Jane threw herself on the woman,
digging her fingers into the throat with her left hand and drawing
back her right for the first punch. She could feel the witch changing
shapes under her hand, first the scales of a snake and enough of the
neck free so the head could curl around and sink its fangs into her
forearm, then the scales turning into thick fur and the body widening
into a lynx, the jaws now chewing to get free of the hand.
Jane swung hard and woke to the
light streaming through the white curtains onto the polished hardwood
floor of the bedroom. She held her eyes open in the glare, her
breaths coming fast and shallow, afraid that if she closed her lids
the dream would still be there. She spun her head and saw Carey, then
slowly began to calm down. She was wet, covered with sweat so her
nightgown clung to her. She sat up and waited for the dizzy feeling
to pass, then eased her weight off the bed. She looked at the clock
radio on the nightstand. It was almost six. She walked down the hall
quickly, turned on the shower in the guest bathroom, pulled the
nightgown off over her head, and threw it on the floor. In a few
minutes she would be clean and clear-minded, and Carey could awaken
to hear her making his breakfast downstairs.
As she stepped into the shower,
she tried to get over the dream. Since she was a child she had heard
people clicking their tongues and saying that dreams of the Old Time
had begun to come back. The pessimists said it happened only to
Senecas who had begun to forget who they were and what they were
supposed to do. They were paying the price for repressing their true
inclinations. There were others who said the dreams were returning
because the supernaturals had stayed on the land with the Senecas all
this time and finally gotten used to the way things were now, just as
the Senecas had. They recognized that the people had not changed in
any way that mattered, and so they had begun to touch them more often
in sleep.
Jane felt the terror and
claustrophobia of the dream beginning to wash away with the hot water
and mental exercise. There wasn’t much mystery about it. She
had been holding down a quiet tension since the night when she had
agreed to marry Carey. She had done the little she could do to make
herself unobtrusive. She had taken a new name and moved into a house
that no runner and no chaser could know about. She was living as
quiet a life as a woman could. She had even been careful to leave
untouched all of the things that pertained to Jane Whitefield: the
old house looked occupied, the telephone was connected, the mail
carrier still came every day.
She had told Carey that she had
kept the house as it was because she couldn’t think of a way to
keep her old life from popping in to alarm the new tenants. It had
not been exactly a lie, but it was part of the truth. What she had
not mentioned was that anyone – victim or persecutor –
who was able to satisfy himself that she had moved out of that house,
and not merely gone on a trip, might keep looking and find this one.
The old house kept them one extra step away from here – not
much protection, just something that might buy her the time to see
them before they saw her.
The dream had been her
subconscious mind protesting, reminding her that the few small
obstacles she had placed to hide her own trail were pitiful. No
matter how fervently Mrs. Carey McKinnon wanted to ignore it, Jane
Whitefield could not forget that the trail behind her was full of
wolves.
Jane
parked her car in the gravel driveway in front of the small frame
house under the big hemlock tree. When she got out she stepped into a
little cloud of dust that settled on her shoes. A dog in the back
yard began to bark, then dashed toward her with menacing yaps. It was
a little black mongrel with brown eyebrows, the kind that she had
seen running around yapping on the Tonawanda reservation since she
was a child, so she knew what it would do before it did. It ran up
until it was five feet away, then straightened its forelegs, skidded
to a stop on the grass, and began to hop up and down, wagging its
tail.
“Maggie,” came a
deep voice from the porch. “Come.” The little dog trotted
happily around Jane once, then scampered up the steps onto the porch
and ran through the open screen door to alert the others in the
Peterson house. “Hi, Janie,” said the man. He stood up
from his rocking chair so Jane could see him over the railing. He was
very tall and had the square-chested, long-legged look that she
remembered noting in his father when she had come here with her own
father for visits in the old days.
“Hi, Billy,” she
called. “Is this a good time?”
“There is no bad time,”
he said as he put a sprig that had fallen from the hemlock into his
book to mark the page, set it on the stack on the wicker table beside
him, then folded his reading glasses into his shirt pocket.
He met Jane on the walk and let
her hug him, then leaned his head down and turned his cheek to catch
her kiss. “Married life agrees with you, Janie.”
