The Book of Lost Friends(97)

The men shake out their hats and toss off their oilcloth slickers. Juneau Jane climbs out from under the wagon canvas, where she’s hid during the storms, mostly. She’s the only one here small enough to do that. Missy’s wet clear through, because she won’t keep a slicker on. She don’t shiver or fuss or even seem to notice. Just sits on the tail of the wagon, staring off, like she is right now.

“Quanto de temps…tiempo nos el voy…viaje?” Juneau Jane asks one of the scouts, a half-Indian Tonkawa who don’t speak English but Spanish. With knowing French, Juneau Jane’s picked up their language some on this freight trip. I have, too, a little.

The scout holds up three fingers. I figure that means three hours more for us to travel. Then he raises a hand flat and passes it up and down over his mouth, the Indian sign that we got one more time to cross water.

The sun fights its way through the clouds and the day turns bright, but inside of me comes a darkening. The more we draw nigh on Menardville, the more it weighs heavy on me that we’ll soon be after Old Mister again, and what if we find news of him but the news is hard for Juneau Jane? What if he’s met a terrible end in this strange place?

What comes of us then?

Of a sudden, there’s a patch of blue in the far-off sky, and I think of something. I think it right out loud. “I can’t go back.”

Juneau Jane tips her head my way, then climbs up from the wagon bed, settles in beside me, them cool silver coin eyes watching from under that floppy hat.

“I can’t go back home, Juneau Jane. If we find news of your papa there in Mason, or if we find him even. I can’t go back home with you and Missy. Not yet.”

“But you must.” She strips off her wet hat, lays it on her knee and scratches out her fuzzy hair. The men are far enough away right now, she can do that. Without the hat, a person might not take her for a boy, just lately. She’s growed up some on this trip. “For the land. Your farm. It is the matter of greatest importance for you, no?”

“No. It ain’t.” A sureness settles itself in my soul. I don’t know where it’ll lead after this, but I know what’s true. “Something was begun in me, way back when we stood in that little wildwood church and we looked at them newspaper pages. When we promised things to the roustabouts on the Katie P. and when we started The Book of Lost Friends. I’ve got to go on with it, to keep the promises we made.”

I’m not sure how I’ll do it without Juneau Jane. She’s the writer. But I’m learning, and bound to get better. Good enough to scratch down the names and the places and to write letters off to the “Lost Friends” column for folks. “I’ll be the keeper of the book after you go home. But I want you to promise me that when you make it back to Goswood Grove you’ll help Tati and Jason and John and all the other croppers to get treated fair, just like the contracts say. Ten years of cropping on the shares, and you gain the land, mule, and outfit for your own. Will you do that for me, Juneau Jane? I know we ain’t friends, but would you swear to it?”

She sets her fingers over mine on the reins, her skin pale and smooth against the calluses worn into me by shovels and plows and the crisscross marks from the sharp, dry bracts of the cotton boles. My hands are ugly from work, but I ain’t ashamed. I toiled for my scars. “I think we are friends, Hannie,” she says.

I nod, and my throat thickens. “I wondered about that a time or two.”

I chuck up the horses. I’ve let us fall too far behind.

We start through a draw and toward a long hill and the way is rough, and the horses take my attention. They’re tired and wet, lathered under their collars from pulling in the mud. Their tails lash at flies that gather in the windless air. Up ahead, teams struggle with the rise and the slick earth, digging and sliding, digging and sliding. A wagon rolls back like it might come downhill. I turn my team off to the side to move out of the way, in case.

It’s then I see that Missy’s gotten herself off the wagon, and she’s plopped down on her hindquarters, picking yellow flowers with not a worry in the world. I can’t even push a shout from my mouth before a sorghum barrel busts its tie rope on the catawampus wagon and rolls downhill, kicking a spray of white rocks and mud and grass and chaff.

Missy looks up and watches it pass not ten foot from her, but she don’t move a inch, just smiles and swirls her hands in the air trying to catch the kicked-up fodder as it shines against the sun.

“Get out of there!” I holler, and Juneau Jane scrambles from the wagon seat. She runs in her too-big shoes, jumping grass moats and rocks, wiry as a baby deer. Swatting the flowers from Missy’s hand, she tugs her off the ground and cusses her in French, and they start off afoot, away from the wagons and goods.

It’s times like this I give up on thinking Missy is still inside that body, coming back bit by bit, and that she hears things we say, she just don’t answer. Times like this, I think she’s gone for good—that the poison, or the knock to the head, or whatever evil them men did to her, broke something and it can’t be fixed.

Hearing her take that cussing from her daddy’s mixed-blood girl, I tell myself, If Missy Lavinia was anyplace in that big, stout body, she’d haul back and swat her half sister into next Sunday. Just like Old Missus would.

I don’t want to think what Old Missus will do with Missy Lavinia when they get home. Send her off to the asylum to live out her days, I guess. If there ever was any chance of finding her right mind again, it won’t happen after that. She’s a young woman still. A girl just sixteen. Those’d be long years, in such a place.