The Book of Lost Friends: A Novel by Lisa Wingate Page B

it, indeed, be confirmed that the worst has befallen him in Texas, you will abide by his decrees without causing further trouble or embarrassment to my family.”
    I steer the mare over a pothole in the road, see if I can bounce Missy round a bit to quieten her up. That sugar-sweet voice brings back pokes and whacks, and thumps on the head, and a time in Texas when she give me a tea to drink with a pinch of Seddie’s rat powder on top—just wanted to see what’d happen. I was only seven, barely one year past being rescued from Jep Loach’s bad deed, and wishing I wouldn’t live to be eight after I drank that poison. Missy was five mean years old.
    Wish I could tell Juneau Jane that story, even if I got no friendliness toward her. Living high all these years down in Tremé, even as the Gossett money dried up. What did this girl think? That’d go on forever? If she and her mama end up out on the street, I ain’t sorry. About time they learn to work. Work or starve. That’s how it is for the rest of us.
    I got no reason to care about either one of these two girls, and I don’t. All I am is somebody to tend their field, or wash their clothes, or cook their food. What do I get back for it, even now that the emancipation’s come? Belly that’s hungry more often than not and a roof that leaks over my head and no money to fix it till we can pay off the land contract. Just skin and muscle and bone. No mind. No heart. No dreams.
    It’s time I quit looking after what belongs to white people and start looking after what belongs to me.
    “Boy,” Missy snaps. “Hurry along.”
    “Road mighty rough, Missy,” I drawl out, slow and deep. “Be smoother once we git up to the River Road. That road be smoother.” Old Ginger’s like Goswood Grove itself. Seen better days. This rain-rutted ground is hard on her.
    “Do as I say!” Missy Lavinia snaps.
    “She steps light in the left front hoof, your mare.” Juneau Jane comes out of her quiet to speak for the horse. “Wise to spare her, if we have a distance to travel yet.”
    A distance to travel yet, I think. How long’s this errand meant to take? Longer it goes, better chance of us getting caught.
    A itch starts under my borrowed shirt. The kind of itch that warns of a knowing.
    Mile after mile, crop field after crop field, settlement after settlement, river landing after river landing we pass by, that itch gets deeper, burrows right up under my skin and stays there. This is bad business, and now I’m too far in it to get out.
    Feels like we come plumb almost to New Orleans by the time we get where Missy Lavinia has in mind. I smell the place and hear its sounds before seeing it. Coal stoves and woodsmoke. The chug and whistle and slap-slap of riverboats churning up the water. The cough-puff, cough-puff of cotton gins and steam-fired syrup mills. Smoke hangs low, another sky. It’s a dirty place, black soot laying over brick buildings, clapboard houses, and men and horses alike. Mules and workers drag cotton bales, cordwood, hogsheads of sugar, molasses, and whiskey barrels to the paddle wheelers loading to go upriver, north to where folks have money to buy the goods.
    Old Ginger’s got a pretty good limp now, so I’m glad to pull her up, even if I don’t like the look of things here. I weave the carriage through men and crates and wagons, mostly work rigs, tended to by colored help and a few white-trash croppers. There’s no fancy outfit like ours anyplace in sight. No ladies, either. We catch notice, coming up the street. White men stop, scratch their chins, and cast glances our way. Coloreds peek from under their hats, shake their heads, and try to catch my eye with warning looks, like I ought to know better.
    “Best git your missies on down the road,” one whispers when I climb off to lead Old Ginger through a space where two wagons been parked so narrow, there’s almost no way past. “Ain’t a place for them.”
    “Ain’t my choice,” I mutter low. “Not