The Book of Lost Friends(119)

The old derringer hangs in her hand. The soldier slips it away, careful.

“Missy,” I whisper, and Juneau Jane and me go to her. I hold her head and brush the wispy mud-caked hair from her blue eyes. I think of her as a child, and a girl. I try to think of good things. “Missy, what’d you do?”

I tell myself it was her shot that killed Jep Loach. Hers that did him in. I don’t ask the soldiers if the derringer pistol got fired or not. Don’t want to know. I need to believe it was Missy that did it, and that she did it for us.

I close her eyes, take the headscarf from my hair, and lay it over her face.

Juneau Jane makes the cross and says a prayer in French as she holds the hand of her sister. All that’s left of Mister William Gossett lies dead here, bleeding out into this Texas soil.

All but Juneau Jane.



* * *



—

I stand outside the café in Austin City a long while. Can’t go in, not even to the little yard, where the tables sit in open air under the spread of long-armed oaks. Branches twine theirselves overhead like the timbers in a roof. They share roots, these live oak groves. They’re all one tree under the soil. Like a family, made to be together, to feed and shelter one another.

I watch the colored folk come and go from tables, serving up plates of food, filling cups and glasses with water and lemonade and tea, and carrying off dirty dishes. I study each worker from where I stand in the tree shade, try to decide, Do any look like me? Do I know them?

Three days, I been waiting to come here. Three days since we limped into Austin with four wounded soldiers and what’s left of Elam Salter in the wagon. It’s still true that there ain’t a bullet able to hit him, but the horse crushed him pretty good when it fell. I been there at his bedside by the hour. Only left it now with Juneau Jane to watch after him awhile. Nothing more to do now but wait. He’s a strong man, but death has opened the door. It’s for him to decide if he’ll step through it soon, or at another time long in the future.

Some days, I tell myself I should let him cross over and be at peace. There’s so much pain and fight ahead of him if he clings to this life. But I hope he means to stay. I’ve held his hand and wet his skin with my tears and told him that over and over.

Am I right to beg him to do that for me? I could go back to Goswood Grove. Home to Jason and John and Tati. Back to the sharecrop farm. Bury The Book of Lost Friends deep in the earth and forget everything that’s happened. Forget how Elam lies broken. If he lives, he’ll never be the same, the doctor says. Never walk again. Never ride.

This Texas is a bad place. A mean place.

But here I stand, breathing its air another day, watching this café I walked halfway across town to find, and thinking, Could this traveler’s hotel be the one? If it is, was all this worth the doing? All this spilled blood and misery? Maybe even the loss of a brave man’s life?

I study on a walnut-brown girl who carries lemonade in a glass pitcher, pours it for two white ladies in their summer bonnets. I watch a light-skinned colored man carry a platter, a half-grown boy bring out a rag to wipe up a spill on the floor. Do they look like me? Would I know my people by sight after all these years?

I remember the names, where they left us, who carried them away. But did I lose their faces? Their eyes? Their noses? Their voices?

I watch awhile longer.

Silly thing, I tell myself over and again, knowing it’s likely the Irishman horse thief made it all up, that story.

A traveler’s hotel and restaurant down Austin way, just along Waller Creek. Three blue beads on a string. Tied round the neck of a little white girl…

Never even true, I’ll bet.

I walk away, but only far enough to see that a stream is near. Looking down into its waters, I think, Well, here’s this. I ask a old man passing by with a child in hand, “This Waller Creek?”

“Reckon,” he answers and shuffles on.

I take myself back to the café again, walk round the big lime-plastered building that’s shaped like a tall, narrow house, with rooms for travelers to stay by the night. Standing on my toes, I peek through the open windows, look at more colored people working. Nobody I know, far as I can tell.

It’s then I see the little white girl at the well out back. She’s skinny and small, wiry. Eight years old, maybe ten, more hair than anything else to her. It falls from a yellow headscarf, tumbles down her back in red-brown waves. She’s strong, though, hauling a heavy bucket in both hands, water splashing down her leg, wetting the apron over her gray dress.

I’ll ask her, at least: There anybody here that goes by the name of Gossett? Or did back before the freedom, even? You ever see anybody with three blue beads like these? A colored woman? A girl? A boy?

I finger the string at my neck, move to come into the girl’s path and think to be careful how I say the words, so it won’t scare her off. But when she stops, looks up at me, her gray eyes surprised in a face that’s sweet like a china doll’s, I can’t even speak. There at her neck, tied on a red ribbon, hang three blue beads.

The Irishman, I think to myself. He told it true.

I sink down to the dirt. Fall hard, for my legs go weak, but I barely feel the ground. I feel nothing, hear nothing. I hold up my beads, try to speak, but my tongue has clamped itself still. I can’t make the words. Child, where’d you come by them beads?