Thieving Forest (5 page)

The sound of cicadas rises and falls. The sun is out finally, and the scent of moist, green, newly sprouted life hangs in the air. Seth untwists the last rubbery length of grass from the shaft and cuts it with his knife. Then he stretches out on the grass next to Cade, who is eating plums and saving the pits in his pocket.

They say if you can see enough blue sky to make a woman’s apron then the clouds will soon clear off, and Seth can see enough for an apron, a cap, and the sleeve of a dress. He closes his eyes, tilts his head toward the sun, and inhales as if breathing it in. In his pocket is a ring. A small ring, but pretty with a tiny cream-colored pearl surrounded by even tinier seed pearls. His father told him last night that the Quiners are staying in Severne, which is why they want to sell their team and wagon—they need capital for supplies. At first Seth was surprised, but then he recognized an opportunity. The bargeman had with him but two rings to sell, and the one in Seth’s pocket now was easily the nicest.

He plucks a long piece of grass and ties his dark hair back into a ponytail. He is not Italian, as most people think, nor Hebrew, but Indian. Amos’s mother was full Potawatomi, though you would never guess it from Amos’s fair skin and fair hair. Amos lived with his mother’s people until he was ten, and can speak Potawatomi as well as he can English. Seth can speak it too but Cade doesn’t have any talent for it. Sometimes Seth thinks that all of Amos’s Indian blood was passed on to him, the eldest son, leaving none for Cade. At least that’s what it looks like. The brothers have two different mothers to be sure, but their mothers were both blond and Bavarian—cousins, in fact, who had come to Virginia together. When the second one, Cade’s mother, died some six or seven years ago, Amos took up the boys and moved to Severne and never bothered to marry again.

Seth hears a sound in the distance: horse’s hooves. There is enough blue sky now for a full dress and maybe a parasol cover. They left Severne last night at moonrise to get to the ferry landing by morning, and Seth is tired. At the river he and Cade tethered the two wagons together—the Quiners and their own—and each brother slept in one for safekeeping while they waited for the barge. A couple of hours’ rest at most. What Seth wants now is just a moment to close his eyes.

Cade says, “It’s Mop.”

Seth turns his head. The horse’s reins are flopping up and down in waves and the rider keeps such a loose seat that he seems to be holding on with his ankles. But Mop’s dark curly hair, parted in the middle to make two shelves that hang to his shoulders, is recognizable at almost any distance. After Mop slows his horse up by the wagon he reaches for his water pouch and tips it back to drink. His collar hangs on by a button.

Neither brother stands. Not for Mop. Seth closes his eyes again. He can feel the ring in his pocket pressing on his thigh but makes no adjustment.

Mop takes a breath and says dramatically, “The Quiner sisters have been taken.”

“Taken?” Seth asks. “You mean sick?” Mop’s first words often make no sense. Probably he is here to see if he can earn a few coins in some way and this is his awkward preamble.

“Taken. By Indians. Run out of their home. I thought they usually set fire too, but the store is still standing.”

Now Seth opens his eyes. Taken by Indians? Sunlight seems to shift away from his body and settle somewhere else, and for a moment he can do nothing but wait for something to connect this minute to the last one. He stares at Mop, who is still talking: Indians, no fire, a group from the forest. His lips flop apart like the reins on his horse.

Cade is the one who recovers first. “What do you mean? All the Quiners? Every one?”

“All except Miss Susanna. She hid somewheres.”

“What about Aurelia?” Cade’s voice sounds as though it is coming from a tube. Aurelia is his sweetheart.

“Taken, like I said, all but Susanna.”

That’s when Cade springs to action: he re-hangs the tar bucket that Seth had removed to get underneath the wagon, throws his coat into the wagon box, and catches hold of Clyde and Ginny, their horses. But Seth still can’t make sense of it. They’ve never had any trouble with natives. They trade with them, buy their pelts, compare trap lines. What changed? An insect with wings like hinged wood flies into Seth’s face and he slaps it away instinctively. The movement serves as a gate opening, letting him breathe. He jumps up to help Cade.

Mop is still talking. “And Susanna not right in the head after what she saw, that’s what my ma thinks. Shock. She began quarreling with your pa. Seems the Indians stole the Quiners’ wagon, too, and their horses, so your pa says they’ll be on this road here. But Susanna, she says she saw them go into the forest on foot.”

Now Cade and Seth both stop to look at Mop. Cade says, “What do you mean, the Quiners’ wagon?”

