Thieving Forest (23 page)

“I do.” She hopes so, at least.

Naomi says nothing.

“I think this is for the best, Nami, I truly do. You must leave. These people are dangerous to you. But listen to me, now. This is a second chance. You must make yourself useful. Ask them how they build their fires, and watch them. Make them teach you.”

“I’ll try.”

“And look Nami, I found something else,” she says.

Naomi looks at what Penelope puts into her hand. “A ditch lily,” she says with some wonder. “Are they early this year?”

Penelope tries to calculate how long they’ve been gone but she can’t. Weeks? A month? Tomorrow everything will change again. She does not want to wake up to the day when her sister is traded away from her. Naomi is her favorite sister. Did she know this before? Whether she knew it or not, it seems all too clear now that she is about to lose her. Naomi carries her own world within her, Ellen always used to say, and that is true. Penelope doesn’t understand music and for the most part she thought that Naomi wasted her time playing—or worse, did it to get out of chores. She thought her parents were indulgent to let her. All the same, now that that piece of Naomi is gone, completely gone, the surprise is that Naomi herself is still the same. Her music was indicative of something deeper—this is what she tried to tell Hatoharomas. She isn’t sure if she just saved Naomi or not.

She lies down next to her and takes her hand. “Do you want me to tell you a story? Or are you too tired?”

“I’m not tired. And I know which one I want. Our Journey Here.”

This is a story Penelope often tells: how they came to Ohio from Philadelphia. For a moment she is quiet, gathering the story in her mind. With her thumb she feels her sister’s long, slim, strong fingers, the fingers of a musician.

“Sirus Quiner was a shopkeeper,” she begins. “And his father before him was a shopkeeper, and his father’s father. As far back as anyone can remember the Quiners have been shopkeepers. They sold general goods and lived on Walnut Street in the city of Philadelphia, but one day Sirus got a yearning for space.”

The Great Black Swamp

Fourteen

Meera blesses their journey by scattering tobacco leaves in the water before they leave in the skiff. It’s very early in the morning, almost still night. The wind sounds like an animal looking for its mate, but the rain has finally stopped and everything smells wet and fresh. Susanna looks up into the dark sky. Four bright disks shine there like suns. A good sign, she tells Meera, although she doesn’t know if it is or not.

Meera has brought food from the kitchen. “Enough for two weeks,” she says.

Two weeks! “You said it would take us only two days.”

“Always you must prepare for longer,” Meera tells her. Something about the cloth bundle seems familiar and Susanna takes it from her to look. It is a black shawl turned inside out. When she opens it, tiny fragments of mirrors glint at her.

“Consolation’s shawl,” she says.

Meera nods. Her little face holds a look of pride. “It will fetch a good price in trade.”

Susanna feels a childlike pleasure at this little theft that extends to the journey itself, as if they are only playing a game. She does not want to think too much about what lies ahead. They push off, leaving the flat bark roofs of Gemeinschaft behind them. Susanna can smell the pine gum that the brethren used on the skiff’s seams in place of tar, along with a pervasive scent of wet wood.

They navigate easily downstream, letting the current do most of the work, and the moist, still air seems to wrap itself around her shoulders. She’s wearing the split skirt Liza made for her and Aurelia’s moccasins and the deer collar from Old Adam. Her grain sack is stowed next to Meera’s bundle of food. Last night she gave Ellen’s wedding ring to Beatrice: “For safekeeping, or if you need money.”

Beatrice pushed it over her finger knuckle. Then she took it off and put it in her pocket.

“They might not be there, you know,” she said. There were tears in her eyes. Susanna hugged her tightly.

“I know. But they might be.”

Hard as it was to leave Beatrice, she could not deny that she was relieved to be going, and she packed everything she owned in a matter of minutes. When they left Philadelphia, she tells Meera now as the boat carries them downstream, it took them almost a month to load their wagon. Tools and inkpots and iron pans and window glass. Blank leather ledgers. Nails. Anything they couldn’t make themselves, which was plenty. Every morning Sirus changed his mind about what to bring, and Ellen had to rearrange the loaded wagon so the girls would still have a place to sit. On the very morning of their setting-out, Sirus impulsively bought a small hand mill, and that turned out to be the smartest thing they brought since it meant they could grind their own grain.

Susanna puts her oar into the water to push them away from a fallen tree with a dozen sparrows perched on a high, dead branch. Above them, the sun rises behind a hazy web of clouds. They are going west on Injured River, named for some forgotten injury done to some forgotten Indian. This will lead them to Fish River, and Fish River to the Maumee. The sounds are familiar river sounds: frogs, birdcalls, the gulp of the current as it falls over rocks. She pulls up her oar and lets it drip over the side of the boat.

“It took us only seven weeks to get to Ohio, since that year the spring was so dry,” she tells Meera. “At first we spent the nights in taverns along the way, some of them with only bundles of straw for beds.” Later when there were no more taverns they slept in their wagon. One evening, she said, they came upon an Indian and his wife who were living in a small house built entirely from tree branches. Susanna was only seven and felt a little afraid—these were the first Indians they had ever seen in their lives except once on the street near the open market, a woman who wore a gingham dress. These Indians dressed in skins and hide shoes sewn across the top. They were very small, the man the same size as the woman, and smiled all the time. They fed the Quiners great portions of venison steak, which Susanna had never tasted before, and afterward the Indian woman sang for them.

