Thieving Forest (34 page)

“What do you mean, decided? I’ve just come to bargain for my sisters. Tell him that. If they’re not here, I will leave.” The binding is tight, it doesn’t feel like a symbol. “The Wyandots are friendly to white men,” she says in English, looking straight at the official. “We are friends.”

The man makes a sharp noise with his tongue, a rebuke.

“Do you speak Delaware?” she asks in that language.

The man says something to Meera.

“You must not address him,” Meera says.

The men under the elm tree stand to let an old woman walk though. She is short and wears twenty or thirty strings of beads around her neck and a deerskin dress decorated with a pattern of small white and blue feathers. The skin on her face is stretched and folded into a permanent frown. She stops before Meera and Susanna and, like the official, looks them over carefully. Then she turns to the man, who begins to speak to her.

“This is the chief,” Meera whispers. “He is telling her my tribe.”

“The chief is a woman?”

“That is not unusual. There are many chiefs with different roles, both men and women.”

“What does he tell her about me?”

“Of you he says nothing.”

This is not good. “Please,” Susanna says loudly in Delaware. “Let me speak.”

But the chief does not look at her. She looks at Meera instead and asks her a question. Meera speaks a few words, and then says quickly to Susanna, “I will tell your story before I tell my own. You can see by this how I am a friend to you. Now take out your necklace.”

With her hands tied it is difficult to take the necklace from the box but no one makes a move to help her. While Meera tells the story, Susanna holds the necklace out, but the chief barely glances at it. Finally, Meera moves her bound hands forward as if saying, and that is the end of that story. She tugs at Consolation’s shawl, which she has tied to her waist. The boy unties it for her, and when Meera reverses it to show the tiny mirrors there is a cry of delight from the men watching. The old woman says nothing but takes the shawl.

“Did you explain about the Chippewa chief?” Susanna asks Meera. “How he gave me the necklace himself?”

The official grunts at her. She spoke in English again. But in any case Meera does not answer. She is busy pulling things out of her various pouches and offering them to the chief. Her knife, some white beads, the green feathers from the Stooping Indians, and then, to Susanna’s amazement, Meera pulls out Seth’s purse.

“My purse!” Susanna says.

The skin around Meera’s jaw flushes dark red but she doesn’t look at Susanna. She gives the faded black purse to the official, who counts the money inside. Then he puts it in the pile along with the other offerings. The chief bids Meera to come over, and Meera kneels before her. With her strangely dyed hair and her bony shoulders, she seems both humble and desperate. The chief unties the leather thong from Meera’s wrists. Then she returns Meera’s knife to her, places a hand on her head, and speaks softly for a moment. When she takes her hand away, Meera stands.

“Meera!” Susanna says. “Why did you take my purse? How could you do that?”

“It was not necessary for you,” Meera says. But she still doesn’t look Susanna in the eye. “You had the necklace. I had nothing. I needed a gift. And now I’ve been placed with a family in the north of the village, which means they are wealthy. That is good. Don’t worry, I explained all about the Chippewa chief.”

“You let me think those men did it! But it was you, you stole it!”

Meera says quickly, “If they think we are quarreling it will go worse for you.”

How can it go any worse than it is already going? For a moment Susanna doesn’t know what to do. The young boy begins to walk off and Meera follows him.

“Meera!” Susanna calls.

“Farewell, Susanna,” Meera says. “Stay harmless.” Then she rounds the tree and is gone.

Three black birds with white stripes like rings on their necks fly rapidly around the tree trunk as if in search of a fourth.
Kwe-kwe-kwe
, they sing. An omen of death? Despite the warm day Susanna’s hands feel cold.

She turns to the chief and says in Delaware, “
Nuh-mee-suk. Ne-mah-kal-hu-kohena
. My sisters with the red hair. Are they here? I have come to you with my head bent”—she does not know the word for humble—”seeking an exchange for them.”

The chief waves a hand as if all this means little to her.

“My sisters,” Susanna says again. “Are they here? In exchange for them I give you this honored necklace from an important chief. He took it from his own person to give to me.” She picks up the necklace with her bound hands and moves it closer to the old woman. “Please accept it as my gift.”

