A String of Beads Read online

  As Jane occupied herself serving the cake and berries she felt the muscles in her shoulders relax a little. The women were all very cordial to Jane. “You have such a beautiful house.” “I love the flowers you’ve got in that bed along the side. My grandmother had tulips like that when I was a little girl.”

  Jane accepted their compliments, and felt an almost childish sense of validation, but she could not ignore the unusual nature of this visit. This wasn’t just Jane’s own clan mother stopping by for a chat. This wasn’t even a delegation made up of her moitie—Wolf, Bear, Beaver, and Turtle. It was the mothers of all eight clans assembled here together—something that couldn’t be meaningless, any more than the arrival of all nine Supreme Court justices could.

  She held Ellen Dickerson in the corner of her eye. She was a tall, straight woman about fifty-five or sixty years old, with deep brown skin and long, gray hair gathered into a loose ponytail that hung down her back. She sat on the edge of her chair with her back perfectly straight, and yet managed to look comfortable. Jane knew that it would be Ellen Dickerson who spoke first because she was clan mother of the Wolf clan, Jane’s own clan.

  Jane’s father, Henry, had been a Snipe. Her mother had been a young woman he brought home from New York City who had milk-white skin and eyes so blue they looked like pieces of the sky. In order to marry Henry Whitefield she should have been a Seneca and come from a clan of the opposite moitie from the Snipes. The women of the Wolf clan had insisted on adopting her, just as they had taken in captive women, runaways, or refugees hundreds of years earlier. In Seneca life, children were members of their mother’s clan, so a couple of years later when Jane was born, she was a Wolf.

  They all talked for a while about topics of polite conversation—the early thaw this year, the beautiful spring they’d been having. Daisy Hewitt said, “I’ve been trying to figure out when to plant my corn. The sycamore leaves aren’t the size of a squirrel’s ear yet, but it’s like midsummer.”

  “I’ve got a nursery catalog that divides the country into zones,” said Mae. “This year I’ll just go by the zone south of ours.”

  Then the random conversation faded, and they all looked at Jane. Ellen Dickerson said, “Jane, do you remember Jimmy Sanders?”

  “Sure,” she said. “He and I used to play together when we were kids. During the summer, when my father was away working, my mother and I would go out to the reservation to live.”

  “That’s right,” said Alma Rivers, of the Snipe clan. “I used to see the two of you running around in the woods. You were pretty cute together.”

  Ellen frowned. “He’s in some real trouble right now.”

  “He is? Jimmy? Is he sick?”

  “No. The police are looking for him.”

  “What for?”

  “He got in a fight in a bar in Akron about two months ago. He won, so he got charged with assault I think it was. But before his trial, the man he’d fought with died.” She frowned again. “He was shot. Jimmy hasn’t been seen since.”

  Jane said, “That’s horrible. I can hardly imagine Jimmy in a bar, let alone hurting somebody in a fight. And he’d certainly never shoot anybody. His mother must be going insane with worry.”

  “She is.”

  Jane looked closely at Ellen, who was sitting across the coffee table from her. Ellen’s eyes were unmoving, holding her there. Jane said, “I haven’t seen him in twenty years, when he was at my father’s Condolence Council. No, it had to be my mother’s funeral, when I was in college. Still a long time.”

  “We want you to find him and bring him back.”

  Jane’s eyes never moved from Ellen’s. “What makes you think I can do something like that?”

  “We know it’s something you can do. I’ll leave it at that.”

  “You know that about me?”

  “We’ve never had a good enough reason to speak. Sometimes when a person has a secret, just whispering it to yourself can risk her life.”

  “All this time, you’ve been watching me?”

  “We watch and we listen. Years go by, and the sights and sounds add up,” said Ellen. “Don’t you think we wanted to see how you turned out? Your mother was an important member of the Wolf clan. She gave me the dress I wore to my senior prom, and helped me cut it down to fit. She drove me to Bennett High School in Buffalo so I could take the SATs and get into college.” Ellen paused. “Then she took me to lunch at the restaurant in AM and A’s. She was so beautiful. I can still see her.”

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For not making her sound different because she wasn’t born Seneca.”

  “Some people are born where they belong, and some have to find their way there,” said Alma Rivers. “There’s no difference after that.”

  Ellen said, “Jimmy needs to be found and persuaded to turn himself in before the police find him. They think he’s a murderer, someone who killed a man with a rifle. They’ll be afraid of him, and if he resists, they’ll kill him too.”

  “I knew him, and he was a close friend when we were kids,” said Jane. “But that doesn’t give me—”

  “We think the one most likely to find him is you.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “Who, then?” asked Ellen. The eight women stared at her, waiting.

  Jane kept her head up, her eyes meeting Ellen’s, but there was no answer.

  Ellen stood up. “All right, then.” In her hand was a single string of shell beads. Each shell was tubular, about a quarter inch long and an eighth of an inch thick, some white and some purple, made from the round shell of the quahog, a coastal clam.

