Thieving Forest (21 page)

Penelope is happy about the meat. “How many buttons do you have left?” she asks.

“Eight or nine.”

“And I have ten. Perhaps they’ll do us until my hands heal.”

No one ventures out if they can help it. Naomi spends much of the day trying to make their shelter more waterproof or fetching sodden leaves for Penelope’s hands. The next morning the dark sky is unchanged, but at least the lightning storm is over so they set out on the river again. The scrubby brush that lines the riverbanks does not change for many miles. But around midday there is a break in the landscape and a mass of rock rises like a tabletop above the water. Here they stop to eat and look for chert. As Naomi pulls her canoe up and wedges it between some bushes, she smells a foul scent in the air: weeds and mud and, when the wind shifts, some sort of carcass nearby. The men search until they find the dead animal, an elk, several days old. By now even the vultures have abandoned it.

A man who is traveling with Oyanoga cuts off the elk’s horns and hooves. Oyanoga is still ill. Unable to sit upright, she lies stretched out in her canoe as if it is her coffin.

Although Naomi tries to help the women look for chert she notices that many turn when she approaches, and when she speaks to them they do not answer. But at least Penelope’s hands are looking better. The blisters are beginning to harden. Naomi climbs down the northern part of the rockface to submerge more oak leaves in water, where a large Wyandot woman with very broad shoulders and a barrel chest is crouching to fill her water pouch. When she sees Naomi, she quickly goes up the other side of the rock, a harder climb, her pouch swinging behind her.

“Why are the women keeping away from me?” Naomi asks her mistress when they are back on the river.

Her mistress smiles a smile that is amused rather than kind.

“See you as witch,” she tells Naomi. She is at the stern, navigating with her paddle.

“A witch? Why?”

“Give Oyanoga buttons, Oyanoga get fever. Oyanoga brother take elk feet to cure. He say you are witch turning to wolf at night. In day, clumsy in woman shape.”

“That’s absurd,” Naomi says.

“Wolf whiskers come out there.” She points to the mole above Naomi’s lip.

Naomi turns around and puts her paddle back in the water. She is shocked and hurt. She has enjoyed speaking Wendat to the Wyandots and trading with them these last two days. For the first time she hasn’t felt quite so useless. But she knows about their fear of witchcraft. Sirus used to say they were worse than the Puritans. Once when he was hunting with Old Adam they saw an old woman running in a scattered, haphazard way as if trying to put off her scent. Later, three Wyandot men asked Old Adam if he had seen a wolf in the shape of a woman.

The soft rain comes down steadily as though marshaling itself out to last as long as possible. Naomi wipes her face with her hand. She can smell the rancid bear grease that her mistress uses on her skin as lotion. The river is as brown as the scrub trees. The brief glimpse of beauty she’d seen on the river was only a mockery, not a promise as she thought. If she had argued to go to Philadelphia they might be halfway there by now. She could have broken the tie. But instead here she is: a wolf, a witch. She pulls her paddle up out of the water and changes sides.

That evening Penelope and Naomi stand in a crowd to watch an old man bleed Oyanoga, hoping to save her life. He affixes a sharp piece of flint onto a short stick, presses it against her bare arm, and with a grunt pushes the flint into her skin. To cup her blood he uses a hollowed gourd. When he decides that Oyanoga has bled enough he wraps wet leaves around the wound and then lifts her arm to blow on it. He makes a sign with his hands that looks, to Naomi, very much like the sign of the cross.

Oyanoga shakes all night but the next morning she is able to sit upright, and by the afternoon she can paddle her canoe. However, the old woman who gave Naomi muskrat meat is found dead the following day. That night Naomi’s mistress ties Naomi to a tree after sunset, so she won’t be able to attack them while in wolf form.

