The Book of Lost Friends(60)

Them sawmill men could come sniffing after us, too. Can’t take that chance.

Juneau Jane don’t answer me. She just keeps on with whatever it is she’s doing over there by that wall of nailed-up newspapers. Got herself facing into the corner, so’s I can’t see. She’s mostly been a quiet thing since she come to. Confused and scared and twitchy, like the soldiers that wandered the roads after the war, their minds tangled, their nerves skittery and strange. When the mind’s been lost from the body, it can’t always find the way home. Might be that’s the soul’s way of preserving itself. Far as she’ll say when I ask her, she don’t remember a thing about how she came here, or what was done to them by that man with the patch eye or his helpers.

Missy Lavinia ain’t said a word so far. She was a big, heavy rag doll when I washed her clean with a bucket from the rain barrel and got her dressed in the clothes I paid the old woman for. Boys’ clothes and a hat. If we do see anybody on the road, it’ll be a whole lot easier to explain ourselves that way.

“Time we move on.” I keep talking while I gather up the food and quilt and wool blanket I bought from that woman. We can use them to sleep under or stretch over ourselves like a tent. “I got the horses caught. Saddled. You help me push Missy Lavinia up on that mare, now.”

Still not a word comes, so I cross the room and touch Juneau Jane’s shoulder. “You listening at me? What’s over here in this corner, so important you ain’t got time to answer? I saved your life, you know? Saved both your lives. Coulda left you two locked up in that poacher’s room, that’s what I coulda done…and should’ve, too. I don’t owe you nothin’. I said, for you to come help.” I’m about to the end of myself and the sun’s just barely up past the trees. Might be time I just leave, let them shift for theirselves.

“Soon,” she answers, low and flat, sounding older than the child she is. “But I must first complete my task.”

She’s got one of them newspapers pulled off the wall, and her bare foot set on top of it, and she’s cutting the shape of her foot out of the paper, using the tip of the skinning knife the woman brung me.

“Well, I’m sorry if them shoes I got for you ain’t to your pleasure. We hadn’t got time for you to fix paper to pad them. You can stuff them with grass or leaves on the trail. I’d be grateful just to have shoes, if I was you. That woman couldn’t even get me any to fit Missy Lavinia. Have to leave her barefoot for now, worry about that later. We need to leave from this place.”

The girl turns them strange eyes my way. I don’t like it when she does that. Gives me the shakes. She slips a hand under her leg, pulls out a pair of them newspaper feet that’s already been cut and holds them out toward me. “For your shoes,” she says. “To keep the conjures away.”

A witch’s fingernail slides up my back bone and down my rib bones, and along every other bone in my body, making a chill under my skin. I stay away from any and all conjures and even the talk of them.

I don’t believe in conjures, Lord, I say in my mind. Just so you know. This being a church and all, it’s best to make that plain.

I say to Juneau Jane, “How can a little paper keep a conjure off?” I don’t believe it, Lord, but it might be the quickest thing if I just do what she says. I sit down in that chair, start kicking off my brogans. “If it’ll get you to movin’, I’ll do it. But it ain’t conjures that brung us all this trouble we’re in. It was bad men, and you and Missy Lavinia and the addled brain plan you two hatched, and me being fool enough to dress myself up for a boy and go along with it.”

“You need not have them if you prefer none.” All of a sudden she’s right talkable in that high-tone way of hers. Maybe even got a little sass. That’s a good sign for her health, at least.

She tries to take my shoe newspapers.

I grab them up before she can. “I’ll do it.”

She pulls some more papers off the wall, folds them and tucks them down the boy shirt that bags where her new britches are tied up. The shirt rides so loose on her, the shoulder seams hang to her elbows.

“Hadn’t oughta be stealing from a church house,” I say.

“For later.” She waves a hand toward the wall. “They have many.”

I look up at the slab logs, at them pages stretched floor to ceiling. All that writing sectioned up in little boxes. I hadn’t noticed them much while we been trapped in this room. Too busy. But somebody took the time to put them up there real careful, so that not a one covered over any part of the other. Don’t seem like the way you’d do it to keep the weather from coming in.

“What’s all that say?” I’m wondering it to myself, but I speak the question out loud.

“Have you not read them?” She goes on with fitting newspapers in her shoes. “Not in all this time?”

“Can’t read.” No shame in admitting that, I figure. “Some of us don’t get a house to live in and money for clothes and food just handed out. Some pay our way in toil and sweat, since before the freedom, since after the freedom. Before the freedom, if Old Missus was to catch us trying to learn reading, she’d have us whipped good. After the freedom, we work from see to can’t see every day of the planting time and the hoeing time and harvesting time. In between them times, light up the tallow candle or the pine knot, go to making socks, darning socks, or sew up clothes to wear, or clothes to sell. Whatever money we get goes to buy our goods at the plantation store and the seed for next year, and to pay the contract to Old Mister so the land will be ours one day. Glory! That day is comin’, if I ain’t wrecked it all for you and Missy Lavinia. No, I can’t read. But I can work, and I can cipher good. Can do numbers in my head faster than most folks will on paper. What do I need to know past that?”