Thieving Forest (43 page)

Susanna glances at his face but it’s too dark to see much. The pieces are coming together but she still cannot see the whole picture. She thinks she remembers Aurelia saying that name. Koman. The one with the swine wolf. But there was no swine wolf with him on this trip. She tries to keep following the story as Seth speaks, though what she really wants to do is stretch out among the brittle leaves and go to sleep. She wants to wake up to find that parts of the story never happened.

She thinks of the man with the face painted half red, who saw her hiding behind the maple tree but let her get away. That must have been Koman.

Amos was supposed to meet the Potawatomi at a given place in the forest, Seth tells her. He was supposed to make a show of negotiation with the money from their horses and wagon. His plan was to buy the women back, and in return they would give him their store.

But Amos never came. Why he decided to renege on the deal was anybody’s guess. He got greedy. He didn’t count on Susanna being left behind. His sons bypassed his cabin and went straight into the forest without giving him the money he meant to use to pay the Indians. Whatever the reason, Koman’s band circled around and around, waiting for him to show up. Later, someone found an opportunity to come back and kill him.

“They found Amos...” Seth stops. He doesn’t say how Amos was found. “It was clear that he was killed by a native. In revenge for deceiving them.”

“Koman?”

“Not Koman. But that’s all I know.”

A wind rises gently, as if not entirely willing to commit even to this first step. The moon has sunk behind the trees, which means she cannot read Seth’s expression. Amos planned all this. It’s hard to believe.

“I’m sorry,” Seth tells her.

She understands what he means. “You’re not your father. I don’t hold you responsible.” And she doesn’t. For a long time they say nothing more. With the moon gone, the morning seems somehow further away. It occurs to Susanna that maybe Seth followed her all this way out of shame for what his father did, some need to make it right, like Koman, and not as she thought out of love. All at once her weariness hits her like a stone.

“I need to rest,” she says.

An aching in his arm keeps him awake after Susanna falls asleep. They are lying between three logs that form a broken triangle around them. Seth pulls his blanket up and looks at Susanna’s face. Her expression is firmly set as though whatever she is dreaming takes all her concentration to maintain.

There is no question about it, she has changed. And not just her short hair and the rings in her ears. He’s changed too. He wonders what she thinks of him now.

He must have slept. When he opens his eyes again Susanna is looking at him with that direct look he remembers from childhood and he feels it in his heart. Her face is only an arm’s length away from his own.

The air is blue and cold, neither morning nor night. They talk about the Wyandots, whether they are safe now.

“I’m not sure where their territory ends,” Seth says, “but I don’t think it extends all the way here. If they haven’t found us by now we’re probably all right. My guess is they are staying to the south and combing every inch between their woods and the Maumee.”

“I’ll make a fire then,” Susanna says, and she pushes herself up. “Small. Not too much smoke. I want to boil water for your cut.”

How much sleep did they have, three hours? Susanna uses his flint to light a few sticks and then she boils water in his kettle. She finds some trillium and makes a paste. As she touches his arm, turning it slightly to look at it, he feels himself holding his breath. She tells him it looks all right to her but she covers every inch of it anyway with the paste, and then bandages it up carefully with strips she cut up from his extra shirt. His arm feels much better after that.

She says, “When I was looking for the trillium I saw what looks like a little den. Do you have a piece of twine with you?”

She catches a small wood vole and they skin it together, slicing it down the side and then pulling on it from either end. She cuts the meat up and cooks it in the kettle. While they eat she keeps looking at him in an obvious way, waiting for him to say something.

He says, “Needs a bit of salt,” and she laughs.

“I haven’t yet learned how to trap salt.”

He watches her bury the fire ashes and cover the spot over with leaves. He isn’t sure if she wants to show him what she can do, or if she wants to do it for him. They don’t speak about Amos or anything else that Seth told her last night. The morning chill is dissipating but he can already tell that it will be cooler today than it was yesterday. In this country, autumn can wash into winter overnight.

Around midmorning they finally come to a stream that should lead them, if Koman was right, to the River Raisin. Susanna picks up a few nuts from the ground and puts them into one of her pouches.

“Roasted, they taste like corn,” she tells him.

He looks at her sideways, and then picks up a long dry stick and touches the ground with it, testing its bend. “I was thinking to myself that you’ve changed,” he says. “But now I don’t think you have.”

She looks at him, surprised. “What do you mean?”

“You’re still a Quiner. You speak with that Quiner...authority.”

She grimaces. “Pride, you mean.”

“Maybe.” He’s smiling.

“Well, I’ve had to learn a few things.”

“So I see.”

He’s strangely moved by her little neck and her cropped hair and the set of her shoulders. Although she is thinner, she is very strong and easily keeps pace with him. In his pocket he feels the ring he bought so long ago. Its presence comforts him. It’s a pretty ring. If he can persuade her to take it, it will look nice on her finger.

He plants his walking stick on the ground and lets himself move a little closer to her. To his great happiness, she does not move away.

Susanna walks alongside Seth feeling strangely pleased. She woke up that morning knowing instantly where she was and how she got there. No question but that her senses have sharpened. She liked waking up in the fresh air, the scent of moisture coming out of the earth, no bodies crowding hers in the longhouse, no smoke from the cooking fires getting into her eyes. How did she bear it, living with all those people? She could never live in a city anymore. Not even Philadelphia. That dream is gone.

