The Book of Lost Friends: A Novel (17 page)

We can’t leave this place. Not today. When the woman and the child come, I’ll think what to tell them, but hearing all them papers matters most.

“What’s that next one say?” First time in my life I ever been hungry for words, but I’m hungry for these like I been starved since a six-year-old child. I want to know how to look at the scratch marks up there and turn them into people and places.

Juneau Jane reads me another. Then another, but I don’t hear her Frenchy voice. I hear the rasp of a old woman, looking for the mama she ain’t seen since she was a little child like Mary Angel. Still carries that pain in her heart, like the wounds on the body, blood all dried up, but only way they’ll heal is to find what’s been lost.

I stand next to Juneau Jane, pick one square, then a different one, then another far across the wall.

I stand there looking at the wall, counting the squares in my head, ciphering. There’s so many people there, so many names.

Juneau Jane drops off her tiptoes after a while, rests her hands on her britches. “We must depart this place, you said this yourself. We must travel from here while enough time remains to us. The horses are saddled.”

I look over at Missy Lavinia, who’s huddled herself in the far corner of the building, the quilt clutched up to her neck. She’s staring at the little rainbows tossed over the room by that one pretty cut-glass window. “Might be if we wait a day, Missy would come to her mind by then, be less trouble to us.”

“You made mention of your concern that the old woman who brings our goods has become suspicious.”

“I
know
what I said,” I snap. “I’ve done some more considering on it. Tomorrow would be best.”

She argues with me again. She knows we can’t be safe here much longer.

“You just a little fancy girl,” I spit out finally, sharp, bitter words that pucker my mouth. “Prissy and been spoiled all your years so far, be some man’s pet the
rest
of your years. What do you know about the things in them papers? About how it is for my kind? How it is to yearn after your people and never know, are they alive, are they dead? You ever going to find them again in this world?”

She can’t see that the squares on the paper are like the holding pens in a trader’s yard. Every one, a story. Every one, a person, sold from here to there. “Long time after the war,
long
time, on
all
the plantations, the mamas and the pappies, they still come—just walk up the road one day, say, ‘I am here to get my children. My children belong to me now.’ Some been tromping over the whole country, gathering up their kin. The old marses or missuses can’t stop them after the freedom. But
nobody
ever comes up the road for me. I wait, but they don’t come and I can’t guess why. Maybe this is the way I find out.” I stab a finger toward the papers, say again. “I
got
to know, or I ain’t leaving here. I won’t.”

Before I can do a thing about it, Juneau Jane starts ripping down papers. “We’ll bring them with us, for reading as we go.” She even picks up the cut scraps from the floor.

“It’s thievin’,” I say. “Be wrong to take them from here.”

“Then I will burn them.” She hurries to the stove, cat quick, and opens the door. “I will burn them, and we will have nothing left for disagreement.”

“I’ll pull your little skinny arms off your body first.”

“These have been read previously by the people coming here.” She stands holding them by the stove. “And when we finish reading them, we will leave them with people who, perhaps, have not yet seen them. Would they not be of greater use there?”

I can’t argue against that, and part of me don’t want to, so I let it be.

We’re gone long before middle morning comes, and they’ll see we’ve left one of Missy’s dollar coins for the use of their church house…and for the papers.

We make a sight, traveling down the road, all three of us dressed in too-big britches. Juneau Jane’s got her long hair stuffed down the back of her shirt to hide it. Missy Lavinia’s feet dangle bare and pink while I ride behind her on Ginger. Old Missus would be up on her shoutin’ bench about those feet and ankles showing, if she could see. But Young Missy don’t say a thing, just hangs on and stares off into the woods, her face as pale and blank as the little patch of gray-blue sky up above the road.

I’m beginning to wonder, why hadn’t she come back to her mind, started talking again, like Juneau Jane? Is Missy gone for good? Is that bump on Missy’s head the difference, or does Juneau Jane just carry a stronger will?

Up ahead, Juneau Jane talks in French to her horse, laying over his mane with her arms strung along his neck.

When we stop in the afternoon for water and food, and to rest the horses, I come back out of the woods after my necessary, and there’s Juneau Jane with the skinning knife in one hand and a hank of something black in the other. All round her, like the wool sheared off a sheep, lays that long dark hair. She’s sitting in a nest of it, one side of her head looking like a shaggy baby bird’s. Maybe her mind’s not so much healed as I thought.

Missy Lavinia is sprawled out nearby, her eyes shifting up and down a little, lazy-like, watching that knife do its deed.

