The Book of Lost Friends - Lisa Wingate Page 0,170
broken. If he lives, he’ll never be the same, the doctor says. Never walk again. Never ride.
This Texas is a bad place. A mean place.
But here I stand, breathing its air another day, watching this café I walked halfway across town to find, and thinking, Could this traveler’s hotel be the one? If it is, was all this worth the doing? All this spilled blood and misery? Maybe even the loss of a brave man’s life?
I study on a walnut-brown girl who carries lemonade in a glass pitcher, pours it for two white ladies in their summer bonnets. I watch a light-skinned colored man carry a platter, a half-grown boy bring out a rag to wipe up a spill on the floor. Do they look like me? Would I know my people by sight after all these years?
I remember the names, where they left us, who carried them away. But did I lose their faces? Their eyes? Their noses? Their voices?
I watch awhile longer.
Silly thing, I tell myself over and again, knowing it’s likely the Irishman horse thief made it all up, that story.
A traveler’s hotel and restaurant down Austin way, just along Waller Creek. Three blue beads on a string. Tied round the neck of a little white girl…
Never even true, I’ll bet.
I walk away, but only far enough to see that a stream is near. Looking down into its waters, I think, Well, here’s this. I ask a old man passing by with a child in hand, “This Waller Creek?”
“Reckon,” he answers and shuffles on.
I take myself back to the café again, walk round the big lime-plastered building that’s shaped like a tall, narrow house, with rooms for travelers to stay by the night. Standing on my toes, I peek through the open windows, look at more colored people working. Nobody I know, far as I can tell.
It’s then I see the little white girl at the well out back. She’s skinny and small, wiry. Eight years old, maybe ten, more hair than anything else to her. It falls from a yellow headscarf, tumbles down her back in red-brown waves. She’s strong, though, hauling a heavy bucket in both hands, water splashing down her leg, wetting the apron over her gray dress.
I’ll ask her, at least: There anybody here that goes by the name of Gossett? Or did back before the freedom, even? You ever see anybody with three blue beads like these? A colored woman? A girl? A boy?
I finger the string at my neck, move to come into the girl’s path and think to be careful how I say the words, so it won’t scare her off. But when she stops, looks up at me, her gray eyes surprised in a face that’s sweet like a china doll’s, I can’t even speak. There at her neck, tied on a red ribbon, hang three blue beads.
The Irishman, I think to myself. He told it true.
I sink down to the dirt. Fall hard, for my legs go weak, but I barely feel the ground. I feel nothing, hear nothing. I hold up my beads, try to speak, but my tongue has clamped itself still. I can’t make the words. Child, where’d you come by them beads?
Seems forever, we’re froze that way, the girl and me, just looking and trying to reason it out.
A sparrow flies down from the tree. Only one little brown sparrow. It lands on the ground to drink of the water dripping from the bucket. The girl drops her burden, and water flows in rivers, quenching the dry soil. The sparrow dunks its head under and shakes the water over its feathers.
The girl turns and runs, scampers fast up the stone walk and through the open back door of the building. “Mama!” I hear her yell. “Maaa-ma!”
I climb to my feet, try to decide, Should I run? The girl is white, after all, and I gave her a fright, just now. Should I try explaining? I didn’t mean her any harm. I just wondered, where’d she come by the three blue beads?