“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 waiting 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.