A String of Beads Read online

  “Out here would be nice,” Jane said. “It’s such a spectacular day.”

  “Yes,” said Mattie. “Of course, I see a day like this, and I hope that Jimmy’s somewhere getting the benefit of it. It could still get cold and wet even at this time of year.”

  They went to a small round table on the porch under the roof, and Jane sat in one of the four chairs. She thought about how pleasant this spot was during a late spring or summer rain, and felt sorry for Jimmy.

  Mattie went through the screen door into the small kitchen. She would feel compelled to observe the ancient customs, so Jane knew she would be back with food and drinks, just as Jigonsasee had, six or seven hundred years ago when Deganawida and Hiawatha—the historical one, not the Ojibway hero Longfellow later used in a poem and gave Hiawatha’s name—had stopped at her dwelling beside the trail. Jane sat alone and listened to the chickadees and finches calling to each other in the big old trees. Mattie returned with a plate of brownies and a pot of tea, and resumed the conversation. “So you heard about Jimmy’s problems.”

  Jane took a brownie and nibbled it. “These are wonderful, just as I remembered them. Thank you.”

  Mattie nodded.

  Jane said, “I got a visit from some of my mother’s old friends, and somebody remembered that Jimmy and I were close friends when we were kids, and thought I’d want to know.”

  Mattie looked at Jane’s face for a second, and in that second, Jane knew that she had already seen through what Jane said to what she hadn’t said.

  Jane braved the look, like swimming against a current. “Since I heard, I’ve been worried. What happened?”

  Mattie looked at the surface of the table for a second, then up. “Jimmy isn’t the boy that you knew, any more than you’re the little girl he knew. You both grew up. You’re like the woman I thought you would be. Maybe girls are more predictable. He fooled me. When boys are little you can’t imagine them getting into fights in bars. Or some of the other things they do either. Jimmy is a good person, a good son, but he’s all man.”

  “Where is he?” asked Jane.

  “I don’t know,” said Mattie. “He didn’t say he was leaving. After he was gone he didn’t call or write to say where he was going or when he’d get there.”

  “Do you think he needs help?”

  Mattie sighed. “Anyone who’s alone and running needs help, whether he knows it or not. I just don’t know where he went. And I assume the police are watching me to see if I get into a car and drive.”

  Jane said, “I think I can find him.”

  Mattie said, “You can only get in trouble, and that would be twice as bad.”

  Jane said, “South?”

  Mattie sat motionless for a second, then nodded. “Maybe like you two went south that time when you were teenagers.”

  Jane said, “And how about you, Mattie? Are you getting along okay here?”

  Mattie shrugged. “I always have. I have my Social Security, and a pension from the school system.” Jane remembered Mattie had worked as a janitor in the Akron schools at night. “I also work four mornings a week at Crazy Jake’s. It gives me a few bucks to save.” Crazy Jake sold tax-free cigarettes and gasoline just outside the reservation.

  Jane said, “If Jimmy gets in touch, please tell him I’d like to help. I know some good lawyers.”

  “We probably wouldn’t have what they charge.”

  “I’ll get him a deal.” Jane heard the sound of a car engine, and then the squeak of springs and shock absorbers as a police car bounced up the road toward them. The car stopped, a tall state trooper got out and reached for his Smokey Bear hat, put it on, and walked toward the porch. A second car, this one a black unmarked car, pulled up behind. The driver sat there staring frankly out the window at the women on the porch. Jane and Mattie sat motionless as the state trooper climbed the steps to the porch. “Good morning, Mrs. Sanders,” he said. He nodded to Jane and said, “Ma’am.” He turned to Mattie. “I came by because I was wondering if you had heard from Jimmy yet.”

  “I haven’t,” said Mattie.

  “Sorry about that,” said the trooper. “If he calls or writes, please let him know we’d like to talk to him. Thanks, ladies.” He got into his car and drove up the road.

  Mattie said, “They drive by my house day and night, hoping they’ll see Jimmy. They must have seen your car and hoped it was him.”

  “I suppose that’s to be expected,” Jane said. “I’m surprised they’re so obvious, though. I guess they thought they couldn’t fool you anyway.” She took another sip of her tea and finished her brownie. Then she stood and hugged Mattie. “It’s been great to see you again. I wish it hadn’t been at such a bad time.”

  “Me too,” said Mattie.

  “I’ll come and see you when things are better.” She bent to kiss Mattie’s cheek. Then she got into her car and drove. The reservation had only a few roads, and they all met. She went up Parker Road past Sundown Road to Council House Road.

  She took Allegheny Road to Java, where it became Cattaraugus Road. She drove south to the mechanic’s shop that was owned by the Snows. She pulled close to the garage doorway, got out, and walked to the front of her car.

  “Janie?”

  Jane turned her head and saw a dark-skinned man about her age wearing blue work pants, steel-toed boots, and a gray work shirt with an embroidered patch above the pocket that said ray. Jane stepped up and hugged him. “It’s great to see you, Ray. I was afraid you would be on vacation or something.”

  “No, the guys who work for me get vacations. I’m always here, like the doorknob. Got a car problem?”

