by Lisa Wingate
“Oh.”
“The judge didn’t, either. Come in this way much.” He laughs a little. “Funny, that’s one of the things I remember about him. He liked to use the kitchen door. Steal a little food on the way through. Dicey always kept biscuits or bread or something like that around. And cookies in the jar.”
I think of the square art deco glass canisters in the kitchen, picture the large one filled with pooperoos.
“Tea cakes.” Nathan alters my mental imagery.
Tea cakes do seem more appropriate for this place. Every inch of her speaks of what she was in her youth. Grand, opulent, an extravagant feast for the eyes. She’s an old woman now, this house. One whose bone structure still shows how lovely she once was.
I can’t imagine living in a place like this. Nathan looks as if he can’t, either. He rubs the back of his neck the way he always does when he considers Goswood Grove, as if every brick, beam, corbel, and stone weigh on him.
“I just don’t…care about this stuff, you know?” he says, as we move to the bottom of double staircases that spiral in opposite directions like twin sisters. “I never felt a connection the way Robin did. The judge would probably turn over in his grave if he knew I was the one who ended up in charge of it.”
“I doubt that.” I muse on the stories I’ve heard about Nathan’s grandfather. I think he was, in some ways, a man uncomfortable with his position in this town, that he struggled to navigate the inequities here, the nature of things, even the history of this land and this house. It haunted him, yet he wasn’t ready to fight the battle in big ways, and so he compensated in little ways, by doing things for the community, for people who’d lost their way, by buying books from charity auctions and sets of encyclopedias from kids working to pay for college or a car. By taking LaJuna under his wing when she came here with her great-aunt.
“I really believe he’d trust your decisions, Nathan. Personally, I think he’d want to finally acknowledge the history of Goswood and the history of this town.”
“You, Benny Silva, are a crusader.” He cups a hand along the side of my face, smiles at me. “You remind me of Robin…and I don’t know about the judge, but Robin would have liked your Underground project.” He chokes on the words, pushes his lips together, swallows hard, and shakes off emotion almost apologetically as he lets his hand drop to the well-worn bannister. “She would’ve liked you.”
I feel as if she’s there in the room with us, the sister he loved so much and grieves so deeply. I’ve always wanted a sister. “I wish I could have met her.”
Another intake of breath, and then he shrugs toward the landing above, inviting me to start upward first. “My mother said, whatever Robin had been working on, that she’d been doing a lot of research, compiling papers but keeping them private. Something to do with the house and things she learned from the judge’s files and journals. You didn’t find documents like that in the library, did you? Robin’s or the judge’s?”
“Nothing other than what I’ve already shown you. Nothing recent, for sure.” A note of intrigue plays in my head. I’d give anything to have even one conversation with Robin.
One probably wouldn’t be enough.
I see a photo of her finally, upstairs in her room. Not a childhood photo, like the faded studio portraits downstairs in the parlor, but a grown-up one. The driftwood frame sits on the delicate, spindle-legged writing desk, offering an image of a smiling woman with pale blond hair. She’s slight and narrow-faced. The deep blue-green orbs of her eyes seem to dominate the photo. They’re warm, beautiful eyes. Her brother’s eyes.
She’s standing on a shrimp boat with Nathan, then a teenager, in the background. They’re both laughing as she holds up a hopelessly tangled fishing rod. “The boat was our uncle’s.” Nathan looks over my shoulder. “On my mom’s side. She didn’t grow up with money, but man oh man, her dad and her uncles knew how to have a good time. We’d hitch on the shrimp boats once in a while, ride along wherever they were going. Drop a line if we could. Maybe get off here or there and stay a day or two. Paps and his brothers knew everybody and were related to half the population around there.”
“Sounds like fun.” I picture it again—the shrimp boat, Nathan’s other life. His ties down on the coast.
“It was. Mom couldn’t stand to be back in the swamp for very long, though. Sometimes people have a thing about where they come from and how they were raised. She married a guy fifteen years older and rich, and she always felt like people on both sides faulted her for it—gold digger and that kind of thing. She didn’t know what to do with all that, so she moved away from it. Asheville gave her the art scene, sort of a new identity, you know?”
“Yeah, I do.” More than I can possibly say. When I left home, I expunged every bit of my past, or I tried to, at least. Augustine has taught me that the past travels with you. It’s whether you run from it or learn from it that makes all the difference.
“It’s not as hard as I thought it would be…coming in here,” Nathan says, but the stiff way he carries himself says otherwise. “I have no idea what we’re looking for, though. And to tell you the truth, whatever it is, it could be gone. Will and Manford and their wives and kids let themselves in and appropriated most of what they wanted right after Robin died.”
Even though Robin has been gone for two years, our search of her room feels uncomfortably invasive. Her personal belongings are still here. We carefully check drawers, shelves, the closet, a box in the corner, an old leather suitcase. All of it looks as if it has been previously rummaged through, then dumped haphazardly back into place.
We come up with nothing of significance. Credit card bills and medications, letters from friends, holiday notes, blank stationery, a journal with a cute little gold hasp on the front. It’s unlocked, the key still tucked among the pages, but when Nathan leafs through, all he finds is Robin’s reading list, complete with favorite quotations jotted down, mini summaries of each book, and the dates she started and finished. Sometimes she read several books in a week, everything from classics and Westerns to nonfiction and the Reader’s Digest condensed editions from the boxes downstairs.
“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…
CHAPTER 27
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.
Had the hat shot off his head twice.
Horse shot out from under him three times.
Brung in the outlaw Dange Higgs, single-handed.
Tracked that half-breed Ben John Lester into Indian Territory and clean up through Kansas. Elam Salter can bird-dog a trail like no other.
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.
