Thieving Forest

by Martha Conway

  That gives Seth pause. “I assumed...” He stops. He does not want to insult his host.

  “And you—you wish to leave us also? We could use someone with your talents in our little community. Our door, as you know, is open to everyone. But I would in particular like to welcome you in.”

  They are in need of more blacksmiths. Seth understood this after only a few days. Brother Lyle, who performs that job now, has not been well trained. “Thank you. But I’m not sure I’m enough of—a good enough—Christian.” He is trying to imply that he rarely goes to church.

  But Brother Graves says lightly, “Your heritage means nothing to us. Your heart is what matters. If you allow me to be blunt, your bloodline makes you even more interesting to me. I know your story would attract others if they knew it. I would like to know your story myself.”

  Seth stops walking and looks at Brother Graves in surprise. He knows about me? He’s guessed? Above them the sky darkens as a fat crepuscular cloud drifts over the sun. Of course, as a missionary Brother Graves would have seen Indians from all different tribes, mixed and otherwise. Still, Seth feels caught and exposed.

  Brother Graves smiles. He offers Seth his arm. “Come, here we are.” The chapel is just ahead of them now. Brother Graves says hello to a group of Delaware men waiting by the steps, addressing each one by name, and then opens the heavy door to let Seth walk in first.

  “An Ottawa will be giving his testimony today,” he says as they go inside. “I think you will find his story compelling.”

  “My sister was living with the brethren two years ago,” the Ottawa begins. His large dark eyes crinkle when he speaks, and he is much taller than the translator standing next to him. He faces the congregation with his head bent as though he is used to being too large for a room.

  “She wished very much to be in the church, but her husband, not. So she went back with him to his people in the north. Last spring when she fell ill she begged her husband and his mother to send a message to the brethren to pray for her. This was promised but not done. I was present at her death, and the broken promise pressed itself upon my heart. After much thinking I resolved to make myself free of every thing and to come to the brethren myself. I gave to my mother all my silver ornaments and I released my weapons at the gate. When she was dying my sister told me that the blood of Jesus Christ would save her. As she was saved, so do I wish also to be saved in his blood.”

  Seth shifts restlessly on the bench, still uneasy from his conversation with Brother Graves. Susanna is not here, she is not sitting with the women on the other side of the chapel. He finds himself looking around for anyone with Potawatomi blood while the Ottawa continues talking about his guilt over the broken promise, even though it was not his own. This, at least, is something Seth understands—the feeling, rational or not, of being responsible for something someone else has done. For what his father has done. The chapel darkens as the sky changes itself into a mass of storm clouds, and a short while later the rain begins. Seth looks around at the native men with no axes or knives tucked into their belts. Giving up their weapons is a potent symbol.

  “I met with no happiness,” the Ottawa is saying, “only unrest, until I came to this place.”

  After the service most of the congregation stay in the little chapel waiting for the storm to pass, but Seth goes out to stand on the narrow front porch to watch it. The tree branches shake with the wind, and then the wind shifts and a spray of hard rain hits him full on the face. As he turns, he notices a few women sheltering beneath a nearby oak. One woman wearing a hooded cape is picking up an object from the ground. A few strands of dark red hair escape from her hood.

  He runs out holding his hat, his coat flapping open. By the time he gets to the oak tree his shirt is drenched. He says, smiling, “The last time I saw you, you were the one soaking wet.” He has to raise his voice to be heard over the rain.

  Susanna turns around with a look of surprise. “Seth! I thought you’d left.”

  Her face is pale but alive with thought and feeling, not cloaked like so many other women here. She holds an acorn in her hand. “My Aunt Ogg always kept one on her mantelpiece in Philadelphia, she said it protected the house against lightning. I’ve been debating whether to take this to the Sisters’ Choir or hope the wretched building is struck. Have you seen it? Awful place. We sleep on the floor on blankets.”

  The rain suddenly comes down much stronger, emptying itself in a rush. They both look up. For a moment the sound is deafening. A swift cool wind blows against them and moves the tree branches as if pointing the way out.

