by Lisa Wingate
The water seeps through my body, wakes my arms and feet and mind. The dog sits down and watches, careful. He don’t seem in a hurry to go. Must be he’s close to home.
“Where’d you come from?” I whisper. “Your place near here?”
I shift to get my legs under me, and the dog shies back. “All right,” I whisper. He’s about as sad and sorry a hound as I ever saw, scratches, swole-up places, and bare spots all over his body. “You go on home now. Show me where that is.”
I get to my feet, and he skitters off and I trek along behind, following his weave through the woods. He don’t care to use the road, so we cross it and go down a game trail. The sweet-burn smell of a smokehouse pools the back of my mouth. Dog takes me right to it, at the rear end of a homeplace that’s been hollowed out of the woods on high ground. Little slabwood house and barn, smokehouse and outhouse. The chimneys are sticks and mud, like the ones in the old cabins on the Quarter, back in Goswood Grove. Everything on this place leans one way or the other, the bayou eating it up a little at a time. A pirogue sits against the wall of the cabin, with all manner of traps for animals and beaver. The leftovers of a deer carcass hang in a tree, flies gathered so thick they climb on each other to get what they’re after.
Place is still as the grave. I crouch behind a wood stack high and wide as the cabin, watch and listen while the dog goes on into the yard and sniffs round and digs hisself a hole to lay down in the cool. A horse snorts and stirs a ruckus, kicking the barn’s log wall and knocking loose a shower of chink and dirt. A mule brays. The sound travels so loud it sets birds to flying, but the cabin stays still.
I creep round to the barn, peek in. The wagon’s parked in the aisle. Ginger and Juneau Jane’s gray stand together in a stall, the old mule in the next one. Sweat and lather covers all three. They been carrying on with each other, saying who’s boss. Blood drips from the gray’s leg, where he’s kicked the rails. I move in a little more, so’s I can see the back of the wagon. A whiskey barrel and the trunks are gone.
A few steps more and I spot them big boxes with the brass corners, dumped on the floor of the barn, but they’re open, empty inside, when I creep close and check. The smell’s as bad as the sight. The stink of stomachs that’ve wretched up their food and bodies that’ve soiled theirselves makes me cover my nose, but at least it ain’t the smell of death. I take some comfort in that, even if it’s small comfort. Don’t want to think what it means if Missy and Juneau Jane been carried into that cabin. Don’t know what I can do about it, if they have.
I study on the barn, wish there’d be a rifle left there, but on the walls it’s just harness hanging, still wet from the morning’s work, also a half dozen old Confederate bridles, the round brasses on the browband marked with CSA. There’s Jeff Davis saddles, too, piled together over the top of empty barrels, Confederate canteens and a kerosene lantern, plus Lucifers in a brass box to strike the fire with.
I dig up a piece of oilcloth that’s half-buried in the hay, lay it out on the floor, and go to gathering. Lucifers, a canteen, a tin cup, a piece of broke-off candle, and meat from the smokehouse. I fill a canteen from the rain barrel, sling it over my shoulder and find a hank of rope to tie the oilcloth into a poke. The dog comes round, and I toss him some of the meat, and we don’t bother each other. He follows when I carry the poke off to the woods and put it in the branch of a tree where I can grab it if I need to get away in a hurry.
The dog and me squat together in the brush, then, while I look at that cabin and try to think what to do next. Go for the horses, I guess. Then worry about the rest.
It’s on the way back to the barn I notice the space between the stalls and the end wall. Not much more than three foot, but it’s sealed up good, hid from the outside. Don’t recall seeing a door to it from the aisle. I can think up only one reason for a barn like that, with a room that’s made to be a secret place.
Back inside, I search round, find a hatchet hanging through a metal loop on the wall, but it ain’t there to be a hatchet. It’s there to keep a hasp shut, to hide it. A length of batten wood holds the other side upright. When I wiggle off the batten and lift out the hatchet, the piece of wall comes loose like the lid of a sideways crate.
