The Book of Lost Friends is a work of fiction single ladybug lands featherlight on the teacher’s finger, clings there, a living gemstone. A ruby with polka dots and legs. Before a slight breeze beckons the visitor away, an old children’s rhyme sifts through the teacher’s mind. Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home, Your house is on fire, and your children are gone. The words leave a murky shadow as the teacher touches a student’s shoulder, feels the damp warmth beneath the girl’s roughly woven calico dress. The hand-stitched neckline hangs askew over smooth amber-brown skin, the garment a little too large for the girl inside it. A single puffy scar protrudes from one loosely buttoned cuff. The teacher wonders briefly about its cause, resists allowing her mind to speculate. What would be the point? she thinks. We all have scars. She glances around the makeshift gathering place under the trees, the rough slabwood benches crowded with girls on the verge of womanhood, boys seeking to step into the world of men. Leaning over crooked tables littered with nib pens, blotters, and inkwells, they read their papers, mouthing the words, intent upon the important task ahead. All except this one girl. "Fully prepared?" the teacher inquires, her head angling toward the girl’s work. "You’ve practiced reading it aloud?" "I can’t do it." The girl sags, defeated in her own mind. "Not…not with these people looking on." Her young face casts miserably toward the onlookers who have gathered at the fringes of the open-air classroom—moneyed men in well-fitting suits and women in expensive dresses, petulantly waving off the afternoon heat with printed handbills and paper fans left over from the morning’s fiery political speeches. "You never know what you can do until you try," the teacher advises. Oh, how familiar that girlish insecurity is. Not so many years ago, the teacher was this girl. Uncertain of herself, overcome with fear. Paralyzed, really. "I can’t," the girl moans, clutching her stomach. Bundling cumbersome skirts and petticoats to keep them from the dust, the teacher lowers herself to catch the girl’s gaze. "Where will they hear the story if not from you—the story of being stolen away from family? Of writing an advertisement seeking any word of loved ones, and hoping to save up the fifty cents to have it printed in the Southwestern paper, so that it might travel through all the nearby states and territories? How will they understand the desperate need to finally know, Are my people out there, somewhere?" The girl’s thin shoulders lift, then wilt. "These folks ain’t here because they care what I’ve got to say. It won’t change anything." "Perhaps it will. The most important endeavors require a risk." The teacher understands this all too well. Someday, she, too, must strike off on a similar journey, one that involves a risk. Today, however, is for her students and for the "Lost Friends" column of the Southwestern Christian Advocate newspaper, and for all it represents. "At the very least, we must tell our stories, mustn’t we? Speak the names? You know, there is an old proverb that says, ‘We die once when the last breath leaves our bodies. We die a second time when the last person speaks our name.’ The first death is beyond our control, but the second one we can strive to prevent." "If you say so," the girl acquiesces, tenuously drawing a breath. "But I best do it right off, so I don’t lose my nerve. Can I go on and give my reading before the rest?" The teacher nods. "If you start, I’m certain the others will know to follow." Stepping back, she surveys the remainder of her group. All the stories here, she thinks. People separated by impossible distance, by human fallacy, by cruelty. Enduring the terrible torture of not knowing. And though she’d rather not—she’d give anything if not—she imagines her own scar. One hidden beneath the skin where no one else can see it. She thinks of her own lost love, out there. Somewhere. Who knows where? A murmur of thinly veiled impatience stirs among the audience as the girl rises and proceeds along the aisle between the benches, her posture stiffening to a strangely regal bearing. The frenzied motion of paper fans ceases and fluttering handbills go silent when she turns to speak her piece, looking neither left nor right. "I…" her voice falters. Rimming the crowd with her gaze, she clenches and unclenches her fingers, clutching thick folds of the blue-and-white calico dress. Time seems to hover then, like the ladybug deciding whether it will land or fly on. Finally, the girl’s chin rises with stalwart determination. Her voice carries past the students to the audience, demanding attention as she speaks a name that will not be silenced on this day. "I am Hannie Gossett." T CHAPTER 1 HANNIE GOSSETT—LOUISIANA, 1875 he dream takes me from quiet sleep, same way it’s done many a time, sweeps me up like dust. Away I float, a dozen years to the past, and sift from a body that’s almost a woman’s into a little-girl shape only six years old. Though I don’t want to, I see what my little-girl eyes saw then. I see buyers gather in the trader’s yard as I peek through the gaps in the stockade log fence. I stand in winter-cold dirt tramped by so many feet before my own two. Big feet like Mama’s and small feet like mine and tiny feet like Mary Angel’s. Heels and toes that’s left dents in the wet ground. How many others been here before me? I wonder. How many with hearts rattlin’ and muscles knotted up, but with no place to run? Might be a hundred hundreds. Heels by the doubles and toes by the tens. Can’t count high as that. I just turned from five years old to six a few months back. It’s Feb’ary right now, a word I can’t say right, ever. My mouth twists up and makes Feb-ba-ba-ba-bary, like a sheep. My brothers and sisters’ve always pestered me hard over it, all eight, even the ones that’s younger. Usually, we’d tussle if Mama was off at work with the field gangs or gone to the spinnin’ house, cording wool and weaving the homespun. Our slabwood cabin would rock and rattle till finally somebody fell out the door or the window and went to howlin’. That’d bring Ol’ Tati, cane switch ready, and her saying, "Gonna give you a breshin’ with this switch if you don’t shesh now." She’d swat butts and legs, just play-like, and we’d scamper one over top the other like baby goats scooting through the gate. We’d crawl up under them beds and try to hide, knees and elbows poking everywhere. Can’t do that no more. All my mama’s children been carried off one by one and two by two. Aunt Jenny Angel and three of her four girls, gone, too. Sold away in trader yards like this one, from south Louisiana almost to Texas. My mind works hard to keep account of where all we been, our numbers dwindling by the day, as we tramp behind Jep Loach’s wagon, slave chains pulling the grown folk by the wrist, and us children left with no other choice but to follow on. But the nights been worst of all. We just hope Jep Loach falls to sleep quick from whiskey and the day’s travel. It’s when he don’t that the bad things happen—to Mama and Aunt Jenny both, and now just to Mama, with Aunt Jenny sold off. Only Mama and me left now. Us two and Aunt Jenny’s baby girl, li’l Mary Angel. Every chance there is, Mama says them words in my ear—who’s been carried away from us, and what’s the names of the buyers that took them from the auction block and where’re they gone to. We start with Aunt Jenny, her three oldest girls. Then come my brothers and sisters, oldest to youngest, Hardy at Big Creek, to a man name LeBas from Woodville. Het at Jatt carried off by a man name Palmer from Big Woods…. Prat, Epheme, Addie, Easter, Ike, and Baby Rose, tore from my mama’s arms in a place called Bethany. Baby Rose wailed and Mama fought and begged and said, "We gotta be kept as one. The baby ain’t weaned! Baby ain’t…" It shames me now, but I clung on Mama’s skirts and cried, "Mama, no! Mama, no! Don’t!" My body shook and my mind ran wild circles. I was afraid they’d take my mama, too, and it’d be just me and little cousin Mary Angel left when the wagon rolled on. Jep Loach means to put all us in his pocket before he’s done, but he sells just one or two at each place, so’s to get out quick. Says his uncle give him the permissions for all this, but that ain’t true. Old Marse and Old Missus meant for him to do what folks all over south Louisiana been doing since the Yankee gunboats pushed on upriver from New Orleans—take their slaves west so the Federals can’t set us free. Go refugee on the Gossett land in Texas till the war is over. That’s why they sent us with Jep Loach, but he’s stole us away, instead. "Marse Gossett gonna come for us soon’s he learns of bein’ crossed by Jep Loach," Mama’s promised over and over. "Won’t matter about Jep bein’ nephew to Old Missus then. Marse gonna send Jep off to the army for the warfaring then. Only reason Jep ain’t wearin’ that gray uniform a’ready is Marse been paying Jep’s way out. This be the end of that, and all us be shed of Jep for good. You wait and see. And that’s why we chant the names, so’s we know where to gather the lost when Old Marse comes. You put it deep in your rememberings, so’s you can tell it if you’re the one gets found first." But now hope comes as thin as the winter light through them East Texas piney woods, as I squat inside that log pen in the trader’s yard. Just Mama and me and Mary Angel here, and one goes today. One, at least. More coins in the pocket, and whoever don’t get sold tramps on with Jep Loach’s wagon. He’ll hit the liquor right off, happy he got away with it one more time, thieving from his own kin. All Old Missus’s people—all the Loach family—just bad apples, but Jep is the rottenest, worse as Old Missus, herself. She’s the devil, and he is, too. "Come ’way from there, Hannie," Mama tells me. "Come here, close." Of a sudden, the door’s open, and a man’s got Mary Angel’s little arm, and Mama clings on, tears making a flood river while she whispers to the trader’s man, who’s big as a mountain and dark as a deer’s eye, "We ain’t his. We been stole away from Marse William Gossett of Goswood Grove plantation, down by the River Road south from Baton Rouge. We been carried off. We…been…we…" She goes to her knees, folds over Mary Angel like she’d take that baby girl up inside of her if she could. "Please. Please! My sister, Jenny, been sold by this man already. And all her children but this li’l one, and all my children ’cept my Hannie. Fetch us last three out together. Fetch us out, all three. Tell your marse this baby girl, she sickly. Say we gotta be sold off in one lot. All three together. Have mercy. Please! Tell your marse we been stole from Marse William Gossett at Goswood Grove, down off the River Road. We stole property. We been stole." The man’s groan comes old and tired. "Can’t do nothin’. Can’t nobody do nothin’ ’bout it all. You just make it go hard on the child. You just make it go hard. Two gotta go today. In two dif’ernt lots. One at a time." "No." Mama’s eyes close hard, then open again. She looks up at the man, coughs out words and tears and spit all together. "Tell my marse William Gossett—when he comes here seeking after us—at least give word of where we gone to. Name who carries us away and where they strikes off for. Old Marse Gossett’s gonna find us, take us to refugee in Texas, all us together." The man don’t answer, and Mama turns to Mary Angel, slips out a scrap of brown homespun cut from the hem of Aunt Jenny Angel’s heavy winter petticoat while we camped with the wagon. By their own hands, Mama and Aunt Jenny Angel made fifteen tiny poke sacks, hung with jute strings they stole out of the wagon. Inside each bag went three blue glass beads off the string Grandmama always kept special. Them beads was her most precious thing, come all the way from Africa. That where my grandmama and grandpoppy’s cotched from. She’d tell that tale by the tallow candle on winter nights, all us gathered round her lap in that ring of light. Then she’d share about Africa, where our people been before here. Where they was queens and princes. Blue mean all us walk in the true way. The fam’ly be loyal, each to the other, always and ever, she’d say, and then her eyes would gather at the corners and she’d take out that string of beads and let all us pass it in the circle, hold its weight in our hands. Feel a tiny piece of that far-off place…and the meanin’ of blue. Three beads been made ready to go with my li’l cousin, now. Mama holds tight to Mary Angel’s chin. "This a promise." Mama tucks that pouch down Mary Angel’s dress and ties the strings round a skinny little baby neck that’s still too small for the head on it. "You hold it close by, li’l pea. If that’s the only thing you do, you keep it. This the sign of your people. We lay our eyes on each other again in this life, no matter how long it be from now, this how we, each of us, knows the other one. If long time pass, and you get up big, by the beads we still gonna know you. Listen at me. You hear Aunt Mittie, now?" She makes a motion with her hands. A needle and thread. Beads on a string. "We put this string back together someday, all us. In this world, God willing, or in the next." Li’l Mary Angel don’t nod nor blink nor speak. Used to, she’d chatter the ears off your head, but not no more. A big ol’ tear spills down her brown skin as the man carries her out the door, her arms and legs stiff as a carved wood doll’s. Time jumps round then. Don’t know how, but I’m back at the wall, watching betwixt the logs while Mary Angel gets brung ’cross the yard. Her little brown shoes dangle in the air, same brogans all us got in our Christmas boxes just two month ago, special made right there on Goswood by Uncle Ira, who kept the tanner shop, and mended the harness, and sewed up all them new Christmas shoes. I think of him and home while I watch Mary Angel’s little shoes up on the auction block. Cold wind snakes over her skinny legs when her dress gets pulled up and the man says she’s got good, straight knees. Mama just weeps. But somebody’s got to listen for who takes Mary Angel. Somebody’s got to add her to the chant. So, I do. Seems like just a minute goes by before a big hand circles my arm, and it’s me getting dragged ’cross the floor. My shoulder wrenches loose with a pop. The heels of my Christmas shoes furrow the dirt like plow blades. "No! Mama! Help me!" My blood runs wild. I fight and scream, catch Mama’s arm, and she catches mine. Don’t let go, my eyes tell hers. Of a sudden, I understand the big man’s words and how come they broke Mama down. Two gotta go today. In two dif’ernt lots. One at a time. This is the day the worse happens. Last day for me and Mama. Two gets sold here and one goes on with Jep Loach, to get sold at the next place down the road. My stomach heaves and burns in my throat, but ain’t nothing there to retch up. I make water down my leg, and it fills up my shoe and soaks over to the dirt. "Please! Please! Us two, together!" Mama begs. The man kicks her hard, and our hands rip apart at the weave. Mama’s head hits the logs, and she crumples in the little dents from all them other feet, her face quiet like she’s gone asleep. A tiny brown poke dangles in her hand. Three blue beads roll loose in the dust. "You give me any trouble, and I’ll shoot her dead where she lies." The voice runs over me on spider legs. Ain’t the trader’s man that’s got me. It’s Jep Loach. I ain’t being carried to the block. I’m being took to the devil wagon. I’m the one he means to sell at the someplace farther on. I tear loose, try to run back to Mama, but my knees go soft as wet grass. I topple and stretch my fingers toward the beads, toward my mother. "Mama! Mama!" I scream and scream and scream…. — It’s my own voice that wakes me from the dream of that terrible day, just like always. I hear the sound of the scream, feel the raw of it in my throat. I come to, fighting off Jep Loach’s big hands and crying out for the mother I ain’t laid eyes on in twelve years now, since I was a six-year-old child. "Mama! Mama! Mama!" The word spills from me three times more, travels out ’cross the night-quiet fields of Goswood Grove before I clamp my mouth closed and look back over my shoulder toward the sharecrop cabin, hoping they didn’t hear me. No sense to wake everybody with my sleep-wanderings. Hard day’s work ahead for me and Ol’ Tati and what’s left of the stray young ones she’s raised these long years since the war was over and we had no mamas or papas to claim us. Of all my brothers and sisters, of all my family stole away by Jep Loach, I was the only one Marse Gossett got back, and that was just by luck when folks at the next auction sale figured out I was stole property and called the sheriff to hold me until Marse could come. With the war on, and folks running everywhere to get away from it, and us trying to scratch a living from the wild Texas land, there wasn’t any going back to look for the rest. I was a child with nobody of my own when the Federal soldiers finally made their way to our refugee place in Texas and forced the Gossetts to read the free papers out loud and say the war was over, even in Texas. Slaves could go where they pleased, now. Old Missus warned all us we wouldn’t make it five miles before we starved or got killed by road agents or scalped by Indians, and she hoped we did, if we’d be ungrateful and foolish enough to do such a thing as leave. With the war over, there wasn’t no more need to refugee in Texas, and we’d best come back to Louisiana with her and Marse Gossett—who we was now to call Mister, not Marse, so’s not to bring down the wrath of Federal soldiers who’d be crawling over everything like lice for a while yet. Back on the old place at Goswood Grove, we would at least have Old Mister and Missus to keep us safe and fed and put clothes on our miserable bodies. "Now, you young children have no choice in the matter," she told the ones of us with no folk. "You are in our charge, and of course we will give you the benefit of transporting you away from this godforsaken Texas wilderness, back to Goswood Grove until you are of age or a parent comes to claim you." Much as I hated Old Missus and working in the house as keeper and plaything to Little Missy Lavinia, who was a trial of her own, I rested in the promise Mama had spoke just two years before at the trader’s yard. She’d come to find me, soon’s she could. She’d find all us, and we’d string Grandmama’s beads together again. And so I was biddable but also restless with hope. It was the restless part that spurred me to wander at night, that conjured evil dreams of Jep Loach, and watching my people get stole away, and seeing Mama laid out on the floor of the trader’s pen. Dead, for all I could know then. For all I still do know. I look down and see that I been walking in my sleep again. I’m standing out on the old cutoff pecan stump. A field of fresh soil spreads out, the season’s new-planted crop still too wispy and fine to cover it. Moon ribbons fall over the row tips, so the land is a giant loom, the warp threads strung but waiting on the weaving woman to slide the shuttle back and forth, back and forth, making cloth the way the women slaves did before the war. Spinning houses sit empty now that store-bought calico comes cheap from mills in the North. But back in the old days when I was a little child, it was card the cotton, card the wool. Spin a broach of thread every night after tromping in from the field. That was Mama’s life at Goswood Grove. Had to be or she’d have Old Missus to deal with. This stump—this very one—was where the slave driver stood to watch the gangs work the field, cowhide whip dangling down like a snake ready to bite, keep everybody picking the cotton rows. Somebody lag behind, try to rest a minute, the driver would find them out. If Old Marse Gossett was home, they’d only get a little breshin’ with the whip. But if Marse Gossett was off in New Orleans, where he kept his other family everybody knew about but didn’t dare to speak of, then look out. The whipping would be bad, because Old Missus was in charge. Missus didn’t like it that her husband had him a plaçage woman and a fawn-pale child down in New Orleans. Neighborhoods like Faubourg Marigny and Tremé—the rich planter men kept their mistresses and children there. Fancy girls, quadroons and octoroons. Women with dainty bones and olive-brown skin, living in fine houses with slaves to look after them, too. Old ways like that been almost gone in these years since Mr. Lincoln’s war ended. The slave driver and his whip, Mama and the field gangs working from see to can’t see, leg irons, and auction sales like the ones that took my people—all that’s a thing in the barely back of my mind. Sometimes when I wake, I think all my people were just somethin’ I pretended, never real at all. But then I touch the three glass beads on the cord at my neck, and I tell their names in the chant. Hardy gone at Big Creek to a man from Woodville, Het at Jatt… All the way down to Baby Rose and Mary Angel. And Mama. It was real. We were real. A family together. I look off in the distant, wobble twixt a six-year-old body and one that’s eighteen years growed, but not so much different. Still skinny as if I was carved out of sticks. Mama always did say, Hannie, you stand behind the broom handle, I can’t even see