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."