  Jane’s eyes widened. The Seneca term was ote-ko-a. The rest of the world called it wampum, its name in the Algonquin languages. Ellen placed the string in Jane’s hand. Jane stared at it—two white, two purple, two white, two purple, the encoded pattern signifying the Seneca people as a nation. Ote-ko-a was often mistaken by the outsiders as a form of money, but ote-ko-a had nothing to do with monetary exchange. It was a sacred commemoration, often of a treaty or important agreement. Giving a person a single string of ote-ko-a was also the traditional way for the clan mothers to appoint him to an office or give him an important task. “Come see us soon.”

  “I really don’t know where Jimmy is.” She fingered the single string of shell beads, feeling its weight—like a chain.

  “Of course not,” said Alma Rivers. “I’ll let his mother know to expect you. You were always a great favorite of hers.”

  Dorothy, Daisy, Alma, and the others all stood up too. One by one, they thanked Jane for her hospitality and hugged her. They were all softness and warmth, and together they gave off the smells of a whole garden of flowers, some mild and subtle and others spicy or boisterous. Senecas were tall people. Most of the older generation of women were shorter than Jane, but when the eight clan mothers hugged her they seemed to grow and become huge, like the heroes of myths, who only revealed their true size at special times.

  In minutes they were gone, driving off in the two cars to the east toward the reservation. Jane stood alone in her living room looking down at the single strand of ote-ko-a she held in her hand. She tried to set it on the mantel, but that seemed wrong, almost a sacrilege. She put it into her pocket, where she couldn’t help feeling the weight of it as she went about collecting the cups and dishes.

  WHEN CAREY CAME HOME AT eight, Jane was already preparing. He came in the front door, and she called, “I’m in here.”

  He came into the kitchen dressed in the white shirt and tie he changed into after his morning surgeries and wore until he’d made his hospital rounds. He kissed her and said, “Something smells good. Is that dinner?”

  “I’m sorry, Carey. When I came home from my run, the clan mothers were here wai
ting for me. I had to start hauling things out of the freezer so I wouldn’t seem to be a terrible wife. As it was, I looked like a madwoman, all sweaty with my hair all over the place. Dinner is one of the things I pulled out but forgot about, so it started to thaw. It’s some stew.”

  “I remember that stew. I liked it.”

  “You’re such a liar.” She poked his stomach with her finger. “But I made you a pie as an apology. It was the best I could do, up to my armpits in clan mothers.”

  “Clan mothers? Not just Ellen Dickerson?”

  “All of them.”

  “Is that normal?”

  “No.” She slipped by him, plucked pieces of silverware out of the drawer, then two plates, and went into the dining room. She returned and got two water glasses and two wineglasses.

  “So what was it about?”

  “What?”

  “The visit. All eight clan mothers coming to see you, all in a bunch.”

  “That’s another story. I’ll get to it. Meanwhile, I’d rather hear about your day.”

  “As surgeries go, they were all good, with no sad stories waiting to be acted out afterward when the anesthesia wore off. Everybody will be alive on Christmas if they look both ways before crossing the street for the next few months.”

  “Great,” she said. She slipped past him again carrying two plates of salad, then came back and brought the bowl of stew. “Open a bottle of wine.”

  They came to the table, Carey poured the red wine, and Jane ladled the stew into bowls. They each sat down and took a sip of wine. Carey said, “So stop evading. What did they want?”

  “You know that when I was a kid, my mother and I used to move out to the reservation every summer. My grandparents had left my father a little house there, and the idea was that I wouldn’t lose my connection with the tribe, and I’d be better at the language, and I’d have the fun of running around loose in the woods with the other kids. My father was always gone in the summer, off in some other state building a bridge or a skyscraper or something. On the reservation my mother always had a lot of other women to hang out with.”

  “You were lucky. Other kids just got to go to camp and pretend to be Indians.”

  “I liked it, and I suppose it gave my father peace of mind to know that she and I were safe surrounded by a few hundred friends and relatives. I got to spend summers running around in the woods and hearing people speak Seneca. But I found out today that the clan mothers were watching me then, and never stopped. They knew things I didn’t think they knew.”

  “Such as?”

  “Yes. That. They knew what I was doing for all the years from college until I married you.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I made a careless mistake one time, or somebody I helped told them. For all I know, one of them found out in a dream.”

  “Have they told anybody else?”

  “No. They don’t tell people things. They just know, and maybe they never use what they know. Or maybe years later they use it when they have to make a decision or solve a problem.”

  “You sound as though you’re afraid of them.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I am, a little. They’re eight ladies, most of them old, and a little chubby, but they have power—the regular political kind, but something else, too. When you and I are here in the house together, with the lights on, I believe in quantum mechanics and the big bang and relativity, and everything else is crap. But there’s the power of history. When your ancestors built this house, they had to get the permission, or at least benign acquiescence, of eight clan mothers, who could just as easily have had them disemboweled and roasted. But I feel something else in those women. And there’s a ready-made explanation that’s been waiting in the back of my mind since before I was born, if I let myself pay attention to it. They’re drenched in orenda, the power of good in the world that fights against otgont, all the darkness and evil.”

