Thieving Forest Read online

  Aurelia says, “Koman’s swine wolf has taken up a place in front of the shelter. He’s standing guard.”

  “The dog is just a dog,” Penelope tells her again.

  A moment later Aurelia says, “The one with the scar, he’s coming over here. And he’s holding up his hatchet!”

  “What? Let me look.” Penelope puts her face to the opening.

  The man is shouting in Potawatomi as he walks. Naomi sees Koman’s dog rise. He lays flat his ears and makes a low rattling noise. Is he snarling? The man stops and says something to him, a command. The dog doesn’t move. The man steps closer and the dog crouches as if to strike, but with a quick sweep the man hits the dog alongside his snout with the blunt end of his hatchet. Naomi can’t see where the dog lands, or if he’s all right.

  “What’s happening?” Aurelia asks. She is standing back now, not looking.

  “Koman’s dog...the man hit him,” Naomi says.

  “Why?”

  “I think the dog...I don’t know. He wouldn’t move out of the way. I think he was protecting us,” Naomi says. She wants that to be true. They need some protection.

  “You!” the scarred Potawatomi shouts. “Yaknogeh!” He pulls away the log and then kick-rolls it over in the direction of the dog. The women are standing in front of him now, fully exposed, their dresses in tatters from their forced run among the trees, dirt in their hair.

  “Wait,” Penelope tells him. “Wait! Listen to me! Do you have my knitting bag? She can knit for you! A pair of stockings?” She pulls her skirt up a fraction to show him her stockings. Like her dress, they are torn and dirty.

  “She can make stockings for you!” Penelope says. “She is a very fast knitter!”

  He reaches in to grab Aurelia by the hair. Penelope holds on to Aurelia’s arm and keeps pleading with him. He waves his hatchet so close that Naomi is afraid for a moment he will cut off Aurelia’s arm and Penelope’s hand with it. Beatrice must think so too, for she says, “Penelope! Watch yourself!”

  “It’s all right,” Aurelia says in a tattered voice. The Potawatomi pulls her out with a hard jerk and Aurelia falls outside on her knees, the dirt shooting up in a cloud and then resettling around her. He drags her to her feet. Then he pushes her toward the trees with two hands, forcing her to take one step and then another. Penelope calls out, “Fight him!” But Aurelia only says, “I am so tired.” And she does look tired. Tired and ill. Yaknogeh.

  “What should we do?” Beatrice asks. “He’ll kill her!”

  Naomi makes a move to get out of the shelter but the two young men who supervised their work now step in front of them, making escape impossible. So she can only watch as the scarred Potawatomi pushes Aurelia into the trees. She thinks she sees the leaf in Aurelia’s hair loosen and fall in a slow arc behind her. It disappears in the sunlight before it hits the ground. She is squeezing Penelope’s hand hard on one side and Beatrice is squeezing her forearm on the other. If the two Potawatomi who are guarding the shelter suddenly sprouted wings and flew across the water she could not feel any more bewildered. Her old world with all its rules is surely gone.

  “He’ll take us one by one,” Beatrice says.

  The birds outside are momentarily quiet. Although Naomi still can’t hear her music and does not even try to, she can hear, in the cramped space, the even beat of her sisters’ breath, and this seems both beautiful and sad, a kind of music in the way that a whisper can be a kind of song. The sun is going down and the light seems to fall farther and farther away from them. She closes her eyes. The fresh green wood of the shelter smells strange. How much time passes she can’t tell.

  “He’s back,” Beatrice says finally. “He’s alone.”

  Naomi waits. Penelope’s hand tightens in hers.

  “He’s wiping blood off his hatchet,” Beatrice says. “He’s walking this way.”

  Three

  Later Susanna cannot remember how she got herself to Spendlove’s cabin, she only remembers that her legs felt like lead and that her heart was beating so hard that it hurt. She knows she pounded on the ironworks door with its horseshoe nailed crookedly above the lintel with one nail missing and flecks of rust on the outside edge. She must have stared at it, she remembers it so well. Then she sat down on the bench outside. This is where Betsey T. and her son Mop find her—how much later?—when they come by with a bucket of milk for Spendlove, who does not own a cow.

