The Book of Lost Friends

Hannie, Juneau, and Missy keep moving into the Texas frontier. First, they hitch a ride on a boat heading up the Red River, then steal onto a train heading west into Texas, and finally beg a lift on a wagon. Along the way, Juneau busies herself diligently copying the newspaper ads into a book she is fashioning. She tells Hannie, who cannot read or write, that they cannot possibly remember all the stories. So she must start writing them down. She calls the project the Book of Lost Friends. “What is preserved in writing is safe from failures of the mind” (208), she tells Hannie.

The three are heading to the town of Fort Worth where Juneau believes they will find news from William’s attorney either about her father’s fate or about the disposition of the family farms in Texas and Louisiana. Either way, she will settle her claim on the Gossett fortune. They are both warned by people they meet along the way that Fort Worth is no Dallas; it is still a frontier town, wild and lawless, teeming with dangerous ex-Confederate soldiers unwilling to accept that they lost the war. The way is long and the travel is often dull and uncomfortable. But the women keep moving.

At every stop along the way, Juneau shares with those itinerants they meet the idea of her Book of Lost Friends. She reads to gatherings of the homeless and happily agrees to add their stories of fractured families to her steadily growing book. In an emotional moment, Hannie dictates her own ad to Juneau about her family and her mother lost to her and now somewhere in Texas. She breaks down as she shares her story with Juneau. She acknowledges what she tries not think about, that after all these years her mother is most likely dead. She anxious and lonesome “for people I love. Lonesome for home” (215).

They arrive in Fort Worth only to find the Gossett family lawyer gone, on the run from Federal government agents investigating malfeasance in connection with shady family land transferals since the end of the war. While Hannie and Juneau are in the lawyer’s office, Missy wanders out into the busy main thoroughfare of the town. She causes a horse to rear and buck the driver. He summons the sheriff and accuses the girls of trying to create a disturbance to steal his horse. The three girls, Hannie still dressed as a boy, are summarily jailed.

In the Fort Worth jail, Hannie pines for her freedom. It is raining. Missy is jailed with her, but she is unsure where Juneau is. A talkative Irish horse thief chatters away. As the gray morning begins to break, Hannie hears a familiar voice outside her jail cell window. She is stunned to see Gus McKlatchy, the boy she met weeks earlier on the Genesee Star before getting tossed overboard. The boy whispers he saw her getting arrested and could help get her out—he is heading out on a wagon train headed west into frontier Texas. They needed drivers and guards, the caravan would be going through dangerous open territory. Hannie remembers Guy still thinks she is a boy. Sheepishly, he hands Hannie through the bars of the window her necklace with the glass beads. He found it, he tells her, after she was tossed overboard and figured to hang on to them in case they ever met again. Hannie is overjoyed. She and Juneau are released the next day. Missy is not. The sheriff tells Hannie she will be taken to the state asylum in Austin. Hannie cannot allow that. She negotiates for Missy's release. Hannie, Juneau, and Missy head into town with Gus only to run right into none other than Hannie’s old nemesis, Moses. She tries to run but slips in the mud. She is caught.

Meanwhile Benny understands she must share with Nathan the leather-bound family Bible she found in the library with its careful record of the births and deaths and the “purchase and sale of human souls” (221). She understands how he must accept that his family trafficked in slavery. She hesitates. “How would he feel about coming face-to-face with the human realities even through the faraway lens of yellowed paper and faded ink?” (220). He comes to her house, and the two read through the records together late into the evening. Benny shares with him the idea of presenting the stories of these people as a sort of community pageant, perhaps in the town cemetery where many of them were buried. The pageant has a working title: “Tales from the Underground.” Benny conveys her enthusiasm for the project and how excited the kids are. Nathan’s reaction surprises Benny. Before her death from heart disease, his sister, Robin, worked diligently to bring just this history to life in her own efforts to untangle the family’s dark past. He says that had Robin not been so obsessed with her endeavor, she might have taken better care of her health.

He cautions Benny, however, not everyone in the town shares his sister’s zeal for truth. Benny momentarily feels the urge to share with Nathan the secret of the daughter she gave up for adoption, but she refrains. She thinks of her mother and their complex relationship, a “mixture of full-on love, habitual put-downs, crushing rejection, and threats that might or might not end up being carried out” (257). She feels a “strange tingling” when Nathan visits her classroom the following week. She is unsure how, but she knows their friendship is “relaxing” (259) into something deeper. She envies how Nathan manages to live in the moment and refuses to be burdened by his family’s past. They meet for a sort of date at the Cluck and Oink diner and, again, Benny thinks about sharing her secret, what she calls cryptically “the rest of it—everything” (282). She tells him about her parents’ divorce and how she seldom hears from her father. “It’s strange how you can feel guilty for a family history you didn’t have anything to do with,” she says, but that is as far as she goes (282).