The Book of Lost Friends: A Novel (21 page)

Nodding, she puts the pencil stub to the page, bends low over it, blinks her eyes closed, then open again. I reckon they’re parched tired after all night. “What would you have it say?”

I close my eyes, think long into my little-girl years. “And don’t read them words back to me as you go,” I tell her. “Not this time. Just write it for now. Start it with, ‘Mr Editor: I wish to inquire for my people.’ ” I like how it sounds friendly, but then I don’t know what goes next. The words don’t come in my mind.

“Tres bien.”
I hear the pencil scratch across the paper and then go quiet awhile. A dove sings its soft song and Pete Rain rolls over on his blanket. “Tell me about your people,” Juneau Jane says. “Their names and what happened to them.”

The lantern flame gutters and hisses. Shadows and light flicker ’cross my eyelids, tell my story back to me, and I tell it to Juneau Jane. “My mama was named Mittie. I am the middle of nine children and am Hannie Gossett.” The chant starts in my mind. I hear Mama and me say it together under the wagon. “The others were named Hardy, Het, Pratt…”

I feel them with me, now, dancing in the pink-brown shadows behind my eyes, all us remembering our story together. When I’m through, my face is wet with tears and cool from the morning breeze. My voice is thick from the lonely that comes with how the story ends.

Pete Rain stirs on his pallet with a grunt and a sigh, and so I wipe my face and take the paper Juneau Jane gives me. I fold it to a square I can carry. Hope.

“We might send it in Fort Worth,” Juneau Jane says. “I have yet a bit of money from the sale of my horse.”

I swallow it down hard again, shake my head. “We best keep that for survivin’ just now. I’ll send this letter when I can pay its way. For now, it’s enough just to know I got it with me.” A coldness goes deep in my bones as I look off into the long stretch of sky to the west, where the last stars still labor against the dawn gray. My mama used to say they were the cook fires in heaven, the stars, that my grandmama and grandpapa and all the folk that went before us lit up the fires of heaven each night.

The letter feels heavier in my hand when I think of that. What if all my people are already up there, gathered at them fires? If nobody answers my letter, is that what it means?

Later on in the day, I wonder if Pete Rain thinks the same thing of his letter. We show it to him in the wagon, when we’re riding the last few miles to Forth Worth. “You know, I believe I’ll mail that with the fifty cents myself,” he decides and tucks it in his pocket, his face pinched and sober. “So I can say a prayer over it first.”

I decide I’ll do the same for my letter, when it’s time.

Before we part ways in town, Juneau Jane tears a scrap out of the newspapers and gives it to Pete Rain. “The address for sending your letter to the
Southwestern,
” she says.

“Thank you. And you boys, you tread lightly here,” he warns us again, and tucks the scrap away, too. “Fort Worth’s not the worst town for colored folk, not bad as Dallas, but not peaceable, either, and the Marston Men like this place more than most. Watch the squatter camps down along the river below the courthouse bluff, too. You can get by with pitchin’ camp there, but don’t leave your belongings behind. Nothing’s safe down in Battercake Flats. Too many folks in need, all in one place. Tough times in Fort Worth town, since the railroad’s gone bust and can’t build the line on through to here. Tough times make good people and bad people. You’ll see both.

“You need help, go visit John Pratt at the blacksmith shop, just off the courthouse. Colored fella, good man. Or the Reverend Moody and the African Methodist Episcopals at the Allen Chapel. Mind the whorehouses and the saloons. Nothing but trouble there for a young man. You want my advice—don’t stay long in Fort Worth. Move on to Weatherford or down Austin City way. There’s more future in it.”

“We have come to find my father,” Juneau Jane tells him. “We have no plan to remain after.” She thanks him for the ride and tries to pay him for the trouble, and he won’t take it. “You gave me back a hope I surrendered long ago,” he says. “That’s enough, right there.”

He clucks up the horses and travels on, and there we stand. It’s the middle of the day, and so we huddle off twixt two board-and-batten-sided buildings and eat our lunch of more pilot biscuits and peaches that won’t last much longer in our poke.

A racket takes our eyes to the street. I look up and expect that it’ll be cattle or wagons, but it’s a detachment of Federal soldiers, riding down the street in lines, two by two. Cavalry. They don’t much resemble the ragged Federals of the war, who wore blue uniforms patched up and stitched over holes, stained with dirt and blood and held together with carved circles of wood where the brass buttons went missing. The soldiers back then rode bone-thin horses of whatever kind they could buy or steal, as horses got hard to come by with so many killed in battles.

