Thieving Forest (37 page)

Susanna’s new mistress, Onaway, lives at the far end of the longhouse away from the cooking fires, which worsen her cough. Other than her cough she seems healthy enough despite her age. Although Onaway has three grown daughters and two grown sons, they live elsewhere with families of their own and can no longer help their mother. She is happy to have Susanna do her chores. Most of the work is the same—fetching wood and water, building up a fire, boiling corn—but here she is properly fed and Onaway does not throw sticks at her. Meera said that the wealthier families live here in the north near the head of the stream, and indeed everyone seems to have clearer skin and newer clothes. Susanna does not have to walk so far to find kindling, and even the stream seems brighter and moves at a quicker pace. She no longer has to wear a rope attached to her wrist, and she is not tied up at night. But she moves everywhere with a crowd of women, not only Onaway and Nadoko and Naomi, but other women as well who are somehow related to Nadoko. Susanna is never left alone with Naomi. Is this by design? She wonders if Naomi has already formed a plan to leave, and what that might be.

“The Wyandots have a proud history,” Naomi tells her one morning outside Nadoko’s longhouse, after Susanna has been living there for almost a week. “Nadoko has told me many stories about them. They are one of the oldest tribes. Holders of the council fires.”

They are sitting with Nadoko and Onaway pounding corn. Although the afternoon is warm, the light is no longer lengthening into summer but rather backing away. Huge white clouds seem to dip down into the village itself. Is it late August, Susanna wonders? Early September? She is getting impatient to leave, but still has found no chance to talk to Naomi alone.

“They believe trade is more important than war,” Naomi is saying. “Also—you’ll like this, Princess—women here are prized since they alone have the gift of foresight. Can you imagine the farmers back in Severne believing that?”

“I did not feel particularly prized by Akwendeh-sak,” Susanna says. She pounds the corn in her wooden mortar bowl a little too hard and a few kernels fly up over the rim. Carefully she picks them out of the dirt and looks at Onaway. Akwendeh-sak would have thrown a stick at her, but Onaway pulls the mortar closer to Susanna and shows her how to hold it up a little so the rim makes a kind of wall. Onaway knows no Delaware or English, so they communicate mostly by gesture. Her warm fingers remind Susanna of Ellen. She has the same gentle touch. Naomi is grinding her corn neatly and efficiently, Susanna notices. When did she learn to care about food preparation?

“Women in general are treated very well here,” Naomi continues. “They harvest their own fields, sell their own crops, and keep the profits. They hold positions of power in the village. Nadoko has herself appointed several chiefs.”

“Why are you telling me all this?” Susanna asks sharply.

“It’s interesting,” Naomi says. “I think it’s interesting, at least.”

Susanna pounds the corn harder. After a while she says, “I’ve been trying to work out what seems different about you, Nami. I mean apart from the clothes. I realize that it’s that you’re not carrying around your violin. Do you miss it?”

“No,” Naomi says. She moves her own bowl clockwise and begins pounding again. “I guess you think that’s strange.”

“Don’t you?”

Naomi doesn’t answer. Soon it will be time to fetch wood and begin building up the cooking fire, but for the moment they can remain in the sun’s warmth working the corn and enjoying each other’s company. Susanna feels a twinge of guilt for speaking so sharply to Naomi. Naomi is just making the best of a bad situation.

“I did wonder about the bear,” she says, trying to repair the conversation. “You know, the one in the enclosure with the crooked ear?”

“Oh yes, the bear.” Naomi turns to Nadoko.
“Hanone,”
she says. She tells Susanna its history: some hunters found it as a cub wandering in the forest alone, without a mother, and they brought it back to the village where the boys played with it and taught it tricks. It is now fully tame. At night the bear sleeps in its pen but sometimes during the day the children lead it outside to play.

Nadoko begins speaking, and Onaway and Naomi both stop to listen. When Nadoko pauses and nods in the direction of Susanna, Naomi says, “She is telling a story. She wants me to translate for you. It’s about a Wyandot man and his wife who were traveling from one village to another when they were captured by a company of bears. The bears took the couple back to their mountain and put them in a beautiful cave with lots of nut trees and other food nearby.”

