The Book of Lost Friends: A Novel (29 page)

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.

I stand up, straighten my sore neck, and try to take my courage in hand. “I know what you done for us, and—”

“My work.” He stops me before I can go on. “I’ve done my work. Not as well as I would’ve liked.” He nods toward Missy in a way that says he takes blame for the shape she’s in now. “I didn’t know of this until after the thing was done. The fellow you followed here, William Gossett, had entangled himself in some way with the Marston Men, and it was for that reason they took his daughters. I’d understood that they meant to hold them at the river landing in Louisiana. I’d left a man there to free them after the
Genesee Star
departed upriver, but when he attempted it, they were nowhere to be found.”

“What’d they want from him…Old Gossett?” I try to imagine the man I knew tied up in such a thing, except I can’t.

“Money, property, or if he was already an ally, perhaps just to ensure his further and complete cooperation. It’s by those methods they’ve fattened the finances for their cause. They often make use of young folk from well-provisioned families. Some are hostages. Some are volunteers. Some begin as one and become the other once they’ve caught a case of Honduras Fever. There’s temptation in the idea of free land in Central America.”

I turn my eyes downward. I think of Missy’s troubles, of the baby she’s carrying. Heat comes into my face. I stare at the cream-colored dust covering his boots. “That was how Missy Lavinia got tangled up with these people? Thinking to serve her own purposes at first, but then it went wrong?” Should I tell him about Missy’s brother? Or does he know already, and he’s testing me out? I watch him sidewards, see his thumb and finger smooth his mustache, then stay there pinched over his chin, like he’s waiting for me to speak, but I don’t.

“Quite likely so. The Marston Men devote themselves to the cause in all manner of thought and deed. This idea of returning to old times and cotton kingdoms—of new land to rule as they see fit—gives them something to believe in, a hope that the days of the grand houses and the slave gangs aren’t over. Marston demands absolute loyalty. Wife against husband, father against son, brother against brother, the only importance being that they serve Marston, remain devoted to his purpose. The more bounty they hand over, the more willingly they betray their families, their townsfolk, their neighbors, the higher they rise in the ranks and the more land they are promised in their imagined Honduras colony.”

His gaze fastens on me to see how I take that in.

A deep, hard shiver goes through my bones. “Mister William Gossett, he wouldn’t be party to something like this. Not if he knew what it was. I’m sure of it.” But in the back of my mind, I wonder, was there more to Old Mister’s trip to Texas than I knew? Is that why all the books with the sharecrop papers are gone? Did he plan to cheat us out of our contracts and sell his lands and go to Honduras, too?

I shake my head. That can’t be. He must’ve been trying to save Lyle, that’s all. “He wasn’t a bad man, mostly, but blind when it came to his son. Foolish blind. He’d do anything for that boy. He sent Lyle here to Texas to get him away from a difficulty in Louisiana that ended in a dead man. Then Lyle found trouble here some months ago. That’s why Old Mister come all this way. Seeking after his son, and that’s the
only
reason.”

Elam Salter looks through me like I’m thin as a lace curtain.

“I ain’t lying,” I say and straighten myself.

We face each other, Elam Salter and me. I’m a tall gal, but I have to turn my head up to him like a child. Some snip of lightning crackles between us. I feel its stings all up and down my skin, like he’s touching me, right through the air between us.

“I know you are not, Miss Gossett.” His saying my name that gentlemanly way sets me back a bit. Always been just plain Hannie. “Lyle Gossett had a State of Texas bounty on his head for crimes committed in Comanche, Hill, and Marion Counties. He was reported delivered, dead, six weeks ago to Company A, Texas Rangers, in Comanche County, and the bounty paid.”

Of a sudden, I am cold down deep, the chill of a bad spirit passing by.

Lyle is dead. His daddy’s been chasing a soul that already belonged to the devil.

“I want no part in this. None of it. Only reason I come here…
only
reason I did all I did…was…was because…” Any words I say will sound wrong to a man like Elam Salter. A man who ran from his owner and found his way to freedom when he was no more than a boy. A man who’s made hisself somebody that even the white men speak of in a revering way.

And here I am, just Hannie. Hannie Gossett, still called by the name I was given by somebody who
owned
me. Hadn’t even picked out a new name for myself, because that might vex Old Missus. Just Hannie, still living in a cropper cabin, scratching a piece of ground to make my means. A mule. A ox. Only a beast of the field and hadn’t done a thing about it. Can’t read but a few words. Can’t write. Come all the way to Texas, looking after white folk, same as in the old times.

Been nothing. Am nothing.

What must a man like Elam Salter think of me?

I clench my hands over the rumpled calico. Push my bottom lip into the top one and try to stand square, at least.

“You’ve done a brave thing, Miss Gossett.” His eyes slide toward Missy, singing to herself there on the bench while she picks them wilted wildflowers clean, petal by petal, and watches the colors fall on the parchment-dry ground. “They’d be dead if not for you.”

“Maybe it wasn’t my trouble to worry over. Maybe I should’ve let it happen, that’s all.”

“You’re not the sort.” His words melt over my skin like sweet butter. Does he truly think that of me? I try to see, but he’s got his face turned toward Missy.

“For whatsoever he soweth, that shall he also reap,”
he says in his deep voice. “Are you a churchgoing woman, Miss Gossett?”

“Be not deceived. God is not mocked.”
I know the verse. Old Missus used that one all the time to let us know, if she punished us, it was our own fault, not hers. God wanted us to get whipped. “I am a churchgoing woman, Mr. Salter. But you can call me Hannie, if it suits. I reckon at this point, we know each other pretty close up.” I think of that moment on the boat, when he grabbed me up in the familiarest way to toss me off. Must’ve been about then he figured I wasn’t a boy.

The corner of his mouth twitches up just a hint, and maybe he’s thinking of that, too, but he stays watching Missy.

“I ought to take her back inside, I guess,” I tell him. “Doctor says it’s to be over with her daddy any time.”

Elam nods, but stays where he is. “Do you have a notion of where you’ll go when it’s done?” He’s stroking that mustache again, rubbing his chin.

“Not sure.” That’s the truth. The only thing I know right now is that I
don’t
know. “Got some business to see to in Austin City.”

I pull Grandmama’s blue beads from under the collar of the dress, tell him about Juneau Jane and me and
The Book of Lost Friends.
I finish up with the Irishman’s story about the white girl in the café. “Don’t imagine it means a thing. Could be she found them beads, or maybe the story ain’t even true—I did hear it from a horse-thief Irishman. But I can’t leave, not without knowing for sure. I need to see about that, before I go from Texas. Thought earlier on that I’d stay in this country, keep making my way round with the book, look for my own people, spread the names of Lost Friends, take in more names, ask after folks for other folks and for myself.” I don’t tell him I hadn’t been the one to write in the book and can’t read but a little of it. Elam is an up-spoken man. Dignified and proud. Don’t want him to see me as less than.

I think again about
The Book of Lost Friends,
about all the names in it and the promises we made. “Might be, I’ll come back to Texas in a year or two, go round with the book then. I know the way, now.” I look at Missy, feel her like a full-up field sack strapped over my shoulders. Who in the world will look after her? “Even with all she’s done, I can’t just leave her to wander, such as she is. Can’t leave Juneau Jane with the burden, either. She’s still a child and has the grief of losing her papa. And I don’t want her cheated from her inheritance. We had hopes to find her daddy’s papers and prove what was meant to go to her, but the doctor said Old Gossett was brought here to the fort with nothing.”