The Book of Lost Friends

by Lisa Wingate

  What I feel, I guess, is mercy. Mercy like I’d want for myself if it was me in that bed.

  Juneau Jane touches him first. “Papa, Papa.” She falls to his side and takes his hand, and presses her face to it. Her skinny shoulders quake. After coming all this way and keeping brave, this is the thing that breaks her.

  Missy Lavinia’s got hold of my arm with both hands. Tight. She don’t move one inch closer to him. I pat her the way I would’ve when she was tiny. “Now, you go on. He ain’t gonna bite you. Got blood poison from the bullet, that’s all. It ain’t nothing you can catch from him. You sit here on this stool. Hold his hand and don’t start that squeaking noise you did on the freight wagon, or fuss, or cry, or make any commotion. You be kind and give him comfort and peace. See if he’ll wake up a little to talk.”

  She ain’t willing, though. “Come on, now,” I tell her. “That doctor said he won’t wake up much anymore, if he does at all.” I put her down on the stool and lean over crooked because she’s weighing on my arm, digging her fingers into it.

  “Sit up, now.” I pull her hat off and set it on the little cabinet shelf over the bed. Every plank-wood bunk in the room, maybe a dozen on each wall, looks same as this one, but the rest have mattresses rolled up. A sparrow flits round the rafters like a soul trapped inside flesh and bone.

  I smooth down Missy’s thin, wispy hair, pull it behind her head. Wish her daddy didn’t have to see her this way, if he does wake, that is. The doctor’s wife was scandaled by the sight of us when we said these were the man’s daughters who’d come to find him. She’s a kindly woman and wanted Missy Lavinia and Juneau Jane to wash up and borrow proper clothes to wear, but Juneau Jane wouldn’t go anyplace except to the bedside. I guess we’ll be in boys’ clothes awhile longer.

  “Papa,” Juneau Jane cries, shaking head to toe and praying in French. She signs the cross on her chest, over and over again. “Aide-nous, Dieu. Aide-nous, Dieu…”

  He tosses and blinks and thrashes on the pillow, moans and moves his lips, then quiets and pulls long breaths, drifts farther away from us.

  “Don’t expect overmuch,” the doctor warns again from his desk by the fireplace at one end of the room.

  The wagon driver told us the tale on the ride upriver. He takes the route regular, to the fort and to Scabtown that’s across water from the fort. Old Mister was brought here from the jail in Mason to plead his case and tell the post commander what he knew about the man who sold him the horse that was the army’s, but he didn’t make it that far. Somebody bushwhacked them on the way, shot one soldier before they could get to some cover to fight it out. The soldier died right off, and Old Mister was nicked in the head. He was in pretty poor shape by the time he got carried on into the fort. The post doctor worked on Old Mister in the hopes to revive him and learn if he knew who had set on them and why. They supposed it might be somebody Mister knew and maybe even the horse thief who’d sold the stole army horses. They wanted to catch him pretty bad. Even more if he’d killed a soldier.

  I can tell them about the Irishman, but what will it help? He was already in the army’s hands in Fort Worth town, so he ain’t the one who done the bushwhacking. If Old Mister knows the man to blame for it, he won’t tell. The only person Mr. William Gossett might know down here is the one he come all this way seeking. A son who don’t want to be found.

  I hold my peace about it, keep quiet all day and the next day and the next, though I’d like to tell them of Lyle, and how Old Mister sent him from Louisiana two years back, a boy only sixteen, running from a charge of murder. And how Lyle had care of the land in Texas, the land that was meant for Juneau Jane’s inheritance someday, and Lyle sold it when it didn’t belong to him. A boy who’d do that might shoot his own papa.

  I don’t tell a soul. I’m afraid it won’t go good for us here if I do. I keep my secrets while our days pass at the fort, Old Mister trapped twixt living or dying. The doctor’s wife looks after us and gets us into proper clothes, collected up from the other wives at the fort. We look after Old Mister and each other.

  Juneau Jane and me spend time with The Book of Lost Friends. Regiments of colored cavalrymen live here at the fort. Buffalo soldiers, they’re called. They’re men that hail from far and wide, and men who travel far and wide, too. Way out into the wild lands. We ask after the names in our book, and we listen to the soldiers’ stories, and we write the names of their people in the book and where they were carried away from.

