Thieving Forest

by Martha Conway

  Aurelia swallows with difficulty. She looks confused. “Where are my birds?”

  “They’re fine, don’t worry about them. Mop is taking care of them.”

  A pause. “I want you to. It’s past their feeding.”

  “We’re not home right now, Aury. We’re in Risdale. Remember? At the Eager Tavern. Liza Footbound is helping me take care of you. Well, I’m helping her.”

  Aurelia frowns. Her eyes are like little caves with light way in the back of them.

  “You were taken by some Potawatomi. Outside by the henhouse. But now we’re in Risdale. You’re all right now.”

  Something shifts in Aurelia’s expression. “In Risdale?”

  “At the Eager Tavern. Aury, I’ve been given strict orders to feed you. Can you open your mouth? It’s applesauce. I’ve been eating it all morning. It’s good you woke up when you did or there’d be nothing left.”

  Aurelia allows herself to take a little. “Why are we in Risdale?”

  “You were taken into Thieving Forest. By some Potawatomi. Do you remember that?”

  Aurelia looks up at the ceiling. Her lips are very dry.

  “There was a man there. Behind a tree.”

  Susanna wipes Aurelia’s lips with a wet cloth. “I know, Aury. A Potawatomi.”

  “A white man,” Aurelia says.

  She is confused, delusional. Susanna spoons up more applesauce. “Another bite. Just a little one. Please.”

  Aurelia inhales as if gathering strength and opens her mouth. Susanna gives her the tiniest amount, but even so for a moment she thinks that Aurelia is going to let it spill out. From the other room there is the sound of a hearth being scraped, and then Jonas begins singing:

  As Dinah was walking the garden one day,

  She saw her dear papa and thus did he say,

  “Go dress yourself, Dinah, in gorgeous array,

  And choose you a husband both gallant and gay.”

  “Oh no, dearest Papa, I’ve not made up my mind

  To marry just yet I don’t feel so inclined

  To you my large fortune I’ll gladly give o’er

  If you’ll let me stay single a year or two more.”

  Liza comes in on the chorus, her voice as low as a man’s:

  Sing tura-la-lura-la-lura-la-lie

  Sing tura-la-lura-la-lura-la-lie...

  Aurelia seems to be listening. She closes her eyes and her breathing changes. But she isn’t asleep. After a minute she says with her eyes closed, “I remember something else.” A pause. “The one with the half-red face. Koman. He had an animal with him.”

  Susanna tries to follow. “One of the Indians?”

  “Like a dog. But it was...” Another pause. “One of those swamp creatures. A swine wolf.”

  A breeze flutters the window curtain as slight as a caterpillar walking a leaf. Susanna has heard about swine wolves of course. She has always wanted to see one. Penelope and Beatrice claimed they didn’t exist.

  “Don’t worry,” she tells Aurelia. “You’re safe here.”

  “Its hackles were up but its eyes...” Aurelia turns her head and looks at Susanna as if seeing her face will help her form the words. “Its eyes were kind.”

  “The swine wolf?”

  “The eyes of a friend, or, what do you call it...”

  “Aury—”

  “For protection.”

  “Aury, you can tell me all this later when you’re better. Here, take another bite.”

  “It tried to protect us.”

  “One more taste. Please, Aury. For me.”

  “I can’t.” Aurelia presses her lips closed. Susanna reluctantly puts the spoon back.

  “I’m cold,” Aurelia tells her. “Will you lie down with me?”

  “How can you be cold,” Susanna says lightly, trying to tease. “It’s sweltering out.” But she stretches out on the little straw tick next to Aurelia, careful not to jostle her, and takes her hand. Aurelia’s hair smells of blood and dry leaves and something else, something flowery—maybe Liza has brushed it with scented water?

  “I’m glad you’re here, Princess,” Aurelia says. Susanna squeezes her hand. Jonas and Liza have stopped singing but she can still make out sounds from the next room: a murmur of voices, the clang of tinware. In contrast their little room feels still and cozy.

