The Book of Lost Friends(5)

Just as quick as I feel her there, she’s gone again.

“Why didn’t you come?” My words hang in the night air. “Why didn’t you come for your child? You never come.” I sink down on the stump’s edge and look out toward the trees by the road, their thick trunks hid in sifts of moon and fog.

I think I see something in it. A haint, could be. Too many folk buried under Goswood soil, Ol’ Tati says when she tells us tales in the cropper cabin at night. Too much blood and sufferin’ been left here. This place always gonna have ghosts.

A horse nickers low. I see a rider on the road. A dark cloak covers the head and sweeps out, light as smoke.

That my mama, come to find me? Come to say, You almost eighteen years old, Hannie. Why you still settin’ on that same ol’ stump? I want to go to her. Go away with her.

That Old Mister, come home from fetching his wicked son out of trouble again?

That a haint, come to drag me off and drown me in the river?

I close my eyes, shake my head clear, look again. Nothing there but a drift of fog.

“Child?” Tati’s whisper comes from a ways off, worried, careful-like. “Child?” Don’t matter your age, if Tati raised you, you stay child to her. Even the strays that’ve growed up and moved on, they’re still child, if they come to visit.

I cock my ear, open my mouth to answer her, but then I can’t.

Somebody is there—a woman by the high white pillars at the Goswood gate, afoot now. The oaks whisper overhead, like it’s worried their old bones to have her come to the drive. A low-hung branch grabs her hood and her long, dark hair floats free.

“M-mama?” I say.

“Child?” Tati whispers again. “You there?” I hear her hurry along, her walking stick tapping faster till she’s found me.

“I see Mama coming.”

“You dreamin’, sugar.” Tati’s knobby fingers wrap my wrist, gentle-like, but she keeps a distant. Sometimes, my dreams let go with a fight. I wake kicking and clawing to get Jep Loach’s hand off my arm. “Child, you all right. You just walkin’ in the dream. Wake up, now. Mama ain’t here, but Ol’ Tati, she right here. You safe.”

I glance away from the gates, then back. The woman’s gone, and no matter how hard I look, I can’t see her.

“Wake up, now, child.” In moonglow, Tati’s face is the red-brown of cypress wood pulled up from the deep water, dark against the sack-muslin cap over her silvery hair. She slides a shawl off her arm, reaches it round me. “Out here in the field in all the wetness! Get a pleurisy. Where all us be with that kind of troublement? Who Jason gonna settle in with, then?”

Tati nudges me with the cane stick, pestering. The thing she wants most is for Jason and me to marry. Once the ten years on the sharecrop contract with Old Mister is done and the land is hers, Tati needs somebody to hand it down to. Me and the twins, Jason and John, are the last of her strays. One more growing season is all that’s left for the contract, but Jason and me? We been raised in Tati’s house like brother and sister. Hard to see things any other way, but Jason is a good boy. Honest worker, even if both him and John did come into this world a shade slower minded than most.

“I ain’t dreamin’,” I say when Tati tugs me from the stump.

“Devil, you ain’t. Come on back, now. We got work waitin’ in the mornin’. Gonna tie your ankle to the bed, you don’t stop dealing me this night misery. You been worser lately. Worser in these walkin’ dreams than when you was a li’l thing.”

I jerk against Tati’s arm, remembering all the times as a child I wandered from my sleep pallet by Missy Lavinia’s crib, and woke up to Old Missus whipping me with the kitchen spoon or a riding whip or a iron pot hook from the fireplace. Whatever was close by.

“Hesh, now. You can’t help it.” Tati scoops down for a pinch of dirt to throw over her shoulder. “Put it behind you. New day comin’ and plenty to do. C’mon now, throw you a pinch your ownself, to be safe.”

I do what she says and then make the cross over my chest, and Tati does, too. “Father, Son, Holy Ghost,” we whisper together. “Guide us and protect us. Keep us ahead and behind. Ever and ever. Amen.”

I hadn’t ought to, then—bad business to look back for a haint once you throwed ground twixt you and it—but I do. I glance at the road.

I’m cold all over.

“What you doin’?” Tati near trips when I stop so sudden.

“I wasn’t dreamin’,” I whisper, and I don’t just look. I point, but my hand shakes. “I was lookin’ at her.”





CHAPTER 2


BENEDETTA SILVA—AUGUSTINE, LOUISIANA, 1987

The truck driver lays on his horn. Brakes squeal. Tires hopscotch across asphalt. A stack of steel pipe leans in slow-motion, testing the grease-encrusted nylon binders that hold the load. One strap breaks loose and whips in the breeze as the truck skids toward the intersection.

Every muscle in my body goes stiff. I brace for impact, fleetingly imagining what might be left of my rusted-out VW Beetle after the collision.

The truck wasn’t there an instant ago. I’d swear it wasn’t.

Who did I list as the emergency contact in my employee file?

I remember the pen tip hovering over the blank line, the moment of painful, ironic indecision. Maybe I never filled in the space.