To Live Forever: An Afterlife Journey of Meriwether Lewis (11 page)

“But if I had been unfriendly like that when you found me, we wouldn’t be here together. Would we?”

She had a point.

“Doesn’t matter. For all we know, he works for the Judge. He could be going back to his car right now to load a pistol and force us to go back to New Orleans with him.” I stopped when she gasped. Held her eyes and let the impact of my words sink in. “This world can be pretty small. You can’t trust anybody.”

Whistling wafted out of the woods. I got up, put Emmaline behind the wall and braced myself for whatever menace Jack might bring from the car.

TWENTY-THREE

Mister Jack was a nice man
, not bad like Merry
thought. He brought marshmallows just for me, plus his rolled-up sleeping bag. I grabbed the marshmallows, the squishy jumbo kind, and stuffed three of them in my mouth. Sugar stuck my lips together, and my cheeks got fat. Even Merry smiled a little bit.

I played with Mister Jack until it got dark. He let me look through his binoculars, and when different birds sang out, he told me their names from their sounds. After a few tries, I could even name one or two. He patted me on the head and called me
ch
é
rie
, and my heart felt funny, like it would beat right out of my chest.

When it got dark, I crammed myself into my tent face first and kicked my feet through the opening.

Thinking.

Merry was right. Even though Mister Jack turned out to be my friend, I had to be careful with strangers, but sometimes I wanted to say hello so much I thought I would blow up, especially after Mister Jack got so close to the deer.

I scratched at mosquito bites on my hands and legs. Rolled up pants were a bad idea. My heavy shirt had long sleeves and my thick corduroy pants made my sunburn hotter, but I was protected from most of the bitey bugs.

Merry was right about that, too.

I flipped onto my back and admired myself in boys’ clothes. The cut of the pants made my legs look strong, and the cuff on my shirt didn’t itch. Boys’ clothes were definitely easier to wear.

My mother’s rules exhausted me, dressing up every day, always having to look girly. Ruffles and lace might make a girl pretty, but beauty was on the inside. That’s what Daddy always said. If my heart was ugly, it would make all of me ugly in the end. Maybe that’s why he came to hate my mother. No matter what she wore or how she fixed her hair, her heart was mostly rotten, and he couldn’t find anything to love in the end.

Did I ever love her? I didn’t know.

I closed my eyes and imagined Daddy. Did he still wear the white suits of his Dixieland days? Would he smell like smoke and wood? Would his fingers be rough from hours of playing his upright bass?

Would he know me when he saw me? Even without my fancy dresses and long hair?

I slid out of the tent and stretched in falling darkness. Merry and Mister Jack sat on the ground, leaning their backs against a dead log near the edge of the trees. A small campfire popped and flickered in front of them, and Mister Jack was on his knees, working a small tank. I rubbed my eyes and wandered across the dewy grass.

When I felt the heat from the fire on my face, I heard Merry’s voice. “And that’s how I thought I knew you, I guess.”

I stopped, and my throat closed. Who was Mister Jack, really? Would he tell anyone about Merry and me? If he did, it would be all my fault. If I hadn’t run up to him and the deer in the woods, he might’ve walked right on by instead of coming through the clearing. Were the marshmallows part of his trap?

I blinked my eyes and focused. Merry’s legs made a lazy line in front of him, and he threw one arm back over the dead tree. Relaxed. Not worried. His mouth turned up in a smile. If Merry thought Mister Jack was our friend, then he had to be. Merry wouldn’t sit there and let something bad happen to me. To us. I let out a long breath of relief and tried to forget my hyperactive imagination for one night.

Mister Jack pushed a button on the tank, and a circle of blue fire shot up through the top.

“
Et voila
. I may be as dull as a beetle, but I do have my uses.”

“That you do, Jack.” Merry threw another stick of wood on the fire. “It’s been good for me to have a spell of manly conversation. I’m glad you understand my predicament.”

Predicament? Was I his predicament? Was that how Merry saw me? As something bad?

Before I could ask, Merry patted the ground next to him. “Hi, Em. I missed you while you napped.”

“I wasn’t sleeping.”

I ignored Merry and watched Mister Jack turn a can opener around the top of the biggest tin of red beans I ever saw. It was enough to feed us for two days, a whole week even. He dumped it into a pot and stuck it on top of the ring of blue fire. With a flick of his hand, he added other things: salt, lots of pepper and a heap of brown sugar.

He handed me a flat wooden spoon. “Stir?”

“Oh, yes. Can I be the taster? Aunt Ber—I mean—I always get to taste when I help cook.”

He nudged the spoon into my hand and sat back. “By all means,
ch
é
rie
. Taste as much as you like.”

I stuck the end of the paddle into the beans and moved my arms in a slow pattern. The more I stirred, the better they smelled. I stuck my nose in peppery steam that made my tummy turn a hungry cartwheel.