  “You’re all right now,” Susanna says. Her eyes begin to close. In spite of the heat she is drifting to sleep. Some time later she hears a commotion in the tavern, excited voices in the outer room and then a lower one asking a question. Her fingers, still holding Aurelia’s hand, feel stiff. Aurelia lies very still. For a moment Susanna doesn’t move. A bird is singing outside the window. It stops and starts, stops and starts.

  “Susanna!” Liza comes into the room wiping her hands on her apron. “There’s news! Two of the brethren over at the Christian mission have ransomed a white woman with red hair.”

  Still Susanna doesn’t move. A tear rolls out of her eye and down over her jaw.

  “What is it?” Liza asks. She quickly goes to Aurelia and puts a hand on her forehead.

  “She’s passed,” Susanna says.

  Six

  Seth is preparing to camp when Cade catches up with him. At this twilit hour the ground is humming with insects, and the clearing, surrounded on three sides by forest, smells heavily of moist decay, as if even air were a thing that could rot. To the west a grove of dying beech trees stands between him and the rest of Ohio. He is following an old buffalo trail, the only way out. At some point he will start coming across soldiers and that means that the string of forts between the Maumee and Fort Wayne has begun.

  When he hears hoof beats he stops building his campfire and listens. Sounds like a white man riding, although if someone asked him he would not be able to say why. Sure enough, even at a distance, he makes out his brother’s fair head. As he comes closer, Seth sees that Cade’s face is like the mask of tragedy, his jaw so clenched it seems bound with cloth. He understands even before Cade’s horse has fully halted: Aurelia is dead.

  From the beginning it seemed unlikely to Seth that anyone could survive such an attack. He lets Cade tell him, though, and then he says what he can say, knowing that nothing will bring comfort so close to the fact. A good woman, gone before her time, a loss—but Cade is hardly listening. His anger and despair hold most of his attention.

  “Couldn’t stay in Risdale.” He rubs his chin up but it has no effect on his expression. He tells Seth the news: a white woman has been ransomed by the Moravian missionaries, and Susanna is fixing to go to their village, called Gemeinschaft, tomorrow. Every settler in the area knows about Gemeinschaft, where a dozen or so white men and women live alongside fifty or sixty converted Indians. It’s a safe haven for the Christian Indians to practice their faith away from liquor and marauding tribes and ill-natured Europeans, a place where they can grow their own food and start little businesses—weaving, carpentry, textiles. There are several of these Moravian villages in Pennsylvania and New York, but this is the first one in Ohio.

  “Old Adam found out,” Cade tells him. “He came across a couple of the brethren out prospecting the woods. Guess they’re thinking of clearing more land.”

  Seth pulls flint and charcloth from his tinderbox. There is no use pretending that they will do anything else but camp here before they return, for there is no moon to light their way. Besides, the horses are tired. Cade waters them at the stream while Seth gets the fire lit. They boil coffee and eat the cornbread Jonas sent with Cade. Insects rise in a dense, cloudy mass and find little hollows in the land over which they swarm as if trapped there. Seth watches them, staying close to the fire’s smoke, which keeps them at bay.

  What Seth doesn’t say is this: he is still relieved that Susanna, out of all of them, was spared. How can he help it? But the feeling sits uneasily on him. He loves his brother and feels his loss. Although they sit side by side with their boot tips nearly touching, Seth feels his brother’s thoughts pulling
him away. They will separate. They will go their own ways. Only a week ago the future Seth saw was the two of them in Severne each married to a Quiner. Amos gone or dead, somehow no longer a problem. But Amos has always had so many tricks. Uprooting them from Virginia, as it turned out, was the least of them. But that was when they were too young to venture forth elsewhere on their own.

  Seth gives Cade the last of the cornbread even though he could eat it himself and still want more. He will see Susanna through this, he vows to himself. He can’t make up for what Amos did, whatever that was exactly, but he will see Susanna through to the end even though she has not asked for help and it does not even appear to cross her mind to seek it from him.

  “I’ll go to Kentucky, then,” Cade says once the fire is banked and they are lying on the damp ground looking up at the stars. “Nothing for me here.”

  It is one of the things he sometimes talks about. Joining a militia. He has the weight and look of a soldier, that’s certainly true.

  “You would fight Indians?” Seth asks.

