The Endless Forest

by Sara Donati

  “Dost thou mean, do I miss my family and my home? Thou sees that John comes to call whenever he can, and that helps a great deal. But I am happy here, so happy that sometimes I fear that I might wake up and find it was all a dream.”

  She glanced at Hannah, who smiled at her. “This is where I am meant to be,” Susanna said. “I want no other life.”

  “Listen,” Hannah said, straightening.

  “Who is that with the rattle?” Susanna said after a moment.

  Martha thought it was a question for its own sake and expected no answer, but Hannah had one.

  “Standing-Elk is come. Listen, the Round Dance is starting.”

  Hannah looked so excited and pleased that Martha felt her own pulse leap.

  “Then you should go ahead, both of you,” she said. “As soon as I’m warm through I’ll dress and come out, I promise.”

  —

  The bonfire had been built up so that the flames shot into the night sky and pulsed with the beat of the drum. It had a life force of its own, and as it danced it threw shadows around it like a many-layered skirt.

  Daniel retrieved his pack from where he had left it on the other side of the lake, and standing there in the shadows, he dressed. First he exchanged the wet sling for a dry one, and then he pulled on breeches and a loose shirt, moving gingerly and praying that his shoulder would leave him in peace this evening. At the moment the pain was small and far away; cold water could do that, and the excitement. And most likely, he told himself, the kissing.

  He cast one more glance at the cabin and saw his sister and Susanna closing the door behind themselves, without Martha. But she would come. He felt the truth of that deep in his gut. In those few seconds when he held her and her whole body softened, he understood that she wanted to be here, with him. She was frightened, but more than that she was curious and open, and that was enough, for now at least.

  As he walked back to the fire he watched Gabriel strip down to loincloth and leggings and then join the circle of men moving into the dance. Runs-from-Bears and Standing-Elk sat with Sky-Wound-Round on benches, the big water drum between them. Standing-Elk had horn rattles in both hands, and all three of them were already caught up in the singing. At Good Pasture there were sometimes a dozen men gathered around two or three water drums and another three or four with horn rattles, but here at Lake in the Clouds they had their own ways, and they were good.

  Daniel came into the heat and light and moved into the shuffle-kick-step of the dance behind Blue-Jay, just as the women came up to form another circle inside their own. Martha would join them, and the dancing would go on and on until they were all breathless with laughter. As this thought came to him, Daniel saw that Martha had come out on the porch and John Mayfair was walking toward her with purpose.

  As soon as Martha stepped off the porch John Mayfair appeared—seemingly out of the shadows—and startled her so that she jumped. She would have fallen—for the second time in one evening—if he had not caught her by the elbow and steadied her.

  She had never seen a man so determined to apologize. He should not have let her go fill the water jug on her own, and he hoped she would forgive him for his thoughtlessness. Martha had forgot about the jug and about John Mayfair too, but she hoped her expression didn’t give that much away.

  It was hard to talk over the crackle of the flames, the drums and the singing and the dancing, but she wanted to put his mind at ease.

  “You are not to blame, and there was no real harm done. Won’t you join the—” She stopped herself, but not quite in time. “Pardon me, I forgot. Of course you’re not dancing.”

  He shook off her apology. “While I have the opportunity, may I ask thee a question?”

  Martha pulled up short. She gathered the borrowed shawl more closely around herself and gave a brief nod.

  John looked away into the trees and when he looked back he was smiling. A small and apologetic smile. “Will Callie be joining the party, does thou know?”

  For a moment Martha was so surprised that she couldn’t organize her thoughts. He rushed ahead before she could respond.

  “Callie and I are—I like to think of myself as her friend. I—” He paused. “I am interested in her work. We sometimes talk about apples. About grafting. Thou must know….”

  He looked a little panicked, so that Martha’s initial surprise gave way to the impulse to reassure him.

