Most mornings, John Henry went to his furniture factory. He’d become gaunt, his foghorn voice now a tin whistle. His workers stayed out of his path and put their questions to Hank: John Henry’s despondency and tetchy criticism weren’t helpful. The men became tentative around him, so his place of escape took on a different mood. Soon, he found himself deferring to Hank, too. He continued the search for his son at every opportunity, urging Sheriff Sherman not to slacken the reins, responding to letters, travelling when a tip seemed promising.
He’d abandoned Scout training for George and Paul. Mary was right: they were too young. On that, she and Baden-Powell agreed. George had retained no memory of anything that might be a clue, cried at the slightest prod to think harder. And Paul was tiresome in his repetition of nonsense reasons Sonny was to blame for his own absence. All of that was John Henry’s cross to bear; boys were only as capable as their Scoutmaster. He hadn’t prepared them for the freedom he’d encouraged. And now his sons and wife languished indoors. A stronger man, he thought, would’ve stayed at home, faced the problems head-on, persisted with his sons’ improvement and comforted his wife. But John Henry wanted to be away, at work or in another city, and not return until he’d found Sonny.
The reporters speculated about the Davenport marriage, since each time John Henry left Opelousas to search for Sonny, Mary stayed behind in the care of a nurse and friends. Some said her grief had tipped into madness; some asked how long John Henry could shoulder the burden of a missing child and a mad wife. The house had a new nanny, too, a skittish young Negro named Pru. The presence of Nanny Nelly had been more than Mary Davenport could bear.
‘I saw her at the window again this morning,’ Dan Hardy said. ‘Staring at nothing.’
Tutors came and went from the house. The reporters learned to call out to Madame Caron in French, wagered on whether Mrs Barry would drop her sheet music on any given visit, and mocked Mr Long’s smirk of superiority.
‘Latin,’ Eddie said, blowing smoke to one side. ‘Who needs it?’
‘What I don’t get is why they’re not going to Westwood Academy with the other rich kids,’ Dan said.
‘You think she’s going to let those two out of her sight?’ Tom asked.
‘Well, I don’t know how long she can keep them cooped up in there. Boys need to spread their wings.’
‘Those wings have been clipped to the bone.’
In late November, Mr Collins heard from the sheriff that John Henry was travelling to New Orleans. He told Tom and Eddie to be on the same train out of town.
John Henry now stood ten feet away from the pair on the wet steps of the New Orleans City Hall, passing out a reward flyer that featured the same old photograph of Sonny dressed in a white smock.
‘Remind me why we’re here?’ Eddie asked Tom, pulling his coat collar up against the wind.
‘You know why.’ It confounded him that Eddie didn’t share his ambition, seemed content to take his pictures and then go home. Day in, day out.
Eddie pointed at John Henry. ‘Mr Moneybags, pamphletting like a suffragette. Nobody would’ve believed me if I said he’d be doing that one day.’ He glanced down at the sheet Tom held. ‘Looks like a happy kid.’
Sheriff Sherman, meanwhile, had left to interview the woman who’d penned the letter that brought them here. The woman claimed to have seen a boy on Canal Street who matched Sonny’s description, and who replied when she called his name. It had been a Tuesday morning, she wrote, when she’d noticed an elderly Italian woman hunched and dressed in black, a deathly spectre in the fog, getting on a streetcar with a white boy, heading north. Her level of detail had swayed the sheriff.
Tom had no interest in witnessing the sheriff talk with yet another old lady. He’d read the letter, written an article about it. Mr Collins was pushing him hard for a different angle on the story, a take on how people in the Louisiana capital were responding. Tom’s boss disliked the uppity folk there, and wanted confirmation that people in New Orleans were selfish, cold-blooded, thought themselves too superior to care about goings-on in Opelousas and Half Moon Lake. Tom knew this was the story Mr Collins wanted, but he saw no sign it was the case. All types of people stopped outside the city hall to talk to John Henry, offering their sympathy and promising to stay vigilant. Reporters from the New Orleans papers took Tom aside to check they had the chronology of the case right, and to ask questions about the lake’s environs and how the mother was faring. John Henry appeared buoyed by the responsiveness, and vigorously thanked each interested person.
