SHE HAD lain for two days in the birthing hut before her daughter was born. Just hours before the child thrust itself out of her, she had struggled against being pinned to the pallet by something she could not control and had thought of hurling herself up and out the door and through the woods. She wondered if other, violent motions could distract, could oppose and forestall the painful thickenings and shortenings of her muscles.

Scowl-Face pushed into the hut. The white woman looked featureless to him, like the underbelly a turning fish might present. Her infant looked white, too, and strange, monstrous. He pitied the Delaware Sheninjee, having to explain this offal to other warriors.

Since the child had looked sickly to the sisters—was the infant really ill, they thought, or was it that she had been cast this pale, being part white?—he had been summoned. But he had stopped to pull on his wide ochre mask and position it.

Sniffing in the direction of the afterbirth, he spotted it in the corner in a pot. It would make a rich pudding for his dog.

As he bent to examine the child, the white woman, leading with her hips and with her infant in her arms, moved reflexively away from him across the pallet as if she were hiding something.

I had wanted Weeping-Face to attend me. Why had they sent Scowl-Face instead? I wanted Weeping-Face.

BUT HE persisted, his fingers probing in the infant’s wrapping. Suddenly he thrust his chin to one side and tilted his head as if to see better, his eyes slanting down toward the child. And then he sprang back.

“Dead,” he said. He was disgusted. The new mother and her two so-called sisters jerked when they heard these words.

They had called him to perform against, to inveigh against, the evil spirits of an already dead infant. He turned and pushed out of the hut in a huff.

My infant’s fingers began to uncurl, to go the color of sky at the tips, to grow cool to the touch. I did not want to surrender the little body of my daughter. Somehow I would keep it with me so that I could touch it, its eyelashes, its toe-nails, the stub where the cord had been, the milkweed texture of the hair. The child had the sensuous, perfectly fitted curves of Sheninjee’s lips. I must keep this little body close for all time.

AT DAWN, when Mary’s fever began to lessen a little so that she slept, her eldest sister lifted the tiny dead one from the arms of its mother and walked straight out the door with it.

As if in a dream I saw the shape of my husband push into the hut where I lay and then I heard him speak, asking my sisters why his wife was still in this miserable place; the answer came from my elder sister in the patronizing tone that often infuriated Sheninjee: according to custom, the ill one must be kept in the isolating-house. Besides, she told him, you were absent, late in coming.