He spoke the name in the same hushed tone, but this time he leaned forward so that she heard it. “Jane.”

“What?”

“Jane. After your mother. Are you losing your powers of hearing?”

BUT SHE gave birth to a boy, not a girl. Sheninjee asked if she had considered naming him Thomas.

Mary cringed. All she said was, “When we were captured, my father acted like a dead man.”

“He did not act nobly, then,” Sheninjee said. “But perhaps he really was a dead man. You were seeing his ghost walking, the flesh still draped about it.”

I thought Sheninjee was right. In fact, I remembered thinking that the man who refused to speak to us or to comfort us right after we were taken was in no way like my father. “If our child were to be called Thomas,” I said to my husband, “we could think of him as named for my real father and not for that man who, after my capture, only looked like my father.”

Then I waited for Sheninjee’s response, which was slow in coming. When he finally spoke, he said, “What I think makes no difference. It is the Seneca mother, as you know, who names her child. I,” he continued, “have nothing to do with it.”

Would my son die after two days even as my daughter had died?

I would not be parted from him; even while I relieved myself I would hold him and if he was awake gaze at his eyes, will him to focus on me, and I would concentrate on him, as if such methods would keep him alive.

His eyelids kept fluttering, his eyes kept closing as if they were weighted. In spite of this, as the Messiah had done in the Scriptures, he appeared to wax and grow strong; though, I thought, there could be something inside his little body I could not see, some evil in his intestines, something malformed under his small skull.

“I AM going to take our Thomas and walk about with him,” Sheninjee said one day. “I am going to show him off to the men and I am going to show the men to him.”

She protested.

Sheninjee looked coolly at her. “If you were ready to do so, if you were ready to see your fear as fear, you would look closely at Thomas and see that he is perfectly healthy.”

In later days, I would look at my baby’s maleness and feel a sort of peculiar pride. How strange, how delightful that I, a woman, had grown a male creature inside me. With some shyness, I told my husband my thought.

JUST a few months after Thomas was born, the spring season began.

The reds and oranges of wild columbine hung all about in May; for the first time she noticed how yellow their stamens were. She would hold Thomas close to the blooms. “See? Can you see that? Can you see those colors?”