  “Oh,” she said. “Yes, I know. We spent so much time following her father around the orchard. I believe I can name all the different trees. Snow and Seek-No-Further and the Spitzenburg. There was a very good one called Duchess.”

  He nodded avidly. “It’s one of Callie’s favorites. She had a graft of the Duchess on the Red Moon that produced its first fruit last year. I do believe the new apple was as close as it is possible to get to perfection. It was medium-sized, with a skin of red and yellow both and a crisp bite with the most flavorful juice. The new apple—she called it Bleeding Heart—would have made her fortune. If not for the flood.”

  Understanding and regret brought sudden tears to Martha’s eyes. She was ashamed of the small worries that had kept her from seeing the depths of Callie’s loss.

  “Few people know about this,” John Mayfair said. “So I suppose it is wrong of me to tell thee. But I am worried about her, and thou art her friend. Is that not so?”

  “I am,” Martha said firmly. “And now it is my turn to ask, what are you to Callie?”

  He seemed to be anticipating the question. “I am her friend. I can be nothing else.” His gaze moved across the scene before them and dwelled on his sister. The speed of the dance had picked up and Susanna was flushed with excitement. The two circles were moving in opposite directions and as they watched, Susanna and Blue-Jay passed each other. Susanna’s face, tilted up toward Blue-Jay’s, was as bright as the firelight.

  Even among such well-favored men, Blue-Jay stood out. When Martha was a girl it had been everyone’s pastime, watching Blue-Jay and admiring him, though few would admit such a thing. In the old days the Bonners and their Mohawk relations had been respected and feared by all, but most kept their distance; certainly no white girl would admit that she liked an Indian boy. It would have been like standing up in church and announcing that you preferred the devil to the angels.

  It surprised nobody when Gabriel Bonner married Annie, but Susanna Mayfair binding herself to a full-blooded Mohawk, that was too much for her people to bear. Thus Birdie had explained the situation to Martha, and it seemed that her perceptions were very much in line with the truth.

  Susanna had been brave and strong enough to come to Blue-Jay. It took great courage to step beyond the line drawn by faith and duty and habit.

  “She’s happy,” Martha said. “Whatever it cost her to leave you all, she is happy.”

  “Yes,” said Susanna’s brother. “She is. And as much as she is missed, I am happy for her.”

  Someone called out yo’-ha’ and both the inner and the outer circles jumped in place to change direction. Most of the men had shed their shirts, and sweat shone on skin of every shade, from Ben Savard’s rich deep red-brown to Ethan’s pale winter white. Every one of them was built in the way of men who worked hard, with heavy muscles that flexed across shoulders and down thighs, the flow and flex almost too beautiful to watch.

  Martha looked away for a moment. She could not ask John Mayfair what it was he wanted, not only because it was too forward a question and none of her business, but because she had an idea of what he might say, and she had no answers for him. Just a few months ago Martha might have spoken of love and fate and the need to follow one’s heart. She had been smitten with the very idea of love, and wanted nothing more than to have everyone else join her in that state. Now she knew better.

  She said, “I am glad that Callie has a friend such as you, John Mayfair. I will try to be a better one.”

  When she looked up again, Daniel was standing there. He was breathing hard, sweat rolling down h
is face even this far from the bonfire. He held out his hand palm up, and his fingers curled in invitation.

  “You’re wanted at the dance,” John Mayfair said. “Please, don’t let me stop you.”

  The bonfire made an undulating island of light in the darkened glen, and Martha let the women pull her into it. More than that, she was glad of it.

  She had seen the Mohawk dance once or twice as a girl, when the whole school had been invited up to the Midwinter Ceremony at Lake in the Clouds. She remembered the excitement of those visits well, but few of the details; she didn’t know the names of the dances or what was required of her. None of that seemed to matter.

  The women danced together, in a line or circle, interwoven with the men or separately, and the steps were easy enough to follow. Sometimes someone would call out yo’ and the other men would respond ha’ but the driving force, the animating force, was the water drum. She felt the pulse of it move up from the ground and through her feet, along the length of leg and backbone and into the very bones of her skull.

