The Book of Lost Friends: A Novel (15 page)

We start up another rise, little rivers washing all around us. Water flows through my shoes, burns on the blisters there at first, then just turns my feet cold, so I can’t feel them at all. My body quakes till it feels like my bones might break in two.

Juneau Jane moans long and loud enough I hear it, even over the storm. Dog hears it, too, circles in behind her. Next thing, he’s back to lead the way, but I’m blinded enough that I trip over him and fall hands first in the mud.

He yelps, squirts out from under me, and skitters off running. It’s only when I’m climbing to my feet and pulling my hat out of the mud that I figure out why. There’s a place here. Little old place tucked in the trees, low roofed and built of cypress logs chinked with straw and tabby. The trail meets a half dozen other trails from other directions and leads us right to the front door of that little house.

Nobody answers when I step on the porch beside the dog, and call out, and pull the horses up close where they can shelter their heads at least.

Once I open the door, I know why, and what this house is. This the kind of place the slaves built with their own hands, way deep in the swamps and the woods, where their masters wouldn’t find it. Sundays, when the work gangs didn’t go to the fields, off they’d sneak to these hideaways, one by one, two by two. Meet up for preaching, and singing, and shouting, and praying, where they couldn’t be heard, where the owners and the overseers couldn’t stop them from crying out for freedom and how their deliverance was coming one day soon.

Here in the woods, a colored man was free to
read
from the Bible, if he could read, or listen to it if he couldn’t, not just be told that God gave you to your masters so that you could obey.

I thank the saints and get us out of the weather, quick as I can. Dog follows me back and forth ’cross the dirt floor, the two of us leaving trails of water and mud on the straw that’s been laid down. Can’t be helped, and I don’t suppose God or anybody would blame us.

Slabwood benches stand in quiet rows. Up front for the altar, the floor’s built up using four old doors that must’ve been on a Grand House back before the war. Three red velvet chairs sit behind the preacher’s stand. On the communion table, there’s a pretty crystal glass and four china plates, probably brung from a big house when the white folks went refugee because of the Yankees, leaving the place empty.

Behind the altar, a tall cut-glass window catches what there is of the daylight. It’s out of one of the doors on the floor. Oilcloth stretched on frames covers the rest of the windows. Newspapers been nailed to the walls at the back of the room. The chink must be gappy in that part.

It’s up there at the altar that I lay down Missy Lavinia and Juneau Jane, pull the velvet cushions off the chairs and put them under their heads. Juneau Jane shivers like a wretch, that wet shimmy stuck to her body with dirt and water and blood. Missy Lavinia is worse yet, and she still don’t moan or move. I lean close to her nose to see,
Is she still breathin’?

Just the least stroke of air stirs on my cheek. It’s cold and feathery, and I got no good way to warm her up. Everything we have is soggy wet, so I strip us all down, hang the clothes to drip, and get a fire laid in the iron stove at the back of the room. It’s a fancy little one from a ladies’ parlor, with roses and vines and ivy leaves cast in the iron and a pretty skirt and bowed legs.

There’s a cook plate up top. After the stove heats, I’ll fix up that squirrel, feed Dog and me.

“Least we got kindle in here and plenty of split wood out front. Lucifers, too,” I tell him. I’m thankful the floor is dry, and the roof don’t leak. And when I get a good flame, I’m thankful for that, too. I crouch naked, bare and slick from the rain, and feel the fire’s heat even before it comes. Just knowing there’s an end to the cold makes it better.

After the stove’s drafted good, I drag one of them velvet chairs to the back of the room. It’s the big, wide kind for a lady to sit with her hoops, back when they wore such. A courtin’ bench, so’s she could arrange her skirts closer a bit if she wanted a beau to sit with her, leave it laid out, if she wanted to keep him off.

I pull my knees up in the chair, let my head rest, stroke my fingers back and forth against the red velvet. It’s soft like a horse’s muzzle. Soft and warm everyplace it touches my body. I sit and stare at the flame, thinking how good that chair feels.

Never sat in a velvet chair in my life. Not once.

I rub my cheek against it and soak the heat from the fire. My eyes get heavy and close, and I let go.

