A String of Beads (3 page)

4

J
ane pulled her backpack up over her shoulders, adjusted the waist strap, and began
to walk. She had known from the visit of the clan mothers that it might come to this,
but she had not been sure until she talked with Mattie. She had not been able to tell
Jane where Jimmy was—had not known, specifically—so what she did was let Jane know
that maybe the answer was already there, inside Jane’s memory.

Jane wasn’t in doubt about how to get there. When Jane and Jimmy were fourteen, they’d
saved money all spring. They had spent a few days collecting road maps, hoarding clean
socks and underwear from the laundry, and planning. On the third morning after school
let out in June, they set off toward the south.

Today, as Jane walked out of town away from Ray Snow’s mechanic shop, she made a hundred-yard
detour so she could walk in the footsteps of the fourteen-year-old Jane. She and Jimmy
had begun their journey on the reservation and walked to the south. The first big
moment for Jane was when they crossed Route 5. It was an old road, one that white
people had made by paving the Wa-a-­gwenneyu. Underneath the pavement was the trail
that ran the length of the longhouse-shaped region that was Iroquois territory, from
Mohawk country at the Hudson River to Seneca country at the Niagara River.

The reason for their trip was personal and complicated. They told other people they
wanted to explore a bit of the region. But what they were looking for was themselves.
Jane and Jimmy had lost their fathers when they were eleven and twelve. Later, after
Jane had become an adult, she realized that this coincidence must have been what drew
them together and launched them on their trip. Without their fathers they had lost
part of their link to the past, to the long history that had produced them. Changes
that had taken place before they were born left them as two lonely Senecas, survivors
among countless millions of other people in a world that sometimes bore no resemblance
to the one that had formed their culture. Jane had been especially lost without her
father, because her mother was white and didn’t speak Seneca even as well as Jane
did, and they lived in a city miles from the reservation. Jane and Jimmy had seen
nothing in junior high school that made them want to be part of the wider world, learned
no point of view that gave them an acceptable place or a purpose in it.

When they talked about this during their thirteenth summer, they had made a pact to
go on a trip the following summer, when they would be fourteen. They would travel
as the old people had, speak only Onondawaga, and visit places that had not been changed,
deforested, tamed, or demolished. Maybe they would learn something about who they
were. In their fourteenth summer, they went.

Jane and Jimmy had hiked only a few miles by the time they reached Route 5, but when
they crossed the highway they became travelers, not kids going for a walk. They were
going back to the indeterminate time before the arrival of white people, when the
eastern woodlands still extended from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and from James
Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. Whenever Jane and Jimmy stepped a hundred yards into the
woods between the roads it could have been two hundred or ten thousand years ago.

A couple of miles farther on would be the New York State Thruway. Jane looked at her
watch when she reached it, and remembered. It had been noon by the time Jane and Jimmy
had arrived on this spot. The thruway was a serious barrier. There was a high chain
link fence, then a weedy margin about two hundred feet wide, and then a two-lane strip
of highway full of cars driving sixty or seventy miles an hour toward the west. Next
came a central island of grass and trees, and then the two-lane strip going east,
and another weedy margin before the next fence. Kids from the reservation knew that
the thruway was a fearsome barrier that kept deer, foxes, and other animals captive
on one side or the other. The thruway was a toll road, so it had few exits a pedestrian
could use for crossing. Some were thirty miles apart.