  Even sitting Susanna feels like her body is being pulled down to the ground by invisible ropes. She tries to tell Betsey T. and Mop what happened, pressing her two hands against her stomach. Why, she thinks, and the word is like a bird that won’t stay still. She can’t think what to do. Amos Spendlove comes out from around back, where he’d been working he says, and she has to start the story all over again. She can’t remember what she has already said. Afterward, she stands up and vomits into the grass.

  Betsey T. gives her water to drink. Amos Spendlove is drinking whiskey from a tin cup, which he calls tea. That isn’t unusual. His hands are shaking and that isn’t unusual either. He’s a mean drunk whom her father Sirus never trusted, but he is the only man not out in the fields.

  “We have to get them,” Susanna says. She means the men, but Betsey T. misunderstands.

  “We’ll find your sisters, honey, don’t worry. Do you need to be sick again?”

  She is called Betsey T. to distinguish her from Betsey Mowatt, wife of John Mowatt, another settler. Betsey T.’s husband died two springs ago when a lightning storm hit while he was hunting and a heavy tree limb fell on his back. Susanna decided long ago that Betsey T. was a foolish, empty-headed woman but she’s the only woman besides the Quiners who live in town. Her son Mop is foolish to the point of dim-witted but he has a rare talent for trapping and fishing, which means that he and his mother can live a tolerable life out here without farming. Besides the Quiners and the Spendloves, they are the only ones who don’t farm.

  “The men,” Susanna corrects her. “We have to call them in.”

  She stops and swallows. Her stomach feels watery but she wills herself not to be sick again. Somehow she must be to blame for all this. If only she hadn’t—what? She remembers thinking she’d had enough of their quarreling for one day, but it’s ridiculous to think that that meant anything, could do anything. She takes her turkey hen bone out of her pocket and makes a fist around it. She feels inadequate and foolish, as foolish as Betsey T., and the thought comes to her that really she is no better than a child, that up to now her deepest wishes have been childish wishes: to leave home; to have someone else do her work. If only I could go back to the world of an hour ago, she thinks. But that wish is childish too, and painful because impossible.

  “Where did you say you were at during all this?” Spendlove asks her. He is standing before her with his back to the forest, scowling. His shoulder-length hair holds a good deal of oil from the roots to the ends.

  “Between the pig’s pen and the henhouse,” Susanna says. “Behind a maple tree.”

  “And how is it they didn’t see you?”

  She doesn’t know. She can’t tell him. Mop, who left to check on the Quiners’ cabin, comes back to report on what has been stolen: all the candles, all the food, Sirus’s tools, and their horses and wagon, which they keep in their own small barn rather than the public stable. Susanna presses her left thigh with her fingertip, testing for feeling. Her shock is wearing off and the seeds of her later, full-blown emotions are beginning to emerge: grief, horror, and the fear of being alone. What little breeze there’d been earlier is gone, and the air feels warm and thick. If she leans forward she can see her own cabin and she wants to be able to see it.

  Why is nothing happening? “You go raise the cry,” she tells Spendlove. “We’ve delayed too long already.”

  But Spendlove makes no move. “The men are racing as it is to get their grain in. When they come back we’ll get together a proper search.”

  “But the Potawatomi will be long gone by then!�
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  “They’re long gone now.”

  That stops her a moment. “Where’s Cade? He’ll go.”

  At the river with his brother, Spendlove tells her. “They’ll be back by nightfall.”

  “Nightfall! But Aurelia is sick, he’ll want to find her!”

  “How sick?” Betsey T. asks.

  “Getting over a fever. But still weak.”

  “The Indians won’t keep her then,” Spendlove says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If they see she’s sick they’ll kill her and go on their way.”

  Susanna stares at him. How can he say such a thing? His eyes are watery and his pupils dart around like black flies. An uncouth man who eats his food with a knife.

  “Or drop her at the nearest village,” Mop says hopefully. “That would be Risdale.”

  “Maybe the Potawatomi hope to get a ransom there,” Betsey T. suggests.

  “Didn’t I see you talking to some Potawatomi yesterday?” Mop asks Spendlove. “Over out by Stilgoe Creek?”

