Thieving Forest (33 page)

The ferry is tied up against the dock: a sorry-looking platform made up of wet gray planks nailed together without symmetry, and splintering everywhere. Swale loads Meera’s bundle onto it with the manner of a man pitching hay.

“That’s a pound apiece,” he tells them.

“Will you take federal dollars?” Susanna asks.

“Aye, if it’s minted these last five years.”

She opens her grain sack to get Seth’s purse. For a moment her hand gropes, finding nothing. She opens the neck of the sack wider and looks in. Still nothing. She dumps everything out onto the dark compacted sand.

“My purse,” she says.

Her eyes run back and forth over her possessions. The purse has to be here. There is no other place for it to be. Meera kneels down and spreads the objects apart with her fingers, the ax and the dinner knives and everything else, but there is no way the bulky purse could be hiding underneath any of that. After a minute, the boatman throws Meera’s bundle off the ferry and turns to go back to his shack.

“Wait,” Susanna tells him. She looks at Meera. “The eunuchs. They must have taken it while we slept.”

“They were very quiet,” Meera says.

“And afterward they made us hide so they could get away.”

“Your wench speaks English same as you,” Swale interrupts roughly. She looks at his face, which is crossed with an expression she can only call judging. She realizes that she and Meera have been speaking Delaware to each other. When did that become their shared language?

“Bad enough you take one of them as your wife,” he says.

For a moment Susanna doesn’t understand his meaning, and then when she does she almost laughs. He thinks she is a boy.

Meera says rapidly in Delaware, “And you look like you were born of wolves and then abandoned by them for your ugliness and backward manner.”

Swale glares at Meera, understanding nothing except that an insult was given. He thinks Susanna is a boy but that hardly bothers her, the lost purse is much worse. Her hair is short from cutting nits out of it, and ragged and dirty. She has no cap and her split skirt could be taken for unbecoming trousers. She is thin to the point of a stick. And why else would she have an Indian girl with her? People carry their own beliefs with them and then paint the world accordingly. That’s what Sirus always said. But she won’t bother to correct Swale—he might give them worse trouble if he knew. They aren’t in the Black Swamp anymore, they’re back in the world of men. Already they’ve met with thievery and insult and the day is little more than half over.

How will they get across the Maumee with no money? She looks down at her belongings scattered on the bank.

“Is there anything here you would take in trade?” she asks in English.

Swale leans over to examine what she has. Feathers. Dinner knives. Sirus’s ax. Their kettle. Meera clutches their bundle of food, not on offer.

“Don’t need feathers. I’ll take everything else.”

Meera says in English, “We will keep the necklace. You have no use for that.” To Susanna, in Delaware, she says, “The Wyandots are allied with the Chippewa. They’ll value the necklace of a chief. That will be enough for the ransom.”

“But we need the kettle, too.” In her pouch Susanna still has her mother’s cherry buttons and the avian-head nail scissors, but Meera puts a hand on her arm. “
Punitu
,” she says. Leave it.

“But without the kettle, how will we cook?”

“We’ve fared worse,” Meera tells her, and that is certainly true.

Swale poles them across the water and holds the ferry more or less steady as they disembark. Susanna hates to think of Sirus’s ax in his hands but there is nothing she can do about that. He points out the wagon path that leads to the Wyandot village, a couple of hours’ walk, he says. Then he spits not too far off Susanna’s foot, his last gesture of disgust.

But Susanna doesn’t care what he thinks. The day is still fine, with a thin string of clouds hanging overhead like a partially beaded necklace. For a long time she can still hear the Maumee behind them.

“Perhaps I should go into the village by myself,” Meera says presently. “Just at first.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I could find out if your sisters are there.”

“You told me they would be.”

Meera hesitates. Then she says, “If they are alive, I mean.”

So that’s it. Meera is protecting her.

“I want to hear for myself,” Susanna tells her. She adjusts her nearly empty grain sack and keeps walking. Just behind her conviction that she will find her sisters at the village, there is the other conviction that she will not. A worry she has to resist. Her plan is very rough: she’ll negotiate their freedom and then they’ll leave. From here, it is easy to get to Sandusky, and from Sandusky they can get to Philadelphia. Her basic plan hasn’t changed. Leave Ohio and go back East. They pass a maple tree with an unbroken spider web shining in the sun, a sign of good luck.

Eventually the brook widens and they begin to see the first signs of people: a partial footprint in the mud and broken branches set off together in a pile next to the wagon path.

“They no longer bother to cover their tracks,” Meera remarks. “We are fully in their territory. Will you hand me the shawl?”

Consolation’s shawl with the last of their food is wadded up inside Susanna’s grain sack. Meera reaches inside and pulls out a small hard lime.

“Where did you get that?” Susanna asks.

“From Omie.” Meera slices the lime in half with her hunting knife. Then she takes a fistful of her thick, dark hair and begins cutting it off.

“What are you doing? Your hair!”

“I must make myself humble.” She scoops up some dirt and squeezes half of the lime into it. Then she rubs the dirt into her shorn hair.

“This is what the Wyandot do?” Susanna asks.

“It is what I do.”

Her hair looks ghastly. Already the lime juice has altered its color in places. Why would Meera have to make herself ugly? Wouldn’t her uncle tribe welcome her no matter what, like a lost daughter, a lost niece? Susanna is beginning to wish she had a better plan.

“If something worries you,” Meera says, “say
scan-oh-nye
. That means peace in Wendat.”

Her chopped-off hair makes her look like a stranger. “Why would something worry me?” Susanna asks. But her jaw tenses as she says it.