These soldiers today travel on matched bays, the whole bunch of them. The yellow cavalry stripes on their pants show bright, and the black bill caps sit square and level. The brass plates on their rifles shine at the sun. Scabbards, buckles, and hooves raise a clatter.

I step back in the shadows. A tightening starts deep in my middle and works its way through me. Ain’t seen soldiers anytime lately. Back home, if you spot one you don’t dare look his way or stop to talk. No matter that the war is over and
been
over all these years, you get seen talking to the Federals, folks like Old Missus don’t like it.

I pull Juneau Jane and Missy back, too. “We got to be careful,” I whisper and hurry them away to the other end of the alley. “That woman in Jefferson said it was the Federals come looking for Mr. Washburn and his papers. What if they’re looking for him here, too? Some of that trouble Lyle brought on, maybe.” I’m surprised by my own mouth for a minute. I didn’t call him Young Mister or Marse Lyle, or even Mister Lyle, just
Lyle,
like Juneau Jane does.

Well, he ain’t your marse,
I tell myself.
You are a free woman, Hannie. Free to call that snake by his given name if you want to.

Something inside me gets bigger, just then. Not sure what it is, but it’s there. Stronger now. Different.

Juneau Jane don’t seem worried about the soldiers, but it’s clear her mind’s on other things. She looks down the hill, where shanties made from all manner of wagon parts, downed branches, slabwood, barrel staves, crates, and sawed trees squat low on the muddy banks of the Trinity River. The frames lean toward the water, covered in hides, oilcloth, tarred scrim, and pieces of bright-colored signs. A little brown boy pulls wood off one shack so he can feed the cook fire at another.

“I could manage a change of clothing down there, before seeking Mr. Washburn. Some of the huts appear vacant,” Juneau Jane says.

What’s she thinking? “That’s got to be Battercake Flats. Where Pete told us not to go.” But arguing don’t do no good. She’s already finding her way to the path. Can’t let her walk down there by herself, so I go along, dragging Missy with me. Missy might scare somebody, at least. “Get me killed. Get me killed in Battercake Flats,” I call ahead to Juneau Jane. “Ain’t the sort of place I want to meet my maker, that’s for definite sure.”

“We will not leave our belongings,” she says, marching right ahead on them skinny spider legs.

“We will if we’re dead.”

Two soot-smudged white women in threadbare clothes come up the path. They inspect us over real careful, studying our bundles to see, can they steal something? I grab hold of Missy’s arm like I’m worried, say to her, “Now, you leave them two women be. They ain’t hurting you.”

“You’ns in need a’ som’pin’?” one of the women asks. Her teeth are rotted off into sharp points. “Got us a camp jus’ thar. Hungry fer some hot grub, err ya? We don’ mind to share our’n. Carryin’ any coin, err ya? You gimme jus’ a little, Clary, here, she’d skee-daddle on over to the merkateel store, git us’ns some coffee. Drunk up the las’ of our’n in camp. But it ain’t far…to the merkateel.”

I look yon, and there’s a man standing and watching us. I back off the path and pull Missy with me.

“No reason for to be so skeert and skitterish.” The woman smiles, her tongue working the holes where teeth are gone. “We’s right friendsome folk.”

“We have no need of friends,” Juneau Jane says and moves away to let the woman pass.

The man down the hill stays watching. We wait till the women round the courthouse, then we turn and go that way, too. Back up the hill.

I remember what Pete said. There’s good people, and there’s bad people. Here in Fort Worth town, round every corner we turn, seems like somebody’s looking us over, seeing if we’re worth the trouble to steal from. This is a place of plenty and none, this Fort Worth. A town you’ve got to know the way of to be safe in it, and so we go to the blacksmith shop to find John Pratt. I leave Missy and Juneau Jane outside, and step in just myself. He’s kindly, but can’t say about Mr. Washburn.

“Been many folk leave the town since the railroad didn’t come on,” he says. “Lot of people had been speculatin’ on that. Shucked out when the news come. Hard times, right now. But there’s some who moved in to grab up what can be bought cheap. Could be your Mr. Washburn is that kind.” He tells us how to get to the bathhouses and the hotels, where most folk new to town would go if they had money. “You ask around there, you’ll likely find news of him, if there’s any to be had.”