  “More like the English, the bastards. But Indians too if need be. I’m not one of them. Not like you.”

  “Cade, that’s ridiculous.”

  “What? You’re the one got it all, just look at you. Besides, one quarter, what’s that? Easy enough to throw that away.”

  “Amos will want you to work the forge with him.”

  Cade rolls over in his blanket. He is sleeping in his boots and they stick out from the bottom. A rafter of turkeys, gabbling aimlessly, crosses a corner of the clearing. Cade picks up his musket and, hardly raising himself, lets off a shot without aim. The turkeys scatter, gabbling louder.

  “Amos be damned,” he says.

  In the small back room in Eager Tavern, a few hours after Aurelia died, Susanna helps Liza prepare her sister for burial. Her stomach feels loose and watery and she now understands the phrase sick with grief, because that is how she feels exactly: her own body is both hot and cold and also somehow strange to her. Her hands are not her hands. They move with a will of their own.

  She finds herself thinking about something that happened to her years ago, when she was eight years old. They had been living in Severne only a couple of years then. It was a fine day in early summer, and her mother decided they should eat supper outdoors. A preacher was visiting the settlement with his wife and young son, and every evening they ate with another family. Tonight it was the Quiners’ turn. Ellen made her famous turtle soup, and Sirus and Beatrice carried their large oak table outside. Susanna found dry flat stones to hold down the tablecloth, for there was a wind. When they could see the reverend and his family walking over—three distinct dots, one in a black hat—Ellen told Susanna to go wash up but to find Aurelia first.

  Susanna went to the henhouse, the obvious place to begin, but Aurelia wasn’t there. As she turned to go she heard a noise, a kind of crackle, nothing unusual, just a hen turning about, but for some reason she looked closer and saw that next to the hen there was an egg waggling on the straw. It had a big crack all the way around it. A chick was hatching.

  Susanna had never before seen a chick coming out of its shell and since she thought it would be the work of a moment she stayed to watch. But it wasn’t the work of a moment. It was long and arduous: the widening crack, the first glimpse of the beak pecking out, and then a claw coming up like a long forked splinter of wood. How could such a weak creature possibly break through that shell? The longer she watched the more impossible the task looked, and Susanna found herself more and more engrossed. In the middle of it, one of her sisters came into the henhouse behind her—no doubt sent by Ellen—and exhaled impatiently. But still Susanna didn’t take her eyes off the egg. She said over her shoulder, “A chick is trying to come out and I want to watch. Don’t tell.” So together, silently, they watched as the chick worked and rested, chipping off more and more shell until it could finally unfold itself out onto the straw: a skinny, goopy, putty-colored baby bird with scraps of eggshell still stuck to its body.

  Susanna felt as victorious as if she had done it herself. She turned around to smile at her sister since together they had witnessed this wonderful thing. But there was no one behind her. She was alone. The exhale she’d heard was only the wind. And right then she realized that she had thought, or felt, that it was Lilith behind her, Lilith her younger sister who still lived in Philadelphia. She’d had the feeling of Lilith without thinking about it, so absorbed was she in the chick’s struggle. But Lilith never came to Severne. Maybe Susanna imagined her because back in Philadelphia Lilith had been her particular partner, cutting out old newspapers into houses and drawing in chairs and fireplaces and people. They played together behind the house, although now Susanna can’t remember what they played, only Lilith’s laugh like a hiccough.

  As she got older Susanna forgot to miss Lilith, but now, as she helps Liza prepare Aurelia’s body in the little room where Aurelia died, she finds herself hoping that Lilith will suddenly step through the low doorway with a heavy longing that she puts down to grief.

  Together Liza and Susanna undress Aurelia and cover her with a sheet. Then, delicately, as though Aurelia might care, Susanna uncovers only that part of the body she is washing. As the light crosses the room Aurelia’s skin seems white then gold then a dull yellow. Susanna helps Liza sew Aurelia into a new blue dress, because why should she be in mourning now? Her brushed-over hair nearly covers the bandage on her forehead.

