Crooked River Read Online Free PDF Page B

stand in the way of a grown man. Not if Pa got word of it. So, the trapper scraped his boots on the stone beside the door and pushed his way right inside. I could see his eyes darting from one thing to the next, taking account of everything we had—the pewter on the table, our big food cupboard, the red-painted chest from the East that sat at the foot of Pa's bed—
    “Indian's upstairs,” Laura said, trying to hurry him on his way.
    It wasn't long after the trapper went up the narrow steps that I knew something was wrong. There was a thumping noise, as if a large stone had been dropped on the floor, and then came the sound of the trapper's raspy old laughter. A sickly feeling crawled right into my stomach.
    I couldn't hear all the words the trapper was saying to Indian John, but the few I could catch were ugly enough. There was more raspy laughter and scraping and thumping on the floor above our heads, as if the trapper was tormenting poor Indian John, who was desperate to move.
    What happened next took me by surprise, though. Laura ran to the hearth, picked up the big frying pan, and flew up the steps to the loft.
    “Out of our house,” she hollered at the trapper in a voice that didn't even sound like her own. It was loud and booming, as if she was shouting into a barrel. “Out of our house before I smash you to bits.”
    And believe me, by the sound of her voice, there was no question that she would smash the trapper's head flat as a rattlesnake's if given half the chance. Iexpect that the trapper must have believed this, too, because he left the loft so fast, he missed half of the steps coming down.
    While he was shooting past me and out the door, I noticed that he had something in his hand. It looked like maybe it was a twist of brown paper, but I didn't pay it any real notice. I just stood by the hearth, with my knuckles squeezed white, praying for the cabin door to close and for us to be rid of him.
    After the trapper had gone, Laura came back down the stairs. She didn't even glance in my direction. All she said was, “May the Lord forgive me for defending the life of a murderer,” and she dropped the pan on the hearth with a loud clang that made me jump. “And may the Lord keep Pa from finding out what I done, too,” she added.
    Then she picked up a lump of bread dough we had left on the table and began to knead it furiously, as if she was trying to squeeze the life out of it.
    “Any harm come to him?” I said finally.
    “To whom?” Laura answered.
    “Indian John.”
    Laura's hands stopped right in the middle of her work. “Don't you show even the smallest kindness or pity for that Indian, Rebecca Carver,” she said fiercely. “Or I will take all of the things that you've hidden in our chest—the quills, the beads, everything—and I will burn them to ashes this very minute.”
    Laura lifted up the dough and thudded it back on the table, lifted and thudded—hard enough to send up clouds of flour. To my way of thinking, she wasn't making the smallest bit of sense. First she saved IndianJohn from the no-good trapper and then she scolded me for asking a trifling question.
    “I only wanted to know,” I kept on.
    With the way Laura's eyes looked daggers at me, I didn't dare to open my mouth again. I didn't dare to ask if she saw the trapper carrying something when he left the loft, or if she thought he had stolen something from us or from Indian John.
    I just kept silent and did my work without a word. By evening, I had nearly forgotten all about the trapper. I didn't know then what an unfortunate mistake that would later turn out to be.
    the trapper
    steals from me
    as the crow steals
    from a patch of corn.
    i can smell a trapper coming
    upwind
    in a rainstorm
    two camps away.
    the trapper laughs
    and plucks a feather from my head
,
    laughs
    and struts as if he is
    ten feet tall
    in his boots
,
    too tall to fit
    in his own canoe.
    holding the feather
    in his hand, he turns
    and runs.
    cowardly