But regardless of John Henry’s hope, Sheriff Sherman’s thoroughness, Tom’s digging and the local goodwill, the trip to New Orleans did not turn up a useful lead to Sonny. Which was aggravating for each of them in different ways.
On their last night in the Hotel St. Helene, the four men sat together to eat. So few of them had come from Opelousas that it would’ve been rude not to. After the meal, Sheriff Sherman went to his room, and John Henry asked Tom and Eddie if they’d join him at a nearby saloon for a nightcap.
‘We’d be delighted, Mr Davenport,’ Tom said.
John Henry encouraged him to address him more informally. ‘Seems you’re in this with me. You may as well use my name.’
Eddie scowled, not at the suggestion of fellowship but the thought of leaving the hotel. He’d sat himself in front of the fireplace and loosened the top two buttons on his trousers. Had Tom not been his friend through thick and thin, Eddie could not have been persuaded to budge from that pleasant room. Mr or otherwise.
The three walked heads down, their umbrellas useless in the wind, through cold sleet and hail, a wide slash of water rearing up and soaking their legs when a car drove close to the kerb. They sought temporary shelter under the awning of a playhouse. (The audience scurried out from a performance then huddled around them, comparing opinions.) They passed brothels on Rue Bassin, dance halls and cabaret bars, theatres advertising minstrel shows inside, saloons thumping to the sounds of trombone, clarinet and coronet. Though the sky boomed and lit up, John Henry urged them on.
Now settled in the Black Cat Saloon, on the fringe of Storyville, they agreed they’d more than earned their whiskey. They sat at the back of the noisy, smoky room. A piano player thumped out ragtime tunes. Scantily clad girls moseyed from table to table, one ruffling a customer’s hair, another yanked off balance onto a lap.
‘Am I missing something?’ Tom asked John Henry. ‘Could be I am, but this place doesn’t seem any different from the others we walked past.’
‘I’ve been here before. There’s comfort in familiarity when you travel as much as I do. Though you’ve logged as many miles, haven’t you? I imagine you curse your editor for making you trail me across the country.’
‘Not at all. Nobody’s forcing me or Eddie. In fact, we asked to be here.’
Eddie shot Tom an inquiring glance: it was the first he’d heard that. He’d have preferred to be back in Opelousas spending time with his new girl, Nora.
‘Family is everything to me, John. The minute I heard your boy was lost I knew I was the person to tell the story, to get the facts and look for clues until Sonny was found. I promised your wife that Eddie and I would do everything we could to help find your boy. It’s a promise I intend to keep.’
John Henry sighed. ‘My beautiful wife, a rose battered by storms.’
That hadn’t been the response Tom expected. ‘Only this one storm, I hope.’
But John Henry stared at the piano player and didn’t reply.
‘Has her family been able to provide any solace?’ Tom asked.
‘Are you married, Tom?’
‘No, sir, not yet. But if my girl Clara’s mother has her way, I won’t be able to say that for long.’
John Henry swirled the whiskey in his glass. ‘You make it sound like a punishment. You don’t know the happiness and peace that comes of being with the right woman. Mary has always been the one for me. Most nerve-racking time of my youth was waiting o
n her father to approve our courtship. She was the prettiest girl I’d seen, the most graceful and kind. Before this she was happy, and I was happy with her.’
A barmaid stood at their table, taking one glass then another off her round silver tray and placing them in front of the men. John Henry handed her enough coins to bring a wide smile to her face. It was the kind of money that usually came with expectations, but John Henry didn’t even glance her way. He hunched forward, staring at Tom first and then Eddie. ‘Mary won’t survive his loss. It’s undoing her. We must find him.’
After a brief silence, Tom spoke. ‘You must miss your boy, too, John. No man wants to think of his son out in the night, with –’
‘Of course I miss him,’ John Henry barked. ‘I can’t bear the thought of –’ He made a fist on the table. ‘It’s crushing me. I – Ah, but for Mary.’ He turned away to hide his eyes.
