Thieving Forest (44 page)

“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?”

Meera shrugs a long shrug. “You leave a trail as though painting it.”

Twenty-Seven

When Meera hears about Seth’s arm and his fever, she immediately sets to work making a new poultice using trillium and a dark purple root that she digs up from the stream. She says she will take care of him. But Meera says a lot of things.

“They made me stay inside all day,” she tells Susanna. “They watched everything I did. They betrothed me to a boy as short as a goat but not nearly so handsome. They let their dogs lick their spoons to clean them.”

“Didn’t I say you might not like them? Didn’t I warn you?”

Meera shrugs, a tiny concession. They are sitting beneath a tree with two wide, exposed roots like the arms of an armchair as they make the new poultice. Meera is using a rock to pound the purple root into flakes, and Susanna mixes the flakes up with water and trillium to make a paste.

“But how did you know where to look for us?” Susanna asks her. “Why didn’t you go to the Maumee, like the others did?”

“I knew there were two sisters. A long time ago I asked where the other one was.”

She leans over to tip more flakes into Susanna’s bowl. Susanna looks down at the top of Meera’s dark clean hair. It is parted carefully down the middle from her forehead to her nape in such a straight line that Susanna thinks that someone else, a woman, must have parted it for her. Meera was the only one except Naomi who knew that Susanna would seek out Penelope, but that doesn’t explain everything.

“How did you get my mother’s scissors?”

“The answer to the riddle was so obvious I thought I would have to share the prize with many people. But it seems I was the only one who guessed it.”

“You asked for
scissors
for your prize?” Susanna suspects that this is Meera’s way of recompense but it isn’t enough. “You were the one who stole my money. Not those eunuchs. You.”

Meera does not look up from her work. “You had the necklace. I had nothing.”

“The necklace was of no value to them.”

“I learned of this later.” Meera turns the root over and begins pounding the other side.

That’s it, that’s all that Susanna will get. Nothing like an apology. When she stole the money, Meera thought the Chippewa necklace would be sufficient for ransom. She didn’t cross Susanna on purpose. And when she found out her mistake, she managed to obtain the cherry buttons and leave them for her.

“Did you know about Seth?” Susanna asks.

“Of course.”

“You were following me.”

“Only that once. After it was discovered I was never left alone.”

“And Tako? Was he helping you?”

“Who?”

When the poultice is finished, Meera and Susanna sling up Meera’s blanket between two trees to make a hammock. They want to get Seth off the damp ground. When they wake him up he looks at Meera and calls her by name. That’s a good sign.

He says to her, “You’ve grown.”

“Can you lean on me?” Susanna asks. “We’re taking you to your new bed.”

He holds his head stiffly, like an old man. “That’s good,” he says. “Because my old bed was beginning to smell...”

“Step carefully here.”

“...of dry leaves.”

When they get him in the hammock Meera says, “I stand no taller than I did before.” She gives him a tin cup with two fingers of greenish liquid inside. “Here. Gargle but do not swallow.”

Seth swirls the mixture in his mouth and spits it onto the ground. After Meera applies the new poultice to his arm she wraps a clean bandage around it.

He says, “I think you’re taller.”

“I am the same,” Meera insists.

“Whatever you say to her,” Susanna tells Seth, pushing the hair back from his forehead, “she’ll contradict.” His head is not as hot as it was before, but it is still warm.