Thieving Forest (13 page)

“Susanna.” He stops walking and turns to her. Without thinking he takes her two hands in his own. “I am so very sorry.”

She doesn’t pull away. Her eyes are wet. “And now it’s only the two of us, Beatrice and myself, and in thinking of our future...”

“Sister Susanna! Brother Spendlove!”

He turns to see a tall, fair woman walking quickly up the path toward them. He doesn’t recognize her. How does she know his name?

“Sister Consolation,” Susanna says. A stubborn look crosses her face.

“I am surprised,” Consolation says when she reaches them. “I am deeply surprised. Brother Spendlove, here you see is a crossing path, which you may take. I’m sure you know that we do not permit unmarried women and men to walk together.”

He feels his face grow warm. He bows. “My apologies.”

Consolation lifts her dark shawl slightly and resettles it. A dismissive gesture, she does not want apologies. She takes Susanna by the arm and turns her away.

There is nothing he can do but obey. But a moment later when he looks back he notices the mirrors sewn into Consolation’s shawl. He wonders about that. Gemeinschaft has its own stories and you have to learn how to read them: white men sleep in the same buildings as natives because we are all one family. Ottawas forsake their weapons because only Christ’s blood will protect them. But shards of mirror on a shawl? Seth cannot read the story behind that. He is disappointed that he’s let this chance slip away from him, although he does not know exactly what he wanted, unless it was just to see her and try to take her home.

The next day Consolation stops Susanna as she is walking to the store with Beatrice.

“Today I would like your help, my dear, someplace else,” Consolation tells her. She smiles without pleasure, as if proud of her ability to be nice to people she does not particularly like. To Beatrice she says, “Will you cut me six yards of new linen? I’ll come by for it later today.”

Above them a thin layer of clouds drifts across the sky like a web. Susanna follows her with some curiosity. Where are they going? She wants to ask but something in Consolation’s manner stops her. She is walking a step or two ahead of Susanna as if that’s her rightful place; forgetting, Susanna thinks, that in this settlement we are equals. When the sun pierces through the cloud cover, the mirrors on Consolation’s shawl throw out quick shafts of light like spears.

“You are looking at my shawl,” Consolation says. “Perhaps you wonder why I took such trouble over it?”

“The mirrors are very pretty,” Susanna says.

“Well of course I did not sew them on for the looks of it. Quite the opposite.” She smiles a hard, satisfied smile. Susanna can see that Consolation is the type of woman who enjoys leading you into the warm, lovely room of her words and then, once there, dousing you with cold water.

“One day a poor Miami wanted a mirror that I had with me. We had just arrived here, myself and my late husband Jeriah and Brother Graves and a handful of Delaware Indians from our old settlement in Pennsylvania. We were negotiating something, I don’t remember what, and the man saw the mirror in one of our wagons. The mirror had been made by my grandfather, but I realize now I should not have brought it with me. The desire for such objects should be resisted.”

Consolation would not give the Miami the mirror but offered him instead a bag of seed corn, much more useful. To her horror he turned the bag upside down in disgust and spilled the seed on the ground. Later that night he came back and tried to steal the mirror but it broke.

“These pieces are remnants,” Consolation says, resettling the shawl on her shoulders. “A lesson in vanity. And a reminder that we can never truly see ourselves if we look from the outside.”

Again that hard, self-satisfied tone. Susanna has the urge to remind Consolation that she is not her pupil. She is tired of lessons, and in fact sympathizes with the Miami, who just wanted something beautiful to hold.

“Nor can anyone else truly see another just by looking at his face,” she says.

“True, my dear, true. Our actions tell our character much more potently than our looks. Self-will, vanity, a disrespect for our elders and the rules they live by—these speak of a limited person, I fear.” She gives Susanna a meaningful look.

Susanna’s face flushes with annoyance. She spent five minutes talking with an unmarried man, a friend of hers from home. That means she’s self-willed and vain and disrespectful? Anyway, why should she take moral counsel from a woman who clearly has had every advantage in life? A beautiful, tall, wealthy woman—there is obviously wealth in her past—who wishes, as if these advantages are not enough, to be thought of as morally superior as well.

“We can also be limited by a lack of empathy for those undergoing hardship,” Susanna replies. She is thinking about her own losses but Consolation says, “Ah, the natives, it is true, we feel for them, hard though it might be to understand why they cling to their difficult ways. And now here we are, my dear. The tannery.”

They’ve come to the end of the path, where a small cabin stands by itself. The tannery? To Susanna it looks more like a potting shed than anything else. It is surrounded by dry, partially denuded elderberry bushes and has but one tiny window and a sloping door. No one else is around. They are at the very limits of the Gemeinschaft land, half forsaken and overgrown.

“But I don’t know anything about tanning hides,” Susanna says. She feels that nothing will induce her to go into that dark, dismal shed. “I’m better with figures.”

“Oh, the girl inside will show you. Unless you want to help prepare the lower fields instead? Some native women are out there now. You can bring water to them, if you don’t want to hoe.”

Bring water to Indians? Or
hoe?
Susanna looks miserably at Consolation, who meets her gaze without wavering.

“We must put our vanity behind us, my dear,” Consolation says. She smiles her hard smile. “It only gets in our way.”

Inside the tannery a native girl stands at a long trestle table with her back to the door. She is looking at a lumpy hide folded unevenly in thirds. On one side of the table are two large mud-colored barrels and a narrow cask of water, and on the other side is a mangle. A couple of stools have been pushed out of the way.

