by Lisa Wingate
“Nah,” he mutters as we stand up. I’m suddenly afraid that he’s decided against dinner. “Let’s just go down to the Cluck and eat. You’ve had a tough week. No sense in you having to clean up afterward.” He must be reading the explosion of surprise on my face, because he quickly adds, “Unless you don’t feel like it.”
“No!” I blurt. But aside from his one library visit, which was just the kids and me and a few helpers, Nathan and I have kept to ourselves. “That sounds great. Let me do something with this hair real quickly.”
“To go to the Cluck and Oink?” His forehead twists into a bemused serpentine shape.
“Point taken.”
“You look great. Sort of Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing meets Jennifer Beals in Flashdance.”
“Oh, well, in that case…” I do a nerdy dance move my colleagues in the college English department once affectionately dubbed Big Bird on Ice. Nathan laughs, and we proceed to his truck. On the way to town, we chat about nothing important.
Entering the Cluck and Oink, I feel a pang of self-consciousness. Granny T is behind the cash register. LaJuna brings our menus, offers a shy hello, and tells us she’ll be waiting our table.
Maybe takeout would’ve been a better idea. The library was one thing, but this looks too much like a date and sort of feels like one, too.
The girls’ cross-country coach is in the corner. She checks me out in a way that’s not friendly. She and the other coaches are annoyed with me. Some of the kids have been late for after-school practices because they’re busy working on their Underground projects.
Lil’ Ray emerges from the back room carrying a dish tub, spray bottles of pink cleaner looped over his belt like cowboy six-shooters. I didn’t even know he worked here.
He and LaJuna cross paths in the narrow space between the waitress station and the kitchen door. They jostle and tease and then, where they think no one can see, melt into full-body contact and a kiss.
When did that get started?
I feel like my eyes have just been burned. No. Please no.
No more.
Heaven help me, I may not survive these kids. It’s something, every time I turn around. Some new pitfall, pothole, roadblock, poor decision, or act of pure stupidity.
Lil’ Ray and LaJuna are so young and they both have tremendous potential, but they’re also dealing with huge challenges in their daily lives. When you’re a kid in a tough family situation, you’re painfully vulnerable to trying to fill the void with peers. As much as I’m in favor of young love in theory, I’m also aware of the potential fallout. I can’t help feeling that Lil’ Ray and LaJuna need a teenage relationship about as much as I need five-inch stilettos.
Don’t read too much into it, I tell myself. Most of these things come and go in a week.
“So, I was thinking about the house.” Nathan is talking. I rip my eyes away from the scene at the waitress station and try to ignore the glowering coach, as well.
“My house?”
The question hangs in the air while the bread boy stops at our table with an offering that would smell heavenly under any other circumstance. He sets down a well-used plastic basket, then loads it with corn muffins, breadsticks, and rolls, then adds butter, honey-butter, and a knife.
“Hey, Miss Pooh,” he says. I’m so out of sorts, I haven’t even looked up and noticed that the bread boy is also one of my students. A shaggy-haired kid from the Fish family. The others classify him squarely in the category with the hoods. Rumor is, he smokes weed, which his family grows in fields carved out of the backwoods somewhere. Generally, he smells like cigarettes, especially after lunch.
The Fish family receives no kindness in the teachers’ lounge, either. White trash. None of those Fish kids ever graduate from high school, so why waste your time? was the exact quote. Sooner they drop out, the better. Just a bad influence on the others.
I offer up a smile. While Shad Fish, the next oldest boy in the family, is a bit more talkative, I wasn’t even aware this senior Fish kid knew my name. Gar Fish has never spoken in class. Not once. Most of the time, he has his forehead propped in his hands, staring down at the desk. Even at the library. As a student, he’s a complete slacker. He’s not an athlete, either, so there’s no coach defending his lack of academic effort.
“Hey, Gar.” The poor kid has sisters named Star and Sunnie, and a little brother named Finn. People poke fun at the names constantly.
I had no idea Gar worked at the Cluck.
