The Book of Lost Friends: A Novel (19 page)

I decide against buying button boots for Juneau Jane. Too much money, and they’re lady shoes she can’t wear for a boy. We’ll just have to hide her brogans under her dress hem while she talks to the lawyer. I go to a peddler store in a tent, looking for a needle and thread, in case we need to put a stitch or two in that dress to keep on Juneau Jane’s skinny body.

I buy socks and another blanket and a cook pot. Buy some pretty peaches from a man with a basketful. He adds a nice plum to the top and don’t even want me to pay for it, since I’m new here. Folks are kind in the colored town. They’re all just like me, come off plantations after the freedom, took to working for the railroads, or the timber companies, or the riverboats, or the shops, or in the white ladies’ big houses that’re almost close enough to see from here. Some freedmen started up stores of their own, to sell to colored folk in this little gully town.

They’re used to folks coming through, traveling. I ask after the names of my people while I make my bargains, and I tell about my grandmama’s blue beads. “Ever know anybody here name of Gossett? Be free now, but slaves before the war. Ever seen somebody wear just three beads on a string?” I ask over and over. “Three blue glass beads, just big around as the tip of your little finger and real pretty?”

Can’t recollect so.

Don’t believe I do, child.

Sounds right purdy, but no I ain’t.

You seeking after your people, child?

“Feel somewhat familiar about those, I do,” a old man tells me when we stand aside to let a dray rumble by, filled with coal. White clouds lay over the man’s eyes like sifted flour, so he has to lean close to me to see. He smells of pine sap and smoke, and he walks stiff and slow. “Think I have seen such before, but a long time ago. Can’t say where, though. Mind’s not good these days. My apologies, young sprout. God speed you along in your journey, all the same. Don’t go by the names, though. There’s many that’ve changed their names. Picked new ones after the freedom. You keep looking.”

I thank him and promise I don’t take it for discouragement. “Texas’s a big place,” I say. “I mean to keep asking.” I watch him walk back toward the colored settlement, bent over and hobbling.

I could stay here in the gully town,
I think to myself.
Stay here in the shadow of all them big buildings and fine houses and the music and the noise and all the different kind of folks, and wouldn’t that be something? I could ask after my people, day after day to travelers who come through from the East and the West.

The idea sparks in my head, a fire on wood that’s been laid and waiting a long time. Be a whole new kind of life to leave behind mules and farm fields and table gardens and chicken houses, and stay in a place like this. I could get work. I’m strong, and I’m smart.

But there’s Tati and Jason and John and Old Mister and Missy Lavinia and Juneau Jane to think about. Promises and sharecrop papers. Life never is just about what you want. Seldom ever.

I push my mind back to the task I’m at now and commence worrying how long I been gone from Juneau Jane and Missy and what’d happen if Missy walked off or stirred up trouble. Juneau Jane might not try to stop her, and probably can’t anyhow. Missy’s bigger and stronger by twice.

I head back, walking fast and taking care to keep out of the way of farm wagons and shays and white ladies with market baskets and baby carriages. I work up a sweat under my clothes even though the day ain’t warm. I’m just worried.

In my mind, young Gus McKlatchy says,
Well, that’s the problem with postulatin’, Hannibal. Brings up trouble that ain’t happened yet and likely won’t ever. Why bother with it?
I smile to myself and hope Moses didn’t catch Gus and throw him off that riverboat, too.

I try to quit postulating while I make my way back to the port landing.

Missy and Juneau Jane still sit right by the cordwood. There’s colored folks gathered round—a couple men standing, couple squatted down or sitting on the grass, a old man leaning on a young girl’s shoulder, and three women. All peaceable enough. Juneau Jane’s reading to them from the Lost Friends. She’s got our quilt set out, folded in front of her. I watch a man drop a coin in it. There’s three little carrots, too, plus Missy Lavinia’s eating on one.

It takes some doing to get us away from there, but I know we need to move on in our task. I tell the folks we’ll come back later with the Lost Friends. Then I push Missy’s feet into the shoes I bought her, and thank heaven they mostly fit.

Juneau Jane ain’t happy with me when I chase off the last of the people so we can go. “You hadn’t ought to make a spectacle,” I say while we start down the riverbank.

