Thieving Forest

by Martha Conway

  “Over here,” Nadoko says.

  The sound of drumming intensifies as they round the large elm tree that stands in the heart of the village. In the small clearing behind it, a woman is sitting in an enormous basket holding on to its two sides. She is dressed all in red, and her dark oiled hair hangs loosely over her shoulders. Men and women are standing on either side of the basket. They are Wyandot but not, Nadoko says as she stares at them, from this village. According to the practices of ononharoia the ill woman would have been carried in the basket, her attendants singing as they walked.

  “But why bring her here?” Naomi asks. “Why not cure her in her own village?”

  “Ahntenyai-teri,” Nadoko says. I don’t know.

  One of the village chiefs comes to talk to the ill woman, and Nadoko bids Susanna and Naomi to move closer so she can listen. The questioning goes on a long time, and Susanna, who cannot follow what they are saying, finds herself looking around at the crowd. She sees a group of Ottawa and Potawatomi, the visiting warriors she’s heard about. Behind them, across the clearing, she can see Detsukwa holding his prized possession, the brown umbrella. Although he doesn’t look at her, for the first time she fancies that he is aware of her.

  Then a figure catches her attention. There, behind a group of women—is that Meera? A short, stocky girl. Susanna tries to get a closer look. A moment later the crowd shifts, and Meera—or whoever it was—has gone. Meanwhile the drummers carry on, never varying their beat. Bomp bomp boom.

  “The chief is satisfied with her answers,” Nadoko says finally over the noise. She tells them what she has heard: the woman suffers from weakness of the bone. She has tried many cures but nothing has helped. Three nights ago the moon appeared to her in the form of a beautiful woman, who told her she would be healed if she returned to the village where she was born.

  “You can see that she is dressed in red like the moon,” Nadoko tells them, “which is made of fire.”

  Ononharoia lasts several days. The villagers will give the ill woman gifts, and in exchange she will interpret their dreams. Afterward, a feast to celebrate. And then she will be cured.

  “What if she isn’t cured?” Susanna asks.

  “She will be cured,” Nadoko insists. “Within a month, she will walk by herself.”

  A month, Susanna thinks. About the same time she is to be married—if all goes well, as Naomi said. Susanna looks across the clearing at Detsukwa again. This time he looks back.

  Naomi feels bad for speaking so plainly to Susanna. She remembers what it was like to be treated as a servant. But Susanna is unrealistic. She’s just not being practical. And Naomi can’t help thinking that even as a servant she is treated much better here than Naomi was treated back on the Maumee. She’s fed. No one thinks she’s a witch. No one scatters frog parts near her while she sleeps, hoping to curb her powers.

  They walk back to the longhouse past a line of women skinning and gutting three stags, and a moment later Naomi hears the squeals of pigs being slaughtered. Susanna walks looking down at her moccasins. Is she pouting?

  She must be persuaded to think realistically about her choices, Naomi decides. She has to grow up. I grew up. She can see in the distance a great cloud moving west, almost but not quite cleft in the middle. Sometimes she likes to think that she really is a witch, and she conjured Nadoko and Hato out of the misty fog that day to rescue her. She still doesn’t understand why she felt, almost from the first, easy in their company, or why she finds pleasure here in this crowded village with its packs of dogs and snorting pigs. There are many things she’s surprised by. Her interest in how Nadoko makes clothes or meals and, once she concentrates, her own success at doing these things. Back home the only thing she was good at was her music. Here, Nadoko is constantly picking up things Naomi has made to praise them.

  Of course the biggest challenge will be having a baby. She has not told Nadoko the rumors about her family. Naomi knows she’s not barren. She is not. Nevertheless there is a woman she sees secretly in the southern part of the village, who gives her a strengthening potion in exchange for firewood. It tastes like sour milk and cinnamon.

  The ragged frog legs did not curb her powers, they only hardened her against other people’s ideas about her. This is what she tells herself.

