The Book of Lost Friends: A Novel (31 page)

“Your sister was a definite bibliophile,” I remark, looking over Nathan’s shoulder at the book list.

“She got that from the judge,” he replies. Tucked inside the diary, there’s also a running tally of billiard games played on the old Brunswick table downstairs in the library, sort of an ongoing tournament between grandfather and granddaughter in the last year of the judge’s life. “They had a lot in common.”

The desk drawer tips forward as Nathan opens it to put papers back in. A cue ball rolls to the front corner, clatters to the floor, then starts moving, seemingly under its own power. Nathan and I watch it weave over the uneven plank floors, this direction, then that, catching the sun and reflecting fairy lights on the wall before finally disappearing under the bed.

My shoulders shimmy involuntarily.

Nathan crosses the room, lifts the dust ruffle, and looks under the bed. “Nothing but a few books.” He toe-nudges them into the open.

The desk drawer resists going back into place. I squat down to eyeball the problem and work the slides back onto the tracks. The triangle-shaped rack and the rest of the billiard balls are wedged in the back end, making the drawer travel unevenly. Years rescuing thrift shop antiques have given me a particular skill with old furniture, and so after a bit of finagling, I have things in their proper order again.

When I turn around, Nathan is sitting on the floor by the cherrywood four-poster bed, his back resting against the dust ruffle, his long legs splayed out. He seems to have sort of collapsed there, lost in the pages of a children’s book,
Where the Wild Things Are.

I open my mouth to ask if that was his, but the answer is evident in his faraway expression. I’m not even in the room with him right now. There’s a ghost alongside him, instead. He’s reading the book with her. They’ve done the same thing many times before.

I stand and watch, and for an instant I can see her—the woman in the fishing photo. She’s turning the pages. Halfway through, they lay flat. Nathan takes out an envelope and a small stack of photographs, lets the book rest in his lap.

I quietly move closer as he lays the photos on the floor, one by one.

Baby pictures. First day of school photographs, vacations. A family ski photo. Nathan’s mother is a tall strawberry blonde in pink insulated overalls. She’s supermodel gorgeous. Robin is about ten years old, Nathan a bundled-up toddler. Nathan’s father, dressed in expensive gear, holds Nathan in the crook of his elbow. He’s smiling, his face devoid of the downturned eyebrows and heavy frown lines so evident in his older brothers, Will and Manford. He looks happy. Unstressed.

Nathan opens the envelope next. I read the enclosed note over his shoulder.

Nathan,

I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist this book.

Mom had these photos rattling around in her art supply bins. You know how unsentimental she is! I thought I’d better grab them and save them for you. This way, you’ll at least know what you looked like once. You were such a cute little pudster, if sometimes annoying. You used to blabber out questions until Mom and I wanted to tape your mouth shut. When I asked you why you had so many questions, you looked at me in the most honest way and said, “So I’ll know everything, like you do.”

Well, little brother—surprise—I don’t know everything, but I do know you grew up to be a pretty great guy. You were worth all the trouble. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders. If you’re reading this note, I’m probably leaving you with a few questions I didn’t get to answer.

There are things I’ve been working on this last year since Granddad Gossett died. I always had the feeling there was a secret he was keeping, something he wanted to tell but couldn’t bring himself to. Just in case I’m gone and someone else looks through the library before you do…you know who I mean…I want to make sure you get the information. When you see it, you’ll know why. If you don’t find my papers in the library downstairs, go to the bank. I’ve been keeping a copy of most of it in a safe deposit box there. I put your name on the box and paid up the rent, long term, so it’ll be waiting there for no one else but you.

You’re on your own with this one now, Nat. Sorry about that. You’ll have to decide what to do about it all. I hate leaving you with the burden, but you’ll sort out the right decisions, whatever they are.

Like the author of this book (which you made me read to you until I thought I’d go nuts if I had to do it one more time) said before he passed away, “I have nothing now but praise for my life. There are so many beautiful things in this world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready.”

Find the beautiful things, little brother. Every time you mourn for me, I’ll be far away. But when you celebrate, I’ll be right there with you, dancing.

Take care of Mom, too. She’s quirky, but you know how we artists can be. We march to our own music.

Love you most,

Robin

There’s a key taped inside the back cover of the book. Nathan holds it up and looks at it.

“That’s so much like her. That’s
just
like her.” His words are thick with tenderness as he drops an arm over one knee and lets the card dangle. A long time passes while he stares out the window, watching the wispy white clouds that have blown off the gulf farther south. Finally, he wipes his eyes, and with a rueful laugh, chokes out, “She said not to cry.”