Jane and Jimmy had stopped to eat their sandwiches and study the traffic on the thruway.
Their maps said they’d have to go east as far as Le Roy to reach the next exit, or
chance a quick run across the pavement. They had begun their journey already knowing
which it would be, but they took their time sitting side by side in a bushy area outside
the first chain link fence and watching the cars go by, the nearer ones from left
to right and the farther from right to left. Jane knew a car going sixty covered eighty-eight
feet per second. If they could start right at the moment when a car passed, they could
be across the pavement before the next arrived, but there was a problem of visibility.
If a state police car came by at the wrong moment, they’d be picked up and suffer
serious but nonspecific consequences far beyond the anger of their mothers. In the
end they climbed the fence, crawled close to the pavement, pushing their backpacks
ahead of them, and waited. They watched cars coming, evaluating each one, and finally
saw a break in traffic that was inexplicable but welcome, and dashed across the two
westbound lanes into the stand of trees in the center margin. They sat and laughed,
not because there was anything funny, but because their fear had made them giddy.
A state police car passed on the side they had just crossed, and it was twenty minutes
before they dared to make the second crossing.

Grown-up Jane climbed the fence at a post, swung a leg over and set her toe in a link
on the far side, lowered herself to the ground, then trotted across the field to the
center strip and began to look to the right, barely pausing in the trees before she
crossed the last two lanes. When she got to the second fence she dropped her backpack
on the other side and stepped on the top of the fence to vault over. As she walked
on, she thought about how easy it had been this time. Had she and Jimmy been smaller
at fourteen? Probably Jimmy had, but he was fast, strong, and wiry, and could climb
a tree like a squirrel. She guessed the fear of doing something they knew was illegal
and dangerous must have weighed them down.

Jane faded into a stand of hardwood trees on the other side and kept walking south.
She remembered the trip as fully as she could, bringing back details and finding others
in the landscape as she went. She and Jimmy had stayed away from big north-south routes
because they’d wanted to be in the woods and not on a road. In the old days, Senecas
used to travel south on foot to the countries of the Cherokees and Catawbas to fight.
They took canoes down the rivers and streams that ran south from Seneca country into
Pennsylvania, and she had read in old sources after she’d grown up that they had also
used a route along the crests of the Appalachian mountain ranges to strike as far
south as Georgia. A number of times in the early 1700s the sudden appearances of Iroquois
war parties in the high country had raised formal protests from the governors of the
colonies of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.

While Jimmy and Jane had walked, they spoke Onondawaga by advance agreement, forcing
themselves to avoid blurting out something in English. But as the time passed, they
spoke more comfortably, thinking less and less about it. Jane’s vocabulary was good,
but a bit formal and archaic. Much of it had come from her grandfather and grandmother,
who had taken over the job of teaching her after her father died when she was eleven.
But Jimmy had always lived on the reservation, and his language was more flexible
and functional, replete with borrowings from English.

Now, as Jane retraced the route over twenty years later, she thought about the two
fourteen-year-olds and their relationship. They had been very close at six, closer
still at eight or nine, but then they had reached that strange age around ten when
Jimmy stopped playing with her. She had gone back to her parents’ house for school
at the end of one summer, and when she came back to the reservation in the spring,
Jimmy and his friends had refused to have anything to do with her. At first she searched
her memory for the crime she must have committed, but came up with nothing. Eventually
her mother had asked her why she was alone all the time, and heard Jane’s story with
sympathy. She explained it as “the way boys are. A time comes when they go away from
us for a while. They fight a lot. It’s the last time in their lives they can do it
without killing each other, so it’s probably okay. They play rough sports, they have
secrets, they compete. There seems to be an agreement that girls don’t exist. It lasts
two or three years, and then around seventh or eighth grade, they admit girls to the
world again. It’s as though they couldn’t see us for a while, and then they can again.”

Just as her mother had predicted, when Jane came back to the reservation in the summer
of her thirteenth year, not only Jimmy but the other boys too were friendly again.
Jane and Jimmy became close, but forever after there was a slight reserve between
them. They had each discovered things during the break that made using the different
pronouns “he” and “she” seem not nearly large enough to reflect the real differences
between the sexes.

