The Book of Lost Friends - Lisa Wingate Page 0,167

past the boy and see the man come out from the brush. A rifle rests comfortable over his shoulder. He moves in a slow, easy stride, satisfied as a cat that’s got its next meal cornered. A slow smile spreads under his hat brim. When he tips it up, there’s the patch on his eye, and the melted scars on one side of his face, and I know why his voice caught me. Might be this is the day he finishes the job he started at the river landing.

Missy growls in her throat like a animal, gnashes her teeth, and chomps at the air.

The man tosses his head back, laughing. “Still a biter, I see. I thought maybe we’d worked that out of you before we parted ways.”

That voice of his. I sift memories like flour, but they fly away, carried off by the storm winds. Did we know him before? Was he somebody Old Mister knew?

Missy growls louder. I reach up and grab her arm, but she strains away from me. I try again to place the man. If I can call his name, maybe it’d catch him by surprise, throw him off long enough the troopers could get at the boy that’s closest, grab his gun.

I hear horses splash through the water and scrabble up the bank behind us. But I keep my eyes on the man with the rifle. He’s the one to worry about. The boy with him looks crazy and blood hungry, but it’s this man who has charge of it all.

“And you.” He turns to Juneau Jane. “It is a shame to dispatch a perfectly good yellow girl. Especially a fetching one who has…a certain sort of value. Perhaps it is a fortuitous turn of events that you’ve managed to survive, after all. Perhaps I’ll keep you. A final recompense for all the loss I’ve suffered at your father’s hands.” He holds up a left glove with missing fingers sagging down, then he passes across the eye that’s gone.

This man…this man believes Old Mister’s to blame for his disfigurings? Why?

I let go of Missy, scoop Juneau Jane round behind me. “You leave this child be,” I tell him. “She ain’t done nothin’ to you.”

He cocks his head to see me better, looks at me for a long time through the one good eye. “And what is this? The little boy driver Moses told me he’d done away with? But none of us are what we seem to be, are we?” He laughs, and there’s a familiar sound to it.

He steps in closer. “I might just keep you, too. A good set of slave irons, and you’ll be no trouble. Your kind can always be broken. The infernal Negro. No better than a mule. No smarter. All can be broken to harness…and to other uses.” He studies me in pure meanness, but that’s familiar, too. “I think I knew your mammy,” he says and smiles. “I think I knew her quite well.”

He looks away toward the men coming up from the river. My mind tumbles back, and back, and back. I see past the scars and the patch on his eye, take in the shape of his nose, the set of his sharp, pointed chin. I grab the memory, see him crouched beside the wagon where we’re curled in the cold with Mama. His hands catch her, drag her out, her arm still chained to the wheel spokes. The sounds of her suffering bleed into dark, but I don’t see. “You keep down under the blanket, babies,” she chokes out. “You just stay there.” I push the blanket hard against my ears, try not to hear.

I cling to my brothers and sisters, night after night, eight, then seven, then six…three, two, one, and finally just my cousin, little Mary Angel. And then only me, curled in a ball underneath that ragged blanket, trying to hide.

From this man, Jep Loach. Older, scarred and melted so that I didn’t know his face. Right here is the man who took my people away. The man Old Mister had tracked down all them years ago and had dragged off to the Confederate army. Not killed on a battlefield someplace back then. Right