Two days of sleeping and waking and tending follow. Two days, I think. Might be three. I turn feverish myself late in the first day. Feverish, and tired, and even though I cook up the squirrel, I can’t keep much of it down. It’s all I can do to hobble the horses so they can forage, and get back in my dry clothes and wrap the other girls with the drawers and shimmies, and try from time to time to let the dog come and go or force a little water down Juneau Jane. Missy still won’t take any, but her little half sister’s getting stronger.

The first day I get my wits again, Juneau Jane opens her strange gray-green eyes and looks up at me from the red chair cushion, dark hair splayed out all over it like a nest of snakes. I can tell she’s seeing me for the first time and can’t make sense of where she is.

She tries talking, but I shush her. After all the days of quiet, even that much noise makes my head pound. “Hush, now,” I whisper. “You’re safe. That’s all you got to know. You been sick. And you’re still sick. You rest now. It’s safe here.”

I figure that much is true. Rain’s been falling, day after day. Water must be up high everywhere, and whatever tracks we left behind, they’re surely gone. Only worry is how long it might be till Sunday, when somebody comes. I got no idea by now.

Question answers itself when Dog sits up and barks me awake early in the morning. Scares my eyes wide open.

Outside, a voice sings,

Children wade, in the water

And God’s a-gonna trouble the water

Who’s that young girl dressed in red?

Wade in the water

Must be the children that Moses led

God’s gonna trouble the water….

The voice is deep and strong. Can’t tell,
Is it a man or a woman?
But the song brings Mama to mind. She’d sing it to us when I was little.

I know I need to move, stop whoever that is from coming in here, but I can’t help it. I listen at a few words more.

They come in a child’s voice this time.

That’s good. Good for what I got in mind to do next.

Wade in the water, children,
the little voice sings loud, not afraid.

Wade in the water,

And God’s a-gonna trouble the water.

Then the woman again,

Who’s that young girl dressed in white?

Wade in the water

Must be the children of the Israelite,

God’s gonna trouble the water.

I whisper the lines along with them, feel my mama’s heartbeat against my ear, hear her say real soft,
This song ’bout the way to freedom, Hannie. Keep to the water. The dog, he can’t find the smell of you there.

The child sings the chorus again. It ain’t far away now. They must be almost to the clearing.

I get up and hurry to the door, press my hand hard against it, get myself ready.

Who’s that young girl dressed in blue

Wade in the water…

I swallow hard, think,
Please, let them be good people coming up the path. Kind people.

They sing together, the big voice and the small one.

Must be the ones that made it through

Wade in the water.

Behind me, a scratchy whisper says, “Wade…wahhh-ter. Wade in…wahh-ter.”

I look quick over my shoulder, see Juneau Jane pushing herself up off that red velvet cushion on one wobbly arm so weak it wiggles back and forth like a hank of rope, her eyes open halfway.

And God’s a-gonna trouble the water,
the child outside hollers into the air.

“Y-you d…don’t, b-believe…be…been redeemed…” Juneau Jane sways, fighting to push out the words and stay upright.

A cold feeling travels all over me, then hot sweat breaks after it.

“Hush up! Quiet, now!” I hiss. I pull open the door, stagger to the edge of the porch, and hang against a post. Two people come out of the woods—a stout, round woman with hands like supper plates and big feet in black leather brogans, white kerchief on her head. With her comes a little boy child. Her grandson, maybe? He’s skipping along with picked flowers in one hand.

The woman twirls a piece of feather grass at him, tickles his ear when he’s dancing by. He laughs hard.

“D-don’t come no closer!” I holler out. My voice is weak and won’t carry far, but they stop sudden, look my way. The boy drops his flowers. The woman snakes an arm out and, quick, tucks him behind her.

“Who you be?” She stretches to get a better look at me.

“We got fever!” I yell across. “Keep away. We got sickness.”

Woman backs up a little, pushes the boy with her. He hangs on to her skirt, peeks from it. “Who you be?” she asks again. “How you come in dat place? I don’ know who you is.”

“We travelin’,” I answer. “Been struck with fever, all us. Don’t come no closer. Don’t nobody come here, catch the sickness.”

