Soon Be Free

by Lois Ruby

  “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.”

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  April 1857

  SHEEP IN WOLF’S CLOTHING

  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.

  • • •

  Months passed. Miz Pru put some meat on her bones, and Homer weaned his first litter of German shepherds. Callie became the best customer of the new Lawrence lending library, the first one in Kansas.

  “Thee must stop calling me ‘Mr. James,’ ” he told Callie one day. “Thee’s not anybody’s servant.”

  “Well, I thought you’d never say it!” Callie stamped her foot like she always used to. Only now she had dainty girlish shoes with a satin bow that tied at the top of each foot. Every time James saw them, he thought about those gingham napkins Homer had tied over Callie’s feet so she’d not stick to the ice on the Ohio River.

  Solomon kept working with Dr. Olney and turned into a kind of doctor himself, using a combination of Dr. Olney’s remedies and Miz Pru’s concoctions to treat most of the black people in Lawrence. “I ain’t had to give up my art,” Miz Pru said. “Just moved it north.”

  James filled up his sketchbook, and his proudest accomplishment was the set of drawings for the house Solomon built for Sabetha. The drawings looked just right, although James would never tell anybody that he was disappointed with the way the house turned out, boxy and graceless, like a barn with too many windows. Was it possible that he still had a few things to learn about the steps between the drawing of a house and the moving in?

  In August, Lawrence celebrated its third birthday as a bona fide town. Miss Malone asked everyone to bring a piece of Lawrence history to school. Jeremy Macon brought his Sharps rifle. Just about every family, except James’s, of course, had one of these Beecher Bibles smuggled into Lawrence to fight uprisings with the proslavers. Jeremy’s family had had the very first one in Lawrence.

  Flint Morrison brought a magnifying glass that his father had ground. “My pa’s the first oculist ever been here in Lawrence,” he boasted. “Without my pa, nobody’d see where they were going and they’d be walking right into the river, I reckon.”

  James wondered what Will would have brought. Maybe the bullet that made him lose his leg in the battle that would keep Kansas Territory a free state.

  He, James, took his prized sketchbook to school. Jeremy whooped over an exterior drawing of Solomon and Sabetha’s house. “Whoa, don’t it look just like the real thing! Hey, can you draw a pitcher of me, hunh?” Jeremy mugged for the portrait. Flint grabbed the sketchbook away from Jeremy and flipped through the pages, stopping here and there to run his magnifying glass over different parts. He seemed fascinated by the whole thing, until James thought Flint might be interested in architecture like he was. Maybe the two of them would build houses all over Douglas County. Maybe they could do it without cutting down a single tree. Houses of native limestone quarried nearby, or of cinnamon-red bricks that stacked neatly and locked tight at the corners. Houses nestled in the trees, so pert and perfect that you’d just stand there peeking through the trees and staring at those houses until night fell. Could you build a house right around a tree, letting it grow through the roof?

  Meanwhile, the other six people in class passed their treasures around for everyone else to fuss over.

  At the end of the day, James asked Flint Morrison to Sunday supper. He knew Flint had no mother to turn out a rabbit stew and a gooseberry pie like Ma did. Flint needed a friend, and so did James. A new friend wouldn’t replace Will, but he could make the ache more tolerable.

  Flint Morrison came to supper just twice before the fall leaves started turning, and then he sprang some big news. “Guess what, James Weaver. Me and my pa’s moving to Leavenworth first of next week.”

  “New job for thy father, Flint?”

  The boy’s eyes grew soft as cotton. “New life altogether, James. My pa’s getting hitched to a widow who ain’t too ugly, and before long, we’re gonna be rich. We done found us a pirate treasure trove!”

  • • •

  The first of April 1858, again by moonlight, James paced off twenty boot-lengths from the back door and began digging for the cowhide roll that held the Delaware Indian treaty. He’d resolved to dig it up and read it every year on this anniversary until—true to his solemn word—he’d unearth it for the last time and see to its delivery into the hands of the Delaware people.

  He dug and dug, his chest thumping with the effort and a sudden fear that grabbed his heart as he realized the truth:

  The treaty was gone. Stolen.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  NEW TIME, OLD TIME

  Poor squawky Firebird was banished to my room upstairs because, with all those people jammed into our parlor, he’d have a nervous breakdown and peck off half his feathers.

  “So, are you and Mike a couple now?” asked Sally as she stuffed a cheesy Triscuit cracker in her mouth. It was hard to hear her over the crush of voices, but her tone of disapproval came through clearly.

