Crooked River (9 page)

I didn't say a word, just hoped in my head that Mr. Kelley was smart enough to know that he could get me and Laura in awful bad trouble with Pa if he kept coming around to our house and didn't watch his step.

Standing up, Laura cast her eyes around the cabin and sighed. “I surely hope he doesn't come back this morning,” she said. “What would he say about me keeping a house like this?”

“He's gonna come back?” I asked, wide-eyed.

Laura tugged Mercy off the bed and began picking up the yarn that she had unrolled every which way. “He said he might, if Pa and the boys are gone.”

I already knew that they were going to the mills with the last of our shelled corn. After they had the wagon ready, they would rattle down the road with our old horse, Mary Ester. She walked so slow and plodding, I knew they wouldn't be back from the mills until well after dark.

Sure enough, not long after they left, we heard the sound of a person coming down the path toward the house. Me and Laura both jumped up from our baking, and Laura nearly spilled a whole jug of water in her rush to scrub the dough and flour off her hands.

When we reached the door, Peter Kelley stood outside waiting. He was wearing the same wide-brimmed hat and ill-fitting coat. “Good morning,” he
said, pulling the hat off his head real fast and turning a shade of pink, I noticed.

Laura answered “Good morning” in a soft voice that didn't even sound like her own. “This here's my sister Rebecca,” she told Mr. Kelley as if he had never seen me before. Strange to say, this time he had a single snowshoe tucked under his arm.

When Peter Kelley finished his meeting with Indian John and came down the stairs, Laura invited him to stay for a piece of custard pie.

She had made the pie the day before, just in case Mr. Kelley did come back again as he had promised. But Laura said that I was the only person, in all of earth and heaven, who was to know that she had used up eight whole eggs, four great spoonfuls of precious loaf sugar, and a good bit of our nutmeg to make it.

I believe that Peter Kelley didn't know what to answer at first. After Laura asked him to stay, he stumbled over his words. First saying no, he didn't want to cause us any trouble with our Pa, and then saying perhaps he could stay for a moment to be polite, and finally deciding that it was a real kind offer and, yes, he would greatly appreciate a piece of pie.

“It's one of our Ma's good pies,” Laura told him. “The kind she used to make.”

“Your Ma?” Peter Kelley asked gently as he sat down at the table. “She is gone?”

“Three years ago,” Laura answered. “She died in the month of March. God rest her soul.”

“Right after giving birth to our sister Mercy,” I added, nodding at Mercy, who had her fingers in the yarn basket again. I don't know why I always had to tell folks that our Ma had died giving birth to her, but I did. It sounded as if I was putting all of the blame for Ma's death on my helpless little sister, who was born into this world silent and nearly blue. Maybe I still was.

“I don't have any sisters of my own, only brothers,” Mr. Kelley said, slowly stirring the tea that Laura had set in front of him. “Just two brothers still living now and my Ma, who has grown quite old and feeble, I'm afraid.” He shook his head, and I could tell his Ma was dear to him by the sorrowful way his face looked.

“Every time I see Amik here, what I can't keep from thinking about is how …” He paused and looked toward the loft stairs. “Is how my Ma wouldn't be alive today—she wouldn't have raised any of us, not my brothers or me—if it weren't for his family.” He pointed upward, as if pointing straight at Amik himself. “Years ago, his family saved her life.”

“What?” I said, more loudly than I should have.

He glanced at Laura and me. “I could only have been nine or ten years old when it happened,” he said. “It was the fall of the year, I remember, and we had all gone to a cranberry marsh to pick berries.”

In my mind, I could picture a cranberry marsh— the green color of the leaves and the bright red berries nestled inside like jewels.

Peter Kelley continued. “All of us went—my Pa and Ma and my four brothers. I remember how it was a beautiful autumn afternoon, not a hint of a cloud. All was right with the world, it seemed. That's what I remember most about that day.” He wrinkled his forehead. “Do you understand what I mean?”

I nodded.

There was a summer afternoon before Ma died that I had not forgotten either. It was a real pretty day. Me and Laura and Ma were picking beans in the garden, and we got to singing songs and tossing beans from one basket to another, just for our own amusement. We had never done a thing like that before, and we must have been a sight. I could still recall the bright blue sky and the sound of Ma laughing.

Peter Kelley shook his head. “Maybe we weren't watching as close as we should have been, on account of how beautiful that day was. But before any of us knew what had happened, a rattlesnake came through the cranberries, just came up real sudden, and it struck our Ma hard on the foot.”