“How many you is?” She lifts her apron, wads it over her mouth.

“Three. Other two’s worse off.” It ain’t a lie, but I sink against the post to look weaker. “Need help. Need food. Got money to give. You carryin’ mercy in your soul today, sister? We travelers, come in need a’ mercy.”

BENNY SILVA—AUGUSTINE, LOUISIANA, 1987

“See,” LaJuna says as she pushes aside stacks of
National Geographic
magazines. She lays an
Encyclopaedia Britannica
on the billiard table, then flips up the cover, which has no pages or binding attached. It’s been used to house—or hide—a package wrapped in a worn scrap of wallpaper, gold-and-white flocked at some time in the past, but the remaining stripes are more of a glue stain than anything else. Jute string holds the whole thing together.

“Miss Robin didn’t even know about these, I don’t think.” LaJuna taps a finger to the bundle. “One time when I came in here—that was toward the end part, when the judge had good days and bad days with his mind—he says to me, ‘LaJuna, climb on up there to that top shelf for me. I need something, but somebody took the ladder.’ Now, that ladder’d been gone since the track broke, so I knew the judge wasn’t having a good day with his mind. Anyhow, I did like he wanted, and he showed me what’s in here. Then he looked at me and said, ‘I shouldn’t have let you see that. There’s nothing good to come of it and no way I can set it right. I want you to put this back where it was. We won’t touch it again unless I decide to burn it, which I quite likely should. Don’t ever tell anybody it’s here. If you do that for me, LaJuna, you can come take any
other
book anytime and keep it to read, as long as you like.’ Then he had me get him one of the encyclopedias, and he cut the encyclopedia cover right
off
the pages and wrapped it around this whole thing, and then we put it away.”

LaJuna picks at the knotted jute with chipped-up candy apple red fingernails, but the twine is stiff and tightly tied. “See if there’s some scissors in that top drawer. Judge always kept a pair in there.”

A pang of conscience forces me to hesitate. Whatever is inside that bundle must have been very private. It’s none of my business. None. Period.

“Never mind.” LaJuna’s fingernails do the trick. “I got it.”

“I don’t think you should. If the judge didn’t…”

But she’s already laying open the wallpaper wrapping. Inside, there are two books, which she places side by side. Both leather bound, one black, one red. One thin, one thick. The black one is easy enough to recognize. It’s a family Bible, the old-fashioned kind, large and heavy. The red leather book is much thinner and bound along the top like a notepad. Faded gold letters on the cover read

“Now that little skinny book…” LaJuna’s still talking. “That’s stuff they bought and sold. Sugar, molasses, cotton seed, plows, a piano, land, lumber, horses and mules, dresses and dishes…all kinds of stuff. And, sometimes, people.”

My mind goes numb. It can’t quite register what I’m looking at, what this is. “LaJuna, it’s not…we shouldn’t…The judge was right. You need to put this back where it was.”

“It’s history, isn’t it?” She’s as casual as if we were talking about what year the Liberty Bell was cast or when the Magna Carta was written. “You’re always telling us that books and stories matter.”

“Of course, but…” Something so old should be handled with only freshly washed hands or white cotton gloves, for one thing. But if I’m honest with myself, I know it’s not the archival concerns that bother me; it’s the contents.

“Well, these are stories.” She skims a fingernail along the edge of the Bible and opens it before I can stop her.

The
Family Record
pages at the front of the Bible, perhaps a dozen or more, are filled with the artful script of old dip pens like the ones I’ve collected for years. Names occupy the left column: Letty, Tati, Azek, Boney, Jason, Mars, John, Percy, Jenny, Clem, Azelle, Louisa, Mary, Caroline, Ollie, Mittie, Hardy…Epheme, Hannie…Ike…Rose…

The remaining columns list birthdates, death dates for some, and odd notations,
D, L, F, S,
plus numbers. Names are sometimes listed with dollar amounts beside them.

LaJuna’s half-red fingernail hovers over one, not quite touching it. “See, this is all about the slaves. When they were born, and when they died and what number grave they were buried in. If they ran away or got lost in the war, they got an
L
beside their name and the date. If they got freed after the war, they got an
F,
and
1865,
and if they stayed on the place to be sharecroppers, they got an
S
/
1865
.” Her hands flip palms up, as matter-of-factly as if we’re discussing the school lunch menu. “After that, I guess people kept their own notes.”

