by Lisa Wingate
“Sorry. The commitment has already been made.” His gaze darts off evasively.
I push a palm to my chest to calm the sort of instant panic that always hit the minute my mother announced we were moving again. Having grown up somewhat transient, I’ve become an adult who values the nest. The home space is sacred. It’s the zone where my books and dreams and comfy reading chair live. I need the little clapboard house in the quiet field by the cemetery, where I can walk the paths or the old farm levee lane, breathe and restore and settle my head.
I bite back the sting, stiffen my neck, and say, “I understand. You have to do what you have to do…I guess.”
He winces, but I can see his resolve solidifying, as well.
“So…about the books?” I can at least try to strike that bargain, and I am running out of time to make something good come of this visit.
“The books…” He rubs his forehead. He’s tired of me, or of the situation, or of being asked for things. Probably all three. “The agent has a key to the place. I’ll let her know that it’s all right to give it to you. I’m not sure exactly what you’ll find in there, but the judge was a reader, and aside from that, he could never resist a kid selling encyclopedias, or Reader’s Digest subscriptions, or whatever. The last time I was in that room, stuff was stacked everywhere, and the closets were full of books still in the shipping boxes. Somebody should clean that junk out.”
I am momentarily struck silent. Clean that junk out? What kind of a Neanderthal talks about books that way?
Then I remember. “The real estate agent had a medical issue. She’s out of the office. There’s been a note on the door for well over a week now.”
He frowns, seemingly unaware of that fact. Then he reaches into his pocket, sifts through his key ring, and begins removing a key. He’s exasperated by the time it is finally loosed, and he extends it my way.
“Take any of the books you can use, and by the way, let’s just keep that between us. If you run across Ben Rideout mowing the place, tell him you’re there to sort some things for me. He won’t ask for details.” The hardening of Nathan’s demeanor is swift and definitive, gut level, like my panic over having to move. “Don’t send me lists. I don’t care. I don’t want to know. I don’t want any of it.” He blows past me, and less than a minute later he’s in his truck and gone.
I stand there, drop-jawed, gaping at the bit of patinated brass in my hand. It’s old-fashioned, like a skeleton key, but smaller. Scrollwork adorns the edges, and with its diminutive size, the key almost looks like something that would open a trunk, or a pirate’s chest, or Alice’s tiny entrance to the gardens of Wonderland. Slivers of murky morning sun slide over it, casting strange reflections on my skin. For an instant, I almost make out the shape of a face.
Just as quickly, it’s gone.
Fascination grabs me in an overzealous embrace, sweeps me off my feet, fills me with a greedy, ravenous hunger. It takes everything I have to keep from driving straight to Goswood Grove to see what this key might lead to.
Unfortunately, there’s the matter of dozens of kids expecting me to continue with Animal Farm…and to open the pooperoo storage drawer. With a little cooperation from traffic, I can still get there in time to meet my first-period class and properly start the day.
The Bug and I beat it back across town, dodging Gossett Industries pipe trucks and farmers in pickups. The replacement science teacher is more than pleased to see me when I sneak in the back door. The bell rings less than three minutes later, and kids flood my classroom.
Fortunately, my first-hour students are only seventh graders, so it’s a little easier to intimidate them into taking their seats. Once they can hear me over the din, I tell them that, after we finish talking about adverbs, I’ll read them a bit of Animal Farm, which is a book the high schoolers are using, but I know they can handle anything the freshmen and sophomores can.
They gasp, straighten in their chairs, look surprised. Miss Silva, you seem strangely less defeated today, almost giddy, their expressions say.
If only they knew.
I pull out the supply of pooperoos. “I burned the bottoms a little on this batch. Sorry. But they’re not horrible. You know the rules. No pushing. No shoving. No noise, or I close the box. If you want one, come get one.”
I attempt a half-hearted lesson on adverbs, then abandon the effort and pick up Animal Farm to read to them. Meanwhile, the brass key weighs heavily in my pocket and on my mind. I’m distracted.
