The Beaded Moccasins (15 page)

O
UR GARDENS ARE DOING WELL
; the cornstalks are almost as tall as my chin. My father used to say the corn should be knee high by the first of July, so the summer must be almost over. At any rate, it feels like late summer.

Now that I've lost track of the days, I have to use other ways to mark the passing of time. The shrill singing of the tree frogs ends a little earlier each evening. Raccoons and woodchucks are out in the middle of the day, shamelessly stuffing themselves with anything they can find-mussels, acorns, blackberries, milky-green gooseberries-to fatten up for the long winter to come. The shadows stretch just a little longer than before. The days are still hot and sticky, but the nights are cooler.

The poison ivy winding around the oaks and black-walnut trees is turning scarlet. That means late August
or early September back in Connecticut. I've been with Grandfather, Hepte, White Eyes, and Chickadee for more than a year.

Our pumpkins and squash are about the size of my fist. Every morning I go into our garden and admire the corn, just as Kishelemukong did so long ago. In the sunniest patch of the garden the corn grows fastest, and a few ears have already been picked and roasted.

We all had a few kernels of roasted new corn as a treat. The tender-sweet corn crunched between my teeth and filled my mouth with juice sweeter than an apple's.

***

One night it begins to rain hard and doesn't stop all the next day. We sit in our wigwams and stoke our starfires. The rain makes the fires hiss and sputter. Late in the day White Eyes steps outside and puts a rabbit skin over the smoke hole in the roof Now the smoke has nowhere to go and fills our wigwam. We cough and our eyes sting.

Our village above the cave slowly fills with shallow pools, and the children splash in the water for sport. I volunteer to watch Chickadee splash in one of the pools just to get out of the smoky wigwam. Adults poke anxious faces out of wigwam door flaps to look at the sky.

The woman with the stone pot goes from wigwam to wigwam, carefully filling up the pot with coals from each starfire.

By evening water trickles into the wigwams. The men
quickly dig ditches around our homes to keep more rain from coming in. They dig a long ditch all the way around our village for the same reason. It just rains harder.

We lie awake all night, too tense to sleep. The rain doesn't stop. It's been two nights and one day of hard, steady rain.

At dawn's first light Hepte shakes my shoulder and I sit up. She's holding the two elk collarbones we've used as hoes and shovels. She gives me one of them as she pulls me to my feet.

Our gardens are almost submerged. Just the tops of the pumpkins and squash poke through the water. Everyone begins digging a new ditch around the gardens. We dig faster and faster as the standing water creeps into the ditch. The flat land is saturated, waterlogged from the constant rain. And it's still raining.

At the edges of the gardens cornstalks fall like cut timber into the ditch and are carried away by the swift current. Well-tended vegetable rows turn to mud and flatten out.

All our work! All our food for the winter! Everyone digs faster, but the rain is unrelenting. It just falls faster and faster, too.

I hear the Cuyahoga roaring like a wild thing in the distance.

I remember the stream running through the center of our gardens. That creek must be submerged by now-water running underwater! It reminds me another field full of corn with a stream in the middle of it.

In Connecticut a farmer had dug ditches from a
stream to between his corn rows. The whole town thought he was muddleheaded, but his corn was the best, and the earliest, in Fairfield.

Constance and I had climbed an apple tree to fetch a better look. His ditches looked like a giant water tree lying flat right in the middle of the field, the branches reaching out to water the corn.

I wade to the middle of the garden and look frantically for the stream. It
is
hidden, running under the standing water.

I remember that the cornstalks close to the stream are taller because of the extra water they receive. I find the extra-tall cornstalks and then the place where the new ditch is closest to them. I begin digging a canal from the stream to the new ditch. I push water-clogged mud out with my bare hands. The harder I push, the more muddy water falls into my canal. The elk collarbone shovel works no better. The rain is coming down so hard, it hurts to look up; water rushes into my eyes.

We'll starve without our corn and vegetables. Corn is eaten at every meal. Even the toothless old and young eat a thin porridge of ground corn mixed with water and acorn flour. Corn is our lives. I dig harder and harder.

