The cooking of the cakes gave her pride: swirling water into the meal, mixing and shaping, then placing them in the baking pit, covering them with broad oak leaves, then with warm ashes, and finally with hot coals.

When my hands were small, I patted the meal mixture into what must have been very uneven cakes, for Mother would follow me and reshape them, which hurt my feelings. My favorite part was when, in the winter, we put two cakes on a broad hoe blade which Father had brought in; then we held it over the fire in our hearth. As soon as the thinnest edge of the blade began to glow, I would smell the corn-mush fragrance and my hunger would be sharp and Father would look at me and say, “No one is hungry in this house, are they?”

“I’m hungry.”

“No.”

“Yes, Father! I am hungry.”

“No.”

“I am!”

“Then,” he would say, “you shall have your hominy pominy!”

“For I shall have my hominy pominy.”

And Matthew said, “For we shall have our pie!”

“And,” Robert called out, “we shall have our hominy pominy pie.”

Betsey would say, “It’s not a pie.”

But I would stop my reveries when feelings rose inside of me: our father had abandoned us when we most needed him. And then I had a thought that was terrible. At Fort Duquesne, I had acted like Father. What he had done to me, I had done to little Daniel.

WHEN the first snow came, when she stepped outside to find patches of white skimming the earth, a sudden nausea gripped her.

She did not speak of her memories of the snow, but some days she served cakes of corn which were salted with the water of tears.

“I THINK that time,” Sheninjee observed weeks later, “will make your cakes less salty.”

IN TWO years’ time Mary and her husband left the Ohio River lands to visit her Seneca sisters, who had gone to the Genesee Valley to live with the rest of the family. And when Sheninjee helped her step into their fur-laden canoe, she had Thomas on her back.

Now they were leaving Ohio and her child was slung high enough so that he could see out just above the line of her shoulders. Always he was swiveling his head, like an owlet, to look at every living thing.

They paused at a creek mouth at the outlet of Sandusky Lake where a trading house sat back in the trees. Nothing stirred.

Sheninjee studied the scene and said, “The English traders are absent. No canoes.” He frowned. “They were supposed to be here. Perhaps they are sleeping somewhere downriver—drunk on rum as usual.”

Then they lifted their paddles and moved forward.