The Book of Lost Friends: A Novel (28 page)

“We
do
provide every new teacher with a copy of the employee manual, which contains all the school policies and procedures.” The lovely Mrs. Gossett, who has not deemed me worthy of permission to use a first name, pops a shiny silver alligator-skin pump off her heel, lets it dangle on her toe as she twitches her foot. “The new employees sign the paper saying they’ve read it, don’t they? It goes in their file, doesn’t it?”

Her little lickspittle, a trim brunette, nods along.

“Of course,” Principal Pevoto answers.

“Well, it’s very plain in the manual that
any
off-campus activity involving a student group or club requires board approval.”

“To walk two blocks to the city library?” I spit out. Principal Pevoto delivers an eye flash my way. I am not to speak unless spoken to. I’ve been warned already.

The blonde swivels her pointed chin with robotic precision, click, click, click. I am now directly in her crosshairs. “To promise these children that they will be holding some sort of…pageant…
off
campus,
after
school hours, most certainly
is
flouting the rules. And flagrantly, I must say. And in the city graveyard, of all places. Good gracious.
Really!
It’s not only ridiculous, it’s obscene and disrespectful to the dearly departed.”

I’m losing it. Mayday. Mayday. “I’ve asked the cemetery’s residents. They don’t mind.”

Principal Pevoto draws a sharp breath.

Mrs. Gossett purses her lips. Her nostrils flare. She looks like a skinny Miss Piggy. “I wasn’t
teasing;
did you think I was? Though I am trying my very best to be nice about this. While that cemetery may not mean
anything
to
you,
being from…well, wherever you are from…it surely does matter to this community. For historic reasons, of course, but also because our family relations are laid there. Of
course
we don’t want them disturbed, their graves desecrated to…to entertain young miscreants. It’s hard enough to keep
these kinds
of kids from committing mischief out there, much less encouraging them to think of our cemetery as a playground. It’s careless and insensitive.”

“I was hardly—”

She doesn’t even let me finish before she stabs a pointy little finger toward the window. “Some years ago, several expensive grave markers were tipped over in that cemetery. Vandalized.”

My eyes go so indignantly wide, they feel like they’re about to pop out of my head. “Maybe if people understood the history, knew about the lives those stones represent, things like that wouldn’t happen. Maybe they’d even be
preventing
things like that from happening. Some of my kids have ancestors buried there. Most of them do—”

“They are not
your
kids.”

Principal Pevoto hooks a finger in his collar, tugs at his tie. He is as red as the volunteer fire truck he mans on weekends. “Miss Silva…”

I blaze forward. I can’t stop myself now that I’ve started. I feel everything, all our plans slipping away. I can’t let it happen. “Or they have ancestors buried next door. Under graves that were left unmarked. In a graveyard that my students are painstakingly working to enter into the computer, so the library can have records of those who lived their lives on that land. As
slaves.
”

That does it. I have tripped her trigger now. This is the real issue. Goswood Grove. The house. Its contents. The parts of its history that are hard. That are embarrassing. That carry a stigma no one quite knows how to talk about, and tell of an inconvenient heritage that still plays out in Augustine today.

“That is none of your business!” she snorts. “How dare you!”

The sidekick shoots from her chair and stands with her fists balled as if she’s going to take me down.

Principal Pevoto rises, leans halfway across his desk with his fingers braced like spider legs. “All right. That is enough.”

“Yes, it
is,
” Mrs. Gossett agrees. “I don’t know
who
you think you are. You have lived here for…what…two months? Three? If the students at this school are ever to rise above their upbringing, become productive members of society, they must do it by leaving the past behind. By being practical. By gaining vocational training in some sort of work they are capable of. Most of them are lucky if they can achieve the functional literacy skills needed to fill out a job application. And how dare you insinuate that our family is uncaring in this regard!
We
pay more taxes to this school district than anyone.
We
are the ones who employ these people, who make life in this town possible. Who work with the prisons to give them jobs when they’re released. You were hired to teach
English.
According to the
curriculum.
There will be no graveyard program. Mark my words. That graveyard is run by a board, and they will in no way allow this. I will make certain of that.”

She pushes past me, the foot soldier following in her wake. At the door, she pauses to fire off one more volley. “Do your
job,
Miss Silva. And mind
who
you’re talking to here, or you’ll be lucky if you still have a job to worry over.”

Principal Pevoto follows with a quick calm-down lecture, telling me everyone stumbles in their first year of teaching. He appreciates my passion, and he can see that I’m building a rapport with the kids. “That’ll pay off,” he promises wearily. “If they like you, they’ll work for you. Just, in the future, stick to the curriculum. Go home, Miss Silva. Take a few days off and come back with your head clear. I’ve called in a sub for your classes.”

I mumble something, the bell rings in the hall, and I wander from the office. Halfway back to my classroom, I stop and stand, shell-shocked. I realize I’m not
supposed
to go back to my classroom. I’m being sent home in the middle of the school day.