The bears told the couple they must not leave, Nadoko continues, but every night the man tried to escape. However, each time the bears found him and they beat him until every bone was broken, or they gave him diseases that left his body limp. But the following morning the bears always showed his wife how to cure her husband, until she knew as much as they did. And when that time came, the bears released the couple, saying, “We are friends of the Wyandot. Now we have shown you how to cure yourself when sick or injured. Bring this knowledge back to your people.”

Naomi translates Nadoko’s words almost without pause. Out of all of Susanna’s surprises, this is perhaps the greatest: Naomi’s fluency in another language. Although she is smart, Naomi was always lazy about schooling. She could barely be bothered to learn her times tables.

“Why did she tell us this story?” Susanna asks when Nadoko has finished.

“Nadoko and her family are from the bear clan. She is very proud of that. By telling the story the Wyandots keep the bear clan sacred.”

“I think she wants to warn us against running away.”

“Careful,” Naomi says. “Most people here know more English than you might think.”

Nadoko stands up abruptly. She spreads her arms and speaks to Naomi pointedly, an instruction that Susanna does not understand. Then she goes into the longhouse. Onaway is leaning back against a tree trunk. She has fallen asleep in the sun.

When Nadoko comes back out she is holding something in her hands. A basket. She looks at Naomi and waits.

Susanna looks over at Naomi, too. “What? What does Nadoko want?”

Naomi picks up her bowl and sets it down beside her. “Susanna,” she says, and then stops. She tries again. “Susanna, there is something I must tell you. It was a surprise to me, too. But I’ve changed.”

“You’ve changed? What do you mean?”

Naomi hesitates again. Then she says, “I’m in love.”

“What? How can you be in love?”

“I’m in love with Hato. Hatoharomas. Nadoko’s oldest son.”

Hatoharomas? For a moment Susanna cannot speak from amazement. “But that makes him your brother!”

“Susanna, don’t be foolish, of course he’s not my real brother.”

“But I don’t understand. I thought you would want to leave. To play your violin again.”

“I feel, indeed I have long felt, that that is no longer my fate.”

“But what else could you do? You’ve never liked doing anything else!”

Naomi says, “I have married him.”

“What?” Susanna stands up. She feels an urgent need to move, to do something. She looks at Nadoko who surely cannot follow their conversation, but who nods nevertheless.

“I fell in love with Hato, I betrothed myself to him, and now we are married.”

“But Naomi, he’s an Indian!”

“Oh Susanna, don’t be so closed minded.”

“What about home? What about our store?”

“I know it’s hard to understand, but I like living with Hato and Nadoko. I’m learning so much. And I don’t miss my violin at all. Not at all. Don’t you think that means something?”

“No. I don’t.”

“Susanna, I know this is difficult.” Naomi stands and tries to take her hand but Susanna pulls it back. She feels as though she’s been holding on to her self-control as one would hold on to the end of an icicle, trying to climb it like a rope, and now it’s slipping out of her hold.

“Difficult?” she says. “This is nothing, this is easy. I don’t have to fight with wolves for meat, I don’t have to wade through miles of bog and pull leeches from my legs over and over. All of which I did for you. For you! For you and Penelope. And now you tell me, now you say...” She is stuttering with emotion. She wants to shake Naomi hard. Nadoko is watching her closely.

“Susanna...” Naomi says.

“How can you want to live with the people who did all this to you?”

“They weren’t the ones who took me.”

“And what about me? How will I ever get back?”

Onaway makes a soft snore. Naomi looks at her and says quietly, “You don’t have to leave. We could find a place here for you, too.”

By
we
she means herself and Nadoko. Susanna swallows hard, not trusting herself to speak.

“Susanna. Listen to me. It’s a good life here. You may not think so now, but you’ll see. When you have experienced more, and can see what I see.”

But here is the problem exactly. Naomi has always seen the world differently. No matter how much Susanna wants to—and at the moment she wants to not at all—she knows she can never be like Naomi. I see things as I was taught to see them, she thinks bitterly. White women do not work in the fields. White women do not fall in love with Indians. Naomi is right, I am closed minded, and moreover I’m foolish and misguided. I counted on luck when I shouldn’t have, and now I’m paying for it. What is luck anyway except self-delusion? And I’ve been deluded my whole life. I can’t change the smallest particle of myself. I’m not Naomi.

