The Book of Lost Friends

by Lisa Wingate

  How’d Missy get herself tied up with men like these? I need to find the why of it, and so I open her lace bag to see what’s there. Inside is a kerchief that smells like it’s got corn pone wrapped inside. Missy don’t go too many places without food. My stomach squeezes while I finger through the rest of what she was carrying. A coin pouch with six Liberty dollars, Missy’s ivory hair combs, and, at the very bottom, something rolled up in one of Old Mister’s black silk cravats. The thing inside is hard and heavy and jingles a little when I unwrap it. A shudder goes through me as a little pearl-handle two-shot pistol and a pair of loose rimfire cartridges drops in my palm. I dump the pistol back in the cloth and sit looking at it on my knee.

  What’s Missy doing with something like that? She’s a fool for getting herself in this mess, that’s what she is. A fool.

  I let the pistol stay there while I open the corn pone and eat some. It’s dry and hard to get down without water, so I don’t eat much, just enough to settle my stomach and my head. I put the rest back in Missy’s reticule with the money pouch. Then I sit looking at the little pistol again.

  The smells of pipe smoke and leather, shaving soap and sipping whiskey rise up from the cloth that wrapped it, bringing to mind Old Mister. He’ll come home, and all this mess will be over, I tell myself. He’ll be good to his word about the land papers. He won’t let Old Missus stop it.

  Old Mister don’t know you’re here. The idea slips through my head, sudden as a thief. Nobody knows it. Not Missus. Not even Missy Lavinia. She thinks some yard boy drove her carriage to this place. Make your way home, Hannie. Don’t ever tell nobody what you seen tonight.

  That voice falls easy on my ear, takes me back to the last time somebody else tried to get me to bolt and run from trouble, but I didn’t do it. If I had, maybe I’d still have a sister right now. One, at least.

  “We oughta take our chance,” my sister Epheme had whispered to me all them years ago when Jep Loach had us behind his wagon. We’d stumbled off into the woods to do our necessary, just us two little girls. Our bodies were stiff and sore from walking and whippings and nights on the froze-up ground. The morning air spit ice and the wind moaned like the devil when Epheme looked in my eye and said, “We oughta run, Hannie. You and me. We oughta, while we can.”

  My heart pounded from fear and cold. Just the night before, Jep Loach had held his knife in the firelight and told us what he’d do if we troubled him. “M-m-marse is comin’ to f-fetch us,” I’d stammered out, too nervous to work my mouth right.

  “Ain’t nobody gonna save us. We got to save ourselves.”

  Epheme was just nine, three years older than me, but she was brave. Her words peck at me now. She was right back then. We should’ve run while we could. Together. Epheme got sold off, two days farther down the road, and that’s the last I ever laid eyes on her.

  I oughta run now, before I get shot or worse.

  Why’s it my trouble, what young Missy’s got herself into? Her and that girl, that Juneau Jane, who’s been fetched up like a queen all these years? Why I oughta care? What’d anybody ever give me? Hard work till my body screams from it and my hands bleed raw from the cotton thorns and I fall to bed nine in the evening, then get up at four the next morning, start all over again.

  One more season. Just one more season, and you’re finally gonna have something, Hannie. Something of your own. Make a life. Jason maybe ain’t the quickest in the head, not as exciting as some, but he’s a fine, honest worker. You know he’d be good to you.

  Get walking. Get back into your dress and burn these clothes soon’s you make it to home. Nobody ever need know. The plan sets up in my head. I’ll tell Tati I been holed up in the cellar of the Grand House, couldn’t slip out because there’s too many hired boys out sweeping the yard, then I fell asleep after that.

  Nobody’s got to know.

  I set my teeth in that idea, and put away the pistol, cinch up Missy’s reticule, hard and angry. What’d I do to deserve this mess, anyhow? Stuck here hiding in some wagon camp, dead of night, man chasing after me, wants to shoot me and dump me in the river?

