by Lisa Wingate
That’s it. That’s all I can stand. “I think we should put this away.”
LaJuna frowns, her gaze probing mine, surprised and…disappointed? “Now you sound like the judge did. Miss Silva, you’re the one always talking about stories. This book, here…this is the only story most of these people ever got. Only place their names still are, in the whole wide world. They didn’t even get gravestones with it written on there or anything. Look.”
She flips back a page so that the heavy endpaper attached to the cover lies flat beside the flyleaf, open like butterfly wings. A grid of sorts has been drawn across them, sectioned off in somewhat orderly rectangles with numbers. “This”—she tells me, circling the grid with her fingertip—“is where they are. Where they buried all the slaves whenever they died. The old people and the kids and the little bitty babies. Right here.” She grabs a pen and sets it on the desk below the book. “That’s your house. You been living right there by these people, and you didn’t even know it.”
I think of the lovely orchard only a short walk from my back porch. “There’s no graveyard out there. The city cemetery is over on this side.” I place a deco-era stapler and a plastic clip to the left of the pen. “If the pen is my house, the cemetery’s here.”
“Miss Silva.” LaJuna cranes away. “I thought you knew so much about history. That graveyard over there beside your house, the one with the nice fence and all the little stone houses with people’s names, that was the graveyard for white folks. Tomorrow, when I come to help you with the books, I can walk over and show you what’s out behind your place. I went and looked for myself after the judge—”
A grandfather clock in the hall chimes, and both of us jump.
LaJuna jerks away from the table, pulls a broken wristwatch from her pocket, and gasps, “I gotta go. I just came over here real quick to get a book for tonight!” Snatching up a paperback, she dashes out the door. Her footsteps echo through the house along with “I gotta babysit for Mama on her shift!”
The door slams, and she vanishes.
I don’t see her for days. Not at Goswood Grove House, nor at school. She’s just…gone.
I walk the orchard behind my place alone, study the rise and fall of the ground, squat down and pull back the grass where it grows in little mounds, dig away a few inches of soil and find plain brown stones.
A few of them still bear the faint shadow of carved markings, but nothing I can make out.
I sketch them in a notebook and compare them to the narrow, numbered squares on the hand-drawn graveyard map in the Goswood library. It matches up as well as could be expected after the passage of time has been allowed to absorb the truth. I find adult-sized plots and smaller ones—babies or children, buried two or three to a space. I stop counting rectangles at ninety-six, because I can’t stand it any longer. A whole community of people, generations in some families, lie buried behind my house, forgotten. LaJuna is right. Other than whatever has been handed down orally among relatives, that sad, strange batch of notations in the Gossett Bible is the only story they have.
The judge was wrong to have hidden this book. That much I know. What I’m unsure of is how to proceed from here, or if it’s even my place to. I’d like to talk more with LaJuna, to find out what other information she has, but day after day goes by and there’s no opportunity.
Finally, on Wednesday, I go searching for her.
The quest eventually leaves me standing in front of Aunt Sarge’s house, shod in the worn, lime-green Birkenstocks that go with absolutely nothing I own, but are kind to a big toe that was in the way when a stack of books tipped over at Goswood Grove House, seemingly with a mind of its own. A few other strange things have happened there during my many hours alone in the library, but I refuse to think much about them. I don’t have time. All weekend, and for three days after school now, I’ve been sorting books at warp speed, trying to do what I can before anyone else discovers I’ve been given access and before I track down Nathan Gossett again to make him aware of what he actually has in that library.
I’ve fallen behind on laundry, grading papers, planning lessons, and just about everything else. I’m also dangerously low on pooperoos.
On the upside, with the change in classroom snacks, I have shed my old nickname and the kids are testing a new one—Loompa, owing to the Oompa-Loompas in the ever-popular book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a copy of which has been added to our classroom shelves, courtesy of the judge’s penchant for Book of the Month subscriptions. We’ve devised, after much class debate, a system of allowing weeklong checkouts from our new lending library. One of my extremely quiet backwoods kids, Shad, has the book right now. He’s a freshman and a member of the notorious Fish family. He saw the movie after a family trip to visit his father, who’s doing three years in federal prison on some sort of drug charge.
