Thieving Forest (14 page)

“Are you not a Moravian?” the girl asks finally. “One of the missionaries?”

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

Susanna leans her weight into the paddle. “My sister is here.”

The girl nods as if this is something she can understand: following your family. Even to a place like this where everything—the buildings, the services, the clothes—is made to be as stark and useful as possible. There is no beauty anywhere. Susanna wonders what Naomi would have thought of Gemeinschaft. The brethren do not believe in music outside of chapel; even humming is discouraged.

When at last the dinner bell sounds, the girl takes off her apron and hangs it on a nail. She strokes the edge of the pounded skin with her forefinger to check for stray hairs. Then she turns to look at Susanna.

“My name is Meera,” she says.

Ten

Later, when Susanna tries to count up the days she and Meera worked together at the tannery, the time seems impossibly short. Two weeks? Three? It seemed like several months at least. She can easily recall the smell of wet animal skin, the humid heat, the low bark ceiling—she remembers all of these things, but not the exact sequence of days. She remembers the shape of the rock they used to prop the door open, and the flies that perpetually hovered over the barrels. Also the way the dirt on the floor ribboned in the corners after it was swept, like rippled fabric.

While they work, they talk. Meera is fascinated that Susanna once lived in Philadelphia. She has never been to Philadelphia, nor any English town, as she calls it. Was it very crowded?

Oh yes, Susanna tells her, there might be two or three dozen buildings between here and the Bell House. In truth she does not remember very much, she was so young when they left.

“Every woman owns at least three dresses. There is a henhouse in every yard.”

“And your sister who lives there still. She is not married? Your aunt must be rich.”

“No. Her husband owned a glove shop. They adopted Lilith because they had no children of their own. Now that my uncle has died, my Aunt Ogg and Lilith run the shop together.”

She does not tell Meera about her other sisters. In her stories she mentions only the three of them: Beatrice, Susanna, and Lilith. Be Seldom Late. She reasons to herself that, being a native, Meera would not like to hear about what happened to the others. In truth, however, that story isn’t one she knows how to tell. She doesn’t want to tell it.

“So your sister Lilith is a servant to your aunt?” Meera asks.

“Oh no! My aunt loves her. They are family.”

This makes Meera fall silent. For a while she strikes the skin with the paddle particularly hard. Meera, like Lilith, was also adopted. As Susanna suspected, the woman in the Birthing Hut is no blood relation. Meera was given to her as a very small child when Meera’s tribe fell in battle to the woman’s tribe. Nushemakw, the woman’s name is. All this Susanna learns slowly, by degrees.

Meera was given to Nushemakw to replace Nushemakw’s baby, who’d recently died. Since that time Nushemakw has given birth five more times—four sons and a daughter. None of the babies lived. If they had lived Nushemakw would have given Meera to another woman, or worse, left Meera behind somewhere to starve. This is what Nushemakw often threatens, Meera tells Susanna, when Meera displeases her. They come to Gemeinschaft every year for a few months pretending to convert but really, Meera says, for the food.

But when Nushemakw became pregnant again last hunting season she had a vision: her baby would live if it were born in Gemeinschaft. And indeed the infant—a small, yellowish, wrinkly boy—is somehow yet living.

“Now will she stay here for good?” Susanna asks.

Meera shakes her head. “She is from the Turtle tribe, content with neither land nor sea, always moving from one to the other. Consolation told me that I can stay without Nushemakw if I wish. I am old enough now. But I must accept Jesus Christ as the Great Spirit.” She lifts her shoulders as if to say: impossible.

“What will you do?”

Meera puts down the paddle and goes over to the cask for a drink. Her hands, Susanna notices, are small and pretty. She likes Meera. She is tough, like a Quiner woman. She works hard and she doesn’t feel sorry for herself. At the same time she won’t let someone else tell her what she should do with her life. It occurs to Susanna that they are in the same situation: living with the missionaries, dependent on them, but not believing in their cause.

“I have my own plans,” Meera says, hanging the dipper back on its nail. But she does not elaborate.

Beatrice, standing in the doorway of the small Gemeinschaft general store, is watching a group of native women settling themselves beneath a drooping willow tree. One of the women unrolls a horse blanket to sit on while the others take reddish-brown roots from their baskets and begin to cut them into pieces. Their faces are dappled in shadow and light, and the trees around them spread curtains of fresh, green leaves.

Gemeinschaft is beautiful, Beatrice thinks, like a forest village in a fairytale. Not everyone can see its beauty, however. Susanna, for instance. She complains almost daily about how ugly and
useful
everything is. She says the word “useful” with a tone that implies there is nothing worse. A breeze makes its way into the store and Beatrice leans back on her heels. She has not had a chilblain for over a month.
When comforts flee
,
abide with me
, she chants to herself automatically.

“They harvest the roots from the stream behind the Birthing Hut.”

Beatrice turns to see Brother Graves approaching from the other direction and she feels herself blush. How long has she been standing in the doorway, doing nothing?

“After they dry them out, the women will pound them and then bake them into bread. Some years this is their principal food. When the hunting is bad.” He is smiling and has his hands clasped behind his coat like a scholar. Beatrice moves to let him inside.

“Have you ever tasted the bread?” she asks.

