Thieving Forest (11 page)

“Tomorrow we’ll talk more,” Beatrice says.

Eight

Ever since she arrived in Gemeinschaft Beatrice has attended both the morning and the evening service, and often the one at midday, too. Her nights are uneasy but she awakens to the chapel bell ringing out in clear tones:
no, no, no
, as if it can banish the night with its ringing. As she dresses she looks forward to sitting on the hard bench with the other women, singing hymns, listening to Brother Graves preach, and then the testimony of the natives who have been saved. At the chapel she is able to think about something other than Penelope and Naomi. There are buns and coffee, prayers and a blessing. The Moravians like to bring up Christ’s suffering in physical detail: the blood he spilled, the points in the skull where thorns pierced his skin.
When comforts flee
, they pray,
abide with me
.

Beatrice sees the bloody wounds in Christ’s hands. She feels the mockery he endured, she can see the expression on his face when he is given his cross. These pictures take the place of those other pictures: the back of Naomi’s dress as the Potawatomi leads her away. Her red hair coming out of its braid.

Yesterday at the evening service a Delaware with thick lips and pockmarked cheeks stood to give testimony. Last winter, before he came here, his wife froze to death and his infant son starved. Only the blood of Jesus could have saved them, he said. Then he said, I saved myself, but I wish it them.

Beatrice’s blood seemed to stop in her veins when she heard that. A few minutes later her hip sent out its old pain. She shifted on the bench but it didn’t make a difference. It never made a difference. She closed her eyes.
When comforts flee, abide with me
she prayed, and prayed again, and again. And then, just as the young girls were coming around with the honeyed buns and the coffee, the pain disappeared. For the first time in her life she made it disappear.

She thinks about this the next morning when she wakes up to the chapel bell and makes the decision to stay with Susanna instead of going to the morning service, a decision she later regrets. She touches her hip gently with her fingertips. She feels nothing, no pain.

The fire in the Birthing Hut’s little fireplace is down to embers and someone—probably Sister Johanna—has put a new dress and apron and cap over the little chair near the bed. She must have come very early. The memory of Naomi’s messy braid floats into her mind and she pushes it away. There are things she cannot think about. That she cannot tell Susanna. This she knows for sure.
When comforts flee, abide with me
. Naomi disappears.

The new clothes are for Susanna, and Susanna makes a face at how ugly they are.

“Better than that split skirt,” Beatrice points out, which is still damp and smells like a river. Susanna looks just the same. She slept late and had to be told to help tidy the room. As they make their way to the Bell House for breakfast, Beatrice can feel Susanna staring at the people they pass without any sense it might be rude. Beatrice knows Gemeinschaft is a strange sight at first. All the women, both native and white, wear the same gray linen dress and white cap that Susanna and Beatrice are wearing. White men walk along the path arm in arm with native men, chatting sociably. Many of the natives wear European clothing, and some of the white men wear leather tunics and braid their hair. Beatrice still finds it strange to see a white man with a long blond plait. But they do it to affirm their unity with each other, she explains.

“Moravians believe we are all one family.” She opens the door to the Bell House, where women are finding seats at the long tables. There is a strong smell of soap and wood and, fainter, the scent of hot ashes from innumerable fires. The fireplaces on either end of the room are huge, and native women bend over them, ladling up oatmeal from six or seven large copper pots. “The name Gemeinschaft means community. We work together, we eat together. We sleep side by side. There is no distinction between races.”

Susanna looks skeptical but after the grace is said she tucks into the hearty breakfast: oatmeal and honey and dried berries and thick slices of bread with butter and even one small pork chop each. They are sitting on a narrow bench in front of a long oak table covered with a simple brown cloth. If Beatrice looks to her left or right she sees a row of identical white bonnets like buttons down the row. Young native girls serve them from large baskets, and one carries a coffeepot wrapped in cloth.

“Where are the men?” Susanna asks.

“They eat breakfast earlier. We don’t share any meals together. We only see them at chapel or walking about, but we are not allowed to converse with them.”

Susanna scrapes more butter over her bread. “How old-fashioned!”

Beatrice tells her no, on the contrary, the Moravians are very forward thinking. “They don’t carry weapons. They don’t drink alcohol or swear to any oaths, even to the government.” But as she hears herself talk their habits begin to seem more and more archaic. She cannot explain it right.

“The food is very good,” Susanna says. It is the only compliment she gives.

“The Moravians believe feeding the body is just as important as feeding the soul.” Beatrice feels sure that Susanna will like that at least, as someone who has always been, in her opinion, greedy about food. She tells Susanna how much work they all do, good work, not only preaching the gospel but farming and scutching flax and tanning hides, weaving, cooking, washing clothes for so many.

“
Ohne Fleiss kein Press
, as the brethren say. No reward without toil.”

But she has gone too far. Susanna makes a face and says, “We must talk about how to get home.”

Why can’t Susanna see what she sees? This is a new kind of society where whites and natives live in harmony. The natives are settled and happy, industrious, friendly, with no face painting and no battle scars.

“We’re safe here. And you should rest after your fall.”

“What do you mean, safe?” Susanna asks. She looks at Beatrice more closely and closes her mouth, as though deciding not to say anything more. But after a minute she can’t help herself.

“Don’t you think it’s funny to see a man wearing two blond braids?”

Beatrice says, “Of course not. It’s perfectly fine.” But she feels herself blush.

That afternoon Susanna meets Sister Consolation, one of Gemeinschaft’s founding missionaries. A woman of high principle, Beatrice whispers to Susanna as they see her approach, and Susanna can see that in the way Consolation holds her head up over her very straight spine. She is tall and fair, Danish perhaps, with a patrician nose, high cheekbones, and the teeth and skin of someone who has always had enough to eat. They stand in the path while native women with baskets move around them, on their way to the cookhouse or washhouse or the fields.

