Soon Be Free (23 page)

She closed one eye to sight him better, or maybe to scare him, since she'd already proved that she had second sight. “You say you can take care of us, all of us?”

“Try my best,” Solomon assured her.

Callie shrugged. “He can marry us.”

Ma gave her blessing, too, in a word. “Fine. Now, Sabetha, Mrs. Noonan will be needing help. Her time's coming soon, and Dr. Olney believes she's carrying twins, plus she's got three little ones not yet off to school. Mr. Noonan's the banker. They'll pay a good wage. Homer, what is thy strength?”

“I kin lift a wagon fulla hogs, Miz Weavuh.”

Miz Pru said, “My boy Homer's awful good with hounds.”

“Yes, suh! They's mush in my hands.”

“Otis Clement keeps cowherd dogs. I believe he can use a hand, since his boy's gone off to college in St. Louis. Callie, there's school over at the African church. I dream of a time when all children, black ones and white ones and Indian children, too, can go to school together here in Kansas. Maybe when the territory becomes a state,” Ma said, sighing. She cracked a bunch of eggs into a blue crock full of flour. “I'm about to drop these dumplings into the stew. How long since thee's had a steaming bowl of rabbit stew, friends?”

“Oh, 'bout thirty years,” said Miz Pru.

“James, you know where the forks and knives are. Won't thy father and sister be surprised to see how many of us will be thanking the Lord for our bread tonight?”

“We're grateful to you, Miz Weaver,” Sabetha said.

“Nonsense.” Ma curled her lip at the snarl of braids on top of Sabetha's head. “I believe with a little cleaning up, thee shall be a presentable bride. Solomon, could thee kindly go down to the cellar for some spiced peaches? Callie, plates are on the second shelf over there. The peas, Miss Pru?” No one moved. “Well? Are thee all rooted where thee's planted? Handsome meals like this don't happen with a flick of the wrist.”

Suddenly everyone was in motion, and Ma whispered to James, “It's a joy to have these people here, but oh, mercy, does my heart weigh heavy for poor Marian Bowers this night.”

“I was so surprised when you phoned, kiddos. Days pass, and my phone doesn't ring. Who's this you brought me?” Faith Cloud batted her eyelashes at Dad.

He smiled. “I'm Jeffrey Shannon, Dana's father.”

“Married? Poor Faith has no luck at all. Say, you must be Mattie Berk's brother.”

I spoke up quickly. “We didn't exactly tell the truth when we were here before. I'm not, strictly speaking, Mattie's niece.”

Faith eyed me suspiciously. “I see. No, I don't see at all. Well, I'll bring some iced tea.”

“No!” Mike nearly shouted it. “I mean, no, thank you.”

Wolf came loping into the room and did a search-and-destroy number with his tail, overturning pots of dried-up plants all over the studio.

“Oh, don't mind the pup,” Faith said, setting the pots upright. “He's staying with me for a while. Kitty, too. Mattie and Ray decided to take a little vacation in Mexico.”

Mike punched my knee in one of his more subtle moves that said,
Oh yeah?

“Ms. Cloud,” I began.

“Oh, kiddo, everybody calls me Faith. Even I do.”

“Okay. We need to ask you a couple of questions. Can you tell us about Chief Tonganoxie?”

“Oh, he was one of the great ones. We had a lot of honored chiefs in the olden days, not just one like a king, like some tribes do. Let's see, around Tonganoxie's time there was Chief Fall Leaf and Chief Sarcoxie and Chief Neconheson and Chief White Turkey, and Chief Journeycake, but he was a
schwonnah.”

“A what?” Mike asked.

“Schwonnah
. Somebody who goes to the white man's church. He was only half Indian, on his daddy's side, which doesn't count, and a Christian, to boot.”

Dad asked, “Do your people still own any land around Leavenworth?”

Faith wrinkled her lips up as if she'd just tasted some bad fish. “Not since 1866, when they kicked us out. Oh, a few stubborn ones stayed in Kansas, about twenty grown folks and twice as many children. But most of us were shipped off to Oklahoma like no more than sticks of furniture. Sold us off to the Cherokee.”

“You're still here,” Mike pointed out, yanking his foot out from under Wolf's belly.

