Thieving Forest (47 page)

Boucherie is sliding over the scattered cornmeal on the other side of the room. Blind as he is, he is still trying to get back to them, to put them in their places.

“Wait,” Penelope says at the doorway.

Boucherie falls again and swears in French. He’s pulled the scissors out and is holding his hand over his bleeding eye.

“The dog,” Penelope says.

Susanna looks at the pup, a shivering little ball near the door. She scoops him up, holding him with one arm under his belly.

“What about Ellen’s scissors?” Penelope asks.

Susanna doesn’t look back. “They’ve found a good use,” she says.

Twenty-Eight

They return to Severne by water. Penelope makes a nuisance of herself with the dog, refusing to put him down and yet unable to carry him for long, until finally Seth fashions a collar out of deer hide and ties a rope to it that she can use as a leash.

“He went all that way for a new pup,” Penelope keeps saying. “He’ll come looking for it. I know him. He won’t give it up.”

But Susanna knows he won’t be looking for anything. She feels cold and warm at the same time when she thinks of what she’s done. Boucherie will die alone among the mice and bird feces, bleeding out from his eye until there is no blood left. She tries not to think about it, but she does.

They walk through the forest following streams to the Maumee, and in all that time—two and a half days—they meet with no incident. Either the Wyandots have given up looking for them, or they are lucky. They travel by night. Susanna has brought back no alcohol for Seth’s wound and no bandages, but thanks to Meera’s nursing his arm is healing fine. At first Penelope refused to speak to Meera—”I don’t like Indians,” she announced calmly—but then she forgets and speaks to her anyway. Susanna tells herself that Penelope will grow more lucid the farther away from Boucherie they get, and that turns out to be mostly true, although for the rest of her life Penelope will have her moments, as she calls them. A touch of melancholia, as she says.

“Make us a fire,” she says to Meera the first evening. “My heart is cold with damp.”

Meera says, “Watch how you sit. Your side must not open.” For she has taken on the task of cleaning and dressing Penelope’s wound, making fresh poultices twice a day and finding certain plant leaves to crush into water, which she lets no one but Penelope drink.

“Penelope, we can’t risk a fire,” Susanna tells her. “Remember we’re in Wyandot territory now. We should not make our presence so obvious.”

“Well that’s just foolish. We need a big fire to keep ourselves warm. I’m the oldest, I know best what to do. Seth, you make it.”

“In truth your sister builds a better fire than I do,” Seth tells her.

“Who, Susanna?” Her old scoffing voice.

Meera says, “If Boucherie sees smoke, he might follow it to get to the dog.”

Penelope pulls the pup closer. She has named him Tripper because he often trips over his own large paws. “No one must know about him,” she says. She touches the space between the dog’s eyes and watches his ears twitch in two different directions.

“That’s right,” Susanna tells her. “And no one will know.”

Great gold and red leaves fall onto the brittle carpet of the forest floor. Silver maple, black ash, oak, basswood, elm. Susanna falls asleep among them and wakes when the moon is up. She and Seth take turns on watch while Meera takes care of Penelope. The next afternoon Seth lifts his arm out of his sling and flexes his fingers. “All good,” he says. When no one is watching, he kisses her.

When they finally get to the Maumee it is a few hours before dawn. Seth looks for the canoe that he and Koman hid but it is no longer there. Koman has gotten to it first.

“Hopefully he is far away by now,” he says to Susanna.

“Do you think we will ever see him again?”

“My guess is no.”

A sharp wind blows the water east to west, and they walk until they spot the ferryman’s barge tied up on the opposite shore. Penelope keeps looking back into the trees with a worried expression. She picks up the dog and puts him down again.

“When will the ferryman come? The rogue fears water. He will try to fetch the pup before we cross.”

“Once we cross, is the dog safe?” Susanna asks.

Penelope nods. “The rogue fears the water,” she says again.

“Wait here,” Susanna tells her. She goes into the trees and looks around until she finds a hazel tree with short curling branches like overgrown fingernails. She breaks off a twig and brings it to Penelope. “Anyone who wears hazel in her cap will meet with good fortune,” she says.

“More of your superstitions! You haven’t changed at all.” Penelope feels the side of her head. “But I have no cap.”

Susanna breaks the twig and puts one half in Penelope’s hair, and the other half she wedges in the dog’s deer-hide collar. “There now. We don’t need caps.”

The ferryman is the same one, Swale, who crossed Meera and Susanna so many weeks ago. Just after dawn they see smoke rising from his chimney, and then Swale comes out to the river carrying a bucket. They wave him over. Seth gives him two English pound notes for their crossing, the last of his money, and Swale tells them of a trading house a mile or two south, a cabin in an abandoned settlement surrounded by a stockade. There they might find someone who can take them upriver, he says.

The Maumee is vividly green and weedy, and Susanna almost falls asleep watching the ferry pole bring up stringy wet plants and then disappear into the water and then bring them up again. It’s a rocking, soothing motion, and Swale is adept at keeping up a rhythm, even graceful. Seth comes to stand next to her. He touches her hand with his pinkie and she puts one arm around him, and then the other, encircling him, not caring who sees. She rests her head against his chest. Swale does not seem to connect her with the boy he crossed before.

When they get to the opposite shore, Susanna spots Sirus’s ax by the side of Swale’s shack. The handle is already split but the blade looks well cared for, and although they barter hard Swale will not trade for it, not for anything they have.

