby ass-first in its crown. When he saw it wouldn't topple out he stood behind the horse, talking to it, and grounded his feet and squatted and with both hands around the horse's fetlock yanked it free, the mud yielding with an anguished and greedy slurp.

It was a long afternoon that they traveled south across the bird-less crackled brown mudscape without ever arriving at its edge. At four it rained and woke the baby but they kept riding. They passed through the rain and through a spell of cool, the air dotted with mosquitoes, before it got hot again. Twice Ingersoll's horse jumped the bloated bodies of goats, his mount so weary and jaded it hardly broke stride. They crossed a patch where strange arcs and teeth of stone pressed through the mud that Ham said must have been a cemetery. As they rode, Ingersoll switched the baby from sore arm crook to sore arm crook, grateful that his horse had fidelity, hardly needed guiding at all.

As they pushed south, Ingersoll held his drinking pouch-he'd mixed sugar and water-for the baby to suck on. He'd also peered in its swaddle and seen its tiny knob, cleaned its backside with a rag dipped in puddle water, and rigged his kerchief to make a new diaper.

They dismounted at the top of a small hill with a swift swollen creek below, a butter churn bobbing against speckled rocks. Ham hobbled the horses, keeping them close and saddled. Ingersoll took off his Stetson and frowned at the rotten smudges on his fingers but lowered the baby in it anyway, extending its arms along the brim. Ham had arranged a few twigs and branches and soon had a fire sputtering, its pops and sparks and orbiting moths a fascination for the baby, who pointed a crooked finger.

They chewed beef jerky and drank water from their canteens and rolled out their bedrolls. Ham unstoppered his pouch of mescal and pushed out his feet like he did when he was fixing to elaborate. His boots, caked in mud, were twice their regular size. Ingersoll reached into his saddlebag and lifted out his taterbug mandolin, a bowl-backed beauty of maple and mahogany, now warped a few degrees because of the rain. They'd found it washed ashore in a hussar trunk that Ham opened by shooting off the lock. Ingersoll, by tuning it a step and a half below standard, could play all the blues keys on it.

He laid down a few licks and the baby turned its attention to watch Ingersoll with its bright blue eyes. Ingersoll began to pick out a little ballad he'd made up.

"Tell this youngun your real name, Ham."

His partner swigged from his pouch. "Nobody knows it, living ner dead."

Ingersoll always enjoyed the next question for the contradictory answers it provoked. "And tell him how you come to be called Ham."

Ham took another pull. "You know how babies have that good smell, that sweet smell to their heads? Well, when I was a baby, my head gave off the perfume of ham."

"Oh, yeah?" Ingersoll played two bar fills and saw that the baby's eyelids were heavy, its head bobbing toward sleep.

"Yeah. Smelled like ham, like real good roast ham. People around me always getting hungry. It was my breath, something from inside. Over the years"-he took another swig, and Ingersoll laid down a blues lick-"over the years, I learned to stand downwind of folks. Naturally, as I grew I lost that sweet ham smell some, but it's still there if you get close, whore-close. In fact, had there been this flood back then, I'd likely have been the first one cannibalized. 'Ham Johnson,' they'd say, shaking their heads. 'Damn but he made a fine breakfast.'" Ham leaned to pass the mescal. "Nobody would of ever thought he'd a been a genuine war hero and confiscated by the military government itself to pursue saboteurs of levees-"

"Dynamite-wielding saboteurs," Ingersoll added, taking a drink.

"Dynamite-wielding saboteurs of such a low stripe," Ham said, "that they're willing to set their charges wherever the highest bidder says." He started talking about how one group of saboteurs, posing as government engineers, had taken money from a village on the east side of the river and then blown the west side, flooding a village over there in order to keep theirs dry.

Ingersoll handed the tequila back and laid down a turnaround in E, just showing off now. He'd gotten his first guitar at ten, and holding it felt like somebody had attached a missing piece to his body. By fourteen he was making a living, a little gambling on the side, playing blues up in Clarksdale. But in 1916 he left for the Great War, put down his guitar for a U.S. government-issue Mossberg.50-caliber rifle. He'd taken to it the same way, either-handed and cool-headed and pitch-perfect and fingers as nimble as air.

Finally Ham belched and tapped his chest and aimed the neck of his pouch at the baby in the Stetson.

