The Book of Lost Friends(74)
“I didn’t mean to stay this long,” he says. “I fell asleep, and then I wanted to copy the grid map of the graveyard. The thing is, there’s the annexation deal with the cemetery association, but there are already people buried under that ground. I need to see if I can make some kind of estimate of where these begin and end.” He indicates the plots marked in the book.
“You should’ve thrown something at me. I could have gotten up and helped you.”
“You looked pretty comfortable over there.” He smiles, and the morning light catches his eyes and a strange tingle slips through me.
Horror follows in its wake.
No, I tell myself. Firmly and unequivocally, no. I am at a strange, unmoored, lost, lonely, uncertain point in life. I now know enough about Nathan to realize that he is, too. We pose a risk to one another. I’m on the rebound, and he’s…well, I’m not sure, but now isn’t the time to find out.
“I just stayed and kept reading after you dozed off,” he explains. “I probably should’ve gone into town and grabbed a room at the motel.”
“That would’ve been silly, and you know there’s only the one motel in Augustine, and it’s awful. I bunked there my first night.” It’s sad, actually, that this is his family’s hometown, where his two uncles seem to possess the lion’s share of everything, and he, himself, owns not only my house but an enormous one down the way, and he’s talking about staying in a motel.
“The neighbors won’t start rumors, I promise.” I deploy the old cemetery joke to let him know I’m in no way worried about damage to my reputation. “If they do, and we can hear them, then I’ll worry.”
A dimple forms in one suntanned cheek. It’s endearing in a way I know I shouldn’t further contemplate, so I don’t. Although I catch myself idly wondering how much younger than me he might be. A couple years, I think.
And then I tell myself to stop.
His comment provides a perfect segue into shoptalk, which is a relief. We’ve been so busy on our journey of discovery with the Goswood Grove documents, I haven’t even brought up my other reason for wanting some of his time—beyond the matter of the value of antique books, and what he feels okay about donating, and making some arrangements for the proper historical preservation of the plantation records.
“There’s one more issue I need to talk with you about, before I let you get away,” I say. “The thing is, I want to use all these materials with the kids in my classroom. So many of the families in this town go back for generations, and a lot of them are connected, in one way or another, to Goswood.” I watch for his reaction, but he keeps that to himself. He seems to be almost dispassionately listening as I go on. “The names in so many of those ledgers, and records of purchases and sales, and births and deaths and burials—even enslaved people whose labors were rented from or to other plantations up and down the River Road, and tradesmen who worked here or sold goods to the Gossetts, a lot of those names—in some form or other have been handed down through families. They occupy space in my grade book. I hear them being announced on the loudspeaker during football games and talked about in the teachers’ lounge.” Faces scroll through my mind. Faces in all shades. Gray eyes, green eyes, blue eyes, brown eyes.
Nathan draws his chin upward and away slightly, as if he senses a blow coming and his reflex is to avoid it. He hasn’t considered, perhaps, that these long-ago events have woven their threads into the here and now.
I know, if I didn’t fully internalize it before, why there are black Gossetts and white Gossetts in this town. They are all tied together by the tangled history in this Bible, by the fact that the enslaved people of a plantation shared their master’s last name. Some changed the name after emancipation. Some kept what they had.
Willie Tobias Gossett is the seven-year-old boy who was buried well over a century ago along with his four-year-old brother and baby sister, Athene—Carlessa’s children, who perished in a burning cabin with no way out. All that lives on of Willie Tobias is a notation in the carefully kept plot map that now sits on the end table next to Nathan Gossett’s hand.
But Tobias Gossett is also a six-year-old boy who wanders, seemingly unrestricted, the roadsides and farm paths of this town in Spider-Man pajamas, his name possibly handed down through generations like an heirloom—a coin or a favorite piece of jewelry—from long-dead ancestors who possessed no tokens to pass along, save for their names and their stories.
“There’s a project the kids want to do for school. Something they sort of cooked up on their own. I think it’s a good idea…a great idea, in fact.”
Since he’s still listening, I proceed with the description of my Friday morning guest speaker, and the tale of the Carnegie library, the kids’ reaction, and how their ideas morphed from there. “And the thing is, it really just started out as a means of getting them interested in reading and writing. A way to take them from books on a class requirement list they don’t see as relevant, and into personal stories—local history they may have brushed past all their lives. People wonder these days why kids don’t have respect for themselves or their town or why they don’t honor their names. They don’t know what their names mean. They don’t know their town’s history.”
I can see the wheels turning as he slowly rubs his stubbled chin. He’s catching my excitement, I think. I hope.