A String of Beads (19 page)

This time when the big stone house came into view, there were lights on in the first-floor
windows. He searched his memory, trying not to leap to conclusions, but he remembered
turning off the last light when he had left for the hospital before dawn. His foot
involuntarily stepped harder on the gas pedal, and the BMW took the turn into his
driveway a bit faster than he had intended. He pulled around the house, craning his
neck to see into the lighted windows, but all he saw from the car was ceilings. He
drove into the garage that had once been the old carriage house, and then trotted
to the kitchen door. It was unlocked.

He swung the door open and saw her standing on the other side of the big old kitchen,
a figure in black. The doctor in him took note that she seemed thin. She said, “Pretty
fast driving, Doc. If you roll your car when your wife is away, who will call the
ambulance?”

He crossed the kitchen and held her in his arms. “I must have been showing off for
you.”

“It’s not necessary,” she said. “I’m already sufficiently seduced. You’ve got me on
your hands for life.” They shared a long, slow kiss, until Jane gently separated herself
from him and held him at arm’s length. “You don’t seem that mad at me anymore.”

“You don’t seem that mad at me, either.”

“I’m quietly holding a grudge. It’s late, and I’ll bet you’re starving. I made us
some dinner.”

“I thought I smelled something good.”

“The meat will take a couple more minutes. Go sit down so I don’t burn you, and I’ll
bring it in.”

Carey went to the dining room sideboard and opened a bottle of Bordeaux he had bought
and set aside for a time when Jane was home, took glasses from the shelf, and filled
them while Jane brought in their plates. “Rack of lamb,” said Carey. “My favorite.”

“I may not get a high grade for attendance, but I’ve learned a few things you like.”
She set the plates across from each other at the far end of the long antique table.

“To you,” he said. “My eyes don’t want to stop looking at you, so I probably won’t
be able to eat this beautiful meal and I’ll starve to death.”

“To both of us,” she said. “And if I know you, somehow you’ll manage.”

Carey had come home later than usual this evening, because when Jane was away he took
longer with his evening rounds to visit his surgical patients, so they were both very
hungry. They ate and drank their wine with little conversation at first, and then
Carey said, “I was really worried about you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“And I kept wishing that I hadn’t reacted the way I did before you left,” Carey said.
“I know it’s bad enough to have to do something difficult, without having your family
criticizing you for doing it.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s just a bad situation. Nobody asked to be in it—not you,
or me, or Jimmy. We’ll just have to get through it.”

When they were finished, Jane said, “Nia:wen.” She sat still and watched him.

Carey repeated, “Nia:wen.”

He stood and began to clear the table and she joined him. When they met a few minutes
later with their hands free of dishes, they kissed again and held each other.

Jane said softly, “How much wine is left?”

“Not enough to drown a hummingbird.”

“So at least it’s not a safety hazard. Bring some cognac and glasses and I’ll meet
you upstairs.”

After a few minutes Carey came upstairs carrying the two small snifters and the bottle,
and walked down the hallway into the master bedroom, where Jane stood waiting for
him, naked. “Oh, there you are,” she said.

Carey put the two glasses on his dresser, poured a splash of cognac into each, and
handed her one. “This is a nice surprise. With all these lights on, I assumed you’d
be dressed more formally.”

She shrugged and took a sip of her cognac. “It would be kind of silly to hide anything
from you, Dr. McKinnon. There’s nothing new to see, but I know how much you like to
verify that for yourself.”

“Yes, you’re a very practical girl,” he said. He set his glass on the dresser, scooped
Jane up, carried her to the bed. The cover had been pulled back, and he set her gently
on the sheets. In a few seconds he was undressed too, and they were together on the
bed. It felt wrong.

Their talk had been false, a way to gloss over the distance that had grown between
them, and they both knew it. Their movements were awkward. Too much time had passed
while Jane was away and they were resenting each other, so they both felt clumsy and
uncertain, as though they were strangers.

