CHAPTER ELEVEN

MARGARET WOKE AT first light, not knowing where she was. After a moment, her eyes grew accustomed to the dimness and she recognized the long house that, she knew, would from now on be her dwelling place. Piles of blankets, a cooking pot, and various utensils were piled near the shallow pit that was now a smoldering bed of ashes.

Looking at the sleeping bodies around her, wrapped in blankets or bedrolls, Margaret estimated that twelve full-grown men and woman and an equal number of children shared this space. The long house was perhaps twenty feet long and twelve feet wide; poles divided it into spaces for each family. She was grateful for the few feet that had apparently been designated hers.

Her new brother was seated on a folded blanket at the center of the dwelling. He seemed to be lost in thought or dream, wearing only his breechcloth and beaded moccasins. Two eagle feathers rose from a knot of hair on the back of his head. The rest of his head had been shaven. The slight familiarity she had gained on the trail evaporated in the dim light. Margaret thought him a terrifying hulk, impenetrable in his strangeness.

Two Indian squaws were waking. One of them said something Margaret could not understand but which she thought might be a sort of greeting, or even a welcome. She had heard tales at home of the cruelty of the squaws to their white women captives, but in that case, nearly all of the captives had been young and, she guessed, adopted as concubines by the braves rather than as daughters. She knew she would not fall into that trap and endure the ignominy as well as the jealous rage of the squaws.

Now her new brother was looking at her as though for the first time. He said a word in Shawnee with profound emphasis, repeating it several times, that seemed to mean she was being renamed. Then he dismissed her with a wave of his hand. The two squaws led her out of the long house.

Margaret attempted to repeat the new name and to inquire about its meaning, but the squaws either did not understand her or chose to ignore her question.

In the clearing, thirty or more Shawnee were gathered, wearing what Margaret thought might be clothes for a ceremony. For a moment she imagined the ceremony might be in honor of her adoption. As the Shawnee circled, stomped, and shouted, two drummers took up the beat. Margaret and the squaws stood watching as other Shawnee gathered behind them, all watching attentively.

Then she saw Agatha led into the circle. Agatha, too, had been stripped, scrubbed, and re-clothed in deerskin kilt and moccasins. The experience seemed to have unnerved her; she looked across the circle at Margaret beseechingly, but Margaret was beginning to realize that a stern protocol governed all her movements and she did not go to her.

When the braves’ dance was finished and the circle cleared, Margaret’s and Agatha’s squaws led their two charges to the middle of the space. As the whole tribe watched, the squaws spoke words that might belong, Margaret first thought, to a prayer or a chant—a long, low droning that might instead be a recitation of the wars, the deaths, and the captures leading to this moment: a somber account.

White Bark stepped forward and firmly placed Margaret’s right hand into the hand of the squaw who stood beside her.

Then, with the same firmness, he separated Agatha’s hands from the hands of her two squaws, who stepped back into the crowd.

The white Indian, Girty, stepped forward, seized Agatha’s arm, and began to drag her away. Margaret lunged, but her two squaws held her back. She had never abandoned her sister during all the trials of the trail, but now she had no choice. To comfort herself, she remembered that likely captives were sometimes sold to the governor in Detroit and went into his service. She swiped the tears off her cheek. Agatha, sobbing and struggling, was dragged away.

A few minutes after she disappeared, the two squaws let go of Margaret’s hands. But the whole tribe was watching her attentively. There would be no escape.

She was set to her first task immediately, sent with a group of girls to gather the last blackberries from a dense, thorny patch on the far side of the long houses. The girls chattered and laughed, quickly stripping the berries from their branches, seeming not to notice the way their arms and hands were scratched. Margaret was slower. The work gave her a chance to look all the way down what seemed to be the main street of the village, with bark-covered long houses on both sides. She was astonished to see so many—fifty at least, each a hive of activity with squaws outside, grinding corn in mortars, slicing meat, or tending to the cooking fires. The braves were nowhere to be seen.

The basket of berries she brought back to her squaw was only half full, and the woman snarled a word Margaret didn’t need to translate. She would have to do better at her next task. Fatigue was no excuse nor, she guessed, was her aching back, brought on by days of riding and her delicate condition. She had suspected it since September when her courses had not returned but had laid that down to the fact that she had been nursing. Now, she knew the truth.

She did not know when it had happened, when a sharp urge had wakened John from the sodden sleep of exhaustion, but she could not remember the conception of her lost daughter either and suspected this was generally true of women who never spoke of such things. Possibly this new life was created to replace the daughter she had lost.