He said it in Seneca, so Jane
answered in Seneca. “The old man wanted to come too, but I made
him go to work so I could keep being a grand lady who wanders around
doing nothing.”
As they stepped up onto the
porch, he saw her notice his books, and reverted to English. “Just
some reading for my undergraduate course in the fall. Basic abnormal
psychology.”
“What we used to call Nuts
and Sluts.”
“That’s the one,”
he said. “The department makes me take a turn every third
year.”
The little dog pushed through
the screen door again with its nose, and then a woman nearly as tall
as Billy with hair like Jane’s came out from behind it holding
three glasses of lemonade on a tray. “Hi, Janie,” she
said. “I thought you might like a cold drink.”
Jane took a glass. “Thanks,
Vi,” she said, and they exchanged pecks on the cheek while
Billy took the tray to keep the other glasses level.
Violet Peterson sat on the porch
swing with Jane and smiled. Jane looked around her. “Did you
sell the kids?”
Violet said, “They’re
in school, believe it or not. Veronica’s taking a computer
class every morning, and Delbert’s doing art.” She
glanced at her watch. “I pick them up in an hour.”
“So serious,” said
Jane.
“It’s great,”
said Violet. “If I don’t make them do something in the
summer they run around in the woods like – ”
“Like we did,” said
Jane.
“Exactly,” said
Violet. “Kids are wonderful, but anybody who says they don’t
drive you nuts is in a state of denial.” Her lips pursed and
she said slyly, “You’ll see.”
Jane sipped the cold lemonade
and listened. The red-winged blackbirds at the edge of the marshland
a hundred yards away were calling to each other.
Billy said, “You have
something on your mind?”
“You must be a psychology
professor,” said Jane. “It’s kind of a delicate
problem. Delicate politically.”
“Politically?”
“I came to see my friends
Billy and Violet, but before I go, I want to do some lobbying with
Sadagoyase.”
She could feel the weight of
ages as he stared at her. Sadagoyase meant Level Heavens. It was the
name that had been given to the member of the Snipe clan who held
that sachemship in each generation since the first Sadagoyase, one of
the forty-nine who had sat at Onondaga with Hiawatha and Deganawida
to establish the Iroquois League. Each of them for a thousand years
had probably sat in front of the doorway of his wife’s house on
a day like today, with the blackbirds calling in the hot sunshine,
and listened to a woman like her who had come to talk politics.
“Is this about the
gambling?” asked Violet.
“Yes, I’m afraid it
is,” said Jane. “I’ll bet you’re both sick of
it.”
“Not at all,” said
Sadagoyase. “It’s good that you came, because I’ve
been meaning to give you a call about it.”
“Me?” asked Jane. “I
thought I was being clever sneaking around to the sachem of another
clan. Why would you call a Wolf?”
“You said it was delicate
politically. It’s been voted down four times, but it keeps
coming back up. I need to know what key people think, the ones who
are educated and can sway public opinion.”
“I don’t know,”
she said. “Everything I see about it tells me to leave it alone
and let other people decide. I’m not here to offer advice about
the general issue. I just wanted to make one little point and skulk
away.”
“But I’m asking your
advice.”
“I’m not the one to
ask. Whitefields haven’t lived on the reservation in three or
four generations.”
“Being a Seneca isn’t
a matter of residence.”
“I had a mother who
started out Irish. A colleen, as they say. It sounds like the name of
a dog that’s not quite a collie, doesn’t it?”
“Cornplanter
had a father named O’Bail. Mary Jemison was a year out of
Ireland when she was captured. She had thirty-nine grandchildren by
Hiokatoo. You want to tell their great-great-grandchildren they’re
not Senecas? There’s probably nobody within rifle shot of here
who doesn’t carry DNA from somebody who was adopted twenty
generations back. It’s a nonissue.”
Jane sighed. “I would love
it if the people could have a little dependable money coming in.
There are already over a hundred Indian casinos all over the country,
and I heard somebody refer to gambling as ‘the return of the
buffalo.’ But I’ve got worries. If I say those worries
out loud, people I love and respect are going to say things that hurt
me.”
“What will they say?”