By this time more people have gathered, both men and women, crowding around the stone building to watch. The old woman pays them no attention. She lifts up the necklace and, significantly, lets it drop in the dirt.

“We have quarreled with the Chippewa,” she says in Delaware, “and no longer count them among our friends.”

She calls to another boy—a smaller boy, without a dog—and gives him some instructions. The boy pulls Susanna to her feet. He speaks to her in Wendat, which of course she cannot understand. Susanna looks at the old woman. “But my sisters,” she says. “Can you tell me where they are? Are they here?
Scan-oh-nye
,” she says. Peace.

The chief gathers up the gifts—the feathers, the beads, Seth’s purse—and rolls them up in Consolation’s shawl, preparing to leave. The boy repeats himself and Susanna looks down at him, a skinny minute of a child with nut-stained teeth. The official clucks at her and lays his hand meaningfully on the long knife hanging from his belt. Now the boy calls to her a third time, the same incomprehensible words, but this time he roughly pulls her forward.

“
Hay-tet. Hu-wahay. Huwae
.”

“
Scan-oh-nye
,” she says again, looking from the chief to the official and then back.
“Scan-oh-nye. Scan-oh-nye.”

But they aren’t listening. They are done. There is no sign of Meera, nor anyone else who might speak on her behalf. The birds with the white neck rings fly off their branch in perfect unison and she hears their wings flutter like tiny drumbeats overhead. She is hot and confused, and just like that terrible morning when she stood outside Amos Spendlove’s cabin, she wishes more than anything else that she could go back in time and do something different. The boy tugs her again by the arm. What else can she do but go with him, her hands still tightly bound in front of her? It is in this way that she realizes she is now a captive herself.

Twenty-Two

Susanna is taken to a hut and left with two women who strip her of her clothes and examine her lean, dirty body. They give her the name Tarayma, which means, she learns later, Holding Mud.

It takes them a long time to scrub her clean in their large copper tub, and afterward she is given Wyandot clothes to wear: an unpainted deerskin dress that smells strongly of wood smoke, and long moccasins with stiff soles. They take Aurelia’s moccasins away and Susanna never sees them again. One woman cuts off her hair to the nape and another pierces her ears. The earrings are made up of four small thin metal circles that hang one inside the other, like chains.

She tries speaking to the women in Delaware. “Have you seen my sisters?
Nuh-mee-suk? Ne-mah-kal-hu-kohena
.” We have red hair.

They take her pouch from her belt and shake it upside down. Ellen’s nail scissors fall out as well as the two remaining cherry buttons. They pass around the scissors, each of them rubbing her thumbs over the bird-head fingerholes. One of the women gives her a spoonful of roasted corn. Then the same boy who led her here comes back to lead her away. He takes her to the other side of the village, where it is very dusty, and as they walk he explains to her in bad French that a family has bought her and that she must
plaisir
with hard work.

They pass longhouses with groups of women cooking in front of them, but the hut that the boy stops in front of is small and ill-made and there is no one outside. Inside, Susanna finds an old woman sitting cross-legged mending a basket. When she stands Susanna sees that she is not as tall as the others—the Wyandots are generally a tall people. This woman is small with a thin, angular frame and very white skin. She looks like she has been ill. Behind her, built into the interior wall, is a narrow shelf made from hides, a kind of hammock covered with a couple of bearskin blankets. The old woman is bent with age but not so bent as the Stooping Indians. Her face seems neither kind nor cruel. She assesses Susanna closely, feeling her forearms for muscle.

“Have you seen my sisters?” Susanna asks her. “
Ne-mah-kal-hu-kohena
.”

“
Astay-ta.”
No.

The old woman’s name is Akwa and she speaks some Delaware, but it is her daughter, Akwendeh-sak, who will be Susanna’s mistress, she explains. Akwendeh-sak has been working in the cornfield but soon returns with her two daughters, both of whom are older than Susanna. As soon as Akwendeh-sak enters the hut Susanna can smell on her the smell of plowed land and sweat—a familiar odor that exuded from every farmer who ever set foot in the Quiners’ store. Like her mother, Akwendeh-sak pinches Susanna’s arm. Her pinch, though, is meant to hurt.