  When the women finally retired to the trestles the men kept dancing. The Robin Dance, Annie told her, handing her a beaker of water. It was very cold but Martha was too thirsty to worry about her stomach or good manners; she gulped, and then Jennet filled it again for her. Jennet was so flushed with color and so clearly happy, in the light of the fire she might have been no more than twenty if not for the child she carried so unselfconsciously.

  The drum’s rhythm was speeding up steadily. There was little talk now and less laughter, they were all so focused on the dancing. Because it was beautiful, there was no other word for the sight of men in their prime moving for the sake of movement. As a student Martha had been taught to observe line and proportion, but this—men in the flesh—no sculptor could equal it.

  Martha watched Gabriel spin in place with his long hair flying around him, his feet moving so fast that a dust cloud reached his knees. She thought of her friends in Manhattan, of Marianne and Catherine and Luisa, whether any of them could watch this and see it for what it was, or if training and habit would blind them.

  When she could resist not one moment longer, Martha turned to watch Daniel.

  He wore his hair cropped short, but now a few damp curls fell forward over his brow. His whole face was streaked with sweat. His expression was not joyful; Martha didn’t know what she saw there, beyond deep concentration. At this moment it seemed his whole world was drum and rattle, and so for once she could watch him and he wouldn’t catch her at it.

  All the Bonner men were big, so tall that finding one of them in a crowd was no difficulty. As tall as Daniel was, his younger brother was an inch or two bigger still, as was Blue-Jay. Both Gabriel and Blue-Jay were woodsmen, heavily muscled in chest and shoulder, back and leg. Daniel spent most of his day in the classroom, but it was hard to see any evidence of that. He was long and lithe and powerful in the way of the big cats who hunted in the forests.

  His left arm was back in its sling. Martha forced herself to look at it directly. There was a lack of symmetry, certainly. The muscles of his good arm were more developed, but the left side was not withered, as she had expected. Martha realized how little she really knew about the nature of the injury.

  Hannah had come to sit down beside her. She said, “You know he was in the militia in the last war?”

  Martha nodded but didn’t look at Hannah. “Of course. Under Magistrate Bookman.”

  For a while it seemed as if Hannah would say nothing more, but then what came next was as fluid as it was detailed.

  “There is a spot in the shoulder where many nerves come together. That bundle of nerves is protected by muscle and by the collarbone. It’s very hard to reach on a healthy person, though I have known men who could do it. Dig in hard with two fingers to compress the nerves at the juncture, I mean. It’s a pain that can’t really be described. I think probably only a severe burn is worse.”

  “And that’s what Daniel lives with?”

  “It isn’t as bad as it once was, but I can’t tell you why. Whether the nerves are healing with time, or if he has just learned to shut it out of his mind, at least some of the time. Such things are possible.”

  “How do you know the pain is less than it was?” Martha asked. “Does he talk of that?”

  “No,” Hannah said. “He doesn’t need to. For the first year he wasn’t able to do much of anything, the pain was so crippling. But you see him now, able to go about his life and do most things. Most of the time,” she added.

  “The pain comes and goes?”

  She lifted her own shoulder in a shrug. “When he disappears for a day or two without warning, it means the pain has got the upper hand. It doesn’t happen often. He has learned to protect the arm and shoulder and not to overextend himself.”

  Runs-from-Bears had begun to chant, and the men were answering.

  “Might it continue to get better?” Martha asked, and this time Hannah turned toward her sharply.

  “He is what he is,” she said. “If by some magic the damage was healed instantly, it would be very hard, maybe impossible, to bring the left arm up to strength. He knows that, and because he knows he flatly refuses to see surgeons who might be able to help at least ease the pain. There has only been one exception, something an old teacher of mine sent to try. A treatment that comes from China.”

  “But it didn’t work,” Martha concluded for her.

