The Book of Lost Friends

by Lisa Wingate

  “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 foll
ows 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.”

  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.”

  CHAPTER 19

  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?”