We go along as he told us, asking anybody that’s willing to talk to three wandering boys.

A yellow-haired woman in a red dress calls us to the side door of a building, says she runs the bathhouse, and she offers a bath cheap. They got hot water ready and nobody to use it.

“Slim times, right now, boys,” she tells us.

The sign in the window says my kind ain’t welcome there and Indians ain’t, either. I know that because Juneau Jane points and whispers it in my ear.

Lady in the doorway looks us over good. “What’s wrong with the big boy?” She folds her arms and leans closer. “What’s wrong with you, big’un?”

“He simple, Missus. Simpleminded,” I say. “Ain’t dangerous, though.”

“Didn’t ask you, boy,” she snaps, then looks in Juneau Jane’s face. “What about you? You simple? You got Indian blood in you? You a breed or you a white boy? Don’t take no coloreds ner Indians in here. And no Irish.”

“He a Frenchy,” I say, and the lady hisses air to shut me up, then turns to Juneau Jane. “You don’t talk for yourself? Kind of a pretty little boy, ain’t ya? How old are you?”

“Sixteen years,” Juneau Jane says.

The lady throws back her head and laughs. “More like twelve years, I’d say. You ain’t even shavin’ yet. But you sure sound like the Frenchies, all right. You got the money? I’ll take it. I don’t got nothin’ against a Frenchman. Long’s you’re a payin’ customer.”

Juneau Jane and me move off from her. “I don’t like the look of it,” I whisper, but Juneau Jane’s got her mind made up. She takes the coins she needs and the bundle with her woman clothes and lets me keep the rest.

“We’ll be out here. Right here, waiting,” I say, loud enough for the lady to hear. Then whisper behind Juneau Jane’s head, “You get inside, you look for where there’s another door. See that steam rising out behind the building? They got to be emptying buckets and washing clothes back there. You slip out that way when you’re done, so she don’t see you in your lady clothes.”

I grab Missy Lavinia’s arm, steer her away and figure I might as well look for some of my own kind to ask after Mr. Washburn. Down the boardwalk, a boy’s hollering for boots to shine. He’s a skinny brown thing maybe about Juneau Jane’s age. I work my way over there and ask him my question.

“Might know,” he says. “But I don’t give answers free, ’less I’m shinin’ shoes at the same time. Them shoes you got ain’t worth shinin’, but you gimme five cents, want it done, I’d do it, but back in the alley, though. Can’t have the white folk think I do colored shoes. Won’t let me to use my brushes on them after.”

Nothing comes free in this town. “Reckon I can find out someplace else to ask…unless you want to trade for it.”

The eyes go to slits in his tan-brown face. “What you wantin’ to trade?”

“Got a book,” I say. “Book to write the names of people you lost in the war, or who was sold from you before the freedom. You missing any of your people? We can put their names in the book. Ask after them all the places we go. You got three cents for a stamp, and fifty cents for the advertisement, we can write up a whole note about your people, and send it to the
Southwestern
newspaper. It goes by delivery all over Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas, to the churches where they can call it out from the pulpit, case your people are there. You missing any people?”

“Ain’t got none at all,” the boy says. “My mam and pap’s both killed by the fever. Never remembered neither one of ’em. Got no people to look for.”

Something tugs my pants, and I look down, and there’s a old colored woman, sitting cross-legged against the wall. She’s wrapped in a blanket, her back so humped she can scarce turn her face up to get a look at me. Her eyes are cloudy and dull. A basket of pralines sits in her lap, with a sign I can’t read, except some of the letters. Her skin is dark and cracked as dry leather.

She wants me to come close. I go to squat down, but Missy Lavinia tries to pull my arm. “Stop troubling me,” I tell her. “You just stand there.”

“I can’t buy your goods,” I tell the woman. “I’d do it if I could.” She’s a poor, ragged thing.

Her voice is so quiet, I have to lean close to hear her over the racket of men and wagons and horses passing by. “I got people,” she says. “You help me seek my people?” She reaches for the tin cup that sits with her, shakes it, and listens hard for the sound. Can’t be more than a few cents in there.

“You keep them coins,” I say. “We’ll put you in our book with the Lost Friends. Ask after your people anyplace we go.”

I move Missy Lavinia over to the wall. Set her down on a painted bench in front of a window. She’s white, so she can sit there, I reckon.