One entire corner of our garden has been completely swept away. Stalks, leaves, and pumpkins bob aimlessly on the muddy water like the arms, hands, and faces of the drowned.

I dig faster and faster. My elk collarbone shovel breaks in half I try to use the pieces as a dike around a cornstalk, but they wash away.

I dig with my bare hands again, pushing wet earth out as fast as the water slides in to replace it. My palms and the tips of my fingers begin to bleed. Everything is blurry because of all the water in my face. I pry rocks and stones out of the mud and throw them along the edges of my canal, thinking they might make a barrier. I push against the earth so hard, I slide into the mud again and again.

Coated with mud, my hair is heavy against my neck. More mud slides down my forehead and into my mouth and eyes. I'm crying even though I know that crying won't help us in the least. The last thing we need is more water.

Thunder blasts overhead, so loud I feel it roll through my bones. The sky is a purplish-yellow bruise as lightning tears through the gorge. I smell smoke and see great tongues of fire leaping from tree to tree. How can trees be on fire in this torrential rain?

A mighty westerly wind pulls the flames higher and higher. I sit up in time to see a black funnel cloud on the northern horizon, twisting like a great coiled snake, the tops of burning trees spinning in its wake. The wind whips my muddy hair clear off my shoulders. For one terrifying moment my knees and feet leave the ground.

A tornado.

The twister roars past, but I don't stop digging.

Finally my canal joins the new ditch to the midfield stream. Water rushes past my legs in great swells as the canal fills. As more water flows into the canal, more flows over the cliff, taking bits and pieces of garden with it.

The wind and rain begin to lessen. I hear people shouting for help. Kolachuisen is sitting on the sodden ground, a sobbing lump of muddy misery.

Vegetable rows near the cliff have been swept away, but wonder of wonders, the gardens are beginning to drain. Where there were once submerged vegetable mounds and standing water, there is now saturated soil and the tops of pumpkins and squash poking through the mud. One by one we stop digging.

I straighten up painfully and look around. It's evening; we have been digging without stopping since dawn.

Moonlight shines on the water, the moon's reflection pockmarked by the occasional drop of rain. I see a few stars peeping out between fast-moving clouds. What happened to the burning trees? There are no flames anywhere. The rain must have put the fires out, how many hours ago?

I hold my fingers out and see that they are raw shreds, most of the fingernails gone. My hands drip blood onto the water-clogged ground. Only then do I feel the pain: searing, throbbing, shooting up into my elbows and shoulders. I stumble, whimpering, toward our wigwam with my hands high in the air. Maybe that will keep the blood from gushing out.

"Hepte, Hepte," I scream.

Hepte runs to me and holds my hands up to the moonlight. Blood is running down my arms like sticky ropes of molasses.

"Tonn," she says gently, but I hear the panic and exhaustion in her voice, "I want to soak your hands in water and herbs, but my cooking pots are full of dry food. I'll have to empty one of the pots. Come with me.

She half carries me the rest of the way. I sit on the summer porch with my back resting against the outside of our wigwam.

"What happened to your elk collarbone?" she asks me.

"Broke, broken. The pain..."

"You should have found me. I would have given you a cooking pot to dig with."

White Eyes sits next to me, holding my hands in his. Other people stand around the summer porch looking at my torn fingers.

"Husband, she was digging with her bare hands! Her shovel broke. Our daughter dug more than anyone and with her bare hands," Hepte cries. "I need a bowl, a cooking pot, anything to soak her hands in. Could you find something? Anything?"

"I will look for a bowl," White Eyes says as he jumps off the porch.

A woman I have never spoken to elbows her way to the front of the crowd of people. She looks embarrassed as she hands me my grandmother Campbell's bowl, the one with roses painted on the bottom.

"This is yours," she says, and she quickly steps away.

"My grandmother Campbell's bowl, from Scotland," I say in amazement. In English, too. I'm too tired to think in Unami and too tired to care. "I thought it was gone."