  Nothing. That’s what. Just like the old days. Young Missy starts her mean ideas to rolling downhill, sits back and waits for somebody to get smushed. Then she stands with her fat little hands behind her back, rocking on them round little feet, proud that she’s got away with it.

  Not this time. Missy Lavinia can find her own way out of trouble.

  I’m bound to get myself to the edge of town while it’s still dark, seek a place off the road to hunker down till first light. Can’t start for home till then. Colored folk traveling alone, there’s still plenty of riders working the night roads, same as the patrollers did back in the old times, keep our kind from going place to place, unless they’re doing business for white folk.

  Peeking from the tarps, I look over the wagon camp to figure my best way out. Closer toward the landing, a flash of a man in a white shirt catches my eye. I pull back, in case he’s looking at me. Then I see it ain’t a man, just a set of clothes that’s been hung up in a tree branch to dry out overnight. The little cook fire underneath sputters down to coals. A wagon curtain is stretched across and tied to the branch, a net slung over it to keep off the mosquitos.

  A big pair of feet pushes up against the net, flopped out sidewards.

  The first part of my plan comes clear. I slip from my hiding spot, step soundless on the ground, and move through the patches of shadow and moon to that camp.

  I take the hat that dangles there, change it for the one on my head, and try not to think about if it’s thieving when you take somebody’s hat but leave your own in trade for it. In case Moses, or the scarred man, or his workers are still hunting me, I’ll look different when I get on the road tomorrow.

  My fingers fly up and down my shirt, undoing the bone buttons. I slip it off and reach for the stranger’s white one before the mosquitos have time to get after me. The collar hangs up when I tug, and even though I’m tall, I have to jump to get it loose without tearing. The branch snaps back and pulls at the man’s camp shelter, and he tosses on his pallet, snorts and coughs.

  I stay still as the dead, waiting for him to settle, before I throw my old shirt on the branch and run off half-naked, carrying his. I hunker down in a stubble field just off from the camps to get dressed. A dog barks in the woods, and then another with it. Then a third. They sing the long, wavering song of a hunt. I hark to the days when the overseers and the patrollers rode the night with their tracking hounds, chasing after the runners that tried to hide in the swamps or head north. Sometimes, the runaways got caught quick. Sometimes, they’d stay out there for months. A few never came back, and we hoped they’d made their way to the free states we’d all heard of.

  Mostly, the runners got hungry, or sick with fever, or lonesome for their people, and they wandered home on their own. What happened then depended on their marse or missus. But if a runner got caught in the field, the patrollers would let their dogs chew flesh from bone before dragging whatever was left back to the home plantation. Then everybody, the field hands and the house girls and all the little children on that place, would be stood out to see the poor, tore-up soul and watch the lashing that was to come.

  Old Gossett never kept a runner. Always said if a slave wasn’t grateful to be fed good and not worked on Sunday except during sugar season, and kept in clothes and shoes, and not sold off from their family, he wasn’t worth having. Nearly all of the Gossett help had been raised on the place, but the slaves that’d come from the Loach family as wedding gifts to Old Missus, they had different stories to tell. Their bodies spoke in scars, and the nubs of cutoff fingers and toes, and twisted arms and legs healed crooked after being broke. Was from them and others on plantations near Goswood Grove that we learned how other folks had it. Our worst worry day by day was to watch out for Old Missus’s bad temper. A life could be meane
r than that, and many were.

  I don’t want them dogs in the woods to get after me, and since I can’t tell what they’re chasing tonight, I figure I better hide up closer to town, maybe try to find myself a ride out on a wagon come morning. I could pay for it with the money in Missy’s reticule, but I don’t dare.

  I ponder that, squatting there in the stubble while I button up the shirt placket. Tucking the hem over Missy’s reticule in my britches waist, I cinch John’s leather belt tight to hold it. Makes me shaped like a fat-bellied boy, which is good. Fat boy in a white shirt and a gray hat. The more different I look from before, the better. Now I just need to find a likely wagon and hide before morning, when that man sees the clothes he left to dry been traded out instead.

