Thieving Forest

by Martha Conway

  The air is blue and cold, neither morning nor night. They talk about the Wyandots, whether they are safe now.

  “I’m not sure where their territory ends,” Seth says, “but I don’t think it extends all the way here. If they haven’t found us by now we’re probably all right. My guess is they are staying to the south and combing every inch between their woods and the Maumee.”

  “I’ll make a fire then,” Susanna says, and she pushes herself up. “Small. Not too much smoke. I want to boil water for your cut.”

  How much sleep did they have, three hours? Susanna uses his flint to light a few sticks and then she boils water in his kettle. She finds some trillium and makes a paste. As she touches his arm, turning it slightly to look at it, he feels himself holding his breath. She tells him it looks all right to her but she covers every inch of it anyway with the paste, and then bandages it up carefully with strips she cut up from his extra shirt. His arm feels much better after that.

  She says, “When I was looking for the trillium I saw what looks like a little den. Do you have a piece of twine with you?”

  She catches a small wood vole and they skin it together, slicing it down the side and then pulling on it from either end. She cuts the meat up and cooks it in the kettle. While they eat she keeps looking at him in an obvious way, waiting for him to say something.

  He says, “Needs a bit of salt,” and she laughs.

  “I haven’t yet learned how to trap salt.”

  He watches her bury the fire ashes and cover the spot over with leaves. He isn’t sure if she wants to show him what she can do, or if she wants to do it for him. They don’t speak about Amos or anything else that Seth told her last night. The morning chill is dissipating but he can already tell that it will be cooler today than it was yesterday. In this country, autumn can wash into winter overnight.

  Around midmorning they finally come to a stream that should lead them, if Koman was right, to the River Raisin. Susanna picks up a few nuts from the ground and puts them into one of her pouches.

  “Roasted, they taste like corn,” she tells him.

  He looks at her sideways, and then picks up a long dry stick and touches the ground with it, testing its bend. “I was thinking to myself that you’ve changed,” he says. “But now I don’t think you have.”

  She looks at him, surprised. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re still a Quiner. You speak with that Quiner...authority.”

  She grimaces. “Pride, you mean.”

  “Maybe.” He’s smiling.

  “Well, I’ve had to learn a few things.”

  “So I see.”

  He’s strangely moved by her little neck and her cropped hair and the set of her shoulders. Although she is thinner, she is very strong and easily keeps pace with him. In his pocket he feels the ring he bought so long ago. Its presence comforts him. It’s a pretty ring. If he can persuade her to take it, it will look nice on her finger.

  He plants his walking stick on the ground and lets himself move a little closer to her. To his great happiness, she does not move away.

  Susanna walks alongside Seth feeling strangely pleased. She woke up that morning knowing instantly where she was and how she got there. No question but that her senses have sharpened. She liked waking up in the fresh air, the scent of moisture coming out of the earth, no bodies crowding hers in the longhouse, no smoke from the cooking fires getting into her eyes. How did she bear it, living with all those people? She could never live in a city anymore. Not even Philadelphia. That dream is gone.

  They walk above the noisy stream among just enough trees to make shade. Once in a while Seth’s arm brushes hers. The first time it happened she felt a tingling sensation. As they go along Seth describes a deer hunt he went on, and she tells him about trapping animals in the woods with Tako. The way he listens is Indian but his easy humor, that reminds her of Sirus. Late in the afternoon the deer path leaves the stream’s edge and ventures farther into the woods, although they can still see sparkling glimpses of water through the branches. Some time later the path ends in a small, natural clearing so beautiful that Susanna and Seth both stop at the same moment to stare.

  “Oh,” Susanna says.

