Crooked River (8 page)

I couldn't imagine how Peter Kelley was going to stand up to my Pa. Or how he was going to save an Indian who everybody believed was guilty. But as I watched Mr. Kelley pick up his hat and walk out the door with his skinny shoulders and his too-big coat, I am ashamed to say that I wanted to see him try.

I didn't expect that Peter Kelley would ever dare to come back to our house. Not with how Pa had run him off. While we fixed supper that night, I asked Laura, “You think he'll still try to be the lawyer for Indian John?”

“Perhaps,” Laura said, keeping her eyes on the turnips she was cutting.

“You think all he told us is true? About Indian John not being the kind of person to kill a trapper?”

“I know what our Pa and the other men have said,” she answered evenly. “That's what I know to be true.”

I felt sorry for Laura. She had been real quiet and downcast ever since Pa had sent Mr. Kelley away and scolded us. I figured she had taken a small fancy to the lawyer just in the brief moment we had met him. On account of his wavy red hair and gentle eyes, I
think. And I expect he would have made a good beau for her if he hadn't been going against our Pa and defending an Indian.

Pa always said the only man who would ever marry Laura was an old widower. “Someone who ain't interested in picking through all the apples in the barrel and will take jist about anyone. That's the fellow for you,” Pa would tell her. But I knew that kindhearted Laura would make a good wife for anyone.

“You suppose Mr. Kelley knows something about Indian John that Pa don't?” I kept on. “That why he's trying to defend him?”

“I don't know,” Laura answered, standing up and dumping her handful of turnips into the soup pot. “But he has some very peculiar beliefs about Indians.”

“Maybe Indian John didn't murder anyone— couldn't that be true?” I said. “Maybe they caught the wrong person by mistake. Don't that happen sometimes?”

Laura's eyes flashed toward me. “You better not let Pa catch you saying something like that, Rebecca Ann Carver,” she warned. “That's spreading lies and gossip.”

I tried to put my restless questions in the back of my mind, but it wasn't easy. While we did our mending work in the evening, I thought hard about the new calf that had finally been born to our sickly cow and what we could name it if it lived long enough. I tried to remember the words to a verse that Ma always used to recite. But my mind still circled back to Indian John and Peter Kelley. What did
Mr. Kelley know? What had he said to Indian John in the loft?

Laura kept her head down and her eyes fixed on her work the whole time. She didn't speak hardly a word. When Amos told me they would need help in the fields the next day I was glad for the chance to go and leave Laura to herself.

The next morning, I followed Pa and the boys out to the fields. It was a real pretty morning. The wispy clouds looked like bits of wool tumbling across the cabin floor. Under my feet, the dirt was cool and soft. Only thing Pa said to me was that I had better work as hard as a boy.

In the field, I stayed close to Amos and far from the others. He had a pointed ax for loosening the rocks and roots, and I tugged the smaller ones out of the dirt and threw them in a pile. The field had to be cleared—grubbed, as the men said—before it could be plowed for corn.

It was hard not to talk and fill up the empty space when you were working with Amos. He could go for hours without saying anything, stopping only to spit or take a swig of water from the jug he had set into the field dirt.

One thing I found while I was grubbing was an arrowhead point.

I thought at first it was a stub of a sprouting plant, and then when I leaned closer, I realized it was a small gray arrowhead. I held it in my palm for Amos to see.

“Here, see what I dug up.”

“Lorenzo's got a whole collection of those,” he said, not even taking a half minute to look at it. “The field's full of them.”

“I never found one before,” I said, surprised. “How'd they get here, in our field?”

“How do you think, Reb?” Amos went back to chopping at the dirt. “This was Indian land long before it was ours. How do you reckon arrowheads got here?”

Finding that arrowhead had a powerful effect on me because I had never before thought about Indians living on the same ground where we lived now. In my mind, they had always been on the far side of the Crooked River or on the edges of wherever we were living. Indian lands were always beyond— beyond the river, beyond that mountain, on the other side of that lake. They had their place. We had ours. And it had never been the same place. But looking at that little gray-colored arrowhead gave me a peculiar feeling.