you there. Then she’d smile and touch my face and whisper, But you a beautiful child. Always been pretty. I hear it like she’s there beside of me, a white oak basket on her arm, bound for the garden patch out behind our little cabin, last one down the end of the old quarters. Just as quick as I feel her there, she’s gone again. "Why didn’t you come?" My words hang in the night air. "Why didn’t you come for your child? You never come." I sink down on the stump’s edge and look out toward the trees by the road, their thick trunks hid in sifts of moon and fog. I think I see something in it. A haint, could be. Too many folk buried under Goswood soil, Ol’ Tati says when she tells us tales in the cropper cabin at night. Too much blood and sufferin’ been left here. This place always gonna have ghosts. A horse nickers low. I see a rider on the road. A dark cloak covers the head and sweeps out, light as smoke. That my mama, come to find me? Come to say, You almost eighteen years old, Hannie. Why you still settin’ on that same ol’ stump? I want to go to her. Go away with her. That Old Mister, come home from fetching his wicked son out of trouble again? That a haint, come to drag me off and drown me in the river? I close my eyes, shake my head clear, look again. Nothing there but a drift of fog. "Child?" Tati’s whisper comes from a ways off, worried, carefullike. "Child?" Don’t matter your age, if Tati raised you, you stay child to her. Even the strays that’ve growed up and moved on, they’re still child, if they come to visit. I cock my ear, open my mouth to answer her, but then I can’t. Somebody is there—a woman by the high white pillars at the Goswood gate, afoot now. The oaks whisper overhead, like it’s worried their old bones to have her come to the drive. A low-hung branch grabs her hood and her long, dark hair floats free. "M-mama?" I say. "Child?" Tati whispers again. "You there?" I hear her hurry along, her walking stick tapping faster till she’s found me. "I see Mama coming." "You dreamin’, sugar." Tati’s knobby fingers wrap my wrist, gentle-like, but she keeps a distant. Sometimes, my dreams let go with a fight. I wake kicking and clawing to get Jep Loach’s hand off my arm. "Child, you all right. You just walkin’ in the dream. Wake up, now. Mama ain’t here, but Ol’ Tati, she right here. You safe." I glance away from the gates, then back. The woman’s gone, and no matter how hard I look, I can’t see her. "Wake up, now, child." In moonglow, Tati’s face is the red-brown of cypress wood pulled up from the deep water, dark against the sack-muslin cap over her silvery hair. She slides a shawl off her arm, reaches it round me. "Out here in the field in all the wetness! Get a pleurisy. Where all us be with that kind of troublement? Who Jason gonna settle in with, then?" Tati nudges me with the cane stick, pestering. The thing she wants most is for Jason and me to marry. Once the ten years on the sharecrop contract with Old Mister is done and the land is hers, Tati needs somebody to hand it down to. Me and the twins, Jason and John, are the last of her strays. One more growing season is all that’s left for the contract, but Jason and me? We been raised in Tati’s house like brother and sister. Hard to see things any other way, but Jason is a good boy. Honest worker, even if both him and John did come into this world a shade slower minded than most. "I ain’t dreamin’," I say when Tati tugs me from the stump. "Devil, you ain’t. Come on back, now. We got work waitin’ in the mornin’. Gonna tie your ankle to the bed, you don’t stop dealing me this night misery. You been worser lately. Worser in these walkin’ dreams than when you was a li’l thing." I jerk against Tati’s arm, remembering all the times as a child I wandered from my sleep pallet by Missy Lavinia’s crib, and woke up to Old Missus whipping me with the kitchen spoon or a riding whip or a iron pot hook from the fireplace. Whatever was close by. "Hesh, now. You can’t help it." Tati scoops down for a pinch of dirt to throw over her shoulder. "Put it behind you. New day comin’ and plenty to do. C’mon now, throw you a pinch your ownself, to be safe." I do what she says and then make the cross over my chest, and Tati does, too. "Father, Son, Holy Ghost," we whisper together. "Guide us and protect us. Keep us ahead and behind. Ever and ever. Amen." I hadn’t ought to, then—bad business to look back for a haint once you throwed ground twixt you and it—but I do. I glance at the road. I’m cold all over. "What you doin’?" Tati near trips when I stop so sudden. "I wasn’t dreamin’," I whisper, and I don’t just look. I point, but my hand shakes. "I was lookin’ at her." T CHAPTER 2 BENEDETTA SILVA—AUGUSTINE, LOUISIANA, 1987 he truck driver lays on his horn. Brakes squeal. Tires hopscotch across asphalt. A stack of steel pipe leans in slow-motion, testing the grease-encrusted nylon binders that hold the load. One strap breaks loose and whips in the breeze as the truck skids toward the intersection. Every muscle in my body goes stiff. I brace for impact, fleetingly imagining what might be left of my rusted-out VW Beetle after the collision. The truck wasn’t there an instant ago. I’d swear it wasn’t. Who did I list as the emergency contact in my employee file? I remember the pen tip hovering over the blank line, the moment of painful, ironic indecision. Maybe I never filled in the space. The world passes by in acute detail—the heavyset crossing guard with her blue-white hair and stooped-over body, thrusting the handheld stop sign. Wide-eyed kids motionless in the intersection. Books slip from a grade-school boy’s skinny arm, tumbling, tumbling, hitting, scattering. He stumbles, hands splayed, disappears behind the pipe truck. No. No, no, no! Please, no. My teeth clench. I close my eyes, turn my face away, yank the steering wheel, stomp harder on the brake, but the Bug keeps sliding. Metal strikes metal, folds and crinkles. The car bumps over something, front wheels, then back. I feel my head collide with the window and then the roof. It can’t be. It can’t. No, no, no. The Bug hits the curb, bounces off, then stops, the engine rumbling, rubber smoke filling the car. Move, I tell myself. Do something. I picture a little body in the street. Red sweatpants, too warm for the day. Faded blue T-shirt, oversized. Warm brown skin. Big dark eyes, lifeless. I noticed him yesterday in the empty schoolyard, that boy with the impossibly long eyelashes and freshly shaved head, sitting all alone by the tumbledown concrete block fence after the older kids had picked up their new class schedules and dispersed to do whatever kids do in Augustine, Louisiana, on the last day of summer. Is that little guy okay? I’d asked one of the other teachers, the pasty-faced, sour-lipped one who’d repeatedly avoided me in the hall as if I were giving off a bad smell. Is he waiting for somebody? Who knows? she’d muttered. He’ll find his way home. Time snaps into place. The metallic taste of blood tightens the back of my mouth. I’ve bitten my tongue, I guess. There’s no screaming. No siren. No outcry for somebody to call 911. I yank the gearshift into neutral, engage the emergency brake, make sure it’s going to hold before I unfasten the seatbelt, grab the handle, and ram the door with my shoulder until it finally opens. I tumble into the street, catching myself on numb feet and legs. "What’d I tell you?" The crossing guard’s voice is toneless, almost languid compared to the spiraling pulse in my neck. "What’d I tell you?" she demands again, hands on her hips as she traverses the crosswalk. I look first at the intersection. Books, squashed lunch box, plaid thermos. That’s all. That’s it. No body. No little boy. He’s standing on the curb. A girl who might be his older sister, perhaps thirteen or fourteen, has him by a fistful of clothing, so that he’s stretched on tippy-toe, an incongruously distended belly hanging bare beneath the hem of his T-shirt. "What sign I gave you just now?" The crossing guard slaps a palm hard against the four-letter word STOP, then thrusts the placard within inches of his face. The little boy shrugs. He looks more bewildered than terrified. Does he know what almost happened? The teenage girl, who probably saved his life, seems annoyed as much as anything else. "Idjut. Look out for the trucks." She shoves him forward a step onto the sidewalk, then releases her grip and wipes a palm on her jeans. Tossing back a handful of long, glossy dark braids with red beads on the ends, she glances toward the intersection, blinks at what I now realize is the Bug’s bumper lying in the street, the morning’s only casualty. That’s what I ran over. Not a little boy. Only metal and nuts and bolts. A minor miracle. The pipe-truck driver and I will exchange insurance information —I hope it won’t matter that mine is out of state still—and the day will go on. He’s probably as relieved as I am. More, since he’s the one who ran the intersection. His insurance should take care of this. Good thing, considering that I can’t even afford to cough up my deductible. Between renting one of the few houses in my price range and splitting the cost of a U-Haul with a friend who was on her way to Florida, I’m tapped out until my first paycheck comes in. The squeal of grinding gears catches me by surprise. I turn in time to watch the pipe truck disappear down the highway. "Hey!" I yell, and run a few yards after it. "Hey! Come back here!" The chase proves futile. He’s not stopping, the pavement is slick with the condensation of a humid south Louisiana summer morning, and I’m in sandals and a prairie skirt. The blouse I carefully ironed atop moving boxes is plastered to my skin by the time I stop. An upscale SUV rolls by. The driver, a big-haired blonde, gapes at me, and my stomach turns over. I recognize her from the staff welcome meeting two days ago. She’s a school board member, and given my last-minute employment offer and the chilly reception so far, it’s no stretch to assume that I wasn’t her first choice for the job… or anyone else’s. Compounded with the fact that we all know why I’m here in this backwater little burg, it probably doesn’t bode well for my surviving the probationary period of the teaching contract. "You never know until you try." I bolster myself with the line from "Lonely People," a hit-parade anthem of my 1970s childhood, and I walk back toward the school. Oddly, life is moving along as if nothing happened. Cars roll by. The crossing guard does her job. She pointedly avoids looking my way as a school bus turns in. The Bug’s amputated limb has been moved out of the intersection —I do not know by whom—and people politely circumvent my car to reach the horseshoe-shaped drop-off lanes in front of the school. Down the sidewalk, the teenage girl, maybe eighth or ninth grade —I’m still not very good at eyeballing kids—has resumed charge of the little crosswalk kid. The red beads on her braids swing back and forth across her color-block shirt as she drags the boy away, her demeanor indicating that she doesn’t consider him worth the trouble, but she knows she’d better get him out of there. She has his books and thermos jumbled in one arm and the mangled lunch box hooked by a middle finger. I turn a full circle beside my car, surveying the scene, befuddled by its veneer of normalcy. I tell myself to do what everyone else is doing—move on with the day. Think of all the ways things could be worse. I list them in my head, off and on. This is how my teaching career officially begins. By fourth period, the mental game of Things could be worse is wearing thin. I’m exhausted. I’m confused. I am effectively talking to the air. My students, who range from seventh to twelfth grade, are uninspired, unhappy, sleepy, grumpy, hungry, borderline belligerent, and, if their body language is any indication, more than ready to take me on. They’ve had teachers like me before—first-year suburban ninnies fresh off the college campuses, attempting to put in five years at a low-income school to have federal student loans forgiven. This is another universe from the one I know. I did my student teaching in an upscale high school under the guidance of a master teacher who had the luxury of demanding any sort of curriculum materials she wanted. When I waltzed in halfway through the year, her freshmen were reading Heart of Darkness and writing neat fiveparagraph essays about underlying themes and the social relevance of literature. They willingly answered discussion questions and sat up straight in their seats. They knew how to compose a topic sentence. By contrast, the ninth graders here look at the classroom copies of Animal Farm with all the interest of children unwrapping a brick under the Christmas tree. "What’re we s’posed to do with this?" a girl in fourth period demands, her pert nose scrunching as she peers from a bird’s nest of perm-damaged straw-colored hair. She’s one of eight white kids in an overstuffed class of thirty-nine. Last name Fish. There’s another Fish, a brother or cousin of hers, in the class as well. I’ve already overheard whispers about the Fish family. Swamp rats was the reference. The white kids in this school fall into three categories: swamp rat, hick, or hood, meaning drugs are somehow involved, and that’s usually a generational pattern in the family. I heard two coaches casually filing kids into those categories while sorting their class rolls during the teachers’ meeting. Kids with money or real athletic talent get siphoned to the district’s swanky prep academy over "on the lake," where the high-dollar houses are. Really troubled kids are shifted to some alternative school I’ve heard only whispers about. Everyone else ends up here. In this school, the swamp rats and hicks sit in a cluster on the front left side of the room. It’s some sort of unwritten rule. Kids from the black community take the other side of the room and most of the back. A cluster of assorted nonconformists and other-thans—Native American, Asian, punk rockers, and a nerd or two—occupy the noman’s- land in the middle. These kids intentionally segregate. Do they realize it’s 1987? "Yeah, what’s this for?" Another girl, last name…G…something… Gibson, echoes the question about the book. She’s of the middle-ofthe- room variety—doesn’t quite fit either of the other groups. Not white, not black…multiracial and probably part Native American? "It’s a book, Miss Gibson." I know that sounds snarky as soon as the words leave my mouth. Unprofessional, but I’m only four hours in and near the end of my chain already. "We open the pages. Take in the words." I’m not sure how we’ll make it happen, anyway. I have huge freshmen and sophomore groups, and only one classroom set of thirty copies of Animal Farm. They look to be ancient, the pages yellowed along the edges but the spines stiff, indicating they’ve never been opened. I unearthed them in my musty storage closet yesterday. They smell bad. "See what lessons the story teaches us. What it has to say about the time it was written, but also about us, here in this classroom today." The Gibson kid drags a glittery purple fingernail across the pages, flips through a few, tosses her hair. "Why?" My pulse upticks. At least someone has the book open and is talking…to me instead of to the kid at the next desk. Maybe it just takes a little while to get into the groove on the first day. This school isn’t very inspiring, in truth. Cement block walls with peeling gray paint, sagging bookshelves that look like they’ve been here since World War II, and windows covered with some kind of streaky black paint. It feels more like a prison than a place for kids. "Well, for one reason, because I want to know what you think. The great thing about literature is that it’s subjective. No two readers read the same book, because we all see the words through different eyes, filter the story through different life experiences." I’m conscious of a few more heads turning my way, mostly in the center section, nerds and outcasts and other-thans. I’ll take what I can get. Every revolution starts with a spark on dry tinder. Someone in the back row lets out a snore-snort. Someone else farts. Kids giggle. Those nearby abandon their books and flee the stench like gazelles. A half dozen boys form a jostling, poking, shoulder-butting group by the coatrack. I order them to sit down, which of course they ignore. Yelling won’t help. I’ve tried it in other classes already. "There are no right or wrong answers. Not when it comes to literature." My voice struggles over the racket. "Well, this oughta be easy." I miss the source of the comment. Somewhere in the back of the room. I stretch upward and try to see. "As long as you’ve read the book, there are no wrong answers," I correct. "As long as you’re thinking about it." "I’m thinkin’ ’bout lunch," an oversized kid in the annoying pileup says. I cast about for his name from roll call, but all I can remember is something with an R, both first name and last. "That’s all you ever think about, Lil’ Ray. Your brain’s wired direct to your stomach." A retaliatory shove answers. Someone jumps on someone else’s back. A sweat breaks over my skin. Wads of paper fly. More kids get up. Someone stumbles backward and falls across a desk, a nerd’s head is grazed by a high-top tennis shoe. The victim yelps. The swamp rat girl by the window closes the book, lets her chin bump to her palm, and stares at the blackened glass like she wishes she could pass through it by osmosis. "That’s enough!" I yell, but it’s useless. Suddenly—I’m not even sure how it happens—Lil’ Ray is on the move, shoving desks aside and heading for the swamp rat section like a man on a mission. The nerds abandon ship. Chairs squeal. A desk topples over and strikes the floor like a cannon shot. I hurdle it, land in the center of the room, slide a foot or so on the ancient speckled industrial tile, and end up right in Lil’ Ray’s path. "I said that is enough, young man!" The voice that comes out of me is three octaves lower than usual, guttural, and strangely animalistic. Never mind that it’s hard to be taken seriously when you’re five foot three and pixieish; I sound like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. "Get back in your seat. Right now." Lil’ Ray has fire in his eye. His nostrils flare, and a fist twitches upward. I’m aware of two things. The classroom has gone deadly silent, and Lil’ Ray smells. Bad. Neither this kid nor his clothes have been washed in a while. "Man, siddown," another boy, a skinny, good-looking kid, says. "You crazy or something? Coach Davis is gonna kill you, if he hears about this." The rage drains from Lil’ Ray’s face like a fever breaking. His arms go slack. The fist loosens, and he rubs his forehead. "I’m hungry," he says. "I don’t feel so good." He wobbles for a second, and I’m afraid he’s going down. "Take…take your seat." My hand hovers in the air, as if I might catch him. "It’s seventeen…it’s seventeen minutes until lunch." I try to collect my thoughts. Do I let this pass? Make an example of Lil’ Ray? Write him up? Send him to the principal’s office? What’s the demerit system at this school? Did anyone hear all the noise? I glance toward the door. The kids take that as an excuse to depart. They grab backpacks and make a beeline for the exit, tripping over desks and chairs, bouncing off one another. They push, shove, elbow. One student attempts to escape the chaos by using the desktops as steppingstones. If they get out, I’m dead. The singular rule most emphasized during the teachers’ meeting was No kids in the hall during classes without adult supervision. Period. Too much fighting, skipping, smoking, adding graffiti to the walls, and other acts of delinquency, which the weary-looking principal, Mr. Pevoto, left to our imaginations. If they are in your classroom, you are responsible for keeping them there. I join the stampede. Fortunately, I’m nimble and closer to the exit than most of my students. Only two get loose before I plant myself in the doorway, my arms stretched across the opening. It’s at that point I revisit The Exorcist. My head must be turning 360 degrees on my neck, because I see a pair of boys sprinting away down the hall, laughing and congratulating each other, while at the same time I observe stragglers bumping into the logjam I’ve created at the exit portal. Lil’ Ray is at the front and fairly immovable. At least he’s averse to mowing me down. "I said, get back in your seats. Now. We still have…" I glance at the clock. "Fifteen minutes." Fifteen? I’ll never make it that long with this bunch of miscreants. They are by far the worst of the day, and that’s saying a lot. No amount of money is worth this, and certainly not the pittance of a salary the school district has agreed to pay me for being here. I’ll find some other means of repaying my student loans. "I’m hungry," Lil’ Ray complains again. "Back to your seat." "But I’m hungry." "You should eat before you come to school." "Ain’t got nothing in the pintry." A sheen of sweat covers his coppery skin, and his eyes are weirdly glassy. I’m struck by the sense that I have bigger problems than the stampede. Standing in front of me is a fifteen-year-old who’s desperate in some way, and he expects me to solve the problem. "All the rest of you, get in your seats!" I bark out. "Put those desks back where they belong. Plant yourselves