Cries from the Earth Read Online Free Page A

eyes at last, sensing that last breath gushing up in a ball from his punctured lungs, spilling across his tongue and over his lips. His head gently sagged to the side as he felt the release come at long last.
    Anguished, Shore Crossing sobbed, pressing his head against his father’s bloody breast, “I promise … promise not to kill this man who has killed you!”

Chapter 1
    May 1, 1877
    She scraped the thick sulphur head of the lucifer across one of the rough boards lying beneath her shoe and watched the match leap into life. Emily FitzGerald cautiously inched the wavering flame to that stubby, blackened wick protruding from the top of the half-used beeswax taper and lit the candle she and the Doctor kept atop the tall bureau near their bedside at night. The flame struggled a moment, then caught, spreading a small womb of warm light around her.
    Emily peeked over her shoulder at her sleeping husband. He was turned toward the wall, snoring gently. After sliding the candleholder to the side, she quietly removed the glass stopper from the top of the inkwell, dipped her pen, and started scratching the nib across that first small sheet of paper she held in place beneath her reddened left hand.
    Fort Lapwai
    May 1, 1877
    Dear Mamma,
    Emily got that far, then caught herself staring at the red knuckles of both hands as she considered how to begin this letter. With those two children of hers, there was so much washing of clothes grown so grimy in their play, doing her best to keep her children scrubbed as much as possible with what seemed to be one bath right after another. While Jennie, their Negress, did lend her efforts with the washing, as well as the cooking and keeping after the house, Emily did not allow the servant girl to assist in bathing Bess or her little brother, Bert. Mending and sweeping the floors, baking and peeling and snapping beans, scrubbing chamber pots, and boiling the doctor’s underthings were all tasks Jennie had performed dutifully for the family over the last few years now, ever since the Doctor—that was the name Emily always used for her husband, John—had first shipped north for that assignment in Sitka, Alaska. But bathing these young, precocious, grimy children remained Emily’s domain alone.
    My brown babies are still the picture of health. Such solid, round, little brown toads you never saw.
    She gazed at the slim hand holding the long pen there in the pulsing candlelight, that tiny flame stirred only by her breath, remembering those vibrant red spots showing up on little Bert’s arms just before they left Sitka for the Nez Perce country last spring. The Doctor had vaccinated his son in one arm; then two days later, when it appeared the vaccination wasn’t going to take, her husband vaccinated Bert in the other arm. Then both arms took! How sore her little Bert had been, pouting so badly that it really hurt his father.
    Emily remembered those first months after coming here to Nez Perce country—a land where the Doctor said he wanted to return once he finished his service to the army. It was undeniably beautiful, she agreed, in spite of the half-wild Non-Treaty bands who came and went past the fort and agency every now and then. She recalled the frightening hubbub of last summer’s Indian troubles so many hundreds of miles and many days to the east over in Sioux country and reassured herself again that her little family really was far enough removed from those scenes of such horrid disasters that were on everyone’s lips for a time last year. Then she thought of how she had written to her mother giddily celebrating that the Doctor wasn’t going to be among those outfits posted to Sitting Bull’s country.
    The Indians respect no code of warfare, flags of truce, wounded—nothing is respected! It is like fighting to exterminate wild animals, horrible beasts. I hope and pray this is the last Indian war. Don’t let anybody talk of peace