  Hundreds, maybe thousands of tiny flowers spread out before them like an embroidered bedcover, purple and white and yellow, the buds almost stemless, their faces no bigger than knuckles. Their colors change as the sun moves in and out from behind clouds. Susanna and Seth sit down on an old nursing log in the midst of them and Seth takes an apple from his pack. He peels it perfectly in one long peel, a lucky sign. She accepts a chunk of apple and the wind presses on the tiny flowers as though something invisible is stepping among them. Seth tells her how once, at the very beginning of their trip, he and Koman saw four deer leaping together across a clearing like this one. They leaped from one end to the other in perfect unison, he says, like dancers going across a stage.

  “You’ve seen dancers on a stage?”

  “A troupe, if you could call it that, came though our town in Virginia once on their way to the capital.” He gives her the last of the apple and throws the core away with a long, strong throw. “But the deer were more graceful. They had just come from the river and their legs were still wet.”

  Susanna holds the last apple slice in her hand. She says, “You came a long way to help me.”

  “Longer than I expected,” he says with a smile, but she is not joking.

  “You came to make amends.”

  “In part.”

  He wipes the blade of his knife on his trousers and looks at her with what she takes to be sadness or maybe fatigue. She cannot understand why it makes her heart billow out like a muscle made out of impossibly thin fabric. Back in Severne she liked to walk by his shop but she didn’t like to go in because of Amos. Sometimes Seth would be outside working, a heavy hammer in two hands. Everyone went to him when they needed something fixed. If he was outside Seth said good morning or good afternoon and she replied the same. It occurs to her now that what she liked was just seeing his face.

  The wind begins pushing harder on the flowers and Susanna sees clouds gathering to the east. A storm coming on. They find the stream again and follow it until they get to a dry rise of land with a patch of scrub woods to the right. Some of the trees have hollows, but none are big enough for a person to sit in. Their only choice, besides getting soaked, is to build a twig shelter and wait out the rain inside it.

  Seth builds a fire while Susanna searches the woods for bendable sticks. As she works on the shelter she sees herself through his eyes: a woman in a hide dress weaving branches into the arch of a frame. Her hair is short now and she prefers moccasins to boots. Her arms are very strong and her hands are chapped from so much outdoor work. She is good at building fires and finding food, and she can walk just as long and as far as he can. How did she become this person, she wonders? But the answer is obvious—necessity—and that’s the answer every time.

  “I hung up our food,” Seth tells her when she returns. “In case of bears. And there’s hot water for tea. Wait.”

  He pulls a few small twigs out of her hair. When his fingers brush the top of her ear she feels herself blush.

  “There,” he says.

  She steps back quickly without looking at him. As they are drinking their tea—the last Seth has with him—the rain begins to fall. Two minutes later it seems as though someone has overturned a hundred buckets at once. They abandon the campfire for the shelter and sit inside facing each other. They can stretch out their legs if they want to, but they will have to curl up if they want to lie down.

  “I should have made it larger,” Susanna says, wrapping her arms around her bent legs. “We might have to sleep here.”

  “It’s fine. It’s very well constructed. No terrible leaks.” He looks up. Then he smiles. “Yet.”

  Up close his face seems flushed and his eyes are so dark they look wet. He is still smiling but something in his expression turns sad. When h
e moves his elbow he touches her leg. She looks down at her knees. She doesn’t want to meet his eyes. She has the thought that if she looks at him he will be able to see everything she feels.

  “The canopy is very thick here,” she says. “The trees will offer a lot of protection.” She makes herself breathe evenly, as if that will steady her heartbeat. The air is moist from the rain.

  “Susanna,” Seth says.

  She squeezes her legs and looks up at him. He is wearing the same expression she has seen off and on all day, only now she realizes that it is not disappointment, as she feared, nor weariness, as seemed likely, but rather patience.

  He says, “All his life Amos hid his Potawatomi side. I’ve decided I’m not going to do that.”

  “All right,” she says. “Why should you?”

  “A hundred reasons. You know them as well as I do.”

  “Who cares what the farmers think. They don’t know beans from bird eggs, as Penelope likes to say.”

  “I care what you think.”