Jane knew she was coming to a bad place as she walked today. The first night she had
camped, just as she and Jimmy had twenty years ago, under the stars in an old apple
orchard at the back of a farm. The second was so warm and still that they lay in a
field under the stars, and she did the same on her second night. But on the third
night the weather had changed. When they had decided to take a summer hiking trip,
they hadn’t thought hard enough about rain. She remembered one of them saying, “We
should set aside extra time in case it rains,” and the other replying, “The old people
didn’t hide under roofs when it rained. They just kept going. Skin is waterproof.”
She was pretty sure the stupid one was the fourteen-year-old Jane Whitefield.

The rain began before first light on Jane and Jimmy’s third day and didn’t stop. They
walked southward under a ceiling of gray clouds that produced a steady summer downpour
as though the sky were draining onto the earth. T
he pair walked all day in soaked clothing. They were cold at the start, and kept telling
each other the rain would end in the afternoon. In the afternoon the rain was heavier.
They both agreed that rainstorms in Western New York blew through from somewhere on
the Canadian plains across the lakes and eastward, and since they were walking south,
the rain clouds shouldn’t stay with them this long. They should just pass over them
to the east and be gone. But the rain went on all day, and as night fell, the rain
picked up strength.

They trudged along the edge of an alfalfa field where a farmer’s ancestors had left
a windbreak of chestnuts and maples that had long ago grown too tall to stop the wind.
A more recent owner had planted a set of six-foot-tall evergreens as a hedge, so if
they stayed beside it they didn’t feel the full force of the northwest wind. They
were approaching the second major highway, the Southern Tier Expressway, just as the
dim glow from the invisible sun gave out.

To them the expressway looked almost exactly like the much-older New York State Thruway.
It was illegal to climb over the fence to the margin of the big road, and dangerous
to cross the lanes to the other side. Now that it was dark, the traffic seemed to
be mostly giant tractor trailers carrying cargo across the southern edge of the state.
Commuters had already made it to safe, dry homes, and vacationers were somewhere waiting
for the weather to improve. Jane and Jimmy watched a few high, long trucks coming
along the highway like trains, their headlights appearing in the near lanes somewhere
a mile or so to the left, where the road curved gradually, and their taillights blinking
out a few miles to the right at the crest of a low ridge. The map in Jane’s pack told
them they were near the exit for the Seneca Nation Allegany Reservation.

Jane said, “See across on the other side?”

“It’s a rest stop,” said Jimmy. “The building might be closed at night. I don’t see
a lot of cars.”

“It won’t hurt to check,” Jane said.

As Jane remembered their conversation now, she’d had no sense of concern, no reluctance
or foreboding. The rest stop was just an unoccupied place that might be dry inside.

They got a sense of the speed of the trucks, the average distance between them, and
a measure of how far in front the beams of their headlights extended. They clambered
over the chain link fence, moved closer, and waited for the right moment.

It came. They scooped up their packs, ran hard, and came across to the wooded center
strip before the next truck’s headlights could reach them. They squatted in a thicket
for a few minutes before they chose a time to run again, and this run was successful,
too. They made it all the way to the opposite fence before the glare of the next set
of headlights appeared.

They used the next period of darkness to climb the fence and trot into the long parking
lot of the rest stop. Jane remembered that she felt hopeful for the first time in
hours. Her sneakers were so wet they squished as she walked on the pavement. She said,
“I only see two cars, and they’re way down there by the entrance. That building is
probably bathrooms, and this one too.” She pointed to a low building like a cinderblock
box with a roof.

As they approached she saw a small sign that said
MEN
and let Jimmy peer inside while she walked around the building to the door that said
WOMEN
. She held her breath as she reached out to the doorknob. It turned and she breathed
again.

She slipped into the restroom and felt the rain stop pounding on her head and shoulders.
Suddenly the water was reduced to a thrumming sound on the roof, and a noise as it
trickled down off the eaves. The room was a single ­
concrete-and-cinderblock box with three toilets in small stalls,
three sinks, and a big plastic trash barrel. The mirror above the sinks was scratched
with initials. She couldn’t imagine why some woman would make use of a diamond that
way.