by Lisa Wingate
Nobody wants to be dead, either. Gus didn’t lie about the risk of it.
At night, they tell stories in the camp. Dead by Indians is a particular bad dead. I’ve been showing Juneau Jane how to work the pistol and the carbine rifle that Penberthy give us to use. I even put the cartridges in Old Mister’s derringer, case we get desperate enough to find out if it’ll still fire. Evening after evening, Juneau Jane shows me and Gus letters and words, learns us about how they sound and how to write them, while she keeps on with The Book of Lost Friends. Gus ain’t as quick to pick it up as me, but we both try. There’s men on this train that’re missing people, men who lived as slaves in Arkansas and Louisiana and Texas and Indian Territory before the war. There’s folks in the towns we pass through, too, so we find plenty of chances to learn new words.
Time to time, some fresh names to add to the book even come to us from strangers on the road. We share talk or a camp and a meal, gather tales of Lost Friends or information about the way ahead of us, or get word of Indian troubles, or bad patches where road agents or them Marston Men look to rob and steal, or the nature of the rivers and watercourses. It’s a mail wagoner on one of our last camp nights who warns us to take care in this area. He tells of horse thieving and cattle thieving and a range war twixt the German ranchers and the Americans that went in with the Confederates during the war.
“The Germans formed themselves a vigilante gang, call it the Hoodoos. Busted down the jail door in Mason a while back to get their hands on some fellas that’d been locked up for stealing loose cattle. Nearly killed the sheriff and a Texas Ranger. Shot one man in the leg, who had not a thing to do with the cattle, but was jailed for riding a stolen army horse. Poor sap was lucky they didn’t hang him that night, too. The Hoodoos had strung up three of their prisoners before the sheriff and the Texas Ranger got it stopped. Now, the Hoodoos have shot another one, and his people have gathered a gang and gone warfaring over it. Troubles here lately with these Marston Men, too. Their leader calls himself ‘the General.’ Been stirring up another wave of Honduras Fever, telling diehard secessionist folk there’s a new South to be built down in British Honduras, and maybe on the island of Cuba, too. Has won quite a few over to his cause. You can’t tell who’s who just by looking, either. You folks watch out. Ain’t but a hare’s hair between the law and the outlaws around here. This is dangerous country.”
“I heared of them Marston Men,” Gus says. “They was holding secret meetin’s in a warehouse up to Fort Worth town, recruitin’ more folks. Fools on a fool’s errand, you ask me. World don’t turn backward. Turns forward. Future belongs to the man that faces hisself straight on.”
Penberthy strokes his gray beard and nods. The wagon boss has put young Gus McKlatchy under wing, like a papa or a grandpapa would do. “That kind of thinking will take you far,” he agrees, and to the mail wagoner, he says, “Thanks for the warning, friend. We’ll be watchful over it.”
“What was the name of the man who got his leg shot?” I pipe up, and everyone looks my way, surprised. I been purposeful to not call attention on this trip, but right now I’m thinking of the Irishman’s story. “The one who’s in jail for the stole army horse?”
“Don’t rightly know. He survived the bullet to the leg, though. Strange sort for a horse thief, a gentlemanly type fellow. Reckon the army will hang him, if they haven’t already. Yes, there’s all sorts of bedevilment these days. World’s not what it used to be, and…”
He goes on with his tales, but I tuck his news in my mind, think on it late into the night. Maybe the Irishman in Fort Worth wasn’t fibbing about trading a stole army horse to a Mr. William Gossett, after all? If that was true, was the tale about the little white girl with the three blue beads real, too? I talk of it with Gus and Juneau Jane as we put in for the night, and we make a pact that once we get the freight to Menardville, we’ll go over to Mason and see about the man who was shot in the leg, just in case there’s a chance that man could be Old Mister or somebody who knows of him.
I close my eyes and drift and wake and drift again. In my dreams, I drive a freighter with a team of four black horses. It’s Mr. William Gossett I’m looking for. But I don’t find him. Moses comes instead. He steals into my dream like a panther you don’t see, but you know it’s stalking behind, or left, right, overhead, perched against the sky. You hear it stir and then it’s on you, its body heavy against yours, breath coming fast.
