ON SUNDAY MORNING, NEITHER Mam nor Father seems to remember about Sunday school, and we children are not disposed to remind them. The day starts gray and cool, nothing like the previous Sunday, the day we found Mr. Bell’s body. Can it be that only a week has gone by? It seems like it all happened to somebody else, like in a story.
I’m splitting wood in the yard when, late in the morning, we have a visitor. It’s Agnes’s son, Joe Hampton. Agnes has sent him over with a brace of quail, wanting to trade them for eggs and a quantity of flour. When Joe sees John’s shiners, he tells Mam there’s a paste his ma makes from yellow flowers to bring down bruises and he offers to fetch some. But before he does that, Mam insists on giving him a bowl of the barley soup she’s cooking for our lunch, which he eats outside, leaning against the paddock fence.
Joe is a few years older than I am. His hair is long and wild and he’s dark-skinned like an Indian, but his eyes are blue from his father. He speaks English like a white man, but with a lilt he got from the way his mother’s people talk. As he eats, he watches me work, and I half watch him, feeling awkward about his presence. I’m mindful of having recently been called an Indian lover, and of now having one dining right here on my doorstep.
“You’re George,” he says, after a few spoonfuls of the soup.
“That’s right.”
I set another log on the chopping stump.
“I heard you rode with them the other night.”
This to me seems disrespectful, an Indian questioning me about my business.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say.
I bring the ax down on the log, but my aim is off and instead of splitting it, I send it flying off the stump. I wish this hadn’t happened in front of Joe. As I bend over to pick up the log, he tells me, “People are talking. The Sumas are worked up about it.”
I say, “The Sumas ought to acknowledge the fact that one of them is a murderer.”
“What murderer would that be?” he asks.
“You know what murderer.”
He won’t let it go. “That’s just it. Louie Sam talked to his ma. He told her he didn’t do it.”
This hits me. For one thing, I never thought about Louie Sam having a mother. For another, I’ve got that niggling feeling working at me again, making me wonder whether Father was right, whether the Nooksack Vigilance Committee should have let Louie Sam stand trial. Joe Hampton fixes me with a look, like he’s reading something in my face. I turn away quickly.
“Of course that’s what his ma would say,” I tell him. “Anyway, the Sumas are just protecting their own.”
“We don’t abide outlaws any more than you whites do. Look at Louie’s pa. When Justice Campbell showed the Sumas chiefs enough evidence, they handed him over for murder.”
“For a Nooksack, you seem to know an awful lot about the Sumas,” I remark.
“Louie Sam was my cousin,” he says. “His ma and my ma had the same chope—grampa.”
I don’t want to know that. I don’t want to hear any more about Louie Sam, or about his family. I split another log, cleanly down the middle this time—hoping Joe will take the message that this conversation is at an end.
“Thursday morning, Justice Campbell showed up at the Sumas village to tell the chiefs that a lynch mob had come up from the American side to take Louie away from Thomas York’s house.” I keep chopping wood, pretending not to listen. “Big Charlie and Sam Joe went with Justice Campbell to track the mob down the Whatcom Trail until just before the border. That’s where they found Louie, still hanging where he’d been left the night before.”
My limbs cease to function for the moment and I have to let the ax rest on the block. Joe Hampton knows he’s gotten to me. He lets me sweat for a little before saying, “But I suppose you know all about that.”
I’m done listening to him. I stack up the chopped wood in my arms and walk past him, heading for the cabin. Before I get to the door, Joe decides he’s got something else to tell me.
“The People of the River are coming to Sumas from all over.”
“What people?”
“The People of the River. The 
. We’re deciding what should be done to avenge my cousin’s death.”
“You don’t avenge justice,” I tell him. But I’m blowing smoke, and he knows it.
“Let me tell you about justice, the way. Among our people, if you kill one of our kin, then one of your kin has to die. Doesn’t matter who. Any white man will do.”
From the look in his eyes, I get the feeling he would be satisfied if that somebody was me, here and now. But in the next second he’s friendly again, telling me to thank Mam for the soup. He sets the bowl on the fence post and I watch him as he heads away down the path toward the creek. Then I go inside the cabin and stack the wood by the stove. I’m wondering exactly how many Indians are gathering at Sumas, and whether the Nooksack on our side of the border will stand with them—and how far the lot of them intend to go in pursuit of what they call justice. I’m wondering how safe my family will be if Louie Sam’s kin decide they’re coming across the border to settle the score.
I HAVE TO TELL FATHER that the Indians are gathering, that they’re thinking about attacking. I head down to the mill, but he’s not where I expect to find him, oiling the driveshaft or cleaning the mill stones as he would normally be doing when the mill is idle. It’s cold in the mill, and silent—except for the scream of gulls circling over our pond. Then I hear a tinkling noise outside. I open one of the shutters on the window, and there’s my father, perched on the ledge beside the waterwheel—doing his business into the pond. I decide to wait until he’s done to talk to him. But I’m too late. He’s seen me leaning out the window.
“What in damnation do you want?!” he thunders.
I have seen my father drunk only once before, when the baby girl that was born after Annie and before Isabel died. He was sad and quiet then. He’s angry now.
“Leave me alone!” he yells. “All of ye leave me the hell alone!”
I pull my head back inside so fast I knock it against the jamb. I see a liquor jug on his workbench, just like the jugs that Pete Harkness’s pa brings home from Doc Barrow’s Five Mile Roadhouse, and from which Pete and I stole a nip once or twice. I pull out the stopper and my eyes sting from the fumes. The jug is almost empty. I’m tempted to pour the rest of it out onto the floor, but I’m afraid of what Father will do in his present state if he finds out.
I think about telling Mam about what Joe Hampton said, but it would be wrong to worry her right now, when she’s busy with the new baby. I decide to keep my fears about the Indians attacking to myself for now.
When I return to the cabin, everybody is at sixes and sevens. Annie and Isabel are squabbling because Isabel won’t mind Annie and take her nap. Teddy won’t stop crying, and Mam is fretting about what’s gotten into Father just when she needs him the most. I daren’t tell her where he is, nor what condition he’s in. This being Sunday, I have a notion that I should step up in his place and read something calming from the Bible to all of them, but when I open the Good Book and start reading out loud from Deuteronomy, these are the first words I find:
So shalt thou put away the guilt of innocent blood from among you, when thou shalt do that which is right in the sight of the Lord.
“What’s wrong, George?” says Mam. “Keep reading.”
“I can’t,” I tell her.
Because when I read those words, all I can think about is Louie Sam.