They walk above the noisy stream among just enough trees to make shade. Once in a while Seth’s arm brushes hers. The first time it happened she felt a tingling sensation. As they go along Seth describes a deer hunt he went on, and she tells him about trapping animals in the woods with Tako. The way he listens is Indian but his easy humor, that reminds her of Sirus. Late in the afternoon the deer path leaves the stream’s edge and ventures farther into the woods, although they can still see sparkling glimpses of water through the branches. Some time later the path ends in a small, natural clearing so beautiful that Susanna and Seth both stop at the same moment to stare.

“Oh,” Susanna says.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of tiny flowers spread out before them like an embroidered bedcover, purple and white and yellow, the buds almost stemless, their faces no bigger than knuckles. Their colors change as the sun moves in and out from behind clouds. Susanna and Seth sit down on an old nursing log in the midst of them and Seth takes an apple from his pack. He peels it perfectly in one long peel, a lucky sign. She accepts a chunk of apple and the wind presses on the tiny flowers as though something invisible is stepping among them. Seth tells her how once, at the very beginning of their trip, he and Koman saw four deer leaping together across a clearing like this one. They leaped from one end to the other in perfect unison, he says, like dancers going across a stage.

“You’ve seen dancers on a stage?”

“A troupe, if you could call it that, came though our town in Virginia once on their way to the capital.” He gives her the last of the apple and throws the core away with a long, strong throw. “But the deer were more graceful. They had just come from the river and their legs were still wet.”

Susanna holds the last apple slice in her hand. She says, “You came a long way to help me.”

“Longer than I expected,” he says with a smile, but she is not joking.

“You came to make amends.”

“In part.”

He wipes the blade of his knife on his trousers and looks at her with what she takes to be sadness or maybe fatigue. She cannot understand why it makes her heart billow out like a muscle made out of impossibly thin fabric. Back in Severne she liked to walk by his shop but she didn’t like to go in because of Amos. Sometimes Seth would be outside working, a heavy hammer in two hands. Everyone went to him when they needed something fixed. If he was outside Seth said good morning or good afternoon and she replied the same. It occurs to her now that what she liked was just seeing his face.

The wind begins pushing harder on the flowers and Susanna sees clouds gathering to the east. A storm coming on. They find the stream again and follow it until they get to a dry rise of land with a patch of scrub woods to the right. Some of the trees have hollows, but none are big enough for a person to sit in. Their only choice, besides getting soaked, is to build a twig shelter and wait out the rain inside it.

Seth builds a fire while Susanna searches the woods for bendable sticks. As she works on the shelter she sees herself through his eyes: a woman in a hide dress weaving branches into the arch of a frame. Her hair is short now and she prefers moccasins to boots. Her arms are very strong and her hands are chapped from so much outdoor work. She is good at building fires and finding food, and she can walk just as long and as far as he can. How did she become this person, she wonders? But the answer is obvious—necessity—and that’s the answer every time.

“I hung up our food,” Seth tells her when she returns. “In case of bears. And there’s hot water for tea. Wait.”

He pulls a few small twigs out of her hair. When his fingers brush the top of her ear she feels herself blush.

“There,” he says.

She steps back quickly without looking at him. As they are drinking their tea—the last Seth has with him—the rain begins to fall. Two minutes later it seems as though someone has overturned a hundred buckets at once. They abandon the campfire for the shelter and sit inside facing each other. They can stretch out their legs if they want to, but they will have to curl up if they want to lie down.

“I should have made it larger,” Susanna says, wrapping her arms around her bent legs. “We might have to sleep here.”

“It’s fine. It’s very well constructed. No terrible leaks.” He looks up. Then he smiles. “Yet.”

Up close his face seems flushed and his eyes are so dark they look wet. He is still smiling but something in his expression turns sad. When he moves his elbow he touches her leg. She looks down at her knees. She doesn’t want to meet his eyes. She has the thought that if she looks at him he will be able to see everything she feels.

“The canopy is very thick here,” she says. “The trees will offer a lot of protection.” She makes herself breathe evenly, as if that will steady her heartbeat. The air is moist from the rain.

“Susanna,” Seth says.

She squeezes her legs and looks up at him. He is wearing the same expression she has seen off and on all day, only now she realizes that it is not disappointment, as she feared, nor weariness, as seemed likely, but rather patience.

He says, “All his life Amos hid his Potawatomi side. I’ve decided I’m not going to do that.”

“All right,” she says. “Why should you?”

“A hundred reasons. You know them as well as I do.”

“Who cares what the farmers think. They don’t know beans from bird eggs, as Penelope likes to say.”

“I care what you think.”

The way he says this surprises her. “Do you think I hate Indians?” she asks.

He is silent. Then he says, “In the Wyandot village, in the woods, you said to me, how can Naomi be happy married to an Indian?”

“I don’t think I said that.”

“You did.”

“Well, I was mad at her.”

Seth shifts a little. “I thought...after everything you’ve been through, what you saw, what happened. You might have some strong feelings.”