BRANCH walked up behind Mary, who sat awkwardly cross-legged at the river’s edge washing undergarments, pounding and turning them. “I saw you notice the scalps hanging over there and now you look away: you turn from them.”

Mary did not respond. Beyond her, an empty canoe wobbled in the water, tied up at the village’s lowest docking point. On a pole in the canoe were strung two scalps. She had turned her back on the sight.

Between the two women there was silence until the older sister said, “You are not being your white parents’ daughter in this.”

Mary flinched and then turned at the mention of a subject which, along with her English, she had thought taboo.

My white parents?

SINCE her capture she had no forum and little voice for such a subject. Her childhood lay as if shut up before its time in a stoppered, milk-white vessel. Indeed she had come all unawares to prefer this separate, painful, but pure containment.

Now Branch’s uttering “white parents” started something running, as a fine, dark line seems to rise of itself and course through thin porcelain.

“Like most whites in the lands across the waters,” her sister said, “I am sure that they had certain wounds to the spirit. But unlike many whites, they had courage.”

Mary’s eyes were on her sister’s face.

“And,” her sister continued, “they decided their own path, a new path that might in the end bring comfort and healing. But their daughter is more timid. She cannot decide. She could leave us now if she truly wished to do so. But all she does is hide from her wounds, and the maggots fill them and they spread; they spread until her flesh is more used-up ulcer than flesh.”

Mary turned away again.

“What is it,” her sister said deliberately, “what is it, the English word for scalp?”

Mary did not believe she had heard her sister’s Seneca correctly.

Branch said once more, “What is it? Tell me the English word for scalp.” When there was no response she walked off.

Mary watched her go and then looked in the direction of the canoe. After a while she rose and went after her sister, with the intent of answering her, of wounding the eldest Seneca sister with English, with the original language of Two-Falling-Voices.

This was how I came to say “scalp” in English to my Seneca sister in the heart of an Ohio village.

“WHAT?” her sister said at hearing a word.

“Scalp.”

“What are you saying?”

In reply, Mary wound a strand of her own hair around and around her hand. Then she jerked that length of hair suddenly and violently upward so that she winced at her own action. “Scalped. Scalp,” she said.

And then she jerked the strand of hair upward once again and the gesture was at once steely, accusatory, and full of acknowledgment.