Ransom's Mark

by Wendy Lawton

  A line of dancers began to circle the pile. Some were naked. Embarrassed, Olive averted her eyes from them. Others wore blankets. Most of the women wore skirts made of bark and tied round the waist with natural twine.

  The circle began to move at a dizzying pace. The dance itself seemed angry and violent. While circling, the dancers chanted a singsong cry. One by one, when they reached a spot in front of the girls that had been cleared of all grass, the dancer bent himself to the ground, yelling and gesturing wildly, slapping the ground and leaping into the air. Each one performed the same movement in turn. There was something wild and powerful about it. For Olive, fascination overcame fear.

  Over the course of the captive journey, Olive had expected death many times. She surprised herself by finding that once you got used to the possibility, a sort of numbness took over. Each new challenge struck fear at first, but then, when she and Mary Ann settled into the situation, they found a way to make do. Perhaps she was learning to live moment by moment.

  For this moment, however, she found herself curious about her new hosts. Looking around the camp, she saw what she took to be a temporary village—a collection of wigwams with smoke trailing out of each one. Some had a stack of root baskets outside; others had frames with skins stretched on them, drying in the sun. The ground outside the structures was packed hard and shiny. Maybe these aren’t so temporary. Can people really live with so little?

  The dance continued. When the dancers eventually lost interest and the festivities wound down, the girls were pushed off the pile. Apparently, they planned no burning. Instead a Yavapai woman managed to explain with a mixture of Spanish, English, and gestures they were now slaves—onatas.

  “Oh dear, does that mean they’ll never let us go?” Mary Ann asked later, when they were alone.

  “It does mean we are property,” Olive answered. “Perhaps they will trade us for a ransom.”

  “Remember when we played Indians with Royce and his friends?”

  “Yes. And you hated being held captive.” Olive smiled to remember the way her little sister had screamed.

  “You came and took my place because we had no ransom.”

  “I remember.”

  “Do you think someone may come and take our places?”

  “Who, Mary Ann?” Olive often wondered if anyone searched for them. She remembered the night that Lorenzo promised that if any Oatmans were ever taken captive, he’d not rest until he rescued them. How she missed her big brother. “Anyone coming after us would carry along a ransom to trade for us, or else, if the army came, they might take us by force.”

  “When we played the game, why didn’t you just come in and take me, like the army?”

  “I didn’t want to ruin Royce’s game—I only wanted to get you free, so I played by the rules.” Olive paused. “I got the idea of substituting myself for you from the Bible.”

  “They had Indians in the Bible?”

  “No, silly. The idea of substitution came from Christ’s dying. Remember?” When Olive saw the blank look on Mary Ann’s face, she continued. “When God put man into the world, everything was perfect.”

  “I know that part. Adam and Eve sinned and everything changed.”

  “That’s right. Because of sin man had to die—we were all doomed. That’s why Jesus came into the world. God’s own Son became a man and substituted Himself. He died in our place. So we could live.”

  “I remember now. Ma used to say He paid the ransomprice for us.”

  Mary Ann must have continued thinking about this, because later, when they were gathering mesquite for the fire, she said, “Remember Beauty and the beast?”

  “I hardly think you’d let me forget,” Olive said, pulling playfully on one of Mary Ann’s braids.

  “Beauty ransomed her father with her own life, didn’t she?”

  “Hmmm, she sure did,” Olive said. “You do know, little sister, that ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is a fairy tale, right?”

  “Of course.” Mary Ann made a face at Olive. “I’m not a baby. It’s just that it is like the story of Jesus in some ways.”

  Olive smiled at Mary Ann. Sometimes she was surprised by her little sister’s understanding. “Remember that time when Ma read ‘Beauty’ to us?” Those days seemed like a different lifetime. “She said that folktales were ancient made-up stories to help people understand the true story of God. Ma believed that many myths and folktales grew out of the truth, but when people told them over and over the stories changed.”

  Olive looked over at the men sitting by the brush pile. “Do you think that the stories told by the Indians around the fire still have parts of God’s story in them as well?”

