Crooked River by Shelley Pearsall Read Free Book Online Page B

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 didMr. 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