"What His Hand Had Been Waiting For"
by Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly
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 mewing past the house’s slanted silhouette—the owners smart enough to leave the doors and windows open, which had let the flood waters 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. Idn’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 mutton chops
(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.