  Carey said, “Sounds like a lot of responsibility.”

  “Thanks for not laughing at me until I leave the room. What they said was that a little boy they saw me playing with on the reservation twenty-five or thirty years ago has grown up, and he’s in trouble. He got into a fight, and a short time later the man he fought was murdered. He took off and hasn’t turned up.”

  “What are you supposed to do about that?”

  “They asked me to find him and bring him back.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Find him and bring him back.”

  Carey stopped eating and sat back in his chair. His eyes were staring, and he took several deep breaths. “Really?”

  “I know.”

  His face was tense with dismay and growing anger. “It’s hardly a year since you came in the kitchen door barely able to walk. The burns on your back have hardly had time to heal even now. Tell me—when you go out running, don’t you ever feel a twinge on your right side and remember what caused it?”

  “Of course I do,” she said. “I know this sounds to you as though I’m out of my mind. But I’m not going off with some stranger who’s got people chasing him down to kill him. They want me to find an old friend and tell him that coming back is for his own good.”

  “I can’t believe that you’d even consider getting involved in something like this. We have police. We have courts. In spite of everything, most of the time they do their jobs and get things right. It almost never makes sense to run away from them. This is just madness. For a long time you told me this part of your life was over.”

  “I’m sorry, Carey. I know this is difficult for you to understand. I don’t want to go. I especially don’t want to spend any time away from you. But this time I have to.”

  He stared at her for a moment. “If you honestly believe that’s true, then I guess I have to accept your judgment. I can have my people postpone my appointments and go with you.”

  She shook her head. “They’re not just appointments. They’re surgeries. People could die if you don’t help them. And what I have to do might be possible if I do it alone. It won’t be if anyone goes with me. That’s why the clan mothers came to me.”

  “You know that if you shelter him from the police, even for a day, you can be arrested and charged with a crime.”

  “I know.”

  He sat unmoving. He looked as though he was about to give in to the anger, but she could tell he was fighting it to keep his composure. “I think you’re making a mistake. That’s for the record. But I can see you’re going to do it anyway.”

  “I’ll try to make it as quick and painless as I can.”

  “I hope you succeed.” Dinner was over. He got up, tossed his napkin on the table, and walked to the staircase.

  When Jane finished clearing the table, loading the dishwasher, and cleaning the counters, she went upstairs. Carey had gone to bed.

  3

  Jane drove away from the McKinnon house early the next morning. The traffic on the New York State Thruway going eastward away from Buffalo was light, even though the incoming traffic was heavy.

  The Tonawanda Reservation was about three miles north of the Thruway, just northeast of Akron. After the Revolutionary War, George Washington had signed the treaty letting the Senecas retain roughly two hundred thousand acres of land in this single plot. During the next half century, a cabal of prominent New York businessmen formed a land company and stole legal ownership of the reservation with the help of federal Indian agents who were openly on their payroll. The Tonawanda Senecas, led by the clan mothers, could only repurchase eight thousand acres. What was left was mainly swampy lowlands and second-growth forest, but various parts had been farmed as long as the land had been occupied.

  Jane drove through Akron to Bloomingdale Road, then to Hopkins Road. The ho
uses she passed were all ones she had known since she was born. She knew the people who owned them, and knew the complicated network of kinship that connected one family with another throughout the reservation, and even some of the connections with people from other Haudenosaunee reservations in New York and Canada. Jane turned and drove up to the house on Sand Hill Road that belonged to the Sanders family. She stopped her white Volvo beside the road and studied the place for a few seconds. There had always, for Jane, been a profound feeling of calm in the silence of the reservation. The thruway and major highways were too many miles away to be heard. The roads on the reservation didn’t allow for much traffic, and didn’t lead anywhere that big trucks wanted to go. Today the only sounds were birdsongs and the wind in the tall trees.

  The Sanders house was old, but it had a fresh coat of white paint on it, and Jane was glad to see the shingle roof was recent too. Jane got out and headed for the wooden steps to the porch. She had always loved the thick, ancient oak that dominated the yard and shaded the house, so she patted its trunk as she passed. She remembered how she and Jimmy had made up stories about it when they played together as children. They agreed that a great sachem had been buried on this spot thousands of years ago, and an acorn planted above his heart had sprouted into this tree. They decided that the buried sachem’s power inhabited the tree, and so the tree had always protected the family from harm.

  The front door of the house opened while Jane was still climbing the steps, and Mattie Sanders came out. “Jane?” she said. “You’re looking wonderful.”

  “So are you, Mattie. All I did was grow taller.”

  Mattie Sanders hugged Jane tightly. She was about five feet nine inches tall, with long, thick hair that had been jet black when Jane had come here as a child. Now it was hanging down her back in a loose silver ponytail, the way Jane wore hers to do housework. “If you came to see Jimmy, I’m afraid I have bad news for you.”

  “I heard about his troubles yesterday,” Jane said. “I came to see you.”

  “Well, then, come on inside.” Mattie looked up and around her at the sky and the trees. “Or we could sit out here if you’d like.”