  “I wondered if you could do the scheduled maintenance on my car—you know, oil, filter, lube, check and replace belts and hoses—and then keep it here safe for at least a week or so.”

  “I’d be glad to. You staying around here?”

  “I thought I’d go on a hike, like we used to when we were kids.”

  Ray Snow’s brows knitted. “You trying to find Jimmy?”

  Jane looked around to see if anyone else was in earshot. She smiled and said, “Not me. That’s the police’s job. I wouldn’t want to get involved.”

  “Well, that’s good. A person would have to be stupid to do that.” He whispered, “Give him my regards.”

  4

  Jane pulled her backpack up over her shoulders, adjusted the waist strap, and began to walk. She had known from the visit of the clan mothers that it might come to this, but she had not been sure until she talked with Mattie. She had not been able to tell Jane where Jimmy was—had not known, specifically—so what she did was let Jane know that maybe the answer was already there, inside Jane’s memory.

  Jane wasn’t in doubt about how to get there. When Jane and Jimmy were fourteen, they’d saved money all spring. They had spent a few days collecting road maps, hoarding clean socks and underwear from the laundry, and planning. On the third morning after school let out in June, they set off toward the south.

  Today, as Jane walked out of town away from Ray Snow’s mechanic shop, she made a hundred-yard detour so she could walk in the footsteps of the fourteen-year-old Jane. She and Jimmy had begun their journey on the reservation and walked to the south. The first big moment for Jane was when they crossed Route 5. It was an old road, one that white people had made by paving the Wa-a-­gwenneyu. Underneath the pavement was the trail that ran the length of the longhouse-shaped region that was Iroquois territory, from Mohawk country at the Hudson River to Seneca country at the Niagara River.

  The reason for their trip was personal and complicated. They told other people they wanted to explore a bit of the region. But what they were looking for was themselves. Jane and Jimmy had lost their fathers when they were eleven and twelve. Later, after Jane had become an adult, she realize
d that this coincidence must have been what drew them together and launched them on their trip. Without their fathers they had lost part of their link to the past, to the long history that had produced them. Changes that had taken place before they were born left them as two lonely Senecas, survivors among countless millions of other people in a world that sometimes bore no resemblance to the one that had formed their culture. Jane had been especially lost without her father, because her mother was white and didn’t speak Seneca even as well as Jane did, and they lived in a city miles from the reservation. Jane and Jimmy had seen nothing in junior high school that made them want to be part of the wider world, learned no point of view that gave them an acceptable place or a purpose in it.

  When they talked about this during their thirteenth summer, they had made a pact to go on a trip the following summer, when they would be fourteen. They would travel as the old people had, speak only Onondawaga, and visit places that had not been changed, deforested, tamed, or demolished. Maybe they would learn something about who they were. In their fourteenth summer, they went.

  Jane and Jimmy had hiked only a few miles by the time they reached Route 5, but when they crossed the highway they became travelers, not kids going for a walk. They were going back to the indeterminate time before the arrival of white people, when the eastern woodlands still extended from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and from James Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. Whenever Jane and Jimmy stepped a hundred yards into the woods between the roads it could have been two hundred or ten thousand years ago.

  A couple of miles farther on would be the New York State Thruway. Jane looked at her watch when she reached it, and remembered. It had been noon by the time Jane and Jimmy had arrived on this spot. The thruway was a serious barrier. There was a high chain link fence, then a weedy margin about two hundred feet wide, and then a two-lane strip of highway full of cars driving sixty or seventy miles an hour toward the west. Next came a central island of grass and trees, and then the two-lane strip going east, and another weedy margin before the next fence. Kids from the reservation knew that the thruway was a fearsome barrier that kept deer, foxes, and other animals captive on one side or the other. The thruway was a toll road, so it had few exits a pedestrian could use for crossing. Some were thirty miles apart.

  Jane and Jimmy had stopped to eat their sandwiches and study the traffic on the thruway. Their maps said they’d have to go east as far as Le Roy to reach the next exit, or chance a quick run across the pavement. They had begun their journey already knowing which it would be, but they took their time sitting side by side in a bushy area outside the first chain link fence and watching the cars go by, the nearer ones from left to right and the farther from right to left. Jane knew a car going sixty covered eighty-eight feet per second. If they could start right at the moment when a car passed, they could be across the pavement before the next arrived, but there was a problem of visibility. If a state police car came by at the wrong moment, they’d be picked up and suffer serious but nonspecific consequences far beyond the anger of their mothers. In the end they climbed the fence, crawled close to the pavement, pushing their backpacks ahead of them, and waited. They watched cars coming, evaluating each one, and finally saw a break in traffic that was inexplicable but welcome, and dashed across the two westbound lanes into the stand of trees in the center margin. They sat and laughed, not because there was anything funny, but because their fear had made them giddy. A state police car passed on the side they had just crossed, and it was twenty minutes before they dared to make the second crossing.

  Grown-up Jane climbed the fence at a post, swung a leg over and set her toe in a link on the far side, lowered herself to the ground, then trotted across the field to the center strip and began to look to the right, barely pausing in the trees before she crossed the last two lanes. When she got to the second fence she dropped her backpack on the other side and stepped on the top of the fence to vault over. As she walked on, she thought about how easy it had been this time. Had she and Jimmy been smaller at fourteen? Probably Jimmy had, but he was fast, strong, and wiry, and could climb a tree like a squirrel. She guessed the fear of doing something they knew was illegal and dangerous must have weighed them down.

  Jane faded into a stand of hardwood trees on the other side and kept walking south. She remembered the trip as fully as she could, bringing back details and finding others in the landscape as she went. She and Jimmy had stayed away from big north-south routes because they’d wanted to be in the woods and not on a road. In the old days, Senecas used to travel south on foot to the countries of the Cherokees and Catawbas to fight. They took canoes down the rivers and streams that ran south from Seneca country into Pennsylvania, and she had read in old sources after she’d grown up that they had also used a route along the crests of the Appalachian mountain ranges to strike as far south as Georgia. A number of times in the early 1700s the sudden appearances of Iroquois war parties in the high country had raised formal protests from the governors of the colonies of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.

  While Jimmy and Jane had walked, they spoke Onondawaga by advance agreement, forcing themselves to avoid blurting out something in English. But as the time passed, they spoke more comfortably, thinking less and less about it. Jane’s vocabulary was good, but a bit formal and archaic. Much of it had come from her grandfather and grandmother, who had taken over the job of teaching her after her father died when she was eleven. But Jimmy had always lived on the reservation, and his language was more flexible and functional, replete with borrowings from English.

  Now, as Jane retraced the route over twenty years later, she thought about the two fourteen-year-olds and their relationship. They had been very close at six, closer still at eight or nine, but then they had reached that strange age around ten when Jimmy stopped playing with her. She had gone back to her parents’ house for school at the end of one summer, and when she came back to the reservation in the spring, Jimmy and his friends had refused to have anything to do with her. At first she searched her memory for the crime she must have committed, but came up with nothing. Eventually her mother had asked her why she was alone all the time, and heard Jane’s story with sympathy. She explained it as “the way boys are. A time comes when they go away from us for a while. They fight a lot. It’s the last time in their lives they can do it without killing each other, so it’s probably okay. They play rough sports, they have secrets, they compete. There seems to be an agreement that girls don’t exist. It lasts two or three years, and then around seventh or eighth grade, they admit girls to the world again. It’s as though they couldn’t see us for a while, and then they can again.”

  Just as her mother had predicted, when Jane came back to the reservation in the summer of her thirteenth year, not only Jimmy but the other boys too were friendly again. Jane and Jimmy became close, but forever after there was a slight reserve between them. They had each discovered things during the break that made using the different pronouns “he” and “she” seem not nearly large enough to reflect the real differences between the sexes.

  Jane knew she was coming to a bad place as she walked today. The first night she had camped, just as she and Jimmy had twenty years ago, under the stars in an old apple orchard at the back of a farm. The second was so warm and still that they lay in a field under the stars, and she did the same on her second night. But on the third night the weather had changed. When they had decided to take a summer hiking trip, they hadn’t thought hard enough about rain. She remembered one of them saying, “We should set aside extra time in case it rains,” and the other replying, “The old people didn’t hide under roofs when it rained. They just kept going. Skin is waterproof.” She was pretty sure the stupid one was the fourteen-year-old Jane Whitefield.

  The rain began before first light on Jane and Jimmy’s third day and didn’t stop. They walked southward under a ceiling of gray clouds that produced a steady summer downpour as though the sky
were draining onto the earth. The pair walked all day in soaked clothing. They were cold at the start, and kept telling each other the rain would end in the afternoon. In the afternoon the rain was heavier. They both agreed that rainstorms in Western New York blew through from somewhere on the Canadian plains across the lakes and eastward, and since they were walking south, the rain clouds shouldn’t stay with them this long. They should just pass over them to the east and be gone. But the rain went on all day, and as night fell, the rain picked up strength.

  They trudged along the edge of an alfalfa field where a farmer’s ancestors had left a windbreak of chestnuts and maples that had long ago grown too tall to stop the wind. A more recent owner had planted a set of six-foot-tall evergreens as a hedge, so if they stayed beside it they didn’t feel the full force of the northwest wind. They were approaching the second major highway, the Southern Tier Expressway, just as the dim glow from the invisible sun gave out.

  To them the expressway looked almost exactly like the much-older New York State Thruway. It was illegal to climb over the fence to the margin of the big road, and dangerous to cross the lanes to the other side. Now that it was dark, the traffic seemed to be mostly giant tractor trailers carrying cargo across the southern edge of the state. Commuters had already made it to safe, dry homes, and vacationers were somewhere waiting for the weather to improve. Jane and Jimmy watched a few high, long trucks coming along the highway like trains, their headlights appearing in the near lanes somewhere a mile or so to the left, where the road curved gradually, and their taillights blinking out a few miles to the right at the crest of a low ridge. The map in Jane’s pack told them they were near the exit for the Seneca Nation Allegany Reservation.

  Jane said, “See across on the other side?”

  “It’s a rest stop,” said Jimmy. “The building might be closed at night. I don’t see a lot of cars.”