The Book of Lost Friends: A Novel (20 page)

I can see the wheels turning as he slowly rubs his stubbled chin. He’s catching my excitement, I think. I hope.

I soldier on. “What they have in mind for the culmination of this…is this thing they call
Tales from the Crypt.
It’s done in cemetery tours in New Orleans apparently. They’ll research and write about someone who lived and died in this town, or even here on the plantation, an ancestor or someone they feel connected to across the centuries. For the big finale—maybe as a fundraiser even—they’ll dress up in costume and stand by the tombstone as a living witness, and tell their story during a cemetery tour. It’d let everyone see
how
all the histories are intertwined. Why the lives of ordinary people mattered then, and why they
still
matter. Why it’s relevant today.”

He looks down at the book of plantation records in his lap, runs a thumb carefully along the edge of the page. “Robin would have loved this. My sister had all kinds of ideas about Goswood, about restoring the house, documenting its past, cleaning out the gardens. She wanted to open a museum that would focus on
all
the people of Goswood, not just the ones who slept in those four-poster beds in the big house. Robin was one for lofty ideas. A dreamer. That’s why the judge left the place to her.”

“She sounds like an incredible person.” I try to imagine the sister he’s lost. I summon her up in my mind. Same deep blue-green eyes. Same smile. Medium-brown hair like Nathan’s, but seven years older, more fine-featured and slight-boned.

And so obviously loved. He looks heartbroken, just mentioning her. “You need her, not me,” he admits.

“But we
have
you.” I try to go at it gently. “I know you’re busy and you live out of town and all of this”—I indicate the papers he’s been up all night reading—“isn’t something you were interested in. I’ll be incredibly grateful if my students can have access to these papers for their research projects, but many of the kids are going to find their ancestors in the graveyard that’s not marked. We need permission to use the land behind my house, and that land belongs to you.”

An inordinate amount of time passes while he wrestles with the question. Twice, then three times, he starts to reply, then stops. He surveys the materials on the coffee table, on the end table, on the sofa. He pinches his forehead, closes his eyes. His lips thin to a grim line drawn by emotions he obviously feels the need to keep from showing.

He’s not ready for all of this. There’s a well of pain here for him, and I have no way of fully understanding all the wellsprings that feed it. His sister’s death, his father’s, his grandfather’s, the human reality of Goswood Grove’s history?

I want to let him off the hook, but I can’t quite make myself say anything that would. I owe it to my students to pursue this before heaven-knows-what happens to these documents and Goswood Grove itself.

Nathan shifts forward on the sofa so that, for a moment, I’m afraid he’s decided to walk out. My pulse ratchets up.

Finally, he props his elbows on his knees, sags between his shoulder blades, stares through the window. “I hate that house.” He fists his hands together. Tight. “That house is a curse. My father died there, my grandfather died there. If Robin hadn’t been so obsessed with fighting my uncles over the place, she wouldn’t have ignored the symptoms with her heart. I knew she didn’t look good the last time I was there. She should’ve gone for tests, but she didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t want to face the fact that the house was too much for her to take on. She spent fourteen months fighting battles over her plans for it—battles with my father’s brothers, with the parish, with lawyers. You name it, if it’s around here, Will and Manford have their hands in it. That’s what consumed my sister’s final years, and that was what we argued about the last time I saw her.” His eyes glitter as he recalls these events. “But Robin had promised my grandfather she’d take care of the place, and she wasn’t one to go back on a promise. The only one she ever broke was when she died. She promised me she wouldn’t.”

The pain of his loss is raw, overwhelming, unmistakable, even though he tries to conceal it.

“Nathan, I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I didn’t mean to…I wasn’t trying—”

“It’s okay.” He rubs his eyes with a thumb and forefinger, drinks in air, straightens, tries to toss off the emotions. “You’re not from here.” His eyes meet mine; our gazes grab and hold on. “I understand what you’re trying to do, Benny. I admire it, and I see the value of it. But you have no idea what you’re stepping into.”

HANNIE GOSSETT—TEXAS, 1875

I’m on my knees when I wake. The ground shakes and sways like I jumped a thundercloud to ride it over the land. Splinters needle through my britches and dig at my skin.