First thing that goes through my thoughts is,
Old Missus would have a fit about this, Hannie. You turned your back, left the child alone with a knife. It’s never the child’s fault for doing bad. It’ll be your fault for not watching closer. You’re the nursemaid.

I remind myself that I ain’t, and Juneau Jane ain’t my trouble, but still, I say, “What’d you do that for? Old Missus…” It’s halfway out of my mouth before I remember that Old Missus would flick this child off her porch like a tick. Squash her twixt two fingernails. “Could’ve just kept it tucked up under your hat till you get home. Your mama won’t like what you done. Your papa, either, when he comes back. Reason he always loved you best, is you always was a pretty little thing.”

She goes right on with her business.

“And he’ll come back, you just watch. If them bad men told you he was gone for good, they just lied because Missy paid them to. Bad men lie easy as breathin’. And your papa
won’t
like that…what you’re doing.”

Even I know that the only thing this girl’s got of value is the way she looks. Her mama will be watching for a man with money who’s interested in the girl. Ain’t as many of them as there used to be, but there’s still some. In the old days, they’d be trotting this child out at the quadroon balls by now, letting her get
seen
by all the rich planters and their sons. They’d be having conversations, working out a bargain with a man who’d keep her for hisself, but couldn’t ever marry her, even if he wanted.

“Take a long time for hair like that to grow back.”

She stares right through me, whacks off the hank in her fist, tosses it down like it’s the head of a snake, keeps right on. Grab, pull, cut. Must hurt, but she’s stony as them carved lions that sat on the gateposts at Goswood Grove before the war. “I’ll not be returning. Not until I’ve found Father, or the proof of my inheritance.”

“How you gonna do that?”

“I have decided to go to Texas.”

“Texas?” That settles my question of this girl’s mind. “How’re you getting to Texas? And once you’re there, where you plan to find your papa? Texas is a big place. You ever
seen
any of it? Because, I been there when Old Mister took us refugee. Texas is a wild land, full with rough men, and Indians that’ll cut that hair off your head
for
you, and the skin with it.”

A shudder runs through me, end to end. I remember Texas, and not in any good way I can think of. Not going back there. Ever.

But something else whispers in me, too:
Texas is where some of your people was carried off to.
Where you left Mama.

“My mother received word from Papa upon his arrival at the river port of Jefferson, Texas. He had engaged his solicitor there to defend the Gossett properties nearby, which
her
brother”—she gives a shrug toward Missy Lavinia, to let me know we’re talking about young Mister Lyle now; just the mention of that boy darkens my mind—“had unlawfully sold. Those lands are my inheritance, and Papa’s intent was that, once a settlement was reached in the lawsuit, the proceeds would be transferred to me, so as to assure my provision. The solicitor was to dispense with the legal matter immediately and if possible cause Lyle to return to Jefferson, that our papa might take him in hand. In his letter, Papa spoke with great concern of Lyle’s rash behavior and the company he had been keeping of late.”

I get a shiver, a bad feel. “Did your money come? Or word from Old Gossett that he’d
got
a hand on his son?”

“No further word arrived from Papa’s solicitor, a Mr. Washburn, or from Papa. Papa’s agent in New Orleans now puts forth that the letter in my mother’s possession is invalid and perhaps fraudulent, and until corroborating documents
or
Papa might be found, nothing more will be proceeded with.”

“It was that Mr. Washburn Missy was taking you to see in the building at the river landing, ain’t that so?” I try to line it all up in my mind, but with Lyle’s name in it, there’s no good way. “You remembering any more about that, yet?” Every time I ask her that, she just shakes her head.

She does that same thing again, but a little quake goes ’cross her shoulders, and her eyes skitter away. She’s remembering more than she wants to say. “I believe Lavinia knows no more of Mr. Washburn than I, and that the man has remained the entire time in Texas, even as
she
claimed he would be present to speak with us at the river landing.” Her eyes go cold and turn Missy’s way. “She bandied his name so as to lure me to the place and to have me waylaid there, but her arrangements went awry, and she was betrayed, as well.”

My stomach turns over. Would Missy do such a thing to her own half sister? Her blood kin?

Juneau Jane goes back to chopping hair. Scraps of afternoon sunshine flick off the knife blade and skim the tree roots and the moss and the palmetto leaves. “I will ask in Jefferson Port of Papa and pay a call to the office of Mr. Washburn and then discern what I must do next. I pray that Mr. Washburn be found an honest man, unaware that Lavinia had bandied his name. I pray also that I find Papa, and he is well.”