  Hannah looked at her, surprised. “That is yet to be seen. We haven’t tried it yet.” She stood. “The last dance,” she said. “You’ll need your shawl.”

  “Watch me,” Annie told Martha. “It’s not hard.”

  There was something new here, something about this last dance that was different, but no one seemed to think it necessary to explain it to her. But to retreat now would be silly, and more than that, Martha didn’t want to.

  The water drum started up. They danced in two lines, men and women facing each other, half on one side of the water drum and half on the other. The pace was easy at first as they moved forward and then back, but soon enough the tempo began to increase with each pass. Someone let out a high yipping cry—Gabriel, Martha saw from the corner of her eye—as the women swept in a circle around the man opposite, shawls held in outstretched hands to give them wings.

  Her shawl brushed against Daniel and then she was gone again, turning in time with the others. Breathless, she danced in place as the men came forward. Daniel’s gaze was on her face, but there was nothing frightening there. He was enjoying himself; he liked the dance. And this was nothing more than that, an evening’s entertainment in this circle of light and sound. To step outside that circle into the cold seemed an impossible thing, though her face and neck and back were damp with sweat. All of her body was damp, so that the sweep of the shawl as she turned brought a welcome relief.

  In some part of her mind she tried to recall the last time she had danced, and while the details came to her easily enough—her gloved hand on Teddy’s arm, the brush of silk skirts against delicate slippers—she could not see her own face, or remember what she had been feeling.

  But this, this she would never forget. She knew that as they swept forward for the last time, shawls held high and wide and pausing for a moment, for no more than a moment, while she looked into Daniel’s eyes and saw the question there before she revolved and lowered her arms to let her shawl fall onto his shoulders.

  In the sudden echoing quiet all Martha could hear was the rush of her own harsh breath and the thump of her heart at the base of her throat. She could not have moved; she might have forgotten how to walk, but Daniel’s hand touched her elbow and steered her toward the house. There was a lot of quiet talk but little laughter. Somehow the mood had shifted. She wanted to know what was coming, but she didn’t want to know, not really.

  The men carried the benches into the house and after some moving and shifting, the whole party was sitting in a half circle before the hearth. The great room was very warm now and
Martha was glad of it. She was glad too that Daniel was sitting beside her, but his quiet disconcerted her. He might be in pain, if she had understood Hannah correctly. That he wouldn’t want to be asked, she knew even without being told.

  He sat straight of back, his good hand rested on a knee. Martha could feel the heat coming off his skin. He smelled of healthy sweat and wood smoke. Suddenly his face turned to her and smiled as if he had just remembered who she was and why she was sitting here at all.

  “Storytelling,” he said. And just at that moment Runs-from-Bears stood, a big man unfolding to his full height.

  Daniel inclined his head toward her and translated.

  “It’s a prayer. ‘Great Spirit who gave us the darkness in which to rest. In that darkness we send our words to you.’”

  Runs-from-Bears turned and cast tobacco into the fire and the smell filled the air. Then he started to talk again.

  “It’s an old story,” Daniel said. “How a raiding party came to Hidden Wolf. When He-Who-Remembers claimed both the Todd boys to replace the sons he had lost in battle.”

  Martha had heard bits of this story over the years, many fancifully embroidered. Now she learned about how children were adopted into a longhouse, of training as a warrior and going into battles.

  One story led to another.

  They all took turns. Ben told of the journey from New Orleans to Paradise, where he had made his home with Hannah. Luke spoke of his grandmother Iona, and Gabriel of the first bear he killed on Hidden Wolf. Blue-Jay told a story Martha knew, about a time two great hogs had got stuck under the schoolhouse floor. The stories, long or short, were well told and the small audience was receptive. Martha wondered if Daniel would take a turn, but after a longer pause Jennet got up and told the story of how she left her home in Scotland to come and claim Luke as her husband.

  “Fine and good,” said her good-sister Hannah. “But what of the fairy tree?”