One
Pa never told us he would capture an Indian and bring him back across the river. Never breathed a word that he would march an Indian right into our cabin and make him a prisoner while we were gone away. Now, if our poor Ma had been alive, I don't expect he would have ever dared to do such a shameful thing. But Ma was gone, and me and my sister Laura had set out in pouring rain to help the Hawleys, who had all taken sick with a fever.
"You coming, Laura?" I hollered as we made our way toward the Hawleys' cabin. I pushed back the hood of my cloak to look for my sister, who was lagging somewhere behind me in the rain. Laura was seventeen, four years older than me, and she had always been big for a girl. No matter how much our Ma had added and mended, Laura's clothes kept up a never-ending tug-of-war around her body, and her dresses were always too short to cover up her thick ankles and wide white feet. Pa called her "our horse." That's what he said when folks came to visit.
"This here's Laura. Our big horse," he'd laugh, in that loud way of his. "Gonna have to turn her out to pasture if she keeps on growing like she is." Then he'd nod at me. "And this here's Rebecca," he'd say. "She looks like her Ma did, but she's slow in the head, and lazy, and don't do a quarter of the work."
I was not slow in the head. Or lazy. But we would just keep our heads down and not say a word whenever Pa was talking to folks. No matter what he called us. Since our Ma had died, me and Laura had only ourselves for company. Breakfast, noonday dinner, and supper. That's all we were to them.
As me and Laura drew closer to the Hawleys' log house, I noticed there wasn't a whisper of smoke coming from their chimney, a bad sign, surely. "No fire going." I pointed. Laura tugged her wet cloak tighter around her shoulders. "Well, we are just gonna knock on that door and see what we find," she said, casting a jumpy look at the cabin and taking a deep breath.
Turned out, poor Mrs. Hawley was nearer to death than life. I reckon it was a good thing we had come when we did because she couldn't even stir from her bed to fetch a cup of water or a crust of bread for her ailing husband and children. And the smell in that place could have nearly kilt you.
My brother Lorenzo was sitting inside our cabin when I returned. He had been left to keep an eye on little Mercy, but he had himself pulled up to a big platter on the table, and he was picking out the leftover pieces of cold pork from breakfast with his fingers instead. Pick. Chew. Pick. Chew. One of the fresh loaves that me and Laura had baked the day before was sitting on the table with its end all crumbled in where he had tunneled through it with his fingers.
I glared at him. "We was saving that bread for supper."
Lorenzo was eleven, two years younger than me, and he was named after my Pa, so that showed you something right there. He could do whatever he pleased. Always acted like he was the biggest toad in the puddle. Always grabbed the biggest piece of meat from the supper table and took the warmest part of the hearth for his seat. "No one told me a thing, and I was hungry," he said, sticking his greasy fingers back into the pile of pork again. Pick. Chew.
It would serve Lorenzo right if my feet got tangled in my skirts and I fell down the steps, cracked my head on the plank floor, and died. Below me, I could hear the sound of Lorenzo's chair scraping back from the table. "You best take care," he called out.
Although I went up to the chamber loft nearly every day to fetch something, I never took much of a liking to it. The long, low-ceilinged room had only two small windows, one at each end, and you could hear mice rustling about in the shadows. Each time I reached my hand into an apple barrel, I was tormented by the thought that one of those mice would go skittering up my arm. I squinted into the shadows of the loft, figuring that Lorenzo had hung an old coat from one of the rafters. Or fixed up a hat with goose feathers. That would be just the sort of thing he would do. But I was wrong. There in the loft, not more than a few steps away, was a real Indian staring straight back at me.
Two
"Indians!" I shouted, and belted out every name I knew. "I seen an Indian, Pa. There's an Indian hiding up in our loft."
Pa's eyes narrowed. "One Indian?" he said sharply. "That all you saw? One Indian?"
I nodded. "Yes sir."
At this, one of the men gave a big snort of laughter and some of the other men started to chuckle and exchange glances among themselves, as if they all knew something I didn't.
"I ain't lying," I hollered in a voice that was choking up fast with tears. "You go on back there and see. I ain't lying." I waved my arms in the direction of the house. But the men just kept on chuckling and rolling their eyes at every word I said.
"Course you ain't lying, girl. We know there's an Indian in your Pa's house, 'cause we the ones who put him there."
This was the first I realized what my Pa and the men had done. I imagine that my face went as white as a wall right then. I didn't understand a thing.
Excerpted from Crooked River by Shelley Pearsall Copyright © 2007 by Shelley Pearsall. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.