I’d like to learn more about Shad’s situation—he consumes a lot of pooperoos, for one thing, and also covertly stuffs them in his pockets—but there aren’t enough hours in the day. I feel as though I’m constantly doing triage on who needs my attention the most.
Which is why it’s taken me days to venture into the LaJuna situation. I’ve just finished paying a call at the home address in her file. The man who answered the door of the ramshackle apartment informed me, quite curtly, that he’d kicked the so-and-so and her brats out, and I should get off his porch and not bother him again.
My next option is Aunt Sarge or Granny T. Sarge lives closest to town, so here I am. The one-story Creole cottage reminds me of my rental, but with renovations. The siding and trim have been painted in contrasting colors, creating a dollhouse effect in sunny yellow, white, and forest green. Seeing it strengthens my resolve to plead the case with Nathan for my rental house being spared. It could be as cute as this.
Tomorrow is farmers market day. I’m hoping to catch him.
First things first, though. Right now, I’m after LaJuna.
No one answers the door, but I hear voices coming from around back, so I make my way past an immaculate flower bed to a chain-link fence and leaning gate. Morning glory vines twine their way up the posts and back and forth through the wire, woven like living cloth.
Two women in tattered straw hats work along a row of tall plants in a vegetable garden that takes up most of the yard. One woman is heavyset and labors along, her movements slow and stiff. The other is Sarge, I think, though the floppy hat and flowered gloves seem out of character. I watch the scene a moment, and a memory teases my mind, then breaks through. I recall being a small child in a garden, having someone guide my stubby fingers over a strawberry as I pulled it from the plant. I remember touching each berry still clinging to the plant and asking, Pick this one? Pick this one?
I have no idea where that was. Someplace we lived, some neighbor warmhearted enough to play surrogate grandparent. People who were always home and spent a great deal of time out in their yards were my favorite targets whenever we’d land in a new town.
A yearning skates in unexpected, slams hard against my heart before I can turn it around and send it packing. Every once in a while, even though Christopher and I had talked about it at length and agreed that kids weren’t right for either one of us, there’s that urge, the painful What if….
“Hello!” I lean over the gate. “Sorry to bother you.”
Only one garden hat tips upward. The older woman continues along the row. She plucks, and drops, plucks, and drops, filling a basket with long green pods of some sort.
That is Aunt Sarge in the other hat. I recognize the way she swipes her forehead with her arm before readjusting her hat and crossing the yard to me. “Got another problem with the house?” Her tone is surprisingly solicitous, considering that our last meeting ended unpleasantly.
“No, the house is fine. Sadly, I think you’re right about its future rental status, though. If you hear of something coming open, a
garage apartment or whatever, I don’t need much, since it’s just me.”
“Well, if it’s going to end up just you, it’s better to know when he’s only the fiancé, right?” She recalls our conversation during the roof recon, and I feel the tug of kinship again.
“Truth.”
“Look,” she offers, “I’m sorry I was hard on you the other day. It’s just that it’s not a far trip from believing you can change things in Augustine, to going nuts. That’s all I was trying to say. I’m not much of a diplomat, which is mostly what cut short my military career. Sometimes, if you’re not willing to blow smoke at people, you find yourself ditched on the side of the road.”
“Sounds a little like the faculty in a college English department,” I admit. “Minus the Humvees and camouflage, I mean.”
Aunt Sarge and I actually chuckle. Together.
“Is this your house?” I say, by way of keeping the conversation going. “It’s great. I’m a sucker for anything antique or vintage.”