That girl hadn’t got the first idea what she’s saying,
I tell myself and stand up.
Best to quit talking, now.
Need to move along. Still a few hours left before dark.

Don’t know why I stop or why I turn round. “So, how you plan on getting to Texas?” Don’t know why I say that, either. “You got money? Because I learned my lesson about stealing away on them boats. They’ll drown you for that.”

“I have the gray horse.”

“You’d
sell
your horse?” She loves that horse and it loves her.

“If I must. For Papa.” She chokes on the last words, then swallows hard and stiffens up her mouth.

Comes to me then that, of the three children, this is the only one that maybe loves Old Gossett, instead of just looking to gain from the man.

We go quiet awhile. I feel my blood rushing through the muscles and flesh, hear it beat in my ears, wanting to be heard. Calling out.

“I think I might just take myself to Texas.” The words come in my own voice, but I don’t know who spoke them.
One more sharecrop season, Hannie. One. And that patch of ground at Goswood is yours. Yours and Tati’s and Jason’s and John’s. You can’t leave them like this, shorthanded with a crop to make. Nobody to help with the sewing and the knitting for extra money. How they gonna pay the note?

But I think of the squares on the paper. Mama. My people.

Juneau Jane stops cutting and runs the blade along her palm, not hard enough to draw blood, but it marks her. “Perhaps…we might make the journey together.”

I nod and she nods. We sit that way, tangled in the idea.

Missy Lavinia lets out a big ol’ snort. I glance her way, and she’s slumped over in the soft, wet moss, sound asleep. Juneau Jane and me look at each other, both thinking the same thing.

What’re we gonna do about her?

BENNY SILVA—AUGUSTINE, LOUISIANA, 1987

I have a sense of déjà vu as I stand in the farmers market parking lot, watching Nathan Gossett’s truck pull in. Except I am exponentially more nervous this time. After a long confab with Sarge last night at my house and a few phone calls, incredible plans are falling into place, but most of them depend on Nathan’s cooperation.

Was it only a week ago that I ambushed him, seeking permission to enter Goswood Grove House? He couldn’t possibly know what that key has led to. I hope I can do a coherent job of sharing the vision with him.

In hindsight, a good night’s sleep might have been a wise idea, but nerves and caffeine will have to do. Sarge and I were up late, scheming and arranging for a few volunteers.

I clench and unclench my fingers, then shake out my hands like a sprinter about to run the hundred-yard dash. This is for all the marbles. I’m ready to put forth a sound argument, and, if necessary, grovel. Although I must be quick about it. I need to have my act together at school this morning. A very special guest speaker has been arranged for my freshmen, sophomore, and combination junior/senior classes today, courtesy of my new friend Sarge.

If all
that
goes well, we’ll have the speaker come back another day to talk with my first and second period seventh and eighth graders. With some luck, my students are about to embark on a journey that none of us could’ve imagined two weeks ago. One that the dreamer in me truly believes has the potential to plant seeds. Sarge is not nearly so optimistic about it, but she is at least willing to come along for the ride.

Nathan stiffens defensively when he spots me crossing the parking lot on an intercept course. His lips circle around an exhale of air and sound. The muscles in his cheek tighten, momentarily obliterating the little cleft in his chin. He’s sporting a five o’clock shadow, which, I am suddenly aware, does not look bad on him.

The observation hits me by surprise, and I find myself blushing when first we speak.

“If you’re here to give me a report, I don’t need one. I don’t want one.” He lifts both hands, palms facing outward, a gesture that says,
I have no further involvement in this.
“I told you, I don’t
care
what comes out of the library. Take what you can use.”

“It’s more complicated than I thought. With the library, I mean.”

He winces in a way that says he regrets having given me that key.

At this point, full steam ahead is my only option. “I’ve already stocked some shelves in my classroom. Your grandfather was
quite
a book lover.” I stop short of saying that the judge was a book
hoarder
—I’ve met a few in my bookstore years. I’d be surprised if there weren’t more books in other rooms of the house, but I haven’t snooped. “I have multiples of things like encyclopedia sets and Reader’s Digest Classics. Is it okay if I donate some of those to the city library just down from the school? I hear their collection is pretty outdated. They don’t even have a full-time librarian. Just volunteers.”

He nods, loosening up a little. “Yeah, my sister was…” He shakes off whatever he was about to say. “She liked that old building.”

“She had good taste. Those Carnegie grant libraries are amazing. There aren’t very many in Louisiana.” I could talk at length about why that is, and about the reasons
this
particular Carnegie library is special—I learned a ton last night with Sarge—but I’m conscious of time ticking by. “It’s sad to see one in danger of shutting its doors for good.”