“I been…I been writin’…on my project,” he says.
Knock me over with a feather.
A tentative glance flutters through the dark fringe of greasy, overgrown bangs beneath the Cluck ball cap. “Uncle Saul went over to the nursing home in Baton Rouge to say hey to Poppop. Me and Shad went on with him so we could talk to Pops, too. We don’t got any family Bibles or anything like that at home.”
He glances up self-consciously as the hostess seats new customers in the next booth. Gar shifts his back toward them before he goes on. “Pops told me some stuff about the family. They used to run a operation upwater from here. Biggest bootleggers in three parishes. Pops joined in at just eleven years old, after the revenuers took his daddy off. The family business got busted up after a while, though. Pops left home and went farther upriver to work for some uncles that had a sawmill. He remembers they had a room in the barn still with slaves’ chains in it. Way back when, they’d catch runaways in the swamp, take them off to New Orleans and make money from it. You imagine that? Poachers. Like huntin’ gators out of season. That’s what my people did for their livin’.”
“Huh.” On occasion that’s all I can say to the facts we’ve uncovered during our journey through the Underground project. The truth is frequently horrific. “The things we find in history are hard to understand sometimes, aren’t they, Gar?”
“Yeah.” His saggy shoulders slump. His eyes, a murky swampwater color, cast downward. There’s a fairly pronounced bruise under the left one—no telling where he got that. “Might can I start over on my project? It’s just that the Fishes do bad stuff and get in jail mostly. Maybe I can pick somebody out of the graveyard and talk about them? A rich guy or the mayor or something?”
I swallow the urge to get emotional. “Don’t give up yet. Let’s keep digging. Remind me tomorrow when we’re at the library, and we’ll work on it together. Have you looked into the other side of your family? Your mother’s side?”
“Mama got put in foster care when she was little, so we didn’t ever meet her people. They’re from around Thibodaux, I think.”
I shift uncomfortably in my seat, pinched by the thought of a child left unmoored in the world, at the mercy of strangers. “Well, all right, then we’ll see what there is to learn. We’ll start there tomorrow. With your mother’s last name. You can never tell where the—”
“Gold nugget might be unless you dig. Yeah, I know.” He finishes the class mantra the kids and I have developed.
“Every family has more than one side to its history, right? What was her last name? Your mother’s?”
“Mama was a McKlatchy before she married a Fish.”
Nathan sets down the butter knife with a clank, straightens a bit. “My mother has some McKlatchys in her family. Distant kin, but they’re all down around Morgan City, Thibodaux, Bayou Cane. We might be related way back.”
Gar and I both gape at him. I had no idea that Nathan enjoyed family ties around here on his mother’s side. Based on the descriptions of her as an outsider, I assumed she was from someplace far away. Nathan has an entire life south of here along the coast. A life with people in it. Kinfolk and family reunions.
“Maybe,” Gar says, as if he’s having a hard time processing a possible genetic connection to Nathan Gossett. “But I doubt it, though.”
“Just in case you might be a relative,” Nathan says, �
�do a little digging into Augustus ‘Gus’ McKlatchy. The old aunts and uncles used to talk about him at the family reunions when I was a kid. There’s a good story there, if he’s in your family tree.”
Gar looks doubtful. “Hope your bread’s good,” he mutters, and shrugs, and then he’s gone.
Nathan watches him walk away. “Poor kid,” he says and looks at me in a way that silently adds, I don’t see how you can do this day in and day out.
“Yeah, I kind of know how he feels.” For some reason, maybe it’s the new revelation about Nathan and the Fishes, but more of the Mussolini rumors from my father’s family spill out. “It’s strange how you can feel guilty for a family history you didn’t have anything to do with, isn’t it? My folks finally divorced when I was four and a half, then my father moved back to New York City. We don’t keep in touch, but now I kind of wish I could ask him about it, find the truth.” I can’t believe I just said that, and to Nathan. With the Underground project invading so much of my mental space, family ties have been on my mind, I guess. The way Nathan’s sitting there listening, nodding attentively, makes it seem all right.