  “There, that will finish it,” Seth says when the sound dies.

  “Do you think?”

  “In a moment.”

  Sure enough, the rain lightens and then stops altogether. Susanna and Seth step out from under the dripping tree. The other two women peer up at the oyster-colored sky and stay put.

  As they walk down the path together, Susanna tells him that she’d been living in the Birthing Hut with Beatrice but they had to move out a few days ago when a woman went into labor. Now she sleeps with twenty other unmarried women in one room. During the day she works at the brethren’s store, mostly taking inventory. It is very dull, she tells him. She looks at him from time to time with a frank expression. There is something of a bird about her, he thinks, maybe her liveliness. The coarse missionary dress doesn’t suit her, it is too confining and dull. Blown leaves litter the path in front of them and a fresh scent rises from the earth. Usually there would be pairs of Indian women along here gathering up the green nuts they use for tea, but the storm has driven everyone to shelter. They are alone. He wants to touch her.

  “My father was not a churchgoer,” Susanna is saying. “He used to say that ever since Reverend Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door we need not be dependent on anyone to act as a liaison between ourselves and God. I don’t know if he ever spoke to you on the subject. He could be quite...what is the word...”

  “Persuasive?”

  “Lengthy.” She smiles. A lock of hair has fallen over her face. He has the urge to tuck it back behind her ear. “I’m like him, talking so much. But it is so good to see someone from home!”

  His heart twists but he tries not to give her words any more weight than they ostensibly have. “What are your plans for going back?” he asks.

  Her pleased expression fades and she looks away. “The trouble is,” she begins, and stops.

  He says, “Because I would be happy to accompany you and your sister when you decide to leave. It would be my pleasure.”

  “Our plans are a little uncertain,” she says. She still doesn’t look at him. “It is very kind of you to offer, but we may, or at least Beatrice, she wants to stay for a while.”

  “Stay here?”

  “She thinks our sisters have been...Penelope and Naomi...she saw them...well, I don’t know what she saw. But they are dead.”

  “Susanna.” He stops walking and turns to her. Without thinking he takes her two hands in his own. “I am so very sorry.”

  She doesn’t pull away. Her eyes are wet. “And now it’s only the two of us, Beatrice and myself, and in thinking of our future...”

  “Sister Susanna! Brother Spendlove!”

  He turns to see a tall, fair woman walking quickly up the path toward them. He doesn’t recognize her. How does she know his name?

  “Sister Consolation,” Susanna says. A stubborn look crosses her face.

  “I am surprised,” Consolation says when she reaches them. “I am deeply surprised. Brother Spendlove, here you see is a crossing path, which you may take. I’m sure you know that we do not permit unmarried women and men to walk together.”

  He feels his face grow warm. He bows. “My apologies.”

  Consolation lifts her dark shawl slightly and resettles it. A dismissive gesture, she does not want apologies. She takes Susanna by the arm and turns her away.

  There is nothing he can do but obey. But a moment later
when he looks back he notices the mirrors sewn into Consolation’s shawl. He wonders about that. Gemeinschaft has its own stories and you have to learn how to read them: white men sleep in the same buildings as natives because we are all one family. Ottawas forsake their weapons because only Christ’s blood will protect them. But shards of mirror on a shawl? Seth cannot read the story behind that. He is disappointed that he’s let this chance slip away from him, although he does not know exactly what he wanted, unless it was just to see her and try to take her home.

  The next day Consolation stops Susanna as she is walking to the store with Beatrice.

  “Today I would like your help, my dear, someplace else,” Consolation tells her. She smiles without pleasure, as if proud of her ability to be nice to people she does not particularly like. To Beatrice she says, “Will you cut me six yards of new linen? I’ll come by for it later today.”