A moment passes before I can process the information and stammer out, “You learned all that from the judge?”

“Yeah.” Her features arrange in a way that conveys the slightest bit of uncertainty about the mysteries the judge left behind. “Maybe he wanted somebody to know how to read it, since he decided not to show Miss Robin. Can’t say how come. I mean, she knew this place was built by people who had to be slaves. Miss Robin was way into doing research about Goswood. The judge just didn’t want her to feel guilty about stuff that happened a long time ago, I guess.”

“I guess…maybe,” I echo. The lump in my throat is itchy and uncomfortable. Part of me wishes the judge would have taken responsibility for nailing shut the coffin on this piece of history and burning the book. Part of me knows how wrong that would’ve been.

LaJuna pushes on, dragging me along on a trip I don’t want to take. “Now, see where there’s no daddy listed? Just a mama and then somebody’s born? That’s where the daddy was probably a white man.”

“The judge
told
you that?”

Her mouth thins and an eye roll comes my way. “Figured it out on my own. That’s what the little
m
means—
mulatto.
Like this woman, Mittie. She hasn’t got a daddy, but,
of course,
she had a daddy. He was the—”

That’s it. That’s all I can stand. “I think we should put this away.”

LaJuna frowns, her gaze probing mine, surprised and…disappointed? “Now you sound like the judge did. Miss Silva, you’re the one
always
talking about stories. This book, here…this is the only story most of these people ever got. Only place their names still are, in the whole wide world. They didn’t even get gravestones with it written on there or anything. Look.”

She flips back a page so that the heavy endpaper attached to the cover lies flat beside the flyleaf, open like butterfly wings. A grid of sorts has been drawn across them, sectioned off in somewhat orderly rectangles with numbers. “This”—she tells me, circling the grid with her fingertip—“is where they are. Where they buried all the slaves whenever they died. The old people and the kids and the little bitty babies. Right here.” She grabs a pen and sets it on the desk below the book. “That’s
your
house. You been living right there by these people, and you didn’t even know it.”

I think of the lovely orchard only a short walk from my back porch. “There’s no graveyard out there. The city cemetery is over on this side.” I place a deco-era stapler and a plastic clip to the left of the pen. “If the pen is my house, the cemetery’s
here.
”

“Miss Silva.” LaJuna cranes away. “I thought you knew
so
much about history. That graveyard over there beside your house, the one with the nice fence and all the little stone houses with people’s names, that was the graveyard for white folks. Tomorrow, when I come to help you with the books, I can walk over and
show
you what’s out behind your place. I went and looked for myself after the judge—”

A grandfather clock in the hall chimes, and both of us jump.

LaJuna jerks away from the table, pulls a broken wristwatch from her pocket, and gasps, “I gotta go. I just came over here real quick to get a book for tonight!” Snatching up a paperback, she dashes out the door. Her footsteps echo through the house along with “I gotta babysit for Mama on her shift!”

The door slams, and she vanishes.

I don’t see her for days. Not at Goswood Grove House, nor at school. She’s just…gone.

I walk the orchard behind my place alone, study the rise and fall of the ground, squat down and pull back the grass where it grows in little mounds, dig away a few inches of soil and find plain brown stones.

A few of them still bear the faint shadow of carved markings, but nothing I can make out.

I sketch them in a notebook and compare them to the narrow, numbered squares on the hand-drawn graveyard map in the Goswood library. It matches up as well as could be expected after the passage of time has been allowed to absorb the truth. I find adult-sized plots and smaller ones—babies or children, buried two or three to a space. I stop counting rectangles at
ninety-six,
because I can’t stand it any longer. A whole community of people, generations in some families, lie buried behind my house, forgotten. LaJuna is right. Other than whatever has been handed down orally among relatives, that sad, strange batch of notations in the Gossett Bible is the only story they have.

