Thieving Forest (36 page)

“Hush, don’t, it’s all right. You don’t have to worry about that tonight,” Naomi says. She draws Susanna closer to her. An owl hoots nearby. “Princess, I have to go. My family might miss me. But I’ll arrange something. Is your Wyandot family good to you?”

“They hit me and won’t feed me. I have to scrape the bottom of the kettle for my supper.”

“I’ll try to have you traded to another family.”

“You can do that?”

“My family is wealthy...they have some power. And they’re kind.”

“Meanwhile I’ve been treated like a slave,” Susanna says bitterly. “Nami, let’s leave this place together right now! You must know the woods around here, places to hide.”

“It would never work. They know the woods much better than we do. And you’re in no condition to run. Just look at you—a ghost of a child.” A phrase of their mother’s.

Susanna looks up. The stars seem to pulse for a moment. “That seems so long ago, doesn’t it?”

“Another life,” Naomi agrees.

The owl hoots again and Susanna realizes that it isn’t an owl at all, but Tako. He is sitting on the ground some ways off, a rock in the shadows.

“I must go,” Naomi tells her. “Tomorrow I’ll see that you’re moved closer to me. Remember, you have me now.” She rearranges Susanna’s blanket over her thin shoulders and kisses the top of her head. “We’ll get you a thicker blanket, too,” she says.

Twenty-Three

Naomi follows Tako through the village although she does not need him as a guide. She has only been gone for a month. When she gets to her longhouse she lifts the bark door and makes her way carefully to her blanket, stepping over many sleeping people, including Nadoko, her foster mother. Nadoko partially wakes and says without raising her head,

“
Hat-kah-keta?
” What are you doing?

“
Aja-yai-haw. Iskwanyo
,” Naomi whispers. I went outside and now I have come back. But Nadoko falls back asleep even as Naomi is speaking.

Naomi settles herself on her blanket and looks up at the bark ceiling, trying to breathe evenly. Smoke holes are scattered along the far end, and near them the bark has turned black with soot. Her heart is still beating hard with surprise and something else—what? Something she does not want to examine too closely. How did Susanna find her? Why did she come here?

The answer to that last, of course, is that Susanna thinks Naomi is a captive and needs her help. Naomi is strangely irritated by the thought, although she knows she’s being unjust. She was a captive once, but now she is not. Now it is her choice.

When Naomi first went off with Hatoharomas and his mother Nadoko, she wasn’t thinking about choices, for she had none. She was just hoping to live out the day. She’d been traded for a dozen silver brooches, about half the price of a good horse, and she felt both lucky and despondent. Lucky because Hatoharomas—whom his family called Hato—did not think she was a witch, and despondent because she felt in her bones that she would never see Penelope again, no matter how many times Penelope assured her that they were both heading to the same village and would meet up again in a matter of weeks. But in this case Naomi was right. By the time she arrived at the village, Penelope had been sold to a fur trader who wanted a wife. A white man called Boucherie.

From the first, the difference between Nadoko and Naomi’s old mistress was marked. The canoes Hato and his group had hidden were miles away, and they made their way to them carefully through forests of hugely tall poplars and trees that Nadoko called “sugars,” all of them intertwined with so many vines that scarcely any sunlight could penetrate. Naomi often stumbled, but each time, instead of scolding her, Nadoko helped her up and asked if she needed to rest. She fed Naomi peas and bear meat, though not in the same dish—that, Naomi learned, was unacceptable—and taught her how to skim clear water out from a layer of algae.

Remembering Penelope’s advice, Naomi tried to learn from Nadoko. She asked questions that her old mistress would have laughed at: how do you build a fire up quickly, or tamp it down without letting it go out altogether? What kettles do you use for fetching stream water, and what kettles do you use to cook with? What food should never touch one another, like the bear meat and peas?

Naomi wondered if Nadoko’s patience with her came from ignorance—perhaps she thought all white women were as backward as Naomi?—but Hato was equally patient, and he knew white people. He spoke very good English from living outside a British fort for a year. Once, when they were walking across a stream with white rocks on the bottom, Hato took her by the arm to keep her steady. And when Naomi made her first samp porridge by herself he complimented her greatly, although it was not nearly as creamy as the porridge Nadoko regularly cooked up.

What will Susanna think of me now? she wonders. She’s shared pipes of tobacco with Nadoko and Hato, and when their tobacco ran out they smoked red sumac bark that Hato ground into powder. She speaks Wendat easily and has learned how to cook animal rough—the diced organs—in fire embers, and to eat the dish with pleasure. She has learned to look at the world as Hato looks at it, and this perhaps is the greatest change. This is the change she will have the most trouble explaining.

By the time they came to their canoes and embarked on the river, Naomi felt almost comfortable with Nadoko and Hato. There were others in the group—Hato’s younger brother Detsukwa, and several cousins. They divided up into the four canoes, Naomi with Nadoko. But unlike her first group, this group was not in a rush. They lingered, enjoying the journey. For five days there was not a spot of rain, only blue sky and trees that seemed golden at their tips as the canoes snaked north along a jagged vein of the Great Black Swamp.

Every day Hato called to her from his canoe to look at various things on the shore: a grebe with a new chick on its back, a wild boar with two striped babies. At night they pulled their canoes up over the bank and camped in clearings bordered by tall bluestem, where they gathered wild grapes, eating some of them and boiling the rest into syrup. When Naomi took off her moccasins to bathe her feet one night, the dried twig of yellow buds that she found so long ago, when she was still with Penelope, fell out. Hato picked it up and gave it back to her. A few days later when she woke up she found twenty twigs with fresh yellow buds in a bunch beside her head. That was when she understood he was wooing her.

