Crooked River (4 page)

“You listenin’?” Pa hollered. “You hear what I said?”

“Yes, Pa,” Laura whispered. And then Pa slid out the door like the mean old rattlesnake he was and disappeared.

After Pa left, Laura laid her head down on the table and wept so hard that it made me start to tremble with fear. Mercy sat in her chair staring silently at both of us, pale as a little snowdrop.

“What on earth are we gonna do, Reb?” Laura cried softly. “What on earth are we gonna do?” Watching her big shoulders heave up and down with sobs made my heart pound. I was dreadful afraid of being left alone in the world. If I lost Laura, what would happen to me?

After Ma died, I think my mind tried to turn Laura into my Ma. It erased and rewrote Laura and Ma, as if they were lines drawn on writing slates. But seeing my sister cry as if the world was ending made me realize that even though she was tall and strong for a girl, I could lose her just as quick and heartless as I had lost my Ma.

Taking a deep breath, I picked up one of the pewter dishes on the table.

“I'll go on upstairs,” I said. “I don't much mind. I already seen that Indian once.” I tried to keep my
voice sounding as if I didn't much mind. I stood up and started to scrape the food from the dish into one of our big wooden bowls.

“Sit down,” Laura answered, with her voice muffled in her arms. “You will not do any such thing, Reb.”

I sank back down in my chair again and stared at my hands. I circled my fingers around one of my scrawny wrists and traced the lines on my palm so I wouldn't have to look over at Laura with her head down on the table.

Outside, a woodpecker rattled loudly on a tree. It was quiet above us in the loft, I noticed. No one would have guessed an Indian was up there. A gray mouse skittered across the plank floor, and I stomped my foot to make him run.

“All right,” Laura said suddenly. She lifted her head and wiped a sleeve across her face. “You and me, we'll just go on up there and do exactly what Pa said. That Indian kills us, it'll be Pa's price to pay in heaven.”

I didn't dare to get in her way. As she lumped food into the bowl, her lips were pressed tight together. They made a fierce white line below her nose. “You're gonna carry the food,” Laura said in a high-strung voice. “And I'm gonna walk behind you with a frying pan and a knife. That's what we are gonna do….”

So that's how we went up to the loft.

I had hold of the wooden bowl of leftover food, and Laura followed me with the frying pan. She had once kilt a rattlesnake with that same iron pan. Flung it right at the snake's head and smashed it flat. The
rattlesnake tail had twelve bells on it, if you can believe that, and we still had the tail and the frying pan both.

As we crept up the stairs, Laura hissed, “You just be sure to get out of the way.” She was holding the pan so close behind me, seemed like I could feel its cold weight pressing on my neck. “If that Indian causes us any trouble, I'm throwing this frying pan at him,” she said. “You hear me, Rebecca?”

I nodded.

“Never been so full of fright in all my life,” Laura said, pressing her hand to her chest when we reached the bottom of the stairs. “We just gave bread to the devil, sure enough we did.” She squeezed my arm. “We was awful brave to do that, wasn't we, Reb? My heart was pounding like a hammer.” She paused and looked at me. “How about yours?”

I nodded, and Laura leaned closer.

“You feeling scared?” she said, frowning. “You're being real quiet.”

I shook my head no.

“Well, Pa never should have made us do that,” she insisted. “It weren't right of him anyway. Even if the Indian was chained and all. He's a prisoner and a murderer. There was no cause for Pa to have his daughters take food up to him.”

I don't think Laura felt a morsel of pity for the Indian after seeing him, not by the way she talked, and so I didn't dare to say how I felt. Ma always said I was too softhearted.

Sometimes Lorenzo or Cousin George brought back the chewed-off foot of a beaver or a fox that got out of one of their traps, and it turned my stomach over to see it. Or they'd grin and show me a broken-winged crow or something else that got caught instead. “Looka here at this,” they'd say.

Although I hadn't noticed the chains when Lorenzo first sent me to the loft unawares, I couldn't shake from my mind the sight I had seen with Laura. The Indian was sitting on one of the straw-filled pallets that we kept in the loft. He had cuffs of iron fixed around both his ankles, right above his moccasins. A long piece of ox chain ran from the irons to a big bolt in the floor. Even though the Indian could move his arms and legs, I reckoned Pa was right—he would need to tear up half the plank floor to ever get away.

In the dim light of the loft, the man hadn't looked more than a few years older than Amos or Cousin George. There was a wide band of dark fur wrapped around his head, with a few tall feathers stuck on one side. Peculiar twists of hair dangled on each side of his face, and there were metal ornaments around his neck. Truth to speak, he appeared the way Amos or Cousin George might look in a nightmarish dream.

Still, even with how he looked, I couldn't help feeling pity for him being kept chained in our loft with the scuttling mice. And without much light to
see or air to breathe. It seemed to me that the Indian could very well wither to dust and die sitting up there day after day.

I thought about those desperate foxes and beaver chewing off their own feet to survive. It made me shiver to imagine.

“You think Pa will keep him up there very long?” I asked Laura.

“I surely do hope not,” Laura said, setting the frying pan back down on the hearth.

“How long?”

Laura sighed. “I don't know, Reb.”

As I stacked the plates on the breakfast table, I said, “It's rather sorrowful seeing that Indian the way he is, with the chains and such. Don't you think?”

“What?” Laura stopped and stared at me as if I was addle-headed.

I hurried on. “I meant to say, it's dreadful sad seeing that Indian and knowing what he did. To that trapper.”

“Yes,” Laura said sharply, turning back to her work. “It's a terrible thing.”

All day, I tried to turn the current of my mind to do more thinking about the Indian's terrible crime and less about the mournful sight I had seen upstairs.
The Indian murdered a man.
That's what I tried to tell my mind. And even though the murdered man was a trapper, and trappers were a miserable lot of men mostly, it was still an awful thing to do. Maybe the dead trapper had been a God-fearing and good-hearted man who didn't deserve to die just then. Maybe he had left behind ten
children and a grieving wife. I tried hard to reason that the savage Indian deserved to be kept in our loft, chained to the floor. But it wasn't easy.

And the next morning when me and Laura went upstairs to fetch the wooden bowl we had left with the Indian, my mind grew even more tossed and turned. Because when I lifted up the empty bowl to carry it downstairs, I saw that there were six glass beads inside.

Seeing the beads in the center of our wooden bowl, I could not imagine how they had come to be there at first. For a moment, I thought they were little berries.

As I carried the bowl downstairs, I squinted at them, trying to imagine how it was possible. Where had berries, ripe or unripe, come from at the end of April? In Ohio? And how had they found their way into the bowl we had left upstairs with the Indian?

“What are you staring at?” Laura asked when we reached the bottom of the stairs.

On account of her bad eyes, I held the bowl higher. The glass beads rolled in tiny circles. “There's something inside the empty bowl,” I replied. “Beads, I think. The Indian left us a handful of little beads.”

“What?” Laura leaned closer.

“Ain't they pretty,” I said, rocking the bowl gently so the glass beads turned and circled inside.

Pa was fond of saying that the Indians were so simple, they would trade everything they owned for a paltry handful of worthless trade beads. I had heard him tell folks that he could likely buy the whole state of Ohio—nay, the whole country—from the Indians for nothing but whiskey and blue glass beads if he was given half the chance.