“They’ll remind me
in that quiet, gentle way people around here have that I’ve
never been poor. And I’ll know that they could have said more.”
“What could they say?”
“I’m one of them
too. Maybe I would say it to myself. There I would be, this doctor’s
wife who lives in a house like a fortress in Amherst, driving Carey’s
BMW up to the dilapidated council building to tell them gambling
money isn’t good for the nation.”
Sadagoyase raised his eyebrows.
“Maybe living that life makes you objective. The
traditionalists, the longhouse people, trust you because they know
you’re at least as conservative as they are. They’re an
important constituency.”
“I’m an anomaly, and
they know it,” she said. “I’m a leftover Indian
Rights radical from ten years ago. A lot of what I know comes from
the Old People, but a lot doesn’t. It comes from staring at old
archives at Cornell and Rochester that were written by Europeans who
studied us the way doctors study viruses. I’m not a radical
now. I’m a spoiled rich woman who has a hobby.”
“Good for you,” said
Sadagoyase. “I’m a professor teaching the theories of a
dead man from Vienna. Now answer my question and I’ll listen to
whatever you came to tell me.”
Jane shook her head and smiled
sadly. “All right. Here goes.
I’m not a spiritual
believer in the Gaiiwio of Handsome Lake. I don’t believe
there’s anything left after we’re dead, at least not in
broad daylight like this. But whatever happened when Handsome Lake
got drunk and passed out in 1799, he woke up with some sense. I think
there wouldn’t be any such thing as a Seneca now if he hadn’t.”
“You want to be more
specific?”
“Don’t sell any
land. Accept as much education as you can get, but keep up the
ancient cycle of celebrations. Drinking liquor might be fine for
whites, but for us it’s poison. Don’t abuse your wife and
kids the way whites do. And – here it comes – don’t
gamble.”
She glanced at her old friend,
but Sadagoyase was waiting in silence. She said, “He didn’t
mean don’t play the peach-pit game or bet on snow-snake
matches. He was a warrior, brought up in the Old Time. He got his
scalping knife wet at Devil’s Hole. He was saying, ‘These
are the temptations that the modern world is sending our way. Watch
out.’ I think he was right.”
“What about now?” he
asked. “Is he still right?”
She took a deep breath and let
it out slowly. “For hundreds of years the Five Nations kept the
peace, managed a unified foreign policy with fifty or sixty other
nations, and played the Dutch, English, and French off against one
another. Now on half the reservations there are competing governments
and splinter groups, and Iroquois burning their own buildings and
taking shots at each other. And every time one side looks like it’s
losing, they call for intervention by the New York State Police or
Quebec or Ontario Provincials, or the Canadian or American federal
governments. They’ve always gotten it, and they always will.”
“Are you worried about
hard feelings or loss of sovereignty?”
“I don’t think those
are two issues. They’re the same. I’m not saying all of
that would happen at Tonawanda. But it would be especially stupid if
any of it happened here. Everybody around here knows that in 1838,
when the state was kidnapping chiefs to force them to sign the land
treaty, not one single chief from Tonawanda let himself be caught. I
hope people remember that the reason for that was that the chiefs
were willing to risk their lives to disappear, and the people were
willing to risk theirs to hide them. That’s not just why we’re
still here. It’s who we are.”
“So what you’re
afraid of is just that I’ll get dehorned?”
“Not you, Billy –
Sadagoyase. Once gambling comes in, you’ve got to think of what
else happens. New York State will want a vested financial interest
the way they did with the Oneidas, and they’ll have to police
the gambling and everything around it.”
“That
boat sailed in 1821,” said Sadagoyase.
“The State of
New York
versus
Tommy Jimmy.”
He needed only to allude to the
case because it was one of the legal precedents that had established
the boundaries of the modern Seneca world. A witch named Koquatau had
murdered a man at Buffalo Creek, and Tommy Jimmy had been appointed
by the council to act as her executioner. He had followed her into
Canada and, as soon as he had her back on Seneca land, had cut her
throat. He had been defended at his trial by Red Jacket, one of the
greatest orators of his time, and acquitted on the grounds that he
was following Seneca law. After that, the state had asserted its
jurisdiction.