Soon Be Free (17 page)

“Land, we had land, land, land. They take it. White man. We come from Pennsylvania. They push us west, west to this spot, not even called Kansas Territory yet. Here we make a home, up by
the river, the Kansas River, where it meets the Missouri River, our land. You know the place?”

I've been there, Mr. Prairie Fire. In fact—”

“Narrow strip of land by the mouth of the two rivers. Belongs to my people, a thousand people. People of the corn. Fall Leaf; ever hear of him? A chief. Early this year he finds gold in the western part of the territory. Some call it Colorado. But our land's in the east. Northeast corner, up near Leavenworth. Land, land, two hundred thousand acres.” His eyes raced wildly, as if a movie were flickering past them. “My grandfathers are buried there. Six, seven, eight generations, nine, ten.

“Tepees, we live in tepees. How do we keep them from blowing over? Kansas wind blows all the time, girlie, night and day.” Mr. Prairie Fire paused to take a puff of his cigarette, which he inhaled deeply. His gray hair hung almost to his waist but was thin on top, where brown age spots dotted his head.

“We cross lodgepoles, we bind them with rawhide. Know what rawhide is? We drop a strip of it from the center and anchor it on a peg in the ground. Dry ground. Not enough rain. Some years the corn doesn't grow. Heavy rocks hold the edges of the tepees, keep them from blowing over in the wind. White man moves us. We have to move fast, move fast. We pick up the tepees and take them with us. You can see the circle of stones left over. Go and see.”

“Wasn't this a long time ago, Mr. Prairie Fire?” I asked.

“Long time ago. Eighteen and thirty, eighteen and forty. Yesterday. Go and see.” He stubbed his cigarette out on the cement floor and immediately lit another one. “I'm a turkey.” He paused to let that fact sink in, but I didn't follow. He pulled his feet up on the couch with amazing grace and propped his chin on his knees. “We have three clans. Wolf. Turtle. Turkey. I'm Turkey Clan. Twelve,” he said, looking at me sternly.

“Twelve, sir?”

“Yes, yes! It takes twelve shouts to reach the ear of the Great Spirit up in the twelfth heaven.” He demonstrated the shouts, which sent the lightbulb in the ceiling swinging. I expected the bulb to shatter. I resisted covering my ears.

“South wind, north wind, they play dice.”

Plainly the man was nuts.

“Captain John Ketchum, chief of the Lenni Lenape, my people, the real people. He died yesterday, you know.”

“Yesterday?” I asked. Funny, I hadn't seen anything about it in the paper even though I was scrounging for every piece of information I could ferret out on the Delaware people.

Gently, Tracy probed him. “Mr. Prairie Fire, what year is it now?”

“The year Chief Ketchum dies. Yesterday. Eighteen and fifty-seven.”

Heading north and west across Illinois, they stumbled through fifteen to twenty miles each night. Callie and Will took the miles like frisky pups. James felt himself growing heartier with each night's traveling. Thick wads of muscle balled in his calves, and his back was now strong enough to bear his pack and Miz Pru's, both. Solomon and Sabetha plodded along, trailing the younger folks, and most of the way Homer carried Miz Pru on his back.

“If I wasn't blind as an ear of corn, I could do this on my own,” the old woman groused. Every so often she'd slide down his back and bark, “Can't any of you see in the dark any better than I can, so I might as well walk,” and she'd thrust an end of her leash rope into Homer's hand.

One morning just before dawn, a wagon slowed to pick them up. The driver was an immigrant peddler with a bushy beard, strange fringes hanging below his shirt, and an accent James could barely decipher.

“My wife, Shprintze, calls me Shmuel,” he said
in his singsongy style. “Sam is good enough.” He lifted Miz Pru onto the seat beside him and tucked a red plaid blanket around her legs. “You've been on the road a long time?” He tried not to wrinkle his nose, but James could just imagine how ripe they all must smell.

He explained, “We've been sleeping in haylofts and on horse blankets and in caves and out in the pouring rain.”

“We had baths,” Will reminded him.

Shmuel sniffed the air. “When, last Christmas?” He said it like “Krrrissmuhss.”

“Three days ago,” Will responded indignantly. “But we didn't have any clean clothes to change into.”

“I'm afraid we must smell like skunks to thee.”