  The way he says this surprises her. “Do you think I hate Indians?” she asks.

  He is silent. Then he says, “In the Wyandot village, in the woods, you said to me, how can Naomi be happy married to an Indian?”

  “I don’t think I said that.”

  “You did.”

  “Well, I was mad at her.”

  Seth shifts a little. “I thought...after everything you’ve been through, what you saw, what happened. You might have some strong feelings.”

  “I do have strong feelings, but they’re not always consistent. Some Indians in the Black Swamp saved my life. Meera, too. She could have abandoned me there but she didn’t. Also there’s Tako.”

  Seth moves a little closer, cradling his bad arm. She waits for him to reply but he doesn’t.

  “I’m not always logical,” she tells him. “My imagination is very good. I can believe all sorts of things that maybe aren’t true.”

  He still doesn’t speak. Their toes are touching, nothing else.

  “In a strange way I think that’s helped me,” she says.

  At that he smiles his lopsided smile. His dark good looks make him seem, to her, more substantial than other men, as if he thought more, considered the world more closely. He leans forward and puts his hand on the tip of her ear and caresses it. Then he brings his mouth down on hers. His lips are cool from the night air and firm and altogether lovely. All of her feelings gather on her face and light seems to come off her skin like tiny spears from the inside. Her heart is a painfully sharp rock in her chest. She bends closer to kiss him again. He went down Injured River on a boat looking for her, and when he didn’t find her, he went home. Now he is here: a miracle.

  Somewhere above them an owl declares something, waits a moment, and then declares it again.

  “Why did you come after me?” she asks. “Was it because of your father?”

  “I was hoping you needed me.”

  She thinks of her sisters. “I know that feeling,” she says.

  They scrunch closer, pressing together, their feet intertwined. They are in a tiny space but are doing everything they can to make the space between them even tinier. The warmth she feels is his warmth. She likes his gentle wit, his patience. He can fix just about anything. He can tally long numbers in his head. He can find her even when she thinks she doesn’t want to be found. And now here they are in a forest, a place she once despised, but now it feels like just another room in a house. Her hair is shorn, she is thin, she has no proper clothes, but he doesn’t care and neither does she. Outside she can hear the rain moving off. She feels for his hand.

  “But I guess you were doing all right without me,” he tells her.

  She kisses him. She wants to keep kissing him, and also she wants just to look at his face.

  “This is better,” she says.

  Later that night, while Susanna sleeps, Seth pulls her blanket over her shoulders and then crawls outside to check the sky. His arm is beginning to throb a little. He builds a small fire although it is hard finding dry sticks and they take a long time to catch. He sees that the flames will not last long. But he sits beside it anyway, warming his injured arm. From far away he hears a couple of wolves starting up, a string of thin howls as if just testing their upper registers. Probably too far away to worry about, but he should have his gun handy in any case.

  For the moment, though, he doesn’t move. He can feel her sleeping just a few feet away. This is something he has wanted to do for a long time: watch her sleep. He never in his life imagined it might happen out here, miles away from any proper town or village or settlement, in a stick-and-leaf hut like his great grandmothers made for their men. But he doesn’t mind that. There is a burning feeling in the back of his throat and he swallows, trying to coat it. He can’t find a comfortable position for his arm. He wants to be alone by the fire to steep himself in the sudden gift of her, to stay with the surprise, which he still only half-believes in. He also wants to go back to watch her sleep, but he puts off the moment in order to savor it.

  Susanna is dreaming of the white moths she saw when she was with Meera.

  It was their last night in the Black Swamp but they didn’t know it, and they’d stopped to camp in a meadow full of short yellow grass. They drank raisin wine and shared a pigeon pie, and just as they were finishing Meera said, “Do you smell that?”

  Susanna looked around the clearing. Something was moving in the wind but there was no wind, and then she realized that what she had taken for yellow grass wasn’t grass at all but rather small budded flowers that bloomed at night. While they were eating, the flowers had opened into tiny yellow mouths. A moment later Meera pointed to a cloud of white moths flying into the meadow.

