Crooked River (21 page)

Indian John was taken away in the Hoadleys’ big wagon. I wish I had not turned back toward the window to see it.

When my Ma died, the minister told me to take one final look before the top of the coffin was nailed shut by Amos and Pa. Many times since, I had regretted seeing her lying in that coffin because it was the picture of her that always came first to my head. I could not forget how her face was the color of marble and turned a bit to the side, and how the piece of lace we pinned around her neck had come loose.

It was the same feeling with Indian John. He was led down from the loft by the sheriff, my Pa, and two other men. Reverend Doan followed them, still praying in his thin, wavering voice. I caught a glimpse of Indian John's soft moccasins moving past. There was
one small flicker of color among the heavy leather boots, and then they were gone.

The Hoadleys’ big plow horse stood in our door-yard, hitched to a wagon, and Indian John was seated on a pine box coffin in that wagon. His hands were tied behind him. In the bright light, the white blanket over his shoulder looked poor and unkempt.

I remember all of the people standing in crowds around the wagon. I stared at them, hardly able to believe how they gathered and grew like a swarm of sickening flies. There were women and children, even—with baskets of food and bed quilts for sitting upon. Poor Laura stood with Lorenzo, as Pa had ordered.

Angry choking sobs rose in my throat. Even in the darkest part of my mind, I couldn't understand how the whole settlement, and strangers, too, could come to gawk and stare at the hanging of a helpless Indian. How could they act as if an Indian's death, or anyone's death, was nothing but a fancy exhibition?

When the rattling drum began again and the wagon rolled forward, I could hardly see through the haze of tears and fury. Outside the window, the crowd of militiamen moved away in a blur of wool coats and muskets, and the women and children, wearing their Sunday best, trailed behind like a flock of mindless sheep.

As the last of the crowd disappeared from sight, I tore open the door of our house. “May the devil take all of you!” I shrieked at the empty place where they had been. “May the devil curse your wicked souls!”

And then I turned on my heels and ran in the opposite direction with Mercy.

Clutching her hand, I ran toward my Pa's cornfields like a person gone mad, filled with choking anger, intent on ruining everything I could lay my hands upon.

I would make my mean Pa and my brothers sorry for hanging a poor man who hadn't done a thing wrong. Stumbling from furrow to furrow, I began to pull up the green growing blades of corn by the handful.

Pa said it was going to be a good year for corn, maybe the best ever. And a real good crop of beans and squash, too, everyone said. I ground my bare heels into the sprouts of beans and squash growing among the corn.

Mercy thought it was a game, and she followed me, tugging at the plants with her small fingers. But I ran on without paying her any mind, stumbling from one row to the next, trying to pull every bit of green out of the wretched brown earth that belonged to my Pa and brothers.

Let us go back east poor and hungry as paupers.

With all of my raving, I didn't notice the monstrous storm coming across the sky. I would have seen it, surely, if I had been watching. But my brain was turned, and so I saw nothing. I kept on tearing up blades of Pa's corn until my hands were cut and crossed with scratches, and the only sound I heard was a pounding, hammering fury inside my head.

I was in the middle of the field when the sky suddenly turned as dark as evening. It was as if someone had snuffed out the sun. The air became prickling cold, and an odd, wailing wind began to bend and toss the branches of the trees until you could hardly hear a word above the rushing noise. Pulling Mercy close to me, I looked up at the sky and gasped at the sight.

Rain and hail came down on our backs as if to pound us to pieces, and the claps of thunder shook the earth so hard I thought the world had surely come to an end. Me and Mercy lay in the field like two flat stones, and I prayed to God and Ma to save us. There wasn't a thing we could do, but lie in the mud and pray.

When the thunder finally moved off and the rain stopped, I didn't know at first if we were dead or alive. I wiped my eyes and lifted up my head. What I saw made me gasp. The cornfield was gone. Nothing but mud and water surrounded us, with bits of green scattered here and there like straggles of yarn.

Pa's corn was gone.

The weight of that sight took away all my breath. It was as if the storm had finished what I started with
my own foolish hands. Only it had done far worse. I had just wanted to hurt my Pa and the boys. But the storm had taken away every growing thing.

Next to me, Mercy clung to my arm and cried to go home. “I'm scared, Reb, I'm scared,” she wept over and over. “Take me back. Take me back.” In her bedraggled clothes, she looked small and helpless, like a tiny bird. And for the first time in my whole life, I had the peculiar soft feeling of being a Ma. As if I was the Ma bird who was supposed to be looking out for her.

“Hush,” I said, wiping the hair back from her face. “We're going on back to the house. Ain't nothing to worry about.” Now, I hadn't carried Mercy since she was a toddling baby, but I picked her up after that and carried her all the way to the cabin with her tiny, wet arms holding tight to my neck.

The house was in a ruined state. When we got there, the fire on the hearth was out, and all the wood was soaked. Water had come down the sides of the chimney and run across the floor. Some of the shingles on the roof were gone, and one tree had toppled into the dooryard.

After all that had happened to us, I couldn't find the strength to move one foot more after we got back. I took off Mercy's clothes and wrapped her in a quilt, and then I sat in a chair by the cold hearth, not even bothering with my own rain-soaked dress.

Outside the house, everything seemed strangely silent. I thought about what Peter Kelley had said. How he waved his arm at the sky and told us Indian John believed the thunder would save him. Inside
me, a terrible fear began to grow. A fear that perhaps the storm had swept away everyone in the settlement and spared only Mercy and me.

Heart pounding, I listened hard for the sound of Laura or the boys coming back. A hawk screeched above the trees. A wasp began to hum and peck at the window. And then, when the eerie silence seemed as if it would never end, I heard the sound of someone coming down the road. I jumped up.

“Rebecca!” a familiar voice called out. “Reb! Mercy! Are you there?”

It was Laura, running without her bonnet and as soaked to the bone as me.

When she reached where I stood in the dooryard, she pulled me tight against her big shoulder. “I was just so awful afraid of losing you and Mercy,” she cried, her whole self shaking with sobs. “It just tore my heart to pieces, standing inside that store knowing you and Mercy were by yourselves in the storm. I didn't know what I'd find when I got here. I didn't know what terrible sight I'd find.”

It was hard to keep my voice steady to tell her that me and Mercy were fine. We had been caught in the storm, I said, but we were both fine.

Laura wiped her eyes and glanced at the cabin. “And Mercy's inside?”

I nodded.

The question I wanted to ask, and didn't want to ask, seemed to hang in the air between us. I didn't want to grieve Laura more by asking it, and I think perhaps she didn't want to cause me grief by answering it. So, neither one of us spoke. We just stood
there in the dooryard for a long while, taking account of all that the storm had done around us.