The Book of Lost Friends(36)

I know stars can be changed. I’ve seen it.

The hammer echoes after me as I dangle one foot to test the ladder, then climb gingerly back down to the soggy grass, open the front door and ram my feet into my duck shoes, then grab the binoculars and a clipboard from the Bug and start off across the yard.

“House is unlocked,” I yell in the general direction of the roof. “Go inside if you need to. Lock it when you leave.”

For whatever reason, she has stopped to observe my exit, a shingle dangling between her knees. “Where’re you headed with those?” She motions to the binoculars and the clipboard, as if we haven’t just had words.

“Bird-watching,” I snap and start walking.

“Look out for coral snakes,” she calls. “That’s their territory back there.”

A shiver runs under my clothes, but I will not succumb to it. I’m not afraid of coral snakes. I laugh in the face of coral snakes. Besides, I’ve been over to Goswood Grove multiple times, and I have not seen a snake yet.

Even so, tales I’ve overheard at school sift through my mind. Stories of swimming holes, flooded rice fields, chicken coops, swamp boats, the dark spaces under front porches…and snakes. A little poem whispers as I walk. One of the country kids wrote it on a quiz paper in answer to a question about the most important lesson he’d learned from the daily reading of Animal Farm.

How to tell deadly coral snakes from harmless milksnakes, he wrote. Red touches black, friend of Jack. Red touches yellow, kill a fellow.

That detail was nowhere in the daily reading, but it is good information to have right now, because my borrowed field glasses and I are headed for Goswood Grove, no matter what. Even from outside the window, I’m going to be able to make out the titles gracing those rows upon glorious rows of unused books.

Coach’s field glasses, Mr. Clipboard, and I are about to compose a shopping list.





CHAPTER 9


HANNIE GOSSETT—LOUISIANA, 1875

I stare off in the night, lay eyes on the water, deep and wide under the moon and boat lamps and shadows. Yellow and white. Light and dark. I pretend I’m back home, safe, but truth is this river’s carrying me deeper into trouble by the hour and by the day. Need to go back to my hiding spot for sleep, but looking out over the rails, all I can think is, the last time I was on a packet boat like this one was when Old Marse Gossett herded up a batch of us and sent us with Jep Loach to run from the Yankees, off to Texas. Chained one to the other, and half who couldn’t swim, all us knew what’d happen if that bloated-down boat hit a sandbar or a snag and went under.

My mama wept and cried out, Take off the chains from the children. Please, take off the chains….

I feel her close to me now. I want her to make me strong. To help me know, was it right what I done when them two big trunks went up the bow ramp onto this boat, and I heard moanin’ inside? There was a clatter of men nearby, wrestling the last of the livestock—two teams of fighting, kicking, biting, squealin’ bay mules.

Three men, only.

Four mules.

I set down my empty crate, pushed Missy’s necklace deep in my pocket, and ran to take up the line to the last mule. Onto the boat I went with that mule, and there I stayed. Hid myself in a space twixt cotton bale stacks taller than two men. Prayed not to wind up buried alive in it.

So far, I ain’t.

“Mama…” I hear myself whisper now.

“Hush up!” Somebody grabs my wrist and pulls me hard away from the side rails. “Quieten down! Git us throwed in the river, you don’t shut yer yap.”

It’s that boy, Gus McKlatchy, beside me, now, trying to pull me back from the deck’s edge. Gus, who’s twelve or fourteen years old depending on which time you ask, nothing more than a ragged little pie-eater white boy from someplace back in the bayou. He’s scrawny enough he can slip between the cotton bales and hide away like I been doing. The Genesee Star is loaded to the guards, hauling freight and livestock and people. She’s a sad, battered old thing, and drafts low in the water, rubbing the shoals and the snags while she trudges her way upriver, slow and painful. Faster boats go by now and again and blow their whistles, passing us up like the Genesee is tied on at the banks.

The folk she’s carrying are of the sort to barely scratch up money for deck passage. At night, they bed down in the open, with the goods and the cows and the horses. Cinders and ash swirl down from the stacks of passing boats, and we just pray it don’t set fire to the cotton.

There’s only a few staterooms on the boiler deck for folks that can afford cabin passage. Missy Lavinia and Juneau Jane, if they’re alive yet, must be up there. Trouble is, there’s no way I can know. During the day, I can mix in with the roustabouts, who are colored men, but that won’t get me up in the passenger rooms.

Gus’s got the opposite problem. Being a white boy, he don’t pass for a roustabout, and he ain’t got a ticket to show, if he was asked. He moves round the boat at night. The boy’s a thief, and thievin’ is a sin, but just now he’s all I got to show me the way of things. We ain’t friends. I had to give him one of Missy Lavinia’s coins so he’d let me share the cotton bales. We help each other, though. Both know if you get caught for a stowaway, they throw you off in the river, let the paddle wheel suck you under. Gus’s seen it happen before.