“There is much for you to do, Tarayma,” she says in Delaware.

It is the last Delaware she speaks to her. She is very bad tempered, Susanna soon discovers, and her hands are flat and hard. She sends Susanna to fetch water and then tells her to build up the fire and set the water to boil. The cooking fire is just outside the hut, and as she works Susanna keeps watch on the people walking by. But she sees no one with red hair and not a glimpse of Meera, who is, in any case, by her account, living with a rich family on the other side of the village. Akwendeh-sak comes out with corn and indicates that Susanna is to boil it in the kettle. Susanna stirs it, not knowing exactly what to do, and when Akwendeh-sak comes out later to taste it, she spits it on the ground. Then she kicks the dirt in front of Susanna so that a cloud of dust hits her in the face. While Susanna is shielding her eyes, Akwendeh-sak begins to hit her arm with a stick. Susanna steps back but Akwendeh-sak holds her by the other arm and gives her a swat across the back. She is shouting in Wendat.

“I know Delaware, can you tell me in Delaware,” Susanna says but Akwendeh-sak doesn’t hear her or doesn’t care. What is perfectly clear, however, is that if Susanna does not do her chores to Akwendeh-sak’s satisfaction, she will be beaten.

By now her stomach is tight with hunger. At least in the Black Swamp there was no smell of roasted meat to mock her. Akwendeh-sak’s hut sits on a crowded, noisy spot where two dusty paths intersect. People are everywhere. They don’t seem to be looking at her but still she feels watched. Clouds of insects hover over her.

On the ground near the cooking fire she spies the stick that Akwendeh-sak beat her with, and she picks it up and throws it behind the hut. But there are other sticks, a forest full. She sits on the ground and tries not to cry. She thinks of what Meera said, “We’ve fared worse.” For a while she lets herself be angry with Meera. That at least feels better than self-pity.

A young boy with a round, pleasing face runs down the path carrying a dead rabbit. He wears a too-long tunic and woolen leggings dyed green. Perhaps because of the smile on his face, Susanna calls out to him.

“
Mi-chewakan?
” she asks in Delaware. Food?

The boy stops to look at her. Then he puts down the rabbit and draws out three hulled nuts from his pouch, which he gives to her.

She thanks him, and then says, “Have you seen my sisters, with the red hair?”

He smiles and nods and then shakes his head no.
“Astay-ta, astay-ta!”
he shouts.
No, no!
Susanna steps back quickly, gesturing for him to go. She is afraid that Akwendeh-sak will hear and come outside. As the boy skips off he swings the rabbit by its hind legs, and she eats the nuts quickly before anyone can take them away.

Her days fall into a pattern: she wakes before dawn and fetches kindling from the scrubby, picked-over woods, brings the bundle of wood to the hut, and then goes to the stream for fresh water, carrying two full buckets awkwardly up the long path. After that she builds up the cooking fire and boils water and corn in the kettle to make samp porridge for the women. It’s heavy work and the skin on her fingers—so bony they are bent out of their natural shape—often bleeds. Most days Akwendeh-sak is displeased with her labor and hits her or, if Susanna manages to get the cooking fire between them, throws sticks at her head. Susanna learns to pass over the most sharply jagged sticks when she fetches kindling but still blood runs from her arms from tiny punctures almost every day. Akwendeh-sak ties a rope to her wrist so she can tether Susanna at night and whenever she wants to during the day. When Susanna fetches kindling or water the rope dangles from her wrist, marking her as a captive as surely as her shorn hair and the rings in her ears.

Escape is impossible. There are people everywhere who watch her. And anyway she is too hungry to think about anything other than how to get more food. Sometimes in the morning Akwendeh-sak gives Susanna a spoonful of the porridge but sometimes she forgets or is angry at her and refuses. After breakfast she and her daughters leave for their plots of land where they work all day, while Susanna helps old Akwa—mostly sewing or mending hide garments. Susanna is always hungry but Akwa is a little cowed by her daughter and will not give her anything without Akwendeh-sak’s leave.