The Book of Lost Friends(39)

“People is overrated.” He makes a strangled sound and coughs hard to cover it, and I can tell I’ve poked someplace tender. I don’t say sorry, though. What I got to be sorry to a white boy for?

“Ain’t no place in the world like that for me.” I don’t even know the words are set in my mouth till I hear them. “No place where I’m gonna get rich for just chasin’ up a few cows.”

“There’s Texas.”

“Texas won’t be like that for me, either.”

“Can be if you want it.”

“I’m colored, Gus. I’m always gonna be colored. Ain’t nobody will let me pile up a bunch of money. If I can get me part of a sharecrop farm, I’ll be doing good as to be expected.”

“Pays to do bigger expectin’, sometimes. My pa tolt me that once’t.”

“You got a daddy?”

“Not really.”

We’re quiet awhile. I travel down my own mind like a river, try to think of, What do I want? Try to draw pictures of a life someplace in the wild, far off in Texas. Or maybe up north in Washington, D.C., or Canada or Ohio, with the folks who run off from their marses and missuses years ago and took the Underground Railroad to freedom, long before the soldiers bathed this land in blood and the Federals told us we didn’t have to belong to nobody, not one more day forever.

But I do belong to somebody. I belong to that sharecrop farm and Jason and John and Tati. To tilling the land and hoeing the crops and bringing in the harvest. To soil and sweat and blood.

I ain’t ever seen some other kind of life. Can’t conjure what you never seen.

Maybe that’s the reason why, every time Mama calls to me in my dreams, I wake fretful and washed in my own sweat. I’m afraid of the great big everything that might be out there. Afraid of all I’m blind to. All I’ll never see.

“Gus?” I whisper it soft, case he’s gone off to sleep.

“Yeahhh.” He yawns.

“It ain’t you I’m mad at. It’s just things.”

“I know.”

“I’m grateful you went up to look for Missy and Juneau Jane. I’ll fetch you that dollar.”

“I don’t need it. Got the biscuits for my trouble. Them’s enough. I hope they ain’t dead—them girls.”

“I do, too.”

“I don’t want them hauntin’ after me, is all.”

“I don’t think they would.”

We go quiet awhile again. Then, I say, “Gus?”

“I’m sleepin’.”

“All right.”

“What’d you want? Might as well say, since you bothered me.”

I bite my lips. Make up my mind to toss something out, like a leaf into a river, never know how far the currents might carry it, where it might wash up on shore. “You do a thing for me when you get to Texas? While you’re traveling round looking for them wild cattle and such?”

“Might.”

“Anywhere you go, and you talk to folks—because I know you talk a heap—you mind asking them, do they know any colored folk, name of the Gossetts or the Loaches? You find anyone like that, maybe you could ask them, have they been missing somebody by the name of Hannie? If you ever find somebody who answers yes, let them know, Hannie’s still living back on the old place, Goswood Grove. Same as ever.”

Hope flutters up in the hollow of my throat, clumsy like something just born and trying to find its feet. I push it down hard. Best not to let it grow too much, right off. “I got people out there, maybe. In Texas and in the north of Louisiana. All us keep three blue glass beads on a string round our necks. Beads all the way from Africa. My grandmama’s beads. I’ll show you once it’s light enough.”

“Yeah, I reckon I could ask here and there. If I think about it.”

“I’d be grateful.”

“Them’s the saddest threesome of words I ever put my ears on, though.”

“What is?”

“Them words at the tail end of your story.” He smacks his lips, drowsy, while I try to remember what I said. Finally, he gives the words back to me, “Same as ever. Them’s three mournful bad words.”

We go quiet then, and sleep. First light shines above the cotton bales when we wake again. Gus and me come to at the same time, sit up and twist to see each other, worried. The slap-slap of the paddle wheel and the engine’s rumble is gone. The cotton bale above our heads shudders side to side. We both wiggle up on our haunches at once.

Except for fire, this is the thing that’s worried us most. Cotton don’t get freighted all the way to Texas; it gets brought out of Texas and south Louisiana and carried north to cloth mills. Sometime before Texas, our cotton palace is bound for an offload. We just don’t know when.

First night in our hiding place, we slept in shifts, so’s to keep an eye out, but we’ve turned lazy. Water’s been smooth, and the weather’s clear, and the boat passes by the towns and the plantations that have their own river landings along the way. Don’t even stop for folk that come out to their docks and try to wave her down to catch a berth upwater. The Genesee Star is loaded for the long haul. Just eats boiler wood, stops for reload here and there, and steams right on. Ain’t the normal way of the river, but it’s the way of the Genesee Star. She ain’t sociable and she don’t want to be troubled with new folks.