Thieving Forest (28 page)

She stops to catch her breath, and when she does she realizes she cannot possibly keep walking with any kind of speed. Every muscle in her bad leg aches, and with the wind blowing against her she is even colder than she was in the water. She looks at Meera. There is a long gash down the side of her face, making a line of blood like an arrow to her mouth. She is holding Consolation’s wet shawl against her stomach. Susanna is afraid that she will say they cannot continue without a boat. But how can they go back without one, either? She is afraid Meera will say, This is the end.

But Meera just stares at the place in the river where the boat disappeared. There is a glazed look on her face. She doesn’t say this is the end.

“This is your fault,” is what she says.

They follow the river slowly, stumbling over the stones and tree limbs that are scattered along the bank. Meera will not speak to her, even after Susanna cleans the gash on her face. At every bend Susanna hopes to see their skiff caught on a rock but eventually the river turns and they are obliged to abandon it. If they head due north they will get to the Maumee River or Lake Erie eventually, and the Wyandot village is not far from where the two meet. But if they let themselves circle around following this stream or that they might be lost in the Black Swamp for weeks.

Susanna reties her grain sack more firmly to her back. Most of their food has fallen into the river, but she still has their kettle and their blankets and Meera has a bundle of rabbit bones in one of her pouches for soup. While they walk they must keep particular watch for anything edible: berries, plant greens, roots. She tries not to think about her aching leg.

The trees spread their branches like great wings blocking the sun. Mud sucks at her moccasins. They are in the true heart of the Swamp now, as Meera would say. Late in the afternoon they come upon small pools of oily water floating in patches: petroleum, which her mother used to call Seneca oil. Meera scoops up some in the cup of her hand to put into one of her pouches.

“Good for sore feet and sore bones,” she says.

This is the first thing she’s said for hours. To encourage her, Susanna says, “My mother used the oil to treat chilblains.”

“Chilblains? I don’t know this word.”

“Little swellings on your feet. You get them from the cold or the wet. Bigger than blisters. Beatrice used to get them a lot on her heels.”

Meera nods. “That is sore feet,” she says with the authority of a doctor.

They pick dandelion greens for their supper, and after they eat Meera scouts around until she finds four young trees arranged in a rectangle with no trees in the middle. She ties two thick branches to the trees on the longer sides of the rectangle, about a foot off the ground, and then she collects long sticks to arrange across the two branches, making a kind of platform. She has some rope and her hunting knife. Everything else they have to search for on the ground. When the rope runs out they cut vines to use as twine.

“This will be our bed,” Meera says. “We will make one every night.”

Susanna lies down on it. It is not very comfortable, but at least it keeps them from sleeping on wet ground. She can’t see the stars or the moon or anything else through the thick canopy of tree branches above them. The air feels wet when she breathes it in.

“How far do you think we’ve gone so far?” she asks Meera. “I mean, since Gemeinschaft?”

“Perhaps ten or fifteen miles.”

Ten or fifteen miles! The Black Swamp is forty miles north to south at least. How will they manage to travel twenty-five miles without a boat? The foolishness of her venture strikes Susanna again with all the force of false pride. They will never get out. She will never see her sisters or anyone else ever again. She will die here, and her last meal on earth will be boiled dandelion leaves without salt. A swarm of pinhead insects hovers over her face and although she swats them away they only come back.

“If you move about they are worse,” Meera says. But it makes no difference whether she moves or not. They have found her, and they are not going to leave.

Now, every day, they walk. The days become weeks. They carry no food since they eat every morsel they chance upon and wish for more. Their packs are lighter, that is the only good thing. But they wade through so much standing water that they have to stop again and again to pick leeches off their legs. At night Susanna becomes adept at making raised swamp beds, but even so she never feels completely dry. Sores form on her arms and legs that will not heal because of the damp. Her fingernails become as soft as skin.

They keep to the north, using the sun for direction. Somewhere Susanna loses one of her mother’s gloves, and the other one she uses to dry her feet at night. She can feel the wet seeping deeper and deeper into her skin, saturating her bones, the muscles of her heart. She imagines tiny wet spores lodged beneath her ribcage or flowing alongside the blood in her veins, a part of her now. If they come to dry ground, Meera finds a tree shadow and stops to mark the tip of it with her knife. They count out the seconds to make a quarter of an hour as the shadow moves from west to east, and then they mark the tip of the new shadow with a stick. Standing with Meera’s knife on their left and the stick on their right, they face true north. But if they can’t find a shadow they have to guess and trust their luck.

Are they walking in circles? Conflicting signs are everywhere: whole spider webs, good; broken fern leaves, bad. The constant wind through the low swamp trees is like an approaching wave that never breaks. Sometimes the trees end abruptly and they come into a small, wet, grassy prairie where swamp swallows swoop like bats hunting for insects. One afternoon Susanna hears a bugle call in the distance. At first she thinks it is just her hunger playing tricks on her, but then it sounds again.