“News of us and the Lost Friends traveled as the men from our boat visited the town with their pay,” Juneau Jane answers. “Others came. What would you have me do?”

“I don’t know.” That much is true. “Just that we don’t want everybody in the Port of Jefferson talking about us.”

We go on about our business, make our way down the river on a trail folks must use for fishing or hunting. At a brushy spot near the water, I get all us washed some, but work on Juneau Jane most.

The dress and petticoats are a sorry sight. The raggedy corset hangs on her like a sack, and the dress hem is too long. “You’ll have to walk high on your toes, like you got heel boots on,” I tell her. “Keep your feet up under the dress, don’t let them old brogans show; that’ll give us away. No Gossett lady would be in such poor shoes.”

I finally undo everything and take the britches she’s been wearing and wrap them round her middle inside the corset, and stuff the bosom part with the shirt she had on, then do up the laces again. It’s better, some. Who knows if it’ll fool anybody, but what choice have we got? I do up her spoon bonnet last, pull it up tight against her face to hide the hair, then I stand back and look.

The picture of her pushes a laugh out my mouth. “You…y-you…look like somebody been whittlin’ on Missy Lavinia.” I cough. “Look like some…somebody took her down to the nubbins.” I get to laughin’, and I can’t stop. Can’t even catch my breath. Juneau Jane stomps her little foot and scolds me to hush up before somebody comes wandering down here to see, what’s the ruckus about? But the madder she gets, the harder I laugh.

All that laughing makes me miss Tati and Jason and John, and even farther back, my brothers and sisters and Mama and Aunt Jenny and my four little cousins and Grandmama and Grandpapa. With all the ways we labored hard, planting and chopping and hoeing and harvesting, we laughed, too.
Laughing carry you over a tough time,
that’s something my grandmama used to say.

I go right from laughing to being heavy in my heart. Feel a lonesome burden all of a sudden. Lonesome for people I love. Lonesome for home.

“We best get on with this,” I say, and we pull Missy Lavinia up, work our way back to town, follow the directions the folks gave Juneau Jane to the lawyer man’s office. It ain’t hard to find. Man’s got him a big brick building, two floors high, with letters carved in a square stone up top. Juneau Jane looks at it and reads his name there.
L. H. WASHBURN.

“Walk up on your toes,” I remind her. “Keep them shoes under your hem. And talk in a lady voice. And act in lady ways.”

“I am aware of how to conduct myself with propriety,” she brags, but she looks scared to death under that bonnet. “I have been given deportment lessons. Papa insisted upon it.”

I pass over that last part. Just reminds me how good she’s had it all these years. “And whatever you do, don’t take off that bonnet.”

We go up to the front steps, and I check her over one more time, and in she walks. I find a place to sit in the shade with Missy. She’s rubbing her stomach and moaning a little. I try to give her hardtack to quieten her, but she won’t take it.

“Hush, then,” I say. “Ought to be too scared to think about your belly, anyhow. Last time I stood outside a building while somebody went in, you and Juneau Jane wound up in a box, and I almost got shot dead.”

I won’t be falling asleep in some hogshead barrel this time, that’s for definite.

I keep a narrow eye on that building while we wait.

Juneau Jane ain’t gone very long, and I’m afraid that can’t be good news, and it’s not. The lawyer ain’t even there; only a woman that keeps his office, and she’s packing the place up, floor to rafters. Old Mister was by here sometime back, but he left the property settlement for the lawyer to argue out, then he went on to Fort Worth town, hunting for Lyle. Then, two weeks after Old Mister was through here, Federal men come to the office looking to get some files. The woman didn’t know what, but Mr. Washburn went out the back door when he saw them Federals. Next day, he gathered up some things and left for Fort Worth hisself. Said he meant to see about opening up a office there, didn’t know when he’d be back.

“She had nothing in the remaining files bearing Papa’s name,” Juneau Jane tells me. “She opened the box, that I might see for myself. There was only this. And it is just a book in which Mr. Washburn recorded the accountings of Papa’s land here—the land that was fraudulently sold by Lyle. After the turn of the year, the notations ended, and so we must—”

“Ssshhh.” I grab her with one hand and Missy with the other.

