Thieving Forest (19 page)

The problem is that Naomi is not much good at anything other than playing her violin. Back at home almost every task she did had to be done over again by someone else. She undercooked beans and made watery butter and her stitches were always uneven and loose. Even Susanna can sew a better seam than Naomi. Penelope watches the young woman take out their mother’s blue pieced bed quilt, their candlesticks, a bag of tea. Soon the Wyandots will knock down their bark shelters and bank their fires and be on their way. Her mistress will no doubt start looking for her, if she isn’t looking already. Several loud birds call out to each other. Later Penelope recalls that a couple of Wyandot men stood when they heard that and looked toward the stream, which is half-hidden by trees and brush.

At last the young woman comes to the knitting bag and she holds it up to show Penelope. But before Penelope can even nod, a rushing sound comes up from behind her like a sudden, fierce wind sweeping through the trees. She turns to see a group of men running toward them waving hatchets and knives.

Her first impossible thought is that white men have come to take her home. But that lasts less than a second. These men aren’t white. It is the group of Potawatomi from yesterday. Everything becomes chaotic as shouting breaks out from several areas at once. Two or three Wyandot men begin herding the women and children to the other side of the clearing where they can escape into some woods, while others engage the intruders. Penelope’s throat seems to close up in fear and she has to push her breath to get it out. She reaches for Naomi’s hand just as Naomi is reaching for hers.

“We must stay together.”

She’s not sure if she says this or if it’s only something she thinks. She tries not to look back as they run with the other women toward the trees. Although the gunshots are not frequent—reloading takes time—the arrows are flying nonstop. Before they get to the end of the clearing there is an earsplitting sound and the woman running on the other side of Penelope falls, her skull split open by gunshot. Blood spurts up the side of Penelope’s dress and later she finds bits of skin in her hair. A whiteness comes over her like a spell. Her legs are moving but she feels herself fading. She makes a noise and stumbles but Naomi pulls her forward before she can fall to the ground.

“Stay with me,” Naomi orders her.

They enter the woods and stop beneath a huge oak tree with dead limbs intermixed with living. For a moment Penelope bends over with her hands on her ears, thinking she is going to be sick. The men’s cries are horrifying. After they catch their breath they move deeper into the woods, but what tree anywhere could protect them? Now Penelope stops and really is sick, and afterward she does nothing but take a step back. It is Naomi who wipes her mouth for her on the sleeve of her own dress. Then they stand pressed together looking back through the trees in the direction of the fighting. Penelope’s arm moves with each breath Naomi takes, in and out. Her own breath leaves in spurts, and when she inhales it feels like a gulp.

Then, just as suddenly as it started, the sound of fighting is over. Gradually the noises of the forest—birds, insects, a brief knocking on wood—resume. Only now Penelope notices all the women sheltering under this tree or that with their children. No one moves. After a little while an older Wyandot with pockmarked skin comes with his hands raised to signal their victory.

As they make their way back to the clearing, Penelope sees the young woman with the heart-shaped face crouching between two trees, still holding Penelope’s knitting bag. Penelope looks down at her hands. She is still holding her stockings.

Back at the clearing the women scatter to help the wounded. The air smells of gunpowder and blood.

“They must have been following us all this time,” Naomi says. She means the Potawatomi.

She goes from body to body and Penelope follows her. They are searching for the scarred Potawatomi. Without saying it aloud, they both want to find him among the fallen.

Sure enough there he is, lying dead on his back. His eyes are open to slits and there are two arrows in his chest, one with a broken shaft. The scar down the side of his face is in shadow. Blood trickles out of his ear.

Penelope stares at his face. This is the man who killed Aurelia. She doesn’t believe in fate but she feels avenged.

“Do you think he wanted us back?” she asks. “Do you think that’s why they attacked?”

Naomi looks at her in surprise. “They just wanted more horses,” she says.

The Wyandots spend the rest of the day in the same clearing tending the wounded and burying the dead. Naomi and Penelope have been given the task of breaking up walnuts and mixing them with water. Naomi’s fingers feel empty without her violin. She picks up the shallow wooden bowl and begins grinding kernels. The women are burying the dead west to east while the men cut up a horse that was shot by mistake in the fighting. The stench is terrible.

“My legs ache,” Penelope is saying. “And my back. And my shoulders. Everything aches.”

Naomi says, “You sound like Beet.”

“But my aches are real.”

They smile at each other—they are too hungry to laugh. If at first they felt a slight thrill from surviving the battle and seeing their enemy dead, that thrill is gone and they are left with their empty stomachs and their aches and pains and worries. Naomi’s arms feel heavy but her head feels light, as if emptied of all her thoughts and dreams as well as the music she kept so carefully stored there. Everything is gone, that’s how it feels. Even music cannot help her.

