The Book of Lost Friends - Lisa Wingate Page 0,138

the names and the places and to write letters off to the “Lost Friends” column for folks. “I’ll be the keeper of the book after you go home. But I want you to promise me that when you make it back to Goswood Grove you’ll help Tati and Jason and John and all the other croppers to get treated fair, just like the contracts say. Ten years of cropping on the shares, and you gain the land, mule, and outfit for your own. Will you do that for me, Juneau Jane? I know we ain’t friends, but would you swear to it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The question nips at me all the rest of the way to Menardville, which when we get there, ain’t too much more than a few store buildings, a smith shop, a wheelwright, a jail, two saloons, houses, and churches. Juneau Jane and me make plans to leave out for Mason to see about Old Mister. It’s just a day’s hard horseback ride away, but longer afoot. Penberthy holds our pay and won’t let us strike off. Says it’s too dangerous walking, and he’ll find us a better way to get there.

By morning, we know we won’t go to Mason, after all. Folks tell Penberthy that the soldiers took the man who had the stole army