  Spendlove spits into the grass.

  “You spoke to some Potawatomi?” Susanna is surprised. She thought Spendlove hated Indians. “What did you say?”

  “When the men come in we’ll organize a good search,” Spendlove tells her. “Meanwhile we can send a runner to the river, maybe Mop.”

  “The river? But they went into the forest!”

  “They stole your horses and wagon. That means they’re going by road.”

  “I saw them,” Susanna insists. “They went into the trees.”

  But Spendlove just spits again. “You don’t know what you saw. You’re in shock.”

  Susanna’s face flushes with anger. “And you’re drunk.”

  “Susanna!” Betsey T. scolds.

  “This is tea,” Spendlove tells her. He throws the word out like a punch.

  Susanna leans forward and looks at her cabin again. Spendlove won’t help her. He is even more useless than she is. She turns to look down the other side of the settlement. “Old Adam knows the way through the forest.” She is thinking aloud.

  “You wait on the men,” Spendlove says. “This is not advice, this is the rule for the situation.”

  But she’s waited too long already. “If no one will go now,” she says, “then I’ll go myself.”

  For a moment no one says anything. Mop and Betsey T. look at her with identical expressions: heads cocked and mouths half open as if trying and failing to parse her words. Spendlove spits again and bends over to cough. Then he takes another pull from his cup.

  “You go into the forest,” he scoffs.

  Amos Spendlove’s two sons, Seth and Cade, are on their way back from a partially successful trip to the ferry landing when they hear the news about the Quiner sisters. Successful in that they were able to sell the Quiners’ horses and wagon at a good price, but the iron Amos ordered had been either sold off to someone closer on the line or lost overboard in a thunderstorm so violent that it kept the barge from being able to land for a full day. This according to the bargeman, a thick Scot with a web-like beard. He claimed it was a miracle the whole vessel didn’t overturn and he himself drowned.

  “Work like his, you’d think he’d take it upon himself to learn how to swim,” Cade says.

  Seth is under their wagon with his coat off. They are only a couple of miles from Severne but had to stop because one of the tree axles is tangled with switch grass. Seth is lying on his back trying to clear it. “Almost a matter of pride with these rivermen that they don’t know a stroke.”

  Although Cade is the younger brother, he is taller and broader than Seth. He has his father’s blue eyes and fair hair. Even in a town of large farmers, Cade stands out. Seth, however, people sometimes forget about until they need a tool mended or the mechanism of a turning wheel explained. Unlike his brother, Seth has dark eyes and very dark, very straight hair, which even the recent rain and humidity could add no curl to. Is he part Italian, the settlers wonder? Or even Hebrew? It is known that the two brothers come from two different wives. As brothers they are close, and notwithstanding their difference in size it is Seth who feels protective of Cade.

  The sound of cicadas rises and falls. The sun is out finally, and the scent of moist, green, newly sprouted life hangs in the air. Seth untwists the last rubbery length of grass from the shaft and cuts it with his knife. Then he stretches out on the grass next to Cade, who is eating plums and saving the pits in his pocket.

  They say if you can see enough blue sky to make a woman’s apron then the clouds will soon clear off, and Seth can see enough for an apron, a cap, and the sleeve of a dress. He closes his eyes, tilts his head toward the sun, and inhales as if breathing it in. In his pocket is a ring. A small ring, but pretty with a tiny cream-colored pearl surrounded by even tinier seed pearls. His father told him last night that the Quiners are staying in Severne, which is why they want to sell their team and wagon—they need capital for supplies. At first Seth was surprised, but then he recognized an opportunity. The bargeman had with him but two rings to sell, and the one in Seth’s pocket now was easily the nicest.

  He plucks a long piece of grass and ties his dark hair back into a ponytail. He is not Italian, as most people think, nor Hebrew, but Indian. Amos’s mother was full Potawatomi, though you would never guess it from Amos’s fair skin and fair hair. Amos lived with his mother’s people until he was ten, and can speak Potawatomi as well as he can English. Seth can speak it too but Cade doesn’t have any talent for it. Sometimes Seth thinks that all of Amos’s Indian blood was passed on to him, the eldest son, leaving none for Cade. At least that’s what it looks like. The brothers have two different mothers to be sure, but their mothers were both blond and Bavarian—cousins, in fact, who had come to Virginia together. When the second one, Cade’s mother, died some six or seven years ago, Amos took up the boys and moved to Severne and never bothered to marry again.