Penelope thinks about food more and more often and with growing details: the color of pork, the texture of hominy. She knows that instead of letting her imagination run this way, she should be coming up with a plan. She needs to do something now that they are calling Naomi a witch. But what can she do? She has no idea how long they have been with the Wyandots, how many days on foot and how many in a canoe. Maybe it doesn’t matter. When she asks how far away their village is, a shrug is the answer. At least her hands have toughened up. She begins to knit again at night after she has finished her chores and before exhaustion sets in. She sits close to Naomi, who is now tied securely to a tree every evening.

Not everyone believes that Naomi is a witch. Tawakota, the leader, does not believe it. This is fortunate, for the rest can do nothing without his leave. Naomi’s mistress argues that anyone can see that Tau-tie-yost never takes on wolf shape, but of course she does not want Naomi killed since Naomi does chores for her every day.

Some believe Naomi’s mistress, some do not. A powerful witch can choose not to change her shape if it suits her.

“How can you tell if someone is a witch?” Penelope asks her own mistress.

“Make circle of fire, she walks west to east. If cross, woman. If stumble,
day-hudah-ki
.” Witch. She looks at Penelope and nods. “Witch killed,” she says. “Woman not.”

But they call Naomi Tau-tie-yost, There She Stumbles. Surely they must know she would fail that test.

“Sister cannot make good fire. Cannot make
urica
.” Stockings. “Don’t know good chert. All like witch, not woman.”

“She is not a witch, I promise you!”

Her mistress shrugs. “Tawakota not know,” she says. “Wait.” Penelope is not sure if she must wait, or if Tawakota is waiting. For supper, her mistress gives her a piece of dried fish folded over like paper.

“Eat,” she says. “But not giving to sister.”

She watches as Penelope puts the dried fish into her mouth, but when she looks away Penelope takes it out and hides it in the palm of her hand. She is the oldest. Naomi is her responsibility. She must come up with a plan. She thinks of the little fish they used to catch at a stream near their cabin. They were no longer than a thumb. Sirus didn’t know their name so he called them silveries because of their color. Ellen would fry them by the dozen in buttered breadcrumbs. She served them with cornbread or with eggs and bacon. Or fried up with hashed potatoes for breakfast.

She has to stop thinking about food.

Their river meets up with a larger river, and then a larger one after that. As the days go on, Naomi grows more quiet and withdrawn. She no longer tries to speak Wendat with anyone and she does not try to barter for food. The spark Penelope noticed when they got to the river has vanished. One evening, after a particularly long day canoeing, Penelope is shocked to see Naomi’s bleak, inward expression as she pulls her mistress’s boat up the bank. It reminds her of a neighbor they had back in Philadelphia who was not ill, but who died anyway after her child died of yellow fever. She just turned her face to the wall and stopped breathing.

“I caught a fish,” Penelope tells her that night when they are collecting pieces of bark for their beds. “I boiled it when no one was looking.” She holds it out. It is the size of a small pickle. “Do you remember the silveries Mama used to fry up?”

Naomi looks at the fish as though it were a stone. “It’s strange, but I’m not hungry anymore. I think I’ll lie down.”

“Eat this first. Please, Nami. I took a great chance getting it, I stole some meat for bait. If they find out they’ll flog me...” She doesn’t know if this is true but she will say anything.

Naomi chews the fish slowly as if even eating is now a chore. The weather has turned warmer and a blue mist rises from the mud. Penelope brings her some water.

“It’s hard to find a clear stream around here, so much algae, and the weeds. But look at the gourd I found. Doesn’t it make a good cup?”

Naomi lies down on her bark and blinks, looking up at the clouds.

“What are you thinking about?” Penelope asks.

“Hmm. You know, I don’t suppose I was thinking anything,” Naomi says in a dull voice.

It’s as if her body is a loose sack around her, she cannot pay it sufficient attention. If this keeps up she will die. Penelope makes herself imagine the worst, hoping this will spur her brain into action. All she can think of is running away but they can’t run away. Where would they go? What would they eat? Could they find enough berries, could they fish? She thinks about breakfast, egg pudding and oatmeal and jam.