  Above them a thin layer of clouds drifts across the sky like a web. Susanna follows her with some curiosity. Where are they going? She wants to ask but something in Consolation’s manner stops her. She is walking a step or two ahead of Susanna as if that’s her rightful place; forgetting, Susanna thinks, that in this settlement we are equals. When the sun pierces through the cloud cover, the mirrors on Consolation’s shawl throw out quick shafts of light like spears.

  “You are looking at my shawl,” Consolation says. “Perhaps you wonder why I took such trouble over it?”

  “The mirrors are very pretty,” Susanna says.

  “Well of course I did not sew them on for the looks of it. Quite the opposite.” She smiles a hard, satisfied smile. Susanna can see that Consolation is the type of woman who enjoys leading you into the warm, lovely room of her words and then, once there, dousing you with cold water.

  “One day a poor Miami wanted a mirror that I had with me. We had just arrived here, myself and my late husband Jeriah and Brother Graves and a handful of Delaware Indians from our old settlement in Pennsylvania. We were negotiating something, I don’t remember what, and the man saw the mirror in one of our wagons. The mirror had been made by my grandfather, but I realize now I should not have brought it with me. The desire for such objects should be resisted.”

  Consolation would not give the Miami the mirror but offered him instead a bag of seed corn, much more useful. To her horror he turned the bag upside down in disgust and spilled the seed on the ground. Later that night he came back and tried to steal the mirror but it broke.

  “These pieces are remnants,” Consolation says, resettling the shawl on her shoulders. “A lesson in vanity. And a reminder that we can never truly see ourselves if we look from the outside.”

  Again that hard, self-satisfied tone. Susanna has the urge to remind Consolation that she is not her pupil. She is tired of lessons, and in fact sympathizes with the Miami, who just wanted something beautiful to hold.

  “Nor can anyone else truly see another just by looking at his face,” she says.

  “True, my dear, true. Our actions tell our character much more potently than our looks. Self-will, vanity, a disrespect for our elders and the rules they live by—these speak of a limited person, I fear.” She gives Susanna a meaningful look.

  Susanna’s face flushes with annoyance. She spent five minutes talking with an unmarried man, a friend of hers from home. That means she’s self-willed and vain and disrespectful? Anyway, why should she take moral counsel from a woman who clearly has had every advantage in life? A beautiful, tall, wealthy woman—there is obviously wealth in her past—who wishes, as if these advantages are not enough, to be thought of as morally superior as well.

  “We can also be limited by a lack of empathy for those undergoing hardship,” Susanna replies. She is thinking about her own losses but Consolation says, “Ah, the natives, it is true, we feel for them, hard though it might be to understand why they cling to their difficult ways. And now here we are, my dear. The tannery.”

  They’ve come to the end of the path, where a small cabin stands by itself. The tannery? To Susanna it looks more like a potting shed than anything else. It is surrounded by dry, partially denuded elderberry bushes and has but one tiny window and a sloping door. No one else is around. They are at the very limits of the Gemeinschaft land, half forsaken and overgrown.

  “But I don’t know anything about tanning hides,” Susanna says. She feels that nothing will induce her to go into that dark, dismal shed. “I’m better with figures.”

  “Oh, the girl inside will show you. Unless you want to help prepare the lower fields instead? Some native women are out there now. You can bring water to them, if you don’t want to hoe.”

  Bring water to Indians? Or hoe? Susanna looks miserably at Consolation, who meets her gaze without wavering.

  “We must put our vanity behind us, my dear,” Consolation says. She smiles her hard smile. “It only gets in our way.”

  Inside the tannery a native girl stands at a long trestle table with her back to the door. She is looking at a lumpy hide folded unevenly in thirds. On one side of the table are two large mud-colored barrels and a narrow cask of water, and on the other side is a mangle. A couple of stools have been pushed out of the way.

  “Two Seneca scraped off the flesh on this one,” the girl says in English without turning around. She pushes it aside. “They did a most miserable job.”

  The smell of rotting meat is terrible. Susanna puts her hand over her nose and breathes through her mouth. “I’ve been told to help you,” she says through her fingers.

  The girl whirls around. She looks familiar. For a moment they stare at each other.