I’m looking right across the street at three men walking toward that building—two white, one tall, lean, and pecan-shell brown, his hand resting on the butt of a hip pistol. I’d know the long, steady stride of that man anyplace.

Moses looks my way while I’m pulling Missy and Juneau Jane back into the shadows. Can’t see his eyes under the hat brim, but I feel them on me. His chin draws in a little, then his head cocks to study us.

He falls a step farther back from the other men, and I figure a bullet comes next.

A question bolts through my mind.

Which one of us does he shoot first?

BENNY SILVA—AUGUSTINE, LOUISIANA, 1987

I wake and look across the room, surprised to find myself curled in the worn recliner affectionately nicknamed
Old Snoozy.
My favorite fuzzy blanket, Christopher’s gift to me last year on my birthday, lies askew over me. I snuggle it under my chin as I’m opening my eyes to the gentle sunlight on the old cypress-plank floors.

Loosening one arm, I wrist-rub my forehead, blink the farmhouse into view, look across the room at the stocking-clad man feet propped crisscross on the antique wooden box I rescued from a dumpster near campus a few years back. I don’t recognize the socks on those feet, or the well-worn hunting boots kicked off on the floor nearby.

And then, suddenly, I
do.
And I realize the night has passed, and morning is here, and I’m not alone. In an instant of befuddled panic, I touch my arm, my shoulder, my folded-up legs. I
am
fully dressed, and nothing is amiss in the room. That’s a relief.

The previous evening comes back slowly at first, and then faster, faster, faster. I remember gathering things from Goswood Grove House and even a few treasures from the city library collection, to be fully prepared for my meeting with Nathan. I remember that he was late getting to my place. I was afraid he’d decided not to show.

He stepped onto my porch with an apology and a boxed cake he’d picked up as a gift. “Doberge cake. It’s sort of a Louisiana thing,” he explained. “I feel like I should apologize for the intrusion. I’m sure you could’ve made more interesting plans on a Friday night.”

“This looks like a pretty incredible apology.” I took ownership of what felt like three pounds of dessert, while shifting back a step to allow him in the door. “But I’ll admit, it’s tough to compete with gate duty at the football stadium and preventing teenagers from making out under the bleachers.”

We laughed the nervous laugh of two people uncertain where the conversation should go from there.

“Let me show you a little of why I asked you to come,” I said. “We’ll grab some barbecue and iced tea in a minute.” I purposely didn’t offer wine or beer, for fear of making our meeting seem too much like a date.

It was hours before we even remembered the takeout food and the cake. As I’d been hoping, Nathan wasn’t as disinterested in family history as he thought. The tangled past of Goswood Grove swept us up as we sifted through old first-edition books, ledgers listing years of the plantation’s business transactions and harvest tallies, journals detailing day-to-day activities, and several letters that were tucked between the books on one of the shelves. They were just the chatter of a ten-year-old girl writing to her father about her daily activities at a school run by nuns, mundane in their day but fascinating now.

I saved the family Bible and brought out the more innocuous and pleasant things first. I wondered how he’d feel about the bits of heritage that were raw and difficult. Of course, in the clinical sense, he most certainly
knew
his family’s history, understood what a place like Goswood Grove would have been in the era of slavery. But how would he feel about coming face-to-face with the human realities, even through the faraway lens of yellowed paper and faded ink?

The question haunted me, dredged up a few specters of my own, realities I’d never been willing to revisit, even to share them with Christopher, who’d had such an idyllic childhood, I guess I was afraid he’d look at me differently if he knew the whole truth about mine. When it finally did come out, he felt betrayed by my lack of candor in our relationship. The truth blew us apart.

It was late at night before I gave Nathan the old leather-bound Bible, with its records of births and deaths, the purchase and sale of human souls, the babies whose paternity was not listed because such things were not to be discussed. And the grid map of the enormous graveyard that now lay hidden beneath an orchard. Resting places unmarked other than possibly by fieldstone or a bit of wood slowly eaten away by wind and water and storms and seasons.

I left him alone with the words, went to clean up the dishes and put away the leftovers. I diddled around with drying the plates and refreshing our tea glasses while he murmured, to himself or to me, that it was so strange to see it all on paper.

