One of the sons says something to Koman, shrugging and smiling. When he smiles small wrinkles make an O around his mouth.
“Not enough wild meat anymore,” Koman translates.
Seth watches them smoke. They inhale deeply and seem to enjoy the conversation. They don’t have an air of despair. No feeling of tragedy. It’s just a fact: not enough wild meat. So now they will do something else, something to augment the hunting. Pigs and cattle. Seth notices a long kind of flute on the smiling son’s belt, which he has seen Old Adam use when he’s fishing—it makes a certain noise to attract the fish. The Miami will do what they have to do to survive.
The son reaches over and feels the hem of Seth’s trousers.
“What will you take for?” he asks.
The gray linen fabric is stained and ripped in one place, although that can be mended. Still, Seth is surprised. The Miami’s leather breeches are much more useful for traveling in a swamp. More effective against the mosquitoes, for one thing.
Seth points to the man’s own breeches, and they agree to trade. Wearing the breeches will mark him as Miami, or as one who trades with Miami. But he doesn’t care about that. Even better would be one of their hide tunics. He would trade everything he had if it meant even one mosquito could not get through to his skin. He goes to his canoe and comes back with Cade’s fishing net.
“This gift for you,” he says. “For your shirt?”
Twenty-One
As soon as she and Meera come out from the trees that mark the end of the Great Black Swamp, Susanna sees the two Wyandot men fishing on the riverbank.
The men’s poles are stuck fast in the sandy dirt, and they are squatting next to them playing a game with rocks—gambling?—and laughing at some mistake one of them has just made. Susanna’s first urge is to turn around and escape their notice, but where would she run to? Back into the Black Swamp? She almost cannot believe that they have gotten free of it at last. She looks at the Maumee River stretched out before them, which is wide and green and dotted with slivers of islands like thin crusts of bread. Susanna draws in her breath at the vast pale sky above the water. It’s been a long time since she has seen anything overhead except tree branches.
In the end Omie let them stay with her for three nights, but she never changed her mind about the canoe. Yet she was generous in her way, feeding them and washing their clothes and packing enough food for two weeks although she claimed the journey would take them less than half that time, even with crossing the Maumee. On the morning they left, she herself led them to the rill—to Susanna, indistinguishable from all the other rills they passed—that would lead them out of the Black Swamp. Omie lifted her hand in farewell as she turned without breaking her pace to go back. Besides pigeon pies, she gave them a jar of raisin wine and a good many bones for soup, wrapped up in a handkerchief. When Susanna drank the wine later, she fancied it carried the faint taste of flower stems.
They have come out of the trees to a spot where the Maumee turns, and the two men are on a narrow sandbar near its bend. Both of them are muscular and thin and wear only a small patch of deerskin covering their loins. Behind them lay two large cords of firewood. One stands to check his fishing pole, and Susanna steps back into the tree shadows. But Meera walks boldly past her down the bank.
“Wait,” Susanna whispers, and reaches out to grab her arm. Too late. Meera walks toward the two men and after a moment Susanna follows, feeling both annoyed and protective. Why does Meera never consult me? she thinks peevishly.
Meera approaches the two men holding something out in her hand—four white beads—and she asks the men where they can find a boatman to cross them to the other side of the river.
“We are looking for the Wyandot village,” she says in Delaware. “We were told it was to the north.”
The older man looks at Susanna and speaks quickly in a low voice, a question.
Meera says, “She is my property.”
Susanna has a moment’s surprise at that. The younger man wears an affable expression, as if everything he looks at pleases him in a way that he did not foresee. When he opens his mouth, she sees that his two front teeth have been filed to points.
There is a boatman, the older one says, just a mile or so up the river. But he warns them that the man has moods and you never know where those moods might lead him—sometimes away from his boat for days. Follow the river north until you see a small dock, he tells them. If no one is there, sit down and wait.
“And the Wyandot village is on the other side?”
He gives her directions. Although he’s a Wyandot, he doesn’t say if he is from that village or not. Meera thanks him and gives him two more white beads, which he hands to the younger man.
“Lennowayeh-hum,” Meera tells Susanna as they walk away.
“What’s that?”
The men are eunuchs. Susanna feels a flush of shock as Meera explains it to her. “What? But why? Are you sure?”
“Did you not notice the bundles of firewood? They have been sent to do a woman’s work. There was one in Nushemakw’s tribe. It is not so unusual.”
Susanna looks back at the men. “Was it a punishment?” The men, playing their game again, are squatting close together making their own shade. They do not look unhappy.
“Usually the men choose it themselves. I don’t know why.”
“But afterward...how do they marry?”
Meera shrugs. “Some have women as companions, some have men. The eunuch in Nushemakw’s tribe lived with a man. He made beautiful little animals out of twigs and acorn tops, and was a skilled hunter. He taught me to shoot.”
“What happened to him?”
“He died and was buried, the same as everyone else. Let us take cover, we need not walk in plain sight.”
