or is he living yet, in a place far off, up north even, or just wandering the roads, still lost in his own mind?
I stand there looking at the wall, counting the squares in my head, ciphering. There’s so many people there, so many names.
Juneau Jane drops off her tiptoes after a while, rests her hands on her britches. “We must depart this place, you said this yourself. We must travel from here while enough time remains to us. The horses are saddled.”
I look over at Missy Lavinia, who’s huddled herself in the far corner of the building, the quilt clutched up to her neck. She’s staring at the little rainbows tossed over the room by that one pretty cut-glass window. “Might be if we wait a day, Missy would come to her mind by then, be less trouble to us.”
“You made mention of your concern that the old woman who brings our goods has become suspicious.”
“I know what I said,” I snap. “I’ve done some more considering on it. Tomorrow would be best.”
She argues with me again. She knows we can’t be safe here much longer.
“You just a little fancy girl,” I spit out finally, sharp, bitter words that pucker my mouth. “Prissy and been spoiled all your years so far, be some man’s pet the rest of your years. What do you know about the things in them papers? About how it is for my kind? How it is to yearn after your people and never know, are they alive, are they dead? You ever going to find them again in this world?”
She can’t see that the squares on the paper are like the holding pens in a trader’s yard. Every one, a story. Every one, a person, sold from here to there. “Long time after the war, long time, on all the plantations, the mamas and the pappies, they still come—just walk up the road one day, say, ‘I am here to get my children. My children belong to me now.’ Some been tromping over the whole country, gathering up their kin. The old marses or missuses can’t stop them after the freedom. But nobody ever comes up the road for me. I wait, but they don’t come and I can’t guess why. Maybe this is the way I find out.” I stab a finger toward the papers, say again. “I got to know, or I ain’t leaving here. I won’t.”
Before I can do a thing about it, Juneau Jane starts ripping down papers. “We’ll bring them with us, for reading as we go.” She even picks up the cut scraps from the floor.
“It’s thievin’,” I say. “Be wrong to take them from here.”
“Then I will burn them.” She hurries to the stove, cat quick, and opens the door. “I will burn them, and we will have nothing left for disagreement.”
“I’ll pull your little skinny arms off your body first.”
“These have been read previously by the people coming here.” She stands holding them by the stove. “And when we finish reading them, we will leave them with people who, perhaps, have not yet seen them. Would they not be of greater use there?”
I can’t argue against that, and part of me don’t want to, so I let it be.
We’re gone long before middle morning comes, and they’ll see we’ve left one of Missy’s dollar coins for the use of their church house…and for the papers.
We make a sight, traveling down the road, all three of us dressed in too-big britches. Juneau Jane’s got her long hair stuffed down the back of her shirt to hide it. Missy Lavinia’s feet dangle bare and pink while I ride behind her on Ginger. Old Missus would be up on her shoutin’ bench about those feet and ankles showing, if she could see. But Young Missy don’t say a thing, just hangs on and stares off into the woods, her face as pale and blank as the little patch of gray-blue sky up above the road.
I’m beginning to wonder, why hadn’t she come back to her mind, started talking again, like Juneau Jane? Is Missy gone for good? Is that bump on