“It’s a horrific thing to realize that your family bought and sold people,” he said, his head resting back against the wall, his fingers spread lightly alongside the writing of his ancestors, his face sober. “I never understood why Robin wanted to come here and live. Why she felt compelled to dig into it so much.”

“It’s history,” I pointed out. “I’m trying to impress upon my students that everyone has history. Just because we’re not always happy with what’s true doesn’t mean we shouldn’t know it. It’s how we learn. It’s how we do better in the future. Hopefully, anyway.”

In my own family, there were rumors that my father’s parents had held positions of note in Mussolini’s regime, had aided in the axis of evil that supported a quest for world domination at the expense of millions of lives. After the war, his family quietly faded back into the population, but they’d managed to keep much of their ill-gotten money. I never even considered investigating whether those rumors were true. I didn’t want to know.

I confessed all that to Nathan for some reason, as I returned to the living room and sat down beside him on the sofa. “I guess that makes me a hypocrite, since I’m forcing you into your family history,” I’d admitted. “My father and I were never close.”

We talked about parental relationships then—maybe both of us needed something else to focus on for a while. Maybe fathers lost early to death or divorce seemed like a more approachable topic than trafficking in human bondage and how such a thing could be continued generation after generation.

We pondered it as we thumbed through pages of the plantation’s daily logs, a journal of sorts detailing activities of business and life—gains and losses in financial terms, but also in much more human ways.

I leaned close, struggling to decipher the elaborate script noting the loss of a seven-year-old boy, along with his four-year-old brother and eleven-month-old sister. They’d been left locked in a slave cabin by their mother, Carlessa, a field hand purchased from a slave trader. It undoubtedly wasn’t her choice to report to the harvest at four in the morning to begin a day of cutting sugar cane. Presumably, she locked the cabin to keep the children from harm, to prevent wandering. Perhaps she checked on them when the gang broke at midday. Perhaps she gave her seven-year-old strict instruction on how to look after his younger siblings. Perhaps she nursed almost one-year-old Athene before hastily settling the baby down for a nap. Perhaps she stood on the doorstep, worried, weary, afraid, agonizing as any mother would. Maybe she noticed the chill in the room, and said to her seven-year-old son, “You just get you a blanket, and you and Brother wrap up. If Athene wakes, you walk her round, play with her some. I’ll be back when dark comes.”

Perhaps the last instruction she gave him was, “Don’t you try to light that fire, now. You hear me?”

But he did.

Carlessa’s children, all three of them, were taken from her that day.

Their horrific fate is recorded in the journal. It ends with a notation, written by a master or a mistress or a hired overseer—the handwriting varies, making it evident that the responsibility for keeping records was shared.

November 7, 1858. To be remembered as a cruel day. Fire at the quarters. And these three taken from us.

Those words,
a cruel day,
were left to interpretation. Were they an indication of the writer’s remorse, sitting at the desk, pen in hand, the faint scents of ash and soot clinging to skin and hair and the fibers of clothing?

Or were they an abdication of responsibility for the circumstances that ended three young lives? The
day
was cruel, not the practice of holding human beings as prisoners, of forcing women to leave their children inadequately tended while they labored, unpaid, to fatten the coffers of wealthy men.

The children’s burials were mentioned that same week, but merely in matter-of-fact terms to document the event.

The hour grew later and later as Nathan and I read through the daily logs, sitting side by side on the sofa, our shins touching, our fingers crossing each other’s as we struggled to make out notations that time was slowly bleaching away.

I try to recall the rest, now as I wake, uncertain how I ended up across the room in the recliner asleep.

“What…what time is it?” I croak in a drowsy voice, and sit up and glance toward the window.

Nathan lifts his chin—perhaps he was dozing, too—and looks my way. His eyes are red and tired. His hair disheveled. I wonder if he has slept even a little. At some point, he did slip off his shoes at least, make himself comfortable. He’s taken the liberty of borrowing a stack of blank paper from my school supplies. Several sheets of notes lie on my coffee table.

“I didn’t mean to stay this long,” he says. “I fell asleep, and then I wanted to copy the grid map of the graveyard. The thing is, there’s the annexation deal with the cemetery association, but there are already people buried under that ground. I need to see if I can make some kind of estimate of where these begin and end.” He indicates the plots marked in the book.