Jane sat up and held Carey’s face in her hands so they had to look into each other’s
eyes. “I love you,” she said. “I’m not going to let things turn sad because we can’t
put our problems out of our minds for a while. We’re going to fight some more about
this another time. Not tonight. And we’ll still love each other just as much at the
end of that fight too. Right now, be with me.”

“I am,” he said. “I love you.” He put his arms around her and held her.

They caressed each other slowly and gently, a lavish, leisurely expenditure of time,
savoring the fact that she was at home with him tonight and not somewhere else that
neither of them wanted to think about. They didn’t speak, only touched and kissed,
feeling the understanding that they loved each other deeply and permanently—that for
him, she was the one woman who would stand in his life for all women, and in her life,
he would stand for all men.

They were grateful to and for each other, and as their pulses and breathing sped up
and their skin temperatures rose with the excitement, each of them tried to give the
other more pleasure, to cause it and feel it and observe it at the same time. They
began to express their own love and receive the other’s love at the same instant,
and to increase the pleasure and increase it until the strain of containing it overwhelmed
them.

They lay motionless on the bed for a few seconds, and then Jane got up and turned
off the big light on the ceiling, so there was only the moonlight through the window.
“I’m not in the mood for the glare anymore.”

“If I can’t see you I’ll find you by touch.”

“Or I’ll find you.” Jane leaned over him and kissed him softly, her lips lingering
on his, barely touching. They lay close for a time, not talking or needing to talk.

Then they touched again, neither of them really knowing who had moved a hand first
and initiated the touch, but both knowing instantly that this touch was different,
and responding to it before it was over, prolonging and intensifying the touch. They
were more uninhibited this time, less aware of themselves and their own bodies but
more aware of each other, and when it ended it left them tired and at peace. Carey
got up and opened the window, and they lay back together on the bed, feeling the cool,
soothing air of the night drifting over their bodies. And then Jane fell asleep.

She was still lying on the bed beside Carey and she knew they had both been sleeping,
and that she was still asleep, when she heard the faint sound of a person climbing
the stairs to the second floor. The feet were silent, but a few of the steps of the
staircase creaked faintly when a person stepped on them. She had trained herself to
hear the sounds. In the silence that followed, Jane could feel someone coming along
the hallway toward her.

The woman appeared in the doorway, and Jane sat up on the bed to look at her. The
woman wore a deerskin dress with leggings and moccasins. Her shining black hair was
long, combed and straight, and Jane could see that its weight made it swing a little
each time she moved her head. As the woman stepped into the bedroom, the silver-blue
light from the moon shone on her and Jane could see that her dress, leggings, and
moccasins were decorated with dyed porcupine quills sewn like embroidery in the shapes
of wildflowers. Jane knew she was from the old time.

The woman spoke in Seneca. “Owandah. Or maybe I should call you Onyo:ah.” This was
Jane’s secret name, a nickname her father had given her when she was little.

Jane pulled the bed sheet up to her neck.

“Don’t bother hiding yourself,” said the woman. “You’ve been doing what you should
be doing.” She looked at Carey. “Your husband is good and he’s strong. You’re a good
match.”

“You know the name my father gave me.”
Onyo:ah
was a call used in the peach-pit game. It meant that five of the six peach pits in
a player’s throw had landed with the black, burned side up, and only one was on the
unburned side—literally “one white.” If all six had been black, the player would have
been allowed to take five score counters. With one white, he could take only one counter.
Her father had explained to her that Onyo:ah meant the player was winning, but by
slow, gradual steps, the way people did in life.

The game was played at Midwinter and Green Corn to celebrate the triumph of life over
winter. But it was first played just after the beginning of time by Hawenneyu the
Creator and Hanegoategah the Destroyer, the twin gods who transformed the dirt on
the great turtle’s back into a world. The twins’ grandmother proposed that she and
the destroyer play the game against Hawenneyu the Creator to decide who would have
dominion over the earth. When she rolled the pits from the bowl, she got no points.
When Hawenneyu cast the pits, he won.