The room’s what I thought. A hiding place like slave poachers used back before the freedom. Even in the shadow dark, I can see pegs hung with slave chains. Men like these would hunt down runaways in the swamp. Grab folks right off the road—free coloreds with papers, mulattos and Creoles, slaves doing their master’s bidding and carrying a pass. Men like these didn’t bother to question. Just throw a bag over the head of a man, woman, or child, tie them under a tarp in the back of a wagon, hide them in the swamp to sell to a trader marching some sad coffle to a auction sale far off. Men like these do their business the way Jep Loach done his.
The smell comes, then sifts up out of the dark of that room. Same as the trunks. Stomachs and bowels emptied, then the mess left to sour and rot. “You in here?” I whisper, but no answer comes. I listen hard. Do I hear breathin’?
I move by feel, find a half-warm body dumped ’cross the straw, and then another one. Missy Lavinia and Juneau Jane ain’t dead, but they ain’t alive, either. They’re dressed in no more than their shimmies and drawers. Can’t be roused with whispering and shaking and slapping. I poke my head from the room, check the house again. The red tick dog sits in the barn door, watching me, but he just scrubs his half-bare tail back and forth over the dirt, remembering the meat. He won’t be no trouble.
Do the next thing, Hannie, I tell myself. Do the next thing and do it quick, before somebody comes.
I hunt up halters and leads and bridles and the best two of them old war saddles. The cinches and leathers hang rat chewed and weak, but they’ll hold, I hope. Got no choice. Only way I can keep them two girls on the horses is to have something to tie them to. Push them up there and hogtie them belly-down, just like the patrollers did to the runaway slaves back in the bad times.
Juneau Jane is a easy task, even though the gelding’s tall. She don’t weigh much and that horse is so glad to see her, he’s gentle as a toy rocky horse while I get her settled. Missy Lavinia, she’s a whole other task. She ain’t ladylike and airy. She’s solid. Weighs way more than a hundred-pound white oak basket full of cotton, that’s for definite. But I’m a strong woman, and my heart’s pumping so heavy from fear, I’m good as two strong women put together. I get her in the wagon bed, pull Old Ginger up next to it and go to pulling and pushing till Missy’s flopped over the saddle and I can tie her there. The stink on her drags dried meat and bile and cypress water right on up my throat, and I swallow back and swallow back and swallow back, check the house, check the house, check the house, thankful for the whiskey them men got from the boat and lots of it. They must be stone drunk asleep in there. I hope they don’t know a thing till tomorrow morning, elsewise we’ll all end up back in that poacher’s hold together.
I tie the old, dull hatchet on one of the saddles, and then the last matter I try to figure is the mule. Less chance of them men catching up to me if I got hooves under me and they don’t. If I try to take that mule with me, he’s likely to carry on and fuss with the horses and make noise, though. I can turn him loose, and if the luck’s on me, he’ll wander off in the woods looking for fodder. If the luck ain’t, he’ll linger near the home barn.
Opening the stall door, I say to that half-starved old soul, “Shush now. If you’re smart, you won’t ever come back here. These’re bad men. They done you in a terrible way.” The hide of that poor mule looks like the skin of the old folks who had come as marriage dowry from the Loach plantation. The Loaches used to brand the little ones when they turned a year old. Said it made them harder to steal. Branded the runaways, and any slave they bought, too.
This poor old mule’s been hot marked a dozen different times, including by both armies. He’s got to carry all that with him forever. “You’re a free mule now
,” I tell him. “You go be free.”
He follows out of the barn when I lead the horses away, but I shoo him off, so he trails at a distance while we pick up our poke and wind out from that cabin and through the woods, working inland. The hound follows, too, and I let him. “Guess you’re free, too,” I tell him when we’re well enough away. “No bad men like that oughta have a dog, either.”
Missy Lavinia and Juneau Jane’s heads flop loose against stirrups. I hope nobody’s dead or dying, but there’s no help for it. Not one thing I can do, except get us far from here, be careful, quiet, keep my ears peeled, keep off the wagon trail, stay clear of sump holes, or swamp cabins, or towns, or wagons, or folks. Hide from everybody till Missy Lavinia and Juneau Jane can talk on their own. Ain’t no way of me explaining what looks like a colored boy, toting two white girls, half dressed and tied belly-down on horses.
I’ll be dead before I can even try.