“You should’ve thrown something at me. I could have gotten up and helped you.”

“You looked pretty comfortable over there.” He smiles, and the morning light catches his eyes and a strange tingle slips through me.

Horror follows in its wake.

No,
I tell myself.
Firmly and unequivocally, no.
I am at a strange, unmoored, lost, lonely, uncertain point in life. I now know enough about Nathan to realize that he is, too. We pose a risk to one another. I’m on the rebound, and he’s…well, I’m not sure, but now isn’t the time to find out.

“I just stayed and kept reading after you dozed off,” he explains. “I probably should’ve gone into town and grabbed a room at the motel.”

“That would’ve been silly, and you know there’s only the one motel in Augustine, and it’s awful. I bunked there my first night.” It’s sad, actually, that this is his family’s hometown, where his two uncles seem to possess the lion’s share of everything, and he, himself, owns not only my house but an enormous one down the way, and he’s talking about staying in a motel.

“The neighbors won’t start rumors, I promise.” I deploy the old cemetery joke to let him know I’m in no way worried about damage to my reputation. “If they do, and we can
hear
them,
then
I’ll worry.”

A dimple forms in one suntanned cheek. It’s endearing in a way I know I shouldn’t further contemplate, so I don’t. Although I catch myself idly wondering how much younger than me he might be. A couple years, I think.

And then I tell myself to stop.

His comment provides a perfect segue into shoptalk, which is a relief. We’ve been so busy on our journey of discovery with the Goswood Grove documents, I haven’t even brought up my other reason for wanting some of his time—beyond the matter of the value of antique books, and what he feels okay about donating, and making some arrangements for the proper historical preservation of the plantation records.

“There’s one more issue I need to talk with you about, before I let you get away,” I say. “The thing is, I want to use all these materials with the kids in my classroom. So many of the families in this town go back for generations, and a lot of them are connected, in one way or another, to Goswood.” I watch for his reaction, but he keeps that to himself. He seems to be almost dispassionately listening as I go on. “The names in so many of those ledgers, and records of purchases and sales, and births and deaths and burials—even enslaved people whose labors were rented from or to other plantations up and down the River Road, and tradesmen who worked here or sold goods to the Gossetts, a lot of those names—in some form or other have been handed down through families. They occupy space in my grade book. I hear them being announced on the loudspeaker during football games and talked about in the teachers’ lounge.” Faces scroll through my mind. Faces in all shades. Gray eyes, green eyes, blue eyes, brown eyes.

Nathan draws his chin upward and away slightly, as if he senses a blow coming and his reflex is to avoid it. He hasn’t considered, perhaps, that these long-ago events have woven their threads into the here and now.

I know, if I didn’t fully internalize it before, why there are black Gossetts and white Gossetts in this town. They are all tied together by the tangled history in this Bible, by the fact that the enslaved people of a plantation shared their master’s last name. Some changed the name after emancipation. Some kept what they had.

Willie Tobias Gossett is the seven-year-old boy who was buried well over a century ago along with his four-year-old brother and baby sister, Athene—Carlessa’s children, who perished in a burning cabin with no way out. All that lives on of Willie Tobias is a notation in the carefully kept plot map that now sits on the end table next to Nathan Gossett’s hand.

But Tobias Gossett is also a six-year-old boy who wanders, seemingly unrestricted, the roadsides and farm paths of this town in Spider-Man pajamas, his name possibly handed down through generations like an heirloom—a coin or a favorite piece of jewelry—from long-dead ancestors who possessed no tokens to pass along, save for their names and their stories.

“There’s a project the kids want to do for school. Something they sort of cooked up on their own. I think it’s a good idea…a great idea, in fact.”

Since he’s still listening, I proceed with the description of my Friday morning guest speaker, and the tale of the Carnegie library, the kids’ reaction, and how their ideas morphed from there. “And the thing is, it really just started out as a means of getting them interested in reading and writing. A way to take them from books on a class requirement list they don’t see as relevant, and into personal stories—local history they may have brushed past all their lives. People wonder these days why kids don’t have respect for themselves or their town or why they don’t honor their names. They don’t know what their names
mean.
They don’t know their town’s history.”