“Two Seneca scraped off the flesh on this one,” the girl says in English without turning around. She pushes it aside. “They did a most miserable job.”

The smell of rotting meat is terrible. Susanna puts her hand over her nose and breathes through her mouth. “I’ve been told to help you,” she says through her fingers.

The girl whirls around. She looks familiar. For a moment they stare at each other.

“What happened to the other girl?” she asks Susanna. She is young, maybe twelve or thirteen, and stands firmly with her two legs spread like a warrior. Now Susanna recognizes her: it is the girl who came to the Birthing Hut with the woman in labor, when she and Beatrice had to move out. The pregnant woman was Delaware, and Consolation called this girl her daughter. But anyone could see they were not from the same tribe. They’d arrived in Gemeinschaft only a few hours before the woman’s labor began, although Consolation said they’d lived here for many years on and off. She called the young girl Miriam.

Susanna holds out her hand. “My name is Susanna.”

But the girl says nothing and does not take her hand. Susanna tries again.

“
Ndeluwensi
Susanna,” she says in Delaware. In English she says, “What is your real name? Not Miriam, I shouldn’t think.”

But the girl just makes a sound with her tongue indicating that she does not deem the question worth answering. With two hands she lifts the heavy lid off of one of the barrels that stands by the table, by far the largest barrel that Susanna has ever seen. Floating inside is a length of deerskin. Also something else, a misshapen ball of—what?

“What is that?” Susanna asks. The girl does not answer. “
Keku hech?
” Susanna repeats.

The girl looks down into the barrel. “Horse brain,” she says in English.

Susanna takes a step back. “How long does it stay there?”

“Until the next horse dies.”

Squinting her eyes half closed—she does not want to look into the water again—Susanna helps the girl lift the wet deerskin from the barrel. Together they carry it two steps to the mangle, where they thread it through again and again trying to wring out as much water as possible. It is heavy, wet work. In no time the front of Susanna’s dress is soaked and water drips onto her moccasins. When they have wrung out as much water as they can, they lift the skin onto the table, stretch it taut, and nail it down. Then for the rest of the day they take turns pushing and stretching the skin with a heavy canoe paddle, working its surface in long strokes as it dries.

At every step the girl Miriam explains what they need to do with such a heavy tone of distaste it is as if she believes Susanna has brought on all of her troubles, whatever they are. She has a wide, young face and pale skin. Her dark eyes have the look of someone constantly reassessing everything around her. She is strong for someone so young, but Susanna is strong too from all the years working at their store, unloading goods, pushing barrels, and lugging furs from the counter to the shelves.

Miriam says, “I suppose it was Sister Consolation who directed you here.” She looks into Susanna’s eyes. “I do not like Sister Consolation.” A challenge.

Susanna says, “Nor do I.”

That surprises the girl. She looks like she might say something else but then closes her lips tightly. There is something about her that reminds Susanna of her younger sister Lilith, the stubbornness perhaps, and she decides on this basis, a whim, that she will make this girl her friend. She has never tried to make a friend before, having no need in Severne. Her sisters were her companions. But here it is different. Beatrice will only speak of the brethren and their work, and has recently taken it upon herself to learn more of their doctrine, which she repeats to Susanna with none of the storytelling skills of Penelope. Although Susanna can sometimes induce Sister Johanna to talk about her past or her people or the news of the village, the conversation inevitably leads back to missionary work, and the same is true with just about every other woman Susanna has tried to converse with, most of whom speak limited English anyway. The few white women are mostly married. Sister Louisa, a single white woman about Susanna’s age, is so conscious of trying to be humble that she cannot form a sentence without six or seven qualifiers (“It is my small and perhaps erroneous opinion and if I am wrong please do me the honor to correct me...”), and her strong overbite tends to make her spit when she speaks. The only other white woman near her age, Sister Pauline, is busy embroidering a crazy patchwork of Bible quotations onto her blanket, none of them straight across but jutting up and down as she suddenly runs out of room, and she answers any question put to her with something from scripture.

Susanna is lonely, she knows she is lonely, and she also knows it is wicked to be lonely considering the fate of her other sisters. She is the lucky one. But she wishes she had someone to talk to who didn’t only want to talk about opening Indian hearts and how Jesus most gruesomely died for us all.

When the chapel bell rings, the girl says, “They are calling the afternoon service. You may go if you like.”

“I don’t care for the services,” Susanna says. “But if you want to go...”

“I am not a Christian,” Miriam tells her proudly.

“All right.” Susanna gives her the paddle. Miriam says, “Anyway, they make me go to the children’s service.”

“The children’s service! But you look as old as my sister Lilith, and she is nearly sixteen!” The girl is not more than thirteen, Susanna guesses, but the comment clearly pleases her. Susanna takes the dipper from a nail above the water cask and takes a drink. Then she fills the dipper again and hands it to Miriam. While Miriam is drinking, Susanna takes up the canoe paddle even though it is not her turn. She does not like to work but she likes to impress people. That’s one way to make friends, she thinks.

They pound the skin until Susanna’s arms begin to ache and then a long time after that, too. But she keeps working as hard as the girl, and every time she gets herself a drink of water she gets her one, too. The skin begins to look as pitted and worn as an old man’s face, still far from the smooth buttery touch Susanna knows from the tanned hides coming into her father’s store. They keep at it, and Susanna finds herself comparing her work to the girl’s. She tries a different technique with the paddle, pushing her weight into it. She stands the way the girl stands with one leg in front of the other like a man pushing a cow into a pen.