You’re stopped still, scared to look in its eye. Scared not to.
Overcome by the power of the thing.
That’s how Moses sneaks into my mind, never letting me know for sure, is he my friend or my enemy? I feel every inch of him against every inch of me. See his eyes, smell his scent.
I want him gone…but I don’t.
Don’t turn back, he says.
* * *
—
I wake with my heart gone wild like the barrel drum. It crowds my ears, and then I realize it’s thunder. The sound turns me itchy and fretful, unsettled as the weather. We break camp without breakfast and move out. We got two days yet to Menardville, long as there’s no trouble.
Rain don’t fall often in this dry country, but the next days, it comes like a kettle’s getting tipped side to side over our heads. Thunder troubles the horses and lightning cuts the sky like a hawk’s gold claws ready to scoop up the world and fly off with it.
The animals dance and worry the bits till the land gets soggy and the white caliche mud turns slick and soaks up over the horses’ fetlocks. It sucks down the wagon wheels, and white-tinged water sprays out like milk as they turn, turn, turn.
I tip my head against the misery and think of Mr. William Gossett and try to work out if he could’ve come so far out into this bare land, and found hisself riding a stole horse, and then sitting trapped in a jail while men broke down the door and rushed in with hanging ropes and guns.
I can’t even fancy him in such a place. What could bring him here into the wild?
But deep down, I know. I answer my own question. Love. That’s the thing that would do it. The love of a father who can’t give up on his only son. Who’d wander the entire wide world if need be to bring his boy home. Lyle didn’t deserve that kind of love. He didn’t return it, except with bad deeds and fast living and trouble. Likely, Lyle’s already met his rightful end. Dead, shot, or hanged in some unplatted place like this one, his bones picked clean by wolves and left to fall to dust. Likely, Old Mister come down here chasing after a ghost. But he couldn’t make hisself give up hope till he knew for sure.
The rain stops on the second day, quick as it hit. That’s the way of it in this country.
The men shake out their hats and toss off their oilcloth slickers. Juneau Jane climbs out from under the wagon canvas, where she’s hid during the storms, mostly. She’s the only one here small enough to do that. Missy’s wet clear through, because she won’t keep a slicker on. She don’t shiver or fuss or even seem to notice. Just sits on the tail of the wagon, staring off, like she is right now.
“Quanto de temps…tiempo nos el voy…viaje?” Juneau Jane asks one of the scouts, a half-Indian Tonkawa who don’t speak English but Spanish. With knowing French, Juneau Jane’s picked up their language some on this freight trip. I have, too, a little.
The scout holds up three fingers. I figure that means three hours more for us to travel. Then he raises a hand flat and passes it up and down over his mouth, the Indian sign that we got one more time to cross water.
The sun fights its way through the clouds and the day turns bright, but inside of me comes a darkening. The more we draw nigh on Menardville, the more it weighs heavy on me that we’ll soon be after Old Mister again, and what if we find news of him but the news is hard for Juneau Jane? What if he’s met a terrible end in this strange place?
What comes of us then?
Of a sudden, there’s a patch of blue in the far
-off sky, and I think of something. I think it right out loud. “I can’t go back.”
Juneau Jane tips her head my way, then climbs up from the wagon bed, settles in beside me, them cool silver coin eyes watching from under that floppy hat.
“I can’t go back home, Juneau Jane. If we find news of your papa there in Mason, or if we find him even. I can’t go back home with you and Missy. Not yet.”
“But you must.” She strips off her wet hat, lays it on her knee and scratches out her fuzzy hair. The men are far enough away right now, she can do that. Without the hat, a person might not take her for a boy, just lately. She’s growed up some on this trip. “For the land. Your farm. It is the matter of greatest importance for you, no?”