  The moths were tiny, each one barely the size of a fingernail, and their wings looked to Susanna like small bright eyes in the twilight. While she and Meera watched, the moths spread out among the yellow flowers, dipping and lifting and dipping again, gathering pollen like a woman bringing a needle up and then down. Everything in the meadow seemed to be watching them; even the owls stopped calling out. When they finished, the moths rose up and re-formed their cloud and drifted back into the trees like an enormous white beating heart.

  Meera and Susanna had smiled at each other then, amazed at their good fortune to see all this, and they fell asleep with the sweet scent of the flowers still in the air.

  Now, in Susanna’s dream, the white moths have come back. They settle on her arms and shoulders, and on Meera’s too. Meera is standing next to her laughing with pleasure. A strong sweet smell rises from the ground.

  Susanna wakes with a warm feeling up behind her ribs. Seth is sleeping beside her and she wants to wake him up at once, right now, and feel his arms around her.

  “Seth,” she whispers.

  But when he opens his eyes she can tell at once that something is wrong. She pulls her hand out from under the blanket to feel his forehead, which is burning.

  “Let me see your arm,” she says.

  He is lying with it cradled over his chest. Underneath the frayed bandage the wound has turned yellow and ugly. An infection, but how? She tells him to lie still, that she is going to get water to clean it. Also she’ll look for more trillium. She tries to keep her voice even.

  “Wait,” he says. He struggles for a moment trying to put his good hand in the opposite pocket of his breeches. “Last night. I forgot. This is for you.”

  In the palm of his hand lies a beautiful gold ring with tiny seed pearls circling a larger, rounder pearl. She picks it up to look at it, and then she puts it on her finger. Her hands are rough and red, her jagged nails have arcs of green dirt beneath them. She pulls the ring off.

  “It will be ruined out here,” she says. “Best if I keep it in my pocket for now.”

  “But you’ll keep it?”

  She kisses his hot forehead. She can tell he is struggling to keep his eyes open. “It’s a beautiful ring,” she tells him.

 
; He closes his eyes. “We can go to Philadelphia. I don’t mind that.”

  She starts to assure him that she no longer wants to go to Philadelphia. “Hard enough at the Wyandot village. All the people and the noise...”

  She looks down. He is asleep.

  The first bird of the morning calls out. She pulls the blanket up around his shoulders and tucks it in at the bottom. For a moment she can’t think what to do next although she has already outlined it: clean the wound, apply a new salve, dress it. She wants there to be more, something she hasn’t already done. Even in sleep Seth is holding his wounded arm carefully. His eyelids flutter and she thinks of her dream, the white moths in the meadow. Not everything wild is harsh and ugly, Susanna reminds herself. But it is difficult to remember that when you are sitting next to a wounded man who might die of infection in spite of your best care.

  When she crawls outside she spies the remains of a campfire—Seth must have made one last night while she slept. So his arm was bothering him then already? A moment later something else catches her eye. There, on a flat rock, a rock very like the one near Onaway’s longhouse, lies a shiny metal object.

  Scissors. Her mother’s good nail scissors with their elegant avian finger holes.

  For a moment she feels swept clean of thought like a tide going out. She goes over to pick up the scissors. They are polished and cold. She closes her palm over the blades.

  “Meera,” she calls.

  Several birds begin chattering at once.

  “Meera, come out.”

  When Meera steps out from behind a blackened tree, what Susanna notices first is her dress. It is not a plain hide dress like Susanna’s—the clothing of a servant—but decorated with beads along the hem and sleeve. The beads are brown and white and shaped like teeth, and she wears dark woven bracelets on both of her wrists. She is no longer pinched thin.

  “Meera. What are you doing here?”

  “Those people in the village, they were not my people,” Meera says.

  “But I mean to say, how did you find us?”