The Book of Lost Friends: A Novel (32 page)

“Ssshhh,” I whisper to Missy and Juneau Jane.
Maybe they’ll think the wagon’s empty.
The thought’s gone quick as it comes. I know better.

“Come out!” a voice orders. “Some of these soldier boys might live to fight another day, you come on out peaceful.”

“Your choice,” another man says. It’s low and plain, and my ear knows it in a way that turns me cold inside, except I can’t put a place to it. Where’ve I heard that voice before? “You want four dead soldier boys, plus a dead deputy marshal on your conscience? Ends the same, either way.”

“Don’t—” one of the soldiers hollers. There’s a crack like a gourd getting split, and he goes quiet.

Juneau Jane and me look back and forth to each other. Her eyes are wide and white-edged. Her mouth trembles, but she nods. Beside me, Missy’s already getting up, I guess because the man said to. She don’t understand what’s happening.

I feel for the pistol again. Feel for it everyplace. “Coming out!” I holler. “Might be we’re shot already.” I’m scrubbing the floor with my hands.
The pistol…

The pistol…

“Out
now
!” the man hollers. A shot fires off and tears through the canvas not a foot from our heads. The wagon jerks forward, then stops. Either somebody’s holding the mules or one’s dead in the harness.

Missy scrabbles over the gate.

“Wait,” I say, but there’s no stopping her. No finding the derringer, either. Don’t know what’ll happen now. What kind of men are these, and why do they want us?

Missy’s on her feet and moving away from the wagon by the time Juneau Jane and me get out. My mind slows, takes notice of each thing—the soldiers on their bellies, one bleeding from the leg. Blood drips from the head of the wagon driver. His eyes open and close, and open again. He tries to wake, to save hisself or us, but what can he do?

The sergeant lifts his head. “You’re interfering with a detail of the United States Cavalry in—” A pistol butt comes down hard.

Missy moans like it was her that got struck.

I glance at the one holding the pistol. He ain’t much more than a boy, might be thirteen or fourteen.

It’s then I look past the boy and see the man come out from the brush. A rifle rests comfortable over his shoulder. He moves in a slow, easy stride, satisfied as a cat that’s got its next meal cornered. A slow smile spreads under his hat brim. When he tips it up, there’s the patch on his eye, and the melted scars on one side of his face, and I know why his voice caught me. Might be this is the day he finishes the job he started at the river landing.

Missy growls in her throat like a animal, gnashes her teeth, and chomps at the air.

The man tosses his head back, laughing. “Still a biter, I see. I thought maybe we’d worked that out of you before we parted ways.”

That voice of his. I sift memories like flour, but they fly away, carried off by the storm winds. Did we know him before? Was he somebody Old Mister knew?

Missy growls louder. I reach up and grab her arm, but she strains away from me. I try again to place the man. If I can call his name, maybe it’d catch him by surprise, throw him off long enough the troopers could get at the boy that’s closest, grab his gun.

I hear horses splash through the water and scrabble up the bank behind us. But I keep my eyes on the man with the rifle. He’s the one to worry about. The boy with him looks crazy and blood hungry, but it’s this man who has charge of it all.

“And you.” He turns to Juneau Jane. “It is a shame to dispatch a perfectly good yellow girl. Especially a fetching one who has…a certain sort of value. Perhaps it is a fortuitous turn of events that you’ve managed to survive, after all. Perhaps I’ll keep you. A final recompense for all the loss I’ve suffered at your father’s hands.” He holds up a left glove with missing fingers sagging down, then he passes across the eye that’s gone.

This man…this man believes Old Mister’s to blame for his disfigurings? Why?

I let go of Missy, scoop Juneau Jane round behind me. “You leave this child be,” I tell him. “She ain’t done nothin’ to you.”

He cocks his head to see me better, looks at me for a long time through the one good eye. “And what is this? The little boy driver Moses told me he’d done away with? But none of us are what we seem to be, are we?” He laughs, and there’s a familiar sound to it.

He steps in closer. “I might just keep you, too. A good set of slave irons, and you’ll be no trouble. Your kind can always be broken. The infernal Negro. No better than a mule. No smarter. All can be broken to harness…and to other uses.” He studies me in pure meanness, but that’s familiar, too. “I think I knew your mammy,” he says and smiles. “I think I knew her quite well.”