“No. It ain’t.” A sureness settles itself in my soul. I don’t know where it’ll lead after this, but I know what’s true. “Something was begun in me, way back when we stood in that little wildwood church and we looked at them newspaper pages. When we promised things to the roustabouts on the Katie P. and when we started The Book of Lost Friends. I’ve got to go on with it, to keep the promises we made.”
I’m not sure how I’ll do it without Juneau Jane. She’s the writer. But I’m learning, and bound to get better. Good enough to scratch down the names and the places and to write letters off to the “Lost Friends” column for folks. “I’ll be the keeper of the book after you go home. But I want you to promise me that when you make it back to Goswood Grove you’ll help Tati and Jason and John and all the other croppers to get treated fair, just like the contracts say. Ten years of cropping on the shares, and you gain the land, mule, and outfit for your own. Will you do that for me, Juneau Jane? I know we ain’t friends, but would you swear to it?”
She sets her fingers over mine on the reins, her skin pale and smooth against the calluses worn into me by shovels and plows and the crisscross marks from the sharp, dry bracts of the cotton boles. My hands are ugly from work, but I ain’t ashamed. I toiled for my scars. “I think we are friends, Hannie,” she says.
I nod, and my throat thickens. “I wondered about that a time or two.”
I chuck up the horses. I’ve let us fall too far behind.
We start through a draw and toward a long hill and the way is rough, and the horses take my attention. They’re tired and wet, lathered under their collars from pulling in the mud. Their tails lash at flies that gather in the windless air. Up ahead, teams struggle with the rise and the slick earth, digging and sliding, digging and sliding. A wagon rolls back like it might come downhill. I turn my team off to the side to move out of the way, in case.
It’s then I see that Missy’s gotten herself off the wagon, and she’s plopped down on her hindquarters, picking yellow flowers with not a worry in the world. I can’t even push a shout from my mouth before a sorghum barrel busts its tie rope on the catawampus wagon and rolls downhill, kicking a spray of white rocks and mud and grass and chaff.
Missy looks up and watches it pass not ten foot from her, but she don’t move a inch, just smiles and swirls her hands in the air trying to catch the kicked-up fodder as it shines against the sun.
“Get out of there!” I holler, and Juneau Jane scrambles from the wagon seat. She runs in her too-big shoes, jumping grass moats and rocks, wiry as a baby deer. Swatting the flowers from Missy’s hand, she tugs her off the ground and cusses her in French, and they start off afoot, away from the wagons and goods.
It’s times like this I give up on thinking Missy is still inside that body, coming back bit by bit, and that she hears things we say, she just don’t answer. Times like this, I think she’s gone for good—that the poison, or the knock to the head, or whatever evil them men did to her, broke something and it can’t be fixed.
Hearing her take that cussing from her daddy’s mixed-blood girl, I tell myself, If Missy Lavinia was anyplace in that big, stout body, she’d haul back and swat her half sister into next Sunday. Just like Old Missus would.
I don’t want to think what Old Missus will do with Missy Lavinia when they get home. Send her off to the asylum to live out her days, I guess. If there ever was any chance of finding her right mind again, it won’t happen after that. She’s a young woman still. A girl just sixteen. Those’d be long years, in such a place.
The question nips at me all the rest of the way to Menardville, which when we get there, ain’t too much more than a few store buildings, a smith shop, a wheelwright, a jail, two saloons, houses, and churches. Juneau Jane and me make plans to leave out for Mason to see about Old Mister. It’s just a day’s hard horseback ride away, but longer afoot. Penberthy holds our pay and won’t let us strike off. Says it’s too dangerous walking, and he’ll find us a better way to get there.
By morning, we know we won’t go to Mason, after all. Folks tell Penberthy that the soldiers took the man who had the stole army horse to Fort McKavett, and there he still is, but he ain’t even well enough to hang.
Penberthy fixes us a ride with a mail supply wagon bound on to the fort, just twenty miles south and west from Menardville. Our freight boss parts with us kindly and is good to his promises. He gives my wages and don’t even hold out money for my bail in Fort Worth. He tells us to be mindful of what sort of men we get ourselves in with. “There’s many a youngster succumbs to the promises of riches and fast living. Set the pay money deep in your pocket.” He’s hired Gus McKlatchy for another trip, so this is where we part ways.