A line of beech trees comes down to meet the riverbank, and Susanna follows Meera into their shade. The eunuchs are strong, healthy men who have chosen to live this way. She tries to understand it. Meera is telling her about some of the hunting she did with the eunuch, a bear they tracked for six days, while they walk over piles of old leaves and fallen branches. Without a path it is hard walking, and even after their time at Omie’s cabin their strength is not what it was. After a while they decide to stop and split the last pigeon pie and then they rest, each one leaning back against a tree trunk. Susanna feels herself drift into a hot doze. She is following her mother from room to room in their cabin, now a cave-like maze with dozens of doorways, but she cannot get Ellen to stop or turn around.
Something wakes her. She opens her eyes to see the younger eunuch squatting in front of her with the flat of his hands on opposite knees. He is wearing the same affable expression as before. She draws back reflexively, hitting her head on the tree trunk.
“Meera,” she says. Her voice comes out high and scared, like a child’s.
But he just smiles at her showing his pointed teeth, and says in English, “Not safe here to sleep.”
His companion stands behind him with his arms at his sides. The cords of wood are tied high up on their backs, the way women carry wood, and the older one has a string of strong-smelling fish slung over one shoulder.
Meera gets to her feet. “We weren’t...we just ate. We were resting.”
“A band of Ottawa not far away,” the older one says. “Could be mischief.” He tells them they should climb a tree and wait for the Ottawa to pass.
“Did you see them?” Meera asks. “How do you know?”
The older one says something in Wendat and both men laugh. Meera translates for Susanna: “The smell.”
They choose a thick, leafy buckeye with small orange flowers growing along the base of the trunk like tiny heads of flame. The older eunuch straightens the stems once they are up in the branches to hide their presence. From where she sits, Susanna can see the top of his head. It has been a long time since she’s seen a group of men. Her palms, gripping the tree branch, feel slippery. What would the Ottawa do if they found them? She’s heard sto
ries of prisoners who are burned, their hearts bled into a broth. But Liza Footbound told her that stories like these were lies. Still, she tries to position her feet so they cannot be seen from the ground, and Meera, a little higher up, does the same.
When they are satisfied that Meera and Susanna are well hidden, the two eunuchs shrug their wood bundles up a little higher on their backs. Then, like Omie, they walk on without a backward glance.
For more than an hour Meera and Susanna stay up in the tree. Susanna grows hotter and more uncomfortable with each slow minute. Perhaps the Ottawa have gone by without being seen, she thinks. Perhaps they found a path farther from the river. Perhaps the eunuchs lied. But in any case, when she notices that the sun is directly overhead, that the whole of the morning has passed, she decides that she cannot stay in that cramped position a moment longer.
She says, “I’m climbing down.”
“Is it safe?” Meera whispers.
“I don’t want to miss the boatman. I don’t want to run out of food.”
She has learned one thing at least: food must be considered at every juncture. The trunk of the buckeye is smoother than it looks and her grip slips coming down, causing her to fall on the orange flowers and crushing the eunuchs’ careful work. She stands and holds her breath to listen, but can hear nothing except the sound of the rushing water and the same birdcalls they have heard all morning. Meera climbs down more carefully, and they make their way over to where the tree cover is heavier. They do not speak to each other, fearful of missing any warning sound of the Ottawa.
But they come to the ferry landing without seeing anyone. Through the tree branches Susanna spies a lopsided dock with mossy water lapping up to it, and a weathered gray shack up the shore. There the boatman sits against an unevenly nailed wall with his hat down over his eyes and a hunting rifle across his lap. He takes his time standing when Susanna calls out to him. He looks her over, and then looks at Meera, and tells them his name is Swale. He has long matted hair that reaches halfway down his back like a dark dirty web and he is swarthy for a white man. His arms and legs are fat with muscle, and when he speaks his voice is so heavy it could carry clear across the river. Yet for all of that he is barely taller than Meera. A strong, short man.
The ferry is tied up against the dock: a sorry-looking platform made up of wet gray planks nailed together without symmetry, and splintering everywhere. Swale loads Meera’s bundle onto it with the manner of a man pitching hay.
“That’s a pound apiece,” he tells them.
“Will you take federal dollars?” Susanna asks.
“Aye, if it’s minted these last five years.”
She opens her grain sack to get Seth’s purse. For a moment her hand gropes, finding nothing. She opens the neck of the sack wider and looks in. Still nothing. She dumps everything out onto the dark compacted sand.
“My purse,” she says.
Her eyes run back and forth over her possessions. The purse has to be here. There is no other place for it to be. Meera kneels down and spreads the objects apart with her fingers, the ax and the dinner knives and everything else, but there is no way the bulky purse could be hiding underneath any of that. After a minute, the boatman throws Meera’s bundle off the ferry and turns to go back to his shack.
“Wait,” Susanna tells him. She looks at Meera. “The eunuchs. They must have taken it while we slept.”
“They were very quiet,” Meera says.
“And afterward they made us hide so they could get away.”
“Your wench speaks English same as you,” Swale interrupts roughly. She looks at his face, which is crossed with an expression she can only call judging. She realizes that she and Meera have been speaking Delaware to each other. When did that become their shared language?
“Bad enough you take one of them as your wife,” he says.
