The Book of Lost Friends(108)

There’s a knock at the door. The doctor’s wife has come with word that we oughtn’t dally overmuch in getting down to the hospital. The doctor says Old Mister’s time is close.

“We’d best get on,” I say and finish Juneau Jane’s hair. “Your daddy needs us to tell him it’s all right to leave. Say the death psalm over his body. You know it?”

Juneau Jane nods and stands up and straightens her dress.

“Hmmm-hmmmm…hmmm-hmmm, hmmm-hmmm,” Missy Lavinia carries on, rocking in the corner. I let her keep at it while we get her dressed and ready to go out the door.

“Now, it’s time you stop that noise,” I say finally. “Your daddy don’t need more worries to carry when he goes from this world. No matter what complaints you got with the man, he is still your daddy. Hush up now.”

Missy stops her song, and we go to Old Mister’s bedside, quiet and respectable. Juneau Jane holds his hand and kneels on the hard floor. Young Missy sits quiet on the stool. The doctor has muslin curtains hung from the rafters and drawn round the bed, so it’s only the four of us in that strange, colorless piece of the world. White stones in white lime plaster, white rafters, white sheet against blue-purple arms that lay limp and thin. A face pale as the linens.

Breath sifts in and out of him.

An hour. Then two.

We say the 23rd Psalm, Juneau and me. We tell him it’s all right to go.

But he lingers.

I know why. It’s the secret that’s still inside him. The thing that brings him to haunt my dreams, but that he never speaks. He can’t turn loose of it.

Missy starts fidgeting, and it’s plain enough, she needs the privy. “We’ll come back,” I say, and touch Juneau Jane’s shoulder as I take Missy out. Before I close the curtain, I see her lay forward and rest her cheek on her papa’s chest. She starts singing a soft hymn to him in French.

A soldier sitting up in a bed at the other end of the room closes his eyes and listens.

I take Missy to do her necessary, which is more work now with her in a proper dress. The day is hot, and by the time we’re done, I’ve worked to a sweat. From a distant, I stand and look at the hospital, and the sun and the hot wind washes over me. I am dry and weary in spirit and body. Dry as that wind and filled with dust.

“Have mercy,” I whisper, and move Missy to a rough bench aside a building with a wide porch. I settle in the shade and sit by her, rest my head back and close my eyes, finger Grandmama’s beads. The wind fans the live oaks overhead and the cottonwoods in the valley. The river birds sing their songs not far off.

Missy takes up the sound of a wagon axle but just real quiet now, “hmmm-hmmm….”

The tune gets farther and farther off, like she’s floating away downwater, or I am. You better look over and check on her, I think.

But I don’t open my eyes. I’m tired, that’s all. Bone tired of traveling, and sleeping on floors, and trying to know what’s right to do. My hand falls away from Grandmama’s beads, rests in my lap. The air smells of caliche soil, and yucca plants with their strange tall stalks bloomed up in white flowers, and prickly pear cactus with sweet pink fruits, and sagebrush and feathered grasses, stretched out to the far horizon. I float off on it. Float off on it like the big water Grandmama used to tell of. I go all the way to Africa where the grass grows red and brown and gold by the acre and all the blue beads are back together on a string, and they hang on the neck of a queen.

This place is like Africa. It’s the last thought I have. I laugh soft as I sail away over that grass. Here I am in Africa.

A touch on my arm startles me awake. I hadn’t been there long, I can tell by the sun.

Elam Salter is standing over me. He’s got Missy by the elbow. She’s carrying a handful of wildflowers, some pulled up by the roots. Dry soil falls down and glitters in the sunlight. One of Missy’s fingernails is bleeding.

“I found her wandering,” Elam says from under the trimmed mustache that circles his lips like three sides of a picture frame. He’s got a pretty mouth. Wide and serious, with a thick, full bottom lip. His eyes in this light are the brown-gold of polished amber.

Even as I notice all that, my heart jumps up pounding, and my mind spins so fast I can’t catch a single thought. Every last tired shred of me comes alive at once, and it’s like I been woke up by that swamp panther I once thought he was. Don’t know whether to run or stand and stare because I’ll likely never again be this close to something so beautiful and so frightful.

“Oh…” I hear my own words from far off. “I didn’t mean her to.”

“It isn’t the safest place for her, out past the fort,” he tells me, and I can see there’s more he won’t say about the danger. He guides Missy to the bench. I noticed how he sits her down gentle-like and shifts her hand to her lap, so the flowers won’t get ruined. He’s a good man.

I stand up, straighten my sore neck, and try to take my courage in hand. “I know what you done for us, and—”

“My work.” He stops me before I can go on. “I’ve done my work. Not as well as I would’ve liked.” He nods toward Missy in a way that says he takes blame for the shape she’s in now. “I didn’t know of this until after the thing was done. The fellow you followed here, William Gossett, had entangled himself in some way with the Marston Men, and it was for that reason they took his daughters. I’d understood that they meant to hold them at the river landing in Louisiana. I’d left a man there to free them after the Genesee Star departed upriver, but when he attempted it, they were nowhere to be found.”