Gladys Heaton had fashioned a solution of her own. When she called on Mary alone one afternoon, she told her about the clairvoyant Rosa Capaldi.
‘Kohl-circled eyes, coins sewn onto her cuffs, thick black hair she lets curl every which way.’ Gladys edged closer to Mary on the sofa. ‘I learned about her from my seamstress, and I admit I wasn’t convinced until I visited her myself. But the things she told me. You must visit her, let her peer in her mystic ball for Sonny.’ She pointed at the toy rabbit Mary so often held. ‘Perhaps take that.’
The next morning, Mary travelled with Esmeralda to a back alley littered with piles of rotting food stood over by mangy strays. From the car, with a wool blanket spread on her lap, Mary looked out at emaciated cats, Negroes dressed in tatty clothes, Indians swaying from drink. John Henry would never permit her to set foot in this part of town, so she told Esmeralda and the driver their excursion had to remain a secret.
When they reached the house – marked by a weatherworn blue door with a heavy knocker of a woman’s hand and carved Latin script – Mrs Capaldi herself answered their knock. ‘Buongiorno, Signora.’
Esmeralda eyed the spiritualist with suspicion and curiosity. Her Aunt Celestine – who lived no more than an hour from the Davenport house – was a doctor respected in the community for her protective charms and amulets, and powders that cured ailments, granted desires and destroyed enemies, with skills taught to her by ancestors who’d travelled in chains from Senegal. Celestine possessed time-honed knowledge that white people didn’t understand, that was shared in ways they couldn’t control. Without doubt, Celestine could help the Davenports. But most white people were frightened of voodoo, so she’d never suggested it. She looked at the toy Mary held and thought Celestine might be able to work with that on its own.
Mary and Esmeralda padded close together into a drawing room thick with aromatic smoke, maroon curtains with large gold-threaded tassels that hung either side like limbs. One disturbing object after another passed before their eyes: a stuffed pigeon under glass, a dressmaker’s mannequin wearing a sailor suit, unfamiliar sharp-edged metal implements, a bookmarked copy of Manon Lescaut. Had Mary not been so desperate, she would’ve turned and gone home. Had Esmeralda been given a choice, she would never have come inside.
Mary sat at a round table, as Mrs Capaldi had instructed, in what she assumed was a very small parlour. Esmeralda stood next to the door. A crystal ball on an ornate silver stand sat in the centre of the table. Mary handed Hop to Mrs Capaldi, and the mystic sat, eyes closed, clutching the toy to her chest. After much wailing and swaying, the clairvoyant could go no further than seeing Sonny in a place she described as shrouded with thick trees, lit by campfire and near still water. She held up one finger and whispered, ‘birds’. She assured Mary that Sonny was unharmed: powerful forces shielded him, and the child knew his parents were searching for him. ‘Your love is his strength.’
Mrs Capaldi’s lyrical descriptions of Sonny and his vague location whet Mary’s appetite; perhaps another soothsayer, medium or occultist would be more exact. On the way home, Mary reasoned aloud that it was the greater risk to not visit Mrs Capaldi again, and to seek the counsel of other spiritualists. ‘I really do feel this could lead us to Sonny.’
Esmeralda worried for Mary Davenport: more optimistic than she’d been in months, duped by a sideshow Gypsy Jean. Esmeralda had watched Mrs Capaldi open one eye to a slit to check Mary’s reaction when she muttered ‘still water’. The woman was a fraud. And Mrs Davenport was perfect prey: distraught, rich, as easily manipulated as a child, as transparent as that glass orb. She’d need all the protection she could get.
CHAPTER EIGHT
On the first day of 1914, a bracing and windy day, John Henry sat at his desk and read a letter from Mrs Leonard Potter who lived in Mobile, Alabama. At first glance it had seemed no more than another letter from a stranger who claimed to have seen Sonny. John Henry received those by the sackful. Some letters gave the assurance – insistence, even – that the penman had seen Sonny in the flesh, had spoken with him, had heard the sounds of Louisiana in the boy’s voice, and John Henry would telephone Sheriff Sherman. He’d learned, though, to read letters with the same thoughtfulness the sheriff did, checking the postmark for location, the language for rashness or contradiction. John Henry knew that while the sheriff followed up every credible letter, there were people who simply wanted to be a part of someone else’s story or who lived more in the land of fiction than fact. In addition to information about sightings, he received letters of encouragement, tales from other families who’d lost children, advertisements from private detectives. So many letters.