"Sleeping like a got-damn baby," he said.

Ingersoll went to his saddlebag, put his taterbug back, and removed his spare dungaree shirt. He tucked it around the baby, whose breathing seemed shallow. "We need to get some milk fore long. Tomorrow."

Ham sighed. He pulled his legs in and stood. "You want first watch?"

Ingersoll slipped his thumb into the baby's hand and felt his fingers close around it. He waggled his thumb and admired the baby's fierce grip. "Yeah."

"Well, I'll turn in."

"All right."

Soon he was asleep and Ingersoll sat holding the hatful of baby in his lap. When the fire cracked out an ember that lay fizzing in the mud, the baby opened its eyes. It began to fuss and so he lifted it out and held it against his shoulder and started rocking, singing the one about the Corps men sandbagging the levee: "I works on the levee, mama, both night and day. I works so hard to keep the water away," he sang. "It's a mean old levee, cause me to weep and moan. Gonna leave my baby, and my happy home."

The first homestead they came to the next morning was deserted-aback their horses, through the busted door, they saw standing water and a rat swimming in a lazy circle. Ingersoll was anxious. During the night he'd dreamed about riding up a grassy hill crowned with a sweet olive tree and finding tethered to it a massively uddered milk cow, and he admitted now to himself that he didn't give a damn about finding the saboteurs unless they were running a dairy. The baby had been feasted upon in the night by mosquitoes and bore the bites stoically. It didn't cry and felt hot. Riding, Ingersoll kept touching its head.

The next place they came upon seemed as deserted as the first. It was a stone building with slotted windows. Essentially a small fort, bearded along its bottom in green mold. Nothing moved.

But Ham said, "Wait."

Ingersoll shifted the baby behind him and raised his sixteen-gauge toward the windows.

Ham was already off his horse and standing against the wall with rifle ready. He spun and kicked in the log door. Ingersoll was on the ground using his horse for cover. He'd put the baby behind him and it was starting to fuss.

"Come on in," Ham called to him.

Ingersoll blocked the baby with his body as he sidewindered up. He trailed his single-barrel in the room and followed his partner's gaze to four people crouched in the corner. They were thin, white, dressed in rags. Three were men and one, behind them, a stringy-haired woman. The room smelled like piss. There wasn't a stick of furniture. Only a big washpot and the remains of a fire in a dugout fireplace. They weren't saboteurs, or even looters, but Ham eyed them warily. The baby was crying in a raspy way.

Then the girl stepped forward. "Can I hold it?"

She was skinny but her breasts were enormous under her tattered housedress. They were wet at the nipples.

"What the hell?" Ham glanced at Ingersoll.

"Here." Ingersoll offered her the baby.

She took it and turned her back to them and the baby's squall muffled for a second and then ceased, replaced by wet sucking sounds. She stood, rocking from side to side.

"Oh." Ham grinned and lowered his weapon.

'You can put yours away too, son," one of the men said to Ingersoll. 'We ain't got no guns. All we got is sticks."

Another of the men raised his, a pathetic cane.

Ingersoll slid his shotgun into his boot holster.

"What's your all's story?" Ham asked the oldest-looking of the men, though in truth you couldn't tell how old (or how young) any of them were.

"Our story?" The man looked around. He flung out his arms. "Here it is. Me." He pointed. "Him. Him. Her. This place that used to be a farm. Forty days and nights of rain, no goddamn ark. Near six days spent on the roof with a bellowing coon dog till we ate it. Then suddenly appear a baby and two maniacs with guns. That's our story."

"What happened to her youngun?" Ingersoll asked, nodding to the girl.

She stiffened and looked at him over her shoulder.

"It died," one of the men said.

"How?"

He looked down.

"The way babies die," the oldest man said. "In the middle of the night."

"Yall been sucking her milk?" Ham asked.

The old man met his gaze. "It's worse sins than that when you're starving."

Ingersoll and Ham exchanged a glance.

"I expect it is," Ham said.

Ingersoll looked at the girl. She just rocked with her eyes closed as the baby's hand climbed her neck and hooked a finger in her lip.

"Who're y'all?" another of the men asked.

"We ain't nobody you need to worry about," Ham said.

"Is anybody coming to help us down here? Is anybody sending food?"

Ingersoll shook his head. "Just to the camps in Greenville. Y'all should head over there. They're giving tents and food and seventy-five cents a day to levee repairers."

