The Book of Lost Friends(93)

Don’t read too much into it, I tell myself. Most of these things come and go in a week.

“So, I was thinking about the house.” Nathan is talking. I rip my eyes away from the scene at the waitress station and try to ignore the glowering coach, as well.

“My house?”

The question hangs in the air while the bread boy stops at our table with an offering that would smell heavenly under any other circumstance. He sets down a well-used plastic basket, then loads it with corn muffins, breadsticks, and rolls, then adds butter, honey-butter, and a knife.

“Hey, Miss Pooh,” he says. I’m so out of sorts, I haven’t even looked up and noticed that the bread boy is also one of my students. A shaggy-haired kid from the Fish family. The others classify him squarely in the category with the hoods. Rumor is, he smokes weed, which his family grows in fields carved out of the backwoods somewhere. Generally, he smells like cigarettes, especially after lunch.

The Fish family receives no kindness in the teachers’ lounge, either. White trash. None of those Fish kids ever graduate from high school, so why waste your time? was the exact quote. Sooner they drop out, the better. Just a bad influence on the others.

I offer up a smile. While Shad Fish, the next oldest boy in the family, is a bit more talkative, I wasn’t even aware this senior Fish kid knew my name. Gar Fish has never spoken in class. Not once. Most of the time, he has his forehead propped in his hands, staring down at the desk. Even at the library. As a student, he’s a complete slacker. He’s not an athlete, either, so there’s no coach defending his lack of academic effort.

“Hey, Gar.” The poor kid has sisters named Star and Sunnie, and a little brother named Finn. People poke fun at the names constantly.

I had no idea Gar worked at the Cluck.

“I been…I been writin’…on my project,” he says.

Knock me over with a feather.

A tentative glance flutters through the dark fringe of greasy, overgrown bangs beneath the Cluck ball cap. “Uncle Saul went over to the nursing home in Baton Rouge to say hey to Poppop. Me and Shad went on with him so we could talk to Pops, too. We don’t got any family Bibles or anything like that at home.”

He glances up self-consciously as the hostess seats new customers in the next booth. Gar shifts his back toward them before he goes on. “Pops told me some stuff about the family. They used to run a operation upwater from here. Biggest bootleggers in three parishes. Pops joined in at just eleven years old, after the revenuers took his daddy off. The family business got busted up after a while, though. Pops left home and went farther upriver to work for some uncles that had a sawmill. He remembers they had a room in the barn still with slaves’ chains in it. Way back when, they’d catch runaways in the swamp, take them off to New Orleans and make money from it. You imagine that? Poachers. Like huntin’ gators out of season. That’s what my people did for their livin’.”

“Huh.” On occasion that’s all I can say to the facts we’ve uncovered during our journey through the Underground project. The truth is frequently horrific. “The things we find in history are hard to understand sometimes, aren’t they, Gar?”

“Yeah.” His saggy shoulders slump. His eyes, a murky swampwater color, cast downward. There’s a fairly pronounced bruise under the left one—no telling where he got that. “Might can I start over on my project? It’s just that the Fishes do bad stuff and get in jail mostly. Maybe I can pick somebody out of the graveyard and talk about them? A rich guy or the mayor or something?”

I swallow the urge to get emotional. “Don’t give up yet. Let’s keep digging. Remind me tomorrow when we’re at the library, and we’ll work on it together. Have you looked into the other side of your family? Your mother’s side?”

“Mama got put in foster care when she was little, so we didn’t ever meet her people. They’re from around Thibodaux, I think.”

I shift uncomfortably in my seat, pinched by the thought of a child left unmoored in the world, at the mercy of strangers. “Well, all right, then we’ll see what there is to learn. We’ll start there tomorrow. With your mother’s last name. You can never tell where the—”

“Gold nugget might be unless you dig. Yeah, I know.” He finishes the class mantra the kids and I have developed.

“Every family has more than one side to its history, right? What was her last name? Your mother’s?”

“Mama was a McKlatchy before she married a Fish.”

Nathan sets down the butter knife with a clank, straightens a bit. “My mother has some McKlatchys in her family. Distant kin, but they’re all down around Morgan City, Thibodaux, Bayou Cane. We might be related way back.”

Gar and I both gape at him. I had no idea that Nathan enjoyed family ties around here on his mother’s side. Based on the descriptions of her as an outsider, I assumed she was from someplace far away. Nathan has an entire life south of here along the coast. A life with people in it. Kinfolk and family reunions.

“Maybe,” Gar says, as if he’s having a hard time processing a possible genetic connection to Nathan Gossett. “But I doubt it, though.”

“Just in case you might be a relative,” Nathan says, “do a little digging into Augustus ‘Gus’ McKlatchy. The old aunts and uncles used to talk about him at the family reunions when I was a kid. There’s a good story there, if he’s in your family tree.”