I sit on the edge of the mattress and wait until he catches his breath and tucks the photos back into the book, then closes it and stands up. “Is there
anyplace
my sister’s papers could be in that library?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve canvassed that room pretty thoroughly over these past weeks.”

“Then we’re paying a visit to the bank.”

He stops in the doorway as we leave, gives the room one last look. Air whistles between the door and the frame as he pulls it closed. A faint rumbling follows—the unmistakable sound of the cue ball finding its way across the floor again. It taps the other side of the door, and I jump.

“It’s an old house.” A floorboard squeaks when Nathan steps back. The cue ball rattles away from the door.

We start down the stairs, and I catch myself looking back over my shoulder, thinking,
Why would Robin put the pool balls in her desk drawer, anyway?
Granted, they’re not needed downstairs. The billiard table was covered when I came, and she had it piled with books.

The billiard table…

HANNIE GOSSETT—TEXAS, 1875

I pray that wherever Elam Salter is, he’s as hard to kill as they say. As
he
says.

He can’t be shot. Not ever.

I gather the soldiers’ stories of him, and build a nest the way a barn cat will in the straw on a cold winter night.

The stories carry me through watching Old Mister pass from this world, and then the days of grieving and weeping, and seeing that he is laid to rest, and trying to figure how much Missy understands of what’s happened. At the burying, she lays herself down on the grave right beside Juneau Jane and makes a whimpering sound. I watch her dig her fingers in the dirt and hang on.

Those are strange, sad days, and the end of them can’t come quick enough.

When it’s finally over, we set out along the San Saba River Road, me and Missy and Juneau Jane, in a wagon pulled by army mules, with a driver and three soldiers to ride along. They’ll bring a shipment of weapons back from Austin after carrying us there, or that’s the plan we’ve been told.

The three on horseback sit their saddles relaxed, laughing and making chatter together, their rifles and sidearms tied down in the scabbards. No sort of worry or care shows in them. They spit plugs of tobacco, and tease, and bet who can spit the farthest.

The wagon driver rides calm and looks round at the land, not seeming to watch out for anybody coming up on us.

Juneau Jane and I trade our worries in glances to each other. The skin under her eyes is puffy and rubbed red raw. She’s cried by the hour, so hard I’m wondering if she’ll survive through all this. She turns to the back of the wagon over and over again, to catch one last look at the soil where we laid down her papa. He won’t rest easy in that grave, so far from Goswood Grove. Juneau Jane wanted to take him home to bury, but it can’t be helped. Even to get back ourselves, we’re calling on the mercy of strangers. And for Old Mister’s burial, too. Once, the man owned over four thousand acres, and now he rests under a plain wood cross with his name scratched on it. Had to guess, even, at the proper year of his birth. Juneau Jane and I ain’t sure, and Missy can’t say.

A light rain comes, and we draw the wagon curtains, and just sit and let the wheels wobble on, mile after mile. It’s later in the day when I hear the men hail somebody, off distant. The hair on my neck raises, and I climb to my knees and lift the canvas. Juneau Jane moves to follow.

“You stay back and keep Missy there,” I tell her, and she does. These past weeks made us more than part cousins. I’m her sister now, I think.

The man comes again like a spirit, as much a part of the land as the brown and gold grasses and prickly pear cactus. He’s riding a tall red dun horse, and leading another one that’s wearing a Mexican saddle with the rawhide seat stained in dry blood.

My heart quickens up, and I throw back the wagon curtains and look Elam Salter over to make sure that blood ain’t his. He sees the question in my eyes as he comes alongside the wagon. “I fared some better than the other man.”

“Relieves my mind to see it.” I smile wide at him and give hardly a thought to the man who fell dead from that other saddle. If Elam did the killing, it was a man who had took up evil ways.

“I’d hoped to catch you before you set off. My work ran longer than expected.” Elam leans an elbow on his saddle horn. He’s wet and mud spattered. Dry lather lines the horses’ breast collars. Elam slacks the reins, and the poor, tired dun sags its head and fills its lungs with a long breath.

“I wanted you to know, we’ve cut off the head of the snake,” he says, and he looks from me to Juneau Jane and back. “Marston, himself, is jailed in Hico, to be tried for his crimes and hanged. I hope that eases the burden of your loss in some way.” He looks at Juneau Jane again and then at Missy. “We’ll be after the rest of his lieutenants and higher officers now, but many will lose faith in their cause without Marston, and wander to the frontier or to Mexico. Their leader did not go bravely from his command. We dug him from a corn crib, where he was hiding like a trapped rat. Not a single shot was fired to bring him in.”