At the stockade they fare better. Inside one of the old cabins, a dark-haired Irishman named Patrick Carey has set up a trading post. He agrees to take Seth’s musket and three of Meera’s bracelets in exchange for taking them up the Maumee. He has but one boat and cannot sell it, but he can land them at a bigger trading house where they might purchase a skiff for the rest of their journey: Beaver Creek to Hammer Creek to West Creek to the Blanchard River, straight up through the heart of the Great Black Swamp. A fortnight will see you through to the end, Patrick Carey tells them.

Two days up and two days back, Susanna thinks. How could I have been so foolish to believe that? It is October already, or later. The sun seems a long way off. Like Penelope, all she wants to do is put as much distance as possible between herself and the Raisin. Penelope still has the hazel twig stuck in her thick, golden-red hair. It will be there for days, and when it falls out Susanna will find her another.

By the time they begin rowing their skiff up the Blanchard, certain truths have come back to Penelope: one, that Thomas Forbes did not visit her in the night to give her the child growing inside her, for Thomas Forbes is dead. The babe is the rogue’s. But Penelope is a Quiner, and with all the spirit she has in her command she wills the child to be one hundred percent Quiner too. The child will be a girl, and she will have red hair. Penelope is determined.

She is still sick sometimes, midmorning usually, and once in a while in the afternoon. When she is sitting upright she wants to lie down but when she lies down she waits and waits for sleep. In the skiff she holds Tripper on her lap. He is very good when they are on water but when they pull to shore he wants to run. She is never comfortable until he is safely tied up again. Meera says she will watch him but how can she watch him all the time? Of course, Indians have special talents that white men do not. Penelope knows this for a fact. It is because whites eat too much salt, her old Wyandot mistress told her, and so have lost certain powers.

Another truth: she will never have to set foot in the rogue’s smelly cabin again. The bucket of morning sickness, the animal skins tanned and stretched out for days at a time, the empty jugs of alcohol that still retain their cloying odor. And his odor.

“You cannot think how closely I had to smell him,” she tells Meera when they are stretched out waiting for sleep. Meera’s hands are very gentle and she makes Penelope a good bed every night out of tree bark and leaves.

“White men do not smell good,” Meera agrees.

“He was not a man, he was a devil. He had warts on each one of his knuckles. He held me by the hair when he touched me and afterward he slept with his fisted hands crossed over his neck. Then I could plainly see: wart, wart, wart, wart.”

“You must try to forget,” Meera tells her.

They meet not a single person until they come upon a preacher on horseback near Pike Run. His name, he tells them, is Reverend Forbes, but he is no relation to Thomas Forbes, Penelope’s late husband. They share some food with him, and Penelope finds herself telling him the story of her captivity and escape. He is intrigued, and takes out a small leather-bound notebook and a pencil to take a few notes.

“This gentleman found you?” He nods toward Seth.

“No, my sister Susanna.”

He says, “The gentleman is more believable.”

He wants to write a sermon about her tale. It will be a comfort to women he says, and when it is finished he promises to mail her a copy. She tells him to send it to their store in Severne. “I’ll not leave it again,” she says solemnly, as if he’s asked her to swear to it.

Back on the Blanchard, water sprays up the side of her face. She grows colder and colder the further away from the rogue she gets, but this, she decides, is a positive thing. Even the cold of a grave is better than that cabin—a third truth. She is sorely tired of squirrel meat, which they eat day and night. If it were up to her they would eat venison instead. She would be a good shot, she is sure. She would be a great hunter. The boat lurches and her stomach turns over and she touches the bit of hazel twig in her hair. It reminds her of the little twig of yellow flowers that Naomi kept hidden in her moccasin. Where is that now? She would like to ask if anyone knows if only she weren’t so tired and sick, and if her thoughts didn’t fly off randomly, landing somewhere only briefly before sailing forth again.

Once in Virginia, when Seth was a boy, an Austrian artisan came to the town wanting to cut silhouettes for a penny. He wore a badly powdered wig that sat uneasily to one side, and even when he pushed it back with his hand it fell again almost immediately, as though that side of his head had a dent.

Amos said, “We’ll get a silhouette of the two boys together if he’ll still charge a penny.” As always, he was eager to get more for his money than anyone else.

Seth wonders now what happened to that silhouette. They probably left it in Virginia with everything else, the house that his mother and then his stepmother had filled with furniture and dishes. After his second wife died, Amos traded all he had for the supplies that would get them to the Ohio Country and, he said, to their fortune. He thought he would get rich trading with Indians. He knew their language and fancied that he knew how they thought. But Sirus Quiner got to Severne first. Amos never forgave him for that. Now Seth wonders if his father had been biding his time all these years, working iron and waiting. He would not be surprised.

They leave the skiff at the same landing where Seth and Cade sold the Quiners’ team and wagon so many months ago, and walk the last ten miles to Severne. They are following the same dirt track Seth came by as a child. But this time, instead of coming by wagon with a drunkard father and a younger brother who was taller than he was even then, Seth comes upon the settlement walking alongside his beloved. He feels all the luck in this fact. He thinks of the first time he saw Susanna, how she looked at him and then looked at his brother and then looked at him again. Her hair in two red braids down her back, a dented kettle in her hands.