She wondered if she would be shown more mercy when her belly rounded but doubted it. She had noticed three squaws with big bellies working around the village, one hauling an enormous pack of firewood on her back, the other two sweeping the main street till it was free of every pebble. This was familiar from the Greenbrier Settlement, where women worked until they went into labor, and even then managed to finish whatever task they had undertaken. It was the same here.

In the afternoon two hunters brought in a large stag, slung from a sturdy branch. Several Indians came forward and the skinning, butchering, and carving began. Margaret guessed that the deer signaled a feast of some importance.

Meanwhile a group of squaws fed twigs to the fire in the center of the village and, when it was well aroused, some larger branches. They erected a spit over it and began to roast sections of meat.

The smell of roasting meat made Margaret’s mouth water; she could not remember how long it had been since she had eaten. Trying to calm her hunger, she opened her mouth and swallowed a large mouthful of air, cool and almost liquid. It did no good, serving only to remind her that winter was coming with fierce cold she would have to find ways to survive. All hope of a swift rescue had floated away when they crossed the big river, and she knew she would never survive an escape alone through the wilderness.

When the meat was ready, one of her squaws brought her a choice bit of haunch. As Margaret began to tear it with her teeth, the squaw removed the meat from her hands. When she handed it back, Margaret understood that she was meant to eat more slowly, for health or for ritual, or possibly for both.

Her appetite was rapidly satisfied. She looked at the woman who had taken the meat away, seeing in her wizened face a look so neutral, so lacking in obvious meaning that she felt a distance like a cold draft between them. Nevertheless, she asked her, “Where is my sister?” but the woman, who either knew no English or did not chose to respond, looked away.

Margaret snatched another bit of deer meat from the cooking pot of the squaw she had named Mary Rabbit because of her long ears. She scorched her fingers, but she was so hungry she did not notice the pain. Then she was sent off to scrub a filthy blanket in the icy water at the edge of the river—the Ohio, she said to herself, with satisfaction. Knowing the name of the river comforted her, at least for the moment.

After sunset and a mouthful of corn porridge, Margaret went to settle herself for the night. Her squaw watched her neatly spread her blanket and settle herself in a fold. Then the old woman turned away and began to gather her children and bed them down in the next section. There were four children, close in age, the youngest hardly more than an infant, which surprised Margaret since her squaw seemed to be too old. But perhaps Indian women who looked so wrinkled were actually worn by work and not by age. From her blanket, Margaret watched her squaw lace her sleeping infant onto a cradle board, which she hung from a nail on the post. The next smallest child she huddled inside her blanket, while the other two were left to sprawl where they could. Stricken with exhaustion, Margaret hardly heard the footsteps of other Shawnee coming in and settling to sleep.

In the dark of the night, a little child crawled to Margaret and she extended her left arm to hold it.

Half awake, Margaret realized that the closeness of silent breathing bodies, even though the bodies were those of savages, was curiously consoling. She remembered the loft in the cabin at home where she had been packed in to sleep along with the other children. Their bodies and their breathing had comforted her; she had not expected to find that comfort again unless by some miracle she was restored to the Greenbrier Settlement.

Once, during the night, she was wakened by the sounds of copulation, subdued but unmistakable. She plunged back into sleep before the intercourse ended.

Dawn came with gray light and a chill breeze through the wall cracks, overcoming with scents of resin, the musky smell of the sleepers. Carefully moving her arm from under the sleeping child, Margaret crawled to her pack and withdrew her almanack, quill pen, and vial of pokeberry ink.

As the sleepers around her began to stir and rise, she opened the almanack at random and read, “Fear not death, for the sooner we die, the longer we will be immortal.” Mr. Franklin’s words, she thought, should be addressed to Agatha, not to her. She did not expect to see her sister again, nor did she have any notion of what dangers Agatha would face if she was taken to Detroit to be sold. She still hoped that her sister’s fair face might persuade one of the white men there to marry her.

Thinking of her sister sold like a slave, Margaret’s tears dropped onto the page, moistening the small space where she had intended to write. Wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, she turned the page and read, “Hear no ill of a friend, or speak any of an enemy.”

Underneath it she wrote in neat small script, “In the village at last. All is unknown.”

She became aware of being watched. Wa-Ba-Kah-Kah-Ho had risen from his bedroll to see what she was doing. He said in clear, although strangely accented English, “You write. You teach.”

A sense of calm slowed Margaret’s breathing. She knew there was safety in the task. The Shawnee needed to know how to read and write, if only to sign their names on the documents white men gave them. Perhaps they would even grow proficient enough to read what they were signing.

But then she foresaw a difficulty. If they could read the white men’s writing, would they refuse to sign?