Off in the far fields, I see my people. Mama and all my brothers and sisters and cousins, they stand in the sunshine, their burden baskets set down while they raise their hands and look to see who it is calling out to them.

“Mama, Hardy, Het, Prat, Epheme,” I yell. “Easter, Ike, Aunt Jenny, Mary Angel, I’m here! Mama, come get your child! I’m here! Can’t you see?”

I reach out toward Mama, and then she’s gone, and I open my eyes to a starry dark sky. The wind batters my face, dusts it with hot bits of ash from the engine of the train that’s carrying us west. Mama ain’t out there and never was. She’s just a dream again. The farther we go into Texas, the more I see her when I close my eyes.

Is that a sign?

Juneau Jane pulls me down hard. She’s got a rope tied at my waist to be sure I don’t wander off the edge of this flatcar in my sleep. It loops Missy Lavinia next, and then Juneau Jane. Wasn’t any way to get shed of Missy in Jefferson, with Moses breathing down our backs. Don’t know why he didn’t fire on us in that street and kill us dead, all three. Don’t want to know.

He just turned and walked on with them other men, and we found our way to the train, and got on it and put miles betwixt us.

This open car is a rough way to travel, the wind streaming hot cinders through the night sky over our heads. I’ve seen trains, but ain’t ever been on one. Didn’t think I’d like it, and I don’t. But it was the way to get from Jefferson in a hurry. The trains go west, so full of stock and goods and folks, hardly a space can be had. Folks ride up top of the coach cars and in the stock cars with their horses, and in flatcars twixt the loads, like we’re doing. They hop off here and there, sometimes when the train just slows down enough to drop a mail bag on a hook or pick one up, and blow the whistle.

We’ll stay on this train to the end, past the little town of Dallas, to Eagle Ford at the Trinity River, where the Texas and Pacific Railway ends till they get it open farther west. From Eagle Ford, we’ll cross the river and walk or ride a wagon more than a day’s travel, to Fort Worth town, to find Old Mister or the lawyer man…or what is to be learned of them.

I never laid my eyes on so much country. The farther west we ride on this rumblin’, shakin’ beast, the more the land changes. Gone is the shelter of the piney woods, the last part of Texas I knew from the refugee years. Here, the grass stretches out, mile by mile in low hills, the elms and the live oaks and the pin oaks cluster together along the creeks and in the folds of dry watersheds.

Strange land here. Empty.

I settle back in beside Missy, feel her grab at my clothes. She’s scared of this place, too.

“You hush up now,” I say. “Hush up and be still. You’re all right.” I watch patchy trees whirl by in the dark, their moon shadows laying over hills and flats without a farm light or a campfire, far as I can see.

Deep slumber takes me off, and Mama don’t come, and I don’t go to the trader’s yard or watch little Mary Angel stand on the auction block. All inside me, there’s nothing but peaceable quiet. The kind of quiet with no time passing in it.

Seems like just a blink’s gone by before I wake up to noise, and Juneau Jane shaking my one arm, and Missy whimpering and digging her fingers into the other. There’s music playing someplace and a gristmill chugging and grinding grain. My neck’s crooked from my head laying on my shoulder, and my eyelashes stick from the wind and the dirt. I pull them apart and see it’s dark yet. The moon’s gone, but the stars still spatter the black sky.

The train scoots along in a slow, lazy sway, like a mama rocking her baby, too lost in the look of her child to think of the day’s work done or the hard row ahead.

When the train stops, there comes a ruckus of men and women, horses, dogs, wagons, hand trucks. A barker calls out, “Pots, pans, kettles! Salt pork, bacon!”

Another yells, “Good buckets, sharp axes, oilcloth, shovels….”

A man sings “Oh Shenandoah,” and a woman laughs high and long.

No matter that good folk oughta be sleeping at this hour, the noise of people and animals seems to come from everyplace. Noise and noise.

We get off the train and move away from rolling wagons and scrambling horses and find a place on a boardwalk under a coal lamp. Wagons come too close to other wagons and folks holler out. “Watch yerself, thar,” and “Haw, Bess. Haw, Pat. Git up! Git up, now!”

A man yells something in a language I don’t know. A team of loose horses bolts out of the dark and down the street, harnesses flapping. A child screams for its mama.