  “You mean even when the people don’t know God anymore, their old stories may remember parts of Him?” Mary Ann tilted her head as she considered this.

  “I don’t know for sure, but maybe.” Olive wished she could find some proof that God still dwelled in the Indian village.

  As the months wore on, Olive and Mary Ann came to understand what slavery meant. The girls still followed their mother’s lifelong practice of gathering together for prayer each morning before starting work. They worked from the time the sun rose until it set at night. Much of the time they dug with sharpened stones in the ground for roots—a staple of the tribe’s diet—or collected any elderberries still hidden in the trees. The women treated them with scorn. The children sometimes came up and pinched them or slapped them for no reason. It didn’t make sense until Olive realized that the Indian women and girls were treated the same way.

  Near starvation was an everyday part of village life, but it was worse for women and girls since the meat was mostly reserved for the warriors. The very best ever offered to women was watery soup made from the cast-off parts of meat. During their time with this outcast group of Yavapai, Olive saw many girls who looked permanently stunted by starvation. Others died.

  Olive and Mary Ann ached with hunger most of the time. Spring turned to summer and still they grubbed for food. Many of the people ate insects and lizards, but Olive and Mary Ann were still not fast enough to catch these. They wondered if they’d be able to swallow them if they ever managed to catch them.

  Olive often wondered why no one tilled the soil to raise food. After she learned the language she tried to ask, but her questions did not make sense to her captors. Food, they told her, came from hunting and gathering. Sometimes there was plenty and sometimes none.

  Near the end of the summer, visitors came into the camp. Olive learned they were Mohaves who had come to trade. She became as excited as the Yavapai when she saw that they brought fresh vegetables to trade. How she hoped she could manage to finagle at least a few bites of these for Mary Ann.

  Her sister had grown even thinner over the spring and summer. The frailty and the cough that had begun on the Gila Trail had only worsened since coming to live with the Yavapai.

  When the girls met each day to pray, Olive tried not to worry Mary Ann by praying too long over her health, but in her heart Olive prayed about it all the time. The prayer they prayed over and over was always a version of this: “Heavenly Father, don’t leave us. Somehow let someone know that we live. Please send someone to ransom us or to rescue us. Save us, Lord.”

  Olive would continue praying silently long after they started digging roots: Save us before Mary Ann dies. Please, Father. Strengthen her. Let her know just one touch of kindness once again. Don’t forget us, Lord. Where are You, oh God?

  After the girls learned the language and began to speak with their captives, they learned more about them. The Indians were still angry and distrustful of the settlers—or Americanos, the name given by the Mexicans—but the longer Olive and Mary Ann lived among them, the less the Indians treated the girls like slaves. They merged into the group—treated much the same as the other girls and women.

  Olive knew that girls would get no vegetables—these would be saved for warriors. Lately, however, several men from the group who had taken them
captive had begun to slip bits of food to Mary Ann, who had grown so thin. Olive even overheard one man saying that he ’d take Mary Ann back to the Americanos if he hadn’t killed her family. He seemed to understand that because of the massacre they were outlaws. It ended up that the girls were hiding with the Indians as much as they were captives of the Indians.

  Soon after the visit of the Mohaves, Olive began hearing bits of conversation that led her to believe that she and Mary Ann might be sold to the Mohaves, but nothing came of it. Summer moved into fall. Game became more plentiful, and everyone ate better for a time. Olive and Mary Ann gathered basket after basket of berries and even found some wild grapes.

  Eventually, Olive stopped hoping that someone would rescue them, and they even grew tired of plotting to escape. Perhaps Dr. Lecount never made it to the fort. Perhaps no one realized there were two girls unaccounted for. Perhaps no one cared or everyone figured them dead. Olive often thought about Ma’s words—that God walked alongside them on this journey. She wasn’t as sure anymore—why hadn’t He heard their prayers for rescue?