The judge was wrong to have hidden this book. That much I know. What I’m unsure of is how to proceed from here, or if it’s even my place to. I’d like to talk more with LaJuna, to find out what other information she has, but day after day goes by and there’s no opportunity.

Finally, on Wednesday, I go searching for her.

The quest eventually leaves me standing in front of Aunt Sarge’s house, shod in the worn, lime-green Birkenstocks that go with absolutely nothing I own, but are kind to a big toe that was in the way when a stack of books tipped over at Goswood Grove House, seemingly with a mind of its own. A few other strange things have happened there during my many hours alone in the library, but I refuse to think much about them. I don’t have time. All weekend, and for three days after school now, I’ve been sorting books at warp speed, trying to do what I can before anyone else discovers I’ve been given access and before I track down Nathan Gossett again to make him aware of what he actually has in that library.

I’ve fallen behind on laundry, grading papers, planning lessons, and just about everything else. I’m also dangerously low on pooperoos.

On the upside, with the change in classroom snacks, I have shed my old nickname and the kids are testing a new one—
Loompa,
owing to the Oompa-Loompas in the ever-popular book
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
a copy of which has been added to our classroom shelves, courtesy of the judge’s penchant for Book of the Month subscriptions. We’ve devised, after much class debate, a system of allowing weeklong checkouts from our new lending library. One of my extremely quiet backwoods kids, Shad, has the book right now. He’s a freshman and a member of the notorious Fish family. He saw the movie after a family trip to visit his father, who’s doing three years in federal prison on some sort of drug charge.

I’d like to learn more about Shad’s situation—he consumes a lot of pooperoos, for one thing, and also covertly stuffs them in his pockets—but there aren’t enough hours in the day. I feel as though I’m constantly doing triage on who needs my attention the most.

Which is why it’s taken me days to venture into the LaJuna situation. I’ve just finished paying a call at the home address in her file. The man who answered the door of the ramshackle apartment informed me, quite curtly, that he’d kicked the
so-and-so
and her brats out, and I should get off his porch and not bother him again.

My next option is Aunt Sarge or Granny T. Sarge lives closest to town, so here I am. The one-story Creole cottage reminds me of my rental, but with renovations. The siding and trim have been painted in contrasting colors, creating a dollhouse effect in sunny yellow, white, and forest green. Seeing it strengthens my resolve to plead the case with Nathan for my rental house being spared. It could be as cute as this.

Tomorrow is farmers market day. I’m hoping to catch him.

First things first, though. Right now, I’m after LaJuna.

No one answers the door, but I hear voices coming from around back, so I make my way past an immaculate flower bed to a chain-link fence and leaning gate. Morning glory vines twine their way up the posts and back and forth through the wire, woven like living cloth.

Two women in tattered straw hats work along a row of tall plants in a vegetable garden that takes up most of the yard. One woman is heavyset and labors along, her movements slow and stiff. The other is Sarge, I think, though the floppy hat and flowered gloves seem out of character. I watch the scene a moment, and a memory teases my mind, then breaks through. I recall being a small child in a garden, having someone guide my stubby fingers over a strawberry as I pulled it from the plant. I remember touching each berry still clinging to the plant and asking,
Pick this one? Pick this one?

I have no idea where that was. Someplace we lived, some neighbor warmhearted enough to play surrogate grandparent. People who were always home and spent a great deal of time out in their yards were my favorite targets whenever we’d land in a new town.

A yearning skates in unexpected, slams hard against my heart before I can turn it around and send it packing. Every once in a while, even though Christopher and I had talked about it at length and agreed that kids weren’t right for either one of us, there’s that urge, the painful
What if….

“Hello!” I lean over the gate. “Sorry to bother you.”

Only one garden hat tips upward. The older woman continues along the row. She plucks, and drops, plucks, and drops, filling a basket with long green pods of some sort.

That
is
Aunt Sarge in the other hat. I recognize the way she swipes her forehead with her arm before readjusting her hat and crossing the yard to me. “Got another problem with the house?” Her tone is surprisingly solicitous, considering that our last meeting ended unpleasantly.

“No, the house is fine. Sadly, I think you’re right about its future rental status, though. If you hear of something coming open, a garage apartment or whatever, I don’t need much, since it’s just me.”