Thieving Forest (39 page)

Back in the village the rain stops everything for a while. The women come in from their fields to wait out the storm inside, knitting or mending. Onaway says nothing when Susanna returns with no kindling. She dries Susanna’s hair and face with a worn Englishwoman’s shawl that she uses as a towel and, twisted, for shooing off dogs. They can hear the rain pounding on the roof like a giant drumming his fingers.

Nadoko’s longhouse is large enough to have several fires, and it is dry despite the smoke holes in the roof. Onaway presents Nadoko with her gift of hickory milk in a small birch container, a
mokuk
, which has a yellow flower design embroidered on two sides. Nadoko takes a sip of the milk, nods her pleasure, and passes around a cup to share. Meanwhile Naomi and Susanna pull their blankets over to a corner to do their work. When Nadoko’s cup comes to her, Susanna takes a long sip. The milk is very good.

“Where is Penelope exactly?” she asks in a low voice, handing the cup to Naomi. Everyone is engaged in some task and pays them no attention. Susanna is trying to knit stockings for Onaway using two long heron bones as needles, and Naomi is making thread from the sinews of an elk or deer, breaking the strands apart and then twisting two strands tightly back together.

“I told you. She was sold to a fur trader. A Canadian called Boucherie. He lives on the River Raisin.”

“Where on the Raisin?”

“That’s all I know. Why?”

“I saw Seth Spendlove,” Susanna whispers. “In the woods not an hour ago.”

Naomi looks up quickly. “Seth Spendlove! No, that cannot be.”

“It is.” She tells Naomi how Seth was among the party that went to Gemeinschaft, but she does not mention his marriage proposal. She wants Naomi to believe that Seth has come for both of them. She wants to make it hard for her to refuse to go.

“He has a plan. He will contact me again through his friend, an Indian. It’s complicated. But I trust him.”

“Susanna, think about this a moment. If you leave, they will come after you. You are considered Wyandot property now. And if you’re caught you might even be killed.”

“But this is our chance! We can leave together! Now that there is a way, you surely don’t want...surely you would come with me, wouldn’t you?”

Naomi keeps her eyes on her thread, frowning as if encountering some difficulty there.

“Are you listening to me?” Susanna asks.

“Yes,” Naomi says in a calm voice. “I am listening to you. It is you who won’t listen to me. I don’t want to leave.”

“You can’t mean that. Look at the way you must live!”

“When you are in love, you want to stay with your beloved. It’s that simple. And I like this life. It suits me.”

“But Hato is an Indian! He’s bound to treat you badly!”

Naomi’s cheeks flame. “That is not true. That is not true at all. That is a white man’s misconception. The women in this village own their own land, they own everything they farm. What white woman has ever owned land? What white woman can sell or trade without first consulting her husband or father or brother? It’s different, yes. And in many ways it’s better. Quite a few of the women in the village here are very powerful. Respected. They hold important positions.”

Susanna thinks of the chief who decided her fate when she first arrived. She thinks of Meera. “Indians betray you.”

“No,” Naomi says. “Or at least no more than anyone else. Look at me, look at how well I am treated. I found a good family. And if I could be happy, if I can trust them after everything that’s happened to me...Listen, Princess. I wasn’t going to mention this yet, but Nadoko and I have talked. She might be able to find a husband for you. With your red hair you would be prized, even given your...your current status.”

As a slave, Susanna thinks bitterly. She throws her knitting down beside her. Tears of frustration come into her eyes. “If I had known that I would have to
convince
you all to come back with me, any of you, I would never have stepped foot outside our cabin. You can never make a Quiner girl do anything she hasn’t already thought of doing herself—isn’t that what they said back in Severne?”

“Susanna, you’re upset.” Naomi lifts the thread she’s been working on and examines it. “And now Nadoko is looking at us. We’ll talk about this later. I should make her some tea.”

