Thieving Forest (17 page)

Meera shrugs. She has her own worries. “I will be gone before they next draw the lots,” she says.

“Gone! Where will you go?”

But Meera just cocks her head. After a while she says, “I heard you received a gift from the Chippewa chief.”

“Would you like to see it?” Susanna lays aside the torn collar and opens her grain sack. She sets the necklace down on her blanket, and Meera looks at it without touching. “You must keep it in a cedar box,” she says. “To preserve its strength.”

“I don’t have a cedar box.”

“They will have one in the store. Especially when you travel, that is very important.”

“Meera, what did you mean when you said you’ll be gone soon? Is that really true? Are you planning to leave?”

Meera nods.

“But where will you go?”

For a moment she thinks Meera won’t tell her. But then Meera says in a low voice, “There is a tribe to the north by the Place of Cold Water.” That’s Lake Erie. “They are the uncle tribe of my people, my real people, the people of my mother and father. Last month when Nushemakw was pregnant and we were traveling here we came upon a group of them. One invited me to their village. Follow Injured River until it meets the larger river going north, he said. And then follow that to the Cold Water.”

“Injured River! But that would mean going through the Black Swamp! You don’t want to do that.”

“I am not afraid of getting wet. My name is Meera. That means Walks Through Water. And I have been to the Swamp before, it is nothing.”

Susanna picks up her sewing again. She doesn’t believe her. “When have you been there?”

Meera tells her about a certain kind of fish in its southern brooks that Nushemakw’s people eat in the summer. She claims that the danger is only if you go in winter when the ice is thick and the rivers don’t move. Or in spring, with the floods.

“Natives go into the Swamp all the time, we only spread rumors to keep white people out. It is like all land: if you know its ways you can live on it. The men I saw, my uncle tribe, they are Wyandot. All the time they go back and forth along the rivers of the Swamp. They travel in flat canoes. What do you call them? These are good when the water becomes shallow.”

“Skiffs.”

Meera lowers her voice to a whisper. “If I go by skiff the journey will take me only two days. I can take one from the brethren. They have little need even of one, and yet they have many.”

Susanna is still skeptical. “Did Nushemakw see these men? What does she think?”

“Do not ask Nushemakw about them. If she thinks I am planning to leave she will tie me up. Anyway, they did not speak to her, only to me. Her tribe is not a friendly one to them. And they had captives that they did not want to share. White captives.”

Susanna looks over at Meera quickly, her needle stopping upright in the cloth.

“White captives? You mean white women?” A line of sweat pricks the back of her neck. “White women?” she asks again.

“Yes, white women,” Meera says impatiently. “Captives. Two or three, I’m not sure. It was a large group.”

Susanna is staring at Meera’s small face. A month ago, she calculates. That would fit. But it couldn’t be them. They were killed. “What did they look like?”

“We had just come from the river to the west. They tried to hide them from us.”

“But what did the captives look like?”

“I saw only one clearly,” Meera says. She looks down for a moment and touches a bone on the Chippewa necklace. “She had the red hair, like you.”

“The girl lies,” Beatrice tells Susanna. “She is lying.”

Her mouth is sticky and she swallows, trying to moisten her tongue. They are in the store with Sister Johanna, and Susanna is sitting in front of the Franklin stove trying to dry herself. Outside the wind is howling and rain beats on the store’s sloping roof. Beatrice was astonished to see Susanna bang open the door in all this weather. She is wet from head to toe and her moccasins—Aurelia’s moccasins—are covered in mud. Beatrice still feels a spurt of irritation when she looks at them.

Johanna, who is also sitting on a stool near the stove, is watching her. Beatrice walks over to the water cask and takes a drink. She isn’t sure what she feels most: insulted, angry, or amazed at the girl’s audacity. When she rehangs the dipper she sees that her hand is shaking. She hopes that Johanna doesn’t notice.

“She heard why the chief gave you his necklace,” Beatrice says. “Everyone is talking about it. And so she decided to make use of the story for her own purposes.”

“What purpose would that be?” Susanna asks.

“To leave Gemeinschaft, of course. She needs help to do that, especially if, as you say, she plans to go by boat.”

“Miriam has never liked being here,” Johanna puts in. “I have known her since ten years. Always she has a hunger for someplace else.”

“Her name is Meera,” Susanna tells her.

Johanna looks at her from under her eyebrows, chin down, as if reassessing her worth. “The woman Nushemakw comes only when she is hungry. With Meera, as you call her. I know them both. They have no loyalty to this place.”

“Why do the brethren let them come back if they are just going to leave again?”

“We are Christians,” Johanna says mildly. “Hope is like food to us. We need it, and also we enjoy it.”

Susanna shifts around on her chair as if looking for something she dropped. “But what if she’s telling the truth? At the very least we should try—”

“You would go into the Black Swamp?” Beatrice asks. She cannot picture Susanna there with all the mud and slimy water, the dead trees, and the stories of fantastical creatures like swamp wolves. Not that Beatrice believes those stories, but she knows Susanna does.

“Meera says Indians go into it all the time. They talk ill of it only to keep white settlers out.”

Johanna cocks her head. “I don’t know if this is true.”

“I have to find out if they’re alive. We worked it out, it will take only two days if we go by boat. Two days! Surely I can spare that. Beatrice, what if they are there at that village! What if they escaped?”

