Thieving Forest (4 page)

“How do you know?”

“One of them speaks a little French. Look, they have Naomi at it already.”

Penelope picks up a couple of long twigs and makes her apron into a nest to carry them. Two younger men—the ones carrying the sacks with the Quiners’ goods—are cutting limbs off a tree. When they have three good ones, they pound them into the ground. Then they show the Quiners how to push and weave the twigs around them. Despite the men’s stony expressions, Penelope tries to talk to them. She points to one of their sacks.

“My knitting?” she asks. “Do you have my knitting bag in there?”

They do not understand. “
Mik-chay-wee-win
,” one says. Work.

When the shelter is done the four sisters are told to go inside. It is tall enough for them to stand up in, but narrow and cramped and dim. The men roll a fat log against the opening to serve as a makeshift door, which only partially blocks it. Naomi feels like she’s being buried standing up. Sweat runs under her collar and turns cold. There is hardly room to turn.

“Do you see anything, Aury?” she asks. Aurelia is in the middle with the widest view. When she leans forward Naomi sees a tiny leaf stuck in her strawberry-blond hair from sleeping on the ground. In spite of her sore legs Naomi wishes she were outside again running along the path. In here she feels like an animal.

Aurelia says, “Koman’s swine wolf has taken up a place in front of the shelter. He’s standing guard.”

“The dog is just a dog,” Penelope tells her again.

A moment later Aurelia says, “The one with the scar, he’s coming over here. And he’s holding up his hatchet!”

“What? Let me look.” Penelope puts her face to the opening.

The man is shouting in Potawatomi as he walks. Naomi sees Koman’s dog rise. He lays flat his ears and makes a low rattling noise. Is he snarling? The man stops and says something to him, a command. The dog doesn’t move. The man steps closer and the dog crouches as if to strike, but with a quick sweep the man hits the dog alongside his snout with the blunt end of his hatchet. Naomi can’t see where the dog lands, or if he’s all right.

“What’s happening?” Aurelia asks. She is standing back now, not looking.

“Koman’s dog...the man hit him,” Naomi says.

“Why?”

“I think the dog...I don’t know. He wouldn’t move out of the way. I think he was protecting us,” Naomi says. She wants that to be true. They need some protection.

“You!” the scarred Potawatomi shouts. “
Yaknogeh
!” He pulls away the log and then kick-rolls it over in the direction of the dog. The women are standing in front of him now, fully exposed, their dresses in tatters from their forced run among the trees, dirt in their hair.

“Wait,” Penelope tells him. “Wait! Listen to me! Do you have my knitting bag? She can knit for you! A pair of stockings?” She pulls her skirt up a fraction to show him her stockings. Like her dress, they are torn and dirty.

“She can make stockings for you!” Penelope says. “She is a very fast knitter!”

He reaches in to grab Aurelia by the hair. Penelope holds on to Aurelia’s arm and keeps pleading with him. He waves his hatchet so close that Naomi is afraid for a moment he will cut off Aurelia’s arm and Penelope’s hand with it. Beatrice must think so too, for she says, “Penelope! Watch yourself!”

“It’s all right,” Aurelia says in a tattered voice. The Potawatomi pulls her out with a hard jerk and Aurelia falls outside on her knees, the dirt shooting up in a cloud and then resettling around her. He drags her to her feet. Then he pushes her toward the trees with two hands, forcing her to take one step and then another. Penelope calls out, “Fight him!” But Aurelia only says, “I am so tired.” And she does look tired. Tired and ill.
Yaknogeh
.

“What should we do?” Beatrice asks. “He’ll kill her!”

Naomi makes a move to get out of the shelter but the two young men who supervised their work now step in front of them, making escape impossible. So she can only watch as the scarred Potawatomi pushes Aurelia into the trees. She thinks she sees the leaf in Aurelia’s hair loosen and fall in a slow arc behind her. It disappears in the sunlight before it hits the ground. She is squeezing Penelope’s hand hard on one side and Beatrice is squeezing her forearm on the other. If the two Potawatomi who are guarding the shelter suddenly sprouted wings and flew across the water she could not feel any more bewildered. Her old world with all its rules is surely gone.