She thumbs over her shoulder. “Aunt Dicey’s place. My grandmother’s baby sister. I came by last spring to visit after…” A labored sigh, and whatever she was about to divulge is quickly rerouted to “Didn’t plan on staying, but Aunt Dicey was in a mess. No propane in the tank, the plumbing cut off to most of the house. Ninety-year-old woman heating bathwater on the stove. Too many no-account kids and grandkids and great-grandkids, and nieces and nephews. Whatever Aunt Dicey has, if somebody asks for it, she’ll give it. So, I just moved in.”
She rubs the back of her neck, stretches it one way and then the other. A rueful laugh hisses between her teeth. “And here I am, picking okra in Augustine, Louisiana. My dad would turn over in his grave. Best thing that ever happened to him was getting drafted into the army and discovering a whole new world out there.”
Obviously, there’s a much bigger story under Sarge’s crusty exterior. “Looks like you’ve made a tremendous difference on the house.”
“Houses are easy. People, not so much. You can’t just strip out the lead pipe, re-run the wires, slap on a coat of paint…and fix things in a lot of these families.”
“Speaking of family”—I avoid the sinkhole of what can’t be done in Augustine—“the reason I stopped by is LaJuna. She and I had an accord of sorts last week. She promised not to miss any more school, and I told her that if she didn’t miss, she could help me with a project I’m working on. That was Thursday afternoon. She didn’t come to school on Friday, and I haven’t seen her since. I went to the home address on file for her, and the guy there told me to get lost.”
“That’d be her mama’s old boyfriend. Tiffany hits him up when she needs a place to land. Tiffany’s always hitting somebody up—been doing that since she snagged my cousin senior year of high school and had LaJuna. That’s how Tiff gets by.” She pulls a bandana from her pocket, takes off the hat and mops her neck, then fans some air under her T-shirt. “Tiff’s hard on people. Left LaJuna here for years while she was in prison and never has done a thing to pay Aunt Dicey back.”
“Can you tell me where they are? Living, I mean. LaJuna said her mom had a new job and they were doing fine.” I know a little about intentionally misleading the adults in your life to keep secrets under wraps. Things that, if they knew, would send your whole world tumbling end over end. “I don’t think LaJuna would break her promise. She was so excited about sorting”—I catch myself—“our project.”
“Honey, you coming back?” Aunt Dicey calls out. “Bring your friend. She wants to help us pick, then she can stay over for some okra and fried green ’maters. That’ll be good! Don’t have much meat to put with it. Couple slices of roast left from my Mealsie Wheelsies. We can have that, too. Tell her to come on in here. No need in being bashful.” Aunt Dicey cups a hand around her ear, listening for a response.
“She has things to do, Aunt Dicey,” Sarge calls, loudly enough to be heard in the next town down the road. “And we have meat. I bought a ham.”
“Oh, hi there, Pam!” Aunt Dicey says.
Sarge shakes her head. “She doesn’t have her hearing aid in.” She hustles me toward the car. “You’d better get out of here while you can. She’ll tie you up until midnight, and I know that’s not what you came here for. Listen, I’ll do what I can about LaJuna, but her mama and I aren’t each other’s favorite people. She ruined my cousin’s life. I’ve caught Tiffany over here more than once, looking to mooch food or money from Aunt Dicey. Told her if she shows up again, things’ll get ugly. Tiff needs to pay her own bills, stop skipping out on work to hang with that loser ex-boyfriend of hers down in New Orleans, which, if I had to guess, is where she’s at right now. Taking the baby for a visit with his daddy. LaJuna’s probably stuck there, looking after the rest of the kids and trying to get her mama to go back to work before she gets fired.”
I have a sudden and crushing picture of LaJuna’s life. No wonder she’s bossy with adults. She’s parenting one.
Sarge angles an appraising look my way when we get to the car. “You need to know that it’s not LaJuna’s fault. Kid’s stuck at the bottom of a well and has to drag four people up the rope with her. Multiply that by a half dozen different batches of kinfolk, and you’ll see why some days, I just want to get in the car and drive. But man, I loved my granny and she loved her baby sister, Dicey…well…I don’t know. We’ll see.”