“If some of my grandfather’s collection can help, then great. The man was compulsive about some things. He was famous for letting kids come give sales pitches in his court chambers between cases. He ended up with a lot of encyclopedia sets and Book of the Month subscriptions that way. Sorry, I might’ve told you that already.” A rueful shake of his head sends nutmeg-brown bangs drifting over the delineation mark between a tan and the part of his face that is regularly shielded by a hat or cap. “You really don’t need to come ask me. There’s no sentimental attachment on my end. My dad died when I was three. Mom was from a family that wasn’t considered
of his class,
so Augustine was the last place she wanted to spend time after he passed. My sister had more ties here because she was ten years old when Mom relocated us to Asheville, but I didn’t and don’t.”

“I understand.”
And yet, you’ve moved back to Louisiana to live.

I would never ask, of course, but why has Nathan, raised far from the bayous and the deltas, settled himself within a short drive of the ancestral homeplace he says he cares nothing about and can’t wait to dispose of? No matter how much he wants to see himself as disconnected from this town, it has some sort of hold on him.

Perhaps even he doesn’t understand what that is.

I feel a weird pang of jealousy toward his ancestral connection to a place. Maybe that’s one reason I’m keen to dig into the mysteries of Goswood Grove. I crave the sense of heritage that rises like mist from wet ground there, old secrets kept closely guarded.

Like Nathan’s, I suspect.

The alarm on my wristwatch goes off. I’ve set it to give me a five-minute warning before my drop-dead time for making it to school.

“Sorry,” I say, and fumble to silence the noise. “Teacher thing. We segment the day between bells and beeps.”

When I return my attention to him, he’s focused on me, as if there’s a question he’s pondering, but then he changes his mind. “I really can’t tell you anything about whatever’s in that library. Sorry.”

I plunge into a description of old books, undoubtedly valuable, and historical documents, as well as plantation records that detail events, offering facts that may not be recorded anywhere else. Things that, quite possibly, no one outside the family has looked at in a century or more. “We need some guidance on how you’d like to handle those items.”

“We?” He retracts suspiciously. Suddenly, the air is so taut it could tear at any moment. “The one thing I did ask was that you keep this between us. The house is—” He clips the sentence forcefully, with effort. Whatever he was about to say is mitigated to “I just don’t need the hassle.”

“I know that. It wasn’t my intention, but things have snowballed some.” I forge ahead, daunted but desperate. These are decisions that
must
be made by someone in the family. “Is there any possibility you and I could get together and you could look at some of it? I could meet you at Goswood Grove.” That’s a no-go, I can tell, so I quickly improvise, “Or at my house? I’d be happy to bring some things over there. They’re important. You really need to look them over.”

“Not at Goswood Grove House,” he says sharply. His eyes blink closed, remain that way a moment. His voice drops when he adds, “Robin was there when she died.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“I could come tomorrow evening—Friday. To your house. I have plans back in Morgan City tonight.”

Relief softens the muscles along my spine, pulls the knots loose. “Friday is perfect. Six o’clock or…well, anytime after four-thirty. You choose.”

“Six is fine.”

“I could pick something up for us from the Cluck and Oink, if that sounds good? I’d offer to cook, but I really haven’t settled into the place yet.”

“Sounds good.” But if I had to gauge his countenance right then, I’d say
good
isn’t an apt description. Goswood Grove hangs around his neck like an albatross; the questions of its future care and feeding and the difficult memories it embodies are things he wants to avoid.

I understand that better than he probably thinks I do. I can’t possibly explain the reasons to him, so I thank him profusely and then reconfirm our time.

As we part, I leave with the sense that he’s sorry he ever met me.

Traveling back to school, I try to imagine his life, shrimp boating and whatever else he devotes his time to down there in Morgan City. Girlfriend? Buddies? What does his normal day look like? How does he spend his evenings and nights? His sister has been dead only two years, his grandfather, three. Both passed away while living in that house. What am I treading on by dragging him back to Goswood Grove and a grief that is clearly still fresh?

It’s an uncomfortable question, and I do my best to push it out the Bug’s window, let it sail away on the breeze as I speed across town, a woman on a mission.

I’m so filled with anticipation about what I have planned for my high school classes that I catch myself watching the clock during the first two periods of the morning, wrangling seventh and eighth graders.

