Crooked River

by Shelley Pearsall

  my heart trembles.

  i gaze at the white spirits

  moving and shifting

  around me

  like the sands on the shore

  of a lake.

  and I fear that the future

  foreseen by the old man

  has come.

  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.

  i stand

  on the tall hanging place

  of the gichi-mookomaanag.

  the odor of death is all around me

  and the sound of howling voices

  roars in my ears.

  my heart trembles

  within me.

  i twist my fingers around

  the pinch of tobacco

  in my hand.

  Kitche Manitou, i whisper.

  i do not want to die here

  in a foreign place,

  i do not want to die

  among a people

  who are not my own.

  circle above me a cloud.

  circle above me a cloud.

  the gichi-mookomaanag

  talk and talk.

  they wag their fingers at me

  and talk and talk.

  i pray

  to the spirits—

  circle above me a cloud

  circle above me a cloud.

  the gichi-mookomaanag

  talk and talk,

  talk

  and

  talk,

  they talk so much

  they do not see

  the clouds—

  great piles of black clouds,

  gathering

  at the edge of the sky.

  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.

  the

  Thunder Beings

  have come.

  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.

  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.

  i am

  a running deer

  i am

  a soaring bird

  i am

  a diving fish

  i am

  a rippling snake

  woods

  sky

  water

  day night

  night day

  i run

  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 surel
y 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.

  when i finish

  my story,

  the fire-blaze is low.

  the eyes of the Little Ones—

  children of children—

  grow heavy with sleep.

  you must not forget

  the story of your grandfather,

  i finish softly,

  you must tell it

  to your children

  one day when you are old

  and to your children's children

  for many

  strings of lives to come.

  Rice Bird shakes her head