  Inside the longhouse everyone is putting on their finest clothes for the ononharoia. Nadoko is wearing so many silver bracelets that they clink together like wind chimes. She has oiled her hair with sunflower seed oil and fingers some though Naomi’s hair too. Naomi likes the feeling of being made pretty by someone else. If only Hato were here! The new moon is next week, and he’ll be back then. This year’s training will be over. She’s desperate to see him, to hold his hands and smell his smell, to press her lips against the spot on his neck she likes. She wants to hear what he has to tell her of the world, what he has noticed, which is always something unexpected. He surprises her. She likes being surprised.

  Onaway gives Susanna an embroidered shawl to wear but Naomi thinks the embroidery down the front of her dress is the most beautiful in the room. The pattern is made from yellow and green beads, and only when you stand off a ways can you see what it is: a bird’s head. Naomi runs her hands down along it and tries without looking to distinguish the tiny rows with her fingertips. Nadoko made it for her daughter, the one who died of the blue cough, but the girl never grew tall enough to wear it. It fits Naomi perfectly.

  Nadoko clucks at her in approval. As she adjusts one of the sleeves, her bracelets ring with the movement.

  The ill woman does not arrive until late in the evening, dressed in her red clothing and supported by two young girls wearing plain hide dresses with colorful waistbands. They walk down the length of the longhouse, passing so near the fires that they seem to walk right through them. Nadoko, who is the most important person in the longhouse, gives her their presents: white ribbon, four segars, and a mokuk with embroidered purple flowers on all four sides. Then the woman announces that anyone who wishes can come up to her one by one to tell her their dreams, and she will determine their meaning. After she seats herself one of her attendants covers her with a long raccoon-skin robe, although the longhouse is very warm from all the fires and the bodies.

  Susanna does not go up to her. For one thing, she does not know enough Wendat, and for another she not allowed to, as a captive. Anyway, all her dreams are the same: slogging through mud and cattails in the Black Swamp, and worrying that she has lost sight of the path. But Nadoko takes her turn with the woman, and then Naomi does too. From where she sits Susanna can hear the woman’s high, light voice speaking to her sister. The sound but not the words. There is a musical quality to her voice, and in spite of her bone illness, or whatever it is, she moves her arms gracefully as she speaks. When Naomi returns, her eyes are wide and unfocused, as though she can see through the bark wall and out to the world beyond.

  “She did not guess my dream,” she whispers to Susanna. “But she knew something about me. She knew I would have a child.”

  Susanna draws in her breath. “What?”

  “She said that by the first snow I would feel his life. His life! Susanna, it will be a boy!”

  “A boy? But that’s impossible.” No one has given birth to a living baby boy on her mother’s side of the family for at least three generations.

  “It’s true,” Naomi says fiercely.

  The longhouse is cramped with people, and hot. Two young girls stay by the fires to keep them built up, and Susanna feels a thread of sweat run down the knobs of her spine. She stares at Naomi. This is her dream, she realizes. To be in love, to marry, to have a son. But it will never come true. At least not the son.

  “Naomi,” she says. She looks at her sister’s flushed, pretty face and feels a wave of tenderness, a wish to protect her from disappointment. She takes her hand.

  “I’m glad for you,” she says.

  “Those farmers just hated us, to say such things,” Naomi tells her. “What do they know
about babies?”

  “They don’t know beans from bird’s eggs, as Penelope used to say.”

  “Susanna, think of it, if you marry Fishhook we could have babies together!”

  But Susanna doesn’t want to think of the babies she might have with Fishhook. Only Naomi would be able to conjure up a world where they would be lovely. A small white feather, detached from somebody’s clothing, floats toward them at a slant.

  “I’ve found what I wanted,” Naomi says, watching the feather drift down.

  “What do you mean?”

  But the ill woman has finished interpreting dreams now and is trying to stand. Two of her assistants help her, and when she’s upright she says something in an important-sounding voice.

  Naomi bends toward Susanna. “She is going to tell us all her last desire in the form of a riddle. Whoever solves the riddle gets a prize.”

  “What’s the prize?”

  “The winner can choose her own prize,” Naomi says. She listens to the woman and frowns. “I don’t really understand it. She says a thing alone, or maybe she means single. Something unique, but not unique.”