“I went around to their place and saw it was gone. Your pa says they stole it.”

Cade and Seth don’t look at each other. One thing they both got from Amos: the ability to suddenly stand very still.

“Amos said the Indians stole the wagon,” Seth says. He is speaking to Cade. The two hundred dollars he got for the wagon and team is still in his pocket, next to the ring. What is Amos about? He told his sons to sell the wagon, said that Penelope Quiner commissioned it.

A lie.

“It’s her pride,” Mop is saying. “The Quiner pride. Amos said he would round up the farmers soon as they’re in from planting. She tells him, My sisters are more important than grain! To which your pa says, Not if your livestock goin’ to starve over winter. Says Susanna, But if we don’t start now the Indians will be long gone. And here I say, They’re long gone now.”

“Which Indians did you say they were?” Seth asks.

“She said Potawatomi. But like I say, she’s a fair way in shock.”

Seth looks over at Cade, whose face has a white, hard sheen to it.

“Susanna says if your pa won’t help her she’ll go into Thieving Forest herself.” Mop snorts. “With her bonnet and gloves just so.”

Seth says, “Mop.”

“Well but she scoffed at me when I offered to help,” Mop says. “Instead she’s fetching Old Adam. I came out here to look for clues but my ma says if I see anything I’m to ride back double quick.”

So Amos sent the fool out for advance work. There are no Indians on this road. Seth pulls Ginny’s reins back over her neck and pushes his fingers into her mouth to check the bit.

“I’m going to kill him,” Cade says. He climbs up to the wagon seat and takes the reins although usually Seth is the one who drives.

Mop says, “So you didn’t see anything? Should I keep riding down to the ferry?”

“You do what you like,” Cade tells him, and without waiting to see what Mop will do he jerks the reins to get the horses going.

“Listen, Cade,” Seth says jumping up next to him. “Could be he just sees an opportunity to keep the money.” That is certainly possible.

But Cade says, “Even at the time it seemed fishy. Why sell their wagon? They have to get to the river to get supplies.”

“They needed the capital.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“I don’t know what to believe,” Seth says. He holds on to the seat plank beneath him with one hand. He can feel neither the ring nor the money through the fabric of his trousers, but at the same time his pocket seems to be the center of a dark world that an hour ago didn’t exist. Cade jerks the reins again to urge the horses faster. The wagon lurches crazily to the right and then straightens. Seth moves his hand along the seat to get a better grip. He is sitting on his hat.

“That axle will surely break if you keep on.” He has to raise his voice to be heard.

“We’ll drop the horses at Dunn’s stable,” Cade says. “The forest is too overgrown for a wagon. We’ll have to go on foot.”

The wagon lurches again and rights itself.

“Don’t you give him one cent of that money,” Cade says.

Four

By the time Old Adam finds the narrow opening where Susanna last saw her sisters—the backs of their dresses—it is well past noon. She follows him into the trees where a horde of insects rushes out to meet them, hitting hard against her netting as they look for a place to land. Old Adam’s dog snaps at them once or twice in irritation but Old Adam makes a gesture, silence, and the dog immediately stops. Like all Indian dogs, he is well trained and obedient.

Susanna has known Old Adam for so long that she does not think of him as an Indian, but he is an Indian—a Miami, or Twightwee as they call themselves. His wife Mary, who is Shawnee, calls him a Pkiwileni. The settlers call Old Adam a Christian Indian, and that also is true: he was saved by missionaries after most of his village was killed off by the smallpox, and later they saved his wife Mary, too. The newspapers that come up from Cincinnati are filled with accounts of thieving Indians and lying Indians and bands of Indians who roam around attacking settlers, but Sirus always told anyone who would listen that plenty of natives, like Old Adam, live peacefully side-by-side with white men, either adopting their ways or keeping their own. Sirus in particular liked the Potawatomi who came into the store. He used to say that they were stubborn but fair, and so great fun to bargain with.

Susanna pulls her gloves a little higher on her wrists. None of what has happened makes any sense. What she is doing now, she suspects, makes no sense. But she has to do something, and she likes Old Adam, she trusts him. He used to hunt with Sirus and afterward he told the girls, when they were young, fanciful stories about the wily animals they could not bring down. He is small and thin with badly pocked skin, and he suffers from rheumatism like so many natives. Too much sleeping outdoors, according to the settlers. From behind, his arms seem to jut out at odd angles, or maybe his elbows are just unnaturally prominent. He lives with his wife Mary on the other side of the settlement, where they raise hogs. After Susanna went there and told them her story, Mary fetched her a cup of rye whiskey. Susanna took a sip and handed the cup back. A peppery feeling remained in her mouth.