He looks away toward the men coming up from the river. My mind tumbles back, and back, and back. I see past the scars and the patch on his eye, take in the shape of his nose, the set of his sharp, pointed chin. I grab the memory, see him crouched beside the wagon where we’re curled in the cold with Mama. His hands catch her, drag her out, her arm still chained to the wheel spokes. The sounds of her suffering bleed into dark, but I don’t see. “You keep down under the blanket, babies,” she chokes out. “You just stay there.” I push the blanket hard against my ears, try not to hear.

I cling to my brothers and sisters, night after night, eight, then seven, then six…three, two, one, and finally just my cousin, little Mary Angel. And then only me, curled in a ball underneath that ragged blanket, trying to hide.

From this man, Jep Loach. Older, scarred and melted so that I didn’t know his face. Right here is the man who took my people away. The man Old Mister had tracked down all them years ago and had dragged off to the Confederate army. Not killed on a battlefield someplace back then. Right here standing.

Once I know that much, I know I’ll stop him this time, or die in the trying. Jep Loach can’t steal one more thing from me. I can’t stand for it. I can’t live past it.

“You take me instead of her,” I say. I’ll be stronger without Missy and Juneau Jane to look after. “Just me alone.” I’ll find a way to do what needs to be done to this man. “You take me and leave these two girls and these soldier men be. I’m a good woman. Good as my mama was.” The words rise up my throat and burn. I taste hardtack and coffee, soured now. I swallow it down, and add, “Strong as my mama was, too.”

“None of you are in a position to bargain,” Jep Loach says, and laughs.

The other men, the two behind us, laugh along as they circle on opposite sides. I know the one to the left, soon’s he comes into view, but I can’t make my eyes believe it even after all I heard about him throwing in with bad men. Lyle Gossett. Back from the dead, too. Not turned in for a bounty as Elam Salter thought, but here with his uncle, two men cut of the same cloth. The black cloth of Old Missus’s people.

Lyle and the other rider, a skinny boy on a spotted horse, stop behind Jep Loach, turn their mounts to face us.

Missy growls louder, bites the air and bobs her chin and hisses like a cat.

“Shut…shut her up,” the boy on the paint horse says. “She’s givin’ me the botheration. Got a demon. She’s tryin’ to…to witch us or somethin’. Let’s just shoot ’em and go on.”

Lyle lifts his rifle. Raises it up and points it at his own sister. Kin against kin. “She’s gone in the head, anyhow.” His words come cold and flat, but there’s pleasure in his face when he rests his thumb on the hammer and pulls it back. “Good time to put her out of her misery.”

Missy’s neck tucks, her chin swaying against the collar of her dress. Her eyes stay pinned to Lyle, bright blue circles rolled up half under the lids, white underneath.

“She’s pregnant!” I holler, and try to pull Missy back, but she rips herself out of my hand. “She carryin’ a child!”

“Do it!” the other boy hollers. “She’s witchin’ us! Do it!”

“Stand down, Corporal,” Jep Loach yells. He looks from one boy to the other. “Whose command is this?”

“Yours, Lieutenant,” Lyle answers, like they’re soldiers in a war. Soldiers for Marston. Just like Elam talked about.

“Do you serve the cause?”

“Yes, sir, Lieutenant,” all three of the boy soldiers say.

“Then you
will
obey your superiors. I give the orders, here.”

“Marston’s been caught by deputy federal marshals.” One of the cavalrymen on the ground tries to speak up. “Caught and jail—”

Jep Loach puts a bullet through the man’s hand, then takes three quick steps and stomps a boot on his head, shoving him face-first into the mud. He can’t breathe like that. He tries to fight, but it’s no use.

Lyle laughs. “He ain’t backtalkin’ now, is he?”

“Sir?” the boy on the paint says, his jaw slackening. He backs the horse a step, shaking his head, his face doughy pale. “What…what’s he sayin’ about Gen’ral Marston? He…he been caught?”

“Lies!” Jep Loach swivels his way, crushes the cavalryman’s head into the soil. “The
cause
! The cause is bigger than any one man. Insubordination is punishable by death.” He draws his pistol and swings round, but the boy is a runnin’ mark now, spurring for the brush, then gone, bullets following after.