The peddler chuckled. “Shprintze has a milch cow that stinks sweeter.” He signaled for all of them to climb into the back of his wagon and to find niches around his barrels and crates of merchandise.

Miz Pru sat with her back prim and straight, careful not to spill over onto Shmuel's side of the bench. It occurred to James that she'd probably never sat so close to a white man before.

Shmuel sang,

“I've got needles, I've got thread,

Pots and pans, apples and bread.

I've got scissors, saucers, and snuff,

Tins of marmalade, coffee enough.

I've got buttons, snappers, and hooks,

A bucket of pickles, a barrel of books.

I've got roads to travel, rain and snow,

And yards of Shprintze's calico.”

Sabetha looked longingly at the bolts of fabric, and the thought of orange marmalade smeared on about six of Ma's biscuits made James's head swirl. He leaned into Shmuel's back and replied, “I'm sorry, sir, but we have little money and what we have left we must save for the steamboat tickets in St. Louis.”

Shmuel nodded. “I am also running, friends.”

“You, suh?” asked Miz Pru, barely turning her head.

“Of course, missus. Why else would I leave my little village in the Carpathians? Leave my parents, my grandparents, of blessed memory, and flee with my wife and children across the ocean? To see the world? Hah! We ran for our lives.” Shmuel gently urged the old piebald nag onward, and she glanced back at him for sympathy.

Homer jumped out of the wagon. “I kin walk. That beast ain't able to tote this bigga load.”

Solomon and Sabetha scrambled to the ground as well, and the horse seemed very relieved.

They all spent the day outside of Shmuel's
hut near Centralia, Illinois. Shprintze gave them mounds of her sweet noodle pudding, which they washed down with milk still warm from her fragrant cow. Later they slept while Shprintze and her daughter sewed swaths of calico into colorful shifts for Callie and Miz Pru and Sabetha.

At dusk they left with a basket of bread and carrots and potatoes and the red plaid blanket from the wagon.

“Go in good health,” Shmuel called as they began their trek toward Belleville.

That night, though, things turned sour. Miz Pru was having fits because she'd run out of chewing tobacco. She agitated Homer so much that he set her down in a meadow and walked away. They'd covered a mile before anyone noticed, and Solomon had to double back to fetch the woman.

Callie and James felt achy and weak with ague, and Miz Pru set a few twigs afire to boil the bark of a cottonwood tree. She applied the brew to their aching limbs with her usual rough strokes that felt like urging slaps on a horse's rump. James didn't mention his scratchy throat; no telling
what
nasty tea she'd make him swallow, or what kind of a poultice she'd wrap around his neck.

Sabetha was irritable and snapped at Solomon half the night. She stepped into a declivity, turned her ankle, and blamed Solomon the other half of the night. James could see the tension in Solomon's
shoulders, hunched with his and Sabetha's heavy packs. Finally Solomon said, “We've been traveling eleven nights now, twenty-six for Mr. Will and Mr. James and me. We all need a night of rest.” He dropped the two packs to the ground beside a creek and was asleep before anyone could argue.

The unexpected holiday turned their moods around. Miz Pru conjured up several catfish in the swollen creek and scattered flannel mullein seeds over them to stun them so James and Will could catch them by hand. “Won't hurt human folks none,” she assured them as the stupefied fish floated languidly close to the surface.

Will lit a roaring fire—a chancy gamble, but with Solomon asleep, no one protested. They huddled around the fire that was turning the tough, bony catfish into a feast. Sabetha set half a potato and a mess of carrot peels on the embers for each of them as well.

Homer said, “Honey Sabetha, y'all lookin' right pretty in the firelight.”

“I'm a mess!” She slid her hands together like she was rolling dough. “How come nobody told me how cold it is up here in the North?”

Miz Pru stuck her bare feet toward the fire. “She's a Southern girl, that one. Born in Alabama.”

Sabetha scooped the potatoes and carrot peelings onto a tin plate with a little juice dripped from the fish, and she set the plate over the fire. “You
think Bullocks' is a plantation? Hunh-uh, it's a measly no-account little old hemp farm. I grew up on a real plantation, cotton, three hundred field hands if there was one.”

Callie said, “Tell them, Mama.”

“Ooh, yes, a big plantation. My mama picked cotton side by side with the men, but when I came along in her, she got puny and sickly, could barely keep up. Here I came out, way too early, and my mama was no good in the field anymore.”