  The woman repeats herself: a thing unique but not unique, a thing alone and not alone. Tomorrow there will be feasting and a dance to celebrate the woman’s cure, but the excitement for this night is over. Before they leave, the woman’s attendants hand out gifts: white beaded bracelets for the women, and for the men, small beaded necklaces. Naomi shows Susanna her bracelet. The white beads are irregularly shaped but pretty, and she runs her fingers over them. As a captive, of course, Susanna did not receive one.

  She gives Naomi back the bracelet. “Tell me the riddle again,” she says.

  All the next morning Susanna tries to guess the riddle, but in truth she has never been very good at solving riddles. Sirus used to tell them at supper sometimes, and Beatrice usually guessed before Susanna could even work out all the parts to it. But Nadoko confirmed what Naomi said, that anyone who solves the riddle could name her own prize.

  The drummers begin drumming again as soon as the sun rises, and they continue without stopping while the women cook food for the feast. It will take place in the clearing just beyond the old elm tree near the center of the village. Late in the afternoon Susanna walks down with Nadoko, Naomi, and Onaway, all of them again dressed in their finest clothes and jewelry. A feasting hut has been erected—four slim poles and a bark roof—and the drummers sit cross-legged in front of it, pounding on covered kettles in their laps. Women holding buckets of dyed grease are painting their faces, and one man laughs as a woman bends over him but without missing a drumbeat. Next to him two men hold tambourines on long sticks with stones or pebbles inside, which they shake or turn or strike on the ground.

  For a while Susanna stands with the others watching the musicians, and they discuss if they want to go into the feasting hut now or wait a bit. The clearing is already crowded. Some men are wearing traditional Wyandot costumes—sleeveless tunics, embroidered breechclouts, and leggings that stop above the knee—while others wear English coats with brass buttons. All the women are wearing long decorated dresses like Naomi’s.

  Naomi and Nadoko decide to go into the feasting hut while Onaway stays with Susanna who, as a captive, cannot go in. There are a few logs rolled out as seats, and Susanna helps Onaway to sit down on one. Her eyes are bright and happy, and curve like little crescents when she smiles. She must have been very pretty when young, Susanna thinks. She looks at each passing face but she does not see Seth or his friend and she does not see Meera. She also looks for Tako. The afternoon is unusually warm and the air carries the scent of cooking meat and smoke. She notices a group of men standing off to the side playing some game, and she watches them for a while. A pair of painted bones is placed in a bowl and then tossed up into the air. When the bones come down the men look at them, and then there is much debate and some arguing before they are tossed again.

  The ill woman and her two attendant girls are sitting in a little three-sided gazebo made of willow branches not too far from the feasting hut. Today the woman is dressed all in white and her hair is dyed vividly red. Susanna spots Detsukwa nearby among a group of men. He catches Susanna’s eye and nods to her but does not smile. Their first hello.

  Suddenly she has an idea. “I’d like to guess at the riddle,” she says to Onaway. Onaway does not understand her at first, but when she does she cocks her head and lifts her shoulders as if to say, Well all right! As if this will be just another entertainment to enjoy.

  The gazebo smells like roses, and Susanna notices pink petals scattered on the ground as they enter. The ill woman turns her face toward them and Onaway speaks to her. Then it is Susanna’s turn. She puts her palms forward in supplication.

  “Tiyeme-dutay dasya-nay.” My language is of the Delawares.

  The woman nods. “Dinaytay-ri.” I know it.

  The girls in their beautifully embroidered waistbands look at Susanna calmly. She cannot guess by their expressions whether they know the answer to the riddle or not. She begins speaking in Delaware:

  “I am a white woman with red hair. Unique in this village but not in the world. I am alone here, but if you consider the whole world I am not alone. Therefore I am the answer to your riddle. Unique and not unique, alone and not alone.”

  But the ill woman begins shaking her head even before Susanna has finished. “The answer is not a white woman,” she says.

  Susanna’s heart sinks. “A white woman with red hair?”

  “You are the only one with red hair in this village?”

