The Book of Lost Friends(52)

But sunlight comes bright through the lids of my eyes, little needle points of shadow and color in pretty patterns like Old Missus’s Turkish carpets. How’s the sun so far up this early in the morning? Every day but Sundays, we rise at four, just like the work gangs did back in the old times. Only there’s no overseer’s bugle to chase us from our beds. No more field hands with the little homemade box ovens balanced on their heads, carrying coals from the fire, with meat and a sweet potato inside, to be left at the edge of the field and finish cooking for the first few hours of the day.

Now that we’re croppers, nobody can make us squat in the dirt and eat like animals do. We sit in a chair, take our meals at a table. Proper. Then we go to work.

I open my eyes, and the sharecrop farm is gone. I trade it for mud-spattered horses. A dog. Two gals slumped together in a bed of oilcloth, half dead or dead, I don’t know yet.

And voices.

I’m all the way awake then. I get up in a squat and listen. Ain’t close, but I hear somebody. Can’t make out the words.

Old Ginger’s got her ear cocked toward the road. Dog is up on his feet, looking that way. The gray has his nostrils wide, sniffing. He nickers down in the throat, soft like a whisper.

I scramble to my feet, slip a hand over his muzzle.

“Shhhhh,” I whisper to him and the dog.

That them sawmill men coming for us?

I put the other hand on Ginger to keep her still. Dog creeps to my feet, and I hook a leg over him, squeeze him twixt my knees.

Out on the road, wagon springs creak and rock. Hooves make a squish-pop, squish-pop, squish-pop in the wet dirt. A wheel bounces in a rut. A man grunts. Could be them woodcutters got their mule back.

I lay my head against the gray’s muzzle, close my eyes and think, Don’t move. Don’t move. Don’t move, while the wagon goes right on by. It’s disappearing past the bend by the time I dare let loose of the horses and go look. I don’t follow after it. More than likely all I’d get is trouble. I’m still toting two girls who can’t explain theirselves and traveling with horses too fine for me to own.

Missy Lavinia and Juneau Jane hadn’t changed. I tip them up against the felled tree, try again to put water down them from the canteen. Juneau Jane flutters her eyes open just a touch, swallows a little, but she retches it up, soon as I set her against the roots. No choice but to turn her over on her side and let it come back out.

Missy Lavinia won’t take any at all. Won’t even try. Her skin’s the color of deadwood, gray and puffy, her eyes matted and her lips swole-up, cracked and sealed over with blood, like they been burned. Both of the girls been fed a poison. That’s all it could be. Poisoned with something to kill them or just to keep them quiet in them boxes.

Missy’s got a hard, swole-up knot poking out of her head, too. I wonder if that’s why she’s worse than Juneau Jane.

I know about poisons like the ones old Seddie conjures from the roots and the leaves, the bark of a certain tree, the berries of this plant or that one. She’d give somebody the right one, depending if she wanted to make them too sick to work, or too addled, or too dead.

Keep clear a’ that ol’ witch woman, Mama told Epheme and me when we first went up to the house to nursemaid Missy Lavinia. Don’t look Seddie’s way. And don’t let her get thinking Ol’ Missus favors you better than her. She’ll slip a poison on you. You keep clear of Ol’ Missus, and Young Marse Lyle, too. Jus’ do your work and be good to Old Marse, so’s he’ll let you come visit me on Sunday afternoons.

Every Sunday evenin’, she’d tell us the same thing before she had to send us back.

No way of knowing if somebody’s to live or die after a poison. Just wait while the body decides how strong it is, and the spirit chooses how much desire it has for its earthly home.

I need to find us a hiding place, but I don’t know where. Another day lopped over the back of a horse might be more than Missy and Juneau Jane can bear up to. And the breeze smells of rain.

It’s a chore, getting all us back moving again, but I manage it. I’m weary before even starting on the day, but to save the horses and to keep us clear of the road, I start off afoot, leading the sorrel and the gray behind like pack mules.

“Let’s go, dog,” I say, and we do.

I put one foot down and then the next, pick my way through the woods, poking the ground with a stick to check for bogs and suck holes, and push off the sharp palmetto leaves. Keep on like that far as I can till a long, wide blackwater slough blocks the way and I got no choice but to start back toward the road again.

The dog sniffs his way to a path I didn’t see at first. There’s tracks along the banks of the bog. Big ones…man tracks. Smaller ones, also. A child or a woman. Just the two of them, so they’re not the men from the sawmill. Maybe folks fishing or hunting gators or seining crawfish.

There’s been people here at least, and pretty recent.

I stop on the trail when the road comes in sight up the hill, and I listen hard. No sounds but the bayou. The pop-pop of bubbles in the mud, the heavy-throated bullfrog, the skeeters and the blackflies buzzing. Dragonflies hum back and forth over stands of saw grass and muscadine vines. A mockingbird sings his borrowed songs all hooked together like different-colored ribbons tied end after end.

Dog pushes through the brush into the clear of the road, stirs up a big ol’ swamp rabbit and gives a howl and bounds off after it. I wait and listen some more to see if another dog might answer, if there’s a farm or a house near, but no sound comes.