CHAPTER THIRTEEN

MARGARET RECOGNIZED HER good fortune when, by the time of the first full moon of the new year, Waban was fully recovered. The story of her healing spread rapidly through the village, and Margaret knew there would be other calls for her herbal remedy. Earlier, she had recognized two of the herbs, houndstooth and purslane, growing at the edge of the village, but now they were covered with snow and she would not be able to pluck and dry their leaves to add to her little pouch. Meanwhile, she had used the last of the precious herbs her mother had given her to help Waban and her pouch was now empty.

Fearing what might happen as word of the healing spread, she asked Little Mouse, who often spoke in council, to explain that the white sister could only heal infants or very old people, leaving the others to be saved by traditional means, such as the sweat lodge and the rituals of the medicine man and woman. Little Mouse told her that there was some grumbling at this news, but since Margaret’s authority in the matter of healing was not questioned, her rule held.

Next she gathered strips of yellow birch and alder bark, shredding them and boiling them with a drop of her hoarded honey to make a tea. She was able to bring two babies through sieges of croup and to lessen the suffering of three elders on their death beds.

White Bark, watching her boil the tea, reached out his right hand, touched her shoulder, and said the strange words of her new name, which Robert Dean translated for her. “Why does he call me Little Ship Under Full Sail?” she asked Robert; he was sharpening his hunting knife on the other side of the fire. “These are people of creeks, streams, and rivers, with no occasion to see a sailing ship.”

“One of their myths tells that long ago they lived by a great water, perhaps one of the northern lakes, in truth an inland sea,” he explained.

“Why is this name given to me?”

“You are noted for moving rapidly, like a ship under full sail.”

Now that she understood the meaning, Margaret was glad to accept her new name. In the evening as she fell asleep, she repeated it. The words took the place of the prayers she was beginning to forget.

The deepening cold and heavy snows of late winter were hard on the Shawnee. Hunters ploughed through the shrouded woods in search of game but came back with only a few scrawny rabbits and squirrels, blaming, as always, the Long Knives, although none had been seen in this Ohio country for a long time. The women made do with that meat and whatever they had saved in the autumn—roots, and corn kernels they ground into flour. Mixed with water, a little salt—which was carefully rationed, since a visit to the Blue Licks would be required to fetch more—the cakes were cooked on griddles over the fires and eaten with boiled carrots, potatoes, and squash. Margaret noticed that everyone was growing thin. She was hungry to the point of desperation, waking up during the frigid nights to nurse her swollen belly with both arms.

Little Mouse noticed her condition. She began sharing her meager portion of food. Margaret tried to refuse, but her need was too great as well as the need of the infant she was carrying, who might die in her womb for lack of nourishment. Although she tried to wish for its death in this unforgiving place, she was not able to maintain that resolve, even knowing that the kweewe had several potent herbs to bring on miscarriage.

The biting cold gave the tribe not the infections of the warm months but something quieter and more deadly: starvation, and the fevers attendant on it. White Bark’s brother His Bad Horse succumbed to the coughing sickness, three kweewe went down to starvation, and Margaret was able to save only the two infants; four others perished. Yet even that saving was considered a miracle, and she was now treated with great and unexpected respect.

On a day of early thaw when the roofs of the long houses were dripping melt water that drilled round holes into the fallen snow, a woman came to the cabin carrying an infant laced onto a cradleboard.

Margaret, who had been stripping locust bark to add to the pot of water boiling on the fire, sprang to her feet. The woman held out the cradleboard and Margaret saw that the baby was about the age of her murdered daughter. She was asleep, her small face flushed with fever. Her limbs were firmly encased in the bindings of the cradleboard, and Margaret gestured to the mother to unloose them. She was unwilling and took a step backward.

“What is this woman’s name?” Margaret asked Little Mouse, who was standing close by.

“Wa-Ka-Be-Nu-Pa,” Little Mouse said, beginning to unwrap the infant. “She is afraid.”

“I see that,” Margaret said more sharply than she had intended. As Little Mouse unwound the child, she awoke and began to wail feebly, raising her small hands. The mother loosened her tunic and offered her breast, but the infant turned her head away, too weak to pull on the nipple.

With Little Mouse translating, Margaret asked when this illness had begun and was shocked to hear that the baby had been failing for two months, since the first big snow of December. The mother had been too afraid of the white woman to turn to her for help, and it was only when the rituals of the medicine woman failed that she mastered her fear.

Margaret picked up the little girl and rocked her in her arms. The feeble wails died and the pitiful being lapsed into what might be the sleep of death. Feeling her slight weight in her arms, Margaret sobbed. Her own child had weighed no more on the night before she was murdered but she had imparted the same warmth to her mother’s arms.

“Fetch a little of my tea,” Margaret instructed Little Mouse. The infant was too weak to nurse, but she was able to suck on a tiny pouch of the bark tea when Margaret pushed it into her mouth.

At once she sank back into sleep. Margaret removed the pouch from the small sagging mouth and watched the mother wrap the baby up again. Through Little Mouse, she instructed the mother to take the pouch and a gourdful of the tea and administer it every few hours.

Bowed with sorrow and fear, the mother had not dared to look at Margaret before, but now she raised her face with a flash of hope and expressed her gratitude with words Margaret was able to understand.

In the months since her capture, Margaret realized that the Shawnee language she overheard every day had seeped through her skin and into her veins, coloring her blood and loosening her tongue.

The sick baby improved a little over the winter and the mother continued to bring her to Margaret, more for what she seemed to believe was the benefit of Margaret’s company than for anything further she could do. By summer the baby would be dead, but Little Mouse told Margaret the tribe believed she had gained the infant five months of life.

Anxious about becoming less useful now that her supply of herbs was used up Margaret asked her friends among the kweewe to bring her pupils who wished to learn to read. The men were not willing to spend time with a white woman but the children, confined by bad weather, were restless and eager and it became possible to assemble a class of five or six small ones nearly every day. There was no paper in the camp and the only slate Margaret knew of was kept, like a precious token, at Blue Jacket’s, where she went every third day to teach his boys.

But it was possible, Margaret found, to trace the letters of the alphabet in the dirt floor of the long house with a sharpened stick. After the children learned their letters, Margaret traced a few essential words with her stick. The children began to regard her stick with awe as though it was the teacher. Fostering this notion, she stored it at night tied with a thong tied to a pole.

One dawn, she heard the familiar drone of Shawnee prayer and saw Little Mouse kneeling under the stick. So the stick was blessed with power and her pupils were even afraid of it. She had only to lift it over their heads for any commotion to cease at once.

She was exhausted at the end of each day, for teaching did not relieve her of her other chores, cooking and cleaning and going out to dig the frozen earth for roots. Anxiety about her sister visited her rarely; she had confidence that Agatha had found a way of living wherever she was. She had always been sturdy as well as stubborn, a combination that might save her life.