Kids flow past, parting around me in a strange, raucous tide, but I feel as if they’re far away, as if they don’t even touch me, as if I’ve disappeared from the world.

The halls have cleared and the tardy bell sounds before I come to myself and continue toward my classroom. Outside the door, I gather my wits before slipping in to grab my things.

There’s an aide watching my kids, I guess until the sub can arrive. Even so, they fire off questions.
Where am I going? What’s wrong with me? Who will take them over to the library?

We’ll see you tomorrow. Right? Right, Miss Pooh?

The aide gives me a sympathetic look and finally starts yelling at them to shut up. I slip away and arrive home and don’t even remember how I got there. The house looks forlorn and empty, and when I open the car door, I hear the phone ring four times, then stop.

I want to run inside, rip it from the cradle, choke it with both hands, and scream into it, “What is wrong with you? Leave me alone!”

The message light is blinking on the answering machine. I touch the button like it’s the sharp end of a knife. Maybe this thing is escalating and now…whoever…is issuing anonymous threats on tape. Why would they bother when they can do their work right out in the open via the school board and Principal Pevoto?

But when the message starts, it’s Nathan. His voice is somber. He apologizes for the delay in getting the messages I left on his machine—he’s at his mother’s in Asheville. The last few days have been both his sister’s birthday and the anniversary of her death. Robin would’ve been thirty-three this year. It’s a tough time for his mom; she ended up in the hospital with blood pressure problems, but everything’s all right now. She’s back home, and a friend has come to spend some time with her.

I dial the phone number and he answers. “Nathan, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I had no idea,” I blurt out. I don’t want to heap an additional worry on his shoulders. My job catastrophe and the school board hatchet job seem less consequential when I think of Nathan and his mother, mourning the loss of Robin. The last thing he needs right now is a Gossett fight. I’ll muster other forces. Sarge, the New Century ladies, the parents of my kids. I’ll call the newspaper, start a picket line. What’s happening is wrong.

“You okay?” he asks tentatively. “Tell me what’s going on.”

Tears grip my throat, tighten it like a vise. I’m frustrated. I’m sad. I swallow hard, pummel my forehead with the palm of my hand, thinking,
Stop.
“I’m fine.”

“Benny…” An undercurrent says,
Come on.
I know you.

It breaks me open and I pour out the story, then end with the morning’s heartbreaking conclusion, “They want to shut down the
Underground
project. If I don’t cooperate, I’m out of a job.”

“Listen,” he says, and I hear thumping noises in the background, like he’s in the middle of something. “I’m heading to the airport to try catching a standby flight. I’ve got to run, but Mom told me Robin was working on some kind of project before she passed away. She didn’t want my uncles there to find out about it. Don’t do anything until I get back.”

HANNIE GOSSETT—FORT MCKAVETT, TEXAS, 1875

It’s hard to know the man sunk down in the mattress as being Mister William Gossett. Plain white sheets rumple round his body, sweated down and wrinkled in tight bunches where his hands been grabbing on and trying to wring out his pain like dirty wash water. His eyes, once blue as my grandmama’s glass beads, are closed and sunk down in sallow pits of skin. The man I remember bears no resembling to this one in the bed. Even the big voice that’d call out our names, now it just moans and moans.

The memories come back on me when the soldiers leave us with him in the long hospital building at Fort McKavett. Back before the freedom, there was always a big Christmastime party where Marse had gifts wrapped for each one of us—new shoes made there on the place and two new sack dresses for work, two new shimmies, six yards of fabric per child, eight for women and men, and a white cotton dress with a ribbon sash so’s the Gossett slaves would look finer than all the others, going off to the white people’s church. That party, all us together, every one of my brothers and sisters, and mama and Aunt Jenny Angel and my cousins, and Grandmama and Grandpapa. Tables of ham and apples and Irish potatoes and real wheat bread, peppermint candy for the children, and corn liquor for the grown folk. Those were better times in a bad time.

That man in the bed loved the parties. It pleasured him to believe that we were happy, that all us stayed with him because we wanted to, not because we had to, that we didn’t want to be free. I imagine that’s what he told hisself to make it right.

I stand back from the bed now and remember all that, and I don’t know what way to feel. I want to think,
This ain’t none of your affairs, Hannie.
Only thing you need from this man is to know, where’s the cropper contract that’ll make sure Tati and Jason and John get treated fair?
He’s took up enough of your life, him and old Missus.

But that wall won’t stay built up in me. It’s set on sand, and it shifts with his every ragged breath, trembles along with his thin, blue-white body. I can’t work up the tabby I need to mortar it solid. Dying is a hard thing to get done, sometimes. This man is having a tough time with it. The leg wound from back in Mason festered while he sat in the jail. The doctor here took off the leg, but the poison’s gone into his blood.

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 swallows 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.