“I have tasted it, yes. Surprisingly filling. Not meat of course, but surprisingly filling.”

He takes from the pocket of his coat a handful of fresh quills and places them on the smooth wooden counter.

“Brother Edwards and I did a bit of hunting this morning,” he explains. “I came out rather well.” He spreads the quills slightly with his fingers, picks out two of the best ones, and lays them aside. “I thought I would donate them to the store. What do you think, can you cut them into nibs? Or perhaps you can do the soaking and I will cut.”

“Oh, I’ve cut many a quill for my father,” Beatrice tells him. Back in Severne they kept a small knife wickedly sharp for just this purpose, never using it to cut anything else. That was the secret, Sirus always said. He had many secrets but none that he would not share in a moment, asked or otherwise.

Brother Graves sits down on the closed lid of the pounded-metal woodbox, and while Beatrice sets out a pan to soak the quills he tells her the news. They’ve decided to clear another plot of land for a weaving house, they’ve hit upon a new method for jarring honey, and a group of Menemoni arrived yesterday with two infected dogs, which had to be shot. Very unfortunate, he says, but they could not risk the dogs infecting the cattle. His eyes are soft and sympathetic. She thinks of riding behind him on his horse, when he took her away from her Potawatomi captors. She hung on to his jacket at first, before she gave in and put her arms around him. She rested her head against his back. In all her life she’d never been so tired. Part of her wanted to fall off the horse and be trampled, but she hung on.

“I also met with Seth Spendlove recently,” he tells her. “He asked me to enquire if you would like him to accompany you back to Severne. As your escort.”

He looks at Beatrice steadily, and she allows herself to stare for a moment into his gray-blue eyes. For some reason his eyes make her think of a deer looking down into water. “At the moment we have no wish to depart. That is, if we are not an imposition?”

“You are welcome here as long as you like. I am glad to hear that you’d like to stay.”

She smiles at him, she cannot help it, and Brother Graves smiles back. His dark hair is flecked with gray. She notices fine lines where his jaw meets his ear. He lost his wife in a fire, Sister Johanna told her, in the previous settlement in Pennsylvania. One of the reasons he came here was to make a fresh start.

“You are very helpful to us,” he says. “Very useful. And we like seeing you at our services.”

She notices he has switched from I to we. Of course, that is proper.

“I hope I am useful,” she tells him. “I like hard work. I wish I could do more.”

“That is gratifying. That is certainly gratifying.” He looks at his boots and says nothing more for a moment. Then he begins, “If you are in earnest, I might suggest...it is up to you, of course. But a group of Chippewa are coming next week to parley. Sister Consolation suggested it might be beneficial if a few white women were on hand to serve them. A gesture of good will.”

Beatrice waits. Is this all? He looks at her.

“Of course,” he says, “with your recent troubles I would understand if...”

She feels a flush wash over her. So that’s it. Her recent troubles. And yet she can’t help but feel as though she’s been made worthier by his petition. Someone useful: isn’t that what she wants to be? Beatrice looks out the open door to the native women under the willow tree. As Brother Graves predicted, they are now laying the cut roots on a blanket to dry. A light seems to be spreading behind her eyes; not one of her headaches, but a warm, feathery feeling. She makes herself think of Naomi. She sees the back of her dress, her untidy braid, but from a distance. To redeem others, Brother Graves likes to say in his sermons, is to be redeemed.

“I would be honored to help,” she tells him. “What you do here is more important, I should think, than the single events in a family.”

A week later Seth Spendlove finds himself standing with broomcorn up to his knees under a cluster of beech trees just off the path near the tannery. Hiding, really, though he calls it waiting. The sun shines hotly through a break in the canopy and the air is filled with the low, constant thrum of insects. As they swarm closer, drawn to his heat, a passage of Milton’s comes into his mind:

What dost thou in this world? the wilderness

For thee is fittest place...

What words follow he cannot immediately recall. In Virginia, briefly, Amos let him go to school. He memorized all that he could, knowing it would be temporary. Seth scratches his neck and tugs on his shirt collar. Everything feels tight today. All the food here has plumped him out. The honey and hominy he ate this morning, and last night the squirrel stew and biscuits. Can it be that he has even grown a quarter of an inch? Surely he is past that, but the village seems to live by rules of its own, as if enchanted. All of his clothes feel uncomfortably small.

Twice in the past few weeks he has packed his things and arranged for his horse to be brought to him early so he could set out for Severne at daybreak, and twice he has changed his mind. He continues to carry out favors for the brethren that keep him from feeling he is living on their charity. Last week, with Brother Graves, he met with traders from Detroit and bargained a very good deal for a nearly new anvil. Brother Lyle was pleased when it was delivered, and even more pleased when Seth showed him a new forging technique. He has been Seth’s most constant companion. It is he who mentioned that Sister Susanna is now working at the tannery.

Seth keeps his eyes on the little shed, pulling back slightly as two Menemoni brethren come down the path with four sheep at their heels, mangy little creatures that resemble long gray rats more than anything else. At any moment the bell calling the sisters to their dinner should ring. He moves his hand to check his pocket watch and receives for his effort a long scratch on his arm from a dangling branch.

At last the bell sounds. He feels foolish standing there among the bracken. Also something like despair. He cannot see his way round to getting what he wants but he will try anyway. Now it comes back: