I Am Regina (9 page)

Woelfin glances over at the pole that holds my father's scalp. Another scalp hangs there. Brown hair.

“Did you club mice for me?” Woelfin asks, her head cocked sideways, a dark eye glittering at me.

“No,” I whisper, staring at the scalp. It reminds me of clubbed mice—all brown and pink and bloody. My hands begin to tremble. I think I'm going to be sick.

“Aiii! What are we to eat?” Woelfin says.

I shake my head, trying to clear my mind of a painful memory this new scalp has evoked: the gleam of a tomahawk; death screams; two scalps—Father's and Christian's.

The earthen bowl that Woelfin gave me wobbles in my trembling hands. Suddenly, it crashes to the floor.

Stunned, I stare at the shattered pieces.

“Tskinnak is no good!” Woelfin screams, raising her hand to strike me.

I cover my ears and slowly back away from Woelfin's screams, the broken shards—one step, two, until I feel the door flap, feel cold wind chill my back. I run away from her mean hut, scrambling through the charred circle where the Indians hold their council fires. Snow, mixed with cinders, has turned wet and gray.

I remember the bleak, the frightening day my father died. His hair ...

“No!” I scream, wanting to shut out the memory; running blindly while my head reels with the remembered crash of a cabin door slammed open; the smell of burning flesh; bloodred flames; two scalps.

Tears stream down my face as I scramble past the two upturned canoes resting against the sweat lodge, slide through mud and snow downhill to the stream.

Water rushes past my feet and I see within my mind a whole fleet of canoes. They are made of white birch bark. Indians pole them through a stream of gray and light brown hair.

There is no solace from a memory here. There is no solace anywhere. My mind bums as if it were on fire. I don't know how to make it stop.

I could drown myself in water.

A twig breaks under someone's foot. Woates, a thick-set Indian woman, approaches, walking carelessly through the sticks and dark, wet leaves strewn along the stream bank. She stares at me with curious eyes as she sways from side to side, carrying a load of firewood on her right hip.

I recall a soft low voice, an arm, footsteps strangely silent as they cross twigs and leaves.

Sobbing, I stumble around the curious Woates and up the bank. Hugging my arms, head bowed against the snow, I skirt charred logs, run toward a locust tree arching over a snug bark-roofed hut. Eyes blinded by tears, I stumble through a door flap into the only refuge that I know.

There, beside a warming fire, Nonschetto holds me in her arms. Sobbing, I try to tell her what has happened. Tell her for the first time what had gone on before. Father. Christian. Barbara. All lost. All gone. The Indian words come slowly and I cannot seem to get them right.

Nonschetto croons as she smoothes the wet hair from my face. Her dark eyes well with tears, as if she were experiencing all my pain and horror.

“My mind bums like fire,” I whisper. “I want to die.”

“No, Tskinnak. You will live.” Nonschetto's voice is soft, but I sense the strength of iron in it. “You are a strong girl. You will weather this storm and all the storms to follow.” Gently, she cups my hand in hers, places my hand on my heart so that I feel its slow and steady beating. “Tskinnak. Nonschetto will teach you.”

 

 

 

B
eyond the circle of our village, up a low hill near a small clear spring, grow the sugar trees. Yesterday, Nonschetto taught me how to gather their sap. She was patient with my clumsiness, as she was the day she taught me how to make an earthen bowl. The bowl is not as fine as Woelfin's moss-green one, but she uses it.

Yesterday, along with the other women from the village, we made small incisions in the sugar trees using hatchets the Indians bought from the white man. We inserted small bark funnels into the cuts, tied wooden buckets below the funnels and waited for the chill of night to cause the golden sap to run.

Now, on this crisp morning with frost-covered leaves crackling beneath our feet, we gather the golden harvest. All of us wear deerskin leggings as well as skirts. Some wear bearskin robes; others, shawls of blanket cloth their husbands bought from traders. The tight buds on the trees tell us spring is near. But the clouds our breath makes in the air, the numbness in our fingers, tell us it's still winter.

I have lived here three moons now.

I pour the sap into the large brass kettle which hangs from a spit over the fire that Woates has kindled. She stirs the sap with a wooden paddle. “Cold nights make the sap run freely,” she tells me. “Fire boils the sweet sap and makes it thick.”

I dip my finger into my wooden bucket, cover my finger with golden sap and lick it clean. The sweet taste makes me hungry. This winter, Tiger Claw has caught fox and beaver and I have helped Woelfin prepare the pelts for trading. But Tiger Claw has brought us little meat.

Nonschetto knows how much I hate to club the little mice and rats. When Clear Sky brings her bear and deer meat, she shares it with Quetit, Woelfin and me. In return for her kindness, I teach her white man's words she can use in bartering with traders. Soon, she will leave me. By canoe, she and Clear Sky will travel to the river forks to trade furs for brass kettles, blanket cloth, knives and beads. I don't want her to leave.

Nonschetto pours her bucket of sap into the kettle. “Remember the sugar camp?” she asks Woates.

“Aaaii! I remember. We traveled three nights to get there. My legs ached with walking! And my arms from building shelters! This village is in a good place, for it is near the sugar trees and stream.”

“Where did you live before?” I ask the women.

Nonschetto points in the direction of the rising sun. “We lived there ... maybe three nights travel from this village. But the firewood was scarce. The ground was rocky. It soon tired of growing corn.”

“I have known six villages,” Woates says.

“I have known five.” Nonschetto stares into the boiling sap, as if she were recalling all the places she has been.

“Will we move away from here?” I ask, the thought of leaving disturbing me. I have mapped the location of our village from scraps of knowledge the Indians have given me. It lies northeast of where the Tuscarora and Muskingum rivers meet. White men trade with Indians there. At night, I pray that these white men will discover a stream. Follow it here. Trade a kettle for one useless girl. Take me away from Tiger Claw and Woelfin.

“We will stay here many winters,” Nonschetto says. “Wood is plentiful and the ground is strong.”

Relieved, I stare at the sap bubbling in the kettle. Soon it will thicken and turn dark. Then we will pour it into flat wooden dishes where it will harden into sugar. I cannot think of the name the white man called the sugar tree. I used to know it.

I used to know many things. But now my memories fade like leaves plucked from a tree. At night, when I try to picture my family: the way my mother smiled, the mischievous twinkle in John's eyes when he was about to do something he shouldn't, Barbara's saucy way of tossing her hair; all I see are shadows, like those the fire casts in our hut. Frightening memories no longer burn my mind, but neither do the good ones soothe it.

Several days later, on an afternoon when Nonschetto and I are alone together, gathering firewood by the stream, I share this loss with her, for I feel as if a part of me has died.

Nonschetto picks up a branch and points to a large tree stump. Delicate green branches sprout from the trunk, defying the efforts of a woodsman to destroy the tree. “You are like this tree,” Nonschetto tells me. “Your roots run deep. You may not see or remember them, but they have not died. They feed you. They give you strength to grow new life.”

I stare at the stump, wondering how the tree can continue to grow. Its main trunk has been severed.

“Your new life is here, with us.” Nonschetto waves her branch at the surrounding woods, the stream, the cloudless sky. “You must allow yourself to grow. Do not dwell in the sadness of the past.”

“It is easy for you to say,” I tell Nonschetto. “The home you came from is not so different from this one. And you are Indian while I am white.”

“You speak truth. But I miss my sister, White Cloud. There are times I want to run away and be with her. She knows my heart as well as she knows her own. But then I think of Clear Sky and Gokhas and how they, too, are a part of me.”

“Clear Sky and Gokhas love you. Woelfin hates me,” I say, watching the path my moccasins make through the soggy leaves. I lift my eyes to meet Nonschetto's. “Why?”

A troubled expression crosses Nonschetto's face, as if she were about to tell me something important, something that might hurt me. “The path Woelfin travels has been choked with briars. Now she is old and bitter. You must give her time to accept you.”

Nonschetto finds another piece of kindling and slowly resumes walking along the bank. I follow after her, thinking of how Woelfin's bitterness drains the blood from her lips, turns them into a thin and angry line. She seldom smiles.

Perhaps, many moons ago, someone burned her cabin, too. Killed her father and her brother. The sudden thought troubles me.

I kick a pile of wet branches aside and gather two pieces hidden in the middle of them. I test each piece to make certain it is dry. Wet kindling smolders, fills an Indian hut with smoke.

Thistle shoves her wet nose into my hand. I stroke her head as we amble through the trees. Thistle's large stomach sways from side to side. Nonschetto says that within one moon, Thistle will have puppies. I cannot wait to see them. Thistle and Nonschetto are the bright spots in my life. I feel loved when I am with them.

“Look, Tskinnak! Gokhotit is fishing!” Nonschetto says, pausing at a bend in the stream.

I peer around her. Gokhotit, Chief Towigh's son, crouches on a large gray rock. Intently, he casts a grape vine into the rushing water, then flicks it out, again and again. “What does he use to attract the fish?” I ask.

“Corn,” Nonschetto replies. “Perhaps you could try fishing, too. Maschilamek, the trout fish, is wiley, but its flesh is sweet.”

“Maschilamek would be too wiley for me. I am not good at catching things. W oelfin says that I am as helpless as a wolf cub.”

“Even wolf cubs grow into hunters. Look, Tskinnak. Gokhotit has caught a fish!”

The silvery, rainbowed fish flashes through the air and lands on the stream bank. My mouth waters at the thought of roasted fish. Gokhotit flashes us a smile, proud of his catch. Gokhotit must be twelve or thirteen, not much older than me. But he does not have someone like Woelfin to tell him he is helpless. That he does nothing right.

Nonschetto resumes walking and I hurry after her. Beneath our feet, scraps of birch bark litter the ground where the men have been patching their canoes for travel. Ahead of us, smoke, the color of the bark, curls upward from the village huts. Once the sight of smoke rising from a chimney was a welcoming sight to me. Now it reminds me that I must return to Tiger Claw and W oelfin.

“Tskinnak. How do you say machque in the white man's tongue?” Nonschetto says, pausing outside the long house the Indians call the sweat lodge. I love it when she asks these questions. They make me feel important, for only I know the answers.

“Bear,” I tell her.

“Boar?”

“Bear.”

“I trade you one bear skin for blanket,” she says proudly in the white man's tongue.

“Yes. That's good! You've been practicing the words I've taught you. I can tell. No white trader will trick you now. You understand what he is saying.”

Nonschetto smoothes her long black hair away from her face. It is a gesture she uses when she is pleased. I like to please Nonschetto. She's like a mother to me.

“When the dawn breaks, I will leave with Clear Sky,” Nonschetto says, reverting to the Indian tongue. “When we barter with the white man, I will use the words that you have taught me.”

“I have seen Clear Sky prepare his canoe for travel. When will you return?” I say, trying to hide a loss I am already feeling.

“Within the moon,” she says. “You have dug a hole the way I showed you? Lined it with leaves and stored your sugar cakes so that mice cannot eat them?”

“Yes.”

“And the ground nuts. You stored them there?”

I nod.

“You will be fine. When I return, I bring meat to fill your belly.”

“Will Thistle go with you?” I place my firewood on the ground so that I can rub the gray dog's ears.

“She will go.”

I wrap my arms around Thistle's neck and she licks my face. I do not want this sweet gray dog to leave.

Tiger Claw saunters by us then, accompanied by three other braves. He kicks my pile of kindling, scattering it across the ground. “This wood is wet,” he says loudly, making certain everyone can hear.

“What brains you have must be in your feet. For how then could you tell?” Nonschetto retorts, stooping to help me retrieve the wood.

The other braves laugh and enter the sweat lodge. Tiger Claw keeps silent, pretending not to hear, and saunters in behind them.

“This kindling is dry. I felt each piece to be certain,” I say, feeling tears well in my eyes. Nothing I do pleases Tiger Claw or Woelfin. And when Nonschetto leaves, I'll have no one to turn to.

“There is nothing the matter with the wood,” Nonschetto says. “Do not let Tiger Claw's words wound you. He speaks loudly to make himself feel important.” She hands the kindling to me. Something about her eyes reminds me of my mother. I'm not certain what. Maybe it's the compassion I see in them.