Crooked River (22 page)

But the question would not keep silent.

“I want to know—” I hesitated and my voice stuck in my throat. I looked up at the sky and took a deep breath. “I want to know what happened to Indian John.”

“Reb,” Laura began. “I don't—”

I pressed my lips together stubbornly. “I want to know.”

Laura sighed and gave me a sorrowful look. “I'll tell you what I saw,” she said finally, shaking her head. “May God forgive me, but I'll tell you what I saw.”

Laura said that Indian John was taken to the gallows near Mr. Perry's store. Some of the men who brought him there gave speeches, and then the reverend offered a short sermon and two prayers. “He spoke some kind things about the Indians, Reb,” she said. “Real kind things.”

All the while, Indian John stood on the gallows with the hanging rope around his neck. It was nearly an hour, she told me, before the order for execution was given.

“I had to look away, my stomach was so sick, Reb.” Laura's voice shook. “How could they do that to a poor man? How could they?”

I swallowed hard.

“His body crumpled to the ground, Reb,” Laura said, closing her eyes. “The hanging rope broke above him—”

My eyes flashed toward Laura. “The rope broke?”

“I turned and saw his body on the ground as the storm fell upon our heads,” Laura answered quietly. “May God save the poor man's soul. That's what I prayed as we ran for the shelter of Mr. Perry's store. The whole crowd ran. I thought we would all be swept away in the storm. I had hold of Lorenzo's hand in the scattering crowd and we ran toward the store, with the wind and thunder roaring around us as I have never heard before in all my life.”

I was silent, picking at the cloth of my skirt with my fingers.

“So, he is dead,” I said softly. “They have buried his body, and he is dead.”

“No,” Laura answered in a trembling voice. “That is what has unsettled everyone, all of us who were there.” Laura turned and stared at me. “I saw his body on the ground with my own eyes, Rebecca, truly I did. And Pa said when the storm hit, he lifted the body into the coffin with the help of the sheriff and four other men. And Dr. Weston said that all life had expired. But when the storm ended and the men returned to the gallows, the body was missing from that coffin, and no one knows where it has gone.”

No one knows where it has gone.

Inside my mind, I wanted to believe that Indian John had escaped from the hanging. I told myself that perhaps by cutting the rope, I had saved his life. That maybe he had lifted up the cover of that coffin, in the middle of the storm, and run off into the woods. I knew it was an impossible thing to believe, but I did. My Pa and brothers figured that the body had been stolen by some of the strangers who had come to the hanging. When he got back from the settlement that evening, Pa raged on and on about it. “I know it was some of them men from up near the mills. I heard them talking about how much that body would fetch if they had it. They went out in that storm and stole it while we was inside Perry's store, I swear they did,” he hollered at Amos and George. “I'll go and hunt them down myself, I swear I will.”

Me and Laura didn't breathe a word the whole time Pa was hollering. We just kept our eyes on our work, and Mercy slept through it all in our bed.

Pa and the men left for the mills real early the next day. They took the empty coffin with them in Mr. Hoadley's wagon. We watched them roll down the road—about fifteen men in the wagon with their rifles—and I prayed hard that they wouldn't come back with Indian John's body.

While they were gone, me and Laura put the house in order and set the rain-soaked clothes out in the warm sun. Pa didn't tell us to straighten up the loft, but me and Laura went up there first and swept the whole dusty floor, even the farthest corners. I figure both of us were trying to erase all that had been there.

While she was moving the straw bed pallet, Laura found the little gifts I had once given to Indian John. In the dim light of the loft, they suddenly scattered across the floor. An acorn. A bird nest. A scrap of green ribbon. A brown butterfly wing. I caught my breath, waiting for Laura to say something.

But I think she must have guessed exactly where they had come from, because she picked them up without a word and gave them to me. Although I feared she would give me a scolding, she never did ask me another word about them.

Pa and the boys returned after dark without finding a trace of the body. Amos told Laura that some of the men were starting to wonder whether or not Indians had stolen the body and buried it, and a few, like old Vinegar Bigger, even thought the terrible storm was caused by them, too.

Pa said that Vinegar Bigger's kind of thinking was pure nonsense. If the Indians had power over the heavens, Pa said, they would have sent droughts and windstorms and floods and run the white man off the land long ago. And furthermore, even if the Indians had caused the storm to come, it hadn't done Indian John a bit of good, had it? They had still hanged him, and he was gone forever and dead.

No, my mind hollered at my Pa. He ain't gone forever. Or dead.

But five months would pass before we would find out the truth about Indian John. And the truth would come from an unlikely person—old Reverend Doan.

November 1812

Me and Laura were putting up provisions for the winter on the morning that old Reverend Doan came to our door. It was early November, and most of the men were still away. Pa and Cousin George had left in late summer to fight in the war that had started against the British and the Indians.

Sometimes it was hard to keep count of all that had happened since the trial and hanging of Indian John: the storm that ruined most of the young corn; the news of the war with the British reaching our settlement at the end of June; even Laura finding her first beau. A young schoolmaster named Mr. Josiah Elliott had arrived in our settlement in August when
nearly everyone else seemed to be leaving on account of the war.

Laura Elliott, now that would be a fine name, I liked to tell her.

We were in the middle of our work when Reverend Doan came to call on us. I remember how I opened the door to find him standing there. His thin face was pinched and red from the November cold. “Might I come in?” he said.

Although we couldn't imagine why he had come to visit when no one was sickly or in need of his prayers, me and Laura invited him inside to warm himself with a cup of tea. He took a long while to drink it, and I feared he would surely drop our good teacup with his trembling hands.

But after a long silence, he said in his frail voice, “I was asked to bring a message to you when I passed through the settlement again. The lawyer Mr. Kelley told me you would know how to take it to a young girl known as Bird Eyes and her sister Tall Girl.” Reverend Doan gazed at us in a peculiar way. “Have you heard of them?”

I think me and Laura were both too stricken to say a word, but the reverend didn't seem to notice. He continued on, without waiting for us to answer.

“You are to tell them that their friend has not died as everyone believed, but he has gone away with his family and still lives. Gone away and still lives.” I hardly dared to breathe as Reverend Doan rattled his empty teacup onto the saucer and looked at us. “Can I trust you to give this message to those for whom it
is intended? You'll remember everything exactly as I've said?” Me and Laura just nodded.

“Fine, then.” He stood up slowly and put on his old hat. “God rest your dear Ma's soul,” he said as he left.

Indian John had lived.

In my mind, I tried to picture Amik and Rice Bird and their little band of Chippewas slipping away to another place—far away from Ohio, far away from the Crooked River, far away from the growing war.

But even then, I think we also realized that they would never be able to return. That they would be the last Indians any of us ever saw on the Crooked River. So, the word of their escape made us feel both sweet and bitter at the same time. Like the trees in springtime, sweetness and bitterness both.