  “Stay clear of Scabtown,” they tell us. “It’s too rough a place for ladies.”

  Feels strange to be womenfolk again, after all this time as boys. It’s harder, in a way, but I wouldn’t go out from the fort or to that town anyhow. A knowing’s been brewing in me again. I feel something coming, but I can’t say what.

  It’s a bad thing, though.

  The knowing keeps me close to soldiers and never out farther than the hospital building, which sits away from the others so’s not to spread sickness if there is some. I watch the officers’ wives move round, and their children play. I watch the soldiers drill, form up their companies, play bugles, and leave to the West in long lines, side by side on their tall bay horses.

  I wait for Old Mister to breathe his last.

  And I watch the horizons.

  We’re two weeks at the fort on the day I look out from the room the doctor’s wife has us three girls sleeping in, and I see one man alone, riding in off the prairie at the break of day, no more than a shadow in the bare light. The doctor has said Old Mister’s body won’t last through today, tomorrow at longest, so I think maybe that rider is the death angel, finally come to bring us peace from this trial. Old Mister’s been troubling my dreams. A restless spirit that won’t leave me be. He wants to tell something before he goes. He’s holding a secret, but his time’s run out.

  I hope he can let go of it and won’t haunt me after he’s departed his earthly shell. That thought troubles my mind as I study the death angel on his horse gliding through the early fog. I’m up and dressed in a blue calico like the one we bought for Juneau Jane back in Jefferson. The hem hangs a little short on me, but it ain’t unseemly. I don’t need to pad out the bodice like we did with Juneau Jane.

  I’m pulled from the window when Missy wakes and goes to gagging and holding her mouth. I’m almost too slow with the washbasin to stop her from messing the floor.

  Juneau Jane staggers out of bed and dips a cloth in the pitcher and hands it to me after. Her eyes are red and hollowed out. The child’s heart is weary from all this waiting. “Nos devons en parler,” she says, and nods at Missy. We need to talk about it.

  “Not today,” I tell her, because I understand enough of her Frenchy talk, now. We use it round the fort when we don’t want others to know what we say. This place is crowded with folks who wonder at the secrets we might hold. “We ain’t talking about Missy today. Be time enough for it tomorrow. Her trouble ain’t going nowhere.”

  “Elle est enceinte.” No need for Juneau Jane to explain that last big word to me. We both know Missy is carrying. Her monthly hasn’t come in all this time we been traveling. She’s sick most mornings, and so tender in the breasts, no way she’d let me bind her up, even if we were still wearing boys’ clothes. She fusses and squirms just over a corset tied loose, which she’s got to have to be decent here.

  Juneau Jane and me have left it unsaid till now, ignoring it separate and hoping that’d make it not true. I don’t want to think about how it happened, or who the baby’s father might be. One thing’s certain, it won’t be long before the doctor or his wife figures us out. We can’t stay here much longer.

  “Today is for your papa,” I say to Juneau Jane. The words catch in my throat, hang there with little hooks like sandburs from a dry field. “You fix yourself up real pretty now. You want that I help you with your hair? It’s growed out a little.”

  She nods and swall
ows hard, sits down on the edge of the little bed where she slept. There’s two iron steads and ticking mattresses. I take a pallet on the floor. That’s the only way folks let two white women and a colored girl stay in the same room—if the colored girl sleeps like the slaves did, at the foot of the bed.

  Juneau Jane sits stiff, her shoulders poking from her cotton shift. Tight cords of muscle run under her skin. Her chin puckers, and she bites her lips together.

  “It’s all right to cry,” I tell her.

  “My mother did not approve of such things,” she says.

  “Well, I think I don’t approve of her much.” Over time, I’ve gathered a low opinion of this girl’s mama. My mama might’ve been stole away from me young, but while she could, she spoke all good things into me. Things that lasted. It’s the words a mama says that last the longest of all. “And anyhow, she ain’t here, is she?”

  “Non.”

  “You ever going back to see her?”

  Juneau Jane shrugs. “I cannot say. She is all I have left.”