When the path turns they see the first faint plume of smoke in the distance. They are very close now. Perhaps someone from the village has already seen them and is running back with the news. They follow the path into a stand of birch trees with dark knobs running up their trunks like open sores, and two loose pigs come squealing toward them before veering off. Susanna feels her stomach constrict like a violin string quickly and expertly tightened. After a while the path opens up into a long, sloped clearing, and suddenly there it is spread out below them.

“
Yadata
,” Meera says in Wendat.

The village.

They both stop to stare. Susanna has never seen a settled Indian village before, only ones that have been abandoned. It is much larger than she had imagined. Below them is a wide, fast-moving stream with a bridge at one end, marking the entrance to the village. Beyond the bridge she can see scores of small huts and longhouses laid out neatly across the flat plain, and planted cornfields to the north. To the east, a palisade of sharp poles runs along the perimeter like a fence.

The summer day seems impossibly long but it is still only afternoon. Susanna can see dots of people working the fields. The chirping of cicadas rises and falls, and a bird calls out a question that not another one can answer. Two tall Wyandots, a man and a woman, are walking up the clearing toward them. The man carries a painted buffalo skin and the woman carries a sack and a long calumet pipe made of painted clay. The stem of the calumet is decorated with locks of human hair.

As the pair approaches, Meera drops to her knees and touches her face to the ground. Susanna is looking at the calumet for any red hair. She must have made a movement because the man steps toward her and puts a warning hand on his knife. Its blade is as long as her forearm.

She drops to the ground like Meera. “Peace,
scan-oh-nye
,” she says.

The man comes no closer but keeps his hand on the knife. The woman says something to Meera in Wendat, which Susanna cannot follow, and Meera rises and begins talking. When she finishes, the woman calls to a child who is running across the clearing with a dog at his heels. She gives him some instruction. Then she and the man continue walking toward the stand of birch trees. When Susanna turns, she sees them sit down on the ground facing the path.

“They are not escorting us to the village?” Susanna asks.

Meera makes a noise of reproach. “They are meeting someone important, you can see by the gifts that they carry.”

“Did they say who?”

“A band of Ottawa with their chief.”

“Ottawa? So the eunuchs told the truth!”

A guttural scream comes from the trees. Susanna hears a group of men laugh.

“They are killing a hog for the feast,” Meera says.

“
Hao. Owa-he
,” the boy tells them. Come.

The clearing slopes down to the bridge and the village beyond it, giving the Wyandots long notice of anyone coming out from the birch trees. The boy walks ahead of them, his dog trotting briskly by his side. Everything is adding to Susanna’s confusion: the huge size of the village, the couple taking scant notice of them, the news of the Ottawa. She can see animals—mostly pigs and cows—roaming freely between the longhouses and the woods.

“Where is he taking us?” Susanna asks. Her voice comes out as breathy as a whisper.

“To someone who will decide our fate.”

“The chief?”

“There is more than one chief in a village,” Meera says sharply. “I do not know which one we will see.” She quickens her pace and Susanna tries to keep up.

“Why are you angry with me?”

“I’m not angry,” Meera says.

She’s anxious, Susanna thinks, like me. After they cross the bridge the land flattens and she can no longer see any farther than what is immediately in front of her: rows of huts made of bark and wood with deerskin doors, and women sitting on the ground before them with their work on their laps. It is crowded and noisy. She can smell roasted meat and corn, and animal skin, and smoke, and the faint odor of something unpleasantly sweet, like sewage. They pass a fenced enclosure for horses. “
Kupi kupi kupi
,” a man calls to the animals.

“We will be fine,” Meera tells her. “In the past, Wyandots often used to marry my people. We are related in spirit. And the Chippewa also are special to them. They will honor the necklace you carry.”

But her anxiety doesn’t lessen—in fact it seems to get worse as they walk through the village. Women look at them casually without stopping their work, as though they are used to people coming and going, even white women and natives from other tribes. In contrast to them Susanna feels muddy and thin, like an animal in the wild. When they get to the center of the village the boy stops at a small building made of gray and white stones.

Susanna is surprised to see a stone building. Perhaps it was made by the French and then abandoned? So far she has seen no one with red hair.

The boy makes a motion—stay here—and goes inside the building. Susanna looks around at the nearby men talking or smoking or chewing on long, brown leaves. They look back at her curiously. A thick, ancient elm tree dominates the area, and most of the men are sitting or squatting in its shade. At last a very brown, very wizened man wearing a hide tunic and English trousers comes out of the building. Several peltries are drying on a wattle stand nearby and he takes a moment to rub his hand over one of them. Then he turns to look at Meera and Susanna.

He asks Meera a question. By this time Susanna’s stomach is feeling pinched in the middle. She wishes they would speak Delaware instead of Wendat so she could understand them. The man says a few words to the boy, who clicks his tongue at his dog and they both run off.

“He has told the boy to fetch someone,” Meera tells Susanna. “One of the chiefs. Perhaps the chief of tribal friendships.”

“How many chiefs are there?”

“Often a great many. They don’t always agree with each other. We must hope we are given someone sympathetic.”

The wizened man turns to them. “
Skwaray-miha
,” he says sharply. Meera bows her head.

“He does not want me to speak English with you,” she tells Susanna in Delaware.

Clearly he is some sort of petty official, Susanna thinks. The boy comes back with strips of leather in his hand, which he gives to the man. The man asks him a question and the boy seems to answer yes. Then the man turns to Meera and speaks to her. He has a nasally voice. Susanna gets the impression that he is not happy.

“You must tell him why I have come,” she says to Meera in Delaware.

“I will,” Meera says. She holds out her hands. “But first show him your hands.”

To Susanna’s surprise the man starts to wrap a leather strip around her wrists, and when she pulls away in protest, Meera says, “Huh! It is just a ceremony. What do you say? A symbol. Until our fate is decided. Look, he ties mine as well.”