“So. You know something of the history of this place, then.” Merry just said it, not as a question.

Mister Jack gave him a funny look and nodded. “
Oui
. A recent favorite of mine. A shame, the ruined state of it.” His face grew slack when he angled it at the broken wall. “When I turn my head just right, my eyes play tricks on me. I don’t know why, but I can almost see it whole.”

Mister Jack moved his head, and his mustache twitched a little. Merry’s voice sounded weird when he spoke.

“What can you see when that happens? Do you see the school?”

“This was a school, Mister Jack?”

Mister Jack nodded. His voice was even more Cajun when he continued. He told us the Elizabeth Female Academy was one of the first colleges for women in America. A long time ago. Buildings circled the entire clearing. They fanned out from the center in joined hallways. Craftsmanship of the highest calling, he called it. The pinnacle. All left to rot away. He blinked. “Sometimes, when it’s quiet, when the birds don’t cooperate, I hear them. The girls.”

Shadows fluttered on the brick wall, and smoke danced around the flames. If I squinted, a couple of the poufs floated along the ground. Pretty hair. Long skirts. One turned her head and winked at me.

I swallowed. “What girls?”

“Why, girls like you,
ch
é
rie
. Laughing and whispering. Telling stories about boys. Passing notes and crying over letters from home. Asking hard questions in the classroom, pushing themselves to a better station in life. A lost opportunity for women, the day they closed the academy.”

I stirred the spoon in the other direction. “Why couldn’t they just go to school somewhere else? I mean, almost every school takes girls. They have to, don’t they?”

“They haven’t always,
ch
é
rie
. You are lucky-lucky to be born when you were, right now.” He took a deep breath and stopped. His smile was normal again when he looked at Merry. “Perhaps figments of my imagination are too heavy for dinnertime. I don’t know what comes over me sometimes. When I am here.”

Merry cleared his throat and handed me three thin paper plates. “Those beans smell delicious, Em. Let me take over for you, and I’ll serve them out when they’re done.”

He crawled over and took the paddle from my hands and stirred slower, while I leaned close beside Mister Jack. I sighed when he put his arm around my shoulders. He was so sophisticated and dreamy, with his accent, tanned face and twinkly eyes.

The fire made orange light dance on Merry’s face when he talked. He said the Natchez Trace used to be a busy highway. A long time ago. Nobody knew for sure how old it was. Animals used it, way back before there were people here. They migrated south along its natural ridge line, stampeding herds of buffalo and bear, deer and elk.

When the Indians came along, migration made the Trace a natural hunting ground, with food aplenty. They settled all along it and adopted the pounded ground as their own road. Early settlers used it as a way to get home after they sold their goods down in Natchez or New Orleans. Merry stirred the fire. “A lonesome trip, dogged by rainstorms and poisonous snakes and robbers. Men were almost relieved when the invention of the steamboat killed the Trace.”

“The steamboat? Like the one we rode when we—to get here?”

“Yes, Em. Just like the one we rode. Nobody much came this way when they could just power upriver like we did.”

Mister Jack hugged me to him, and my heart was in heaven. “Yes, Merry. A shame so many wonderful things died with the Trace.”

“But, in the gamut of forgotten places, I probably chose the best neighborhood for exploration. Camping. All that.” Merry scooped the paddle to his lips and tasted a bite of beans. “Mmmm. Perfect, Em. Jack here is definitely an expert of camp cooking.”

He piled them onto each plate and passed one to Mister Jack and me, followed by white plastic spoons. We chewed the first spicy bites in silence, because we were all really hungry.

Mister Jack swallowed a mouthful of beans and laid a hand on Merry’s arm. “Do you think you can make it all the way,
mon ami
? To Nashville?”

“I have to, Jack. It’s the only way.”

Mister Jack shook his head and sighed. “I can take you as far as the bus station in Jackson tomorrow morning, if you’ll indulge me with one stop along the way. Sorry I can’t help you to the end.”

“The end. I don’t know what comes at the end.”

“I don’t know the answer,
mon ami
, but have hope. Hope is like the shy birds. They fly at a great distance, where they are seldom reached by the best of guns. They always make it home. I think, if we can only learn to fly the right way, then we will all find our way home.”

I put my empty plate on the stubby grass and leaned over to fling my arms around Merry. I hugged him as hard as I could.

“Thank you for helping me find my daddy,” I whispered. Before he said anything, I looked over his head at Mister Jack. “Don’t we have more marshmallows? Marshmallows make everything all right, don’t they?”

The two men laughed with me, and it echoed under the stars and through the trees, all the way into my heart.

TWENTY-FOUR

It was my tummy that woke m
e. Too many of Mister
Jack’s beans. I rolled away from my sleeping bag and slipped out of the tent. Both Merry and Mister Jack slept outside, close to the dying fire. When I looked up, the sky was black and sparkly, and the night bugs honked and croaked and cricketed, their sounds coming from everywhere at once.