“I get it.” The problems here are deeply rooted. If the way of things was easy to change, people would’ve done it already. “Like throwing starfish back into the ocean.”
“Huh?”
“It’s just a story I had on the bulletin board of my old office. Perspective, sort of. I’ll xerox a copy for you if I ever find it again.”
Sarge leans over to peer through the Bug’s window. “What’s all that?” She’s studying the library questionables I’ve stacked in the backseat in hopes of showing them to Nathan at the farmers market tomorrow morning—a few valuable old books I’m worried about, along with the plantation ledger and the family Bible with the burial records in it.
I consider trying to obfuscate, but what good would it do? Sarge is looking right at the ledger that bears the Gossett name. “I wanted to make sure I got a chance to study these more closely…while I could. Coach Davis roped me into handling gate duty tonight at the football stadium. There’s some kind of a fundraiser concert for the athletics department and I guess they were desperate for workers. Anyway, I thought I could do some reading in between, or after.”
“You’ve been in the judge’s house? That’s where you got all this?” She slaps the car’s hood. “Oh Lord.” Her head falls back and the straw hat slips off, drifting soundlessly to the driveway. “Oh Lord,” she says again. “Did LaJuna let you in there?”
“Nathan gave me a key,” I blurt, but I can feel the steam building next to me. Sarge is like a pressure cooker, about to blow.
“Put that stuff back where you got it.”
“I’m looking for books for my classroom. Nathan said to take whatever I could use, but I don’t think he has any idea what’s in that house. The library closets are full. Half of the bookshelves are double stacked. Behind the first row of new books, there are old books, rare books. Things like those.” I nod toward the seat.
“This is the project with LaJuna?” Sarge demands. “I don’t care if she messes around in the gardens over there, but I told her to stay out of that house.”
“She showed up the first day.” I can feel my relationship with LaJuna potentially being shredded. First I invade her secret place, now I’m getting her in trouble with her aunt. “She knows a lot about the place. Its history. The stories. She spent quite a bit of time with the judge while she was with her aunt…or great-aunt…your Aunt Dicey. There’s an old hatch in the floor under the—”
“Stop. Don’t. Not interested.” If I didn’t before, now I fully understand that I am into something m
uch bigger than I can grasp. “Put that stuff back. Don’t let LaJuna in that house again, either. If Will and Manford Gossett or their wives find out she’s involved in this, Tiff won’t be clinging to that new job at Gossett Industries, she’ll be out. You get on their wrong side, you better start packing your boxes and rent yourself a moving van. Trust me.”
“I can’t just quit. I need the books, and they’re sitting there going to rot.”
“Don’t think you’re safe because you don’t work for Gossett Industries, either. Manford’s little blond trophy wife is on the school board.”
“My understanding is that the house and land are Nathan’s, though.”
“Look, before Nathan’s sister died, things might’ve been different.” Shaking her head, she focuses on the pavement as if she’s sorting her thoughts. “When Robin inherited that house from the judge, she stood guard over it. She cared about it. It was hers and she wasn’t about to let her uncles steal it out from under her. But she’s gone, and, yes, technically the house passed on to her brother, but the only reason Nathan hasn’t sold it is out of respect for his sister—because Robin fought Will and Manford for it until her dying day.”
“Oh…” I murmur.
“It’s a mess,” Aunt Sarge says. “Stay away from the Gossetts. Stay away from the house. Don’t take those books around town with you, and, whatever you do, don’t show them to anyone at the football stadium. Put that stuff back where you found it. I’ll try to get LaJuna straightened around about school, but you keep her away from Goswood.”
I meet Sarge’s gaze. A lot goes unsaid between us in that quick look before I climb into the car. “Thanks for the help with LaJuna.”
“It’ll depend on what’s up with her mom.” She rests a hand on the open window. “I know that story about the starfish. I get what you think you’re trying to do. But around here, the tide’s pretty strong.”