  Our bed-and-breakfast was so popular now that we were booked through the following football season, and all because of the Delaware treaty business. I could just imagine lining up cots end-to-end down the hall in the spring, when Mattie and Raymond came to trial.

  “I mean, Ahn and I were just wondering, since you never have any time for us because you’re goo-gooing over Mike.”

  I looked across the room at poor Mike, who was practically pinned against the mantel by Mr. Donnelly, the man from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Mr. Donnelly was carefully avoiding Chief Louis Ketchum, from the Delaware Tribal Council in Oklahoma. Chief Ketchum held a framed copy of the long-lost treaty, the original being safely locked away in a vault in Bartlesville.

  Mr. Donnelly wore a tie bursting with pink and purple zinnias. They looked like they might pop right off the tie and suffocate him. I could see his lips rolling and flapping, overflowing with words. He could jam a whole paragraph into the normal pause between a question and an answer.

  Mike kept reaching round the guy for handfuls of Spanish peanuts. I noticed a few things about Mike from this distance, too. One, his cute dimples deepened when he chewed, and he was chewing like mad to keep from choking Mr. Donnelly with his own zinnia tie. And two, Mike chewed with his mouth open. Peanut paste in the braces wasn’t my idea of wildly romantic.

  “We’re just friends,” I told Sally. “Don’t worry, he’s still available.”

  “Worry? I prefer someone of the human species. Anyway, I thought he liked Celina, that blond cheerleader with the skirts that barely cover her butt.”

  The TV station set up blinding lights. Several reporters stuck microphones in Mr. Donnelly’s face, and that was Mike’s exit cue. He dashed over to us. “Lock me in a cell with that guy for two days and I’d confess to poisoning my own grandmother.”

  Sally laughed. “You’d poison your grandmother, anyway. Where’s Ahn?”

  “At the courthouse with her brother Nho,” I replied. “He’s becoming a U.S. citizen today.”

  Jeep arrived with his two little brothers in tow. “They heard there was free food,” he said sheepishly. Calvin and Luther headed right for the sweets table, and Jeep grabbed a peanut-butter ball as Luther sailed by him with a towering plate of chocolate goodies. Jeep jerked his head toward the man with zinnias hanging from his neck. “This is the guy who’s going to solve all the Indian problems, hunh?”

  “Right,” Mike agreed. “If he doesn’t talk them to death first. That’s the Delaware chief over there, Jeep, next to his mother and Faith Cloud.”

  I reminded the boys, “Delaware come through the mother’s line, you know.”

  “Weird,” Jeep said.

  “Male chauvinist,” I hissed.

  We heard Mr. Donnelly blatheri
ng on to the camera, and it reminded me of the Charlie Brown specials where the kids talk normally but all the adults drone in the background: wah-wha-wha-WHA-wah-wah.

  The TV lights clicked off, and the room temperature dropped about ten degrees. The white gauzy curtains billowed in the breeze from the open windows. Then the camera and lights shifted to Chief Ketchum.

  Alone in the crowd, Mr. Donnelly looked around for another victim.

  “Oh no, he’s coming this way!” Sally cried. We all turned our backs to the approaching Mouth, but Calvin tugged at Jeep’s T-shirt. “Hey, this guy wants to talk to you.” We all spun around and plastered smiles on our faces.

  “Young people, I do admire your spunk,” Mr. Donnelly said. “I haven’t had a chance to congratulate you kids. Wha-wha-wah. Valiant work, setting things right. Blather-blather. For these Native Americans after some one hundred forty years of unmitigated injustice. Wha-wha-blah-blah. Negotiations with the Kansas descendants. Of course, they’re not a recognized tribe, but we’ll do what we can. Gwak-gwak-gwak. I’m spending an hour or two tomorrow with your friend Faith Cloud over there next to our brother, Chief Ketchum. Blooey-blooey-blah.”

  I tuned out about every fourth word, like somebody whose hearing aid shorts out.

  “Proud and noble history. Righting the wrongs. Our brother the chief reminds me his people are rightfully called the Lenni Lenape within their own circles. We all have our own names for ourselves, isn’t that so. Wha-wha-blah-blooey-gwak.”

  And then something caught my ear. I know, that sounds like I slammed a car door on my head, but you know what I mean. Mr. Donnelly said, “I understand James Baylor Weaver lived in this house. I saw the sign by the front door. I’m trained to observe details such as this. I do so admire his work, especially that monumental Kentucky House he designed in Washington.”