“In the morning my father gave them two pewter spoons as a parting gift. I remember they were very pleased about that.”

“Where was this place?” Meera asks.

“Near the Allegheny, I think.”

Meera says, “Oneida people.” She speaks confidently, but how she can know, Susanna wonders? By her own account Meera has never been east of the Sandusky.

Their trouble begins not long after they stop to eat. Meera ties the boat beneath a stunted tree half submerged in the river while Susanna unpacks some food. They sit down in the shade and are just cutting slices of cheese when Meera makes a sudden movement, grabbing Susanna’s arm.

“Someone on the river,” she whispers.

They crouch behind the tree, hidden by its leafy branches. Meera grabs the side of the boat to keep it from rocking into view. Susanna listens hard but can hear nothing out of the ordinary. However, a moment later a skiff like theirs comes around the bend. Two white men are rowing hard. Men from Gemeinschaft? It takes Susanna a moment to recognize Seth, and then her heart seems to twist and at the same time expand. She should have sent him a note before she left but they had to be secretive. Nushemakw would never willingly let Meera go unless she herself had no more use for her, and the brethren would honor her wishes. Plus they planned to steal a boat.

Seth and the other man—Brother Lyle, she sees now—steer their skiff into the middle of the river. Brother Lyle leans over the bow and puts one hand in the water to push away some debris while Seth rows for both of them, looking first toward one bank and then the other. As their boat goes by Susanna feels a sudden urge to call out to them: here we are! But she doesn’t. Later she will wish she had. That was her chance.

Only after the boat disappears from view does she realize she is holding her breath. Meera whispers, “They are looking for us. The man who is in love with you.”

“We stole a boat,” Susanna reminds her.

“How long will they look?”

Neither one had seen what supplies the men carried. Do they mean to spend the night? If not, Susanna and Meera could wait here for them to turn around and go back to Gemeinschaft. On the other hand, why waste time waiting? They could leave Injured River here and begin portaging to Fish River.

Meera says, “Since the two rivers do not meet we must portage sometime, the only question is where.”

Susanna did not know about this portaging. She thought that they would be in water for the whole of the trip. She looks for a break in the foliage beyond the river. It’s hard to see much beyond it.

“When I come with Nushemakw,” Meera tells her, “we leave the river a little ways ahead where it feeds into a small lake. But Injured River snakes around so much. At best it only saves an hour or two of walking.”

She draws a map in the dirt. “Here, we are. Here”—a line to the north—”is Fish River.”

In the dirt, it seems a short distance.

At first the skiff feels light on Susanna’s shoulder, or at least light enough. More difficult is finding the next level step. But soon enough the land evens out and they find a rhythm to their walk. They carry the skiff through wet meadows and between stands of trees, and then more meadows and more trees, marking the sun for direction. Heavy oaks spread their branches like nets catching the light. For almost a hundred years, Susanna’s father once told her, after the Iroquois had driven everyone out, Ohio was absolutely empty of people. One hundred years. The land to the south is being cleared and resettled, also to the north along Lake Erie, but here the overgrown landscape feels everlasting.

After a while the ground begins to feel spongy underfoot. It’s getting wetter, more swamp-like.

“This isn’t the real Black Swamp,” Meera says. “When we get closer to Fish River you will see its true heart.”

Susanna has never seen the Great Black Swamp let alone step foot in it, but she knows it is huge, over one hundred miles east to west extending like a sideways fang from Lake Erie all the way down to Fort Wayne. Underneath the water lies rich, black loam—good farmland if it could be drained, which most people doubt. But although they pass trickle after trickle of water and some fairly wide brooks, the afternoon lengthens with no sign of a river. After a while the empty country begins to feel oppressive. Or worse: an illusion. Sounds follow them from behind, probably only frogs or insects but with the skiff on her shoulder Susanna can’t turn around to check. Late in the afternoon they come to a meadow full of long brown grass that bends in the wind like the lush fur of an animal, tall enough for something to hide in. Here they find a few pawpaw trees in fruit. Ellen used to make some very good jelly out of pawpaws, but these are not yet ripe. Still, Susanna picks one and puts it in her pocket.

“Where is Fish River?” she asks. “Could we have missed it?”

But Meera says it is impossible to miss. “Maybe we entered at the longest point between the two rivers. We should stop to make camp. Then we can come to it first thing in the morning.”

That’s fine with Susanna. By now her shoulders are aching and there is a hard knot like an apple at the base of her spine. They find a spot in a little clearing with a small creek running through it and a pond shaped like half a heart. The ground is slightly higher here, and it is bordered on one side by a thicket of black ash trees.

“When the sun sinks,” Meera says, “more mosquitoes will rise. We must light a few fires to keep them away.”

Smudge fires. Back in Gemeinschaft the brethren used to light them at dusk. Meera begins to cover the boat with leaves and sticks to hide it. Susanna does not see the point of that, considering they are the only people within miles. She finds a dry spot to sit down.

“You can start the cooking fire,” Meera says.

Susanna picks at a callus on the palm of her hand. Part of her would like to stretch out right now and go to sleep but she doesn’t want to stand up to go get her blanket. Plus she’s hungry. “I’ve never built a fire outside.”

“I will teach you. First fetch kindling.”