The Book of Lost Friends(87)

I’m the alonest I’ve ever been. Last time I was locked up was when I was six years old, after I told my purchaser at the auction sale that I was stole away from Goswood Grove. Even though I was just a child, alone and scared in that jail after being turned over to the law for safekeeping, at least I had the hope that Old Gossett would fetch me and find Mama and the rest.

This time, ain’t nobody coming. Wherever Juneau Jane is tonight, she don’t know what’s become of us. Even if she did, wouldn’t be a thing she could do about it. By now, trouble might likely have found her, too.

“You s-s-shut that clabberhead u-u-up!” the Irishman horse thief hollers. “Y-you quieten ’im dow…down, or I’m-a…I’m-a…”

I sit myself beside Missy in the dark, and my belly heaves at the smell of her. “Hush, now. You ain’t doing us no good. Hush up.”

I lean my head back and tip my nose up to get at the night air, and I try to hum the song the woman and the child sung outside the church in the swamp. I don’t sing the words, but in my mind, I hear them in Mama’s voice.

    Who’s that young girl dressed in white

Wade in the water

Must be the children of the Israelite

Oh, God’s a-gonna trouble the water.



Missy curls herself into a ball and sinks her head down on my knee, same way she did when I’d crawl into her crib to shush her baby cries at night. Only time she behaved sweet like that was if she was scared and wanted somebody.

I stroke my fingers over her thin, wispy hair and close my eyes, and keep on humming till the song and night finally leave me….

When I wake up, I hear my name. “Hannie,” the voice is quick, a sharp whisper. “Hannie.”

I sit bolt up, listen. Missy stirs, but falls off my knee and back to her slumbering. The Irishman has gone quiet, too. Did I dream the voice?

The first, thin gray light sifts in the window. Dread comes with it. How long will they keep us here and what’s to happen after? I’m afraid to know.

“Hannibal?” The voice comes again. I know it then. There’s only one person who’d call me Hannibal, but that can’t be, and so I know I’m inside one of my waking dreams. Even so, I stand up on the bunk, wrap my hands over the bars, and pull my chin to the windowsill to look out. To learn what the dream has to tell me.

I see his shape, standing in the morning dim, holding the rope on a donkey with a two-wheeled wood cart hooked to it.

“Gus McKlatchy? From the boat?”

“Sssshhh! Don’t call any notice,” he says, but there ain’t another soul in my dream, except him.

“You come with a message for me? The Lord send you?”

“Well, I doubt it, since I ain’t got religion.”

I wonder, then, did they toss Gus off that boat sometime after me and the paddle wheel ground him under? Is that the ghost of Gus McKlatchy, standing there in his ragged shirt and floppy hat, knee high in the fog? “You a haint, then?”

“Not ’less somebody didn’t tell me about it.” He looks over his shoulders and sidles the donkey up close to the wall, then stands on the donkey’s back to get near the window.

“What’re you doing here, Hannie? Never thought to find you again, this side a’ the sod blanket. Figured you’s drowned in the river when that man, Moses, pitched you off’t the deck.”

My whole body shivers at the memory. I feel the water over my head, the big strainer tree pinwheeling along the river bottom, grabbing my britches and pulling me down. I feel Moses’s breath on my cheek, his lips on brushing my ear. You swim? “I got free of the wake and made shore. I don’t swim much, but I can swim.”

“Well, I knowed that was you I seen get arrested yesterdey. You with some big, sapheaded white boy, but I couldn’t comprehend the how of it, bein’ as you got throwed from the boat back on the Red.” Gus’s voice gets louder as he’s more excited. He checks round and quiets again. “You was one lucky chap, by the by. Next night on that boat, I seen a man get pistol-whipped, then they slit his throat and tossed him off the back. Heard them say he was a Federal man and sniffing round their business. That whole boat was folk with Confederate leanin’s, if you know what I mean. Feller with the patch on his eye, they all called ‘the Lieutenant,’ like soldiers, like they don’t know the war’s been over ten years now. I kep’ myself hid all the way to Texas, and I was pleasured to take my leave of them, I will say.”

A knot ties itself in my throat. I’m not happy for where I am, but I’m grateful both Gus and me made it off that boat alive.

“I might could get you outta here, Hannibal,” Gus says.

“I’m glad if you’d say how. We’re in a mess. A pure mess.”

He stops to think a minute, rubs the thick trail of freckles along his chin, then nods.

“I got me a job on a freight wagon headed down through Hamilton and San Saba, all the way to Menardville. They’s some danger in it, Indians and sech, but the pay’s respectable good. I figure it’ll git me farther south toward where all them cattle been runnin’ wild since’t the war, just breedin’ and procreatin’ so’s all a fella’s got to do is catch ’em up and make his fortune. You can come on along, the two of us partner up like we talked about. I might can git the boss man to advance you the pay for freight drivin’ and bail you from jail, if you’s to sign on for the trip. They’re in sore need of drivers and guards. You handle a four-up heavy horse team all right?”