The Book of Lost Friends(24)

Juneau Jane’s arms go stiff at her sides. Her hands ball into fists. “More freely, I would trust a serpent.”

“As I thought.” Missy holds out a hand toward Juneau Jane, palm up. “Then let’s go inside. We’ll do it together.”

Juneau Jane sweeps past the stretched hand, marches up the steps, and walks in the door. Last thing I see of her is that long, dark hair.

“Look after the horses, boy. Should anything happen to them, I’ll take it out of your hide…one way or another.” Then Missy Lavinia goes, too.

The red door swings closed, and I hear the bolt slide into the hasp.

I tie off the saddle horse, loosen the checkrein and the belly band a notch on Ginger, then find me a spot in the shade along the wall, wiggle into a empty sugar hogshead turned on its side, let my head fall back, and close my eyes.

The long night with not much sleep comes to catch me before I know it.

But so does the dream of the trader’s yard.

That tipped-over barrel turns into the slave pen where I’m carried off from Mama one more time.





CHAPTER 6


BENNY SILVA—AUGUSTINE, LOUISIANA, 1987

The rain finally stops by the time I get home. Sloshing past the hidden garden saint and up the porch steps, I feel guilty for my slightly emotional phone call to LaJuna’s aunt, which I had to let myself into the empty school building to make. Aunt Sarge, whose real name I now know is Donna Alston, probably thinks I am a basket case, but in my own defense, rain was sheeting the school windows in blinding torrents. I could only imagine how much might be streaming through the roof at home, and how close it could be to overwhelming the capacity of my makeshift countertop reservoir.

To her credit, Aunt Sarge is as good as her word. She arrives right behind me, and we enter the house and check my catch pot together, then haul it out to the porch for a dump, before even making introductions.

“You’ve got a problem.” Aunt Sarge is all business. She’s a stoutly built African American woman with the look of a fitness coach and a military bearing that silently says, Don’t mess with me. “I can get out here tomorrow to fix it.”

“Tomorrow?” I stammer. “I was hoping to get it taken care of today. Before the rain starts again.”

“Tomorrow afternoon,” she replies. “Best I can do.” She goes on to tell me that she’s watching a relative’s children until then and has left a neighbor keeping them for a moment, so as to run down here.

I offer to sit with the children myself, even have them hang out there at my house if she will fix the roof.

“Two are down with strep throat,” she counters. “Reason why they’re not at the babysitter’s. And their mama can’t miss work. Jobs aren’t easy to find around here.” There’s an edge behind that comment, one that makes me feel like I’m being accused of something. Taking a job that could have been filled by a local, maybe? But I was a last resort for this position. A week before the start of school, Principal Pevoto would’ve taken anyone with a teaching certificate and a pulse.

“Oh,” I muse. “Sorry. I can’t take a chance of getting sick. Just started work.”

“I know.” She adds a rueful smirk. “One of the new victims.”

“Yeah.”

“Subbed at the school a couple times right after I got out of the army last spring. Couldn’t find anything else.” The comment requires no further elaboration. Her facial expression says it all. For an instant, the atmosphere between us feels almost collegial. I think she’s resisting a smile, but she says, straight-faced, “Just grab their heads and thump them together. Worked for me.”

My mouth drops open.

“Course they didn’t ask me back again after that.” She climbs onto the brick column at the bottom of the porch post, grabs the decking above the rafters, and does a chin-up, then hangs there a minute, studying the roof, before swinging herself easily back onto the porch. The landing is superhero worthy.

This, I register silently, is no ordinary woman. I get the impression she could smoothly vault herself onto the roof barehanded. I want to be like her, not some namby-pamby suburban knucklehead who knows nothing of roof tar.

“All right,” she says. “It’s patchable.”

“Will it cost much?”

“Thirty…forty bucks. I charge eight bucks an hour, plus materials.”

“Sounds fair.” I’m thrilled it’s not worse, but this is definitely going to cut into my classroom snack-cake funds. Hopefully I can get the roof money out of my landlord soon.

“But that’s not likely to be the last problem you have.” She squints upward, points out several places where water has dripped through and inked mildew-colored stains on the beadboard porch ceiling. “Only place this roof needs to go’s right over there.” She nods toward the cemetery. “Thing’s a better fit for a funeral than a prayer.”

I chuckle appreciatively. “I like that saying.” I’m a collector of creative idioms. I once wrote an entire graduate-level term paper about them. So far, Louisiana is a collector’s dream.

“You can borrow it. No charge.” A brow lowers and a hooded glance slides my way.

It’s easy to forget, when you’ve been hanging around the college English department for years, that people outside those hallowed halls don’t carry on conversations about idioms, or talk at length about the distinction between analogies and metaphors. They don’t debate the dividing lines while strolling along, lugging weighty backpacks or sitting in tiny apartments sipping cheap wine in thrift-shop stemware.