CHAPTER 12
BENNY SILVA—AUGUSTINE, LOUISIANA, 1987
I slip silently through the house, tracking the sound. I picture mice, squirrels, and the giant nutria rats I’ve seen swimming in the canals and pools of stagnant water during my walks.
Images of ghosts and ghouls and hideous insect-like aliens percolate through my thoughts. Ax murderers and vagrants. I’ve always been a horror movie junkie, proud of the fact that I can watch things like that and never take them seriously. Even after years of dating, Christopher hated that I was too busy trying to figure out the next scene and plot twist to actually be scared. You’re so stinking analytical, he always complained. It’s no fun.
It’s all just pretend. Smoke and mirrors. Don’t be such a sissy, I’d tease. Growing up as a latchkey kid, you can’t panic at every little noise.
But, here in this place, with generations of history I can only guess at, I feel my own vulnerability with strange acuity. Being alone in a shadow-filled old house is different than watching one on TV.
The sounds emanating from the kitchen area are definitely not those of someone stepping casually through the door. Whatever’s there, he, she, or it does not want to be seen. The movements are quiet, cautious, deliberately careful…and so am I. I want to see it before it sees me.
At the butler’s pantry doorway, I stop and search the long rows of tall mahogany cabinets and well-worn countertops where servants must have staged elaborate meals. The mirrors on the opposing sideboards merely reflect one another and the upper cabinets. Nothing unusual or threatening…except…
Shifting to gain a better view, I watch in consternation as a skinny rear end in jeans with silver embroidery backs its way out of the lower-left corner cabinet.
What in the world?
I recognize the jeans and color-block T-shirt. I’ve seen them in my fourth-hour class. Albeit not as much as I would like to.
“LaJuna Carter!” I say before she has even straightened. She whirls about, stands at attention. “What are you doing?”
I don’t ask if she is supposed to be here. No need. It’s clear enough from the look on that face.
She effects a jaunty chin bob that reminds me of Aunt Sarge. “I ain’t hurtin’ nothing.” Long, thin fingers circle her skinny hip bones. “How’d you think I knew about all the books? Anyway, the judge said I can come. Back before he died, he told me, ‘Stop by whenever you want, LaJuna.’ Wasn’t like anybody else ever came…unless they want somethin’. All the judge’s kids and grandkids, kept too tied up with their houses on the lake, takin’ their boats out fishing. Got to go sit on the beach, because they own places there, too. Can’t let that go to waste. You have all them houses, you are a busy person. No time to go sit in some old place with some old man stuck in a wheelchair.”
“The judge doesn’t own this house anymore.”
“I don’t steal anything if that’s what you think.”
“That isn’t what I said, but…how did you get in, anyway?”
“How did you?”
“I have a key.”
“I don’t need a key. Judge showed me all this house’s secrets.”
I’m intrigued. How could I not be? “I took your suggestion about the books—thank you for that, by the way—and got permission to come here and see what might be useful in getting a classroom library together.”
Her eyes widen around their pewter centers. She’s surprised and…dare I assume…impressed that I’ve managed to breach the ramparts of the Gossett world. “You find anything?”
My first inclination is to gush about the book hoard. The library is an amalgamation of the generations of residents in this house. The dust of their reading lives has been left behind like sedimentary layers of sandstone, year upon year, decade upon decade. New books and old ones that probably haven’t been touched in a century. Some may be first editions, or even signed. My former boss at Book Bazaar would be weeping on the floor in sheer ecstasy by now.
But the teacher in me is possessed by a completely different agenda. “I haven’t been here long…because I went to school today. That makes one of us, doesn’t it?”
“I was sick.”
“Speedy recovery, huh?” I squat down and stick my head in the cabinet she seemingly just crawled out of. Something’s not normal about it, but I can’t figure out what. “Look, LaJuna, I know your mother works quite a bit, and that you help out with your little brothers and sisters, but you need to be in class.”
“You oughta mind your own business.” The sharp-edged retort hints that she may often be in the position of defending her mother. “I hand my papers in. You got plenty of kids who don’t do their work. Go hassle them.”
“I do…well, I try.” Not that it works. “Regardless, I don’t think you should be sneaking in here.”
