The Book of Lost Friends: A Novel (25 page)

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.

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.

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.”