He gave her a polished panther’s bone, a whelk shell, and a necklace with one blue feather. Naomi made honeycakes out of oak flour, and gave Hato the biggest one. Being apart for so many hours in different canoes began to feel intolerable. In the evenings, after they ate, Hato took her hand gently. He kissed her at night after the moon had risen and in the morning when the air was still damp.

One evening Hato gave her a smooth white stone like a wild bird’s egg, which even now Naomi keeps in her pouch. It is a stone from the river, Hato told her, where they first touched, when he held her by the arm to keep her from stumbling. The stone was a pledge: when they got to the village, he told her, they would marry. Naomi ran two fingers along the stone’s smooth surface. She had nothing of her own to pledge except the twig with the dried yellow buds that she kept in her moccasin. So she gave him that.

A few days later, Naomi happened to be alone among some trees one afternoon, not far from the riverbank where the others were resting. It was a muggy day, the sun veiled by thin lace clouds. She was looking for food but she didn’t know precisely what. She wanted to make something for Nadoko and Hato. Maybe she could find some early apples. But the ground was wet and spongy, not the sort of place where apple trees grow. As she stepped around a shallow pool of gray water like an unreflective mirror, she noticed that a few small fish were trapped in it. She crouched over to look at them. At this particular angle they appeared purple, and she thought Hato might like to see that. As she was getting down onto her elbows to look more closely, she heard a noise that she first mistook for a frog piping nearby, but the noise went on and changed, forming itself into words. English words. A man was speaking English in a low voice to someone else, who replied in a slightly higher, nasally voice.

For a few moments Naomi could see nothing, and then the two men came into view. They were soldiers, or maybe scouts. They wore blue uniforms and hats that were slightly too large for them. They looked scarcely older than Mop. What were they doing so far into Indian Territory? All soldiers have two things in common, Sirus used to say, lice and the flux. Naomi watched the men squat to relieve themselves, and one scout was close enough so that she could see his trousers down about his knees. They continued to talk to each other calmly, as if disinterested in the business they were doing here in the woods.

All she had to do was stand up and they would see her. They would take her back to their camp or their fort—wherever they came from. One had red whiskers and the other one, the one with the nasally voice, laughed at something with a pitch like a woman’s. Naomi breathed into her chest and crouched farther down. Maybe she should approach them about Penelope, direct them to her. But how could she do that without being taken herself? And if they saw her, they would make her come with them. They would have no scruples about killing Hato or anyone else in their party. A squirrel jumped out from somewhere, startling the two men, and the man with the red whiskers cursed. A rustle of leaves, twigs breaking, and they were gone. When Naomi returned to Nadoko and Hato, she said nothing about them.

And now here she is trying to sleep in Nadoko’s longhouse, turning over and pushing her hot feet outside the blanket. She enjoyed those long days spent out among the white rocks and the bluestem, fishing from the riverbank or stitching the side of a moccasin while Nadoko showed her how to angle the needle. They stayed in the village for only a few weeks before they left again to go on a fishing trip. Hato and Nadoko prefer to spend much of the summer away from the village, but now the time has to come to start preparing for winter, Nadoko told her. So they have come back.

She does not miss Severne. She loves her sisters, but she does not miss living with them, all their noise and quarreling. Perhaps this is the uncomfortable feeling that seeing Susanna has brought up. Without realizing it, she thought that that life was over. And she was glad. She sighs without meaning to, and Nadoko opens one eye, a habit of hers that Naomi still finds unsettling. One of her dogs is lying behind her legs, wound up like a ball of dark yarn.

“
Ekwa-toray-shay
,” Nadoko says quietly. Let us both sleep.

Naomi is good to her word. The next morning a young boy leads Susanna up to the northern end of the village to live, and Akwendeh-sak is given a bolt of cloth for the trade.

Susanna’s new mistress is an old woman called Onaway who is some sort of relation to Naomi’s foster family—an aunt or an older cousin. Naomi’s foster mother, Nadoko, exclaimed over Susanna in Wendat and squeezed Susanna’s two hands in her own with apparent pleasure. Susanna can see at once that she is wealthy, just as Naomi said. She wears a dozen copper bracelets on each arm and she tells Susanna proudly—Naomi translates for her—how she owns many European items: spades and umbrellas and shawls. Nadoko is especially proud of a short fur cape, which she wears every morning over her deerskin dress.

That first morning they stand outside Nadoko’s longhouse with the sun pouring down on their heads. Nadoko touches Naomi’s arm, and then Susanna’s arm, and then her own arm. Here we are together. But Susanna is not sure how pleased Nadoko really is that she has joined her family. There is a look about her—not sly exactly, but maybe secret. As though she is thinking something else.

Although the father of Nadoko’s children is dead, he had been a senior chief in the village and people respect the family. Nadoko has two grown sons, Hatoharomas and Detsukwa, and a daughter who died the previous spring of the blue cough. Naomi is a replacement for this daughter. They are all tall and handsome, well dressed, and, Naomi tells Susanna, clever in business. Their longhouse is the largest in the village, made of slabs of bark over pole frames that extend back almost into the trees. It is big enough for four or five families to live in comfort. Inside there are hammocks for the men to sleep on, and the women use the space underneath them to store wood. They hang their food jars and clothing and anything else they want kept away from the mice on thick poles that rise up to the roof. The mats and skins that serve as flooring give the room a slightly animal smell, not unpleasant, that mixes with the smell of smoke and cooked meat.

At first Susanna is a little in awe of the large space, the plentiful food, the many possessions. Nadoko’s younger son often carries an unfurled brown umbrella—like his mother, he is fond of English goods. He is called Detsukwa, which means fishhook, because of his long crooked nose. The older son, Naomi told her, is named Hatoharomas and called Hato. This month he is training boys in a lodge at the uppermost corner of the village, and so is not living in Nadoko’s longhouse. For a few days nothing more is said of him.