My mind started thinking about how it would feel if, in the years to come, someone dug up something from us Carvers—a button, or a spoon that got thrown out with the dishwater, or a musket ball. Would they know we had lived here? That this had been our farm? Or would we be just like the Indian who sent this arrow flying? Would we be forgotten and long gone?

I remembered how Ma's bones were buried on this land, under a big hickory tree that she always loved. In a hundred years, if they dug under that tree, would they know whose bones—

I dropped the arrowhead back into the dirt and
pressed the clods down hard with my bare feet to cover it. Didn't want to think about that old arrowhead and the Indians anymore. My head was a mixed-up jumble.

We grubbed rocks and roots the whole day, from morning to evening. By the time Pa was ready to go in for the supper meal, my arms were pink from the sun, and my palms looked as if they had been rubbed across a grindstone.

Lorenzo didn't take any pity on me. “Looka there at that little pile of stones you done,” he said, coming over. “The pile of stones me and George have is twice the size of yours.” He reached down to tug a fist-sized rock out of the ground. “You missed this one,” he said, sending it clattering onto my pile.

I scowled at him. “Maybe you and Cousin George ought to stay out here and find all of the rest of them rocks yourself.”

After Lorenzo kicked a footful of dirt in my direction and ran off, I had to admit that it didn't look like me and Amos had done very much. That was the problem with grubbing out the fields. You worked for hours and hours, and it seemed as if all the same stones and roots came back. No matter how far you flung them or how fast you dug them up, you couldn't get rid of them. The earth was stubborn. That was the truth.

I guess Peter Kelley must have been the same way. He wouldn't give up easily. No matter what my mean Pa said. Because when we returned to the house in the evening, Laura pulled me outside and whispered real low, “Today, while you and the boys was gone in the fields, Peter Kelley stopped by here.”

Laura wouldn't tell me anything else about Peter Kelley's visit until the next morning when Pa and the boys left to hitch up our horse. Even then, she wouldn't breathe a word until she had gone outside and made certain they were inside the barn.

After she closed the cabin door, she turned toward me and spoke in a whisper. “I was so startled when I saw that it was Mr. Kelley yesterday. I didn't know whether or not I ought to let him in.”

“What did he say?”

Laura took a deep breath. “Well, he was full of nerves, I could tell. You shoulda seen the way his face was flushed, as if he had a fever. And he talked so fast I could hardly keep up. But he said he knew our Pa believed in his heart that Indian John had murdered someone—and maybe he had—but he
wasn't certain himself and so all he wanted to do was talk to Indian John, just talk for a while, and try to find out the truth.”

Laura looked at me, wide-eyed. “I was wrong to go against Pa and let him in, wasn't I?”

“Not so long as Pa don't find out.” I grinned.

Laura straightened her shoulders and pressed her lips together. “Well, I did let him in, even if it was wrong.” Her voice fell to a softer whisper. “And he brought me a little handful of spring violets, too,” she added.

“Violets?”

“Over here.” She led me to our wooden chest. “I put them inside with our other things.” Sure enough, inside our chest was a knot of flowers from the woods. Delicate purple ones. Me and Laura dearly loved violets.

“I know I shouldn't have taken them,” she whispered. “But no one ever gave me a thing like that before, and I didn't know what to do, truly I didn't. Aren't they beautiful, Reb?” She lifted them up from the teacup of water where they were setting, and my heart pounded, fearing that Pa and the boys might come stomping in.

“Maybe you shouldn't keep them,” I told her in a jumpy voice. My eyes darted from the flowers to the cabin door and back again.

“Reb Carver, I daresay you should be the one to talk, with all the things you have kept from the Indian,” Laura whispered loudly. “My little flowers won't do any harm, I don't think.” She set the violets carefully back in their teacup and closed the heavy
wooden cover. “Never got flowers from a gentleman before,” she said, smoothing her hand across the top of the chest. “Even if Mr. Kelley is helping a savage Indian, they're still real nice.”