The Book of Lost Friends: A Novel (12 page)

They gasp, straighten in their chairs, look surprised.
Miss Silva, you seem strangely less defeated today, almost giddy,
their expressions say.

If only they knew.

I pull out the supply of pooperoos. “I burned the bottoms a little on this batch. Sorry. But they’re not horrible. You know the rules. No pushing. No shoving. No noise, or I close the box. If you want one, come get one.”

I attempt a half-hearted lesson on adverbs, then abandon the effort and pick up
Animal Farm
to read to them. Meanwhile, the brass key weighs heavily in my pocket and on my mind. I’m distracted.

I withdraw it between classes, study it in my palm, contemplate all the hands that held it before mine. I study it in the light at different angles, try to re-create the reflection of a face, but nothing materializes.

I finally give up in favor of checking the wall clock every few minutes, willing it to move faster. When the final bell rings, I’m filled with jubilant energy, the only cloud over my day being that LaJuna was absent in fourth hour. She’d been back for three days in the first part of the week, now poof, gone like a whiff of smoke.

I mull that as I straighten desks, listen to school buses rumble past, and impatiently wait until teacher-release time.

When it arrives, I am out the door with the speed of a cheetah on the hunt.

It’s not until I’ve made my way home and am hiking through the gardens at Goswood Grove that this whole thing starts to seem somewhat questionable. Why would Nathan Gossett give the key over so easily?
Don’t send me lists. I don’t care. I don’t want any of it.
None of this means anything to him? At all? Is he really so disconnected from the house’s history? From
his
history?

Am I taking unfair advantage of that?

I know where the growing specter of guilt originates from. I understand family division and family issues. Irreconcilable differences. Wounds and resentments and differing viewpoints that prevent opposite sides from ever meeting in the middle. I have paternal half sisters I’ve barely even met, a mother I haven’t seen in ten years and intend never to see again and can’t forgive for what she did. For what she made me do.

Have I taken advantage of the very ghosts that haunt me most—spotted them somehow in Nathan Gossett and used them to get what I want?

It’s a valid question, and yet I find myself on the porch at Goswood Grove anyway, trying to discern which door my key fits and telling myself that I don’t care if
Take what you want
is a cannonball, fired across a family battlefield. The best place these books can be is in the hands of people who need them.

Several doors have locks far too modern for the little brass key. The house has obviously been used through the generations, its various inhabitants modernizing it in puzzle-piece fashion—a window here, a door lock there, an aging set of air-conditioners laboring in the back even though the house is vacant, a kitchen that was undoubtedly added long after the home was built. Before that, a separate one probably stood in the yard, built a short distance from the main house to isolate the heat, noise, and fire danger.

A small alcove off the current kitchen offers two entry doors. Through the windows, I can see that one leads straight ahead into a storage pantry, and a second leads to the left, into the kitchen. The tumblers on the ornate brass lock turn as if they were used yesterday. Dust, paint, and a stray coil of ivy relinquish their grip when the door falls open. The ivy slides across my neck, and I shudder in an awkward little dance, tossing it off as I bolt through then stand a moment, unwilling to close the door behind myself.

The house is still and stuffy, humid despite the air-conditioners whirring. No telling what it might take to control the climate in a place this big, rife with ancient floor-to-ceiling windows and doors that list in their frames like tired old men resting against the walls.

I move through the kitchen, which, in the fifties or sixties, must have included all the latest. The red appliances sport space-aged curves, the dials and gauges worthy of the interior of a rocket ship. Black-and-white tile completes the sense that I’ve stepped into some odd sort of time warp. Everything is tidy, though. The glass-fronted cabinets sit mostly empty. A dish here. A stack of Melmac plates there. A soup tureen with a broken handle. In the adjacent butler’s pantry, the situation is similar, though the cabinetry is much older, the crackled, bubbled shellac testifying to the fact that it’s probably original to the house. Whatever fancy china or silver the shelves once held is mostly gone. Flatware drawers hang partially open, empty. An odd scattering of remnants collect dust behind leaded glass doors. The overall feel is that of a grandmother’s house on the day before the estate sale, after family members have divided up the heirlooms.

I wander, feeling like a peeping Tom as I pass through a dining room with an imposing mahogany table and chairs, the seats covered in green velvet. Massive oil-on-canvas portraits of the house’s generational residents look on from the walls. Women in elaborate dresses, their midsections cinched impossibly thin. Men in waistcoats, standing with gold-tipped walking sticks or hunting dogs. A little girl in turn-of-the-century white lace.