Juneau Jane sniffles and nods, makes the sign of the cross over her chest, and looks down at her hands in her lap. A tear drips from her cheek and draws a small circle on the front of her dress.

Anger burns in me. The unholy kind. “I’m glad of it. Glad he’ll be made to pay. Glad you come back in one piece, too.”

His thick mustache lifts with a smile. “As I promised you I would, Miss Gossett. As I promised you I would.”

“Hannie,” I tell him. “Remember I said you could call me by my name?”

“Indeed I do.” He tips his hat, then goes on forward to talk to the men.

That smile stays with me through the day and into evening. I watch him ride away from the wagon, then back, then disappear over the hills. Time to time, I spot him on the horizon. I feel safer, knowing he’s there.

It’s when we’re stopped to camp that the uneasy comes over me again. The animals fret at their pickets, toss heads and twitch ears. Juneau Jane takes the halter of a big gelding and strokes its nose. “They have a sense of something,” she says.

I think about Indians and panthers and coyotes and the Mexican gray wolves that howl on the prairies at night. I hold Missy’s old reticule close, feel the weight of the derringer tucked inside. It’s some comfort, but not much.

Elam Salter comes into our camp, and that’s more comfort, yet. “Stay between the rocks and the wagon,” he tells us, and then talks quiet with the men on the other side of the wagon. I watch their hands and bodies move, pointing, looking.

One of the soldiers hangs a blanket between two cedar trees for our necessary, and another cooks on a small stove at the wagon.

There’s none of Elam’s friendly talk or smiles that night.

When we bed down, he’s disappeared again. Don’t know where he goes or if he sleeps. The dark just grabs him up. I don’t hear or see him after that.

“What does he search for?” Juneau Jane asks as we settle in a tent with Missy twixt us. I tie Missy’s ankle to mine, case she’d take a mind to get up and wander…or I would in my dreams.

Missy’s asleep quick as she can get flat on the blanket.

“Don’t know what he’s after.” I think I scent smoke on the wind. Just a hair of it, but then I ain’t sure. Our cookstove’s been out for hours. “Reckon the night’ll pass all right, though. We got five men looking out after us. You and me been in tougher spots.” I think of the swamp and not knowing if we’d live to morning light. “We ain’t alone, at least.”

Juneau Jane nods, but the lantern light through the cloth shines on a brim of tears. “I have left Papa. He is alone.”

“He’s gone on the other side of the door. He ain’t in that body no more,” I tell her. “You sleep now.” I pull the blanket up, but I don’t find rest.

Sleep finally comes like a summer dry river, a trickle that’s shallow and splits around rocks and downed branches and tree roots, dividing and dividing, till by morning it’s the thin bead of gathered morning dew, dripping lazy off the army tent overhead.

On rising, I think I smell smoke again. But there’s barely enough fire in the stove for coffee, and the wind scatters it the other direction.

It’s only your mind,
Hannie,
I tell myself, but I make sure we all three get up together and go behind the blanket to see to our necessary. Missy wants to pick snowball flowers there, but I don’t let her.

Elam Salter comes in from wherever he’s passed the night. He looks like a man who ain’t slept. He’s keeping watch for something, but he don’t ever say what.

We eat pilot biscuits, dunking them in our cups to soften them up for chewing. Missy fusses and spits hers out. “You’ll go hungry, then,” I tell her. “You need to eat for—” I catch
for the baby
in my throat, and swallow hard.

Juneau Jane meets my eye. This baby won’t hide much longer. Missy ought to visit a doctor, but if her mind ain’t better soon, any doctor we ask will want to send her away to the asylum.

When we move out, Elam points his dun gelding up and across a rise. I see him there with his spyglass as the sky breaks a full dawn that’s like coals from the underside. Red-pink and rose yellow and lined in gold so bright it stays in your eyes when you blink. The sky is wide as the earth, from one end to the other.

Elam and the horse look at home against that fire, against that wide alone. Our wagon circles the hill and wobbles down into a rough draw, and Elam disappears bit by bit.

I keep watch out one side of the wagon, then the other, trying to hold on to the sight of him, but he’s soon gone and we don’t see him again, rest of the morning.

By noon, I take the little derringer out of Missy’s reticule, check it, then set it in reach. Still not sure if it’d fire at all, but I feel better having it there.