  The dogs work closer and closer up the woods, so I cross the camp yard again, move near the river landing and listen at the men talking. I watch for just the right kind of wagon—one where the driver’s alone and the horses hadn’t been rubbed down and picketed, which means they’re headed for home at daybreak.

  Light warms the sky by the time I find what I need. A old colored man guides his mules to the front of the line. The load in his wagon is covered over and tied down tight. Driver’s so crippled, he can’t hardly get down off the seat, and I hear him say he’s from a place upriver. When the workers untie the ropes, underneath the canvas is a fancy piano like the one Old Missus had before the war. It sings lopsided notes as the men take it down, and the driver limps after it up the boardwalk to the boat, bossing every step.

  I start on my way toward that wagon, listening as voices mix with the noise of ropes whining and chains jangling and pulleys squealing. Mules and cows and horses kick and fret while the men make ready to load livestock. Right after that will come passengers, last of all.

  Don’t run, I tell myself, though every inch of muscle and bone inside me wants to. Move like you hadn’t got a worry at all. Like you’re just here working the docks with all the rest. Easy-like.

  I pass by a stack of empty crates, grab two and heft them on my shoulders, keeping my head down between. The hat slips low, so’s all I can see is the strip of ground in front of my feet. I hear Moses’s deep voice someplace nearby hollering out orders.

  A pair of stovepipe boots stop in my path. I pull up short, squeezing the crates hard against my head. Don’t look up.

  The boots half turn my way. I tooth my bottom lip, bite hard.

  “These’uns get took straight where you been told,” the man says. I catch my breath that it ain’t Moses’s voice and he don’t seem to be talking to me, then I check and see it’s a big white man, telling a couple stevedores where to haul some trunks. “Best be quick at it, or you’ll get you a ride on that boat. Wind up in Texas.”

  Past the man, farther on toward the river, is Moses. He stands ramrod-straight under a hanging lantern, one tall boot braced on the boardwalk and one in the mud. His palm rests over the pistol holstered to his thigh while he points and yells and tells workers where to put the goods. Every minute or two, he steps up on the boardwalk and takes a wide look around, like he’s watching for something. I hope it ain’t me.

  I move back as the two big trunks get pushed by, strapped on handcarts. A wheel slips off the cypress planks that’ve been laid over the mud, and the lift handle snaps in two, sending a trunk and the worker sidewards. Something thumps inside the box, hollow like a melon. A whimper comes, low, soft.

  The big white man steps forward, holds the trunk from falling on its side. “Best take care,” he says while the stevedore gets to his feet. “Bruise up Boss’s new dogs, he’d be mighty displeased. Watch them wheels.” He puts a knee and shoulder under the trunk to help get it upright on the planks again. Just as he does, something shiny gold falls through a crack along the trunk slats. It snakes down silent and lands in the mud next to the man’s foot. I know what it is, even before the workers and the man move on, and I set down one of my crates and scoop up what’s been left on the ground.

  I open my hand and, there in my palm, glittering in the gas lamp’s flickery light, sits the little gold locket Missy Lavinia’s been wearing since she got it for Christmas Day when she was six years old.

  She’d be dead in her grave before she’d give that up.

  CHAPTER 8

  BENNY SILVA—AUGUSTINE, LOUISIANA, 1987

  The books keep me going. I dream of those books hidden away at Goswood Grove, of tall mahogany shelves with volumes upon volumes of literary treasures, and ladders reaching to the sky. For several days in a row, when I come home from school feeling discouraged by my lack of progress with the kids, I put on my duck shoes and make the trek down the farm levee lane, slip through the crape myrtles, and follow the moss-carpeted paths of the old garden. I stand on the porch like a kid before the Macy’s display window at Christmas, and fantasize about what might be possible if I could get my hands on those books.

  Loren Eiseley, who was the subject of one of my favorite term papers, wrote, If there is magic in this world, it is contained in water, but I have always known that if there is magic in this world, it is contained in books.