The adjoining parlor is appointed in slightly more modern fashion. Sofa, burgundy wingback chairs, console TV in a cabinet with built-in speakers. More recent eras of Gossetts watch me from hanging portraits and easel frames atop the TV cabinet. I pause at a triple-matted display of graduation photos featuring the judge’s three sons. Diplomas are framed under each picture—Will and Manford, business graduates from Rice University, and Sterling, the youngest, from the LSU College of Agriculture. It would be easy to guess, just by looking, that he was Nathan’s father. There’s a strong resemblance.

I can’t help but think,
Doesn’t Nathan want any of these photos?
Not even to remember the dad who died so young?
Sterling Gossett is probably not too much older than Nathan in that photo. He didn’t live many more years, I guess.

It’s too sad to contemplate further, and so I move on through the parlor to what I know comes next. I’m acquainted with the layout of the house, thanks to my various porch peeking trips. Even so, when I cross the threshold into the library of Goswood Grove, I’m breathless.

The room is glorious, unchanged from what it once was and has always been. Save for the addition of electric lamps, light switches, a plug here and there, and an enormous billiard table that most likely isn’t quite as old as the house, nothing has been modernized. I run a hand along the billiard table’s leather cover as I pass, snag one of the countless paperbacks stacked there. The judge had so many books, they’ve spread like the growths of ivy outside the house. The floors, the space under the massive desk, the billiard table, and every inch of every shelf is laden.

I drink in the sight, stand mesmerized, drenched in leather and paper and gold edges and ink and words.

I’m carried away. Lost.

I’m so completely transfixed that I have no idea how much time passes before I realize I am not alone in this house.

HANNIE GOSSETT—LOUISIANA, 1875

The river tugs at my clothes as I drag my body up onto the sand, then lay there coughing out water and all that was in my gut. I
can
swim, and the man threw me close enough to shore that it could’ve been easy to get there, but this river’s got its own mind. A strainer tree spun off in the boat’s wake, grabbed me up as it whirled by, and dragged me down. Took all I had to get free.

I hear a gator sliding through the mud not far away, and I push to my hands and knees and cough up more water and taste blood.

It’s then I touch my neck and feel the empty place.

No leather string. No Grandmama’s beads.

My legs wobble as I get up and stagger to the shore looking for them. I pull my shirt up and check under it. Missy’s reticule slides lower in my wet britches, but the beads ain’t there.

I want to scream at that river, cuss it, but I just fall on all fours and cough up the rest of the water, think to myself,
If ever I see that Moses again, I’ll kill him dead.

He’s took away all that was left of my people. The last bit of them is gone in the river. Might be it’s a sign. A sign to make my way home, where I never should’ve strayed from. Once I get there, I’ll decide who to tell about what. Might be the law can go after the men that grabbed Missy Lavinia and Juneau Jane, but the news can’t come from me. I have to find another way to let the sheriff know what’s happened.

Looking up and downriver one more time, I wonder how far it is to a place where I can get a ferry crossing to the home side of that big, wide, rushin’ water. Not so much as a hint of people hereabouts that I can see. No buildings, no road but the one where we took on wood. It must go someplace. Might be, if the divine providence is on me, nobody’s come to collect them horses yet.

It’s the best hope I got, so that’s where I go.

Before I get there, I hear the sound of men, the jingle of harness buckles, the groan of shafts and singletree. The soft snort of a horse. I ease up my step, but hold out a hope that the woodcutters might be colored folk who’d help me. Closer I come, the more I know their talk is some other language. Not Frenchy talk—I can pick out a handful of that—but something else.

Maybe this is some of the Indians that still live back in the swamps, married in with the whites and the slaves that run off to hide in the woods years ago.

A prickle crawls over me. A warning. Colored folk got to be careful in this world. Womenfolk got to be careful, too. I’m both, so that’s double, and the only thing I have to protect myself is a derringer pistol with two cartridges that’s wet and probably ruined.

A dog barks, and both men quieten their chatter. I stop where I am, drop down in the brush. The dog rummages closer, and I go fear-cold. Don’t even breathe.

Go away, dog.

I wait for that thing to flush me out. Back and forth he moves, sniffing loud and fast. He knows he’s found something.

A man hollers a sharp grunt of a word.

The dog scampers off, quick as can be.

I let my forehead sag on my arm, catch a breath.

Wagon springs squeak. Wood hits wood. A mule brays. A horse nickers and snorts and paws the ground. The men grouse and mutter, loading up their pay goods.

I crawl forward to where the brush is thin as lace and I can see through in places.

Two men. Not white. Not Indian. Not colored. Something between. Their smell drifts on the wind. Sweat and sour grease and dirt and whiskey and bodies that don’t bother with washing. Long, dark hair hangs from their hats, and mud cakes their raggedy clothes.

The dog is poor and thin, with a patchy bald hide that’s bloody from it scratching its mangy skin. The mule pulling the wagon ain’t much better. Old and stove-up, he’s got sores where the harness’s been rubbing and the flies made a feast on the raw flesh.

