the child outside hollers into the air.
“Y-you d…don’t, b-believe…be…been redeemed…” Juneau Jane sways, fighting to push out the words and stay upright.
A cold feeling travels all over me, then hot sweat breaks after it.
“Hush up! Quiet, now!” I hiss. I pull open the door, stagger to the edge of the porch, and hang against a post. Two people come out of the woods—a stout, round woman with hands like supper plates and big feet in black leather brogans, white kerchief on her head. With her comes a little boy child. Her grandson, maybe? He’s skipping along with picked flowers in one hand.
The woman twirls a piece of feather grass at him, tickles his ear when he’s dancing by. He laughs hard.
“D-don’t come no closer!” I holler out. My voice is weak and won’t carry far, but they stop sudden, look my way. The boy drops his flowers. The woman snakes an arm out and, quick, tucks him behind her.
“Who you be?” She stretches to get a better look at me.
“We got fever!” I yell across. “Keep away. We got sickness.”
Woman backs up a little, pushes the boy with her. He hangs on to her skirt, peeks from it. “Who you be?” she asks again. “How you come in dat place? I don’ know who you is.”
“We travelin’,” I answer. “Been struck with fever, all us. Don’t come no closer. Don’t nobody come here, catch the sickness.”
“How many you is?” She lifts her apron, wads it over her mouth.
“Three. Other two’s worse off.” It ain’t a lie, but I sink against the post to look weaker. “Need help. Need food. Got money to give. You carryin’ mercy in your soul today, sister? We travelers, come in need a’ mercy.”
CHAPTER 14
BENNY SILVA—AUGUSTINE, LOUISIANA, 1987
“See,” LaJuna says as she pushes aside stacks of National Geographic magazines. She lays an Encyclopaedia Britannica on the billiard table, then flips up the cover, which has no pages or binding attached. It’s been used to house—or hide—a package wrapped in a worn scrap of wallpaper, gold-and-white flocked at some time in the past, but the remaining stripes are more of a glue stain than anything else. Jute string holds the whole thing together.
“Miss Robin didn’t even know about these, I don’t think.” LaJuna taps a finger to the bundle. “One time when I came in here—that was toward the end part, when the judge had good days and bad days with his mind—he says to me, ‘LaJuna, climb on up there to that top shelf for me. I need something, but somebody took the ladder.’ Now, that ladder’d been gone since the track broke, so I knew the judge wasn’t having a good day with his mind. Anyhow, I did like he wanted, and he showed me what’s in here. Then he looked at me and said, ‘I shouldn’t have let you see that. There’s nothing good to come of it and no way I can set it right. I want you to put this back where it was. We won’t touch it again unless I decide to burn it, which I quite likely should. Don’t ever tell anybody it’s here. If you do that for me, LaJuna, you can come take any other book anytime and keep it to read, as long as you like.’ Then he had me get him one of the encyclopedias, and he cut the encyclopedia cover right off the pages and wrapped it around this whole thing, and then we put it away.”
LaJuna picks at the knotted jute with chipped-up candy apple red fingernails, but the twine is stiff and tightly tied. “See if there’s some scissors in that top drawer. Judge always kept a pair in there.”
A pang of conscience forces me to hesitate. Whatever is inside that bundle must have been very private. It’s none of my business. None. Period.
“Never mind.” LaJuna’s fingernails do the trick. “I got it.”
“I don’t think you should. If the judge didn’t…”
But she’s already laying open the wallpaper wrapping. Inside, there are two books, which she places side by side. Both leather bound, one black, one red. One thin,