My guest speaker arrives right on schedule, at the end of my conference period. I do a quick double take as she enters my classroom, fussing with a small drawstring purse. She’s decked out in a white blouse with a high lace collar and a bow at the neck, an ankle-length black skirt, and short black lace-up boots. A jaunty, flat-brimmed straw hat crowns her thick gray hair, which is pinned into the same loose bun she wears behind the counter of the Cluck and Oink.

She smooths her skirt nervously. “How’s this look?” she queries. “It was my costume from the Founder’s Day float, back a few years. Put on a little weight since then. Too much barbecue and pie.”

“I didn’t mean for you to go to so much trouble,” I say, though I can hardly stand still long enough to talk. “I just want you to tell them the story of the library. How your grandmother and the ladies of the New Century Club were responsible for putting it there.”

She smiles and sends a quick wink my way, then adjusts the hairpins on her hat. “Don’t you worry, sugar. I brought pictures to show and a copy of the letter my grandmama helped write to Mr. Carnegie. But these kids oughta hear the story from my grandmama herself.”

Suddenly, the costume makes sense. I’m stunned and jubilant all at once. “That’s brilliant.”

“I know.” She agrees with a definitive nod. “You said you wanted these young folks to see history. Well, I’m about to give them a piece of it.”

And she does. She even hides in my supply closet until the class is settled in and I’ve taken roll. They’re suspicious when I tell them we’re having a guest speaker. They’re not enthusiastic. Until they see who’s here.

“Granny Teeeee!” They squeal like first graders.

She shushes them with one finger and a stern shake of her head. I wish I could do that. “Oh, no, not Granny T,” she says. “This is the year 1899. Granny T is a little baby named Margaret Turner, only one year old. And Baby Margaret’s mama, Victory, is a young married woman, and I am
her
mama, little Margaret’s grandmama. I was born in the year 1857, so that makes me almost forty-three years old right now. I was born into slavery, right out on the Gossett place, and it was a hard life when I came up as a child. Had to work picking cotton, cutting cane, and hauling water to the field by hand, but that’s a long time ago now. It’s 1899, and I just took my savings and bought a little building to start myself up a restaurant, because I’m a widow woman now, and I have to earn my way on my own. I have nine children, and some are still at home to take care of.

“Now, I don’t mind that it’s hard work, except there is one thing that does trouble me much. I promised my departed husband that all our children would be educated, but the colored school only goes six months out of the year here, and the town library is small, and it is just for the white folks. The only other library is a little closet-sized shed room out back of the black Methodist church, started about ten years ago. We’re proud to have it, but it ain’t much. Now, at the time, all the highfalutin’ ladies in town, the wives of the bankers and the doctors and such, have what they call the Ladies New Century Club and their project is to build a bigger library…for the white folks. But guess what?”

She bends forward in a dramatic pause, and the kids lean over their desks, their mouths hanging slack in concentration.

“That is not the library you children passed by on the school bus today, in
nineteen
and eighty-seven. No, sir. I’m going to tell you about the time a handful of ordinary women, who worked hard for their living, baked pies and took in extra wash and canned peaches and sold everything else they could get their hands on and fooled everybody and built the fanciest library in town.”

Reaching into her cart, she extracts a framed photo and holds it up for the kids. “And this is them on the steps of that beautiful library the day it was opened. These ladies here, they are the reason it happened.”

She gives the students several framed photographs to circulate as she goes on to tell them about the town’s New Century Club unanimously rejecting the notion of using one of the highly touted Carnegie grants to construct a new library, fearing that money came with a
free use for all citizens
stipulation, which could mean
regardless of color.
The ladies of their church applied for the grant instead, the black Methodist church donated land, and the Colored Carnegie Library eventually opened in a newly created building much grander than that of the other library in town. Thereafter, the Carnegie library’s founders took the liberty of naming themselves the Carnegie Colored Ladies New Century Club.

“Oh, mercy!” Granny T finishes, “All those women of the original Ladies New Century Club, they were pea-green jealous, I’ll tell you. That was back during segregation, you know, and the black folks never got the better part of anything, so for us to have a place so fine and finer than the town library, that was a blot on Augustine, they said. Wasn’t much they could do about it, except they did get the city to rule against the permit for the library to have a sign. That way, nobody coming through would know what it was. And so we put a statue of a saint on top of the marble base that was made to hold the sign, and for years, the building stood there that way, but it couldn’t stop the magic. In those hard times, it was a symbol of hope.”

She has barely stopped talking when the kids begin asking questions. “How come it’s just called ‘Augustine Carnegie Library’ now?” one of the country kids wants to know.