A good man don’t do a mule that way.

Or a dog.

I stay in my hiding place, listen at their strange talk, try not to move while they lead our horses over to the wagon, tie them fast, then climb up and let off the wagon brake. I watch Old Ginger’s stocking feet stomp as she fusses about the buffalo gnats and no-see-ums and deerflies. I want to run out and take her back, steal her away somehow, but I know I need to sneak off while I can, get gone from here before the snakes and the panthers come out and the haints rise from the night bayou. Before the rougarou, the man-wolf, comes from the black water and prowls looking to eat.

A quick, sharp squeal of metal on metal pinches off that thought as the wagon cargo slides and shifts. Through the hole in the leaves, I catch a flash of gold. I know what it is almost before my mind can draw up the thought of the two big trunks with brass corner plates.

What was brought onto the
Genesee Star
far upriver just got loaded off here.

Might be them trunks sit empty now. Might be I oughta forget I saw them, and just look after myself. But I follow that wagon instead, staying far back enough that even the dog don’t know. My head pounds, and the sweat pours off me, and the mosquitos and the deerflies land and bite. I can’t slap, and I can’t run. Got to stay quiet.

It’s far over yon, wherever those men are headed. Seems like mile after mile we go. My legs get weak, and the tree trunks swirl round my eyes, shadows and sun, leaves and bent crooked branches. A cypress knee catches my toe, and I fall hard into the fringe of a slough. I roll onto my back and lay there looking up at the sky, watching the pieces of blue peek through like Mama’s homespun cloth, fresh dyed from the indigo fields.

I lay there waiting for whatever’s to come.

Far off, the wagon axle sings out its rhythm.
Squeek, click-click, squeek, click-click, squee…

The men’s talk drifts back, loud and rowdy now. They been in the whiskey barrel, maybe.

I curl close to the cypress tree, hide all the bare flesh I can from the mosquitos and the blood flies, close my eyes and let their sounds drift off.

I don’t know if I sleep or only fade awhile, but I feel nothing. Worry over nothing.

A touch on my face pulls me from the quiet peace. My eyes burn, sticky and dry when I try to pull them open. The tree shadows have gone long and stretchy with the afternoon sun.

The touch comes again, feathery soft like a kiss. Is it Jesus come to fetch me away? Might be I drowned in the river after all. But the touch stinks of mud and rotted meat.

Something’s trying to make a meal out of me! It jumps sidewards as I swat at it, and when I look, there’s the old rawboned red tick dog from before. He lowers his half-bare head and watches me with careful brown eyes, ducks his tail against his butt, but wags the tip twixt his back knees like he’s hoping I’ll toss him some fatback to eat. We stay there, careful about each other for a while before he moves past and laps up rainwater that’s caught in the scoop of the cypress knees. I pull myself to it and do the same. That dog and me drink side by side at the same dish.

The water seeps through my body, wakes my arms and feet and mind. The dog sits down and watches, careful. He don’t seem in a hurry to go. Must be he’s close to home.

“Where’d you come from?” I whisper. “Your place near here?”

I shift to get my legs under me, and the dog shies back. “All right,” I whisper. He’s about as sad and sorry a hound as I ever saw, scratches, swole-up places, and bare spots all over his body. “You go on home now. Show me where that is.”

I get to my feet, and he skitters off and I trek along behind, following his weave through the woods. He don’t care to use the road, so we cross it and go down a game trail. The sweet-burn smell of a smokehouse pools the back of my mouth. Dog takes me right to it, at the rear end of a homeplace that’s been hollowed out of the woods on high ground. Little slabwood house and barn, smokehouse and outhouse. The chimneys are sticks and mud, like the ones in the old cabins on the Quarter, back in Goswood Grove. Everything on this place leans one way or the other, the bayou eating it up a little at a time. A pirogue sits against the wall of the cabin, with all manner of traps for animals and beaver. The leftovers of a deer carcass hang in a tree, flies gathered so thick they climb on each other to get what they’re after.

Place is still as the grave. I crouch behind a wood stack high and wide as the cabin, watch and listen while the dog goes on into the yard and sniffs round and digs hisself a hole to lay down in the cool. A horse snorts and stirs a ruckus, kicking the barn’s log wall and knocking loose a shower of chink and dirt. A mule brays. The sound travels so loud it sets birds to flying, but the cabin stays still.

I creep round to the barn, peek in. The wagon’s parked in the aisle. Ginger and Juneau Jane’s gray stand together in a stall, the old mule in the next one. Sweat and lather covers all three. They been carrying on with each other, saying who’s boss. Blood drips from the gray’s leg, where he’s kicked the rails. I move in a little more, so’s I can see the back of the wagon. A whiskey barrel and the trunks are gone.