“It’s a fool’s errand,” Beatrice says. She begins rubbing the store counter although it is already polished to a gleam. She can feel something coming up, an ache somewhere, her ankle? She rubs the wood harder. “And it’s a lie. You must accept that they are dead. I don’t want it to be true either, but we have to move forward.”

“Then help me do that! Tell me what happened.”

“I already told you. They were killed.” She does not look up.

“Beet!” Susanna goes over to Beatrice and stops her hand as it moves over the counter. For a moment the rain pounds violently on the roof as though the sky has decided to hurl down everything left in its arsenal all at once. How did Susanna manage to run here in all this rain? Beatrice feels trapped.

“Beet,” Susanna says. “Please tell me what happened. Please.”

Beatrice looks at her. From this angle she can see something of Penelope in Susanna’s face: her nose and forehead. It might be a relief to tell the story but she isn’t sure she deserves relief.
When comforts flee...
she looks over at Johanna, who has never once asked her about it.

But Johanna now says, “Sometimes it is good to tell.”

She sits down where Susanna was sitting in front of the Franklin stove and wishes she had tea or something hot to drink. Instead she holds on to the bit of chamois rag she was using to polish the counter. She doesn’t know where to begin so she just starts talking, looking at the wall behind the stove, the gap where the pipe isn’t quite wide enough for the hole they made for it. Shaves of wood curl off the wall where the surface was imperfectly planed. She opens her fist and draws out a bit of the rag so she can hold on to it with both hands.

“At first they tied us all up together,” she says, “but when we were far enough into the trees they untied us so we could run faster. We were all worried about Aurelia. She got more and more tired. At first the Potawatomi did not seem to notice, they were busy sending scouts back to see if anyone was following us. Sometimes they made us stop and be very quiet while Koman listened, but it’s hard to be quiet when you’re hurting for breath. Koman was one of the leaders. The other leader, I don’t know his name. He had a white scar running down the side of his face. We called him the scarred Indian.” She pauses. “That one hated us,” she says.

She twists the rag around her finger. “In the beginning Penelope thought we were heading toward Risdale, but after a while it felt like we were going in circles. There was some disagreement between Koman and the scarred Indian. Finally we stopped at a place where three streams met up together, and they had us make a shelter out of tree branches. I thought...I don’t know what I thought, that maybe we would sleep there? Sleep and then keep going in the morning? It all felt so wrong, I couldn’t make any sense of it. They were arguing more and more, and Koman left, I don’t know why. I don’t know if he planned to come back. But that’s when the scarred Indian took Aurelia.”

She stops for a moment. In her mind she sees with unusual detail the inside of the shelter again, the roughness of the branches, how it was hard to turn without getting your dress caught on one of them.
Shelter
, she thinks ironically.

“The scarred Potawatomi figured out Aurelia was ill even though we all tried our best to hide it from him. But she was so brave, Susanna. He took her away...and of course I hoped...” She twists the rag in her hands again. “You know what happened. He came back with blood on his hatchet and he lifted it up to show us, almost gleefully, and Penelope said, don’t show him any fear, he’s a devil. But how could we not be afraid? He had us all get out of the shelter and stand before him. He held up his hatchet and said, ‘See this blood? This is the blood of your sister. This blood is lonely, it wants a companion. You,’ he said, and he pointed to Naomi.

“I was holding her hand and I could feel her whole body go stiff. And in that moment I thought...I thought that this was much more terrible than dying, to be forced to watch first Aurelia and now Naomi go off with this devil. I heard myself saying, ‘Take me instead.’ Maybe I thought there was a chance he would only kill one more of us. Maybe I thought Koman would come back and put a stop to it. I’m not sure what I was thinking. But the scarred Indian just laughed at me. ‘You then,’ he said. ‘The others can wait on their fate.’”

Beatrice’s eyes fill with tears. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Susanna, believe me, I thought I was saving Naomi. I really thought I was saving her. Instead I took her place. The Potawatomi was taking me off to trade me, not to kill me. He had come upon Brother Graves and Brother Anders in the forest. Brother Graves did not know, was not told, that there was more than one captive. And when I realized what was happening it was too late.”

Susanna says, “Penelope and Naomi were alive when you left?”

“It should be Naomi who is here. He meant to trade her and not me.”

“But then how do you know they were killed?”

“Because I looked back and I saw another Potawatomi pushing them off. I saw their backs as they were being led away into the forest. Like Aurelia.”

“But being led away is not the same thing as being killed!”

Beatrice makes a fist around the rag. “Why are you making this harder for me? I heard gunshots, Susanna. I was confused when I saw Brother Graves and I didn’t think fast enough...I would have pleaded for them but I didn’t think fast enough. And then there were shots. Two. One for Penelope and one for Naomi. Companions for Aurelia’s blood,” she says bitterly.

The wind shifts and for a few seconds the rain beats so sharply against the window it sounds as though someone is throwing pebbles at the glass. For a moment Susanna stares at the streams of water snaking down the wet pane. She feels a sharp twinge under her ribs as though something has pierced her. The feeling is hope. She tries to keep her voice gentle.

“You heard gunshots, Beet,” she says. “You saw them being led away, and then you heard gunshots. But you didn’t actually see them being killed.”

“I
heard
them being killed.”

“But the Potawatomi took a hatchet to Aurelia. Why would they shoot Penelope and Naomi?” She looks over at Johanna, who is frowning in thought. “What do you think?”