  I need magic. I need a miracle, a superpower. In almost two weeks, I have taught these kids nothing but how to bum cheap snack cakes and sleep in class…and that I will physically bar the door if they try to leave before the bell rings, so don’t try it. Now they skip my class altogether. I don’t know where they are, just that they’re not in my room. My unexcused absence reports sit unbothered on a massive stack of similar pink slips in the office. Principal Pevoto’s grand plan to turn this school around is in danger of falling victim to the way things have always been. He is like the overburdened character in Eiseley’s often printed story, throwing beached starfish back into the ocean one by one, while the tide continually deposits more along an endless and merciless shore.

  With most of the classroom books now missing, I have resorted to reading aloud from Animal Farm daily. This, to high school kids who should be reading for themselves. They don’t mind. A few even listen, peeking surreptitiously from the battery of folded arms, drooped heads, and closed eyes.

  LaJuna is not among my audience. After our hopeful encounter at the Cluck and Oink, she’s been absent Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and now Thursday. I’m disappointed in a soul-crushing sort of way.

  Across the hall, a substitute teacher screams incessantly during my readings as she attempts to control science room chaos. The science teacher who started the year with me has already given up and claimed she had to move home because of a flare-up in her mother’s lupus. She’s gone. Just like that.

  I keep telling myself I will not quit. Period. I will gain access to that library at Goswood Grove. Maybe I’m expecting too much, but I can’t help believing that, for kids who are given so few choices on a daily basis, just having some could be huge. Beyond that, I want them to see that there is no faster way to change your circumstance than to open a great book.

  Books were the escape hatch that carried me away during long, lonely times when my mother was gone. During the years I grew up wondering why my father didn’t want much to do with me, and the times I landed in schools where, with my wild black curls and olive-toned skin, I looked different from everyone else, and kids curiously inquired, What are you, anyway? Books made me believe that smart girls who didn’t necessarily fit in with the popular crowd could be the ones to solve mysteries, rescue people in distress, ferret out international criminals, fly spaceships to distant planets, take up arms and fight battles. Books showed me that not all fathers understand their daughters or even seek to, but that people can turn out okay despite that. Books made me feel beautiful when I wasn’t. Capable when I couldn’t be.

  Books built my identity.

  I want that for my students. For those lonely, hollow faces and unsmiling mouths and dulled, discouraged eyes that stare at me from the desks day after day.

  The s
chool library will not be a suitable source, even temporarily. The kids are not allowed to take books out because they can’t be trusted with them. The city library, housed two blocks from the school in an old Carnegie building, is slowly fading into oblivion. The good, fully modern, and well-equipped library is, of course, situated out by the lake, far beyond our reach.

  I need to know what help can be found in the hoard at Goswood Grove. To that end, I have asked Coach Davis if I might borrow a pair of the binoculars they use in the announcer’s stand during games. He shrugged and muttered that he’d have one of the students bring them over after last period, but this being Thursday, he’d need them back by Friday for the football game.

  Following the last-period bell, I diddle around my empty classroom until Lil’ Ray and the skinny kid with the always perfectly coiffed hair finally show up at my door. Michael, the other boy, is one of Lil’ Ray’s favorite toadies.

  “Mister Rust. Mister Daigre. I’m assuming Coach Davis sent you with something for me?”

  “Mmm-hmmm.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Because Coach has sent the boys, they are as meek as lambs and display good manners, to boot. Lil’ Ray apologizes for not getting here sooner. Michael nods.

  “It’s all right. I appreciate the delivery.” They eyeball the snack-cake drawer, but I don’t offer. After dealing with these two knuckleheads desk wrestling and mouthing off daily in class, I’m shocked and almost peeved by all this politeness. “Tell Coach Davis thanks.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” skinny Michael says when Lil’ Ray hands over the binoculars.

  They start out the door, then Lil’ Ray snaps his head up like he hates to ask, but somehow he must know, “What’d you want them spyglasses for?”

  “What do you want those spyglasses for?” I correct. “Remember, you’re in the English room, which means English class rules apply.”

  Michael looks down at his feet, smirks my way. “Lil’ Ray and me are in the hall, though.”