A few steps more and I spot them big boxes with the brass corners, dumped on the floor of the barn, but they’re open, empty inside, when I creep close and check. The smell’s as bad as the sight. The stink of stomachs that’ve wretched up their food and bodies that’ve soiled theirselves makes me cover my nose, but at least it ain’t the smell of death. I take some comfort in that, even if it’s small comfort. Don’t want to think what it means if Missy and Juneau Jane been carried into that cabin. Don’t know what I can do about it, if they have.

I study on the barn, wish there’d be a rifle left there, but on the walls it’s just harness hanging, still wet from the morning’s work, also a half dozen old Confederate bridles, the round brasses on the browband marked with
CSA
. There’s Jeff Davis saddles, too, piled together over the top of empty barrels, Confederate canteens and a kerosene lantern, plus Lucifers in a brass box to strike the fire with.

I dig up a piece of oilcloth that’s half-buried in the hay, lay it out on the floor, and go to gathering. Lucifers, a canteen, a tin cup, a piece of broke-off candle, and meat from the smokehouse. I fill a canteen from the rain barrel, sling it over my shoulder and find a hank of rope to tie the oilcloth into a poke. The dog comes round, and I toss him some of the meat, and we don’t bother each other. He follows when I carry the poke off to the woods and put it in the branch of a tree where I can grab it if I need to get away in a hurry.

The dog and me squat together in the brush, then, while I look at that cabin and try to think what to do next. Go for the horses, I guess. Then worry about the rest.

It’s on the way back to the barn I notice the space between the stalls and the end wall. Not much more than three foot, but it’s sealed up good, hid from the outside. Don’t recall seeing a door to it from the aisle. I can think up only one reason for a barn like that, with a room that’s made to be a secret place.

Back inside, I search round, find a hatchet hanging through a metal loop on the wall, but it ain’t there to be a hatchet. It’s there to keep a hasp shut, to hide it. A length of batten wood holds the other side upright. When I wiggle off the batten and lift out the hatchet, the piece of wall comes loose like the lid of a sideways crate.

The room’s what I thought. A hiding place like slave poachers used back before the freedom. Even in the shadow dark, I can see pegs hung with slave chains. Men like these would hunt down runaways in the swamp. Grab folks right off the road—free coloreds with papers, mulattos and Creoles, slaves doing their master’s bidding and carrying a pass. Men like these didn’t bother to question. Just throw a bag over the head of a man, woman, or child, tie them under a tarp in the back of a wagon, hide them in the swamp to sell to a trader marching some sad coffle to a auction sale far off. Men like these do their business the way Jep Loach done his.

The smell comes, then sifts up out of the dark of that room. Same as the trunks. Stomachs and bowels emptied, then the mess left to sour and rot. “You in here?” I whisper, but no answer comes. I listen hard. Do I hear breathin’?

I move by feel, find a half-warm body dumped ’cross the straw, and then another one. Missy Lavinia and Juneau Jane ain’t dead, but they ain’t alive, either. They’re dressed in no more than their shimmies and drawers. Can’t be roused with whispering and shaking and slapping. I poke my head from the room, check the house again. The red tick dog sits in the barn door, watching me, but he just scrubs his half-bare tail back and forth over the dirt, remembering the meat. He won’t be no trouble.

Do the next thing, Hannie,
I tell myself.
Do the next thing and do it quick, before somebody comes.

I hunt up halters and leads and bridles and the best two of them old war saddles. The cinches and leathers hang rat chewed and weak, but they’ll hold, I hope. Got no choice. Only way I can keep them two girls on the horses is to have something to tie them to. Push them up there and hogtie them belly-down, just like the patrollers did to the runaway slaves back in the bad times.

Juneau Jane is a easy task, even though the gelding’s tall. She don’t weigh much and that horse is so glad to see her, he’s gentle as a toy rocky horse while I get her settled. Missy Lavinia, she’s a whole other task. She ain’t ladylike and airy. She’s solid. Weighs way more than a hundred-pound white oak basket full of cotton, that’s for definite. But I’m a strong woman, and my heart’s pumping so heavy from fear, I’m good as two strong women put together. I get her in the wagon bed, pull Old Ginger up next to it and go to pulling and pushing till Missy’s flopped over the saddle and I can tie her there. The stink on her drags dried meat and bile and cypress water right on up my throat, and I swallow back and swallow back and swallow back, check the house, check the house, check the house, thankful for the whiskey them men got from the boat and lots of it. They must be stone drunk asleep in there. I hope they don’t know a thing till tomorrow morning, elsewise we’ll all end up back in that poacher’s hold together.