  “What happened to the other girl?” she asks Susanna. She is young, maybe twelve or thirteen, and stands firmly with her two legs spread like a warrior. Now Susanna recognizes her: it is the girl who came to the Birthing Hut with the woman in labor, when she and Beatrice had to move out. The pregnant woman was Delaware, and Consolation called this girl her daughter. But anyone could see they were not from the same tribe. They’d arrived in Gemeinschaft only a few hours before the woman’s labor began, although Consolation said they’d lived here for many years on and off. She called the young girl Miriam.

  Susanna holds out her hand. “My name is Susanna.”

  But the girl says nothing and does not take her hand. Susanna tries again.

  “Ndeluwensi Susanna,” she says in Delaware. In English she says, “What is your real name? Not Miriam, I shouldn’t think.”

  But the girl just makes a sound with her tongue indicating that she does not deem the question worth answering. With two hands she lifts the heavy lid off of one of the barrels that stands by the table, by far the largest barrel that Susanna has ever seen. Floating inside is a length of deerskin. Also something else, a misshapen ball of—what?

  “What is that?” Susanna asks. The girl does not answer. “Keku hech?” Susanna repeats.

  The girl looks down into the barrel. “Horse brain,” she says in English.

  Susanna takes a step back. “How long does it stay there?”

  “Until the next horse dies.”

  Squinting her eyes half closed—she does not want to look into the water again—Susanna helps the girl lift the wet deerskin from the barrel. Together they carry it two steps to the mangle, where they thread it through again and again trying to wring out as much water as possible. It is heavy, wet work. In no time the front of Susanna’s dress is soaked and water drips onto her moccasins. When they have wrung out as much water as they can, they lift the skin onto the table, stretch it taut, and nail it down. Then for the rest of the day they take turns pushing and stretching the skin with a heavy canoe paddle, working its surface in long strokes as it dries.

  At every step the girl Miriam explains what they need to do with such a heavy tone of distaste it is as if she believes Susanna has brought on all of her troubles, whatever they are. She has a wide, young face and pale skin. Her dark eyes have the look of someone constantly reassessing everything around her. She is strong
for someone so young, but Susanna is strong too from all the years working at their store, unloading goods, pushing barrels, and lugging furs from the counter to the shelves.

  Miriam says, “I suppose it was Sister Consolation who directed you here.” She looks into Susanna’s eyes. “I do not like Sister Consolation.” A challenge.

  Susanna says, “Nor do I.”

  That surprises the girl. She looks like she might say something else but then closes her lips tightly. There is something about her that reminds Susanna of her younger sister Lilith, the stubbornness perhaps, and she decides on this basis, a whim, that she will make this girl her friend. She has never tried to make a friend before, having no need in Severne. Her sisters were her companions. But here it is different. Beatrice will only speak of the brethren and their work, and has recently taken it upon herself to learn more of their doctrine, which she repeats to Susanna with none of the storytelling skills of Penelope. Although Susanna can sometimes induce Sister Johanna to talk about her past or her people or the news of the village, the conversation inevitably leads back to missionary work, and the same is true with just about every other woman Susanna has tried to converse with, most of whom speak limited English anyway. The few white women are mostly married. Sister Louisa, a single white woman about Susanna’s age, is so conscious of trying to be humble that she cannot form a sentence without six or seven qualifiers (“It is my small and perhaps erroneous opinion and if I am wrong please do me the honor to correct me...”), and her strong overbite tends to make her spit when she speaks. The only other white woman near her age, Sister Pauline, is busy embroidering a crazy patchwork of Bible quotations onto her blanket, none of them straight across but jutting up and down as she suddenly runs out of room, and she answers any question put to her with something from scripture.

  Susanna is lonely, she knows she is lonely, and she also knows it is wicked to be lonely considering the fate of her other sisters. She is the lucky one. But she wishes she had someone to talk to who didn’t only want to talk about opening Indian hearts and how Jesus most gruesomely died for us all.