Crunching Gravel Read Online Free Page A

cot. Apple crates held her clothes, dolls, and coloring books.
    More rough-plank stairs led to an overhead bedroom. As you ascended you might scrape your skull on the vicious ends of tar-paper nails projecting through the roof There were crates for books and toys. Our play area was adjacent to a tin stovepipe. Well-worn linoleum protected our knees from wood slivers. Standing erect was possible only in the center of the room. The hip roof saved heat, but also induced claustrophobia. Small paned windows, askew, were in both ends of the room. Thin curtains on string covered the icy glass. No wall was finished, nor were the window frames and sills painted. A double bed occupied the far corner. Here I slept with Everett, five years younger, under a heavy quilt made of colored worsted scraps. Since the quilt was too heavy to wash by hand, it accumulated much boy-soil. The pillows were bleached flour sacks crammed with hen feathers.
    On an orange crate beside the bed sat a single-wick glass kerosene lamp on a crocheted doily. In the crate were a book of Lutheran prayers and a much-thumbed King James Bible. I read from the Bible night and morning. I intended to read the entire Bible aloud, including the genealogical names. I loved the Doré illustrations, especially the one of Daniel in the lion’s den. In recurring dreams Daniel visited me.
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Indians
    At 6 A.M . the ice was ablaze in sunshine. Ice-covered birches bent to the ground. Lakes were smothered with freshly fallen snow.
    My father and I were driving in the County Welfare truck to the Lac du Flambeau Indian reservation for a truckload of cotton comforters sewn by Flambeau women, as a U.S. government relief project. The reservation was eighty miles from Eagle River. For months the women had met daily at the Community Hall to sew quilts of cotton batting and flowered cloth supplied by the government. Dad would distribute them to needy families.
    Some Indians lived on the outskirts of Eagle River and in nearby Clearwater. The largest Indian family had our name, Peters. We were not as impoverished as they, and we shared many of the overt prejudices of whites then against Indians. We were sure we bathed more, drank less alcohol, avoided knife fights, and rarely beat our wives and kids. The girls from the “other” Peters clan were regarded as unteachable and usually left high school pregnant. Indian yards swarmed with dirty kids, straggly hens, and mangy hounds (we even believed that they made stew of their dogs). Junked cars completed the scene. A white man marrying an Indian woman was ostracized as a “squaw man.” One white lumberjack, George Petts, married an Indian and lived on the highway to Rhinelander. He joked about his squaw’s fertility—she “squirted” forth a “papoose” a year. At last count, there were eight kids. Petts was a notorious poacher. Apprehended, he pleaded poverty, saying that if the county jailed him, they’d have to feed his family. The authorities usually let him go.
    Lac du Flambeau was located at a confluence of lakes and rivers, with much virgin timber nearby. The town itself was home to three hundred souls, most of whom lived in bark shanties. Tourists avoided the town, preferring not to be distressed by the obvious and extreme want. The Works Progress Administration, as an employment project, built weather-sealed outhouses—one per family. These were of first-quality lumber, painted in bright colors, and far superior to any of the houses they graced. We joked that the Indians would be far more comfortable in their outhouses than in their shacks and wigwams.
    A huge squaw wearing a cheap gingham dress, with a bib apron of a clashing flower pattern, met us. Her graying hair hung full about her chubby face. With a meaty hand she gestured us into the hall where a dozen or so women sat around plank tables working. The odor was a mix of skunk and human sweat.
    We loaded the truck. As we