We have our goodbyes with the crew. The one to Gus is hardest. He’s been a friend to me. A real, true friend.
“I’d come on with you,” he says before our wagon rolls out. “I’d like to see me a fort. Maybe even sign up and do some scoutin’ for the army. But I’m bound to get me a horse and go to where all them wild cattle are just waitin’ to be caught. One more trip back to Old Fort Worth, and I’ll have enough to be well mounted and start making my fortune, gathering up a herd of my own.”
“You watch out for yourself,” I say, and he just grins and waves me off and says McKlatchys always land square footed. Our wagon rolls forward, and the load shifts under us. Juneau Jane grabs on to me, and I hang on to the ropes with one hand and to Missy with the other. “Gus McKlatchy, you watch out,” I holler as the wagon rattles off, bound for Fort McKavett.
He pats the old sidearm in his belt and gives a grin that’s all freckles and horse teeth. Then he cups his hands round his mouth and yells after me, “I hope you find your people, Hannibal Gossett!”
It’s the last thing I hear before the town fades from sight and the San Saba River valley swallows us whole.
CHAPTER 24
BENNY SILVA—AUGUSTINE, LOUISIANA, 1987
It’s Saturday night, and I’m worried, though I’m determined not to show it. We’ve been trying to have a dress rehearsal of our Underground project all week, but the weather has been working against us. Rain and more rain. Augustine, Louisiana, is like a bath sponge after the tub drains. The rain has finally stopped, but the cemetery is wet, the city park is puddled under, my yard is a swamp, the orchard behind my house is covered in ankle-deep mud. Yet, we have to do something. Our last couple weeks before Halloween weekend—and the Underground project—are rapidly ticking away. The school’s agriculture department is hosting a Halloween party and haunted house fundraiser in the school’s shop barn that same weekend, and they’ve already put their flyers out. If we want to compete, we have to start advertising.
Before we do that, I need proof that we’re actually going to pull off the performance of this project. So far, the kids are all over the map with it. Some are ready. Some are struggling. Some keep changing their minds about whether they want to participate in the performance portion. It doesn’t help that many of them get little encouragement or assistance at home and have no money for costumes or materials.
I’m losing hope, wondering if we should shift to doing written reports or presentations in class. Somet
hing more manageable. No living history pageant in the graveyard. No advertising. No community involvement. No risk of humiliation or crushing public disappointment for the ones who really have tried hard.
I’ve commandeered the old football field for our attempt at a dress rehearsal. It’s on fairly high ground, and I see townie kids playing games of tag and sandlot ball here fairly often, so I figure it’s up for grabs.
In the sunset glow, we’ve positioned the Bug and a few other rattletrap student cars so we can turn on headlights for illumination. I have no keys to the stadium lights that hang bent and broken above the old concrete bleachers, and they probably don’t work anyway. A couple of lopsided streetlamps blink overhead, and that’s it. I’ve spent the last of a small historical society grant to equip the kids with dollar store lanterns that look surprisingly like the real thing. They house cheap little tea candles, but even getting those to stay lit has turned out to be a challenge.
Someone thought a string of Black Cat firecrackers would be a great addition to tonight’s fun. Ten levels of chaos broke out when they started popping. Kids ran everywhere, screamed, laughed, tackled one another. The cardboard mock tombstones we’ve worked on this week have been inadvertently trampled. Some of them were really nice. A few kids even went to the graveyard and made charcoal rubbings of the actual monuments they based their reports on.
Our new lanterns now twinkle cheerfully in the muck, half of them kicked upside down and sideways, victims of the fireworks scramble.
This is all too far out of the norm for them, the voice in my head says. It’s more than they can handle.
If they can’t complete a rehearsal, then any kind of a public performance is a no go. It’s partly my fault. I never anticipated how much the group dynamic would change with all my classes, multiple age groups, and even little brothers and sisters and cousins gathered together to reenact their chosen characters.