“Make Nadoko tea? What’s become of you, Naomi? You used to be so...so...independent.”

“Lazy, you mean.”

Susanna can’t help but laugh although she is still irritated. “Yes, that’s what I was thinking.”

“You’re right, I was lazy. But I’ve changed. Don’t you think that these last few months might have changed me? After everything I’ve been through?”

“What about me? What about everything
I’ve
been through?”

“I can see you’ve changed,” Naomi says. She gives her a sly glance. “For one thing your hands look awful.”

Susanna laughs again. But this is exactly what I miss, she thinks, being able to laugh in the midst of a quarrel. Who else can you do that with except your sisters?

“Please come back with me,” she says. “Please, Nami. This is not your place.”

“You’re wrong about that,” Naomi says.

Twenty-Five

Seth and Koman shelter from the rain in the Wyandot forest having nowhere else to go. No one would mistake Koman for a Wyandot except from a distance. In a thicket of oaks they find two hollow trees, each big enough to fit a sitting body. Koman gives Seth the larger one and folds himself up inside the other, disappearing from view. From his own hollow Seth watches a pool of water form outside like a sudden idea. It’s barely past noon but feels like evening. Muddy debris floats by him, broken branches that smell like wet bark. He thinks of how Susanna smelled when she was in his arms. She was glad to see him, at least. She smelled like green trees.

He must have slept. When he opens his eyes again the rain has stopped. He can see the silvery light of the sun but not its body, and the sky is the color of a woman’s summer dress. Climbing out, he sees Koman walking toward him, his moccasins caked with mud and his hair wet. He has been to the village, he tells Seth, scouting around.

“I saw the
Neshnabek
,” Koman says. The band of visiting Potawatomi. “One man I know. I spoke with him. He will vouch for me.”

“So we go into the village?”

“Better than here. There are scouts, we will be found.”

“They’ll accept me?”

“I will paint your face like a captive.”

They are speaking to each other in Potawatomi. For the past two months they have traveled together, made fires and cooked together, hunted for food, and paddled up and down the Maumee asking every ferryman they could find if he had crossed a white woman with red hair. The ferrymen were to a man isolated and unfriendly. One man was pleasant enough in voice but held a knife between himself and every person he came across, while another called himself Wolf and wore an odd cape made out of an assortment of furs. Most of these men, Seth figured, would eventually drown or get killed by another man’s hand. If they looked strangely at a white man and a Potawatomi traveling together, Seth and Koman did not show that they noticed.

They kept to their initial agreement: Koman did not say who killed Seth’s father, and Seth did not ask. He would not avenge Amos’s death. In a twisted sense he feels responsible for it. He never gave Amos the money for the Quiners’ horses and wagon. Of course, twist the rope further and the responsibility loops back again to Amos. Cade would be as unlikely as Seth to avenge Amos’s death. Both of them—he believes he can vouch for Cade—would stop just short of saying that Amos had it coming. It did not positively have to happen this way, and yet like the ferrymen, wasn’t Amos bound by his drinking and his lies to come to a violent end?

“How will we get her?” Seth asks Koman. “And how will we all get away?”

“We will look about once we are settled. Someone will give us shelter. We will say we came with the traveling party and my friend agrees it is true. Only we are late, because of you.”

Koman smiles. He is enjoying this as one might enjoy a hunt or any good game of strategy. “They are negotiating peace with these men and will give us a good place. Then we listen, pay attention, look about. Wait for a distraction. A feast, a game...we will know.”

“What tribe will you say I am from?”

“You? A mixed breed, a little of everything. One sees it in your face.” He opens one of his pouches. “Are you hungry? It is good we go into the village. This is the end of the venison.”