“Nadoko wants to give you a gift,” Naomi tells her. Susana turns to Nadoko, who is pulling something out of her basket. Susanna can’t read the expression on her face but she knows she must feel triumphant. She has won the prize: Naomi. Nothing in the basket can make up for that.

“I don’t want it,” Susanna says.

Twenty-Four

That night Susanna can’t sleep for thinking about all the many ways she’s miscalculated. If only she’d stayed in Severne. If only she’d never asked Old Adam to help her. In Risdale, Liza Footbound made a very generous offer to let her live and work there—why didn’t she take it? Then came Gemeinschaft, another disaster, a mirror of this one. Both of her sisters have found another life without her. They haven’t appreciated her efforts. But hasn’t that always been true? As for Meera—that was her biggest mistake of all. Back in Severne the farmers used to say that friendly Indians are more dangerous than open enemies. Of course, those farmers were fools.

She shifts on her blanket and looks up at the neatly crisscrossed rafters. She came all this way for nothing. What if you do what you think is right, for yourself or someone else, but it doesn’t make a difference? she wonders. What if all the right action in the world still results in pain and disappointment? Maybe she’s just meant to live alone. To go home by herself.

Of course, she can’t go anywhere now. For all of Naomi’s help, she’s still a captive.

She listens to Onaway breathing heavily next to her. At least Onaway has taught her how to keep an outdoor cooking fire hot, and how long to boil meat, and how to mash peas to her liking. She does not beat Susanna for not knowing all this beforehand. They work together side by side, and eat together, and sleep head to foot.

Chores, food, rest. Susanna can almost appreciate that simplicity now. Perhaps she was foolish to think that life could be anything else, that in Philadelphia her days would be different.

In the morning when she is cooking porridge in the big kettle outside, Tako comes skipping along throwing a stick into the air and catching it. He still visits Susanna every day although she can no longer escape with him into the woods—there are too many people watching her now for that. But Susanna makes sure to give him some food whenever she sees him. She ladles porridge into a bowl and Tako leans against a huge gray boulder to eat it.

“You like new mother?” he asks.

Susanna turns back to stir the porridge, which does not need stirring. “She is not my mother,” she says. “But yes. I do like her. She is good to me.”

“Kettle bought last winter,” he tells her. “Very shiny!”

The way he says this makes her laugh. “You like shiny?”

“New is good. Bad is old,” Tako says. He finishes the porridge and wipes his hands down his green trousers. Something on the gray boulder catches his attention. “Tarayma,
regardes
,” he says, picking it up.

At first she thinks it’s a shell of some sort. But then she draws in her breath. It is one of her mother’s cherry dress buttons.

She takes it from him and rubs her thumb over the cherry shape, trying to imagine how it got on the boulder. “This used to be mine. I mean my mother’s. My first mother’s. Where did it come from?”

Tako looks up at the sky as if it came from there, and then grins. A joke. Could he have brought it himself? It fits with his childish crush on her. But he runs off before she can question him further, throwing his stick in the air and catching it as he goes.

Susanna looks down again at the button. Perhaps Naomi negotiated with Akwendeh-sak for it? A conciliatory gift after their quarrel? But Susanna is not sure if Akwendeh-sak was ever given the button. The women who bathed her and pierced her ears took the buttons from her...and after that? They were gone, that’s all she knows.

When she shows Naomi and Nadoko the button they both express genuine surprise.

“Mama’s button!” Naomi says. She passes it to Nadoko, explaining what it is. Nadoko fingers the little stem, and then hands it back.

“You didn’t trade for it?” Susanna asks Naomi.

“I didn’t know about it. Where did you find it?”

“On that rock. I thought maybe you put it there, to surprise me.”

Naomi frowns. “That is odd.”

Susanna rubs it between her fingers. Maybe it was Meera, feeling remorse. But Meera never feels remorse.

“Are you ready?” Naomi asks.

She’s carrying two baskets of uncooked corn and hands Susanna one of them. Today they are going to the boys’ school so that Susanna can see Hato, although she cannot actually meet him since women are not allowed to talk to the boys or their teachers during their training. They will deliver the corn to them and watch the boys train from a distance.