Missy squeezes my arm so hard I feel the blood swell up in my hand. “Stop that, now. You’re troublin’ me. Ain’t walking all the way to Fort Worth with you hanging on me.” I try to shake her off, but she won’t have it.

A spotted bull trots into the torchlight and moves on by, easy as could be, nobody leading it, nor chasing it, nor minding it, far as I can see. The torch lamp glows off its white spots and the frightful, gray horns long enough a man could lay in them like a hammock. The lamp glow goes down into the middle of the bull’s eye and bounces off and comes at us blue-red, and he snorts out dust and steam.

“This’s a awful place,” I tell Juneau Jane, and I worry Fort Worth might be worse, not better. Texas is bad wild, once you get past the river port. “I’d as soon start out walkin’, and us be gone from here.”

“But, the river is first,” Juneau Jane argues. “We must wait until day, in order that we will know the means by which others cross the water.”

“I guess.” I hate to let her be right, but she is. “Might be, in the morning, we can pay a little to get on a wagon, anyhow.”

We wander here and there, looking for a spot to huddle up. Folks chase us out, if they see us. What looks like three ragged boys, colored and white together, and one addle-headed being led by the hand, ain’t something anybody feels kindly toward. Finally, we go down to the riverbank, where there’s wagon camps, and we push up in some brush, and cower together like three lost pups, and hope nobody bothers us.

Soon’s light comes, we eat a breakfast of hard pilot biscuits out of our pack and the last few bites of salted ham from the crew on the
Katie P.,
and then we hold the poke up overhead and cross the river at the shallows. It ain’t hard to know the way, just walk along with the steady row of wagons fording the river and going west. A line of other folks passes us, traveling the other way, too, aiming for the railhead with their buckboards and farm wagons. Herds of spotted big-horned cattle tramp through, trailed by rough-looking men and boys in wide hats and knee boots. Sometimes, the herds pass for what seems like a hour at a time.

It ain’t midway in the morning before Missy goes to limping in them new shoes from Jefferson. Sweat and road dust makes a plaster on her skin, clinging her shirt to her body. She takes up fussing and tugging at it and working loose the cloth that’s binding her bosom flat. “You leave that be,” I keep saying and swatting her hand away.

Finally, we move off into the grass while two wagons pass each other going opposite ways. Minute my back is turned, Missy plops herself down in the shade of a little pin oak. She won’t get up no matter how we try to coax her.

I stand by the road and start looking for a wagon we can get on for a little pay.

A colored driver with a load of freight and a kindly face takes us up, and he’s a talkish sort. Rain is his name. Pete Rain. His papa was a Creek Indian and his mama a escaped slave from a plantation that belonged to some Cherokees. The farm wagon and the team he owns all to hisself, and that is the business he does, hauling goods from the railroads to the settlements and then back from the settlements to the railhead, to ship east. “Not bad work,” he tells us. “All you got to worry about is losing your scalp.” He shows us bullet holes in the wagon and shares tales of bushwhacking and raiding parties with fearsome painted warriors.

He tells tales most of the day. Stories of the Indians up north of here, the Kiowas and Comanches, who roam down off their reservations when they choose and steal horses and burn farms and take captives, or leave cut-up bodies behind. “Doesn’t seem to be any particular figuring to their ways,” he says. “Just whatever they favor doing at the time. The war is over in the South, but there’s still war here. You boys be watchful. Look out for road agents and bad sorts, too. You come across anybody that calls himself a Marston Man, you go the other way double fast. Their gang is worst of all, and growing in numbers each day.”

By the time dark is settling in, Juneau Jane and me, we’re looking twice at every bush and tree and sniffing the air for signs of smoke. Our ears stay sharp for sounds of Indians, and bushwhackers, and gangs of Marston Men, whatever they might be. We’re glad to share Pete Rain’s camp. Juneau Jane helps with the horses and harness, and I take to boiling up a stew from rice, salted ham, and beans. Pete Rain shoots a rabbit, and we add that, too. Missy sits and stares at the fire.

“What’s wrong with the boy?” Pete asks while we eat our meal, and I feed Missy spoonfuls, because she can’t pick up stew with her hands.

“Don’t know.” That’s mostly true. “He run onto a difficulty with some bad men and been this way ever since.”