I caught my breath. I had seen more than my share of rattlesnakes, and I knew what they could do to folks if you came across them unawares.

Peter Kelley closed his eyes, as if he was remembering the scene exactly as it was. “I can still hear the terrible sound of Ma's voice shrieking for us. Pa sent me and my brother Nathaniel running for the
nearest town to fetch a doctor. Never ran so fast in all my life,” he said softly, “trying to save my Ma that morning.”

I swallowed hard, thinking about my own Ma.

“The doctor told us to bind up her foot with tobacco leaves to draw out the poison. If the swelling grew worse, he said to dig a hole in the ground and have her put her foot inside the dirt, packed in tobacco leaves.

“We tried everything.” Peter Kelley shook his head. “But Ma's foot and leg swelled up as full as the skin could hold. It was black from the poison, truly it was.” He took a deep breath. “We knew she wasn't long for the earth. Not more than a few days left, everyone told us. And we didn't know how we would manage in the world without her. My youngest brother was only four.”

I cast a look at Laura because I remembered this feeling too well.

Peter Kelley continued. “The next day my older brother met a Chippewa man fishing in our river. All of us could speak some words in Chippewa, and my brother the best of all, so my brother told the Indian—” Peter's voice caught in his throat. “He told him about the coming death of our poor Ma.

“That same evening,” Peter Kelley said, “I heard a soft knock on our door, and I opened it to see who it was. Amik's grandmother stood outside in the darkness.” He squinted his eyes. “All these years later, I can still recall exactly what she looked like. She was called by the name Old Turtle Woman, and I remember how she was a small woman with stooped
shoulders and gray-streaked hair, and how she always wore a circle of tiny rabbit bones around her neck.

“The woman pressed a bundle of leaves toward me, saying,
‘Aabajitoonan, aabajitoonan’
—Use them, use them.” Peter Kelley looked down at his hands. “Two of the women in our settlement were already sewing Ma's burial clothes when we bound the leaves on her swollen leg that night as Amik's grandmother had told us to do. But not a one of us expected those leaves would change a thing, certainly we didn't.”

Mr. Kelley stopped and took a long sip of tea.

“And the leaves did?” I asked, hardly daring to believe that they would. It made me shiver to think about that blackened, swelled-up leg with Indian leaves wrapped around it, and the women sewing burial clothes in the next room.

Peter Kelley nodded and gave a wide grin. “In the morning, my Ma was well enough to get out of bed and try on those burial clothes for size.”

“Surely not,” Laura cried.

“Yes, she was fine and well again,” he insisted.

“The leaves did all that?” I said.

Mr. Kelley shrugged. “All I can say is that those of us who saw it with our own eyes believed it to be so. And Ma has lived more than a dozen good years since.”

In the silence after he finished his story, I thought about my own Ma. I imagined the old Indian woman with the rabbit bone necklace coming to our cabin when my Ma was dying. Even then, I was certain she never would have taken help from an Indian.
Knowing my Ma, she would rather have died and gone on to the next world than to have allowed Indians to save her. I glanced over at Laura and wondered what we would do if we were in the same place.

Seemed like we were all lost in our thoughts until Mr. Kelley said he didn't mean to keep us from eating our pie, and Laura jumped up to serve the forgotten pieces. I could tell that Mr. Kelley liked that pie real well because he didn't stop to take one breath while eating it. He even picked up the crumbs one by one with the back of his fork. When he finished, he shook his head slowly and said that our Ma's custard pie was the best he'd ever tasted.

Laura just nodded and said that our Ma always was a good cook, but there was still much to be learnt since she had gone.

“Yes, I expect there is,” Mr. Kelley said in a quiet way, and I caught him giving Laura a kind look as he pushed back his chair to leave.

When he reached down to pick up the snowshoe, I couldn't help noticing it again. I think he must have seen me staring at it, because he tucked it quickly under his arm and didn't say one word of explanation about it.

All Peter Kelley told us before he left was that he hoped to return one last time before the trial to talk to Amik. Maybe his eyes said that he hoped to see Laura again, too. It was hard telling. But before he disappeared down the path, he turned and waved at us. I remember how he stopped right in the middle
of his ambling walk and turned around. Taking off his hat, he waved it once in the air. The sunlight caught his copper red hair, and I had to admit that maybe he was handsome in a skinny sort of way.

That would be the last glimpse we would have of him for nearly two weeks.