Hepte pushes my hands into the bowl and splashes clear water on them. I groan in agony as they throb and leak blood. She sprinkles some powdered comfrey on my wet fingers and palms. My hands stop bleeding; they begin to tighten and sting. She grinds sodden buckeyes under her heels and adds these to the water. My hands turn cool, then cold, then numb.

I stare at the bowl, glowing bone white in the moonlight. The red roses and green leaves painted on the bottom have turned ash gray and black. The night sky has drained them of color.

Memories flood into my mind, as sharp as lightning, as painful as fire.

I was kneeling in a strawberry patch and holding this very bowl. Under the jagged, dull-green leaves the wild strawberries hid, as shy as deer. My father's cows and sheep were watching me. It was a fresh, beautiful morning in early summer, the sort of day that arches up, up, up, as though it will never end.

But I was too angry and peevish to enjoy that summer morning.

White Eyes comes back and places me in his lap.

"No," I moan in English. "No more, no more."

I was screaming at Ma and Dougal. I said things to my mother, words full of spite and hate. I may never see her again.

"No more." I hold my hands in front of me, as though by blocking my sight I could block the memories, too.

"Tonn," Hepte says, "I know you're in pain, but this is
good medicine." She pushes my hands back into the bowl.

She and White Eyes talk. Their conversation has a floaty, distant quality to it, as though I am hovering overhead.

Grandfather joins us on the summer porch.

"How is she?" I hear him say.

"She was moaning because her hands hurt," Hepte says. "Husband, hold her steady. They should soak longer."

I rest my head on White Eyes' chest, and he gathers me closer. I'm surprised to feel his heart pounding against my ear; he's worried about me.

My torn fingers and palms are numb; even my forearms feel frozen to the elbows. My hands and arms throb with neither heat nor pain.

Hepte, White Eyes, and Grandfather talk softly to one another. I want to ask about Chickadee but I can't put the words together in my head, either in English or in Unami.

Perchance it's the effect of the comfrey and buckeyes, but I have a wondrous feeling of falling off a cliff, just like one of our lost pumpkins. So that's why it's called falling asleep! But I don't remember ever falling asleep this hard or this fast before.

As my eyes close, White Eyes and Hepte's conversion drifts farther away from me as the Campbell memories come closer.

I remember spilling milk from the butter churn and not caring that it was spilled. Lady Grey and her kittens
formed a crescent at my feet to lick it up, while behind them the sun was rising red over the Susquehanna. Dougal slept late into the morning.

I especially remember hot, burning rage, just as my tongue burned from eating too many wild strawberries.

Was that angry, bitter little girl picking strawberries really me? What on earth did she know of anger, or sorrow, or hunger, or strength?

The worst part of my captivity is how much I've changed. I'm sure my parents and Dougal think of me and pray for me. How could they not? But if they could see me now, here, this evening-would they know the dark young woman in braids and buckskin sitting in White Eyes' lap? Would they even want to know her? Would they want to know why and how I've changed so much?

Surely the Campbells wouldn't even recognize me. The only clue to who I am is the rose bowl in my lap.

They love the Mary I used to be. I know my childhood is gone, torn away from me (and them) just as surely as the tornado tore away our gardens.

Their life seems strange to me now, too. My mother, shut away in a dark, stuffy cabin instead of enjoying the outdoors. My father, working frantically against time to turn a profit on his claim instead of thinking of the earth as a blessing we all share. My brother, thinking of animals as fur instead of marveling at the living, breathing creature underneath.

The Campbells are gone, Mary. Even if you're rescued and see them again someday, they're still gone. You've changed too much.

"Good-bye," I whisper, and I weep harder than I've wept in years.

***

I wake up in the middle of the night with my hands bandaged and my stomach starving I find some corn-meal, and I chew and chew until it's finally mushy enough to swallow. I chew and swallow handful after handful.

Our starfire's embers glow as brightly as ever. Grandfather, Hepte, Chickadee, and White Eyes sleep soundly, their tired faces glowing orange in the firelight.

Very slowly and without making a sound, I creep to the stone water jar near the door flap and drink until I feel the cornmeal beginning to swell in my stomach.

I study their faces. These are the people I think about by day and dream about by night. I'd trust them with my life.