  They bury her the next day in a thick pine box, and Jonas takes it upon himself to say a few words in lieu of a preacher: “And thus we give an end to her trouble and her life.” Susanna has to unclench her fist to throw in the dirt. She doesn’t feel alone, not completely, not yet, but she can sense it coming, like the wind.

  That night Liza sits with her in the little back room for a long time, both of them in nightdresses, and Liza wearing a very odd muslin nightcap set back on her head.

  Susanna holds a piece of paper on her lap, intending to write to Lilith. Instead she looks outside. A spreading bitternut tree grows right up against the tavern wall, and through the open window she can smell the tangy scent of its branches. Its roots are probably somewhere beneath her, right under the floorboards.

  “Some weather rising,” Liza says, looking out at the moon. Even sitting, her feet are firmly planted on the floor as if at any moment she might be called on to get up quickly. Susanna is glad of Liza’s company, maybe just the sound of another woman’s voice. She is used to her sisters all talking at once. Now it feels like she is sitting at a table with too many place settings. Both Liza and Jonas have told her that it isn’t her fault that Aurelia died but Susanna knows differently. She should have started sooner. She should never have stopped to rest, not even once. She stares at the blank sheet of paper. Now that it is before her, it feels too soon to describe Aurelia’s death in words.

  “I wish...,” she says, and then stops. There are a hundred things she wishes.

  Liza waits. She looks at Susanna and takes a pull from her pipe. After a moment she blows out the smoke in a long stream. Susanna watches it rise and spread.

  “I don’t know. I keep thinking. The last time I spoke to Aurelia I said nothing important, nothing at all. I wish I had told her something real. Talked about something important.”

  Liza pulls her pipe from her mouth and rests it on her knee. “That it? Well you don’t need to fret about that. Anything you might have said, she knew it when she woke up and saw you tending her.”

  “But I didn’t know it was the last time. That I wouldn’t get another chance. All I talked about was applesauce. I didn’t say anything that really mattered.”

  “She knew what mattered when she saw you there with her. Words aren’t any more telling than that.”

  Susanna hopes this is true. Outside the wind stirs up the branches of the bitternut tree. The leaves look like birds hanging on.

  “I want to put something to you,” Liza says after a moment. “Jonas and I been
talking. If you want, after you fetch your sister from that missionary village, you could come back here. You both could. We could use more hands.”

  Susanna says, “You must be sorely in need of company if you value mine.”

  Liza smiles, a rare occurrence. “It’s fine company.”

  “Then you haven’t been listening to what people say.”

  “You’ve given yourself no airs around me.”

  The wind rises sharply and then suddenly drops as if changing its mind. Tomorrow she will go to Gemeinschaft, where her sister, she doesn’t know which one, has been ransomed. And then what? Come back here? Return to Severne? She thinks about Old Adam, whom she still hasn’t seen. Clearly he has abandoned her. Gone back to see to his pigs.

  Liza gets up and knocks her pipe ashes out. “It’s late. Try to sleep, now. You need have no worries tonight.”

  But she does have worries, countless worries. How will she pay the missionaries back for her sister’s ransom? The goods in her grain sack seem pitiful now: buttons, nail scissors, a ring. Her sisters are well beyond their worth, prideful as they are, and stubborn, and forever telling her that whatever she is doing is wrong. Where are they now? Sleeping outside without even a blanket no doubt, and probably convinced that she, Susanna, could do nothing to help.

  But she is mistaken about one thing at least: Old Adam has not yet gone back to his pigs. When she steps out early next morning to fetch water he is waiting on the dewy grass, crouching rather than sitting, his rheumatoid knees jutting out, elbows on thighs. From his mouth hangs a long clay pipe not unlike Liza’s, but when he sees Susanna he takes out the pipe and stands. He is gripping something in his other hand: the moccasins Aurelia was wearing when they found her. He holds them out to her.

  “I told Jonas to give those to you,” Susanna says. “If he saw you.”

  “He gave. Last night. But they are yours.”

  “I don’t want them.”

  His face searches hers. “You might like. Good leather. Soft. Try,” he says. The sun is behind him, the sky faintly pink. A single bird makes its claim to the day. She bends down to unlace her boots. He is right, the moccasins are surprisingly soft. Her feet feel warmer already.