in them." The area behind Lil’ Ray slowly clears. Sneaker soles screech. Desks clatter. Chairs scrape the tile. Backpacks drop with muffled thuds. I hear a commotion in the science room across the hall. There’s a new teacher over there, too. A girls’ basketball coach, fresh out of college and only about twenty-three, as I recall. I at least have a little more age on my side, having worked my way through undergrad and then piddled along to a master’s degree in literature. "Anyone who’s not in a chair in the next sixty seconds owes me a paragraph. In ink. On paper." Owes me a paragraph was the go-to form of intimidation of Mrs. Hardy, my mentor educator. It’s the English teacher’s version of Drop and give me twenty. Most kids will do almost anything to avoid picking up a pen and writing. Lil’ Ray blinks at me, his cherub-cheeked face sagging. "Miz?" The word comes in a hoarse, uncertain whisper. "Miss Silva." I already hate the fact that the kids’ default word for me at this school is a generic Miz, as if I am some random stranger, maybe married, maybe not, and with no last name worth remembering. I have a name. It may be my father’s name and, given our relationship, I have my resentments about it, but still… A man-sized hand reaches out, grasps air, stretches farther, closes over my arm. "Miss…I don’t feel so—" The next thing I know, Lil’ Ray is slumped against the frame, and we’re going down. I do my best to break the fall as a million things run through my mind. Overexcitement, drugs, an illness, theatrics… Lil’ Ray’s eyes moisten. He gives me the terrified look of a toddler lost in the grocery store, searching for his mom. "Lil’ Ray, what’s going on?" No response. I turn and shout into the classroom. "Does he have a health problem?" No one answers. "Are you sick?" We’re nose to nose now. "I get hun…gry." "Do you carry medicine? Does the nurse have medicine for you?" Do we even have a school nurse? "Have you been to a doctor?" "I don’t…I…jus…get hungry." "When did you eat last?" "Lunch yesterday." "Why didn’t you have breakfast this morning?" "Nothin’ in the pintry." "Why didn’t you have supper last night?" Deep creases line his sweat-soaked forehead. He blinks at me, blinks again. "Nothin’ in the pintry." My mind speeds full throttle into the brick wall of reality. I don’t even have time to put on the brakes and soften the impact. Pintry… pintry… Pantry. Nothing in the pantry. I feel sick. Meanwhile, behind me, the noise level is rising again. A pencil takes flight and hits the wall. I hear another one clatter off the metal filing cabinet by my desk. From my pocket, I snatch the half-eaten bag of peanut M&M’s left from my morning snack, stuff it into Lil’ Ray’s hand, and say, "Eat this." I stand up just in time to see a red plastic ruler shoot through the half-open door. "That is it!" I’ve said this at least two dozen times today. Apparently, I don’t mean it, because I’m still here, in this outer realm of Dante’s inferno. Just trying to survive Day One. Either it’s mere stubbornness or a desperate need to succeed at something, but I start retrieving copies of Animal Farm from the floor and slamming them onto desks. "What’re we s’posed to do with these?" That complaint comes from the right side of the room. "Open it. Look it over. Get out a piece of paper. Write a sentence telling me what you think the book is about." "We got eight minutes till the bell," a punk-rocker girl with a blue-streaked Mohawk notes. "Then hurry." "You crazy?" "There ain’t time." "That’s not fair." "I ain’t writin’ no sentence." "I’m not readin’ no book. This’s got…one-hun’erd forty-four pages! I can’t read that in fiv…four minutes." "I didn’t ask you to read it. I asked you to look at it. Decide what you think it’s about and write a sentence. With that sentence, you will buy your passage through my classroom door and the privilege of proceeding on to lunch." I move to the exit, where I’m just now noticing that Lil’ Ray has disappeared, leaving the empty M&M’s wrapper as a thank-you. "Lil’ Ray didn’t write no sentence. He got to go to lunch." "That’s not your problem." I stare them down and remind myself that these are ninth graders. Fourteen-and-fifteen-year-olds. They can’t hurt me. Much. Papers rattle. Pens smack desktops. Backpacks are zipped open. "I don’t have no paper," the skinny boy protests. "Borrow some." He reaches over and snatches a blank sheet off a nerd’s desk. The victim sighs, reopens his backpack, and calmly gets out another piece. Thank God for nerds. I wish I had an entire classroom full. All day. In the end, I win, sort of. I’m presented with rumpled papers and copious amounts of attitude when the bell rings and kids storm the door. It’s not until the last group is draining the funnel I’ve created by combining my body and an empty desk that I recognize long, thin braids tipped with red beads, acid-washed jeans, and a color-block shirt. The girl who walked the little lunch box kid away from the intersection this morning. In all the chaos, I never even picked up on the fact that she was in my room. For an instant, I foster the notion that she hasn’t connected me with the near-miss crosswalk incident. Then I flip back through the last few papers on my stack, read sentences like: I think it’s about a farm. i bet this book stooped. About a pig. It’s about George Orwell’s satire of Russian society. Somebody actually copied the summary from the back cover. There’s hope. And then, It’s about a crazy lady who gets in a accident in the morning and hits her head. She wanders off into a school, but she’s got no clue what she’s doing there. Next day, she wakes up and don’t come back. I CHAPTER 3 HANNIE GOSSETT—LOUISIANA, 1875 mash the big field hat down hard to hide my face while I slide from shadow to shadow in the morning dark. It’ll be trouble if I get seen here. Both me and Tati know that. Old Missus won’t let no croppers near the Grand House till Seddie lights the morning lamp in the window. I get caught here at night, she’ll say I come thieving. It’ll give her cause to tear up our land paper. She don’t like the sharecrop contracts and hates ours more than most. Missus’s plan was to keep all us stray children and work us for free round the Grand House till we got too old to put up with it. Only reason she let Tati take us to her sharecrop land was because Old Mister said that Tati and us strays oughta have the chance at working our own plot, too. And because Missus never thought that one old freedwoman and seven half-growed kids could make it, farming on shares for ten years to earn our land, free and clear. It’s a lean, hungry life when three of every four eggs, bushels, barrels, and beans you draw from the field go right back to pay the debt for the land and goods at the plantation store, since croppers ain’t allowed to trade anyplace else. But that thirty acres is nearly ours, now. Thirty acres, a mule and outfit. Old Missus can’t stand the fact of it. Our land sits too close to the Grand House, for one thing. She wants to hold the land for Young Mister Lyle and Missy Lavinia, even though they got more interest in spending their daddy’s money than in farming fields. But that don’t matter. No mystery what’ll happen if things get left up to Old Missus, and I hope we ain’t soon to find out that’s how it is. Tati wouldn’t have hurried me into the boys’ work clothes and sent me scurrying up here if there was any other way to discover what sort of ill wind has brought that girl in the hood cape sneaking up to Goswood Grove by the dark of midnight. She might’ve meant for that cape to hide who she was, but Tati recognized it right off. Tati’s old fingers had worked late by the light of the bottle lamp, sewing up two capes just alike for last year’s Christmas—one to fit that high-yella woman Old Mister keeps in style down in New Orleans, and one for the fawn-pale daughter they made together, Juneau Jane. Old Mister likes to dress them the same, mother and daughter, and he knows Tati’s trustable to always keep her sewing work hid from Old Missus. All us know better than to even mention the names of that woman or that child round here. Be safer calling the name of the devil. Juneau Jane coming to Goswood Grove ain’t a good sign. Old Mister hadn’t been seen at this plantation since day after Christmas, when the word come that Mister’s fine gentleman son had got hisself into another difficulty, this time in Texas. Been only two years since Mister sent the boy west to dodge a murder trial in Louisiana. The time spent on the Gossett lands in East Texas ain’t improved Young Mister Lyle’s behaviors, I guess. Doubt anyplace could. Four months ago that Old Mister left, and no word of him since. Either that little tawny-pale daughter of his knows what become of him or she’s here to find out. Child’s a fool, coming to Goswood this way. The Ku Kluxers and White Camellias catch her on the road, they might not guess what she is just by looking, but no decent woman or girl goes about alone after dark. Too many carpetbaggers, road agents, and bushwhackers round in these years since the war. Too many young rowdies mad about the times, and the government, and the war, and the Louisiana constitution giving black folks the vote. The kind of men that prowl these roads at night ain’t likely to care that the girl’s just fourteen. Juneau Jane’s got courage, or else she’s desperate. Reason enough for me to sneak past the brick pillars that hold the Grand House’s first floor eight foot off the ground, and shinny through the coal trap into the basement. Years past, the boys used it to come snitch food, but I’m the only one of Tati’s strays still skinny enough to get in this way. I don’t want one thing to do with this mess, or with Juneau Jane, but if she knows information, I got to find out. If Old Mister is gone from this world and this left-hand child of his is here seeking after his death papers, I’m bound to get my fingers on our cropper contract at the same time. Make myself into a thief, which I never been. Don’t have a choice about it, though. With no husband to stand in her way, Old Missus will burn them papers quick as she gets the news. Nothing the rich folk like better than to rid theirselves of a cropper right when the land contract’s coming due. I take a few steps, light and careful, one at a time. At corn shuckings and circle plays, I got the dancing feet of a butterfly. Graceful, for a gangly thing, Tati says. I hope that holds out. Old Missus has Seddie sleeping in a little space off the china room, and that old woman’s got light ears, busy mouth. Seddie loves to tell tales to the Missus, cook up trouble, cast curses on folks, get somebody a swat with that riding bat Old Missus carries round. Seddie’ll slip a little poison on anybody that crosses her—put it in the water dipper or top of a corn pone cake—make them sick enough to die or wish they would. The woman’s a witch for sure. Even sees things when she’s sleeping, I think. She won’t know me in this field hat, shirt, and britches. Not unless she gets a close look, and I’ll make definite sure that don’t happen. Seddie’s old and fat and slow. I’m quicker than a cane-cutter rabbit. Burn down the stubble. Stand at the edge of your field, you won’t have me in your stew pot. I’m too fast. I tell myself them things while I cross the basement by the light of the moon through the window. Can’t use the nursery stairs to go up. The bottom steps squeak, and they’re too near Seddie’s room. The ladder to the butler’s pantry floor hatch is the means I choose, instead. Many’s the time my sister Epheme and me sneaked out and back in that way after Old Missus took us from Mama’s little saddleback cabin in the quarters and said we was to sleep on the floor under Baby Lavinia’s crib, and quieten her in the night if she fussed. I was just three and Epheme six, and both of us lonely for our folk and scared of Old Missus and Seddie. But a slave child ain’t given a choice in the matter. The new baby needed playthings, and that was us. Missy Lavinia was a troublesome little bird from the start. Round and fat-cheeked and pale, with straw-brown hair so fine you could see right through it. She wasn’t the pretty child her mama wanted, or her daddy, either. That’s why he always liked his child with that colored Creole woman the best. That one is a pretty little thing. He’d even bring her to the Grand House when Old Missus and Missy Lavinia went away to visit Missus’s people down on cotton islands by the sea. I always did wonder if him being so fond of Juneau Jane was the reason his children with Missus turned out so wrong. I push up the hatch in the butler’s pantry, peek round the cabinet door, and listen out. The air’s so quiet I can hear Old Missus’s azalea bushes scratch at the window glass, like a hundred fingernails. A whip-poor-will calls in the dark. That’s a bad sign. Three times means death is bound to cross your path. This one calls two. Don’t know what two times means. Nothin’, I hope. The window light in the dining room flickers with leaf shadow. I slip along to the ladies’ parlor, where before the war Old Missus entertained neighbor women over tea and needlework, and gave out lemon cakes and chocolates all the way from France. But that was when folks had money for such. My work, or my sister’s back then, was to stand with a big feather fan on a stick, swish it up and down to chase the heat off the ladies and the flies from the lemon cakes. Sometimes we’d fan the sugar powder right onto the floor. Don’t ever taste it when you clean that up, the kitchen women told us children. Seddie sprinkles them lemon cakes with a poison if she feels like it. Some say that was what caused Missus to birth two blue babies after Young Mister Lyle and Missy Lavinia, and to finally end up weak enough to be confined to a invalid’s chair. Others say Old Missus’s trouble goes back to a curse on her family. A punishment to the Loaches for the mean ways they treated their slave people. A shudder slips up my back, rattles every bone in my spine, when I come past the hall where Seddie sleeps in her little room. A gas lamp flickers and spits overhead, turned down low. The house sighs and settles, and Seddie grunts and snorts loud enough I hear it through the door. I round the corner into the salon, then cross it quick, figuring Juneau Jane will try to get to the library, where Old Mister keeps his desk and papers and such. Outdoor sounds get louder the closer I come—trees rustling, bugs with their night noises, a bullfrog. That girl must’ve got a door or a window opened. How’d she manage that? Missus won’t allow windows raised on the first-floor gallery, no matter how miserable hot it gets. Too worried about thieving. Won’t let the windows open on the second floor, either. So fearish of the mosquitos, she makes the yard boys keep tar pots burning outside the house day and night in all the warm months. Whole place wears a coat of pitch smoke, and the house ain’t been aired in more years than I can remember. Them windows been long painted shut, and Seddie minds all the door locks last thing at night, careful as a mama gator on a nest. Sleeps with the ring of keys tied on her neck. If Juneau Jane’s found a way in, somebody from the house helped her. Question is, who and when and for why? And how’d they get away with it? When I peek round the opening, she’s sneaking in the window, so it must’ve took her a while to pry it up. One little slipper touches down on the wood folding chair Old Mister likes to take out to the gardens to sit and read to the plants and the statues. I back myself into the shadows and watch-wait to see what this girl’s about. Climbing off the chair, she stops, looks over to my hiding spot, but I don’t move. I tell myself I’m a piece of the house. You ever been a slave at Goswood, you learn how to turn yourself into wood and wallpaper. Easy to see this girl knows nothing of that. She moves through the room like the place is hers, barely reasonable quiet while helping herself to her daddy’s big desk. Latches click as she opens parts of that desk I didn’t even know there was. Must be her papa showed her how, or told her. She ain’t happy with what she finds, and gives that desk a cussing in French before moving on to the tall hallway doors like she plans to push them closed. The hinges complain, low and soft. She stops. Listens. Looks into the hall. I back my way tighter to the wall and closer to the outside door. If Seddie comes from her bed, I’ll hide behind the curtain, then climb out that window during the ruckus and get myself away from here. The girl shuts the hall doors, all right, and I think to myself, Oh Lord! Ain’t no way Seddie didn’t hear that. Every hair on my body stands up, but no one comes, and little Juneau Jane moves on with her business. This girl is either smart or the biggest fool I ever came upon, because next she takes her papa’s little pocket lantern from the desk, opens the tin case, strikes up a Lucifer, and lights the candle. I can see her face clear then, lit up in that circle of yellow light. She ain’t a child anymore, but she ain’t a woman, either, someplace in-between. A strange creature with long, dark curls that circle her like angel hair and hang far down her back. That hair moves with life of its own. She’s still got that light skin, straight brows like Old Mister’s, and wide eyes that slant up at the corners, same’s my mama’s, same’s mine. But this girl’s are silvery bright. Unnatural. Witchy. She sets the lantern ’neath the desk, just enough to give some light, and she commences to fetching out ledger books from the drawer, turning pages by the light, her thin, pointed finger tracing a line here and there. She can read, reckon. Them sons and daughters born in plaçage live high, boys sent to France to get educated, and the girls to convent schools. She checks over every ledger book and slip of paper she can find, shakes her head, hisses through her teeth, not happy one bit. She lifts up boxes of powdered ink, pens, pencils, tobacco, pipes, holds them to the light and looks underneath. Be a sure miracle if this girl don’t get caught. Child’s getting noisier and braver by the minute. Or else just more desperate. Holding up the candle lamp, she goes to the shelves that rise floor to ceiling against the walls, higher than three men could reach if they stood on shoulders. For a minute, she’s got the flame so close, I think it’s in her mind to burn the books and the Grand House to the ground. There’s hired women and girls asleep at the attic. I can’t let Juneau Jane set that flame, if she tries to. I shift from behind the curtain, creep three steps ’cross the room, almost to the moonlight squares on the cherry wood floors. But she don’t do it. She’s trying to make out what the books are. Lifts onto her toes and holds the lantern high as she can. The candle tin tips, wax funneling over onto her wrist. She gasps and drops the lamp, and it falls on the carpet, the flame drowned in a wax pool. She don’t even bother to go after it, just stands there with her hands on her waist, looking up at the high shelves. There’s no ladder to get up there. The house girls probably took it to use for cleaning someplace. Ain’t two seconds before the cape is off that girl’s shoulders, and she’s testing the bottom shelf with one foot, and then climbing. Lucky thing she’s still in child’s skirts, just only halfway betwixt her knee and her silk slippers. She skitters her way up like a squirrel, the long hair trailing down her back making a big, fluffy tail. Her toe slips near the top. Careful, I want to say, but she rights herself and goes on, then grabs and sidesteps along the high shelves like the young boys traveling the rafters in the wagon shed. The muscles in her arms and legs shake from the strain, and the shelf bows under her when she gets toward the middle. It’s a single book she’s after, one that’s thick and heavy and tall. She pulls it loose and scoots it along the wobbling wood and gets herself back to the edge where it’s stronger. Down she comes, setting the book ahead of her, one shelf lower, one shelf lower. The very last time she lays that book down, it pitches like somebody’s shoved it from behind, and off it topples. Seems like forever, it goes end over end through shadows and light, then hits the floor with a smack that rattles the room and races out the door. There’s stirrings upstairs. "Sedd-ieeee?" Old Missus calls through the house, that screech cutting up my spine like a kitchen knife. "Seddie! Who is there? Is it you? Answer me this instant! One of you girls come lift me from this bed! Put me in my chair!" Feet scramble and doors open overhead. A housemaid runs down the attic steps and along the second-floor hall. Good thing Missus can’t get up from that bed on her own. Seddie’s a whole other matter, though. She’s probably grabbing the old breechloader rifle right now, fixing to lay somebody under with it. "Mother?" It’s Missy Lavinia’s voice comes then. What’s she doing home? Ain’t yet the end of spring term at the Melrose Female School in New Orleans. Ain’t even close. Juneau Jane grabs that book and she’s out the window so quick, she don’t even remember to get her cloak. She don’t close the window, either, and that’s good because I’m bound to get out of here, same way she did. Can’t leave that cloak there, though. If Missus sees it, she’ll know Tati’s stitching and come