I withdraw it between classes, study it in my palm, contemplate all the hands that held it before mine. I study it in the light at different angles, try to re-create the reflection of a face, but nothing materializes.
I finally give up in favor of checking the wall clock every few minutes, willing it to move faster. When the final bell rings, I’m filled with jubilant energy, the only cloud over my day being that LaJuna was absent in fourth hour. She’d been back for three days in the first part of the week, now poof, gone like a whiff of smoke.
I mull that as I straighten desks, listen to school buses rumble past, and impatiently wait until teacher-release time.
When it arrives, I am out the door with the speed of a cheetah on the hunt.
It’s not until I’ve made my way home and am hiking through the gardens at Goswood Grove that this whole thing starts to seem somewhat questionable. Why would Nathan Gossett give the key over so easily? Don’t send me lists. I don’t care. I don’t want any of it. None of this means anything to him? At all? Is he really so disconnected from the house’s history? From his history?
Am I taking unfair advantage of that?
I know where the growing specter of guilt originates from. I understand family division and family issues. Irreconcilable differences. Wounds and resentments and differing viewpoints that prevent opposite sides from ever meeting in the middle. I have paternal half sisters I’ve barely even met, a mother I haven’t seen in ten years and intend never to see again and can’t forgive for what she did. For what she made me do.
Have I taken advantage of the very ghosts that haunt me most—spotted them somehow in Nathan Gossett and used them to get what I want?
It’s a valid question, and yet I find myself on the porch at Goswood Grove anyway, trying to discern which door my key fits and telling myself that I don’t care if Take what you want is a cannonball, fired across a family battlefield. The best place these books can be is in the hands of people who need them.
Several doors have locks far too modern for the little brass key. The house has obviously been used through the generations, its various inhabitants modernizing it in puzzle-piece fashion—a window here, a door lock there, an aging set of air-conditioners laboring in the back even though the house is vacant, a kitchen that was undoubtedly added long after the home was built. Before that, a separate one probably stood in the yard, built a short distance from the main house to isolate the heat, noise, and fire danger.
A small alcove off the current kitchen offers two entry doors. Through the windows, I can see that one leads straight ahead into a storage pantry, and a second leads to the left, into the kitchen. The tumblers on the ornate brass lock turn as if they were used yesterday. Dust, paint, and a stray coil of ivy relinquish their grip when the door falls open. The ivy slides across my neck, and I shudder in an awkward little dance, tossing it off as I bolt through then stand a moment, unwilling to close the door behind myself.
The house is still and stuffy, humid despite the air-conditioners whirring. No telling what it might take to control the climate in a place this big, rife with ancient floor-to-ceiling windows and doors that list in their frames like tired old men resting against the walls.
I move through the kitchen, which, in the fifties or sixties, must have included all the latest. The red appliances sport space-aged curves, the dials and gauges worthy of the interior of a rocket ship. Black
-and-white tile completes the sense that I’ve stepped into some odd sort of time warp. Everything is tidy, though. The glass-fronted cabinets sit mostly empty. A dish here. A stack of Melmac plates there. A soup tureen with a broken handle. In the adjacent butler’s pantry, the situation is similar, though the cabinetry is much older, the crackled, bubbled shellac testifying to the fact that it’s probably original to the house. Whatever fancy china or silver the shelves once held is mostly gone. Flatware drawers hang partially open, empty. An odd scattering of remnants collect dust behind leaded glass doors. The overall feel is that of a grandmother’s house on the day before the estate sale, after family members have divided up the heirlooms.
I wander, feeling like a peeping Tom as I pass through a dining room with an imposing mahogany table and chairs, the seats covered in green velvet. Massive oil-on-canvas portraits of the house’s generational residents look on from the walls. Women in elaborate dresses, their midsections cinched impossibly thin. Men in waistcoats, standing with gold-tipped walking sticks or hunting dogs. A little girl in turn-of-the-century white lace.