“Usually the Potawatomi take for revenge,” Mary had said, looking at Old Adam. “Or to replace someone in their tribe who has died. But no battles since a long time.”

“No battles, no,” Old Adam agreed.

“So want money?” Mary asked.

Old Adam said, “For that they go to Risdale.”

Susanna adjusts the netting that Mary gave her and steps over a fallen branch in the middle of the path. Risdale is on the other side of Thieving Forest, over two leagues away. It would take a young man almost four hours to walk that distance, and that is if he had a cleared track. This path will only get worse. She imagines her sisters running down it in their stocking feet. Back in the cabin their boots are still lined up near the door and their shawls are still hanging on the peg, one over the other. There are things she wishes she could give them: boots, netting, even her turkey hen bone. They need luck more than she does. She takes off one glove to feel the bone in her pocket.

But when they get to the first crossing stream, Old Adam suddenly stops and holds up his hand. Susanna draws in a sharp breath when she sees why: fifteen or twenty spiders are walking in single file along the water. Wolf spiders. They are brown with darker brown markings and huge, the size of young sparrows. She has never before seen spiders so big. She steps back, and then takes another step back. A curious hissing sound is coming from somewhere among them, and quite a few carry egg sacs beneath them using one curved, hairy leg. Has she ever seen spiders in a pack before? They are reputed to hunt and live alone.

“Where are they going?” she whispers, as if they might hear her.

Old Adam lifts his shoulders. “A safer place, perhaps. For eggs.”

When the spiders have all passed Susanna crosses the little stream behind Old Adam, careful to use the same stones he uses as footstones because she does not want to wet her feet in the muck. On the other side of the stream the canopy above them thickens and the air begins to smell like wet moss, a smell Susanna particularly detests since it is her job every spring to fill the chinks in their cabin with clumps of it. Last spring she used Naomi’s violin bow to push the moss in until Naomi noticed and screamed. Where is Naomi now? Somewhere ahead with no water, no netting, no boots. A swarm of insects hovers around her head and she swats at them with both hands. She is both afraid that she won’t find them and afraid that she will—that she’ll come upon their bodies in the bracken. She purses her lips and forces that picture out of her mind. Concentrate on walking, she tells herself. That’s what Penelope would say.

When Old Adam stops to examine a broken tree branch, Susanna takes a moment to adjust the grain sack on her back, which Mary helped her to tie on. In it is anything she could think of that the Potawatomi might accept in trade for her sisters, since there was almost no money in the store. Their silver dinner knives, her mother’s silver hand mirror, her gold wedding ring, and the red buttons from Ellen’s wedding dress that are shaped like cherries. On an impulse Susanna also took Ellen’s fancy nail scissors with their loopy bird-head design. But she didn’t think about food, and now she’s hungry.

A branch cracks and she looks up into the trees. Sirus claimed that there were panthers still living in Thieving Forest. They jump silently from tree to tree before falling on their prey. Old Adam takes his hand from the broken branch and rubs his fingers on his breeches.

“People here lately,” he says.

“Potawatomi?”

“Could be.”

Susanna tries to see down the path. Another branch cracks above them. “What about panthers?” she asks.

“Haven’t seen any prints.” He is wearing an old leather shoe around his neck as a pouch, and he takes from it a few dried berries. He gives her a couple and then helps her over an old nursing log in the path. “But if you sense danger, stop, stand still. Close your eyes.”

“Why should I close my eyes?”

“The bright pupil gives you away.”

The path narrows and Susanna finds herself staring at Old Adam’s back, his sloping shoulders, his thin legs like rubbed sticks in their leather breeches. All at once he seems very slight. She feels in her pocket for her turkey hen bone again. As they walk deeper into the forest the trees grow darker and ropes of stiff, dead vines rise up around their trunks. She thinks of her Aunt Ogg’s house in Philadelphia, where her younger sister Lilith lives, with two brick ovens in the kitchen and an iron railing outside painted green. There would be a boy bringing in a bundle of cut wood for the kitchen and another for the fireplace in the parlor. Old Adam’s dog trots around a burnt-out tree trunk with a single crooked branch pointing up like a finger back at God.