The Book of Lost Friends(78)

In the morning when I wake and sit up on my blanket, the lantern sputters low on its shepherd’s hook, and Juneau Jane sits under it in the dawn dark, her legs crossed and the book in her lap. The skinning knife is stuck beside her in the dirt, and the pencil’s down to just a stub. Her eyes are weary and red.

“You been at that all night?” She never even moved her blanket over to the wagon.

“Indeed, yes,” she whispers real soft, since Pete and Missy hadn’t woke yet.

“Just writing that one letter so’s to mail it for Pete in Fort Worth town?” I climb from my place and scrabble over to her.

“Something more.” She holds the book up in the first of the light and the last of it, so’s I can see. Page after page of it has words now. “I have written all of them.” She shows me her work, while I look down in wonder. “These pages, by the beginning letter of the surname.” She turns to a page with R, which is a letter I know, and there at the top she reads off, “Amalee August Rain.”

I sit down beside her and she gives it over to me, and I turn through all the pages. “I’ll be,” I whisper. “A book of lost friends.”

“Yes,” she agrees and gives me a piece of tore-out paper with writing on it, which she says is the letter for Pete.

A yearning comes in me then, and though we oughta get a small cook fire laid and start on breakfast, I settle in the grass aside of her, instead. “Could you take out another paper from the book and write me one, while there’s still some of the pencil left? I want a letter about my people…for the Lost Friends.”

She lifts a eyebrow my way. “There will be time for this as we go on.” She looks toward Missy and Pete Rain sleeping. In the post oaks overhead, the morning birds call up the dawn.

“I know. And I ain’t got the fifty cents to get it in the paper, yet…or the money I can give for a stamp.” Lord knows when I’ll be able to spend all that on words in a newspaper. “But I just want to hold my letter, I guess. Till the time comes. Be like holdin’ hope, in some way, wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose it would.” She goes to the back of the book, folds the cover flat and scratches her fingernail along the seam, then tears out a page careful and straight. “How would you have it read?”

“I want it fancy, sort of. So, if my people see it, they don’t…” A tickle comes in my throat like a little bird just fluffed its feathers in there. I have to clear it out before I can talk again. “Well, I want that they’ll think I’m smart. Proper, you know? You write it real proper, all right?”

Nodding, she puts the pencil stub to the page, bends low over it, blinks her eyes closed, then open again. I reckon they’re parched tired after all night. “What would you have it say?”

I close my eyes, think long into my little-girl years. “And don’t read them words back to me as you go,” I tell her. “Not this time. Just write it for now. Start it with, ‘Mr Editor: I wish to inquire for my people.’?” I like how it sounds friendly, but then I don’t know what goes next. The words don’t come in my mind.

“Tres bien.” I hear the pencil scratch across the paper and then go quiet awhile. A dove sings its soft song and Pete Rain rolls over on his blanket. “Tell me about your people,” Juneau Jane says. “Their names and what happened to them.”

The lantern flame gutters and hisses. Shadows and light flicker ’cross my eyelids, tell my story back to me, and I tell it to Juneau Jane. “My mama was named Mittie. I am the middle of nine children and am Hannie Gossett.” The chant starts in my mind. I hear Mama and me say it together under the wagon. “The others were named Hardy, Het, Pratt…”

I feel them with me, now, dancing in the pink-brown shadows behind my eyes, all us remembering our story together. When I’m through, my face is wet with tears and cool from the morning breeze. My voice is thick from the lonely that comes with how the story ends.

Pete Rain stirs on his pallet with a grunt and a sigh, and so I wipe my face and take the paper Juneau Jane gives me. I fold it to a square I can carry. Hope.

“We might send it in Fort Worth,” Juneau Jane says. “I have yet a bit of money from the sale of my horse.”

I swallow it down hard again, shake my head. “We best keep that for survivin’ just now. I’ll send this letter when I can pay its way. For now, it’s enough just to know I got it with me.” A coldness goes deep in my bones as I look off into the long stretch of sky to the west, where the last stars still labor against the dawn gray. My mama used to say they were the cook fires in heaven, the stars, that my grandmama and grandpapa and all the folk that went before us lit up the fires of heaven each night.

The letter feels heavier in my hand when I think of that. What if all my people are already up there, gathered at them fires? If nobody answers my letter, is that what it means?

Later on in the day, I wonder if Pete Rain thinks the same thing of his letter. We show it to him in the wagon, when we’re riding the last few miles to Forth Worth. “You know, I believe I’ll mail that with the fifty cents myself,” he decides and tucks it in his pocket, his face pinched and sober. “So I can say a prayer over it first.”

I decide I’ll do the same for my letter, when it’s time.

Before we part ways in town, Juneau Jane tears a scrap out of the newspapers and gives it to Pete Rain. “The address for sending your letter to the Southwestern,” she says.