Thieving Forest (9 page)

She finds herself thinking about something that happened to her years ago, when she was eight years old. They had been living in Severne only a couple of years then. It was a fine day in early summer, and her mother decided they should eat supper outdoors. A preacher was visiting the settlement with his wife and young son, and every evening they ate with another family. Tonight it was the Quiners’ turn. Ellen made her famous turtle soup, and Sirus and Beatrice carried their large oak table outside. Susanna found dry flat stones to hold down the tablecloth, for there was a wind. When they could see the reverend and his family walking over—three distinct dots, one in a black hat—Ellen told Susanna to go wash up but to find Aurelia first.

Susanna went to the henhouse, the obvious place to begin, but Aurelia wasn’t there. As she turned to go she heard a noise, a kind of crackle, nothing unusual, just a hen turning about, but for some reason she looked closer and saw that next to the hen there was an egg waggling on the straw. It had a big crack all the way around it. A chick was hatching.

Susanna had never before seen a chick coming out of its shell and since she thought it would be the work of a moment she stayed to watch. But it wasn’t the work of a moment. It was long and arduous: the widening crack, the first glimpse of the beak pecking out, and then a claw coming up like a long forked splinter of wood. How could such a weak creature possibly break through that shell? The longer she watched the more impossible the task looked, and Susanna found herself more and more engrossed. In the middle of it, one of her sisters came into the henhouse behind her—no doubt sent by Ellen—and exhaled impatiently. But still Susanna didn’t take her eyes off the egg. She said over her shoulder, “A chick is trying to come out and I want to watch. Don’t tell.” So together, silently, they watched as the chick worked and rested, chipping off more and more shell until it could finally unfold itself out onto the straw: a skinny, goopy, putty-colored baby bird with scraps of eggshell still stuck to its body.

Susanna felt as victorious as if she had done it herself. She turned around to smile at her sister since together they had witnessed this wonderful thing. But there was no one behind her. She was alone. The exhale she’d heard was only the wind. And right then she realized that she had thought, or felt, that it was Lilith behind her, Lilith her younger sister who still lived in Philadelphia. She’d had the feeling of Lilith without thinking about it, so absorbed was she in the chick’s struggle. But Lilith never came to Severne. Maybe Susanna imagined her because back in Philadelphia Lilith had been her particular partner, cutting out old newspapers into houses and drawing in chairs and fireplaces and people. They played together behind the house, although now Susanna can’t remember what they played, only Lilith’s laugh like a hiccough.

As she got older Susanna forgot to miss Lilith, but now, as she helps Liza prepare Aurelia’s body in the little room where Aurelia died, she finds herself hoping that Lilith will suddenly step through the low doorway with a heavy longing that she puts down to grief.

Together Liza and Susanna undress Aurelia and cover her with a sheet. Then, delicately, as though Aurelia might care, Susanna uncovers only that part of the body she is washing. As the light crosses the room Aurelia’s skin seems white then gold then a dull yellow. Susanna helps Liza sew Aurelia into a new blue dress, because why should she be in mourning now? Her brushed-over hair nearly covers the bandage on her forehead.

They bury her the next day in a thick pine box, and Jonas takes it upon himself to say a few words in lieu of a preacher: “And thus we give an end to her trouble and her life.” Susanna has to unclench her fist to throw in the dirt. She doesn’t feel alone, not completely, not yet, but she can sense it coming, like the wind.

That night Liza sits with her in the little back room for a long time, both of them in nightdresses, and Liza wearing a very odd muslin nightcap set back on her head.

Susanna holds a piece of paper on her lap, intending to write to Lilith. Instead she looks outside. A spreading bitternut tree grows right up against the tavern wall, and through the open window she can smell the tangy scent of its branches. Its roots are probably somewhere beneath her, right under the floorboards.

“Some weather rising,” Liza says, looking out at the moon. Even sitting, her feet are firmly planted on the floor as if at any moment she might be called on to get up quickly. Susanna is glad of Liza’s company, maybe just the sound of another woman’s voice. She is used to her sisters all talking at once. Now it feels like she is sitting at a table with too many place settings. Both Liza and Jonas have told her that it isn’t her fault that Aurelia died but Susanna knows differently. She should have started sooner. She should never have stopped to rest, not even once. She stares at the blank sheet of paper. Now that it is before her, it feels too soon to describe Aurelia’s death in words.

“I wish...,” she says, and then stops. There are a hundred things she wishes.

Liza waits. She looks at Susanna and takes a pull from her pipe. After a moment she blows out the smoke in a long stream. Susanna watches it rise and spread.

“I don’t know. I keep thinking. The last time I spoke to Aurelia I said nothing important, nothing at all. I wish I had told her something real. Talked about something important.”

Liza pulls her pipe from her mouth and rests it on her knee. “That it? Well you don’t need to fret about that. Anything you might have said, she knew it when she woke up and saw you tending her.”

“But I didn’t know it was the last time. That I wouldn’t get another chance. All I talked about was applesauce. I didn’t say anything that really mattered.”

“She knew what mattered when she saw you there with her. Words aren’t any more telling than that.”

