The Book of Lost Friends(11)

She won’t know me in this field hat, shirt, and britches. Not unless she gets a close look, and I’ll make definite sure that don’t happen. Seddie’s old and fat and slow. I’m quicker than a cane-cutter rabbit. Burn down the stubble. Stand at the edge of your field, you won’t have me in your stew pot. I’m too fast.

I tell myself them things while I cross the basement by the light of the moon through the window. Can’t use the nursery stairs to go up. The bottom steps squeak, and they’re too near Seddie’s room.

The ladder to the butler’s pantry floor hatch is the means I choose, instead. Many’s the time my sister Epheme and me sneaked out and back in that way after Old Missus took us from Mama’s little saddleback cabin in the quarters and said we was to sleep on the floor under Baby Lavinia’s crib, and quieten her in the night if she fussed. I was just three and Epheme six, and both of us lonely for our folk and scared of Old Missus and Seddie. But a slave child ain’t given a choice in the matter. The new baby needed playthings, and that was us.

Missy Lavinia was a troublesome little bird from the start. Round and fat-cheeked and pale, with straw-brown hair so fine you could see right through it. She wasn’t the pretty child her mama wanted, or her daddy, either. That’s why he always liked his child with that colored Creole woman the best. That one is a pretty little thing. He’d even bring her to the Grand House when Old Missus and Missy Lavinia went away to visit Missus’s people down on cotton islands by the sea.

I always did wonder if him being so fond of Juneau Jane was the reason his children with Missus turned out so wrong.

I push up the hatch in the butler’s pantry, peek round the cabinet door, and listen out. The air’s so quiet I can hear Old Missus’s azalea bushes scratch at the window glass, like a hundred fingernails. A whip-poor-will calls in the dark. That’s a bad sign. Three times means death is bound to cross your path.

This one calls two.

Don’t know what two times means. Nothin’, I hope.

The window light in the dining room flickers with leaf shadow. I slip along to the ladies’ parlor, where before the war Old Missus entertained neighbor women over tea and needlework, and gave out lemon cakes and chocolates all the way from France. But that was when folks had money for such. My work, or my sister’s back then, was to stand with a big feather fan on a stick, swish it up and down to chase the heat off the ladies and the flies from the lemon cakes.

Sometimes we’d fan the sugar powder right onto the floor. Don’t ever taste it when you clean that up, the kitchen women told us children. Seddie sprinkles them lemon cakes with a poison if she feels like it. Some say that was what caused Missus to birth two blue babies after Young Mister Lyle and Missy Lavinia, and to finally end up weak enough to be confined to a invalid’s chair. Others say Old Missus’s trouble goes back to a curse on her family. A punishment to the Loaches for the mean ways they treated their slave people.

A shudder slips up my back, rattles every bone in my spine, when I come past the hall where Seddie sleeps in her little room. A gas lamp flickers and spits overhead, turned down low. The house sighs and settles, and Seddie grunts and snorts loud enough I hear it through the door.

I round the corner into the salon, then cross it quick, figuring Juneau Jane will try to get to the library, where Old Mister keeps his desk and papers and such. Outdoor sounds get louder the closer I come—trees rustling, bugs with their night noises, a bullfrog. That girl must’ve got a door or a window opened. How’d she manage that? Missus won’t allow windows raised on the first-floor gallery, no matter how miserable hot it gets. Too worried about thieving. Won’t let the windows open on the second floor, either. So fearish of the mosquitos, she makes the yard boys keep tar pots burning outside the house day and night in all the warm months. Whole place wears a coat of pitch smoke, and the house ain’t been aired in more years than I can remember.

Them windows been long painted shut, and Seddie minds all the door locks last thing at night, careful as a mama gator on a nest. Sleeps with the ring of keys tied on her neck. If Juneau Jane’s found a way in, somebody from the house helped her. Question is, who and when and for why? And how’d they get away with it?

When I peek round the opening, she’s sneaking in the window, so it must’ve took her a while to pry it up. One little slipper touches down on the wood folding chair Old Mister likes to take out to the gardens to sit and read to the plants and the statues.

I back myself into the shadows and watch-wait to see what this girl’s about. Climbing off the chair, she stops, looks over to my hiding spot, but I don’t move. I tell myself I’m a piece of the house. You ever been a slave at Goswood, you learn how to turn yourself into wood and wallpaper.

Easy to see this girl knows nothing of that. She moves through the room like the place is hers, barely reasonable quiet while helping herself to her daddy’s big desk. Latches click as she opens parts of that desk I didn’t even know there was. Must be her papa showed her how, or told her.

She ain’t happy with what she finds, and gives that desk a cussing in French before moving on to the tall hallway doors like she plans to push them closed. The hinges complain, low and soft. She stops. Listens. Looks into the hall.

I back my way tighter to the wall and closer to the outside door. If Seddie comes from her bed, I’ll hide behind the curtain, then climb out that window during the ruckus and get myself away from here.