  My heart squeezes up. I don’t want her to go back. Not to a woman who’d sell off a daughter into the hands of any man offering a money settlement to have her for a mistress. “You’ve got me, Juneau Jane. We’re kin. Did you know that? My mama and your papa had the same daddy, so they were part brother and sister, though nobody talks of such. When my mama was just a tiny baby, my grandmama had to leave her and go to the Grand House to be wet nurse to the new white baby. That man laying there in the hospital now? He’s half uncle to me. You ain’t alone in this world after your daddy’s gone. I want you to know that today.” I go on and tell her more about Old Mister and my mama being born only months apart, half brother and sister. “You and me, we’re cousins some way.”

  I hand her the mirror to hold, and when she looks at the two of us in it, she smiles, then rests her cheek against my arm. Tears fill soft gray eyes that turn upward at the edges like mine.

  “We’ll be all right,” I say, but don’t know how. We’re two lost souls, her and me, wandering the world far from home. And where is home now, anyway?

  I go to work on Juneau Jane’s hair and turn back to look out the window again. The sun has crested the ridge, driving the fog off the hillside. The shadow man has turned to flesh and blood. Not the death angel, but somebody I know.

  I lean over to see him better, watch as he pulls off his gloves, tucks them in his belt, and talks to two men down in the yard below. That’s Moses. I’ve learned some things of him since we been at the fort awhile. Heard tales. Men will talk when it’s a colored girl nearby, not a white woman. They think a colored girl can’t hear. Can’t understand. Knows nothin’. The doctor’s wife is one to talk, too. She gathers with the women of the fort for coffee and tea in the hot afternoons, and they chatter of all their husbands said over suppers and breakfasts.

  Moses ain’t what I thought that first time I saw him at the riverboat landing back in Louisiana. Not a bad man, nor a lawbreaker, nor a servant to the man with the patch on his eye, the Lieutenant.

  His name ain’t even Moses. It’s Elam. Elam Salter.

  He is a deputy U.S. marshal.

  A colored man, a deputy U.S. marshal! I can hardly imagine, but it’s true. The soldiers here tell tales of him. He speaks a half dozen Indian tongues, was a runaway from a plantation in Arkansas before the war and went to the Indian Territory. He lived with the Indians and learned all their ways. He knows the wild country, inch by inch.

  He wasn’t among them bad men to help in their wicked deeds, but to hunt the leaders of that group we’ve been hearing about, the Marston Men. Elam Salter has tracked them ’cross three states and all through Indian Territory. The wagon driver on the freight trip told it true. Their group’s stirred evil talk and got folks rabid mad.

  Their leader, this Marston, will stop at nothing, the doctor’s wife told her ladies. Surrounds himself with murderers and thieves. His followers would go with him straight off a cliff and never look twice, that’s what I heard.

  Elam Salter will chase them from heaven’s gate to the devil’s parlor, a buffalo soldier said of him. Up through the Indian Territory where the Kiowas and Comanches pitch their camps, down into Mexico where the federales would kill any U.S. lawman they could, and out west of here where the Apaches roam.

  Elam Salter keeps his hair shaved off so he’s not worth scalping. Takes that razor to his head every week unfailing, they say.

  Men gather to him now, buffalo soldiers and white soldiers greeting the deputy marshal as a friend. Looking on from the window, I think of those moments in that alley, his body pressing me to the wall, my heart pounding against his. Go, he said and turned me loose.

  That might’ve been my dying day, otherwise. Or might be I would’ve found myself chained in the hold of a ship bound for British Honduras with the Marston Men, a slave again, my freedom gone. The fort women say they steal people—colored folk, white women, and girls.

  I want to thank Elam Salter for saving us. But everything about him pulls me in and scares me at the same time. The idea of him is a flame I stretch my fingers toward, then draw back. Even through the glass, I can feel his power.

  There’s a knock at the door. The doctor’s wife has come with word that we oughtn’t dally overmuch in getting down to the hospital. The doctor says Old Mister’s time is close.

  “We’d best get on,” I say and finish Juneau Jane’s hair. “Your daddy needs us to tell him it’s all right to leave. Say the death psalm over his body. You know it?”

  Juneau Jane nods and stands up and straightens her dress.