Susanna hopes this is true. Outside the wind stirs up the branches of the bitternut tree. The leaves look like birds hanging on.

“I want to put something to you,” Liza says after a moment. “Jonas and I been talking. If you want, after you fetch your sister from that missionary village, you could come back here. You both could. We could use more hands.”

Susanna says, “You must be sorely in need of company if you value mine.”

Liza smiles, a rare occurrence. “It’s fine company.”

“Then you haven’t been listening to what people say.”

“You’ve given yourself no airs around me.”

The wind rises sharply and then suddenly drops as if changing its mind. Tomorrow she will go to Gemeinschaft, where her sister, she doesn’t know which one, has been ransomed. And then what? Come back here? Return to Severne? She thinks about Old Adam, whom she still hasn’t seen. Clearly he has abandoned her. Gone back to see to his pigs.

Liza gets up and knocks her pipe ashes out. “It’s late. Try to sleep, now. You need have no worries tonight.”

But she does have worries, countless worries. How will she pay the missionaries back for her sister’s ransom? The goods in her grain sack seem pitiful now: buttons, nail scissors, a ring. Her sisters are well beyond their worth, prideful as they are, and stubborn, and forever telling her that whatever she is doing is wrong. Where are they now? Sleeping outside without even a blanket no doubt, and probably convinced that she, Susanna, could do nothing to help.

But she is mistaken about one thing at least: Old Adam has not yet gone back to his pigs. When she steps out early next morning to fetch water he is waiting on the dewy grass, crouching rather than sitting, his rheumatoid knees jutting out, elbows on thighs. From his mouth hangs a long clay pipe not unlike Liza’s, but when he sees Susanna he takes out the pipe and stands. He is gripping something in his other hand: the moccasins Aurelia was wearing when they found her. He holds them out to her.

“I told Jonas to give those to you,” Susanna says. “If he saw you.”

“He gave. Last night. But they are yours.”

“I don’t want them.”

His face searches hers. “You might like. Good leather. Soft. Try,” he says. The sun is behind him, the sky faintly pink. A single bird makes its claim to the day. She bends down to unlace her boots. He is right, the moccasins are surprisingly soft. Her feet feel warmer already.

“You can remember when you look at them.”

“Remember?”

“Aurelia,” he says. “To speak the name is to make live again.”

His voice is so gentle it brings tears to her eyes. She thinks of Aurelia standing by her henhouse.

“Now,” Old Adam says. He feels inside his shoe-pouch and pulls out a narrow piece of cloth with a bit of fur on one end. At first Susanna cannot make out what it is, but then she recognizes it as a collar, a linen dress collar, only it has a small deer tail sewn onto it. The tail is reddish brown and about the length of a child’s hand. It serves to hook up the two ends of the collar like a brooch.

She strokes the tiny hairs. “Is it your wife’s?”

“She made it. I give to you.”

Susanna admires the cleverness of the collar’s design, the mix of European and Indian. “It’s lovely,” she says. Then she asks him to wait while she goes into the tavern.

“I want to give you something, too,” she tells him, coming back out with her grain sack.

She pulls out her mother’s wedding ring but Old Adam shakes his head. Too valuable, he tells her, she might need it. He was the one, she will find out later, who went back to the cold trail in the forest and came upon the Moravian missionaries. They told him that a woman with red hair had been ransomed and taken back to their village. Susanna pulls out all the objects in her grain sack and lays them side by side on the ground. Old Adam knocks his pipe ashes behind him and squats to look. He puts Sirus’s axe back inside the sack, and then the dinner knives tied together with twine, and the nail scissors with their avian fingerholes. Susanna has already given Liza Footbound her mother’s hand mirror, small enough compensation for all her kindnesses.

Old Adam picks up one of the cherry buttons and rubs his thumb over the front.

“Thank you,” he says, his fingers closing over it.

“Take all three.”

“One is enough.”

Susanna puts the other two buttons back into the little square of cloth that serves as their bag and winds a strand of cotton thread around it.

“Before she died, my sister...Aurelia...she told me she had seen a creature, one of those Black Swamp creatures, half wolf and half swine.” She pauses and looks at him, but Old Adam says nothing. “Could that be true?”

“Have never seen one,” he tells her.

“She also said that a white man watched them being taken away.”

Old Adam looks away past her, toward the uneven roof of the tavern. His expression does not change. At last he says, “Hard to know what is true and what is illness speaking. Maybe animal, maybe no animal. Maybe man, maybe no man.”

Susanna says, “That doesn’t help me.”

Old Adam smiles. He looks at her like a father might. “You need to know?”

“I think so. I don’t know. Maybe not.”

“Jonas Footbound goes with you to Gemeinschaft. He is good man. Your father was good man too.” He touches her on the shoulder. “When in the wild, remember, lose fear and suspicion. See with all senses.”

“We’re not going through the forest,” Susanna tells him.

The sun begins to spread itself more brightly over the horizon, and as if on its command dozens of birds begin chattering all at once. Old Adam’s hand is still on her shoulder. She feels it like a blessing. “Be well, Susanna Quiner,” he says. “Stay harmless.”