The adjoining parlor is appointed in slightly more modern fashion. Sofa, burgundy wingback chairs, console TV in a cabinet with built-in speakers. More recent eras of Gossetts watch me from hanging portraits and easel frames atop the TV cabinet. I pause at a triple-matted display of graduation photos featuring the judge’s three sons. Diplomas are framed under each picture—Will and Manford, business graduates from Rice University, and Sterling, the youngest, from the LSU College of Agriculture. It would be easy to guess, just by looking, that he was Nathan’s father. There’s a strong resemblance.
I can’t help but think, Doesn’t Nathan want any of these photos? Not even to remember the dad who died so young? Sterling Gossett is probably not too much older than Nathan in that photo. He didn’t live many more years, I guess.
It’s too sad to contemplate further, and so I move on through the parlor to what I know comes next. I’m acquainted with the layout of the house, thanks to my various porch peeking trips. Even so, when I cross the threshold into the library of Goswood Grove, I’m breathless.
The room is glorious, unchanged from what it once was and has always been. Save for the addition of electric lamps, light switches, a plug here and there, and an enormous billiard table that most likely isn’t quite as old as the house, nothing has been modernized. I run a hand along the billiard table’s leather cover as I pass, snag one of the countless paperbacks stacked there. The judge had so many books, they’ve spread like the growths of ivy outside the house. The floors, the space under the massive desk, the billiard table, and every inch of every shelf is laden.
I drink in the sight, stand mesmerized, drenched in leather and paper and gold edges and ink and words.
I’m carried away. Lost.
I’m so completely transfixed that I have no idea how much time passes before I realize I am not alone in this house.
CHAPTER 11
HANNIE GOSSETT—LOUISIANA, 1875
The river tugs at my clothes as I drag my body up onto the sand, then lay there coughing out water and all that was in my gut. I can swim, and the man threw me close enough to shore that it could’ve been easy to get there, but this river’s got its own mind. A strainer tree spun off in the boat’s wake, grabbed me up as it whirled by, and dragged me down. Took all I had to get free.
I hear a gator sliding through the mud not far away, and I push to my hands and knees and cough up more water and taste blood.
It’s then I touch my neck and feel the empty place.
No leather string. No Grandmama’s beads.
My legs wobble as I get up and stagger to the shore looking for them. I pull my shirt up and check under it. Missy’s reticule slides lower in my wet britches, but the beads ain’t there.
I want to scream at that river, cuss it, but I just fall on all fours and cough up the rest of the water, think to myself, If ever I see that Moses again, I’ll kill him dead.
He’s took away all that was left of my people. The last bit of them is gone in the river. Might be it’s a sign. A sign to make my way home, where I never should’ve strayed from. Once I get there, I’ll decide who to tell about what. Might be the law can go after the men that grabbed Missy Lavinia and Juneau Jane, but the news can’t come from me. I have to find another way to let the sheriff know what’s happened.
Looking up and downriver one more time, I wonder how far it is to a place where I can get a ferry crossing to the home side of that big, wide, rushin’ water. Not so much as a hint of people hereabouts that I can see. No buildings, no road but the one where we took on wood. It must go someplace. Might be, if the divine providence is on me, nobody’s come to collect them horses yet.
It’s the best hope I got, so that’s where I go.
Before I get there, I hear the sound of men, the jingle of harness buckles, the groan of shafts and singletree. The soft snort of a horse. I ease up my step, but hold out a hope that the woodcutters might be colored folk who’d help me. Closer I come, the more I know their talk is some other language. Not Frenchy talk—I can pick out a handful of that—but something else.
Maybe this is some of the Indians that still live back in the swamps, married in with the whites and the slaves that run off to hide in the woods years ago.
A prickle crawls over me. A warning. Colored folk got to be careful in this world. Womenfolk got to be careful, too. I’m both, so that’s double, and the only thing I have to protect myself is a derringer pistol with two cartridges that’s wet and probably ruined.