  “Hmmm-hmmmm…hmmm-hmmm, hmmm-hmmm,” Missy Lavinia carries on, rocking in the corner. I let her keep at it while we get her dressed and ready to go out the door.

  “Now, it’s time you stop that noise,” I say finally. “Your daddy don’t need more worries to carry when he goes from this world. No matter what complaints you got with the man, he is still your daddy. Hush up now.”

  Missy stops her song, and we go to Old Mister’s bedside, quiet and respectable. Juneau Jane holds his hand and kneels on the hard floor. Young Missy sits quiet on the stool. The doctor has muslin curtains hung from the rafters and drawn round the bed, so it’s only the four of us in that strange, colorless piece of the world. White stones in white lime plaster, white rafters, white sheet against blue-purple arms that lay limp and thin. A face pale as the linens.

  Breath sifts in and out of him.

  An hour. Then two.

  We say the 23rd Psalm, Juneau and me. We tell him it’s all right to go.

  But he lingers.

  I know why. It’s the secret that’s still inside him. The thing that brings him to haunt my dreams, but that he never speaks. He can’t turn loose of it.

  Missy starts fidgeting, and it’s plain enough, she needs the privy. “We’ll come back,” I say, and touch Juneau Jane’s shoulder as I take Missy out. Before I close the curtain, I see her lay forward and rest her cheek on her papa’s chest. She starts singing a soft hymn to him in French.

  A soldier sitting up in a bed at the other end of the room closes his eyes and listens.

  I take Missy to do her necessary, which is more work now with her in a proper dress. The day is hot, and by the time we’re done, I’ve worked to a sweat. From a distant, I stand and look at the hospital, and the sun and the hot wind washes over me. I am dry and weary in spirit and body. Dry as that wind and filled with dust.

  “Have mercy,” I whisper, and move Missy to a rough bench aside a building with a wide porch. I settle in the shade and sit by her, rest my head back and close my eyes, finger Grandmama’s beads. The wind fans the live oaks overhead and the cottonwoods in the valley. The river birds sing their songs not far off.

  Missy takes up the sound of a wagon axle but just real quiet now, “hmmm-hmmm….”

  The tune gets farther
and farther off, like she’s floating away downwater, or I am. You better look over and check on her, I think.

  But I don’t open my eyes. I’m tired, that’s all. Bone tired of traveling, and sleeping on floors, and trying to know what’s right to do. My hand falls away from Grandmama’s beads, rests in my lap. The air smells of caliche soil, and yucca plants with their strange tall stalks bloomed up in white flowers, and prickly pear cactus with sweet pink fruits, and sagebrush and feathered grasses, stretched out to the far horizon. I float off on it. Float off on it like the big water Grandmama used to tell of. I go all the way to Africa where the grass grows red and brown and gold by the acre and all the blue beads are back together on a string, and they hang on the neck of a queen.

  This place is like Africa. It’s the last thought I have. I laugh soft as I sail away over that grass. Here I am in Africa.

  A touch on my arm startles me awake. I hadn’t been there long, I can tell by the sun.

  Elam Salter is standing over me. He’s got Missy by the elbow. She’s carrying a handful of wildflowers, some pulled up by the roots. Dry soil falls down and glitters in the sunlight. One of Missy’s fingernails is bleeding.

  “I found her wandering,” Elam says from under the trimmed mustache that circles his lips like three sides of a picture frame. He’s got a pretty mouth. Wide and serious, with a thick, full bottom lip. His eyes in this light are the brown-gold of polished amber.

  Even as I notice all that, my heart jumps up pounding, and my mind spins so fast I can’t catch a single thought. Every last tired shred of me comes alive at once, and it’s like I been woke up by that swamp panther I once thought he was. Don’t know whether to run or stand and stare because I’ll likely never again be this close to something so beautiful and so frightful.

  “Oh…” I hear my own words from far off. “I didn’t mean her to.”

  “It isn’t the safest place for her, out past the fort,” he tells me, and I can see there’s more he won’t say about the danger. He guides Missy to the bench. I noticed how he sits her down gentle-like and shifts her hand to her lap, so the flowers won’t get ruined. He’s a good man.