The soldier on the ground groans, getting his face up and sucking a breath while Jep Loach paces away and back, wagging his pistol and shouldering the rifle. His skin goes fire red against the wax melt of scars. He talks to hisself as he paces. “It’s handy. Handy, that’s what it is. All of my uncle’s heirs, here in one place. My poor auntie will need my help with Goswood Grove, of course. Until the grief and her ill health overcome her, which won’t take long….”

“Uncle Jep?” Lyle ain’t laughing now. He chokes on his own voice. Gathering the reins, he looks toward the brush, but he’s barely put the spurs to his horse before Jep Loach lifts the rifle, and a shot meets its mark, and young Lyle tumbles hard toward the ground.

The air explodes, bullets whining past, kicking up dirt and knocking branches off trees. Juneau Jane pulls me backward onto the ground. I hear yelling, groans. Cavalrymen gain their feet. Bullets hit flesh. A scream. A groan. A howl like a animal. Powder smoke chokes the air.

It’s quiet then. Quiet as the dawn, just a moment or two. I cough on the sulfur, listen, but lie still. “Don’t move,” I whisper into Juneau Jane’s hair.

We stay there till the soldiers get up off the ground. Jep Loach is sprawled out dead, shot through the chest, and Lyle lies where he fell from the horse. There in a spill of blue cotton is Missy. Not moving. Blood seeps over the cloth like a rose blooming against a patch of sky. The wagon driver drags hisself to us and rolls her over to check her, but she’s gone.

The old derringer hangs in her hand. The soldier slips it away, careful.

“Missy,” I whisper, and Juneau Jane and me go to her. I hold her head and brush the wispy mud-caked hair from her blue eyes. I think of her as a child, and a girl. I try to think of good things. “Missy, what’d you do?”

I tell myself it was her shot that killed Jep Loach. Hers that did him in. I don’t ask the soldiers if the derringer pistol got fired or not. Don’t want to know. I need to believe it was Missy that did it, and that she did it for us.

I close her eyes, take the headscarf from my hair, and lay it over her face.

Juneau Jane makes the cross and says a prayer in French as she holds the hand of her sister. All that’s left of Mister William Gossett lies dead here, bleeding out into this Texas soil.

All but Juneau Jane.

I stand outside the café in Austin City a long while. Can’t go in, not even to the little yard, where the tables sit in open air under the spread of long-armed oaks. Branches twine theirselves overhead like the timbers in a roof. They share roots, these live oak groves. They’re all one tree under the soil. Like a family, made to be together, to feed and shelter one another.

I watch the colored folk come and go from tables, serving up plates of food, filling cups and glasses with water and lemonade and tea, and carrying off dirty dishes. I study each worker from where I stand in the tree shade, try to decide,
Do any look like me? Do I know them?

Three days, I been waiting to come here. Three days since we limped into Austin with four wounded soldiers and what’s left of Elam Salter in the wagon. It’s still true that there ain’t a bullet able to hit him, but the horse crushed him pretty good when it fell. I been there at his bedside by the hour. Only left it now with Juneau Jane to watch after him awhile. Nothing more to do now but wait. He’s a strong man, but death has opened the door. It’s for him to decide if he’ll step through it soon, or at another time long in the future.

Some days, I tell myself I should let him cross over and be at peace. There’s so much pain and fight ahead of him if he clings to this life. But I hope he means to stay. I’ve held his hand and wet his skin with my tears and told him that over and over.

Am I right to beg him to do that for me? I could go back to Goswood Grove. Home to Jason and John and Tati. Back to the sharecrop farm. Bury
The Book of Lost Friends
deep in the earth and forget everything that’s happened. Forget how Elam lies broken. If he lives, he’ll never be the same, the doctor says. Never walk again. Never ride.

This Texas is a bad place. A mean place.

But here I stand, breathing its air another day, watching this café I walked halfway across town to find, and thinking,
Could this traveler’s hotel be the one?
If it is, was all this worth the doing? All this spilled blood and misery? Maybe even the loss of a brave man’s life?

I study on a walnut-brown girl who carries lemonade in a glass pitcher, pours it for two white ladies in their summer bonnets. I watch a light-skinned colored man carry a platter, a half-grown boy bring out a rag to wipe up a spill on the floor.
Do they look like me? Would I know my people by sight after all these years?

I remember the names, where they left us, who carried them away.
But did I lose their faces? Their eyes? Their noses? Their voices?

I watch awhile longer.

Silly thing,
I tell myself over and again, knowing it’s likely the Irishman horse thief made it all up, that story.