He hasn’t even touched the bread.
For an instant, I wonder if I could tell him the rest of it—everything. And if that wouldn’t matter, either. Just as quickly, shame rushes in, and I squelch the notion. It’ll change the way he thinks of me. Aside from that, we’re in a public place. I’m suddenly aware of how quiet the women at the table behind us are. I hope they haven’t been listening in.
Surely not. Why would they care?
I stretch upward a bit, and the blonde facing me lifts her menu, so that only her nicely highlighted hair is visible above the edge.
I push the bread toward Nathan. “Sorry. I don’t know how I got off on that topic. Dig in.”
“Ladies first.” He scoots the basket back, pinches the knife handle between a thumb and forefinger and offers it to me. “As long as you’re not a fiend on the jalapeño corn bread.”
I chuckle. “You know I’m not.” The corn bread is a takeout joke between us. I’ll get out the plain sixty-cents-a-loaf grocery store bread before I’ll eat corn bread. I know it’s a southern staple, but I haven’t acquired a taste for it. It’s like eating sawdust.
We settle into the bread plate. Corn bread for Nathan, breadsticks for me. We’ll split the rolls with our meal. It’s become our routine.
My gaze has drifted again to the women at the next table, when LaJuna comes by to take our order. She lingers afterward, the pencil dangling. “Miss Silva.” She’s one of the few who has not succumbed to calling me Miss Pooh. It’s her way of separating herself from the rest, I think. “Mama was supposed to come visit the other day and bring the little kids, so I could give my sister her birthday present and a cake Aunt Dicey and me made. But then we had to just talk on the phone, because Mama’s car has trouble sometimes.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” I clench my fingers around the napkin in my lap, twist opposite ways and wring out my frustration. This is at least the fourth promised Mama visit that has fallen through. Every time it happens, LaJuna is bubbly with excitement during the anticipation phase, then retreats into herself when the plans end in disappointment. “Well, I’m glad you got to talk on the phone.”
“We couldn’t very long, on account of collect calls cost too much on Aunt Dicey’s phone bill. But I told Mama about my Underground project. She said when she was little, they used to say that way back, her great-great-great-grandmama had money and fancy clothes and she owned land and horses and stuff. Can I be her for my Underground project, so I can wear a pretty dress?”
“Well…” The rest of the sentence, I don’t see why not, never makes it out of my mouth. The bell chimes on the front door and there’s a sudden, palpable effect. The room feels as if the air has just been sucked out of it.
I see a woman nudge her husband and point surreptitiously toward the door. A man at another table stops chewing in the middle of a bite of brisket, sets down his fork, leans forward in his seat.
Across from me, Nathan’s face goes slack, then rigid. I glance over my shoulder, see two men at the hostess stand, their designer golf clothes out of place against the restaurant’s barn wood and tin interior. Will and Manford Gossett have aged since their portraits were hung at Goswood House, but even without the old photos and the family resemblance, I’d probably guess who they were, just by their demeanor. They move through the place like they own it, laughing, chatting, waving at people across the room, shaking hands.
They pointedly avoid looking our way as they breeze right past us and take their seats…with the women at the next booth.
CHAPTER 23
HANNIE GOSSETT—TEXAS, 1875
The rock bluffs, speckled with live oaks and cedar elms, and growed over in the valleys with pecans and cottonwoods, have turned to grass that rolls out, and out, and out. The hills stand yellow and barely green and hen-feather brown with soft pink tips. Stickery mesquites squat in lace-leaf patches. Flat padded cactus and limestone rock trouble the feet and legs of the horses, making us travel slow, even now that we’re through the top of the Hill Country, with its farm fields and white rock barns and German church houses. We’re gone on beyond all that. South past Llano town, out where there ain’t a thing but scrap trees squatted in the low places like green stitches puckering a brown-and-gold quilt.