“He’ll take us one by one,” Beatrice says.

The birds outside are momentarily quiet. Although Naomi still can’t hear her music and does not even try to, she can hear, in the cramped space, the even beat of her sisters’ breath, and this seems both beautiful and sad, a kind of music in the way that a whisper can be a kind of song. The sun is going down and the light seems to fall farther and farther away from them. She closes her eyes. The fresh green wood of the shelter smells strange. How much time passes she can’t tell.

“He’s back,” Beatrice says finally. “He’s alone.”

Naomi waits. Penelope’s hand tightens in hers.

“He’s wiping blood off his hatchet,” Beatrice says. “He’s walking this way.”

Three

Later Susanna cannot remember how she got herself to Spendlove’s cabin, she only remembers that her legs felt like lead and that her heart was beating so hard that it hurt. She knows she pounded on the ironworks door with its horseshoe nailed crookedly above the lintel with one nail missing and flecks of rust on the outside edge. She must have stared at it, she remembers it so well. Then she sat down on the bench outside. This is where Betsey T. and her son Mop find her—how much later?—when they come by with a bucket of milk for Spendlove, who does not own a cow.

Even sitting Susanna feels like her body is being pulled down to the ground by invisible ropes. She tries to tell Betsey T. and Mop what happened, pressing her two hands against her stomach.
Why
, she thinks, and the word is like a bird that won’t stay still. She can’t think what to do. Amos Spendlove comes out from around back, where he’d been working he says, and she has to start the story all over again. She can’t remember what she has already said. Afterward, she stands up and vomits into the grass.

Betsey T. gives her water to drink. Amos Spendlove is drinking whiskey from a tin cup, which he calls tea. That isn’t unusual. His hands are shaking and that isn’t unusual either. He’s a mean drunk whom her father Sirus never trusted, but he is the only man not out in the fields.

“We have to get them,” Susanna says. She means the men, but Betsey T. misunderstands.

“We’ll find your sisters, honey, don’t worry. Do you need to be sick again?”

She is called Betsey T. to distinguish her from Betsey Mowatt, wife of John Mowatt, another settler. Betsey T.’s husband died two springs ago when a lightning storm hit while he was hunting and a heavy tree limb fell on his back. Susanna decided long ago that Betsey T. was a foolish, empty-headed woman but she’s the only woman besides the Quiners who live in town. Her son Mop is foolish to the point of dim-witted but he has a rare talent for trapping and fishing, which means that he and his mother can live a tolerable life out here without farming. Besides the Quiners and the Spendloves, they are the only ones who don’t farm.

“The men,” Susanna corrects her. “We have to call them in.”

She stops and swallows. Her stomach feels watery but she wills herself not to be sick again. Somehow she must be to blame for all this. If only she hadn’t—what? She remembers thinking she’d had enough of their quarreling for one day, but it’s ridiculous to think that that meant anything, could
do
anything. She takes her turkey hen bone out of her pocket and makes a fist around it. She feels inadequate and foolish, as foolish as Betsey T., and the thought comes to her that really she is no better than a child, that up to now her deepest wishes have been childish wishes: to leave home; to have someone else do her work. If only I could go back to the world of an hour ago, she thinks. But that wish is childish too, and painful because impossible.

“Where did you say you were at during all this?” Spendlove asks her. He is standing before her with his back to the forest, scowling. His shoulder-length hair holds a good deal of oil from the roots to the ends.

“Between the pig’s pen and the henhouse,” Susanna says. “Behind a maple tree.”

“And how is it they didn’t see you?”

She doesn’t know. She can’t tell him. Mop, who left to check on the Quiners’ cabin, comes back to report on what has been stolen: all the candles, all the food, Sirus’s tools, and their horses and wagon, which they keep in their own small barn rather than the public stable. Susanna presses her left thigh with her fingertip, testing for feeling. Her shock is wearing off and the seeds of her later, full-blown emotions are beginning to emerge: grief, horror, and the fear of being alone. What little breeze there’d been earlier is gone, and the air feels warm and thick. If she leans forward she can see her own cabin and she wants to be able to see it.

