The Book of Lost Friends(107)

“Today is for your papa,” I say to Juneau Jane. The words catch in my throat, hang there with little hooks like sandburs from a dry field. “You fix yourself up real pretty now. You want that I help you with your hair? It’s growed out a little.”

She nods and swallows hard, sits down on the edge of the little bed where she slept. There’s two iron steads and ticking mattresses. I take a pallet on the floor. That’s the only way folks let two white women and a colored girl stay in the same room—if the colored girl sleeps like the slaves did, at the foot of the bed.

Juneau Jane sits stiff, her shoulders poking from her cotton shift. Tight cords of muscle run under her skin. Her chin puckers, and she bites her lips together.

“It’s all right to cry,” I tell her.

“My mother did not approve of such things,” she says.

“Well, I think I don’t approve of her much.” Over time, I’ve gathered a low opinion of this girl’s mama. My mama might’ve been stole away from me young, but while she could, she spoke all good things into me. Things that lasted. It’s the words a mama says that last the longest of all. “And anyhow, she ain’t here, is she?”

“Non.”

“You ever going back to see her?”

Juneau Jane shrugs. “I cannot say. She is all I have left.”

My heart squeezes up. I don’t want her to go back. Not to a woman who’d sell off a daughter into the hands of any man offering a money settlement to have her for a mistress. “You’ve got me, Juneau Jane. We’re kin. Did you know that? My mama and your papa had the same daddy, so they were part brother and sister, though nobody talks of such. When my mama was just a tiny baby, my grandmama had to leave her and go to the Grand House to be wet nurse to the new white baby. That man laying there in the hospital now? He’s half uncle to me. You ain’t alone in this world after your daddy’s gone. I want you to know that today.” I go on and tell her more about Old Mister and my mama being born only months apart, half brother and sister. “You and me, we’re cousins some way.”

I hand her the mirror to hold, and when she looks at the two of us in it, she smiles, then rests her cheek against my arm. Tears fill soft gray eyes that turn upward at the edges like mine.

“We’ll be all right,” I say, but don’t know how. We’re two lost souls, her and me, wandering the world far from home. And where is home now, anyway?

I go to work on Juneau Jane’s hair and turn back to look out the window again. The sun has crested the ridge, driving the fog off the hillside. The shadow man has turned to flesh and blood. Not the death angel, but somebody I know.

I lean over to see him better, watch as he pulls off his gloves, tucks them in his belt, and talks to two men down in the yard below. That’s Moses. I’ve learned some things of him since we been at the fort awhile. Heard tales. Men will talk when it’s a colored girl nearby, not a white woman. They think a colored girl can’t hear. Can’t understand. Knows nothin’. The doctor’s wife is one to talk, too. She gathers with the women of the fort for coffee and tea in the hot afternoons, and they chatter of all their husbands said over suppers and breakfasts.

Moses ain’t what I thought that first time I saw him at the riverboat landing back in Louisiana. Not a bad man, nor a lawbreaker, nor a servant to the man with the patch on his eye, the Lieutenant.

His name ain’t even Moses. It’s Elam. Elam Salter.

He is a deputy U.S. marshal.

A colored man, a deputy U.S. marshal! I can hardly imagine, but it’s true. The soldiers here tell tales of him. He speaks a half dozen Indian tongues, was a runaway from a plantation in Arkansas before the war and went to the Indian Territory. He lived with the Indians and learned all their ways. He knows the wild country, inch by inch.

He wasn’t among them bad men to help in their wicked deeds, but to hunt the leaders of that group we’ve been hearing about, the Marston Men. Elam Salter has tracked them ’cross three states and all through Indian Territory. The wagon driver on the freight trip told it true. Their group’s stirred evil talk and got folks rabid mad.

Their leader, this Marston, will stop at nothing, the doctor’s wife told her ladies. Surrounds himself with murderers and thieves. His followers would go with him straight off a cliff and never look twice, that’s what I heard.

Elam Salter will chase them from heaven’s gate to the devil’s parlor, a buffalo soldier said of him. Up through the Indian Territory where the Kiowas and Comanches pitch their camps, down into Mexico where the federales would kill any U.S. lawman they could, and out west of here where the Apaches roam.

Elam Salter keeps his hair shaved off so he’s not worth scalping. Takes that razor to his head every week unfailing, they say.

Men gather to him now, buffalo soldiers and white soldiers greeting the deputy marshal as a friend. Looking on from the window, I think of those moments in that alley, his body pressing me to the wall, my heart pounding against his. Go, he said and turned me loose.

That might’ve been my dying day, otherwise. Or might be I would’ve found myself chained in the hold of a ship bound for British Honduras with the Marston Men, a slave again, my freedom gone. The fort women say they steal people—colored folk, white women, and girls.

I want to thank Elam Salter for saving us. But everything about him pulls me in and scares me at the same time. The idea of him is a flame I stretch my fingers toward, then draw back. Even through the glass, I can feel his power.