"We ain't leaving," the old man said.

"Suit yourself," Ham told him. "But the next party through might not be so kind as we are."

It was decided they'd leave the baby with the girl. They also left matches, sugar, lard, and jerked beef, which the men fell upon instantly.

"Don't eat too fast," Ham said. "You'll produce it right back."

The girl didn't want any. Ingersoll studied her and she smiled and revealed a row of small, even teeth.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Dixie Clay."

"You okay, Dixie Clay?"

She didn't answer.

"She's fine," the younger man said.

"Let's skedaddle," Ham said to Ingersoll. He touched the brim of his derby with his rifle barrel and turned for the door.

Ingersoll watched the girl. For a moment she seemed to lean in his direction, her eyes intensified at him, until the young man stepped in front of her.

"Thank you for your kindness," he said.

"I'll be back," Ingersoll said. "To check on that baby."

He was quiet as they walked their horses side by side, though Ham kept trying to provoke him.

"I read water poured through the Mounds Landing crevasse harder than Niagara. Did you know that?"

"No."

"True. Three-quarters-mile crevasse, and near three hundred levee workers swept clean away right then and there. Unless newspapers lie."

"Some do."

"Could be our saboteurs made that breach," Ham said.

Ingersoll didn't answer. He kept seeing the girl's eyes and how tightly she held the baby to her chest.

It was growing dark and Ham said this looked like a good spot to camp, didn't it, pretty dry. They dismounted and Ham sat on his roll and tugged at his boots, which slurped free. He peeled down his socks and sat looking at his toes, wrinkled and mushroomed.

Ingersoll took off his hat and set it on the ground beside him. How empty it seemed. Ham produced two cans of beans and his opener as Ingersoll turned the pegs, played a lick, tuned it again.

Then he put it down and looked up into the night. "I'm tired of never seeing no stars," he said.

"Just be glad it ain't raining. You gone play?"

"Not right now."

Ham set the cans of beans in the fire to warm and they'd just begun to bubble at the top when he sat alert and laid his hand on his.30-.30. Ingersoll had heard it too, dried mud crunching, and they rolled away from the fire on their bellies, aiming into the dark.

"Don't shoot. I got the baby."

"Oh for Christ sake." Ham spat into the dark.

Dixie Clay stepped forward into the firelight. She was clutching the baby, and she was bleeding across the forehead some.

"We nearly blew your fool head off," Ham said, pushing to his feet. "And for making me spill my mescal, you'd a deserved it."

Dixie Clay looked at Ingersoll, rising himself.

"You okay?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"They following you?"

"No. I don't think so."

"They will," Ham said.

"The baby," she said, "the baby wasn't safe there. With them."

Ingersoll looked at Ham, who didn't meet his eyes and sat down before the fire. He commenced to scraping mud from his boot with a stick.

Ingersoll waited for her to say more, but she didn't. "They eat your baby?" he asked at last.

She lowered her head.

"Girl? I asked you a question. If you don't answer I'm gone send you right back to 'em."

"Yeah."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. They eat her. She was dead already and they said we had to or they'd starve."

"But they won't eat this one," Ham said. "They got food now. We gave 'em some."

She hugged the baby higher on her chest. It was still wrapped in Ingersoll's shirt.

"Well?" Ham demanded.

She was looking at Ingersoll. "Something's wrong with them. Something went wrong."

Ham resumed scraping mud from his boot heel.

"Sit down," Ingersoll said to the girl, and pointed to his roll. She sank onto it, still holding the baby. It gave an enormous yawn. Its color was better.

He opened his pack and offered her an apple.

"No, thank you."

But he tossed it anyway and she caught it with one hand without disturbing the baby.

"Eat it, girl. Otherwise you and this little one both gonna die and all for nothing."

She took a bite and chewed and looked at the baby in her arms and looked back up. "What's gonna happen to us?"

Ingersoll wondered the same thing.

When Ingersoll woke the next morning, Ham had already put coffee on and was pissing into a mud puddle fifty yards off. Ingersoll looked across the ashen coals where he'd laid out his bedding for the girl. She'd slept with the baby nestled against her, and in the dawn light he saw where some of her blood had crusted on the baby's cheek. For the first time he wondered what its name was.

Ingersoll rose quietly and stretched and filled their tin cups with coffee and went to where Ham was loading the saddlebag.