“You bet.” Faith crossed her ankles and leaned her
weight on the sides of her fuzzy slippers. “We folks, the descendants of those brave ones who refused to go, we never got what's coming to us. And now look at that land. It's got cities and oil wells and a busy harbor and gambling casinos—and hardly a tree still standing. Why, I could be rich as the Queen of England today, wearing ugly hats and waving in gloves, if I'd gotten what was mine. At least I'd know nobody was digging up my ancestors to build a high-rise office building. You wouldn't want your folks dug up, would you, for a glass tower?”

“I certainly would not,” Dad agreed. He loves dead things. He can spend a whole weekend in an old cemetery and never feel a chill up his spine.

Mike flashed me threatening looks that said,
Either you tell her nicely or I'll drop the bomb
, so I said, “Faith, we've got some unhappy news. Mattie and Ray aren't in Mexico. They're in the Douglas County jail.”

“Jail? Oh, my.” She locked her pudgy fingers together. Her nails were painted a sparkly green.

Mike said, “We think they stole your Samuel Straightfeather book.”

Faith turned her hands over and over as if she were washing them.

I added, “And we think they're looking for a treaty that was made with your people a long time ago, one that got lost and was never put into law.”

Faith shook her head sadly. “I wondered why they asked me so dang many questions.”

I said, “They were probably planning to sell the treaty to Delaware descendants in Oklahoma. It would be pretty valuable, don't you think, Dad?” He nodded.

Faith laid her head on her shoulder. Her round face was suddenly lined, as if sadness had painted in the creases. Wolf sensed a change in atmosphere, for his tail stopped swishing and clunked to the floor.

“Another thing, Faith,” I began. “You know Bo Prairie Fire?”

“That old loon? We're the same clan, Turkey Clan, but that doesn't mean we're
all
crazy.”

“Faith, I hate to tell you this, but Mr. Prairie Fire died a couple days ago. I saw him Tuesday, and he said to say hello to you.” It was a white lie, but it would make her feel better while we were delivering one jab after another.

“Poor old sweetcakes,” Faith said mournfully. “He hasn't been
right
since 1975, when his wife died. To tell you the truth, he was a few bricks short of a load even before Lulu died. Lulu and Bo and I, we were about the last ones of our clan left in Kansas. Now Lulu's gone, and Bo, too.”

Wolf mourned along with Faith. He lay on his back with his legs sticking straight up, and he whimpered while Dad scratched his pink belly.

Faith said, “I always thought Bo had it, that treaty thing everybody's looking for.”

I caught my breath and tried not to gallop into
the next question. “Why did you think that, Faith?”

She looked back in time, her eyes fixed on a knot in the wall. “Right after Lulu croaked, he started boasting about it. Nobody paid him any mind. He said Samuel Straightfeather told him about that treaty thing. But anybody who's not drunk or crouching in a padded cell could tell you that old Sam died a hundred years ago. Bo and that man never walked one day on this earth together.”

Wolf rolled over and jumped to his feet, as if he'd sniffed a squirrel. “Settle down, pup,” Faith said, hurling one ankle over Wolf's back. “Of course, some of our folks believe you can talk to the spirits of our ancestors if Time and Mother Earth are just right for it. Maybe he did, old Bo Prairie Fire. Maybe long-time-ago Sam told him just where that paper was and said for him to hold on to it so it didn't fall into the hands of crooks in the tribe.”

“Crooks?” Mike asked.

“Yes, kiddos, even your own can turn against you, if your eyes aren't wide open.” She pinched her nose, obviously to keep back tears. “More likely, the old loon just forgot he had it, or didn't even know it. He probably thought he was carrying some gift from the ancestors, and he'd haul it around until he was buried with it.”

“We found it,” I said quietly.

“Tell the truth? Why, that crazy old turtle! Whatchu gonna do with it, kiddos?”

“Send it to Washington, I guess. What other choice do we have?”

“Why, you could send it to young Chief Ketchum,” Faith said. She stared at the knot on the wall again, looking back into a different time and space. “Honest to God, we all suspected Bo's great-great-grandfather had that thing hidden away. He was a white man, doncha know. Only reason he didn't burn it up and throw it back to the earth was because he was married to one of our own. Poor thing died young, birthing her first. I guess the greedy old stag figured his kid would be covered either way, white or Indian, if that thing ever turned up.”

