The Book of Lost Friends(76)
Is that a sign?
Juneau Jane pulls me down hard. She’s got a rope tied at my waist to be sure I don’t wander off the edge of this flatcar in my sleep. It loops Missy Lavinia next, and then Juneau Jane. Wasn’t any way to get shed of Missy in Jefferson, with Moses breathing down our backs. Don’t know why he didn’t fire on us in that street and kill us dead, all three. Don’t want to know.
He just turned and walked on with them other men, and we found our way to the train, and got on it and put miles betwixt us.
This open car is a rough way to travel, the wind streaming hot cinders through the night sky over our heads. I’ve seen trains, but ain’t ever been on one. Didn’t think I’d like it, and I don’t. But it was the way to get from Jefferson in a hurry. The trains go west, so full of stock and goods and folks, hardly a space can be had. Folks ride up top of the coach cars and in the stock cars with their horses, and in flatcars twixt the loads, like we’re doing. They hop off here and there, sometimes when the train just slows down enough to drop a mail bag on a hook or pick one up, and blow the whistle.
We’ll stay on this train to the end, past the little town of Dallas, to Eagle Ford at the Trinity River, where the Texas and Pacific Railway ends till they get it open farther west. From Eagle Ford, we’ll cross the river and walk or ride a wagon more than a day’s travel, to Fort Worth town, to find Old Mister or the lawyer man…or what is to be learned of them.
I never laid my eyes on so much country. The farther west we ride on this rumblin’, shakin’ beast, the more the land changes. Gone is the shelter of the piney woods, the last part of Texas I knew from the refugee years. Here, the grass stretches out, mile by mile in low hills, the elms and the live oaks and the pin oaks cluster together along the creeks and in the folds of dry watersheds.
Strange land here. Empty.
I settle back in beside Missy, feel her grab at my clothes. She’s scared of this place, too.
“You hush up now,” I say. “Hush up and be still. You’re all right.” I watch patchy trees whirl by in the dark, their moon shadows laying over hills and flats without a farm light or a campfire, far as I can see.
Deep slumber takes me off, and Mama don’t come, and I don’t go to the trader’s yard or watch little Mary Angel stand on the auction block. All inside me, there’s nothing but peaceable quiet. The kind of quiet with no time passing in it.
Seems like just a blink’s gone by before I wake up to noise, and Juneau Jane shaking my one arm, and Missy whimpering and digging her fingers into the other. There’s music playing someplace and a gristmill chugging and grinding grain. My neck’s crooked from my head laying on my shoulder, and my eyelashes stick from the wind and the dirt. I pull them apart and see it’s dark yet. The moon’s gone, but the stars still spatter the black sky.
The train scoots along in a slow, lazy sway, like a mama rocking her baby, too lost in the look of her child to think of the day’s work done or the hard row ahead.
When the train stops, there comes a ruckus of men and women, horses, dogs, wagons, hand trucks. A barker calls out, “Pots, pans, kettles! Salt pork, bacon!”
Another yells, “Good buckets, sharp axes, oilcloth, shovels….”
A man sings “Oh Shenandoah,” and a woman laughs high and long.
No matter that good folk oughta be sleeping at this hour, the noise of people and animals seems to come from everyplace. Noise and noise.
We get off the train and move away from rolling wagons and scrambling horses and find a place on a boardwalk under a coal lamp. Wagons come too close to other wagons and folks holler out. “Watch yerself, thar,” and “Haw, Bess. Haw, Pat. Git up! Git up, now!”
A man yells something in a language I don’t know. A team of loose horses bolts out of the dark and down the street, harnesses flapping. A child screams for its mama.
Missy squeezes my arm so hard I feel the blood swell up in my hand. “Stop that, now. You’re troublin’ me. Ain’t walking all the way to Fort Worth with you hanging on me.” I try to shake her off, but she won’t have it.
A spotted bull trots into the torchlight and moves on by, easy as could be, nobody leading it, nor chasing it, nor minding it, far as I can see. The torch lamp glows off its white spots and the frightful, gray horns long enough a man could lay in them like a hammock. The lamp glow goes down into the middle of the bull’s eye and bounces off and comes at us blue-red, and he snorts out dust and steam.
“This’s a awful place,” I tell Juneau Jane, and I worry Fort Worth might be worse, not better. Texas is bad wild, once you get past the river port. “I’d as soon start out walkin’, and us be gone from here.”
“But, the river is first,” Juneau Jane argues. “We must wait until day, in order that we will know the means by which others cross the water.”
“I guess.” I hate to let her be right, but she is. “Might be, in the morning, we can pay a little to get on a wagon, anyhow.”
We wander here and there, looking for a spot to huddle up. Folks chase us out, if they see us. What looks like three ragged boys, colored and white together, and one addle-headed being led by the hand, ain’t something anybody feels kindly toward. Finally, we go down to the riverbank, where there’s wagon camps, and we push up in some brush, and cower together like three lost pups, and hope nobody bothers us.