  Seth hears a sound in the distance: horse’s hooves. There is enough blue sky now for a full dress and maybe a parasol cover. They left Severne last night at moonrise to get to the ferry landing by morning, and Seth is tired. At the river he and Cade tethered the two wagons together—the Quiners and their own—and each brother slept in one for safekeeping while they waited for the barge. A couple of hours’ rest at most. What Seth wants now is just a moment to close his eyes.

  Cade says, “It’s Mop.”

  Seth turns his head. The horse’s reins are flopping up and down in waves and the rider keeps such a loose seat that he seems to be holding on with his ankles. But Mop’s dark curly hair, parted in the middle to make two shelves that hang to his shoulders, is recognizable at almost any distance. After Mop slows his horse up by the wagon he reaches for his water pouch and tips it back to drink. His collar hangs on by a button.

  Neither brother stands. Not for Mop. Seth closes his eyes again. He can feel the ring in his pocket pressing on his thigh but makes no adjustment.

  Mop takes a breath and says dramatically, “The Quiner sisters have been taken.”

  “Taken?” Seth asks. “You mean sick?” Mop’s first words often make no sense. Probably he is here to see if he can earn a few coins in some way and this is his awkward preamble.

  “Taken. By Indians. Run out of their home. I thought they usually set fire too, but the store is still standing.”

  Now Seth opens his eyes. Taken by Indians? Sunlight seems to shift away from his body and settle somewhere else, and for a moment he can do nothing but wait for something to connect this minute to the last one. He stares at Mop, who is still talking: Indians, no fire, a group from the forest. His lips flop apart like the reins on his horse.

  Cade is the one who recovers first. “What do you mean? All the Quiners? Every one?”

  “All except Miss Susanna. She hid somewheres.”

  “What about Aurelia?” Cade’s voice sounds as though it is coming from a tube. Aurelia is his sweetheart.

  “Taken, like I said, a
ll but Susanna.”

  That’s when Cade springs to action: he re-hangs the tar bucket that Seth had removed to get underneath the wagon, throws his coat into the wagon box, and catches hold of Clyde and Ginny, their horses. But Seth still can’t make sense of it. They’ve never had any trouble with natives. They trade with them, buy their pelts, compare trap lines. What changed? An insect with wings like hinged wood flies into Seth’s face and he slaps it away instinctively. The movement serves as a gate opening, letting him breathe. He jumps up to help Cade.

  Mop is still talking. “And Susanna not right in the head after what she saw, that’s what my ma thinks. Shock. She began quarreling with your pa. Seems the Indians stole the Quiners’ wagon, too, and their horses, so your pa says they’ll be on this road here. But Susanna, she says she saw them go into the forest on foot.”

  Now Cade and Seth both stop to look at Mop. Cade says, “What do you mean, the Quiners’ wagon?”

  “I went around to their place and saw it was gone. Your pa says they stole it.”

  Cade and Seth don’t look at each other. One thing they both got from Amos: the ability to suddenly stand very still.

  “Amos said the Indians stole the wagon,” Seth says. He is speaking to Cade. The two hundred dollars he got for the wagon and team is still in his pocket, next to the ring. What is Amos about? He told his sons to sell the wagon, said that Penelope Quiner commissioned it.

  A lie.

  “It’s her pride,” Mop is saying. “The Quiner pride. Amos said he would round up the farmers soon as they’re in from planting. She tells him, My sisters are more important than grain! To which your pa says, Not if your livestock goin’ to starve over winter. Says Susanna, But if we don’t start now the Indians will be long gone. And here I say, They’re long gone now.”

  “Which Indians did you say they were?” Seth asks.

  “She said Potawatomi. But like I say, she’s a fair way in shock.”

  Seth looks over at Cade, whose face has a white, hard sheen to it.