“No good, no, suh.” Homer provided the chorus.

“So master, he used her where she could work hard for him,” Sabetha said, her voice sharp as tacks. “She had two more babies, both died.” She sat back on her haunches while the fish sizzled and the peelings curled in the hot juices. “Sold Mama and me North to Bullocks. Threw us in, no charge, with two strapping men the size of Homer.”

James asked, “How old was thee then?”

“Ten, twelve. Little time passed, and Mama had another baby, but that one killed her, and Bullocks, they just lost track of me with no mama and all. Miz Pru just took me in like her own. Her girl, Lizbet, she'd already been sold away soon as she got to looking pert.”

“Sold away cold,” Miz Pru murmured. She poked at the fish with a stick; the flesh seemed yielding, ready to eat.

Sabetha lifted the hot plate out of the fire with
the hem of her new dress. “And that's why Homer and Miz Pru and Callie and me, we're a family.”

Homer pulled his seared potato out of the fire. “Honey Sabetha, you my sister and my sweetheart, both.”

Sabetha gave Homer a withering look, unmistakable in the glow of the fire. “I ain't nobody's sweetheart. Now that I'm out of Bullocks' house, I'm my own woman, and don't you forget it for an eye blink, hear?”

The screened porch of the shelter was flooded with sunlight, but Mr. Prairie Fire still shivered. A wiry woman in a Hawaiian muumuu came cradling a blue plastic pan filled with water. “Don't mind me,” she chirped. The dry, bloated wood screeched as she raised the screen and tossed the whole pan of water out the window. We heard it go
splat
three floors below. She turned around, flashed us a toothless grin, and said, “Somebody's gotta water the petunias, right, Bo?”

Mr. Prairie Fire brightened at her words. “That's my Lulu. Ain't she a dish? Y'oughta taste her fry bread, my Lulu's fry bread.”

The woman came over and patted Mr. Prairie Fire's head. “Yeah, babe, I'm your Lulu, all right. I'm whipping up a batch of fry bread out in the tepee, babe. Oil's sizzling right now.” Her words comforted Mr. Prairie Fire, but her eyes told us a different story.

When he was distracted by a fit of coughing, she said, “I don't mind that he thinks I'm his sweetheart Lulu. Hell's bells, some days I believe I am.” She
chuckled and left us with Mr. Prairie Fire. He'd dozed off, exhausted by his coughing, but he woke suddenly with his eyes blazing. “Yep,” he said, “eighteen and fifty-seven, that's the year.”

Tracy glanced at me, and I seized the opening. “Mr. Prairie Fire, did something special happen to your people this year, 1857?”

“Yes, yes! Indian agent came to our chiefs. Made promises to return land. Pay us back for trees and horses stolen, corn crops ruined. Made a treaty. Ghosts, ghosts.”

Excitement pounding in my chest, I asked, “What happened to that treaty, sir?”

“Lies, all of it lies. No money came. White man comes back. Buys the land cheap. Steals it. We move, we pack up, fold the tepees. You can see the circles of rocks. Go and see. We move south to Indian Territory. Some call it Oklahoma.”

“What year is it now, Mr. Prairie Fire,” Tracy asked.

He looked at her as if she were missing some significant marbles. “I don't know what year it is in your life, girlie, but for the rest of us, it's eighteen and sixty-six. We're in Indian Territory. Land's gone, land by the Kansas and Missouri Rivers. We live with the Cherokee Nation. They don't want us. Don't even talk the same language.”

While he stopped to puff on his cigarette, I jumped in with another question. “Mr. Prairie Fire,
how do you know about this treaty if it was never signed or honored?”

“Straightfeather,” he said, and my heart leaped. “He wrote a book. He was there, you know, when the treaty was signed by our chief, then, pfft, the treaty vanished like sage smoke. Gone.”

“Mr. Prairie Fire,” Tracy said gently, “Samuel Straightfeather has been dead about a hundred years.”

“Is that so? Nobody told me.” Suddenly Mr. Prairie Fire began to cry. Tracy handed him a tissue, and he dabbed delicately at his tears, which left fine snail tracings down his tanned-hide face. “Go away. You bring bad news.”

Tracy nodded to me, and we gathered up our tape recorder and notebooks. “May we come back, Mr. Prairie Fire?”