“Sad thing,” Pete mutters, and rubs his plate out with sand and drops it in the rinse bucket before laying back to look at the stars. They’re bigger and brighter here than ever I saw back home. Wider, too. The sky goes all the way from one end of the world to the other.

While Pete’s quiet, I tell him about my three blue beads and ask after my people in case he knows of them. He don’t, that he can say.

Juneau Jane tells him of the Lost Friends and he wants to know more, so she gets out the papers and leans to the fire. I sit over her shoulder and she moves her finger along the words for me while she reads. Pete don’t know any of them names, either, but he says, “I got a sister out there someplace. Slave catchers stole her and killed my mama while I was off to hunt with my pap. That was the year eighteen and fifty-two. Don’t reckon I’ll ever find my little sister or that she’d even remember me, but you could put her name in the Lost Friends. I’ll give you the fifty cents to get me a letter printed in that
Southwestern
newspaper, plus the mailing money if you’d post it for me while you’re in Fort Worth. I don’t linger in that place. Folks don’t call it Hell’s Half Acre for nothing.”

Juneau Jane tells him she’ll do what he asks, but instead of the papers, she gets out that ledger book from the lawyer’s office and opens it. “The space on the papers is filled,” she says. “Here, we have room.”

“I’m appreciative of it.” Pete rests his head in his crossed arms like a pillow and watches the trail of angel glow that runs across the night sky. “Amalee, that was her name. Amalee August Rain. She was too bitty to say it at the time, though, so I don’t suppose she got to keep it.”

Juneau Jane starts the book, saying the words she writes,
“Amalee August Rain, sister of Pete Rain of Weatherford, Texas. Lost in the Indian Nations, September, 1852, when three years old.”
She tells the letters out loud, and I try to think how each one looks before the pencil makes it. A few I get right.

When I lay down that night, I think about alphabet letters and I point one finger against that wide black silk sky and draw them from star to star.
A for Amalee…R for Rain…T for Texas. H for Hannie.
I keep on till my hand falls and my eyes close.

In the morning when I wake and sit up on my blanket, the lantern sputters low on its shepherd’s hook, and Juneau Jane sits under it in the dawn dark, her legs crossed and the book in her lap. The skinning knife is stuck beside her in the dirt, and the pencil’s down to just a stub. Her eyes are weary and red.

“You been at that all night?” She never even moved her blanket over to the wagon.

“Indeed, yes,” she whispers real soft, since Pete and Missy hadn’t woke yet.

“Just writing that one letter so’s to mail it for Pete in Fort Worth town?” I climb from my place and scrabble over to her.

“Something more.” She holds the book up in the first of the light and the last of it, so’s I can see. Page after page of it has words now. “I have written all of them.” She shows me her work, while I look down in wonder. “These pages, by the beginning letter of the surname.” She turns to a page with R, which is a letter I know, and there at the top she reads off, “Amalee August Rain.”

I sit down beside her and she gives it over to me, and I turn through all the pages. “I’ll be,” I whisper. “A
book of lost friends
.”

“Yes,” she agrees and gives me a piece of tore-out paper with writing on it, which she says is the letter for Pete.

A yearning comes in me then, and though we oughta get a small cook fire laid and start on breakfast, I settle in the grass aside of her, instead. “Could you take out another paper from the book and write me one, while there’s still some of the pencil left? I want a letter about my people…for the Lost Friends.”

She lifts a eyebrow my way. “There will be time for this as we go on.” She looks toward Missy and Pete Rain sleeping. In the post oaks overhead, the morning birds call up the dawn.

“I know. And I ain’t got the fifty cents to get it in the paper, yet…or the money I can give for a stamp.” Lord knows when I’ll be able to spend all that on words in a newspaper. “But I just want to hold my letter, I guess. Till the time comes. Be like holdin’ hope, in some way, wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose it would.” She goes to the back of the book, folds the cover flat and scratches her fingernail along the seam, then tears out a page careful and straight. “How would you have it read?”

“I want it fancy, sort of. So, if my people see it, they don’t…” A tickle comes in my throat like a little bird just fluffed its feathers in there. I have to clear it out before I can talk again. “Well, I want that they’ll think I’m smart. Proper, you know? You write it real proper, all right?”