“Mr. Nathan wouldn’t care, even if he did know. He’s not so bad like his uncles that own the company now. All their snotty wives and all their snotty kids think they run this town. My Great-Aunt Dicey says Sterling was different. Nice to people. Aunt Dicey was right here making lunch for the harvest crew the day Sterling got sucked up in the sugarcane combine. She stayed overnight to look after Robin and Nathan while their daddy was life-flighted off. After he died, his wife packed up the kids and moved away to some mountain. Aunt Dicey knows all the business about the Gossetts. She kept house for the judge forever. Used to bring me out here when she took care of me. That’s how I knew the judge and that’s how I knew Miss Robin.”
I picture the players in my mind, imagine the long-ago afternoon when everyday life went horribly wrong.
“Nobody wants this house, anyhow,” LaJuna goes on. “Judge’s son died out there in the field. Judge died three years ago in his own bed. Miss Robin died two years ago, just walkin’ up the stairs one night. Her heart quit. Aunt Dicey says that in every generation of Gossetts there’s blue babies, and they had to do surgery on Miss Robin’s heart when she was born. But my mama says Miss Robin saw a ghost and it’s what killed her. Mama told me there’s a curse on this place, and that’s how come nobody wants it. So you might best get what you need of the books and get out.” She shrugs toward the door in a way that lets me know she’d like to limit my tenancy on her turf.
“I’m not the least bit superstitious. Especially when books are at stake.” I lean farther into her point-of-entry cabinet, try to discern how she managed that.
“You oughta be. Can’t read if you’re dead.”
“Who says?”
She snorts. “You go to church?”
Elbowing in beside me, she grumbles, “Move your head.” I’m barely out of the way before she flips a lever behind the cabinet frame, causing the shelves to fold upward and reveal a hatch underneath. “I told you…this house has secrets.”
An ancient-looking ladder descends into the raised basement below.
A huge gray rat scurries across a bit of discarded wrought iron garden furniture, and I jerk
my head out of the hole. “You came in through there?” I catch myself nervously brushing off my hands and arms as I stand up and LaJuna lets the cabinet fall back into place.
She rolls a glance my way. “Those rats’re more scared of you than you are of them.”
“I doubt that.”
“Rats are always scared. Unless maybe you’re sleeping, then you gotta watch out.”
I don’t even ask how she has come by that knowledge.
“The judge told me, in the old-old days, they’d bring food in through the basement and pass the trays up this hatch. That way, the kitchen slaves didn’t get seen by the guests in the dining room. In the war, the Gossetts could use it to sneak away to the canebrakes if the Yankee soldiers came to arrest people for helping the Confederates. The judge loved to tell tales to little kids. He was a nice man. Helped Aunt Dicey get me out of foster care when my mama had to go away to prison.”
She says it so naturally, I’m dumbfounded. To cover that up, I change the subject. “Listen, LaJuna, I’ll make a deal with you. If you promise me you won’t sneak in here anymore, you can come and help me in the afternoons…with sorting the library books, I mean. I know you like books. I saw you with a copy of Animal Farm in your back pocket.”
“It ain’t the worst book.” She scratches a sneaker along the floor. “Not the best book, either.”
“But…only if you’re in school when you’re supposed to be. I don’t want this to interfere.” She’s noticeably unimpressed, and so I try to sweeten the deal. “I need to get a good gauge on what’s in that library as quickly as I can before…” I swallow the rest of before there’s trouble with the rest of the Gossetts.
A sly look comes my way. She knows. “Now, I might help you. Because of the judge. He would probably like it. But I got some conditions, too.”
“Fire away. We’ll see what we can settle on.”
“I can’t always come here. I’ll try. And I’ll try better about school, but lots of times, I need to keep the little kids for Mama. They sure can’t go stay with their daddies. Losers. It was Donnie that got Mama in trouble for the drugs. All she did wrong was be in the car. Next thing, there’s police dragging us off to the emergency children’s shelter, and Mama’s got three years in the pen. I’m just lucky I had a great-auntie on my daddy’s side who could keep me. The little kids don’t got that. Can’t let them go back in foster care again. So, if you’re out to get in our business, make trouble about my school and all, then I ain’t part of this book project.”