“You must be Sister Susanna,” Consolation says, putting her hand on Susanna’s shoulder.

The touch feels forced, as though Consolation understands that people do this to show compassion but has not yet mastered the technique. Although she wears the same gray linen dress as every other woman here, her dress is...what? Better tailored? Perhaps she just stands well.

“How are you faring, my dear?” Consolation asks. Susanna’s linen dress scratches her arms and the cap feels too tight, but it turns out that Consolation is referring to her fall from the horse. She tells Susanna that the Indians here at Gemeinschaft are very good at what she calls the healing arts. She calls the Indians “our natives.”

“You must try the sweat hut,” she says. “It is quite cleansing.”

Beatrice says, “Thank you, Sister Consolation. In fact, Sister Johanna is meeting us there now. Thank you.”

Susanna looks at her sister in surprise. She sounds like a puppy. This is a new Beatrice: subservient, a little in awe. No sign of the know-it-all. Susanna has to admit that Consolation is a formidable woman: beautiful, taller than either of them, and she does not smile even in greeting. She is wearing a dark shawl, and when she turns away Susanna can see small shards of mirrors sewn into the cloth, the largest the size of a deer hoof. There are a dozen or more of them glittering in the sunlight. Why has Consolation sewn them onto her shawl? Like the Amish, the Moravians do not believe in vain ornaments.

“They serve as a reminder,” Beatrice tells her as they start down one of the many paths crisscrossing the wooded village.

“A reminder of what?”

“We must put our vanity behind us,” Beatrice says, and gives Susanna a significant look.

As they walk down the winding dirt paths, all of them shaded by heavy overhanging trees, Beatrice points out various buildings: the kitchens, the washing huts, and the two-story dormitory where the single men sleep, called a choir. All the structures are made from the same rough lumber and have bark roofs the color of barn owls. The sweat huts sit in a clearing near the flax fields: two low domed structures covered in skins. As they get closer Susanna can smell boiling roots and tree bark. Two men are tending a huge kettle over an outside fire and Sister Johanna is standing nearby with three small iron kettles at her feet.

She gives Susanna one of the kettles and smiles. Her manner seems to say, You will enjoy this and I will too. She has a wide mouth and round cheekbones and her teeth are very white. Susanna likes her. She is as good-looking as Sister Consolation but in an opposite way—dark where Consolation is fair, and expressive where Consolation is frozenly refined.

The men ladle the boiling root water into their kettles. Then they shout,
“Pimook!”
Go to sweat! Two other men are heating rocks the size of turnips, which they carry in hide slings into the sweat huts. When everything is ready, Johanna leads the way into the women’s hut. The doorway is low, a covering of deerskin, and inside Susanna looks around. Under the pungent skin walls a complicated structure of willow branches makes up the frame. Benches circle the walls and the hot stones are in the middle. Although there is room for six or seven women to sit, at the moment they are the only ones there.

“Women partake of the sweating much less than men,” Johanna is saying.

“Why is that?” Beatrice asks.

“Men have more ailments.” Johanna smiles. “Or so they think.”

She tips water from her kettle onto the mound of hot rocks. Immediately a spray of steam shoots up and fills the little room. Some of the steam escapes through a hole in the roof.

“Oh,” Susanna says, her face suddenly flushed. “That feels good.” A moment later: “You know who would like this? Naomi.”

Beatrice frowns, looks down at the ground, and touches her hip. Susanna immediately feels bad for bringing up a painful memory and she casts around for a new subject.

“Your English is very good,” she says to Johanna.

“I’ve lived with the brethren for most of my life,” Johanna tells her. “First in Pennsylvania, and now here.” She tells Susanna about the natives who live in the village, mostly Delaware but a fair number of Shawnee like herself, and also some Huron and Chippewa. Any native who wants to adopt this life can live here.

“We clothe them, we give them food, we teach English to their children, but they must give up their weapons and finery. We value what is simple and plain.”

“Yes, I can see that,” Susanna says. Personally she thinks that the buildings are plain to the point of ugliness, and the dresses unbecoming. Johanna pours more water over the hot rocks. Susanna can feel her hair stick to her forehead. But she doesn’t mind heat, it is mud she dislikes.

“You know, Beet,” she says, “Seth Spendlove traveled with me here. I wonder if he might escort us back to Severne.”

“Seth Spendlove—here?”

“Maybe he can hire some horses from the brethren, a cart.” Susanna looks down at the steaming rocks. If Seth can hire a cart they could ride in it following the Blanchard River, which meets up with the track to Severne. But if that’s not possible, they can walk. The journey would take only, what, a day and a half? Two days? Two days, that’s not so bad. But just as this plan is solidifying in her mind she becomes aware that Beatrice is proposing a different plan altogether, a plan with the words
brethren
and
Christians
and
Indians
and
work
. Above all, the word
work
seems to hang in the air.

“They live in simplicity, they deny themselves many conveniences, but in this way they achieve a state of communal feeling,” Beatrice is saying. “A new kind of family. You consider yourselves one family, isn’t that true, Sister Johanna?”

“Yes, we call each other brother and sister.”

Susanna is slow to catch up. “You want to stay here longer?”

“We can do good work here.”

“But our store...” Susanna still feels behind.

“We’ll sell it to Amos Spendlove. He’s always wanted it.” Beatrice’s voice rises in a familiar way—she’s just had a good idea! “And now you tell me Seth is here—so easy, we just send along a letter with him! Think of it, Susanna, we can work here together running the brethren’s store, seeing to trade and supplies, ordering whatever is needed from Cincinnati. You always liked that.”