A dog barks, and both men quieten their chatter. I stop where I am, drop down in the brush. The dog rummages closer, and I go fear-cold. Don’t even breathe.
Go away, dog.
I wait for that thing to flush me out. Back and forth he moves, sniffing loud and fast. He knows he’s found something.
A man hollers a sharp grunt of a word.
The dog scampers off, quick as can be.
I let my forehead sag on my arm, catch a breath.
Wagon springs squeak. Wood hits wood. A mule brays. A horse nickers and snorts and paws the ground. The men grouse and mutter, loading up their pay goods.
I crawl forward to where the brush is thin as lace and I can see through in places.
Two men. Not white. Not Indian. Not colored. Something between. Their smell drifts on the wind. Sweat and sour grease and dirt and whiskey and bodies that don’t bother with washing. Long, dark hair hangs from their hats, and mud cakes their raggedy clothes.
The dog is poor and thin, with a patchy bald hide that’s bloody from it scratching its mangy skin. The mule pulling the wagon ain’t much better. Old and stove-up, he’s got sores where the harness’s been rubbing and the flies made a feast on the raw flesh.
A good man don’t do a mule that way.
Or a dog.
I stay in my hiding place, listen at their strange talk, try not to move while they lead our horses over to the wagon, tie them fast, then climb up and let off the wagon brake. I watch Old Ginger’s stocking feet stomp as she fusses about the buffalo gnats and no-see-ums and deerflies. I want to run out and take her back, steal her away somehow, but I know I need to sneak off while I can, get gone from here before the snakes and the panthers come out and the haints rise from the night bayou. Before the rougarou, the man-wolf, comes from the black water and prowls looking to eat.
A quick, sharp squeal of metal on metal pinches off that thought as the wagon cargo slides and shifts. Through the hole in the leaves, I catch a flash of gold. I know what it is almost before my mind can draw up the thought of the two big trunks with brass corner plates.
What was brought onto the Genesee Star far upriver just got loaded off here.
Might be them trunks sit empty now. Might be I oughta forget I saw them, and just look after myself. But I follow that wagon instead, s
taying far back enough that even the dog don’t know. My head pounds, and the sweat pours off me, and the mosquitos and the deerflies land and bite. I can’t slap, and I can’t run. Got to stay quiet.
It’s far over yon, wherever those men are headed. Seems like mile after mile we go. My legs get weak, and the tree trunks swirl round my eyes, shadows and sun, leaves and bent crooked branches. A cypress knee catches my toe, and I fall hard into the fringe of a slough. I roll onto my back and lay there looking up at the sky, watching the pieces of blue peek through like Mama’s homespun cloth, fresh dyed from the indigo fields.
I lay there waiting for whatever’s to come.
Far off, the wagon axle sings out its rhythm. Squeek, click-click, squeek, click-click, squee…
The men’s talk drifts back, loud and rowdy now. They been in the whiskey barrel, maybe.
I curl close to the cypress tree, hide all the bare flesh I can from the mosquitos and the blood flies, close my eyes and let their sounds drift off.
I don’t know if I sleep or only fade awhile, but I feel nothing. Worry over nothing.
A touch on my face pulls me from the quiet peace. My eyes burn, sticky and dry when I try to pull them open. The tree shadows have gone long and stretchy with the afternoon sun.
The touch comes again, feathery soft like a kiss. Is it Jesus come to fetch me away? Might be I drowned in the river after all. But the touch stinks of mud and rotted meat.
Something’s trying to make a meal out of me! It jumps sidewards as I swat at it, and when I look, there’s the old rawboned red tick dog from before. He lowers his half-bare head and watches me with careful brown eyes, ducks his tail against his butt, but wags the tip twixt his back knees like he’s hoping I’ll toss him some fatback to eat. We stay there, careful about each other for a while before he moves past and laps up rainwater that’s caught in the scoop of the cypress knees. I pull myself to it and do the same. That dog and me drink side by side at the same dish.