“Of course I know your name. I’m in your mind. Maybe I’m one of the four messengers,
a
hatioyake:ono
, a sky dweller. Maybe I’m just a side of you—a part that you need and miss.”

“Why are you here?”

The woman shrugged, and the fringe on her shirt swung, then settled. “You called me.”

“Who are you?”

“Just a woman like you. I’m from the dark times, when no village was at peace with
another. If a man met a stranger in the forest, the wisest thing to do was try to
kill him, and if you were a woman, the wisest thing to do was run. Villages were built
in high places, or on peninsulas jutting out into lakes, surrounded by palisades of
tree trunks set into the ground and sharpened on top. I lived less than an hour’s
walk from this spot. I was working at the edge of a field outside the village planting
corn, beans, and squash with my sisters and cousins when I saw a warrior moving among
the trees. He was a stranger who had come with eight friends to catch someone off
guard and kill him. Our eyes met, and I turned to run. He tried to keep me from giving
the alarm, but I got out a scream before the war club he swung hit my head.”

The woman half turned and pulled her hair aside, and Jane could see a huge gash where
the bone of her skull had been shattered. The back of her beautiful dress was reddish
brown where the blood had poured out and run down it. “All of the women heard me,
and began running and shouting, so the warriors from the village came and chased down
the man and his friends, and killed them all. I was nineteen.”

“It’s terrible and sad,” said Jane. “Nineteen is so young.”

The woman shrugged. “Everybody dies. The part that hurt me most was that I had a young
baby, a beautiful boy. I took him everywhere, and right then he was hanging in his
cradleboard from a branch of a tree. When the wind blew, it rocked him back and forth.
When I saw the killer, I ran away from my baby to distract the killer from him. After
the fighting was over, two of my sisters came back and got him from the tree.”

“What happened to him?”

“He lived to be a man. He was a famous runner and good fighter, and the men all listened
to him respectfully in council. He fathered seven children by two wives, and died
in a fight against the Cat People on an island in the Niagara River when he was over
fifty. He’s satisfied with his life. My sisters and the other women of the clan did
a good job raising him without me.”

“There must be a reason why you’re the one who’s here.”

“I told you why. You chose me.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Maybe your mind chose me because I’m from the time when things were in chaos, before
the great peace. My times are the reason why the Senecas and the other longhouse nations
hate discord and anarchy. We lived it. We died of it. You live a violent life. You’ve
killed people, and that’s not an easy thing for a woman. Killing strains against our
nature. Maybe it’s making you sick. You know
sken:nen
means peace, but the same word means health.”

“I’ve only tried to keep people from being killed,” said Jane. “I taught them to evade,
to run, to start new lives. How could anyone—man or woman—not do that much?”

“If that’s not what’s wrong, then maybe something is missing from your life.”

Jane sighed. “I wanted a baby.”

“You still do.”

“I suppose I do, but Carey and I have tried for years and it hasn’t happened, so I’m
training myself not to keep longing for what I can’t have.”

“Now you’re setting a snare, trying to trip me up so I’ll accidentally tell you whether
you’ll have a baby or not. I’m sorry, but I come from you. I know exactly what you
know, and no more. Maybe I know a few things that you saw or heard but have forgotten.
But you haven’t seen the future, so I haven’t either.”

“Admit that you were sent to me.”

“I was sent to you,” said the woman.

“By the good brother or the evil one?”

“You know better than to ask that. Which is God—birth and growth, or death and decay?
They seem to fight, but they don’t.”

“Are either of them real?”

“If there’s a creator, he created your parents and grandparents, your mind, your
memory, this dream, and sent me to guide you. If there is no creator, and your subconscious
mind put me together out of memories and imagination because your mind needs me, then
your brain sent me to guide you. Tell me which it is.”

“I can’t.”

“Then neither can I,” said the woman. “And my time will be up soon. This is your last
REM cycle for the night, and it should be thirty minutes, or forty. The best thing
you have in your life is Carey. It’s not always in your power to make him happy, but
it is in your power to make him know that you love him.”