asking us about it. If I can get it and close that window, kick the travel lantern under the desk, the rest might be all right. This library’s the last place they’d think of a thief coming. Folks steal food or silver goods, not books. Any luck, a few days might pass before the candle wax on the carpet gets noticed. Even better luck, the house help will clean it up without saying a word. I stuff the cloak down my shirt, nudge that candle lamp with my foot, glance at the mess on the rug, think, Oh Lord. Lord, Lord, cover me over. I want to live some more years before I die. Marry a good man. Have babies. Own that land. The house gets like a battleground. People running, voices hollering, doors slamming, commotion all over. Hadn’t heard that much racket since the Yankee gunboats first come up the river, shelling everyplace and sending us scurrying to the woods to hide. Before I can get on the folding chair and jump through the window, Missy Lavinia’s right outside the library door. She’s the last one needs to find me here. That girl purely delights in the taste of trouble, which is the reason her papa sent her off to the girls’ deportment school in the first place. I run back through the dining room, right past every door, because Missus’s latest manservant is coming up the gallery outside. I get all the way to the butler’s pantry, but there’s no time to open the little hatch to the ladder, so I just crawl in the cabinet on my hands and knees and pull the doors and huddle there like a rabbit in the grass. Somebody’s bound to root me out before long. By now, Missy Lavinia has spotted that open library window and maybe the wax on the carpet, too. They won’t stop looking till they find out who’s in here. But after the noise dies down a bit, it’s Missy Lavinia I hear say, "Mother, for the sake of all, may we return to bed now? And please leave old Seddie to her rest. Don’t punish her for not waking. I troubled her already with my late arrival last evening. I’d left a book on the night table, and it’s fallen, that’s all. The noise only sounded to be coming from downstairs." Can’t guess how Missy don’t see, or smell, or feel the air from that window left open. Can’t guess how Seddie’s slept through all this, but I count it as a blessing and close my eyes, rest my head on the backs of my hands and say my thanks. I might live awhile longer yet, if they’d just all go back to bed. But Old Missus is boiling hot, still. Can’t make out all the words that’re said after, just that there’s heavy discussing and carrying on awhile. Time it’s over, my body is cramped and aching so bad, I’m chewing on my knuckles to keep from moving and pushing on the doors. A manservant gets left up to keep watch, so it’s a long time before I gather together the courage to slip from my place, open the hatch under me, and go down the ladder to the basement. With the man still prowling the yard and the galleries, I don’t dare try to get out till day breaks and Seddie unlocks the doors out to the lawn. I just hunker down, knowing Tati’s probably in a fit of worry, and come morning, she’ll wake Jason and John and tell them what we done. Jason will be bad troubled over it. He don’t like anything out of place from one day to the next. All things the same, day after day, is his comfort. Curled up in the dark, I wonder about the book Juneau Jane stole. That book got Old Mister’s papers in it? No way to know, so finally I rest my head on the soft cloak and let myself sleep and wake. I dream of climbing up the bookshelves myself, and taking one of them books from up top and getting my hands on our land contract. All our troubles will be no more. The door’s getting opened when I come to. A slice of feathery light lays itself over the floor and the smell of morning seeps in. Seddie tells a yard boy, "Don’ you touch nothin’ but the shovel and the yard broom and the hoe. Every apple in the barrel been counted and every drop a’ molasses, and Irish ’tater, and rice grain, too. Las’ boy that try to dip in, he gone. Nobody ever see him no more." "Yes’m." The boy sounds young. Old Missus’s got such a reputation, she’s running slim on choices. Has to take on babies nobody else will hire yet. I lay up awhile before I stuff Juneau Jane’s cloak back down the front of my borrowed shirt and pull John’s field hat so low it bends my ears, and I work my way toward fresh air and freedom. Nobody’s near when I poke my head out, and so off I go. Takes a heap of won’tnot to walk calm ’cross the yard, just in case somebody’s looking out from the house. They won’t think a thing about a little colored boy moving about, slow and easy. But what I really want to do is run, go from cropper cabin to cropper cabin with the word that Missy Lavinia’s showed up from school. Must be a ill wind to bring her home, news of Old Mister. Bad news. We croppers got to coop up together, have a meeting off in the woods, and figure our next move. All us got contracts and all us been depending on Old Mister to keep the promises that’s been given. Time to put our heads to the problem. No sooner does my mind start on it, than I make my way round the garden hedges, and hear voices. Two of them, down under the old brick bridge that was a fine thing long ago, before the Yankees toppled the statues and the rose trellises and butchered the Goswood hogs, then threw what was left of the carcasses in the reflecting ponds. The garden was too far gone after that. Hard times don’t leave money for fine things anyhow. Gate’s been shut ever since the war, the footpaths left for the wisteria and brambles and climbing roses to eat up. Poison ivy drapes the old trees, and hanging moss strings down thick as silk fringes on a ladies’ fan. Who’d be under that bridge, except maybe boys gigging frogs or men hunting possum or squirrel for the supper pot? But it’s whitesounding voices. Girls’ voices, whispering. I make my way through the brush and sidle closer till I can hear for sure. Missy Lavinia is clear as a smith’s hammer on metal and just about as pleasurable: "…haven’t kept your end of the bargain, so pray tell why should I?" What in saint’s name would Missy come here for? Who’s she talking to? I settle real quiet near the bridge rail, point my ear. "Our goal is selfsame." The words are Frenchy-like, hard to make out at first. They run up and down quick as a bird whistle. "Perhaps our fate is in common, as well, if we are unsuccessful in our quest." "You will not assume we hold any similarities," Missy snaps. I can picture them fat cheeks of hers puffing like the hog bladders the butcher men blow up with air and tie off for the children to play with. "You are no daughter of this house. You are the whelp of my father’s…my father’s…concubine. Nothing more." "And yet, it is you who have arranged that I come here. Who have provided for me an entry to Goswood Grove House." They been…Missy did… What in the name a’ mercy? Missy was the one helped Juneau Jane get in? I tell Tati this news, and she’ll say I’m storying. That’s why Missy Lavinia didn’t raise a fuss last night. Might even be why Seddie didn’t come out of her room, in all the ruckus. Maybe Missy Lavinia had a hand in that, too. "And, for all my effort in assuring your passage here, Juneau Jane, I have gained nothing. You do not know where his papers are hidden any more than I do. Or perhaps you were lying when you said you could find them…or perhaps the fact is that my father lied to you." Missy’s low giggle follows on, them words savored like sugar crust in her mouth. "He would not." The girl’s voice rises high, takes on the sound of a child’s, then trembles and thickens when she says, "He would not fail to provide for me. Always it was his promise that he—" "You are nothing to this family!" Missy shrieks, sending a blackbird to flight overhead. I start looking round for where I’ll go if somebody comes to see what’s the trouble. "You are nothing, and if Father is gone, you are as penniless as you deserve to be. You and that wretched yellow woman who bore you. I almost feel sorry for you, Juneau Jane. A mother who fears you’ve grown prettier than she and a father who has tired of the burden you represent. Such a sad state of affairs." "You will not speak of him in this manner! He does not lie. Perhaps he has only moved the papers to prevent your mother from throwing them to the flames. She would then claim all the holdings derived of Papa’s family. With no inheritance left directly to you, you would be forced to forever do your mother’s bidding. Is that not what you fear? Why you have brought me here?" "I didn’t want to bring you here." Missy’s soft and amiable again, like she’s coaxing a little piglet from the corner, so’s to string it up and cut its throat. "If you’d only been willing to tell me where Father hid the papers, rather than insisting on being personally involved in looking for them…" "Ffff! As if you could be trusted! You would steal the portion that is to be mine as quickly as your mother would steal what is to be yours." "The portion that is to be yours? Really, Juneau Jane, you belong back in Tremé with the rest of the fancy girls, waiting for your mother to sell you off to a gentleman caller, so as to pay the notes coming due. Perhaps your mother should have better anticipated the day when my father would no longer be here to provide for her financing." "He is not…Papa is not—" "Gone? Forever?" Missy Lavinia hadn’t got a note of sadness. Not for her own daddy. Only thing she’s hoping for is that what’s left of the plantation farms here and in Texas don’t go straight into Old Missus’s hands. Juneau Jane’s right, Little Missy would be under her mama’s thumb forever if that happened. "You will not say these things!" Juneau Jane chokes out. There’s a long spate of quiet then. Bad quiet that gives me the allovers, like some evil’s come stealing up on me from the shadows. Can’t see it, but it’s there, waiting to pounce. "Regardless, last night’s little exercise was a waste of time and considerable trouble on my part, bringing you here and ensuring your access to the library. Solving the matter will require a bit more travel for us, it seems. Just for the day, and after it’s done I’ll see that you’re provided passage on the fastest riverboat back to New Orleans. Delivered safely to your mother’s home in Tremé…to whatever fate awaits you. At least we’ll have settled the matter." "How can this be possible, that the matter might so easily be solved today?" Juneau Jane sounds suspicious. She oughta be. "I know where we shall find the man who can help. In fact, he was the last person Father spoke to before departing for Texas. I have only to order a carriage for myself, and we will be off to pay him a call. It is all very simple." Lord, I think, squatting low in the thorn brush and the trumpet vines. Oh Lord, oh Lord. Ain’t nothing simple about this. I don’t want to hear anything that comes next. Don’t want to know. But wherever them girls are bound, if they’re after news of Old Mister or his papers, I got to get there, too. Question is, how? S CHAPTER 4 BENNY SILVA—AUGUSTINE, LOUISIANA, 1987 unday morning, I wake in a head-to-toe sweat. My last-ditch rental accommodations offer only the barely there air-conditioning of an aging window unit, but the real problem isn’t this sweltering 1901 farmhouse; it’s the overwhelming dread squatting on my chest like a sumo wrestler. I can’t breathe. The air is wet and muddy smelling, courtesy of a weak tropical depression spinning off the coast. The sky outside the bedroom window hangs close above the live oaks, pillowy and saturated. A drip that started in the kitchen ceiling yesterday plays a tinny tune in the largest pan I own. I’ve been by the office of the broker who rented the house to me. There was a notice on the door: CLOSED FOR MEDICAL EMERGENCY. I left a note in the drop box, but so far no one has come by about the roof. They can’t call, as my new home is phoneless at present. That’s another one of the things I can’t afford until my first paycheck comes in. The power is out. I realize that when I roll over and look at the blank clock on the nightstand. I have no idea how late I’ve slept. Doesn’t matter, I tell myself. You can lie here all day. The neighbors won’t say anything. That’s a little joke between me and me. A thin bit of cheer. This house is bordered on two sides by farm fields and on the third by a cemetery. I’m not superstitious, so the proximity doesn’t bother me. It’s nice to have a quiet place to walk, where no one casts surreptitious glances my way, silently seeming to inquire, What are you doing here, and how soon are you leaving? It’s the general assumption that I, like most new teachers and coaches who join the staff, am in Augustine only until something better comes along. The hollow sense of loneliness I’ve begun to struggle with is familiar, yet somehow it reaches deeper now than in childhood, when my mother’s flight attendant job kept her away four or five days out of seven. Depending on where we were living at the time, I stayed home in the care of sitters, neighbors, daycare providers, my mother’s live-in boyfriends, and a teacher or two who watched kids for extra money. Whatever worked, wherever we were. Extended family wasn’t an option. My mother had been spurned by her parents when she married my father, a foreigner. An Italian, for heaven’s sake. It was an unforgivable affront, and perhaps for her that was part of his appeal, because, in reality, the marriage didn’t last all that long. Of course, my father was drop-dead gorgeous, so it could have just been a case of hot-blooded attraction that wore off. All of my mother’s moving and repositioning and start-stop relationships gave me an uncanny skill in building a community outside the home. I was adept at ingratiating myself with other people’s moms, friendly neighbors with dogs to walk, lonely grandparents who weren’t getting enough attention from their own families. I’m good at friend finding. At least I thought I was. But Augustine, Louisiana, is putting me to the test. It calls up memories of my ill-fated teenage attempt to connect with my paternal relatives after they’d moved to New York. My mother and I were confronting issues we couldn’t surmount. I needed my father and his family to open their arms to me, take me in, offer support. Instead, I felt like a stranger in a strange land, and not a welcome one. Augustine reprises that crippling feeling of rejection. I smile at people here, I get stares in return. I crack a joke, no one laughs. I say Good morning!, I get grunts and curt nods, and, if I’m lucky, oneword answers. Maybe I’m trying too hard? I’ve literally learned more about Augustine from the residents of the cemetery next door than I have from its ambulatory, breathing citizens. To work off the stress of the day, I’ve taken to studying the raised crypts and aboveground mausoleums. The markers date back to the Civil War and beyond. There are so many stories hidden in that place. Women resting next to the babies they birthed, dead on the same day. Children granted tragically short lives. Whole broods gone within weeks of one another. Confederate soldiers with CSA emblazoned on their tombstones. Veterans from two world wars, Korea, Vietnam. It looks like no one has been buried there in a while, though. The newest grave belongs to Hazel Annie Burrell. Beloved wife, mother, grandmother, laid to rest twelve years ago, in 1975. Plink, clink, plink. The leak in the kitchen moves from soprano to alto as I lie there thinking that, with all this rain, I can’t even go walking. I am stuck here alone in this scatter-furnished house with only the basics—roughly half of the contents of a graduate-student apartment. The other half remained with Christopher, who at the last minute decided against our planned elopement and cross-country move from Berkeley to Louisiana. The breakup wasn’t all his fault. I was the one who’d kept secrets, who hadn’t told him everything until after the engagement. Maybe the fact that I’d held out so long spoke for itself. Still, I miss being part of a duo in this plan for a new adventure. At the same time, there’s no denying that, after four years together as a couple, I don’t miss Christopher as much as I probably should. The impending breach of my drip catcher distracts me from overanalyzing and nudges me from the bed. Time to empty the pan. Then I’ll get dressed and go to town, see who else I can call for help in getting the roof situation resolved. There must be somebody. Through the haze on the kitchen window, I make out the shape of someone walking the cemetery lane nearby. I lean closer, clear a swatch with my palm, see a man and a large yellow dog. A black umbrella partially hides the man’s portly frame. Momentarily, I think of Principal Pevoto, and my stomach tenses up. I’ve worn out my welcome with him this week. Your expectations are too high, Miss Silva. Your requests for supplies are outlandish. Your hopes for the students are unrealistic. He will not help me track down the rest of my classroom set of Animal Farm, which have vanished one and two at a time, until we’re down to only fifteen copies. The science teacher across the hall found one stuffed in a lab drawer, and I rescued another from the trash can in the hall. The kids are actually stealing them so they won’t have to read them. It’d seem oddly resourceful if it weren’t book abuse, which is wrong on so many levels. The cemetery visitor looks like a book character himself. Paddington Bear, in his long blue raincoat and yellow hat. He walks with a stiff-legged limp that tells me he’s not Principal Pevoto. Stopping at a grave, he feels for the edge of the concrete crypt without looking, then slowly bends at the waist, the umbrella descending with him until he gently places a kiss on the stone. The sweetness of his longing dives to a tender, bruised place in me. My eyes prickle, and I absently touch my bottom lip, taste rainwater and moss and damp concrete and the passage of time. Who’s buried there? A sweetheart? A child? A brother or sister? A parent or grandparent long lost? I’ll find out once he’s gone. I’ll visit the stone. I withdraw from his private moment and empty the drip pot, eat, dress, empty what’s in the pot again, just for safety’s sake. Finally I rustle up my keys, purse, and rain gear for a trip to town. The humidity-swollen front door and I do battle when I try to close it after myself. The antique lock is especially cantankerous today. "Stupid thing. Just…if you would…just…go in there…." When I turn around, the man with the dog is halfway up my front walk. Umbrella tipped against the wind, he’s hidden from view until he makes his way to the leaning cement steps. He feels for the porch rail hesitantly, and then I realize the golden retriever is wearing a harness and handle, not a leash. It’s a service dog. A russet-brown hand skims the rail as owner and dog navigate the steps easily. "May I help you?" I ask over the patter of the rain on the tin roof. Wagging its tail, the dog peers up at me. Then the man does as well. "Thought I’d come by and look in on Miss Retta while I was in the area. Miss Retta and I both worked in the courthouse with the judge years ago, so we’ve had acquaintance a long time." He nods over his shoulder toward the graveyard. "That’s my grandmother, over there, Maria Walker. I’m Councilman Walker…well, former councilman, these days. Still a little hard to get used to that." He offers a handshake, and, leaning in, I see cloud-rimmed eyes behind his thick glasses. He cranes to one side, trying to make me out. "How is Miss Retta getting on these days? You one of her helpers?" "I…just moved in last week." I glance past him, looking for a car in the driveway, someone he’s with. "I’m new in town." "You buy the place?" He chuckles. "Because you know what they say about Augustine, Louisiana. ‘You purchase a house here, you’ll be the last one who ever owns it.’ " I laugh at the joke. "I’m just renting." "Oh…well, good for you, then. You’re likely too smart for that kind of thing." We chuckle again. The dog participates with a soft, happy yip. "Miss Retta move into town?" Councilman Walker wants to know. "I don’t…I leased this place through a rental agent. I was just headed into Augustine in hopes of finding out how to get a roof leak repaired." I check the driveway again, lean around my visitor, and look toward the cemetery. How did this man get here? The dog moves a step closer, seeking to make friends. I know it’s against protocol to touch service animals, but I can’t help myself. I succumb. Among all the other familiar things I miss about California are Raven and Poe, the tabby cats who kept me in their employ before I moved. They, along with various human helpers, maintained the new and used books store where I worked for a little extra money, which mostly went back into books, anyway. "Can I give you a ride to town?" I ask, although I’m not sure where I’d put Mr. Walker and his rather hefty sidekick in the Bug. "Sunshine and I’ll sit here and wait for my grandson. He’s gone on over to pick us up some Cluck and Oink barbecue for the drive back to Birmingham. That’s where Sunshine and I make our place, these days." He pauses to ruffle the dog’s ears and receives a wag of supreme adoration. "Had my grandson drop me here, so I could pay respects to my grandmother." He nods toward the graveyard. "Thought I’d walk over here and give my regards to Miss Retta, too. She was sure a friend to me after I stumbled in my ways—the judge was, too. Told me, ‘Louis, you better go be a lawyer or a preacher, because you like to argue your case.’ Miss Retta was the judge’s helper, you know. Many a wayward youngster, they took under wing. I spent a great deal of time on this porch, in my earlier years. Miss Retta helped me with my studies, and I helped her keep up the garden and the orchard. That garden saint still there by the steps? Nearly broke my back getting that thing in here for her. But Miss Retta said that statue needed a home after the library took it down. She never could turn her back on a need." I cross the porch and look into the oleander bushes and, indeed, encased in overgrown ivy and leaning against the wall, rests some sort of statue. "There it is, I think." A sense of wonder strikes me, unexpectedly. My flower bed holds a sweet little secret. Garden saints are good luck. I’ll trim back the oleander when I get a chance, fix things up a bit for the old fellow. I make plans in my head as Councilman Walker tells me that if I want to know anything about anything in Augustine, including how and where to secure help with a leaky roof on a Sunday, I should proceed forthwith to the Cluck and Oink and speak with Granny T, who will be at the counter now that church has let out. My rental house, he says, is most likely owned by someone in the Gossett clan. This land was part of the original Goswood Grove plantation, which once stretched almost all the way to the Old River Road. Miss Retta sold the land back to Judge Gossett years ago to finance her retirement, but was allowed to live out her days in the house. Now that the judge has passed away, someone will have inherited this particular parcel. "You go on about your business," he says as he settles on my porch swing with Sunshine at his feet. "If you don’t mind, we’ll wait here. We’re not bothered by the weather, us two. Into every life a little rain must fall." I’m not sure if he’s talking to me or Sunshine or himself, but I thank him for the information and leave him there in his coat and rain hat, his face turned toward the graveyard, his countenance undampened by the weather. The rain does not seem to muck up the spirits at the Cluck and Oink, either. The tumbledown building, which sits on the highway at the far edge of town, looks like the result of an unholy mating between a cow barn and an old Texaco station, surrounded by their spawn of portable storage sheds of various sizes and vintages, some attached, some not. The low-slung porch along the front is crowded with waiting customers, and the drive-through line, at 12:17 on a Sunday afternoon, stretches around the building and through the gravel parking lot, and blocks traffic on the right lane of the highway as people wait to turn in. Smoke belches from a screened area at the back of the building, where a crew scurries about like bees in a hive, tending a bevy of wood-fired cooking pits. Sausages, hunks of meat, and naked whole chickens turn on giant rotisseries. Flies dangle from the fascia boards in shifting black strings, climbing one over the other in hopes of gaining entry. I can’t blame them. The place smells delicious. I park next door at the aging Ben Franklin five-and-dime, and slog across the wet strip of grass between the buildings. "They’ll tow that car, if you leave it settin’ over there!" a teenage employee warns me as he rushes back from the dumpster. "I’m not staying long. Thanks!" It registers that the other restaurant customers have steered clear of the Ben Franklin lot. Even in my short time in Augustine, I’ve heard kids at school regularly kibitzing about the police harassing them for hanging out around town, gathering for parties, and so forth. The perceived heavyhandedness of the local law, and who gets the worst of it, is a favorite topic of student conversation while they’re not listening to my lessons about Animal Farm. If they’d pay attention, they might spot parallels to the way this town operates in separate communities— black, white, haves, have-nots, backwoods kids, townies, and the landed gentry. The lines between them exist like an ancient but unseen network of walls, not to be crossed except through the necessary gates of commerce and employment. Again, Animal Farm offers points for debate, lessons to teach. I plan to spend next week lobbying Principal Pevoto for some kind of classroom literature budget. I need books, resources that might have a hope of drawing in the kids. Maybe something more recent, like Where the Red Fern Grows or The Education of Little Tree. A story with hunting and fishing and outdoor motifs, since most of my students, no matter which group they hail from, can relate to putting food on the table via the forests, swamps, gardens, and backyard chicken coops. I’m searching for connecting points, anywhere I can find them. The Cluck and Oink, I realize as soon as my eyes adjust to the murky interior, is a hub in this town. All the demographics of Augustine—black, white, male, female, young, old—seem at home here in this sea of fried-food smells and scurrying waitresses. Women in impossibly bright dresses and flamboyant Sunday hats tend smartly dressed children at tables crammed with multiple generations of family. Little girls with feet tucked into Mary Janes and legs circled by lace-cuffed socks sit like fluffy cake toppers on booster seats and in high chairs. Boys in bow ties and men in suits of various vintages dating all the way back to 1970s plaid tell stories and pass plates. Conversation, cordiality, and an air of jovial companionship mingle with grease smoke and cooks calling out "Order up!" or "Hot bread! Hot bread!" Laughter rings the rafters like church bells, constant, musical, the sound amplified by the rusty tin roof and showered down again. Boudin balls—whatever those might be—seem to be the order of the day. I check out the picture on the menu board, then wonder what’s inside the deep-fried nuggets as platefuls move past, carried by fleet-footed girls in blue polyester uniform tops and jeans. I’d like to try some, but I hear the teenager at the hostess stand, whom I quickly recognize as one of my students, telling a potential customer that the kitchen is thirty minutes behind on orders. I hope Councilman Walker’s grandson scored some takeout before the postchurch rush. I’ll have to wait until another time for a sample. Even if the kitchen weren’t backed up, I shouldn’t spend the money. I’ve burned through twelve boxes of off-brand snack cakes in my classroom since the Lil’ Ray M&M’s incident. My students constantly claim hunger pangs. I don’t know who’s lying and who’s telling the truth, and I haven’t asked as many questions as I probably should. Maybe I’m hoping that if they can’t be won with books, chocolate sponge cake and fluffy filling might do the trick. I make my way into the cash register line, studying the pies in the glass case while I advance, one satisfied customer at a time, toward the African American woman at the counter, whom I hear others addressing as Granny T. White-haired with hazel eyes and the stocky look of many of the people I’ve met in Augustine, she’s decked out in a pink church dress and hat. She cuts up with customers as she flies through tickets, adding totals in her head, doling out lollipops to kids, and commenting on who’s grown at least an inch since last week, I do declare. "Benny Silva." I introduce myself and she reaches across the counter to shake my hand. Her thin, knobby fingers compress my palm. She’s got a good grip. "Benny?" she repeats. "Your daddy want a son, did he?" I chuckle. That is the most oft-invoked reaction to the nickname my father saddled me with before deciding he didn’t really want me, after all. "Short for Benedetta. I’m half Italian…and Portuguese." "Mmm-hmmm. You got that pretty skin." She narrows one eye and looks me over. I offer, "Well, I don’t sunburn too much, at least." "Watch out," she warns. "You best get you a good hat. This Louisiana sun, she is wicked as sin. You got your ticket so I can ring you up, sugar?" "Oh, I didn’t eat." I quickly explain the roof problem and why I’ve come. "The old white house out by the graveyard? I tried going by the real estate office yesterday, but the note says there was a medical emergency." "You’re lookin’ for Joanie. She’s laid up in the hospital up in Baton Rouge. Got misery of the gall bladder. Just get you a bucket of pitch tar and smear it round that pipe for the stove vent. On the roof, you know? Just smooth it on over the shingles in a good thick layer, like butterin’ bread. That’ll hold out the rain." Suddenly, I don’t doubt that this woman knows what she’s talking about and has buttered many a shingle in her day. She probably still could. But I’ve lived in apartments most of my life. I wouldn’t know roof tar from chocolate pudding. "I’m told the house probably belongs to one of Judge Gossett’s heirs. Do you know where I could find the owner? I’d just keep a bucket under the leak, but the thing is, I have to teach tomorrow, and I won’t be there to empty it. I’m afraid of it spilling over and wrecking the floors." One thing the old house does have is beautiful cypress-plank flooring and timbers. I love old things and can’t stand the idea of letting them go to ruin. "I’m the new English teacher at the school." She blinks, blinks again, rolls her chin back in a way that makes me feel like someone has just made bunny ears over my head. "Oh, you are the Ding Dong Lady!" There’s a snicker behind me. I glance back to see the surly girl who rescued the little grade-schooler on my first day. Even though she’s in class only about half the time, I have now connected her with a name—LaJuna. It’s pronounced as La plus the name of the month, but with an a on the end. That’s about all I know. I’ve tried to make headway with her during my fourth-period class, but the hour is dominated by football guys, which leaves girls, nerds, and assorted misfits with no hope of getting sufficient attention. "You’d best quit feeding them boys cakes. Especially that Lil’ Ray Rust. That one will eat you into the poor house." Granny T is still talking. Lecturing, actually. She’s got a craggy index finger pointed at me. "Children want to eat, they can get their skinny behinds up out of the bed and down to the school cafeteria in time for breakfast. That food is free. Those boys are lazy. That’s all." I give a half-hearted nod. Word of me has gotten all the way to the Cluck and Oink. I’ve been dubbed in honor of a snack cake with a name that makes me sound like a ditz. "You let a child be lazy, he’ll grow up to be lazy. A young boy needs somebody to keep him in line, make him a hard worker. Back when I was a child, we were all working hard at the farm. Gals do the cookin’ and the cleanin’ and hire out sometimes, too, soon as they’d get old enough. Time comes to go sit at a school desk, eat food somebody else cooks up for us, we’re thinking we’re on a luxury vacation. That right, LaJuna? That’s what your Aunt Dicey tells you, sure enough?" LaJuna ducks her head, reluctantly mutters, "Yes’m." She shifts uncomfortably, pulling a sheet off her ticket pad. Granny T is wound up now. "I’m her age, I’m workin’ the farm, or in the orchard, or in this restaurant with my grandmama. And I’m going to school, and hired out to one of the Gossetts to watch her babies after the school day and in summers. Time I’m eleven years old, younger than this girl, even." Behind LaJuna and me, the checkout line is building. "By eighth grade, I’ve got to quit. Crop doesn’t make that year, and there’s bills to pay down to the Gossett Mercantile. No time for school. I was smart, too. But we can’t go live under a tree. Home might not be fancy, but that’s home and we’re glad to have it. Grateful for everything we got, all the time." I stand in stunned silence, letting that sink in. Just the concept of a kid…what, thirteen or fourteen years old…having to quit school to help earn a living for the family…it’s horrifying. Granny T motions LaJuna to the other side of the counter, hugs her around the shoulders. "Now, this one is a good girl. Gonna do all right. What’d you need, darlin’? How come you’re standing here, not seeing to your tables?" "I’m on break. Got my tables all taken care of." LaJuna extends a ticket and a twenty-dollar bill toward the counter. "Ms. Hannah ask me to bring this up so she didn’t have to stand in line." Granny T’s mouth straightens. "Some people always got to have special privileges." She processes the ticket and hands LaJuna the change. "You go give this back and then you have a break." "Yes’m." LaJuna slides around the corner, and it’s obvious that I need to move along, as well. Impatient noises and toe-taps have begun increasing among the customers behind me. On a whim, I spring for a piece of banana cream pie from the dessert case. I don’t need it. I shouldn’t spend the money, but it looks so good. Comfort food, I tell myself. "That old house you live in," Granny T offers as we settle up. "It’s been passed down since the judge died, like everything else. Judge’s two older sons, Will and Manford, got the Gossett Industries mill, the foundry, and the gear plant north of town. Judge’s youngest son died years ago, left behind a son and a daughter. Those two children inherited the big house and the land that would’ve gone to their daddy, but the girl, Robin, she’s passed away since—sad thing, her just thirty-one years old. Your landlord is her brother, Mr. Nathan Gossett, Judge’s grandson, but he won’t be fixin’ that roof. He lives down to the coast. Got him a shrimp boat. Leased out the Goswood land, left the rest to rot. That boy’s the rambling one. Can’t be bothered about none of it. Lot of history in that old place. Lot of stories. Sad thing when stories die for the lack of listenin’ ears." I nod in agreement, feel the whip-sting of my own family ties flapping in the wind. I don’t know beans about my familial history and couldn’t recite an ancestral story if my life depended on it. I’ve always tried to tell myself I don’t care, but that statement from Granny T hits home. A blush creeps up my neck, and I hear myself blurt out, "Would you be willing to come talk to my classes sometime?" "Ffff!" Her eyes widen. "Did you listen at me while ago when I told you I didn’t make it past the eighth grade? You’ve got to have the banker, and the mayor, and the manager from the foundry come talk to these kids. Folks that’s amounted to much." "Well, just…please think about it." An idea blooms in my head, unfolding as if by fast-motion photography. "It’s what you said about the stories. The kids should hear them, you know?" Maybe real stories from people around here would touch my students in a way that Animal Farm can’t. "I’m not having much luck getting them interested in my classroom books, and there aren’t enough copies anyway." "This school ain’t got nothin’," a forty-something freckle-faced redhead behind me mutters, air whistling through a cracked front tooth. "Our boys got all the way to district last year, and they gotta wear cleats somebody else’s used before them. This school’s crap. School board’s crap, too. Them kids over at Lakeland school get everything, and ours don’t get squat." Something’s about to spill from my mouth that’s probably better left unsaid, so I just nod and take my to-go container. At least the football team has enough cleats for everyone. That’s more than I can say for books in the English room. When I exit, LaJuna is settling herself on an overturned trash can near the side of the building where two guys in meat-spattered aprons squat in the shade, smoking cigarettes. LaJuna flashes a covert glance my way as I move past, then turns her attention toward a kid on a rust-dotted spyder bike, wobbling across the highway. He barely makes it into the Ben Franklin parking lot before a minivan zips past. If I’m not mistaken, he’s the little guy from the crosswalk incident. A city police car turns in, and I hope there’s a safety scolding in the making, but the officer seems more interested in my improperly parked vehicle. I hurry through tiny rain lakes in the gravel, back across the grassy muck border and to my car. Pointing at the Ben Franklin, I give the officer the thumbs-up. He rolls down the window, rests a meaty elbow on the frame, and warns, "No restaurant parkin’ over here." "Sorry! I was trying to figure out where to buy some roofing tar." "No place open on Sunday for that. Blue law." His eyes scrunch into his sweat-sheened red cheeks as he studies my vehicle. "And get a bumper on that thang. I see it like that again, I’ll write it up." I make promises I can’t afford to keep, and he leaves. One day at a time, I tell myself and hear the theme song from the TV show in my head. It was not only one of my favorites as a teenager—Valerie Bertinelli made being half-Italian look very cool, especially after she married Eddie Van Halen—that theme song has become my motto for this weird, transitional year. The little boy splashes through the grassy strip on his too-big bike, lets it topple to one side, and skip-skids on the wet gravel until he manages a stop. Kicking a leg over the bar, he proceeds to the back of the Cluck. I watch as he talks through the screen, then gains a chicken leg from one of the workers, who quickly shoos him away. Off he trots, pushing the bike, chicken leg and handlebars all clutched together. The corner of the store building obscures my view, and he’s gone. Maybe I should walk around there and talk to him about crossing streets. I contemplate my new position as an authority figure. Teachers are supposed to look after kids…. "Here." The voice startles me. LaJuna is standing on the other side of my car door. Three long, dark braids escape her hair band and bisect her young face. She lets them hang like the pickets of a stockade fence as she holds out a restaurant ticket, arm stretched as far as it’ll go. "Here." Shaking the ticket, she glances uncomfortably over her shoulder. She retracts instantly when I take what she’s offering. One hand braces on a skinny hip. "That’s my Aunt Sarge’s phone number and address where she lives. She’s fixing stuff at my Great-Aunt Dicey’s house. Aunt Sarge knows how." She watches her muddy tennis shoes instead of me. "She could take care of your roof." I’m stunned. "I’ll call her. Thanks. Really." LaJuna backs away. "She needs the money, that’s all." "I appreciate this. A lot." "Uh-huh." Skirting a mud puddle, she departs. It’s then I notice something small and rectangular in her back pocket. I lean forward, detecting what I’m pretty sure is one of my missing copies of Animal Farm. I’m staring at it when she stops and looks at me over one shoulder. She starts to say something, then shakes her head, then takes two more steps before turning my way again. Her arms drop in resignation before she finally blurts out, "The judge’s big old house is just across the field from that one you rented." A glance flicks in that general direction. "Got lots of books there. Whole walls full, floor to the ceiling. Books nobody even cares about anymore." S CHAPTER 5 HANNIE GOSSETT—AUGUSTINE, LOUISIANA, 1875 ometime, trouble can be like a cut of thread, all tangled up and wrong-twisted from the spinning. Can’t see the why of it or how to get it straight, but can’t hide from it, either. Back in the old bad days, Missus come in the spinnin’ house, find somebody’s work a mess, and go at that girl or woman with a quirt, or a spindle, or broom handle. That old barn was a good place and a fearful place. The women would bring their children, work and sing together, boil the thread in pots of indigo, hickory bark, and copperas to make the colors. Blue, butternut, red. A pretty delight. But always, there’s the worry over a tangle, or a dropped thread, and the trouble it could bring. Even now that the wheels and the looms sit quiet and dust covered, someplace far up under the benches, where nobody but us and the mice know of it, there’s the old ruined thread and hanks of bad cloth, hiding out of sight like trouble does. Passing through the spinnin’ house, I think of them old hideaways and I try to figure, how can I follow along on Missy’s trip so’s to find out her secrets? Then, I think, Hannie, it’d be a heap easier to drive the carriage Missy ordered up, than to try to sneak along after it. You’re already dressed like a boy. Who’d know any different? I hurry on down to the horse barn and the wagon shed, knowing there won’t be a soul there. Percy hires hisself out, shoeing the stock on other places most days now. With Old Missus chairbound, Missy Lavinia away at school, and Old Mister gone to Texas, there’s no work for a driver. I wait in the barn for a yard boy to come running barefoot down the lane. Don’t even know the child—house help ain’t here long enough to get known these days—but he’s so little, he’s still in shirttails. The hem catches round his twiggy bare legs while he runs calling ahead that Missy Lavinia wants the cabriolet at the back garden gate, and be quick. "Already been told," I bark out real deep. "Scoot on back to the house and say to her it’ll be up directly." Before I can blink, there’s nothing left of the boy but a dust curtain hanging where he was. I get to work, but my fingers shake on the halter