  She thinks of Naomi. “I am...I am the only captive with red hair.”

  “It is not you. I did not know of you. You have not guessed the riddle correctly.”

  The woman turns her face away. Some of the red hair dye has stained her neck and Susanna stares at the spot. She could be lying. She could have changed the answer now that Susanna has guessed it. Susanna wants to stay and press her point but Onaway takes her arm.

  “A white woman like myself,” Susanna repeats. “The answer fits the question!”

  Onaway begins to lead her away, patting her arm. She looks at Susanna’s face and Susanna can feel her sympathy but that only makes her feel worse, her hope crumpling up in a wad. Then all at once everything crumples.

  Seth is dead. And her chance to guess her way out of captivity is gone. She walks out with Onaway into the clearing where a few young boys are running around lighting torches, but as far as Susanna is concerned the celebration is over. She helps Onaway sit down again, thinking: Somehow I’ll have to run away on my own.

  She feels a push from behind. “Hello!”

  “Tako! I’ve been looking for you,” Susanna says. Despite her disappointment a nugget of pleasure comes up when she sees his face.

  “I went with the hunters. Brought down a deer.”

  “By yourself? Really?”

  “Well...” he shrugs, pulls a face, and says a few words in Wendat that she takes to mean, Why not? There is a familiar line of dirt along his jawbone. He looks very young.

  “Tako, listen. I wanted to ask you about this.” She pulls one of the cherry buttons from her pouch.

  Tako looks at it, nodding solemnly. “Tudedi,” he says. Button. Then he grins at her as if making a joke.

  “Did you give this to me? Did you find it and leave it on the rock? Or did someone ask you to leave it there?”

  “Oui, non! Oui, non!” he says.

  She tries several ways of asking him, but he makes each of his answers into a joke. Finally, she gives up. “This tudedi, it is for you,” she tells him. She wants to thank him, to tell him—what? How much he helped her? But he would only make a joke of that, too. So instead she just repeats, “For you.”

  Tako closes his fingers around the button and laughs. Then he skips off between bodies in the crowd and is gone.

  Onaway says something to Susanna and points to four men wearing traditional Wyandot dress, who are beginning to dance i
n front of the drummers. This is the oldest dance, Onaway tells her, and the most important—sacred, Susanna understands her to mean. As she watches she thinks it looks like the same dance that the Stooping Indians danced after their rabbit feast. The same dips, the same swerves, except now only men are permitted to dance it. She thinks of Light in the Eyes, and of the small boy learning to play the flute. In this village there are more rules, but there is also more food. But even so she would rather go back to the Stooping Indians than stay here. If she could find them.

  At last Naomi and Nadoko return from the feasting hut, and Naomi presses several strips of spiced pork into Susanna’s hand. Her fingers are slim and strong and Susanna can still picture them curved up over taut violin strings.

  “Nami,” she says. “I’ve been wanting to ask you. What was that last song you were playing on your violin that morning, back in the cabin?”

  “The day we were taken?” Naomi stops to think. “It must have been Bach. Sleepers Awake?” She hums a few bars.

  “Yes, that’s it! I was trying to remember.”

  “There are things I’ve wondered, too. Where was Aurelia? Somehow she wasn’t in the cabin with the rest of us when they came in.”

  “No, she snuck out to feed her hens.”

  “And what was Beatrice doing?”

  “Burning the porridge?”

  They laugh. “We shouldn’t make fun,” Susanna says.

  “I know, I know,” Naomi agrees. But she’s smiling. Beatrice always burned the porridge. Always.

  “Here,” Susanna says, pulling the last cherry button from her pouch. “I want you to have this.”

  “No, no,” Naomi tells her. “You should keep that.”

  “Please, Nami.”

  Naomi hesitates, and then she takes it and hugs Susanna. Her hair, her clothes, even her neck smells Indian. The dancers begin a new dance and now women and boys are allowed to join in. Nadoko leads Naomi into the circle, and Susanna watches them appear and disappear among the dancers.

  Naomi is someone else now, she has to admit that. Even if I stay here, she thinks, that will still be true.