Why is nothing happening? “You go raise the cry,” she tells Spendlove. “We’ve delayed too long already.”

But Spendlove makes no move. “The men are racing as it is to get their grain in. When they come back we’ll get together a proper search.”

“But the Potawatomi will be long gone by then!”

“They’re long gone now.”

That stops her a moment. “Where’s Cade? He’ll go.”

At the river with his brother, Spendlove tells her. “They’ll be back by nightfall.”

“Nightfall! But Aurelia is sick, he’ll want to find her!”

“How sick?” Betsey T. asks.

“Getting over a fever. But still weak.”

“The Indians won’t keep her then,” Spendlove says.

“What do you mean?”

“If they see she’s sick they’ll kill her and go on their way.”

Susanna stares at him. How can he say such a thing? His eyes are watery and his pupils dart around like black flies. An uncouth man who eats his food with a knife.

“Or drop her at the nearest village,” Mop says hopefully. “That would be Risdale.”

“Maybe the Potawatomi hope to get a ransom there,” Betsey T. suggests.

“Didn’t I see you talking to some Potawatomi yesterday?” Mop asks Spendlove. “Over out by Stilgoe Creek?”

Spendlove spits into the grass.

“You spoke to some Potawatomi?” Susanna is surprised. She thought Spendlove hated Indians. “What did you say?”

“When the men come in we’ll organize a good search,” Spendlove tells her. “Meanwhile we can send a runner to the river, maybe Mop.”

“The river? But they went into the forest!”

“They stole your horses and wagon. That means they’re going by road.”

“I saw them,” Susanna insists. “They went into the trees.”

But Spendlove just spits again. “You don’t know what you saw. You’re in shock.”

Susanna’s face flushes with anger. “And you’re drunk.”

“Susanna!” Betsey T. scolds.

“This is tea,” Spendlove tells her. He throws the word out like a punch.

Susanna leans forward and looks at her cabin again. Spendlove won’t help her. He is even more useless than she is. She turns to look down the other side of the settlement. “Old Adam knows the way through the forest.” She is thinking aloud.

“You wait on the men,” Spendlove says. “This is not advice, this is the rule for the situation.”

But she’s waited too long already. “If no one will go now,” she says, “then I’ll go myself.”

For a moment no one says anything. Mop and Betsey T. look at her with identical expressions: heads cocked and mouths half open as if trying and failing to parse her words. Spendlove spits again and bends over to cough. Then he takes another pull from his cup.

“You go into the forest,” he scoffs.

Amos Spendlove’s two sons, Seth and Cade, are on their way back from a partially successful trip to the ferry landing when they hear the news about the Quiner sisters. Successful in that they were able to sell the Quiners’ horses and wagon at a good price, but the iron Amos ordered had been either sold off to someone closer on the line or lost overboard in a thunderstorm so violent that it kept the barge from being able to land for a full day. This according to the bargeman, a thick Scot with a web-like beard. He claimed it was a miracle the whole vessel didn’t overturn and he himself drowned.

“Work like his, you’d think he’d take it upon himself to learn how to swim,” Cade says.

Seth is under their wagon with his coat off. They are only a couple of miles from Severne but had to stop because one of the tree axles is tangled with switch grass. Seth is lying on his back trying to clear it. “Almost a matter of pride with these rivermen that they don’t know a stroke.”

Although Cade is the younger brother, he is taller and broader than Seth. He has his father’s blue eyes and fair hair. Even in a town of large farmers, Cade stands out. Seth, however, people sometimes forget about until they need a tool mended or the mechanism of a turning wheel explained. Unlike his brother, Seth has dark eyes and very dark, very straight hair, which even the recent rain and humidity could add no curl to. Is he part Italian, the settlers wonder? Or even Hebrew? It is known that the two brothers come from two different wives. As brothers they are close, and notwithstanding their difference in size it is Seth who feels protective of Cade.