and harness buckles. My heart makes the sound of Percy’s smithing hammer, striking Tonk! Deling-ding, tonk! Deling-ding. I can barely tack up the stout copper sorrel mare Old Mister named Ginger the year before the war. She’s fretful when I back her twixt the carriage shafts and fasten the straps. Her eye rolls backward to say, Old Missus catches us at this, what’ll happen, you think? I gather up my gumption and climb the three iron steps to the box seat that’s high over the splashboard, front of the cab. If I can fool Missy Lavinia long enough to sit her in the coach, we ought to get along all right. I’m shaky on the reins, but the mare don’t seem to mind. She’s a kind old thing and obeys, except she stretches her neck in a long whinny when the stable goes out of view. A horse whinnies back, and that a sound seems ten miles long and loud enough to wake the dead that’s buried under the soil behind the orchard. A shiver rocks me head to foot. If Tati found out what I’m up to, she’d say I only got one oar in the water. I know that, by now, her and Jason and John are in the field, trying to give off the look of a normal day, but they’re all watching the lane, wondering and fretting about me. They won’t dare come round the Grand House, in case Old Missus and Seddie got suspicions after last night. If Missus sends her houseman out poking around, he won’t see one thing out of normal at our place. Tati’s too smart for that. I hate that they’ll worry, but there’s no help for it. You can’t trust nobody at Goswood Grove these days. Can’t send a message by anyone. I catch my breath and rub Grandmama’s three blue beads on that leather cord round my neck, and I pray for luck. Then I turn from the home way, steering the mare toward the old garden. Branches bow down from the oaks, bramble vines tying them together like corset laces. They needle and grab at my hat as the old horse and me push on through the clutter. A deerfly pesters Ginger’s ears, and she shakes her head and snorts, and jingles the harness. "Sssshhh, there," I whisper. "Hush up, now." She tosses her forelocks, rattling the carriage when I pull up just before the old bridge. Nobody there. Not a sign. "Missy Lavinia?" I whisper low and scratchy-like, hoping I sound like John, not quite man yet, but getting close. I lean over, try to see off the side of the bridge. "Anybody down there?" What if Old Missus caught her making ready to sneak away? A branch snaps and the mare turns her head, perks toward the trees. We listen, but there’s not another sound except what’s usual. Live oaks shiver, and birds talk, and squirrels argue in the branches. A woodpecker hammers after grub worms. Ginger fusses at that deerfly, and I get down to shoo it off her ears and quieten her. Missy Lavinia’s almost on me before I hear her coming. "Boy!" she says, and I jump out of my hide and back in. A whole string of bad memories clamor in my head. Happiest day of my life was when I left the Grand House to live with Tati, and I didn’t have to nursemaid Missy anymore. That girl would pinch, hit, swat me with whatever she could get her hands on soon’s she was big enough. Seem like she knew early on that it made her mama proud. I duck my head down hard under the hat. I’ll know in a minute if this plan of mine’s workable. Missy Lavinia ain’t stupid. But we ain’t been close up to each other in a long time, either. "Why haven’t you brought me the chaise?" Her voice has the high shriek that sounds like her mama, but she don’t look like her mama. Young Missy is stouter and rounder, even than I remember. Taller, too, almost tall as me. "I asked for the cabriolet, so as to drive myself. Why have you come with the calèche? When I get my hands on that yard boy…and where is Percy? Why hasn’t he seen to this himself?" I don’t think it’s best to say, Percy’s been hiring out to keep hisself in food enough since Missus cut back his pay. So, instead, I tell her, "Cabriolet’s broke, ain’t been fixed. Nobody down to the stable, so I got the carriage up and come to drive it." She’s enough put out about the idea that she hauls herself into the carriage on her own without waiting for help. That’s best, since I’m trying to keep away. "We will proceed down the field levee lane, not past the Grand House," she snaps, settling herself into the seat. "Mother is abed. I’ll not have her disturbed by our passage." She’s trying to sound sharp and bossy like her mama, but even now that she’s sixteen and in ladies’ skirts, she still sounds like a girl playing at being big. "Yes’m." I climb up and chuck the old mare, and make a tight circle round the caved-in reflecting pond. The calèche’s big wheels bounce over loose cobblestones and ivy gone wild. Once the way is clear, I hurry the mare on. She’s still got a good trot, even though she’s up in years enough to be white-frosted at the muzzle and eyes. Her forelocks bounce, keeping the flies off. We come three miles down the farm levee, then cut over at the little white church where Old Missus made us go every Sunday back in slavery days. Dressed all us up in same white dresses, tied blue ribbons at our waists so we’d look impressible for all the neighbors. Up in the balcony we’d sit and hear the gospel of the white preacher. I ain’t been in that building since the freedom. We got our own meetings now. Places where a colored man can preach. We move the spot all the time, to keep the Ku Kluxers and the Knights of the White Camellia away, but we all know where to go and when. "Stop here," Missy says, and I pull up the mare. We’re goin’ to the church house? I can’t ask it, though. Out from behind comes Juneau Jane, sitting a ladies’ saddle on a big gray horse, her skinny legs hanging from her little-girl dress in long black stockings. Now, in the light, I can see that the stockings are more darns than threads and her button boots are almost wore through at the toe. The blue flower-stripe dress is clean, but strained at the seams. She’s growed some since that dress was bought. The horse she’s on looks like a handful, tall with a cresty neck that says he was left for stud awhile. The girl’s most likely got a way with animals, though, devil-fired, like her mama and all the rest of her kind, with them strange silver-green eyes. That long hair of hers swirls down her waist to the saddle and into the horse’s black mane, so the two seem like one creature. Juneau Jane rides up to the calèche with her chin propped up so high her eyes go to thin slits when she looks down into the carriage. Still, they send a shiver over me. Did she see me watch her last night? Does she know? I push my shoulders up toward my hat to fend off any curse she might try to cast on me. The air hangs so tight between her and Missy Lavinia you could fiddle a tune on it. "Follow behind," Missy bites out, like she can’t stand the words in her mouth. "C’est ce bon." The girl’s Frenchy talk rolls like music. Reminds me of the songs the orphan children sung when the nuns traipsed them out in chorales to perform at the white folks’ parties before the war. "Indeed, my intention was thus." "I won’t have you sullying my father’s carriage." "Why should I have need of it, when he has given me this fine horse to ride?" "Which is more than you merit. He assured me as much before he departed for Texas. You will soon see." "Indeed." The girl ain’t scared as she should be. "We will soon see." The leaf springs complain and groan when Missy shifts in her seat, locking her hands together and stuffing them in the folds of a red day skirt Tati sewed up last summer for her to take off to school. Got to keep up appearances, Old Missus said. The red skirt was a remake from one of Old Missus’s dresses. "I am merely being practical, Juneau Jane. Realistic. Were your mother a sensible woman, and not so terribly spoiled, she wouldn’t be in a hardship after only a few months of no aid from Father. So, in a way, you and I both find ourselves victims of parental folly, don’t we? My goodness! We do have something in common. We have both been betrayed by those whose duty it was to protect us, haven’t we?" Juneau Jane don’t answer, except to mutter in French. Maybe she’s casting a spell. I don’t want to know. I hunker forward over the footboard, far away as I can get, so it’ll miss me. I pull my arms in close and stick my tongue to the roof of my mouth and shut my lips tight, so if that curse does pass by, it won’t get inside. "And, of course, we will follow Papa’s intentions to the letter, once we know them." Missy Lavinia goes right on talking. She never minded a one-way conversation. "I do intend to hold you to your commitment. Once Papa’s papers are found, and should it, indeed, be confirmed that the worst has befallen him in Texas, you will abide by his decrees without causing further trouble or embarrassment to my family." I steer the mare over a pothole in the road, see if I can bounce Missy round a bit to quieten her up. That sugar-sweet voice brings back pokes and whacks, and thumps on the head, and a time in Texas when she give me a tea to drink with a pinch of Seddie’s rat powder on top—just wanted to see what’d happen. I was only seven, barely one year past being rescued from Jep Loach’s bad deed, and wishing I wouldn’t live to be eight after I drank that poison. Missy was five mean years old. Wish I could tell Juneau Jane that story, even if I got no friendliness toward her. Living high all these years down in Tremé, even as the Gossett money dried up. What did this girl think? That’d go on forever? If she and her mama end up out on the street, I ain’t sorry. About time they learn to work. Work or starve. That’s how it is for the rest of us. I got no reason to care about either one of these two girls, and I don’t. All I am is somebody to tend their field, or wash their clothes, or cook their food. What do I get back for it, even now that the emancipation’s come? Belly that’s hungry more often than not and a roof that leaks over my head and no money to fix it till we can pay off the land contract. Just skin and muscle and bone. No mind. No heart. No dreams. It’s time I quit looking after what belongs to white people and start looking after what belongs to me. "Boy," Missy snaps. "Hurry along." "Road mighty rough, Missy," I drawl out, slow and deep. "Be smoother once we git up to the River Road. That road be smoother." Old Ginger’s like Goswood Grove itself. Seen better days. This rainrutted ground is hard on her. "Do as I say!" Missy Lavinia snaps. "She steps light in the left front hoof, your mare." Juneau Jane comes out of her quiet to speak for the horse. "Wise to spare her, if we have a distance to travel yet." A distance to travel yet, I think. How long’s this errand meant to take? Longer it goes, better chance of us getting caught. A itch starts under my borrowed shirt. The kind of itch that warns of a knowing. Mile after mile, crop field after crop field, settlement after settlement, river landing after river landing we pass by, that itch gets deeper, burrows right up under my skin and stays there. This is bad business, and now I’m too far in it to get out. Feels like we come plumb almost to New Orleans by the time we get where Missy Lavinia has in mind. I smell the place and hear its sounds before seeing it. Coal stoves and woodsmoke. The chug and whistle and slap-slap of riverboats churning up the water. The cough-puff, cough-puff of cotton gins and steam-fired syrup mills. Smoke hangs low, another sky. It’s a dirty place, black soot laying over brick buildings, clapboard houses, and men and horses alike. Mules and workers drag cotton bales, cordwood, hogsheads of sugar, molasses, and whiskey barrels to the paddle wheelers loading to go upriver, north to where folks have money to buy the goods. Old Ginger’s got a pretty good limp now, so I’m glad to pull her up, even if I don’t like the look of things here. I weave the carriage through men and crates and wagons, mostly work rigs, tended to by colored help and a few white-trash croppers. There’s no fancy outfit like ours anyplace in sight. No ladies, either. We catch notice, coming up the street. White men stop, scratch their chins, and cast glances our way. Coloreds peek from under their hats, shake their heads, and try to catch my eye with warning looks, like I ought to know better. "Best git your missies on down the road," one whispers when I climb off to lead Old Ginger through a space where two wagons been parked so narrow, there’s almost no way past. "Ain’t a place for them." "Ain’t my choice," I mutter low. "Not staying long, neither." "Best not." The man shifts empty barrels to let us pass. "Don’t let the moon find you and your missies out ’long the road, neither." "Stop dallying!" Missy Lavinia grabs the coachman’s whip from the seat and tries to reach the horse with it. "Leave my driver alone, boy. Move out of the way. We’ve business to attend to." The man backs off. "Let the darkies get within five feet of one another, and all they want to do is loll around and chat," Missy squawks. "Isn’t that so, boy?" "Yes’m," I say back. "That sure is true." For the first time, there’s a thrill in fooling her this way. She don’t have one thin idea who she’s talking to. Might be a sin to lie, but I take pride in it, of a sudden. I take power in it. We come round some buildings that faces the river on one side. Missy Lavinia wants to go in the alleyway behind, so that’s what I do. "There," she says, like she’s been here before, but I got a sense she’s seeing all this for the first time. "The red door. Mr. Washburn’s shipping office is inside. He is not only an adviser to Papa in matters of law, and the superintendent of Papa’s land holdings in Texas, he is also one of Papa’s closest associates in business, as you may or may not know. Papa took me to dinner with Mr. Washburn in New Orleans. They spoke late into the night in the lounge after I was to retire to our hotel suite. I lingered a bit, of course, to listen. They being members of the same…society of gentlemen…Mr. Washburn committed to looking after Father’s intentions, should Father be unable. Papa later instructed me to seek out Mr. Washburn, if the need should ever arise. He will have copies of Father’s papers. Why, he most likely drew them up for Papa personally." I peek under my hat to gander at Juneau Jane. She believing all this? Her kid leather gloves finger the reins while she looks at that building. The big gray horse, he’s troubled by her worry. He twists his head back and nuzzles her boot, then nickers soft. "Come along," Missy pesters, and wants down from the carriage. I got no choice but to help her. "We can’t solve our trouble sitting here, now can we? You’ve nothing to fear, Juneau Jane. Unless, of course, you really are uncertain of your position, that is?" The trouble-itch goes all over me. Missy’s rubbing that gold locket she’s had almost long as I can remember. She only does that when she’s fixing to hatch somethin’ awful bad. Juneau Jane best turn that gray horse the other way and spur him to a gallop. Whatever Missy’s got in mind to happen next, it ain’t good. I barely hear when that red door creaks open. A tall, well-made man with skin a light shade of brown answers. I’d take him for the butler, but he ain’t wearing livery, just a work shirt and brown wool trousers that form over his strong thighs and dip into stovepipe boots at the knee. He frowns and eyeballs us close, all three. "Yes’m?" he says to Missy. "I help you, Missus? Believe you must’ve come callin’ at the wrong door." "I’m expected," Missy snaps. "Hadn’t been told of anybody expected." He don’t move, and Missy turns peevish. "I’ll see your employer, boy. Fetch him for me, now, I say." "Moses!" A man’s voice calls from inside, quick and ornery. "Mind the task I’ve put you to. Five more men to crew the Genesee Star. Healthy with strong backs. Have them here by midnight." Moses gives us one last look before he steps back into the shadows and is gone. A white man takes up the empty space. He’s tall and thin, hollow in his cheeks with a straw-colored mustache and beard that rounds down and circles the bony point of his chin. "I’m expected. We’ve come to see a friend," Missy says, but she’s rubbing her neck and sounds like she’s got cotton in her throat, so I know she ain’t telling the truth. Stepping out the door, the man chicken-jerks his head side to side, checking the alley. Scars run over the left side of his face like melted candle wax, and a patch covers one eye. The good eye turns my way. "Our mutual friend specifically requested that only the two of you come." I squat down, checking the horse’s bad leg, getting myself small as possible. "And we have. Why, other than my driver boy, of course." Missy Lavinia laughs, nervous-like. "The road isn’t safe for a woman alone. Surely Mr. Washburn will understand." Missy pulls her hands behind her back, pushing her bosom up to show it off, only she ain’t got much of one. She’s just square and straight, all the way up and down, big shouldered like Old Mister. "I’ve a distance to return home on the road yet and barely the daylight needed. I’d prefer to conclude our business as efficiently as possible. I’ve brought what I was asked to, exactly as requested…by Mr. Washburn." Don’t know if anybody else sees it or not, but Missy cuts a quick nod toward Juneau Jane, like that’s what she was told to bring—her little half sister. The door opens wide, and the man disappears behind it. A sticky, pricklin’ cold goes all over me. Juneau Jane ties her horse to the wagon but stands flat-footed in the street, her blue-striped skirt and white petticoats catching the wind and molding to the calves of her skinny legs. She threads her arms and crinkles her nose like she’s got a whiff of stink. "What is this that you have been requested to bring? How shall I be assured you have not offered compensation to Mr. Washburn as payment for a convenient lie?" "Mr. Washburn needs nothing from me. Why, the man owns all of this." Missy waves toward the big building and the river landing on past it. "In partnership with Papa, of course. I’d be most pleased to speak with Mr. Washburn alone, but then you’d have to trust that I will bring to you what information I am able to gather. If Mr. Washburn holds the only remaining copy of Papa’s papers, I could burn them right here in this building, and you would never know. I assume you’ll want to see for yourself. I won’t have you questioning me afterward. If you don’t come in, you must accept my word." Juneau Jane’s arms go stiff at her sides. Her hands ball into fists. "More freely, I would trust a serpent." "As I thought." Missy holds out a hand toward Juneau Jane, palm up. "Then let’s go inside. We’ll do it together." Juneau Jane sweeps past the stretched hand, marches up the steps, and walks in the door. Last thing I see of her is that long, dark hair. "Look after the horses, boy. Should anything happen to them, I’ll take it out of your hide…one way or another." Then Missy Lavinia goes, too. The red door swings closed, and I hear the bolt slide into the hasp. I tie off the saddle horse, loosen the checkrein and the belly band a notch on Ginger, then find me a spot in the shade along the wall, wiggle into a empty sugar hogshead turned on its side, let my head fall back, and close my eyes. The long night with not much sleep comes to catch me before I know it. But so does the dream of the trader’s yard. That tipped-over barrel turns into the slave pen where I’m carried off from Mama one more time. T CHAPTER 6 BENNY SILVA—AUGUSTINE, LOUISIANA, 1987 he rain finally stops by the time I get home. Sloshing past the hidden garden saint and up the porch steps, I feel guilty for my slightly emotional phone call to LaJuna’s aunt, which I had to let myself into the empty school building to make. Aunt Sarge, whose real name I now know is Donna Alston, probably thinks I am a basket case, but in my own defense, rain was sheeting the school windows in blinding torrents. I could only imagine how much might be streaming through the roof at home, and how close it could be to overwhelming the capacity of my makeshift countertop reservoir. To her credit, Aunt Sarge is as good as her word. She arrives right behind me, and we enter the house and check my catch pot together, then haul it out to the porch for a dump, before even making introductions. "You’ve got a problem." Aunt Sarge is all business. She’s a stoutly built African American woman with the look of a fitness coach and a military bearing that silently says, Don’t mess with me. "I can get out here tomorrow to fix it." "Tomorrow?" I stammer. "I was hoping to get it taken care of today. Before the rain starts again." "Tomorrow afternoon," she replies. "Best I can do." She goes on to tell me that she’s watching a relative’s children until then and has left a neighbor keeping them for a moment, so as to run down here. I offer to sit with the children myself, even have them hang out there at my house if she will fix the roof. "Two are down with strep throat," she counters. "Reason why they’re not at the babysitter’s. And their mama can’t miss work. Jobs aren’t easy to find around here." There’s an edge behind that comment, one that makes me feel like I’m being accused of something. Taking a job that could have been filled by a local, maybe? But I was a last resort for this position. A week before the start of school, Principal Pevoto