It was a long shot, but I asked, anyway. “Do you remember the greedy old stag's name, Faith?”

“Well, sure I do, clear as winter air. Jedediah Morrison, he was. A glass grinder. Bo Prairie Fire's great-great-grandfather.”

The shrill, quick yip of wolves kept James awake on his pallet in front of the dying fire. Beside him, Rebecca made mewling noises in her sleep. James couldn't find a comfortable position free of Rebecca's chimpanzee kicks. He'd looked forward to sleeping in his own bed, but after Solomon went home to Olneys', Ma had sent Homer to James's room, and the three women to Rebecca's.

Wolves. They said a wolf could bite right through the ropes that held a horse to a tree, but if a man came near, that sorry wolf would turn and run. James didn't like thinking of himself as a sorry wolf, or, as Ma said, a wolf in sheep's clothing. But he'd done something shameful, selling out the Delaware people for his own friends, and now he was turning and running, too much of a coward to go back on his word.

Well, wasn't a man's word worth more than the air it took to carry it? A mountain, Grandpa Baylor said, a man's word was a mountain that couldn't be bent or splintered.

And Callie and the others: Didn't their lives have
as much worth as anybody else's? James was pledged to protect them, as he had through the long weeks back and forth across the country. He owed that much to Will and to Miz Lizbet, who, like Moses, hadn't lived to see the promised land. Then he remembered a passage from Isaiah, which Ma used to quote back when Miz Lizbet had first arrived and sent them all spinning: “Hide the outcasts; betray not him that wandereth.”

Yet the Delaware were wanderers, too, uprooted from their first home out east and pushed westward mile by mile.

Which way was
right?
Both were, and neither was. James's head reeled. He just had to wake Ma and Pa and talk it out with them.

Upstairs, he inched their door open. The moon highlighted two round forms on the high feather bed. They were turned toward James. Pa's hair was spread across the pillow, and Ma, in her nightcap, fit snug around Pa's back with her face nuzzled into his neck. It was so achingly sweet that James couldn't bear to disturb them.

He'd have to work things out in his own mind, like a grown person.

• • •

It must be midnight,
James thought. The moon hung high in the sky, lit so bright that James could barely make out the drinking gourd. A sure breeze cut through the slats of the porch, where he sat
wrapped in Ma's shawl. Mercy, if anybody saw him, he'd be mortified.

An hour passed, maybe more. The only sounds in the night were the distant wolves and the rustling leaves. After all the traveling, James had become a night person, more apt to be sleepy in the daytime and alert in the dark. He thought and he thought, until he knew what he had to do.

These past weeks he'd learned to pad around silently in the dark, ever vigilant. Inside the house he gathered up everything he needed. He wrapped the Delaware treaty into one of Ma's embroidered flour-sack tea towels, and rolled that up in a swatch of soft cowhide she used as a trivet on the table. He took the shovel Pa kept in a corner by the door and slipped quietly outside.

Around the back of the house, James dug a hole, remembering how he and Pa had buried a few of their treasures during the raid of Lawrence only a few months earlier.

He laid the cowhide roll in the earth and shoveled dirt back over it. He tamped down the mound of newly turned soil and went back into the house. In the drawer of the hutch was the second sketchbook Ma had brought back from Boston, and now he ran his fingers over the raised gold letters on the cover:
JAMES BAYLOR WEAVER, KANSAS TERRITORY,
1857.

Crouched by the window, he worked by the light of the moon, sketching the house where everyone
but he now slept. It took him two hours and four pencils to finish the sketch, and every muscle ached with tension. Printed on the south elevation of the house, in letters so small that they appeared to be shading unless you looked very closely or had high-powered spectacles, was this message:

I, James Baylor Weaver, swear to be a man of my word. If the Lord should take me before April of 1862, I ask that thee go out behind the house thee sees here, twenty boot-lengths from the back door, and find buried an unratified treaty with the Delaware Indians of Kansas Territory. Trust that I hid this document for good reason. Send it to the Delaware people and let every man have what's coming to him.

Relieved, James slid under his comforter and fell right to sleep, with Trembles purring on his back.