Once, a few weeks back, they lived for five days just on whortleberries and ginseng, which grew wild on a little island on the Maumee. When they came upon a band of Wyandot trapping deer, Koman offered their help in exchange for some of the meat. The way they felled the deer was new to Seth: the men made a kind of enclosure out of great wooden stakes, nearly half a mile long. It was covered with branches, closed on two sides, and got narrower as it went on. Seth and Koman helped the men drive deer into this trap, which was so barricaded that once the deer entered they could not get out. Seth ran through the woods with the other men beating deer bones together and imitating the cries of wolves to frighten the deer into running. After three days they caught ten does and four bucks, and hung most of the meat to dry. One deer was roasted on the spot, and Koman and Seth were given a haunch. They saved the fat to use as butter.

The hunt was exhilarating, and, Seth thinks, he did not do too badly at it. Koman has taught him new ways to trap and how to make a fire that cannot be seen from a distance. He taught him to notice the minute signs of other travelers—broken branches, a slight crest in the mud—and to gauge how long ago they had passed. Koman claimed that bird calls varied if there was a wolf on the prowl or if the bird was just searching for a mate, and Seth learned how to listen. He learned to use reeds and little else now to catch a fish. His arms and face have gotten very brown.
What dost thou in this world? The wilderness for thee is fittest place...
To pass the time Seth taught the poem to Koman in Potawatomi. But he is not thinking anymore of Susanna when he recites it, he is thinking of himself.

“Night soon,” Koman says after they have eaten. The day seems to have spent itself away in rain, and what little sunlight filtered down after the storm passed is now fading. “Let us go.”

“What about my face?”

Koman finds a few red berries and begins crushing them with his thumb into his palm, making a red paste. He’ll smear the paste on half of Seth’s face, and on the other half he’ll smear a black paste, marking him as a captive. Meanwhile, Seth gathers his things and puts them one by one into his dark gray pack. Money, some dried fruit, their small kettle for cooking.

Will Susanna forgive me once she knows everything? he wonders as he tucks in his last bag of tea. He is his father’s son, he can never forget this. And in truth he is proud of that lineage now, in spite of Amos. Amos was not proud, maybe that was his problem. Petty, self-serving, secretive, and ashamed. That was his father.

“I will make you as pretty as a girl,” Koman tells him, putting a reddened thumb to Seth’s cheek. Seth laughs. Koman’s dry humor is still a surprise. It reminds him, strangely, of Susanna’s father Sirus.

“If you can, my brother,” Seth says. “If you can.”

While Susanna waits for Seth she decides to gather as much food as possible to take with them when they go. Of course she needs to do this stealthily. But she has the new pouch from Nadoko and a plainer but larger pouch from Onaway, both of which close up tight with a drawstring. She can hide food away and no one will see.

As she helps Onaway cut rabbit meat into thin strips to dry for the winter, Susanna wonders if Seth will go to one of the chiefs to petition for her release. The Wyandots are famous negotiators. What will they trade her for? Akwendeh-sak received only a bolt of gingham cloth, so maybe her value is not very high.

With a short knife she cuts the rabbit meat in the same direction as the muscle, following Onaway’s example. Afterward they hang the strips over poles to dry, and cover them with a piece of cheesecloth so that insects can’t lay their eggs in the meat.

Three days pass, and then a fourth, and there is still no word from Seth. Of course, negotiations take time. A soft rain begins to fall, the kind of weather that Sirus used to call Irish weather. She has not seen Tako in several days but she heard that a second group of hunters left, many of them boys on their first trip, so perhaps Tako went with them.

When the strips of rabbit meat are sufficiently dry, Onaway takes them down and shows Susanna how to beat the meat until it flakes. To this they add melted bear fat and some crushed berries to make pemmican. When no one is looking, Susanna takes a fistful of the pemmican and puts it in her pouch. Later that evening when she fetches kindling she sees a nuthatch hiding seeds in the bark of a tree. After it flies off she picks one seed out with her thumbnail. It tastes sour and does not split when she bites down on it, but she takes another seed and eats that, too. Although she lingers in the woods as long as she dares, there is no sign of Seth or his friend.