  Winter passed and just as the trees began to leaf out, word passed through the Yavapai that the Mohaves were coming to trade for the captives.

  When the small band of Mohaves crossed the rise, Olive could see five men and one young woman. Walking through the camp and listening to the talk around her, Olive found out that the Mohaves and Yavapai had agreed to the trade on the last visit, and the Mohaves had taken the terms back to their chief, Aespaniola. The chief sent his daughter, Topeka, to either approve or cancel the agreement that had been made.

  As they came closer, Olive could see that Topeka could not have been much older than Lucy; she was probably seventeen or eighteen years old. Topeka’s shiny black hair hung in a smooth sheet down her back. Olive ’s hand automatically moved to her own matted braids. Since coming into the Yavapai village, she hadn’t worried about grooming. Hair washing was a rarity. Olive always carefully checked their blankets to make sure they didn’t catch lice, but, other than that, she was too busy working to worry about hair.

  Topeka’s face was beautiful—perfect, except for a strange tattoo running down her chin. And she had the same kind of lines on her upper arms. Olive couldn’t help staring. What was that? Her skirt consisted of reeds woven into a braided waistband. It moved and rustled as she walked and seemed more graceful than the bark skirts of the Yavapai.

  That evening, Olive and Mary Ann were summoned to appear before a gathering of the Yavapai men and the visitors. The men solemnly warned the girls to show respect since it was the chief ’s own daughter who traveled hundreds of miles to buy them—as if Olive didn’t already know all of this.

  Olive watched Topeka as she talked to the men. She spoke sparingly, but Olive was impressed with the woman’s manner. It was soft and respectful, but her words were firm. Olive kept watching Topeka’s face. Something in her eyes suddenly caused hope to rise in Olive’s chest.

  Despite Topeka’s calm manner, the camp was in an uproar. Olive hadn’t thought it would matter whether they stayed with the Yavapai or not. The men who killed her family, however, felt differently. Their arguments grew loud and heated. Some wanted to trade the captives, but those who captured them took great pride in owning these Americano slaves and wanted them to remain. All night long, the girls listened to arguing—sometimes in Spanish, other times in Yuman—as the Yavapai fought about whether or not to sell their slaves. The men who had killed the family and captured the girls argued the longest, but in the end they lost.

  Shortly after the girls had been dismissed, Olive heard that Topeka approved the trade on behalf of her father.

  “Olive?”

  Olive had been sitting near the bark pile where they’d been taken when they first came into camp almost a year ago. “I’m here, Mary Ann.”

  “Ah-hotch-o-cama says that Topeka came to pay a ransom for us. Is that true?”

  “I think so,” Olive said. “Nobody bothered to tell us, but I’ve been listening.”

  “Oh dear, it’s funny to see a girl in charge, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. For Indians, it is very unusual.” Come to think of it, Topeka, for all her respectful ways, seemed very powerful— young and pretty, but very powerful.

  “She’s not paying the ransom with her own life is she?”

  “No. She brought a ransom with her. Do you want to know what we are worth?” Olive smiled.

  “Tell me.”

  “Two horses, a basket of vegetables, a few pounds of beads, and three blankets.”

  Mary Ann whistled to indicate that she was impressed.

  Olive hadn’t heard that whistle of appreciation since Illinois days. It made her smile again. “I’ll admit, little sister, there was a time or two I would have traded you for half those vegetables and just one warm blanket!”

  Mary Ann laughed and whacked Olive on the arm.

  Ki-e-chook —

  The Ransom’s Mark

  With almost no farewell, the girls took their leave. Olive looked back. The women sat near the bark pile as always, heads down—working . . . always working. The men stood at the far end of the village with their backs to the departing slaves. Only the little children stood at the edge of the circle and watched Olive and Mary Ann leave. The dogs followed.

  The Yavapai killed her family and yet, Olive and Mary Ann had lived among and come to know them. Her feelings confused her. The Yavapai village along Date Creek had been their home for nearly a year. They had longed to escape, and now, here they were, leaving. Was the ache in Olive ’s chest caused by the prospect of traveling even farther away from civilization? Or was it something else too confusing to understand?