would’ve taken anyone with a teaching certificate and a pulse. "Oh," I muse. "Sorry. I can’t take a chance of getting sick. Just started work." "I know." She adds a rueful smirk. "One of the new victims." "Yeah." "Subbed at the school a couple times right after I got out of the army last spring. Couldn’t find anything else." The comment requires no further elaboration. Her facial expression says it all. For an instant, the atmosphere between us feels almost collegial. I think she’s resisting a smile, but she says, straight-faced, "Just grab their heads and thump them together. Worked for me." My mouth drops open. "Course they didn’t ask me back again after that." She climbs onto the brick column at the bottom of the porch post, grabs the decking above the rafters, and does a chin-up, then hangs there a minute, studying the roof, before swinging herself easily back onto the porch. The landing is superhero worthy. This, I register silently, is no ordinary woman. I get the impression she could smoothly vault herself onto the roof barehanded. I want to be like her, not some namby-pamby suburban knucklehead who knows nothing of roof tar. "All right," she says. "It’s patchable." "Will it cost much?" "Thirty…forty bucks. I charge eight bucks an hour, plus materials." "Sounds fair." I’m thrilled it’s not worse, but this is definitely going to cut into my classroom snack-cake funds. Hopefully I can get the roof money out of my landlord soon. "But that’s not likely to be the last problem you have." She squints upward, points out several places where water has dripped through and inked mildew-colored stains on the beadboard porch ceiling. "Only place this roof needs to go’s right over there." She nods toward the cemetery. "Thing’s a better fit for a funeral than a prayer." I chuckle appreciatively. "I like that saying." I’m a collector of creative idioms. I once wrote an entire graduate-level term paper about them. So far, Louisiana is a collector’s dream. "You can borrow it. No charge." A brow lowers and a hooded glance slides my way. It’s easy to forget, when you’ve been hanging around the college English department for years, that people outside those hallowed halls don’t carry on conversations about idioms, or talk at length about the distinction between analogies and metaphors. They don’t debate the dividing lines while strolling along, lugging weighty backpacks or sitting in tiny apartments sipping cheap wine in thriftshop stemware. I survey the bowed, splotched porch ceiling, wonder how long it might be before this sort of thing starts happening inside the house. "Maybe I can get the landlord to put on a new roof." Aunt Sarge scratches the skin around her ear, smooths a few stray wisps into a short, slicked-back ponytail bun of chestnut hair. "Good luck with that. Only reason Nathan Gossett kept this house up at all was because Miss Retta was like part of the judge’s family. She was hoping to get back here after her stroke. Now that she’s passed and the judge’s passed, I can pretty much guarantee—Nathan Gossett would be just as glad to let it all fall in. Doubt if he even knows someone like you rented this place." My back stiffens. "Someone like me?" "Out-of-towner. Woman moving in alone. This isn’t that kind of house." "I don’t mind it." My hackles are rising. "I was moving with my boyfriend…fiancé…but, well, you can see it’s just me here." Sarge and I have another one of those moments. An instant in which some sort of line has been crossed, and we’re standing on the same side, strangely simpatico. It’s fleeting, like the sudden breeze that kicks up, carrying the scent of more rain. I cast a worried glance. "That won’t get here for a couple hours yet," Sarge assures me. "Be gone by tomorrow morning." "I hope my drip pan can hold off the tide until then." She checks her watch and starts down the porch steps. "Put the trash can under it. You’ve got one, right?" "Thanks. Yeah. I will." I’m not about to admit the idea never even crossed my mind. "Be back tomorrow." She lifts a hand in a manner appropriate for either a dismissive wave or flipping someone the bird. "Hey," I call just before she climbs into a red pickup truck with a ladder in the back. "How do I get to the judge’s house from here? Someone said it’s close enough to walk across the field." "LaJuna tell you that?" "Why?" "She likes to go there." "LaJuna? How does she get all the way out here?" My house is five miles from town. "Bike, I imagine." Sarge meets my curiosity with a wary look. "She’s not hurting anything. She’s a good kid." "Oh I know." In truth, I haven’t a clue about who LaJuna really is, other than that she was nice to me at the restaurant. "It seems like a long bike ride, that’s all." Aunt Sarge pauses by her truck, studies me a moment. "Shorter by the old farm levee lane. Cuts across back there." She nods toward the orchard behind my house and the tilled field beyond, where the crops are knee-high and bright green. "Highway goes around all the property that was Goswood Grove. The farm levee lane cuts right through the middle of the plantation, takes you past the back of the big house. When I was a kid, farmers still came and went that way to bring crops to market and their cane to the syrup mill, especially the old folks farming with mules, yet. Couple miles makes a big difference when you’re moving at two miles an hour." My mind hiccups. Mules? This is 1987. I’d guess Sarge to be only in her thirties. "Thanks again for coming by so quickly. I really appreciate it. I can’t be home tomorrow to unlock the house until after school." She squints again at the roof. "I shouldn’t need to get in. Probably have it fixed and be gone before you get here." I’m a little disappointed. LaJuna’s aunt is perhaps a bit gruff, but she’s an interesting personality. And she knows things about Augustine, yet I get an inkling that she’s not exactly an insider, either. Her perspective could be helpful. Besides, I’d really like to make a friend or two here. "Of course." I try again. "But if you end up still being around when I get home, I usually brew some coffee after work. Sit out on the screen porch in back and have a cup." It’s an awkward invitation, but it’s a start. "Girl, I’d be up all night." She opens her truck door. Stops one more time and gives me the same perplexed look I got when I asked Granny T to speak to my classes. "You need to lay off that stuff in the evening. Messes with your sleep." "You’re probably right." Lately, I don’t sleep, but I blame job trauma combined with financial stress. "Well, if I miss you tomorrow, you’ll leave a bill for me? Or drop it by the school?" "I’ll stick it in your screen door. Got no interest in that school." She departs without further niceties. I’m reminded that Augustine operates under some unwritten code I neither understand nor can communicate in. Trying to decipher it is like being tucked in the back bedroom of my father’s New York apartment, sitting on the edge of a daybed with my suitcase between my knees, listening as my dad, his wife, and my grandparents conversed in rapid-fire Italian, and wondering if my little half sisters, lying in their beds in the adjoining room, could understand what was being said. About me. I push that memory aside and hurry back into the house, where I trade my work treads for the duck shoes I used on rainy college campus days. They’re the closest things I have to boots, and they will have to do. Hopefully, I won’t be wading through anything too deep in order to find this levee lane. I want to at least give it a try before the rain starts again. Curiosity nibbles as I slog off across the backyard toward the overgrown hedges of oleander and honeysuckle that separate the house property from a small orchard and garden patch, and then the surrounding farm fields. My shoes are wet inside and encased in five pounds of mud by the time I find a rise of ground that snakes along an irrigation canal. The farm levee lane, I’m guessing. The ghost of a wagon trail traces the top of it, but mostly it’s hidden beneath grass and autumn wildflowers. A shaft of sunlight pushes its way through the haze overhead, as if to encourage me to follow. Live oaks shimmer in the golden glow, dripping diamond-like liquid from waxy leaves. Their gnarled branches clutch closer together, moss curtains swaying aimlessly beneath. In thick shadow, the road seems eerie, otherworldly, a passageway to another realm, like Narnia’s wardrobe or Alice’s rabbit hole. I stand and peer down its length, my heart suspended in my chest. I wonder at the conversations this place has heard, the people and animals who have passed along this rise of ground. Who rode in the wagons that hollowed out the ruts? Where were those people going? What did they talk about? Were there battles here? Did soldiers fire shots across this thoroughfare? Do bullets hide still, encased deep in the fiber and bark of these ancient trees? I know the cursory details of the Civil War, but almost nothing about Louisiana’s history. Now that seems like a deficit. I want to understand this reedy, marshy corner of the world that scratches its existence equally from land, and river, and swamp, and sea. My home for the next five years if I can figure out how to survive here. I need more pieces to the puzzle, but no one is going to hand them to me. I have to find them. Dig them from their hiding places, from the ground and the people. Listen, the road seems to admonish. Listen. I have stories. I close my eyes, and I hear voices. Thousands whispering all at once. I can’t make out any single one, but I know they’re here. What do they have to say? Opening my eyes, I push my hands into the pockets of my purple raincoat and start walking. The air is quiet, but my mind is noisy. My heart speeds up as I form plans. I need tools to understand this place, to make inroads here. Ding Dongs are tools. Books are tools. But the stories that aren’t in books, the ones no one has written down, like the one Granny T shared with me, like Aunt Sarge telling about farmers pulling wagons to market with mules: Those are tools, too. Sad thing when stories die for the lack of listenin’ ears. Granny T is right. There must be other people around here with stories no one’s listening to. Real stories that might teach the same lessons I was hoping to bring out in literature. What if I could make them part of my curriculum, somehow? Maybe they could help me understand this place and my students. Maybe they could help my students understand each other. I’m so busy walking and thinking, scheming and planning and crafting positive visualizations of how to make next week different from last week, that when I come out of my imaginary world into the real one again, the tree tunnel around the road is gone and I’m walking past an enormous farm field. I have no idea how far I’ve hiked. My mind hasn’t registered a thing. On either side of the raised lane, neatly planted rows of what looks like spiky grass stand half submerged in water. The sunshine is gone, and the vibrant green seems startlingly bright against the cloudy day—as if I’m looking at it on a TV set and a two-year-old has been playing with the color knob. I realize now what has stopped me in my tracks and awakened me. Two things, rather. One, I’ve apparently walked right past the judge’s place without noticing, because if I continue beyond this field, I’ll be in the fringes of town. Two, I can’t continue on at the moment. A log is blocking the trail ahead…only it’s not a log. It’s an alligator. Not a huge alligator, but big enough that it’s just sitting there, rather fearlessly sizing me up. I fasten my gaze upon it, awed and horrified. It’s the largest predator I’ve ever seen outside a TV screen. "I move him for ya!" It’s then that I notice, in the periphery, the little boy with the bicycle. His dirty shirt bears the evidence of the chicken leg spirited away from the Cluck and Oink earlier. "No. No-no-no!" But my words have zero effect. The kid makes a run at the gator, pushing his bike like a ramrod. "Stop! Get back!" I rush forward, with no idea what I plan to do. Fortunately, the alligator is off-put by the brouhaha. It slinks down the side of the lane into the watery field below. "You shouldn’t do that!" I gasp. "Those are dangerous." The kid blinks, murky light accentuating bewildered wrinkles in his forehead. Wide brown eyes regard me from beneath the impossibly thick lashes I noticed the first day I saw him sitting alone in the empty schoolyard. "Him’s not a very big’un," he says of the alligator. My heart squeezes. His voice and the slight speech difficulty make him seem even younger than he probably is. Regardless, I don’t think a five-or-six-year-old should be wandering all over town like this. Crossing streets and chasing alligators. "What are you doing out here by yourself?" His bony shoulders rise, then fall under the lopsided straps of a faded, grease-striped Spider-Man muscle shirt. That plus the baggy shorts are really a pair of pajamas. I shake the tension from my hands, try to get my wits about me. The leftover buzz of fear has me still prepared to do battle. Leaning in, I go for eye contact. "What’s your name? Do you live around here?" He nods. "Are you lost?" He shakes his head. "Do you need help?" Another nonverbal no. "All right then, I want you to look at me now." He flutters a glance up, then away again. I do the teacher thing with two fingers to my eyeballs, then pointed toward his. We’re locked in. "You know how to get home from here?" His gaze holds fast to mine, his head moving uncertainly up and down. He’s like a stray kitten in a corner, trying to figure out what he has to do to get away from me. "Is it very far?" He points vaguely toward the ramshackle cluster of houses on the other side of the field. "I want you to get on your bike and go right there. And stay there, because there’s a storm coming, and I don’t want you to get hit by lightning or anything like that, okay?" He visibly deflates, displeased. He had other plans. I shudder to think of what they were. "I’m a teacher and kids have to do what teachers say, right?" No answer. "What’s your name?" "Tobiashh." "Tobias? Well, that’s a great name. Good to make your acquaintance, Tobias." I offer a hand, and he’s willing to shake, but he giggles and quickly withdraws, tucking the arm behind his back. "Tobias, you are a very brave, and might I add incredibly handsome, little Spider-Man, and I would hate to see you drowned in a rainstorm, or eaten by an alligator." His eyebrows rise, then fall, rise again, then sort of bounce around his little forehead. "And thank you for saving me from the alligator, but I don’t want you to ever, ever, ever do that with any alligator, ever again, anywhere. Are we clear on that?" He pulls his bottom lip between his eye teeth—the middle ones are missing—then he licks a smear of dirt or barbecue sauce. "Promise me now. And remember, superheroes always keep their promises. Spider-Man, especially. Spider-Man never breaks a promise. And not to a teacher, for sure." He likes this superhero thing. The rounded shoulders straighten. He nods. " ’Kay." "All right. You go on home. Remember, you promised." Turning the bike toward town, he drapes one knee clumsily over the too-high bar and looks back at me. "What your name?" "Miss Silva." He grins, and I wish for a second that I had an elementary teaching certificate. "Miss Seeba," he says. In a flash, he is gone, the bike wiggling its way down the levee until it’s moving fast enough to draw a straight path. I do a quick alligator check before turning and striding off in the direction from whence I came. No more daydreaming for me. Out here, paying attention is a matter of survival. Even though I’m watchful on my way back, I almost miss the path to the judge’s old house a second time. A row of wildly overgrown crape myrtles shields the property from the lane. Thick with sucker shoots, marauding grapevine, and copious amounts of what looks like poison ivy, it’s almost indistinguishable from the natural landscape, save for the empty hulls of the summer’s blooms protruding like burned-out Christmas lights. Between the roots, moss grows in a jigsaw puzzle of green, rectangular shapes. I scrape one with my shoe and uncover the paving stone of a long-ago footpath or driveway. Broken myrtle branches testify to the fact that someone has created a narrow passage through the bowed trunks. My mind zips back to a six-month stint of living in Mississippi with my mom and her boyfriend at the time, who didn’t much care for kids. As an escape, my stuffed animals and I made a secret fort among the crape myrtles of a beautiful, flower-laden estate nearby. Slipping through the gap now feels completely natural, but the garden on the other side, while unkempt, is on a much more epic scale. Yawning live oaks, tumbledown benches, stately pecan trees, and the remains of winding brick walls provide unorthodox trellises for enormous runs of old-fashioned climbing roses. Here and there, mildew-speckled marble pillars lift their crowns above the sea of greenery, standing like dispossessed royalty, frozen in time. No one has tended this place for a very long while, yet it is beautiful even now, peaceful, despite the wind kicking up. A ghostly white hand reaches toward my foot as I turn a corner, and I do an involuntary cat-leap before realizing the severed limb belongs to a toppled one-armed cherub. It lounges nearby on a hammock of tangled trumpet vines, its stone eyes fixed toward heaven with eternal longing. I’m momentarily tempted to rescue it, and then I remember Councilman Walker’s story about moving Miss Retta’s garden saint to the flower bed at my house. The cherub is undoubtedly more than I can lift. Maybe he’s comfortable there, I think. It’s a pretty nice view. I follow the path over an arched brick bridge, where rainbowcolored fish dart about the shallows below. I’m careful, working my way through the knee-high overgrowth on the other side. Alligators, for one thing. And poison ivy. The house comes into view around the last bend. I pass a crumbling gateway, and I’m in a yard that’s freshly mown, the grass thick and lush and waterlogged from the recent rain. The rumbling sky reminds me that there’s more moisture on the way and I’d better not dally. If I had my druthers, I’d stand here and take it all in awhile, soaking up ambiance. Though both show the unmistakable signs of neglect, the house and yard are magnificent, even from the back. Epic oaks and pecans line the drive and shield it overhead. At least a dozen magnolias stretch upward, their branches capped with thick green leaves. Crape myrtles with intertwined trunks as big around as my leg, antique roses, oleander, althea, milk-and-wine lilies, and spindly fouro’clocks scribble riotous patches of color alongside the old Grand House, pressing free from the artificial confines of flower beds and spilling onto the grass. The sweet scent of nectar wars with the salty air of the oncoming storm. Presiding silently over its dominion, the stately house stands perched one story off the ground on a raised brick basement. A narrow wooden staircase up the back provides the closest entry to a wide, breezy wraparound gallery framed by thick white columns that lean inward and outward like crooked teeth. The decking groans underfoot as I traverse it, the sound mingling with a mystical, uneven melody of clinking metal and glass. I find the music’s source out front. Near a pair of grand staircases that circle from the ground in ram’s horn fashion, a wind chime of forks and spoons clatters softly, testing the worn bit of twine that suspends it. Beside the porch, a barren tree strung with multicolored bottles adds a smattering of indiscriminate high notes. I knock on the door, peek through the sidelight window, say "Hello?" a few times, even though it’s clear that, while the yard has been mowed and the flower beds around the house kept up, no one lives here and no one has for a while. The circular patterns of rainspattered dust cover the porch floor, disturbed only by the tracks I’ve made. I know it instantly when I reach the window to the room LaJuna told me of. I don’t even lean close to the thick, wavy glass or shield the slight glare from the going sun. I just stand before the double glass doors, stare through the grid of cobweb-laced wood and glass, and take in rows upon rows upon rows of books. A literary treasure trove, waiting to be mined. I CHAPTER 7 HANNIE GOSSETT—AUGUSTINE, LOUISIANA, 1875 t’s dark when I come awake, not even a moon splinter or a gas lamp or a lit pine knot to see by. Can’t think where I am, or how I come to be here, only that my neck’s sore, and there’s a numb spot on my head where it’s rested on rough wood. I reach up to rub it, and half figure I’ll find a bald place. Back in our refugee years on the Texas plantation, when work was hard and help had got thin after the swamp fever and the black tongue killed some and others run off, even us from the house worked the cotton patch right alongside the field hands. The job for the children was toting water. Buckets on our heads, back and to, back and to, and back again. So many buckets, the wood rubbed us bald on top long before the harvest. But there’s hair on my head when my fingers test it. Hair sheared short so I don’t have to trouble with it, but I’ve got on a hat instead of a