The ferryman is the same one, Swale, who crossed Meera and Susanna so many weeks ago. Just after dawn they see smoke rising from his chimney, and then Swale comes out to the river carrying a bucket. They wave him over. Seth gives him two English pound notes for their crossing, the last of his money, and Swale tells them of a trading house a mile or two south, a cabin in an abandoned settlement surrounded by a stockade. There they might find someone who can take them upriver, he says.
The Maumee is vividly green and weedy, and Susanna almost falls asleep watching the ferry pole bring up stringy wet plants and then disappear into the water and then bring them up again. It’s a rocking, soothing motion, and Swale is adept at keeping up a rhythm, even graceful. Seth comes to stand next to her. He touches her hand with his pinkie and she puts one arm around him, and then the other, encircling him, not caring who sees. She rests her head against his chest. Swale does not seem to connect her with the boy he crossed before.
When they get to the opposite shore, Susanna spots Sirus’s ax by the side of Swale’s shack. The handle is already split but the blade looks well cared for, and although they barter hard Swale will not trade for it, not for anything they have.
At the stockade they fare better. Inside one of the old cabins, a dark-haired Irishman named Patrick Carey has set up a trading post. He agrees to take Seth’s musket and three of Meera’s bracelets in exchange for taking them up the Maumee. He has but one boat and cannot sell it, but he can land them at a bigger trading house where they might purchase a skiff for the rest of their journey: Beaver Creek to Hammer Creek to West Creek to the Blanchard River, straight up through the heart of the Great Black Swamp. A fortnight will see you through to the end, Patrick Carey tells them.
Two days up and two days back, Susanna thinks. How could I have been so foolish to believe that? It is October already, or later. The sun seems a long way off. Like Penelope, all she wants to do is put as much distance as possible between herself and the Raisin. Penelope still has the hazel twig stuck in her thick, golden-red hair. It will be there for days, and when it falls out Susanna will find her another.
By the time they begin rowing their skiff up the Blanchard, certain truths have come back to Penelope: one, that Thomas Forbes did not visit her in the night to give her the child growing inside her, for Thomas Forbes is dead. The babe is the rogue’s. But Penelope is a Quiner, and with all the spirit she has in her command she wills the child to be one hundred percent Quiner too. The child will be a girl, and she will have red hair. Penelope is determined.
She is still sick sometimes, midmorning usually, and once in a while in the afternoon. When she is sitting upright she wants to lie down but when she lies down she waits and waits for sleep. In the skiff she holds Tripper on her lap. He is very good when they are on water but when they pull to shore he wants to run. She is never comfortable until he is safely tied up again. Meera says she will watch him but how can she watch him all the time? Of course, Indians have special talents that white men do not. Penelope knows this for a fact. It is because whites eat too much salt, her old Wyandot mistress told her, and so have lost certain powers.
Another truth: she will never have to set foot in the rogue’s smelly cabin again. The bucket of morning sickness, the animal skins tanned and stretched out for days at a time, the empty jugs of alcohol that still retain their cloying odor. And his odor.
“You cannot think how closely I had to smell him,” she tells Meera when they are stretched out waiting for sleep. Meera’s hands are very gentle and she makes Penelope a good bed every night out of tree bark and leaves.
“White men do not smell good,” Meera agrees.
“He was not a man, he was a devil. He had warts on each one of his knuckles. He held me by the hair when he touched me and afterward he slept with his fisted hands crossed over his neck. Then I could plainly see: wart, wart, wart, wart.”
“You must try to forget,” Meera tells her.
They meet not a single person until they come upon a preacher on horseback near Pike Run. His name, he tells them, is Reverend Forbes, but he is no relation to Thomas Forbes, Penelope’s late husband. They share some food with him, and Penelope finds herself telling him the story of her captivity and escape. He is intrigued, and takes out a small leather-bound notebook and a pencil to take a few notes.
“This gentleman found you?” He nods toward Seth.
“No, my sister Susanna.”
He says, “The gentleman is more believable.”
He wants to write a sermon about her tale. It will be a comfort to women he says, and when it is finished he promises to mail her a copy. She tells him to send it to their store in Severne. “I’ll not leave it again,” she says solemnly, as if he’s asked her to swear to it.
Back on the Blanchard, water sprays up the side of her face. She grows colder and colder the further away from the rogue she gets, but this, she decides, is a positive thing. Even the cold of a grave is better than that cabin—a third truth. She is sorely tired of squirrel meat, which they eat day and night. If it were up to her they would eat venison instead. She would be a good shot, she is sure. She would be a great hunter. The boat lurches and her stomach turns over and she touches the bit of hazel twig in her hair. It reminds her of the little twig of yellow flowers that Naomi kept hidden in her moccasin. Where is that now? She would like to ask if anyone knows if only she weren’t so tired and sick, and if her thoughts didn’t fly off randomly, landing somewhere only briefly before sailing forth again.
Once in Virginia, when Seth was a boy, an Austrian artisan came to the town wanting to cut silhouettes for a penny. He wore a badly powdered wig that sat uneasily to one side, and even when he pushed it back with his hand it fell again almost immediately, as though that side of his head had a dent.
Amos said, “We’ll get a silhouette of the two boys together if he’ll still charge a penny.” As always, he was eager to get more for his money than anyone else.
Seth wonders now what happened to that silhouette. They probably left it in Virginia with everything else, the house that his mother and then his stepmother had filled with furniture and dishes. After his second wife died, Amos traded all he had for the supplies that would get them to the Ohio Country and, he said, to their fortune. He thought he would get rich trading with Indians. He knew their language and fancied that he knew how they thought. But Sirus Quiner got to Severne first. Amos never forgave him for that. Now Seth wonders if his father had been biding his time all these years, working iron and waiting. He would not be surprised.
They leave the skiff at the same landing where Seth and Cade sold the Quiners’ team and wagon so many months ago, and walk the last ten miles to Severne. They are following the same dirt track Seth came by as a child. But this time, instead of coming by wagon with a drunkard father and a younger brother who was taller than he was even then, Seth comes upon the settlement walking alongside his beloved. He feels all the luck in this fact. He thinks of the first time he saw Susanna, how she looked at him and then looked at his brother and then looked at him again. Her hair in two red braids down her back, a dented kettle in her hands.
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.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Severne One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Gemeinschaft Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Maumee River Valley Twelve
Thirteen
The Great Black Swamp Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Yadata Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
The River Raisin Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
About the author
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Severne
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
&nbs
p; Gemeinschaft
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Maumee River Valley
Twelve
Thirteen
The Great Black Swamp
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Yadata
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
The River Raisin
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
About the author
Thieving Forest Page 34