For a moment Susanna doesn’t understand his meaning, and then when she does she almost laughs. He thinks she is a boy.
Meera says rapidly in Delaware, “And you look like you were born of wolves and then abandoned by them for your ugliness and backward manner.”
Swale glares at Meera, understanding nothing except that an insult was given. He thinks Susanna is a boy but that hardly bothers her, the lost purse is much worse. Her hair is short from cutting nits out of it, and ragged and dirty. She has no cap and her split skirt could be taken for unbecoming trousers. She is thin to the point of a stick. And why else would she have an Indian girl with her? People carry their own beliefs with them and then paint the world accordingly. That’s what Sirus always said. But she won’t bother to correct Swale—he might give them worse trouble if he knew. They aren’t in the Black Swamp anymore, they’re back in the world of men. Already they’ve met with thievery and insult and the day is little more than half over.
How will they get across the Maumee with no money? She looks down at her belongings scattered on the bank.
“Is there anything here you would take in trade?” she asks in English.
Swale leans over to examine what she has. Feathers. Dinner knives. Sirus’s ax. Their kettle. Meera clutches their bundle of food, not on offer.
“Don’t need feathers. I’ll take everything else.”
Meera says in English, “We will keep the necklace. You have no use for that.” To Susanna, in Delaware, she says, “The Wyandots are allied with the Chippewa. They’ll value the necklace of a chief. That will be enough for the ransom.”
“But we need the kettle, too.” In her pouch Susanna still has her mother’s cherry buttons and the avian-head nail scissors, but Meera puts a hand on her arm. “Punitu,” she says. Leave it.
“But without the kettle, how will we cook?”
“We’ve fared worse,” Meera tells her, and that is certainly true.
Swale poles them across the water and holds the ferry more or less steady as they disembark. Susanna hates to think of Sirus’s ax in his hands but there is nothing she can do about that. He points out the wagon path that leads to the Wyandot village, a couple of hours’ walk, he says. Then he spits not too far off Susanna’s foot, his last gesture of disgust.
But Susanna doesn’t care what he thinks. The day is still fine, with a thin string of clouds hanging overhead like a partially beaded necklace. For a long time she can still hear the Maumee behind them.
“Perhaps I should go into the village by myself,” Meera says presently. “Just at first.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I could find out if your sisters are there.”
“You told me they would be.”
Meera hesitates. Then she says, “If they are alive, I mean.”
So that’s it. Meera is protecting her.
“I want to hear for myself,” Susanna tells her. She adjusts her nearly empty grain sack and keeps walking. Just behind her conviction that she will find her sisters at the village, there is the other conviction that she will not. A worry she has to resist. Her plan is very rough: she’ll negotiate their freedom and then they’ll leave. From here, it is easy to get to Sandusky, and from Sandusky they can get to Philadelphia. Her basic plan hasn’t changed. Leave Ohio and go back East. They pass a maple tree with an unbroken spider web shining in the sun, a sign of good luck.
Eventually the brook widens and they begin to see the first signs of people: a partial footprint in the mud and broken branches set off together in a pile next to the wagon path.
“They no longer bother to cover their tracks,” Meera remarks. “We are fully in their territory. Will you hand me the shawl?”
Consolation’s shawl with the last of their food is wadded up inside Susanna’s grain sack. Meera reaches inside and pulls out a small hard lime.
“Where did you get that?” Susanna asks.
“From Omie.” Meera slices the lime in half with her hunting knife. Then she takes a fistful of her thick, dark hair and begins cutting it off.
“What are you doing? Your hair!”
“I must make my
self humble.” She scoops up some dirt and squeezes half of the lime into it. Then she rubs the dirt into her shorn hair.
“This is what the Wyandot do?” Susanna asks.
“It is what I do.”
Her hair looks ghastly. Already the lime juice has altered its color in places. Why would Meera have to make herself ugly? Wouldn’t her uncle tribe welcome her no matter what, like a lost daughter, a lost niece? Susanna is beginning to wish she had a better plan.
“If something worries you,” Meera says, “say scan-oh-nye. That means peace in Wendat.”
Her chopped-off hair makes her look like a stranger. “Why would something worry me?” Susanna asks. But her jaw tenses as she says it.
When the path turns they see the first faint plume of smoke in the distance. They are very close now. Perhaps someone from the village has already seen them and is running back with the news. They follow the path into a stand of birch trees with dark knobs running up their trunks like open sores, and two loose pigs come squealing toward them before veering off. Susanna feels her stomach constrict like a violin string quickly and expertly tightened. After a while the path opens up into a long, sloped clearing, and suddenly there it is spread out below them.
“Yadata,” Meera says in Wendat.
The village.
They both stop to stare. Susanna has never seen a settled Indian village before, only ones that have been abandoned. It is much larger than she had imagined. Below them is a wide, fast-moving stream with a bridge at one end, marking the entrance to the village. Beyond the bridge she can see scores of small huts and longhouses laid out neatly across the flat plain, and planted cornfields to the north. To the east, a palisade of sharp poles runs along the perimeter like a fence.
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