"Obliged," Ham said.

They stood together facing the lip of sun pushing itself over the flat brown world, glazing the mud puddles like copper ingots.

Ham sipped his coffee and studied his partner. "What the hell are you about to do?"

"I don't know."

"Yes you do."

"I can't leave 'em."

"Yes you can."

"No I can't, Ham."

"You've connected 'em and saved that damn baby's life. At some point you just have to do your job. Our job."

Ingersoll stood silent, watching the sunrise.

"Shit," Ham said. He flung his coffee into the mud.

"Just tell 'em I'm dead. When you get back."

Ham sighed. "That won't even be no lie," he said. "It's what you call a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the looters don't get you, or the saboteurs, ole Coolidge will. You done seen too much."

"Just do what you have to."

"I will, Ing. Got damn it."

They shook hands and looked for a long moment into one another's eyes. Ingersoll couldn't see a thing in Ham's and wondered what Ham saw in his own. For the first time it occurred to Ingersoll that if Ham killed him now he'd merely be doing his job. But instead Ham nodded and turned away and Ingersoll turned too with his coffee and went to nudge the coals.

The girl's face had relaxed from its fear and he watched her sleep. She was pretty under the dirt and the blood, freckles on her upturned nose and brown hair that she could probably fix nice if she wanted. The baby was sleeping too, its mouth slack around her nipple, a trace of watery milk on its tongue. He stood and turned to gaze across the cracked leather earth to where Ham was cinching the girth on his horse.

"Last chance," Ham called. He kicked the flap of his boot sole down and swung into the saddle, grinning. "Russian girls can smoke cigarette with they virginias. They let you do 'em up the chute if you pay 'em five more dollars."

"Naw," Ingersoll said, grinning too, and raised his hand, and Ham raised his back and then turned and rode away, the sorrel kicking up arcs of mud behind him.

When Dixie Clay woke he doctored her head a little while she licked her thumb and rubbed some of the dirt and dried blood from the baby's cheeks. He told her about Ham leaving and then turned his attention to heating another can of beans so she could nurse. He sang as he stirred, a tune of nonsense, swimming with bowlegged women, the words not making sense but neither were his feelings.

They were aback his horse, the girl before him on the saddle, holding the baby, and they were headed west. The sun was out and the earth drier, trees on the horizon. Dixie Clay said she was two months shy of eighteen. One of them back there had been her husband.

"Which one?"

"The one with the different-colored eyes."

"What was his name?"

She paused. "I'll say it just this one more time. But don't never ask me again, okay?"

"Okay."

"Jesse Swan Holliver." She brushed away a mosquito from the baby's forehead. Then she turned her head to look up at him. "I'm better off now."

A little while later, facing forward in the saddle, she said it again. "I'm better off now."

He rode on, thinking, as she slept within the cage his arms made. He remembered killing the looters in the house in Leland. Killing the baby's mother. She'd had a gold-plated.45-caliber pistol and she was fixing to shoot him. Instead he shot her. Now in his imagination he shot her again. He shot her and then the man she'd been with and the one before him and the saboteurs in Marked Tree and the Krauts on the Flemish Coast and all the way back through his life of murder and mandolining. He probably should have shot Dixie Clay's husband and the other two, and might come to regret not doing so. But it was not yet noon and already he'd carried them fifteen miles farther west from the river and closer to land where you could see some stars. Even the horse seemed spry, its head high and pace quickening despite the heavier load.

The girl nodded in the saddle as she slept. He thought about the Memphis Minnie song, "Gotta leave my baby, and my happy home." He sang it softly to himself and Dixie Clay opened her eyes.

"You gone leave me?" She sat up and turned to look into his face.

He could smell her sour sleep breath, his chest warm from where her back had rested.

"It don't look like it," he said.

She reached to where his hand lay over the pommel and wove her fingers through his. He wondered if she noticed how callused he was. He wondered was it too late to unlearn being good at certain things with your hands. He wondered about the tiny half-moon scar on her lip that shone white when she smiled as she was doing now. He had time to find out.

He looked into her lap where she held the baby, his eyelids jerking in sleep, but his breath was easy, his lungs puffing, and Ingersoll knew they were tiny bellows that would play the rest of his days.

"He's dreaming," she said.

"Yeah," he said, "he must be."