Seen antelope and wild range cattle with spotted hides all different colors, their horns thick as wagon axles. Seen a creature they call the buffalo. We stood the freight wagons up above a river and watched the wooly beasts wander across. Long time ago, before the hide hunters got them, there’d be hundreds and hundreds in a herd, is what Penberthy said. Don’t anybody here call the freight boss Mister. Just Penberthy. That’s all.
So I call him that, too.
I work the last two wagons in the train with Gus. We started as heelers on other rigs, but four men been lost from us already on this trip—one sick, one with a broke leg, one snake bit, and one that run off in Hamilton after news of renegade Indian raids to the south and settlers murdered in terrible ways. I try not to think on it much. Instead, I drive the wagon, and watch every rock and tree, and each stretch where land meets sky. I look for things moving, and I think mile by mile about Moses.
The man was true to his word. I can’t say why, except that he ain’t what I thought he was. He ain’t the devil. He’s the man who saved us—me and Missy Lavinia, and Juneau Jane.
“Go,” he said, as the weight of his body pushed hard against mine in that alley by the bathhouse. His hand held tight over my mouth to keep me from calling out. Wouldn’t’ve helped anyhow. Not likely anybody’d hear it in that bawdy, wild town, or think much of it if they did. Hell’s Half Acre. Pete Rain was right. That name’s well earned. The gravedigger must be the busiest man in Fort Worth.
Only reason we ain’t laying under the soil there is Moses.
“Ssshhh,” he said, and looked over his shoulder down the alley, then he leaned closer to whisper. “Go while you can. Get clear of this place, out of Fort Worth.” His eyes were cool brass metal, his narrow face hardened by the lines of that long, thick mustache, his body heavy with sinew and bone and strong cords of muscle.
I shook my head, and he warned me again not to call out, and he took his hand off my mouth.
“I can’t,” I said and whispered to him of Missy and Juneau Jane and that they were the daughters of Mr. William Gossett, who had disappeared into Texas, and that us three had been split up in a bad way. “I got a job on a freight haul leaving out soon, headed for the Llano country, and then Menardville.”
“I know of it,” he answered, and sweat from under his hat drew trails down his skin.
I told him what the Irishman had said of Mr. William Gossett. “I got to get Missy and Juneau Jane somehow, and I’ll take us away south, far from here.”
A pulse
beat under the sheen on his neck, and he looked around us again. There was noise nearby. Voices. “Go,” he told me. “You can’t help them from a pine box, and that’s where you’ll end up. I’ll send them along, if I can.” He turned me from the shadows toward the light and shoved me and said, “Don’t turn back.”
I ran through the streets and didn’t stop and didn’t catch a full breath till we’d rolled the freight wagons out of Fort Worth town.
We were still at our meet-up camp with the freighter line from Weatherford when a stout-built white man rode in, leading behind him Juneau Jane and Missy Lavinia on a big bay horse. He wore a cowboy’s clothes, but the horses had the tack and brands of a Federal regiment.
“From Moses,” the man said without looking at me.
“But how’d he…”
A quick shake of his head warned me I ought not ask questions, then he helped get Missy and Juneau Jane into my wagon before he went on forward to fix it with Penberthy. And that was all. Don’t know what was said, and Penberthy never made a mention of it in all the days after.
Now we’re young dogs in a pack, we three and Gus McKlatchy, who drives the wagon front of ours. We’re low in the peck, but Penberthy’s crew of drivers and wagon guards is mostly young, and more than half are colored or Indian or mixed blood. We three don’t gather much notice. We get the trail dust, and the ruts at the water crossings, and the haze of churned-up grass and chaff that hangs over the prairie like a cloud after a half dozen wagons pass. If the Kiowa or the Comanches come upon this freight train, they’ll take our wagon first, from the back. Likely we won’t live to see what happens after. Our scouts, Tonkawas and colored men who lived with the Indians and married with them, travel out beside, and before and behind on their quick, sturdy ponies. They watch for signs. Nobody wants to lose the freight.