Meera says, “
Wapiti
. White deer.”

Elk. “I thought they were all gone,” Susanna says. “With the buffalo.”

“They live where the grassland and trees come together. But their meat is not as good as the red deer. Also have tough skin, hard to kill.”

Meat would be manna but they find no way of getting any. Meera fashions arrows from branches of swamp oak but they all have splits or kinks and she has no straightening tool, so the arrows shoot off crookedly in ways she cannot compensate for. The best they can hope for is to stun a small animal long enough to kill it with their hands. But where are the small animals? Susanna gets excited when she sees a dead mouse lying up ahead on a fallen log, but when she gets there it turns out to be only a narrow gray leaf with a long stem curling out behind it like a tail.

Meera says, “This is like the time when we were traveling and my family went many weeks without food. Sometimes I licked cold stones for the mineral taste. We ate moss from the river. We looked for fish but found only moss.”

“I’m surprised Nushemakw didn’t leave you if there wasn’t enough food for you all.”

She wasn’t with Nushemakw, Meera tells her. This was with her real parents. “We walked across a shallow pond and there were fallen tree logs on the bottom and my mother kept slipping on them. My father carried me on his shoulders. We saw a stand of pawpaw trees on the other side. That’s why we were going there. I was crying, and my mother and father thought it was because I was afraid I would fall, but it wasn’t that, it was because I was so hungry and the pawpaws were so far away. I was so little that my father could hold my two legs across his chest with one arm. He told me that I always either cried or talked, that was my way. He said when I was older I would feel pleasure in silence, but that right now silence frightened me.”

The air is misty and wet. They are walking among cattails with edges as sharp as knives. Susanna cannot see an end to them.

“Did you ever eat the pawpaws?” she asks.

“At the other end of the pond, Nushemakw’s tribe was waiting for us behind the trees. They pointed their arrows at my people and killed everyone except for me and one boy.”

Susanna stops walking and looks at her. “Why?”

Meera shrugs. “We were enemies.”

“What happened to the boy?”

Meera doesn’t know. But when the battle was over, someone gave them both a pawpaw and also some meat. “I did not miss my parents at first. I was so eager to get food. I don’t think I really understood until later.” For a while they walk in silence. Then Meera says, “That morning, before we went across that pond, I talked to the trees. I told them how hungry I was. Then my father spotted the pawpaws. The trees heard me. And my father was killed.”

Susanna looks at her quickly, but Meera keeps staring straight ahead. She is so small and thin. Susanna wishes she could give her something. Food or comfort. Preferably food.

“The trees don’t care about our hunger,” she tells Meera. “I’m sure about that.”

The afternoon spills into evening with almost no change of light until suddenly the sun is gone, it is night. The next day they walk for hours without finding anything at all to eat, and Susanna begins to feel very light-headed. She worries that she is walking more and more slowly, and tries to pick up her pace. For a moment she thinks she sees Aurelia in the distance, the particular color of her hair, but it is only a tree in early turning. Still, the idea takes hold of her.

“Susanna, whatever are you doing here?” Aurelia would certainly ask her.

“I’m going to find Penelope and Naomi. They need my help.”

“Your help! Susanna, you astonish me, you do. Even if you could help them, how do you propose to find them? You have no sense of direction, you know you do not. If someone says east, you turn south. We’ve told you this often enough.”

“I don’t know. But here I am. I can only keep going.”

“Well I wish you luck! Truly I do! Now I, as you know, have a very keen sense of direction. I’ve developed it because of my birds. Those hens are smarter than anyone gives them credit for. If a wind comes up in the east they...”

A small, fine rain begins to fall. Susanna wipes droplets from her face with the sleeve of her dress as she listens to Aurelia prattle on about her birds, a speech so familiar to Susanna she could recite it in her sleep. She feels her usual spurt of irritation—Aurelia always leads the conversation back to herself. Then she catches herself and feels ashamed. Poor Aurelia. Tears come into her eyes.

“It does no good to pity yourself,” Meera says sharply.

“I’m not pitying myself!” Susanna says, and then all at once she is. If they had gone to Philadelphia like she wanted she might be sitting down right now with Lilith and Aunt Ogg for supper. Cold ham, hot tea in china cups. Her hands would be clean. Raindrops would not be trickling down her face.

“I’m hungry, too,” Meera tells her.

Susanna wipes the rain from her eyes. “I know,” she says.

The rain comes down for five days without a break, and then six. The clouds remain so heavy that they cannot use the sun for direction. Food becomes even harder to find. At night they are now too weak to make swamp beds but instead lie down on fat logs, sleeping as still as snakes so they will not tumble off onto the wet ground.

“I think we’re walking in circles,” Meera says on the seventh day.