The next day the murky river widens as if approaching the sea. They are on the Maumee now, Penelope reckons. From time to time she can see fish skimming along only a foot under the water, ugly specimens with bulging eyes and whisker-like barbels. In the afternoon the two lead canoes bank on the eastern side of the river, beneath low willow trees. A few Wyandot men stand in the shallows waving everyone over. They are the ones who determine when and where the group lands, when they eat, and when they rest.

Penelope and her mistress paddle over and the men pull up their canoe. Although the river ahead looks clear to her, the Wyandots are preparing to portage through a break in the trees. The carrying place, her mistress calls it.

“Why are we not taking the river?” Penelope asks, shouldering the wet bottom of the boat.

“Hush,” her mistress says.

When everyone is on land the men on the bank untie their canoes and begin to walk in pairs, like everyone else, carrying their boats between them. As Penelope walks she looks for Naomi but cannot find her among the throng. Now she grows anxious. Did they make their decision? Did they drown her in the river? Each time she glimpses someone who might be Naomi but turns out is not her anxiety worsens. But when at last they stop to rest she spies Naomi up ahead holding the front end of her canoe. She stumbles as she sets down the boat, which makes her mistress speak to her sharply.

Penelope exhales the breath that has been tightening in her chest and lowers her end of the boat. They have stopped in a muddy acre of land dotted with standing dead trees with branches bleached as white as bones. A drowned forest. Beneath the trees are pools of the same fish she saw in the Maumee. But here the fish are dead and half-rotting. They must have somehow swum up from the river and then couldn’t get back. Her nose fills with the ripe odor of plants that feed on mud to no purpose, for nothing can eat them. They will only grow until they become too wet themselves to live, and then they will begin their soft, slow decay.

“They are talking about white men,” Naomi says when Penelope catches up to her. “A fort nearby. That is why we left the river.”

But even this potential piece of good news does not seem to stir up any life in her. Her eyes are dull and she speaks without inflection. She looks around as if the world is nothing more to her than a picture book she is paging through idly, having nothing better to do.

Penelope takes hold of her hand and squeezes it. “White men! Nami, that’s good news. Perhaps we can go to them. Make our escape! Did they say where they are?”

“I can’t, my head aches. You go. You can come back for me.” She says this without the least hint of hope in her voice.

“You need some water,” Penelope tells her. “Wait here.”

Naomi needs more than water but water is all that Penelope can offer. Carrying the gourd she now uses as a cup, she makes her way toward a little rivulet no wider than a grass snake is long. The land around it is muddy and rank, and the air is so humid that even the insects can hardly raise themselves. Her clothes seem to cling to every hollow on her body. But just as she is clearing algae away with a stick to get clean water, she sees a group of people come out from behind the dead white trees. At first she thinks they are Englishmen because the men are dressed in English clothes—white shirts and neck-cloths and white sashes around their waists. One woman wears a short fur cape. Penelope’s heart begins to race. But they are only more Wyandots. She sees their faces as they come closer.

This time no attempt is made to hide Penelope and Naomi. Penelope doesn’t know if this is because these new people are from their own tribe, or because by the time they see them it is too late. The tallest man calls out a greeting in Wendat as he walks though the wet grass and stops to talk with Tawakota. After a short conference, Tawakota follows the man and his company back through the dead trees, signaling for the others to follow. They leave their canoes and walk a short distance to a place where an outcropping of flat, brownish-yellow stones rise up like slanted shelves. They are warm from the sun and, more important, they make dry seats.

For the rest of the afternoon the Wyandots rest and eat and talk among themselves. The new women go from rock to rock as if making social calls. Penelope can only understand one word in ten. But her mistress, pleased with something—perhaps just the change that new people bring with them—gives Penelope a large piece of fried cornmeal. No one notices when she gives half of it to Naomi.