Her sisters would be surprised to learn that Naomi’s dream is not the dream of giving concerts or teaching the violin. She does not want to play for anyone else, and she certainly does not want to listen to others play badly for her. She thinks of music as her own private world. No, her dream has always been much more mundane: she wants to marry. But she wants to marry a man who, as she puts it to herself, understands music. This is her way of describing a person who can experience more than just the scrabble of livelihood. She wants beauty in her life. She wants a companion who can appreciate beauty and mystery: the sound of Haydn, the sound of birds flying in after the winter, the sound of a narrowing creek. It’s hard to explain to others and in general she does not even try. Only her father, she thought, understood.

She sits on the ground pounding walnuts with Penelope until a woman with dried blood on her hands comes to take their bowls. With a short spoon she begins feeding the mixture to an infant in another woman’s arms.

“Why are they feeding that to a baby?” Penelope asks.

“Its mother must be dead,” Naomi guesses.

She watches the baby struggle to suck the spoon. Here in this wasted clearing there is no beauty whatsoever. The afternoon sky has turned dark and the stark trees around them are good for neither fruit nor wood, just scrub put down to block the view. The Wyandot women work hard and their hard lives show in their faces. They have nothing, Naomi thinks, except the battle of living one more day. No beauty. No music. She looks down at the hard, permanent calluses on her fingers. And what does she have? Her dream of marriage seems as far off as Sirus and Ellen, as far off as the sun.

A short while later, a tall Wyandot comes over to question them about the band of Potawatomi: how many of them are there, how many guns, are there women and children among them? He speaks broken English and a little French. His name, he tells them, is Tawakota. Naomi can see he is a leader by the way the others address him.

He leans over and touches a spot on top of her lip.

“
Qu’est-ce que c’est?
” he asks.

“A mole,” Naomi tells him. She does not know the Iroquois word. The mole is light purple, unusual, and people often remark on it. “I’ve always had it.
Je l’ai toujours
.” She does not want him to think she is ill. She knows too well what would happen then.

Tawakota turns away and directs two women to cook the slain horse. This will take some time, so he must think another attack is unlikely. In the evening, Penelope and Naomi are given none of the cooked horsemeat but are allowed to drink some of the broth. Afterward Penelope’s mistress gives them two worn deerskin dresses to wear in exchange for their aprons. Their old dresses are badly torn and stained with blood and dirt, but Penelope tucks them into her knitting bag anyway. She pulls out her needles and begins to make over her stockings for the young woman with the heart-shaped face.

Before they go to sleep, Naomi braids her hair into one long plait and binds the end with a rubbery piece of grass.

“You’ll never look like an Indian with your red hair,” Penelope says. Naomi knows she is trying to tease her, to lift her mood, but she answers, “I don’t want to look like an Indian.”

What she wants is to leave this gruesome place that smells of death and find something of beauty. All afternoon a sheet of clouds covered the sun, stretching out like a shroud over the earth. A hard, hungry life—is this her fate now? Her music is gone for good.

In the morning they move on, beginning what Naomi later thinks of as their march through the mud. The ground grows spongier and the stream banks bleed into the surrounding grassland, making everything soggy. Although they are skirting the Great Black Swamp, Naomi feels as though she is falling into sludge every other step. They are still heading west. In the afternoon they wade across a rill so cold that she reels a little when she first steps into it and loses her footing. A few nearby men laugh.
Tau-tie-yost
, one says. He mimics her falling and they laugh again. Soon everyone is calling her
Tau-tie-yost
.

“Why do they call you that?” Penelope asks later, when they have stopped to rest.

“It means clumsy.”

“But you’re not clumsy!”

She is clumsy, they both know it. Both of her shins are badly bruised and there are stinging cuts up and down her legs from when she fell against a nest of nettles. Only when she stands still playing music does she feel graceful. Now she’s like a sailor who can’t find his land legs.

They walk for days without stopping except to sleep. Penelope finishes the stockings for the young Wyandot woman and takes Naomi’s stockings to make for someone else. Naomi watches her, wondering how she has the energy after walking all day. She wants to do nothing but eat and lie down. Penelope knits in the evening, after she has done all her chores and most of Naomi’s. Half the time, more than half the time, Penelope starts Naomi’s cooking fires for her. Naomi’s hands just can’t seem to do what she wants them to do. She takes meat out too soon and lets the fire die. None of the Wyandots like her knitting. In exchange for the stockings Penelope receives a bowl of samp, cooked corn porridge, which she shares with Naomi. They spoon it up using two sticks.

“I wish I knew where we were going,” Penelope says. “Mud, mud, mud. That’s all there is.”

“We’re going to Hog Creek,” Naomi tells her. This is what the natives call the Ottawa River. “I heard some of them talking.”

“You can understand what they say?”

“Back at the store I learned Iroquois pretty well.” She smiles slyly. “I thought if you knew, you would make me work at the counter even more.”

Some of the Wyandots are smoking hemlock, and the thin, tangy scent wafts over with the wind. Naomi listens to them chatting. Language is like music to her, she can hear a word once and somehow understand it and remember it later. It doesn’t help to think too much about it. It’s like knowing where a melody is going the first time she hears it. Often she knows where the notes will land before they get there.

“What else do they say?” Penelope asks her.

“They like our hair, but they wish we didn’t smell so bad.”