  Topeka warned them that the journey to the Mohave village was a long one—several hundred miles. The Mohave traveled even faster than the Yavapai had when they journeyed into captivity a year ago. By the middle of the first day on the trail Mary Ann gave up. She sat in the middle of the trail, laboring to catch her breath. Her skin had paled. It felt clammy when Olive put her hand to Mary Ann’s cheek.

  “What is wrong, little sister?” Topeka halted everyone. She squatted down near Mary Ann.

  Olive answered for Mary Ann. “My sister started coughing on the Gila Trail, even before we were captured. It was during your windbreak moon. Now another windbreak moon —another year—has passed, and she ’s grown even weaker from hunger and from the cough.”

  Topeka didn’t comment, but she took soft skins and wrapped the girls’ already-bruised feet.

  “Is that better?” she asked.

  “Thank you,” Olive said.

  Topeka turned to the men who accompanied her. “We shall travel as the desert terrapin instead of the eagle. You must take turns helping the little one.”

  The men grumbled at the slower pace, but Olive could see that they dared not argue with Topeka. It made Olive look hard at Topeka. After having lived with the Yavapai for a year, she ’d never seen a woman treated with respect. She’d observed that Yavapai dogs were treated far better than the women and girls.

  At night Topeka took out blankets and arranged a bed for all three of them together. Once, during the night, Olive had turned over expecting to find Lucy curled up with her and Mary Ann. Instead, she opened her eyes to find this stranger with markings on her chin and ropes of black hair spread across the blanket.

  As they walked through the barren Mohave Desert, Topeka became much less like a stranger. Her kindness touched a forgotten place in Olive’s heart.

  “Why did you buy us?” Olive asked one morning. They had become comfortable conversing in Yuman, and Topeka was already teaching them her language.

  “What do you think?” Topeka had a habit of asking a question instead of giving an answer. Olive thought it might have been because Topeka liked listening more than talking.

  “Is it because you needed more slaves?” “No. We have enough people in our tribe to do the work of planting and hunting.”

  “Is it b
ecause . . .” Olive didn’t know how to say ‘pride’ in either tongue. “Is it because having slaves adds to your stature?” Perhaps that was close enough.

  Topeka laughed. “No.”

  They continued walking. This was how conversations went with Topeka—few words and long pauses. Olive watched Mary Ann riding on the back of one of the men. At home they would have called it piggyback, but Mary Ann was obviously exhausted, maybe sleeping, and sort of hung down limply.

  “I heard of the massacre shortly after it happened,” Topeka said. “TokwaOa came to us to say that the Yavapai had captured a white girl named Aluitman.”

  “Aluitman?” Olive wondered if another family had been murdered and another girl taken.

  “Listen to the way I say your name—Ah-lee Oot-man.”

  “Oh. Aluitman was me.” So someone did know she lived. “What about Mary Ann?”

  “We did not know about Mary Ann until our people went to Date Creek.”

  “When you went to trade?”

  “Yes. Though we used trade as the reason to see about this Aluitman.” Topeka walked silently for a while. A piece of her hair whipped against Olive as the winds shifted, swirling dust around the trail. “My father and my mother are good and wise. That is why my father is chief.”

  Olive kept walking. She knew if she interrupted with questions, the conversation might end.

  “My father asked me if I had heard about this Aluitman. I told him I had. He never said any more.”

  Mary Ann stirred, wanting to stretch, and the man who carried her let her slide down to the ground. She dropped back and walked alongside Olive and Topeka. Olive could see Topeka’s worried glance, but they both silently agreed to let Mary Ann walk a short distance.

  “I could not get the idea of Aluitman out of my mind,” Topeka continued. “Sometimes as I slept, I even dreamed about her—worried about her. I finally went to my father and asked if I could go to the Yavapai and see for myself.”

  “You did?” Olive felt a strange stirring at this conversation. For some reason she felt like crying.