I had to go, but where? If Mister Jack or Merry woke up and saw me with my pants down, I would die. I didn’t want them to hear me, either.

With my Wonder Twin powers, I tippy-toed past them. A few steps into the woods, and I would have enough privacy. Leaves crunched under my feet, and I blinked my eyes to see better in the dark. The ground was uneven, and I couldn’t remember what Merry said about going in the woods. Did he say rocks were good? Or was that where the snakes were?

A branch broke off somewhere behind me, and I froze. In the dark, tracks thudded along the ground, close to me. A dirty smell came with a sudden breeze, and I pinched my nose together.

Feet scraped at leaves and dirt, a bull getting ready to charge. To ram his horns into me. To trample me like I once saw happen to a cowboy on television. Every way I turned, I heard it, grunting, pawing at the ground, not like it was going to run over me, but like it was going to eat me.

I shuddered.

It was a monster, not a bull. A nighttime woods monster, and it could see me in the dark, and its squinty eyes locked onto me, and it licked its fangs and got ready for its dumb-little-girl-lost-in-the-woods dinner.

When its shadow charged, I screamed and ran as fast as I could. Through the leaves. Over a dead tree. I fell in a ditch, and it kept coming. Stinking wetness ran down my cheek, but I ran again, up the other side of the ditch. Further into the woods. If I could just get far enough away, the monster couldn’t catch me.

My chest hurt. A long ropey thing wrapped around one of my arms. I jerked to a stop. Monster jaws...or snakes. It was snakes. Merry said snakes were everywhere in the woods. One had its drippy fangs around me. I thrashed against it, but it was no use. I could feel its mouth stretching. It was going to put its icky lips all the way over my head and eat me, head first. If it ate me that way, I wouldn’t be able to scream, so I screamed and screamed and screamed until my throat hurt, and I hit and kicked and fell down on the ground and bit the snake’s scaly skin as hard as I could.

“Emmaline! Where are you?”

“Merry! Help me! A snake! It’s eating my head! Hurry!”

My mouth tasted dirty, but I kept fighting that old snake. I scratched it with my fingernails, and I even pulled a piece of it apart in my hands. If I could just keep it from eating me until Merry got there, he would kill it and send it all the way to hell.

A weird light shot through the trees. I screamed again. Strong tentacles went around me, with a light at one end. I kicked at the new creature and bit into the flesh that held the light.

“Ow, Em.”

Merry.

He let go of the flashlight, and it dropped on the ground with a dull thud. “Why did you bite me?”

Merry sat on the ground, rubbing his hand. Mister Jack ran up behind him, panting hard. “
Ch
é
rie
, there you are.”

The flashlight beam lit up a clearing. Lots of vines hung from the trees, the same ones I saw during the day. Merry motioned to them. “Meet your snake, Em. What are you doing, tearing up the forest in the middle of the night?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Do you know how far away from camp you are?”

“I’m sorry, Merry. I, um. I—” I couldn’t talk anymore, because I was crying. When Merry hugged me to him, I wiped my nose with the back of my filthy hand.

“Em, the woods are dangerous at night. You can’t just go wandering off by yourself.”

“But I—I. Um. This is s-s-so embarrassing.”

“What is? That you got lost?”

“N-n-n-n-no! I had to g-g-go a lot—it was the b-b-beans—and I d-d-didn’t want you to s-s-s-see.”

Mister Jack’s mustache shook when he laughed, and Merry chuckled and ran his hand through my hair. “Aw, Em. I never thought about bathroom etiquette on the trail. When you went earlier today, you just walked off in the trees, so I figured you were okay with the whole thing.”

“But that was d-different. It was only number one.”

“Okay. Okay. I understand. Still, if you have to go at night, you need to wake me up and let me know, all right? I can go with you, help you find a spot, and wait a little ways away to give you some privacy.”

“C-c-c-can you and M-Mister Jack do that n-now?”

Merry stood up, still holding me. He rubbed my tears away and set me on the ground. “Sure, Em. We’ll be right over there, behind those bushes. Give a shout when you’re done, and we’ll come back.”

When I couldn’t see them anymore, I pulled my pants down and did what I had to do. It wasn’t nearly as hard as I expected it to be. If I didn’t get ahold of myself, I might make Merry mad enough to stop helping me, and if he stopped helping me, I wouldn’t find Daddy, ever. I looked up at the stars, shining through the trees, and I decided, right then, that I had to grow up. To stop crying when I was scared. I needed to be brave.

Like Merry. If I could be like him, I knew I’d find my daddy.

I cleaned myself up and stood tall. My breath was misty when I spoke. I watched it shimmer and disappear into the night. Remnants of the old me.

“Okay, Merry. Mister Jack. I’m ready.”