Thieving Forest (48 page)
Authors: Martha Conway
Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Literary, #Family Life
Ahead of them, Meera and Penelope are walking side by side talking to each other. “The Wyandots thought Naomi was a witch,” Penelope is saying.
“Why?” Meera asks.
“She made the mistake of trading with a girl who fell ill, and then with an old woman who died.”
Susanna plucks a small gold-yellow leaf from her sleeve. “She’s otherworldly. That’s what our mother used to say.”
“All the farmers were in love with her,” Seth tells them.
“With Naomi?” Susanna laughs. “Now we hear the truth.”
She feels a breeze and looks up. The sky is clear and the same deep blue as the color of her father’s eyes. No snow yet, thank goodness, but the day—it is late afternoon—holds a crisp stillness that seems on the verge of a change. In spite of a small knot in her stomach, she is happy. The air is cooler than when she left but the birds are still calling out and the frogs pipe away in their mudholes. The farmers are probably still out in their fields, Mop is still looking down the river for Indians, and Betsey T. is still telling Susanna that she’s in shock, she doesn’t know what she saw. A breeze brings the first smell of chimney smoke. It’s a slightly uncomfortable feeling coming back home, Susanna thinks, as though you’ll now need to fit your new self into the person you were here, and you don’t know if that’s possible. She is walking so close to Seth that she can feel the warmth of his arm. He’s looking ahead, too. Any moment now they’ll see it.
It might just be possible, she thinks.
The track turns, and all at once there it is: Severne. Penelope and Meera stop for a moment, and Seth takes her hand. It doesn’t look exactly the same. A new building is going up near the public stable—someone starting the courthouse at last?—and its freshly cut yellow lumber stands out. The pine walkway is darker, and the pond at the end of it seems smaller. Seth squeezes her fingers lightly as if to start the blood running again. They keep walking.
Penelope says, “Betsey T. has taken care of Beatrice’s bean garden, at least,” when they come in sight of their cabin.
But it isn’t Betsey T. who steps out to greet them, nor is it Mop, but rather a tall slender woman in a green and yellow dress. They are still too far away to make out her face. Penelope asks, who is that?
“I don’t know,” Susanna says. “Maybe Mop got himself a wife?” But that seems too impossible to imagine, even for her.
They come closer. The woman has red hair.
“Oh—oh,” Susanna says. The pit in her stomach turns over and transforms itself into a warmer feeling of surprise and joy and disbelief and wonder. Her heart rises in her chest. And Penelope says at almost the same time: “Why, it’s Lilith!”
Lilith is rubbing her hands with bear fat to keep them smooth—the day is as dry as white sand, as her Aunt Ogg used to say—when she steps out into the garden. Of course, there is no garden left at this time of year, only a few trampled tomato stalks that she pulls up in idle moments. Not that there are many idle moments. Her worry today is about who she will ask to slaughter the pig for her, and how much of its meat she’ll have to offer in payment. The pig needs to last her through winter, and after that perhaps she can find a way back to Philadelphia. People are always coming and going, her sisters wrote in their letters over the years, but now that she is here she finds that that just isn’t true. Severne is even more isolated than she thought. She almost, but not quite, regrets her decision to come out here. But everyone should have one adventure in their lives, her Aunt Ogg used to say.
When Lilith left Philadelphia she took with her a large trunk with her personal items and a much smaller one that contained only gloves—she and her aunt ran a glove shop just off Chestnut Street, and Lilith thought perhaps the gloves would sell in Severne. Living in Ohio Country had to be hard on a lady’s hands. Her Aunt Ogg had died in late spring, and after she mourned her for a month, and without leaving off missing her, Lilith was ready for adventure. She was nearly sixteen. She’d had two marriage proposals and saw a third one coming but the men—boys, really—were not to her liking. So she sold the shop tenancy to a widow and found a ride to Severne with a little Frenchman and his wife who were moving to New Orleans. They gave her passage and agreed to cut through Severne for six minted dollars.
Bouncing along in the wagon she thought how surprised her sisters would be that she had made such a journey by herself. She was pleased with her own independence, and in the beginning she brought up the subject with the little Frenchman and his wife Marielle whenever she could, asking them didn’t they think she was brave, and didn’t they think her sisters would marvel. By and by, however, the couple seemed to prefer watching the scenery to her conversation, and the journey became tedious. They stayed at taverns with names like Moral Suasion and Vox Populi—brands of whiskey, she was told!—where the drinking was heavy and Lilith thought it prudent to sleep with her money belt tied to her waist. Half the time she even had to purchase and cook her own food. The tavern keepers were rough to a man but their wives and daughters were generally in need of gloves, which Lilith offered at a very good price. One of the wives wore an old-fashioned bonnet with light blue earflaps and wanted a glove color to match it. The others were just as selective, for all that they lived right in the very middle of nowhere.
By the end of the month-long journey she’d sold twelve pairs of gloves and one shirtwaist and her aunt’s cameo brooch, which she had never cared for, and so recouped what she paid for her transport and much of her food—another pleasant anecdote to relate to her sisters. She is good at bargaining. It is in her bones. Her father’s people have been shopkeepers for as long as anyone can remember. But when she finally arrived in Severne and received the news about her sisters, she found herself, for the first time in her life, without a ready solution.
Still, she soon rallied. She always does. She wrote a letter to a state senator’s wife back in Philadelphia, one of her old customers, asking if her husband could help. Two men had already been dispatched to Sandusky to see if information about her sisters could be found there, and she is waiting for news.
Lilith pulls up a tomato plant stalk and throws it into a pile. Later she will see if someone will cut up the pile for mulch. When she turns, she sees a small group of people walking toward her: two very unkempt white women, one man who looks Italian, and an Indian girl. The white women wear neither bonnets nor capes, and the Indian girl has a blue-and-brown blanket thrown unevenly over her shoulders with one end trailing almost to the ground. They are all of them staring at her as they walk toward her cabin—travelers hoping for food? Lilith can see that they are not ideal customers for gloves—too neglectful of their appearance—but she decides she’ll try to sell them a pair anyway. As her mind turns over what she still has in stock, she sees the two white women stop for a second and then begin to run toward her, and one calls out her name in a voice like a startled bird. Lilith! Her heart clenches like a fist in her chest and she sees, with amazement, that they have red hair, that they are her sisters. Her heart lets loose and begins beating wildly. Her sisters! She’s been waiting for them for so long. She begins running, too. She has so much to tell them.
About the author
Martha Conway's first novel,
12 Bliss Street
, was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. Her short fiction has been published in
The Iowa Review, The Carolina Quarterly, The Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, The Mississippi Review, Folio
, and other journals. She has taught fiction at UC Berkeley Extension and the Online Writer's Studio at Stanford University, and is a recipient of a California Arts Council Fellowship for Creative Writing. Born in Ohio and one of seven sisters, she now makes her home in San Francisco.