headscarf. John’s field hat. My mind trips a step or two, then breaks to a run, comes back to where I am now. In a alley, dead asleep in a hogshead barrel that’s still got the boiled sweet smell of cane syrup. Ain’t supposed to be dark, and you ain’t supposed to be still here, Hannie—that’s what hits me first. Where’s Missy? Where’s Juneau Jane? A noise comes close by, and I know it’s what woke me. Somebody’s unbuckling the traces and tugs, unhooking Old Ginger from the calèche. "You want us to roll the wagon off in the river, Lieutenant? She’s heavy enough, she’ll sink mighty good. Nobody know any different, come mornin’." A man clears his throat. When he talks, I try to decide if he’s the same one who took Missy and Juneau Jane in the building hours ago. "Leave it. I’ll have it disposed of before morning. Load the horses onto the Genesee Star. We’ll wait until we’re past the mouth of the Red and over the state line into Texas to sell them. The gray is the sort too easily recognized nearby. An ounce of care saves a kettle of trouble, Moses. Remember that, or it’ll be your hide." "Yas’ir, Lieutenant. I remember that." "You’re a good boy, Moses. I reward loyalty as verily as I punish the lack of it." "Yas’ir." Somebody’s light-fingering Old Ginger and the gray! My body comes full alive so quick I can barely keep from jumping out, hollering. We need the horses to get us back home, and beside that, I was left to watch out for the stock and the carriage. If Missy Lavinia don’t do me in, Old Missus will when she finds out. I might as soon be sunk in the river right alongside of that calèche, and take John and Jason and Tati with me. Dead from drowning’s better than starving to death. Old Missus will make sure we can’t get work nor a meal anyplace. Some way, this mess with Missy Lavinia will be all my doing, before it’s over. "You find her driver boy yet?" the man asks. "Nah, sir. Reckon he run off." "You find the boy, Moses. Get rid of him." "Yas’ir. I do that directly, boss." "See that you don’t stop until it’s done." The door opens and closes and the Lieutenant goes into the building, but Moses stays. The alley’s so quiet, I don’t dare even get my legs bunched under me to run. Can he hear me breathing? These men ain’t just some horse thieves. There’s doings here that’s worse by far. Something tied to that man Missy and Juneau Jane went to see, Mr. Washburn. My leg twitches all on its own. The jingling harness buckles and chains go quiet, and I feel Moses looking my way. Heavy steps grind the stones in the alley, come closer one at a time, careful. A pistol slides from its holster. The hammer draws back. I swallow my breath, press into the wood staves. This how I die? I think to myself. After all these years of toil, I don’t grow more than eighteen years old. Don’t have a husband. No babies. Just dead by the hand of a bad man and dumped off in the river. Moses is right on me now, trying to see in the shadows. Hide me, I beg that old hogshead and the dark. Hide me good. "Mmm-hmmm…" He makes the sound deep in his throat. His smells—tobacco, gun sulfur, wet wood, and sausage grease—dance up my nose. Why’s he waiting? Why don’t he shoot? Should I bust out, try to get past him? Old Ginger nickers and paws, nervous, like she knows this is trouble. Like she feels it the way animals do. She snorts and squeals, and dances over the shafts to take a kick at the gray. The man, Moses, must’ve stood them too close together. He don’t know them two horses ain’t familiar. Old boss mare like Ginger, she’ll put a young rowdy gelding in his place, first chance she gets. "Har!" Moses moves away to settle the horses. I weigh out my chances on running or keeping hid. He stays with the stock, and I hold still. Seems like hours I wait for him to calm the horses, then check up and down the alley, knocking over stacks of crates and kicking up trash piles. Finally, he fires off a shot, but he’s far down from me. I wrap my arms over my head and wonder if that bullet’s coming my way, but it don’t. No more follow after it. A window slides up just over my head, and the Lieutenant hollers at Moses to get done with the job he’s at; there’s cargo to load yet. He wants Moses to see to it, personal. Especially the horses. Get them on the boat and get rid of the boy. "Yas’ir." The horses’ iron shoes ring against the stones and echo on the walls when he leads them off. I wait till the sounds fade before I creep from my spot and hurry to the calèche to feel around for Missy Lavinia’s brown lace reticule. Without it, we ain’t got money or food to get us back home. Once it’s in my hand, I run like the devil’s on my hind heels. Thing is, he might be. I don’t stop till I’m away from that building and down toward the water, where there’s men and boys swarming a night-call boat like ants on a mound. Pushing Missy Lavinia’s reticule down the front of my britches, I move off from the river landing to where farm wagons and freighter wagons sit parked in a camp lot, waiting for boats that’ll come in tomorrow. Tents billow and sigh in the river breeze and wagon curtains and mosquito nets hang stretched to tree branches, sheltering bed pallets underneath. I slip through the camps quiet as the breeze, the voice of the river covering the little sounds of my passing. Water’s up high from spring rains, the old Mississippi making a ear-filling noise like the drummers on their homemade drums did back before the freedom. When the harvest was in—corn was always last of all—the masters had big corn-shuckin’ celebration parties, with platters of ham, sausage, fried chicken, bowls of gravy and peas, Irish potatoes, and barrels of corn liquor, all anybody wanted. Shuck corn and eat and drink and shuck more corn. Play the fiddle and banjo. Sing "Oh! Susanna" and "Swanee River." Have us a frolic, finally free of our labor till it all started up again. After the white folks had long took their leave of the party and gone up to the Grand House, the fiddlers put away their fiddles and took out the drums, and the people danced in the old way, their bodies slick in the lantern light, swaying and stomping and feeling the rhythms. The old ones, weary in their chairs after the hard season of cane cutting and feeding the steam mill in the sugarhouse, threw back their heads in their chairs and sang songs in the tongues they learned from their mamas and grandmamas. The songs of long-gone places. Tonight, the river’s like they were then, wild and looking for a way free, crashing and pushing at the walls built up by men to keep it trapped. I find a wagon with nobody near and climb up into a safe place between piles of oilcloth, a space just big enough for me to fit into. Gathering my knees to my chest, I wrap my arms tight, and try to make sense of things in my mind. Off through the wagons and tents, stevedores and roustabouts come and go from the buildings along the row, rolling barrels and wheeling loaded-down handcarts. They move in a rush under the gas lamps, loading the boat so it can take to the water by morning light. That the Genesee Star the Lieutenant man spoke of to Moses? Moses comes and goes from the buildings to the boat, answers my question. He points, gives orders, pushes the workers along. He’s a strong, brash man like the slave drivers of the old days. The driver was always the sort that’d use the cat-o’-nine-tails on his own kind to earn hisself good food and a better house. Type who’d kill his own color and bury them out in the field and plow and plant over their graves next season. I scoot farther back in the canvas when Moses turns toward the camp, even though I know he can’t see me here. How’d Missy get herself tied up with men like these? I need to find the why of it, and so I open her lace bag to see what’s there. Inside is a kerchief that smells like it’s got corn pone wrapped inside. Missy don’t go too many places without food. My stomach squeezes while I finger through the rest of what she was carrying. A coin pouch with six Liberty dollars, Missy’s ivory hair combs, and, at the very bottom, something rolled up in one of Old Mister’s black silk cravats. The thing inside is hard and heavy and jingles a little when I unwrap it. A shudder goes through me as a little pearl-handle twoshot pistol and a pair of loose rimfire cartridges drops in my palm. I dump the pistol back in the cloth and sit looking at it on my knee. What’s Missy doing with something like that? She’s a fool for getting herself in this mess, that’s what she is. A fool. I let the pistol stay there while I open the corn pone and eat some. It’s dry and hard to get down without water, so I don’t eat much, just enough to settle my stomach and my head. I put the rest back in Missy’s reticule with the money pouch. Then I sit looking at the little pistol again. The smells of pipe smoke and leather, shaving soap and sipping whiskey rise up from the cloth that wrapped it, bringing to mind Old Mister. He’ll come home, and all this mess will be over, I tell myself. He’ll be good to his word about the land papers. He won’t let Old Missus stop it. Old Mister don’t know you’re here. The idea slips through my head, sudden as a thief. Nobody knows it. Not Missus. Not even Missy Lavinia. She thinks some yard boy drove her carriage to this place. Make your way home, Hannie. Don’t ever tell nobody what you seen tonight. That voice falls easy on my ear, takes me back to the last time somebody else tried to get me to bolt and run from trouble, but I didn’t do it. If I had, maybe I’d still have a sister right now. One, at least. "We oughta take our chance," my sister Epheme had whispered to me all them years ago when Jep Loach had us behind his wagon. We’d stumbled off into the woods to do our necessary, just us two little girls. Our bodies were stiff and sore from walking and whippings and nights on the froze-up ground. The morning air spit ice and the wind moaned like the devil when Epheme looked in my eye and said, "We oughta run, Hannie. You and me. We oughta, while we can." My heart pounded from fear and cold. Just the night before, Jep Loach had held his knife in the firelight and told us what he’d do if we troubled him. "M-m-marse is comin’ to f-fetch us," I’d stammered out, too nervous to work my mouth right. "Ain’t nobody gonna save us. We got to save ourselves." Epheme was just nine, three years older than me, but she was brave. Her words peck at me now. She was right back then. We should’ve run while we could. Together. Epheme got sold off, two days farther down the road, and that’s the last I ever laid eyes on her. I oughta run now, before I get shot or worse. Why’s it my trouble, what young Missy’s got herself into? Her and that girl, that Juneau Jane, who’s been fetched up like a queen all these years? Why I oughta care? What’d anybody ever give me? Hard work till my body screams from it and my hands bleed raw from the cotton thorns and I fall to bed nine in the evening, then get up at four the next morning, start all over again. One more season. Just one more season, and you’re finally gonna have something, Hannie. Something of your own. Make a life. Jason maybe ain’t the quickest in the head, not as exciting as some, but he’s a fine, honest worker. You know he’d be good to you. Get walking. Get back into your dress and burn these clothes soon’s you make it to home. Nobody ever need know. The plan sets up in my head. I’ll tell Tati I been holed up in the cellar of the Grand House, couldn’t slip out because there’s too many hired boys out sweeping the yard, then I fell asleep after that. Nobody’s got to know. I set my teeth in that idea, and put away the pistol, cinch up Missy’s reticule, hard and angry. What’d I do to deserve this mess, anyhow? Stuck here hiding in some wagon camp, dead of night, man chasing after me, wants to shoot me and dump me in the river? Nothing. That’s what. Just like the old days. Young Missy starts her mean ideas to rolling downhill, sits back and waits for somebody to get smushed. Then she stands with her fat little hands behind her back, rocking on them round little feet, proud that she’s got away with it. Not this time. Missy Lavinia can find her own way out of trouble. I’m bound to get myself to the edge of town while it’s still dark, seek a place off the road to hunker down till first light. Can’t start for home till then. Colored folk traveling alone, there’s still plenty of riders working the night roads, same as the patrollers did back in the old times, keep our kind from going place to place, unless they’re doing business for white folk. Peeking from the tarps, I look over the wagon camp to figure my best way out. Closer toward the landing, a flash of a man in a white shirt catches my eye. I pull back, in case he’s looking at me. Then I see it ain’t a man, just a set of clothes that’s been hung up in a tree branch to dry out overnight. The little cook fire underneath sputters down to coals. A wagon curtain is stretched across and tied to the branch, a net slung over it to keep off the mosquitos. A big pair of feet pushes up against the net, flopped out sidewards. The first part of my plan comes clear. I slip from my hiding spot, step soundless on the ground, and move through the patches of shadow and moon to that camp. I take the hat that dangles there, change it for the one on my head, and try not to think about if it’s thieving when you take somebody’s hat but leave your own in trade for it. In case Moses, or the scarred man, or his workers are still hunting me, I’ll look different when I get on the road tomorrow. My fingers fly up and down my shirt, undoing the bone buttons. I slip it off and reach for the stranger’s white one before the mosquitos have time to get after me. The collar hangs up when I tug, and even though I’m tall, I have to jump to get it loose without tearing. The branch snaps back and pulls at the man’s camp shelter, and he tosses on his pallet, snorts and coughs. I stay still as the dead, waiting for him to settle, before I throw my old shirt on the branch and run off half-naked, carrying his. I hunker down in a stubble field just off from the camps to get dressed. A dog barks in the woods, and then another with it. Then a third. They sing the long, wavering song of a hunt. I hark to the days when the overseers and the patrollers rode the night with their tracking hounds, chasing after the runners that tried to hide in the swamps or head north. Sometimes, the runaways got caught quick. Sometimes, they’d stay out there for months. A few never came back, and we hoped they’d made their way to the free states we’d all heard of. Mostly, the runners got hungry, or sick with fever, or lonesome for their people, and they wandered home on their own. What happened then depended on their marse or missus. But if a runner got caught in the field, the patrollers would let their dogs chew flesh from bone before dragging whatever was left back to the home plantation. Then everybody, the field hands and the house girls and all the little children on that place, would be stood out to see the poor, tore-up soul and watch the lashing that was to come. Old Gossett never kept a runner. Always said if a slave wasn’t grateful to be fed good and not worked on Sunday except during sugar season, and kept in clothes and shoes, and not sold off from their family, he wasn’t worth having. Nearly all of the Gossett help had been raised on the place, but the slaves that’d come from the Loach family as wedding gifts to Old Missus, they had different stories to tell. Their bodies spoke in scars, and the nubs of cutoff fingers and toes, and twisted arms and legs healed crooked after being broke. Was from them and others on plantations near Goswood Grove that we learned how other folks had it. Our worst worry day by day was to watch out for Old Missus’s bad temper. A life could be meaner than that, and many were. I don’t want them dogs in the woods to get after me, and since I can’t tell what they’re chasing tonight, I figure I better hide up closer to town, maybe try to find myself a ride out on a wagon come morning. I could pay for it with the money in Missy’s reticule, but I don’t dare. I ponder that, squatting there in the stubble while I button up the shirt placket. Tucking the hem over Missy’s reticule in my britches waist, I cinch John’s leather belt tight to hold it. Makes me shaped like a fat-bellied boy, which is good. Fat boy in a white shirt and a gray hat. The more different I look from before, the better. Now I just need to find a likely wagon and hide before morning, when that man sees the clothes he left to dry been traded out instead. The dogs work closer and closer up the woods, so I cross the camp yard again, move near the river landing and listen at the men talking. I watch for just the right kind of wagon—one where the driver’s alone and the horses hadn’t been rubbed down and picketed, which means they’re headed for home at daybreak. Light warms the sky by the time I find what I need. A old colored man guides his mules to the front of the line. The load in his wagon is covered over and tied down tight. Driver’s so crippled, he can’t hardly get down off the seat, and I hear him say he’s from a place upriver. When the workers untie the ropes, underneath the canvas is a fancy piano like the one Old Missus had before the war. It sings lopsided notes as the men take it down, and the driver limps after it up the boardwalk to the boat, bossing every step. I start on my way toward that wagon, listening as voices mix with the noise of ropes whining and chains jangling and pulleys squealing. Mules and cows and horses kick and fret while the men make ready to load livestock. Right after that will come passengers, last of all. Don’t run, I tell myself, though every inch of muscle and bone inside me wants to. Move like you hadn’t got a worry at all. Like you’re just here working the docks with all the rest. Easy-like. I pass by a stack of empty crates, grab two and heft them on my shoulders, keeping my head down between. The hat slips low, so’s all I can see is the strip of ground in front of my feet. I hear Moses’s deep voice someplace nearby hollering out orders. A pair of stovepipe boots stop in my path. I pull up short, squeezing the crates hard against my head. Don’t look up. The boots half turn my way. I tooth my bottom lip, bite hard. "These’uns get took straight where you been told," the man says. I catch my breath that it ain’t Moses’s voice and he don’t seem to be talking to me, then I check and see it’s a big white man, telling a couple stevedores where to haul some trunks. "Best be quick at it, or you’ll get you a ride on that boat. Wind up in Texas." Past the man, farther on toward the river, is Moses. He stands ramrod-straight under a hanging lantern, one tall boot braced on the boardwalk and one in the mud. His palm rests over the pistol holstered to his thigh while he points and yells and tells workers where to put the goods. Every minute or two, he steps up on the boardwalk and takes a wide look around, like he’s watching for something. I hope it ain’t me. I move back as the two big trunks get pushed by, strapped on handcarts. A wheel slips off the cypress planks that’ve been laid over the mud, and the lift handle snaps in two, sending a trunk and the worker sidewards. Something thumps inside the box, hollow like a melon. A whimper comes, low, soft. The big white man steps forward, holds the trunk from falling on its side. "Best take care," he says while the stevedore gets to his feet. "Bruise up Boss’s new dogs, he’d be mighty displeased. Watch them wheels." He puts a knee and shoulder under the trunk to help get it upright on the planks again. Just as he does, something shiny gold falls through a crack along the trunk slats. It snakes down silent and lands in the mud next to the man’s foot. I know what it is, even before the workers and the man move on, and I set down one of my crates and scoop up what’s been left on the ground. I open my hand and, there in my palm, glittering in the gas lamp’s flickery light, sits the little gold locket Missy Lavinia’s been wearing since she got it for Christmas Day when she was six years old. She’d be dead in her grave before she’d give that up.
CHAPTER 8
BENNY SILVA—AUGUSTINE, LOUISIANA, 1987 he books keep me going. I dream of those books hidden away at Goswood Grove, of tall mahogany shelves with volumes upon volumes of literary treasures, and ladders reaching to the sky. For several days in a row, when I come home from school feeling discouraged by my lack of progress with the kids, I put on my duck shoes and make the trek down the farm levee lane, slip through the crape myrtles, and follow the moss-carpeted paths of the old garden. I stand on the porch like a kid before the Macy’s display window at Christmas, and fantasize about what might be possible if I could get my hands on those books. Loren Eiseley, who was the subject of one of my favorite term papers, wrote, If there is magic in this world, it is contained in water, but I have always known that if there is magic in this world, it is contained in books. I need magic. I need a miracle, a superpower. In almost two weeks, I have taught these kids nothing but how to bum cheap snack cakes and sleep in class…and that I will physically bar the door if they try to leave before the bell rings, so don’t try it.
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