John Henry had kept the photographs people sent him of boys they thought might be Sonny, and the photographs of children whom broken parents prayed he’d find in his travels. He was unsure what to do with this growing pile of portraits but couldn’t bring himself to throw them away, so he kept them locked in his desk drawer. He had pictures of children from Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee and beyond: serious-looking lads, cowlicks kept in check with mother’s spit, faces showing the discomfort of tight collars and long-held poses. One scalloped-edge photograph depicted a freckled-faced boy with a snaggletooth. Another had the photographer’s name and town stamped in italics on the back.
John Henry had travelled as far as the eastern parts of Texas on the promise of these letters, sometimes with the sheriff or one of his deputies, sometimes alone. He’d met dozens of tramps and the pink-eyed, dirty boys who shivered alongside them, begging for food and money. He’d spoken with Negroes in factories and fields. He’d been offered beds and meals by farmers’ wives when it was evident he should have offered assistance to them.
A few sentences in, John Henry realised that this letter was different. He sat upright in his chair, barely drawing breath, as he read the backward-sloping scrawl:
‘Dearest Sir, I’ve seen a tramp with a whip-thin boy I think is yours. The two were outside the house of Mrs Eleanor Crumm. I found excuse to pass by and I saw a scar marked his arm, like a red new moon. The left arm, from where I stood, I know that. A sure sign of mistreatment. He didn’t utter a word to me. But I have strong instincts, Sir, and am certain this was not the child of that man. And when Mrs Crumm came onto her porch and said she preferred not to have a tramp loiter near her home, the man shouted and the child cried. Sir, I went and found my newspaper of months past with the photograph of your boy and I do think it’s him. The tramp is still in town. Do come, Sir. I feel certain your boy is here and in dire need of you.’
Reference to a scar made John Henry’s heart leap, for it had not been mentioned by anyone else. Here was a genuine lead. He telephoned the sheriff.
While other Opelousans harvested the last parsnips and spinach, and planned ahead to February when the soil would be warm enough to sow beets and cabbage, onions and peas, while they enjoyed seafood gumbo in the evenings, compared their trap hauls of muskrat, raccoon and mink, and took in what news they cared to of their town and country, John Henry and Sheriff Sherman travelled by train to Mobile. They met with the local sheriff, Sheriff Bird
, with whom Mrs Leonard Potter had also shared her concerns. Together they called on Mrs Potter, who lived with her two grown sons and young daughter in a farmhouse a half-mile from the banks of the Mississippi.
Sheriff Bird assured Mrs Potter they didn’t mind sitting in the kitchen. He preferred, in fact, to be in that room, warm from the pot-belly stove, made homely with wire baskets of eggs, jars of rosemary cuttings, and windows framed by cotton curtains. But Mrs Potter insisted they sit in the living room; they were guests. Her elder boy carried in extra logs, and her daughter brought coffee. Sheriff Bird chose a comfortable armchair, dropping into it after Mrs Potter plumped his cushion, and looked around for the cat that had jumped on his lap when he’d last visited.
While Sheriff Bird held his mug up to accept a refill of steaming coffee, Sheriff Sherman and John Henry gave polite, brisk ‘nos’ to Mrs Potter. They’d been in this position enough times that a new hearth was no novelty, and sweet treats no incentive to stay. They wanted to learn what they could and begin their search.
‘Now, it’s true I haven’t seen your boy since I wrote to you,’ Mrs Potter said to John Henry, ‘but it’d been so sad. He was barefoot, scurrying to keep up with the man, who cuffed him more than once when he moved too slow.’
John Henry winced.
‘Mrs Potter, can you tell us where they were headed?’ Sheriff Sherman asked.
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