The Book of Lost Friends(77)
Soon’s light comes, we eat a breakfast of hard pilot biscuits out of our pack and the last few bites of salted ham from the crew on the Katie P., and then we hold the poke up overhead and cross the river at the shallows. It ain’t hard to know the way, just walk along with the steady row of wagons fording the river and going west. A line of other folks passes us, traveling the other way, too, aiming for the railhead with their buckboards and farm wagons. Herds of spotted big-horned cattle tramp through, trailed by rough-looking men and boys in wide hats and knee boots. Sometimes, the herds pass for what seems like a hour at a time.
It ain’t midway in the morning before Missy goes to limping in them new shoes from Jefferson. Sweat and road dust makes a plaster on her skin, clinging her shirt to her body. She takes up fussing and tugging at it and working loose the cloth that’s binding her bosom flat. “You leave that be,” I keep saying and swatting her hand away.
Finally, we move off into the grass while two wagons pass each other going opposite ways. Minute my back is turned, Missy plops herself down in the shade of a little pin oak. She won’t get up no matter how we try to coax her.
I stand by the road and start looking for a wagon we can get on for a little pay.
A colored driver with a load of freight and a kindly face takes us up, and he’s a talkish sort. Rain is his name. Pete Rain. His papa was a Creek Indian and his mama a escaped slave from a plantation that belonged to some Cherokees. The farm wagon and the team he owns all to hisself, and that is the business he does, hauling goods from the railroads to the settlements and then back from the settlements to the railhead, to ship east. “Not bad work,” he tells us. “All you got to worry about is losing your scalp.” He shows us bullet holes in the wagon and shares tales of bushwhacking and raiding parties with fearsome painted warriors.
He tells tales most of the day. Stories of the Indians up north of here, the Kiowas and Comanches, who roam down off their reservations when they choose and steal horses and burn farms and take captives, or leave cut-up bodies behind. “Doesn’t seem to be any particular figuring to their ways,” he says. “Just whatever they favor doing at the time. The war is over in the South, but there’s still war here. You boys be watchful. Look out for road agents and bad sorts, too. You come across anybody that calls himself a Marston Man, you go the other way double fast. Their gang is worst of all, and growing in numbers each day.”
By the time dark is settling in, Juneau Jane and me, we’re looking twice at every bush and tree and sniffing the air for signs of smoke. Our ears stay sharp for sounds of Indians, and bushwhackers, and gangs of Marston Men, whatever they might be. We’re glad to share Pete Rain’s camp. Juneau Jane helps with the horses and harness, and I take to boiling up a stew from rice, salted ham, and beans. Pete Rain shoots a rabbit, and we add that, too. Missy sits and stares at the fire.
“What’s wrong with the boy?” Pete asks while we eat our meal, and I feed Missy spoonfuls, because she can’t pick up stew with her hands.
“Don’t know.” That’s mostly true. “He run onto a difficulty with some bad men and been this way ever since.”
“Sad thing,” Pete mutters, and rubs his plate out with sand and drops it in the rinse bucket before laying back to look at the stars. They’re bigger and brighter here than ever I saw back home. Wider, too. The sky goes all the way from one end of the world to the other.
While Pete’s quiet, I tell him about my three blue beads and ask after my people in case he knows of them. He don’t, that he can say.
Juneau Jane tells him of the Lost Friends and he wants to know more, so she gets out the papers and leans to the fire. I sit over her shoulder and she moves her finger along the words for me while she reads. Pete don’t know any of them names, either, but he says, “I got a sister out there someplace. Slave catchers stole her and killed my mama while I was off to hunt with my pap. That was the year eighteen and fifty-two. Don’t reckon I’ll ever find my little sister or that she’d even remember me, but you could put her name in the Lost Friends. I’ll give you the fifty cents to get me a letter printed in that Southwestern newspaper, plus the mailing money if you’d post it for me while you’re in Fort Worth. I don’t linger in that place. Folks don’t call it Hell’s Half Acre for nothing.”
Juneau Jane tells him she’ll do what he asks, but instead of the papers, she gets out that ledger book from the lawyer’s office and opens it. “The space on the papers is filled,” she says. “Here, we have room.”
“I’m appreciative of it.” Pete rests his head in his crossed arms like a pillow and watches the trail of angel glow that runs across the night sky. “Amalee, that was her name. Amalee August Rain. She was too bitty to say it at the time, though, so I don’t suppose she got to keep it.”
Juneau Jane starts the book, saying the words she writes, “Amalee August Rain, sister of Pete Rain of Weatherford, Texas. Lost in the Indian Nations, September, 1852, when three years old.” She tells the letters out loud, and I try to think how each one looks before the pencil makes it. A few I get right.
When I lay down that night, I think about alphabet letters and I point one finger against that wide black silk sky and draw them from star to star. A for Amalee…R for Rain…T for Texas. H for Hannie. I keep on till my hand falls and my eyes close.