Juneau Jane slides a glance over the gun, then at me.

“I was looking at it,” I say. “That’s all.”

We pass a wagon or two on the road time to time through the day. Farmers and freighters. A mail wagon. Horsebackers and, near the towns, people on foot going to their farms and back. Here and there, riders take a wide path round us. I wonder what kind of folks those are that don’t care to be seen up close by the soldiers.

At night we camp, and the men tell us to stay near, so we do. Come morning, we break camp and roll off again. Do the same thing the next day and the next and then again. Sometimes Elam joins our camps or rides alongside the wagon, but mostly he ranges. When he does come in, he’s watchful and quiet. I know he’s found signs of something out there.

The days go by as we push hard from first light to last, while the weather’s fair.

A storm comes finally, and we pull the wagon curtains down tight. The horses and mules plod along in the rain and the mud till finally we make our way through it, and it stops quick as it started. I look out for Elam, but don’t see him. Hadn’t all morning and that vexes me.

We meet a man on the road who don’t speak to the soldiers, but stands his saddle horse just barely aside. Once we’re past, he sidles his mount forward to get a peek through the rear gap of the wagon bonnet, see if there’s anything in here he wants. The bold way of him leaves me bad skittish, and I look at the little derringer again. The light shines on its carved silver roses, and Missy reaches for it, and I swat her hand away.

“Don’t you touch that,” I scold. “It ain’t for you to have.”

She squeaks and scrambles out of reach and stares at me narrow eyed. I tuck that pistol down under me where she can’t get it.

Near middle of the day, we come on a water crossing.

The sky has started to rumble again, so we go ahead to make the ford instead of stopping to rest the horses and mules first. The current is fast, but ain’t deep.

“Keep them moving right on up at the slope!” the sergeant yells, circling a fist above his head. “We’ll stop on the other side and rest and water the stock then.”

The sergeant leads, then the driver whips up the team, and the soldiers come along either side to make sure the mules don’t stop and let the wagon drift. The streambed is rocky, so the wagon box rises and sinks, side to side. It falls hard into the deep spots. Missy hits her head and cries out.

I move all us closer to the back of the wagon, where we can get out if it swamps. This ain’t supposed to be a hard crossing, but it is.

Leaning out the keyhole gap over the tailgate, I see Elam. He keeps well back up the slope, but he’s there.

The mules get belly deep, and little seeps of water come through the wagon bed.

It’s then I hear a sharp crack like a wheel or axle broke.

The canvas shudders above our heads. I turn to look over my shoulder, see a round hole and sunlight. Another crack echoes out. Another hole in the canvas.

“Bushwhack!” one of the troopers yells. The mules jerk forward. The driver goes to the whip.

My fingers slip on the tailgate and I tip forward, fall halfway out the back of the wagon. The tailgate pushes the breath out of me, and water rushes just under my chin. A hand grabs my dress. It’s a big, strong hand, and I know it’s Missy. Juneau Jane scrambles to get me, too, and they haul me up, and we all tumble toward the wagon bed. It’s when I’m falling that I see Elam Salter and his big dun horse go straight over backward. I don’t see them land. I hear a horse scream, hear the whine of a bullet, then a soldier’s groan, a splash in the water. Hooves clatter away and up the bank. The soldiers return fire at whoever’s come on us.

The wagon’s got no way out but forward over the rocks, and the mules lurch through the water, the wagon rocking wild like a child’s toy as they scrabble up the bank to dry land. I gather Juneau Jane and Missy, hold them down flat and push my head twixt them. Splinters of wood and dust and canvas rain down.

I say my prayers, make my peace. Might be after all that’s happened, this is how it ends. Not in the swamp from a wildcat, not at the bottom of a river or on a freight wagon in the wild country, but here in this creek, waylaid for a reason I don’t know.

I lift my head enough to search with my eyes, to find Old Mister’s pistol.

Can’t let them take us alive if this is Indians or road agents,
is my only thought. Heard too many stories since we been in Texas, tales of what can be done to womenfolk. Seen it, too, with Missy and Juneau Jane.
Lord, give me the strength to do what’s needed,
I pray. But if I find that pistol, it’s got only two shots, and there’s three of us.

Give me the strength, and the means.

Everything’s shifted and turned upside down, and the pistol is no place I can see.

Of a sudden, the air goes quiet. The gun thunder and screams stop like they started. Powder smoke hangs thick and silent and sour. The only noise is the slow groaning of a horse and the terrible death rattle of blood-smothered breath.