“How long ago? Do you not remember?” Then she asked if Two-Falling-Voices really wanted to hear the screams of the whites, and said that this execution could well open wounds best left closed, that to be a witness to such an event would be a torture to the self, that putting the knife anew to a scar for the sake of curiosity was a violence to the self.

And she said that their own work needed their attention. Then she spoke her final sentence: “Leave it to the warriors to perform their fading, gritty customs.”

The men were burnt on a cool November day, on the north side of Fall-brook.

All I could see from the knoll to which I had gone was a pillar of smoke.

IN THE planting season mornings, Mary would take up her place next to Tree. The older woman noticed that her adopted daughter worked in silence but also often lifted her head to look in the direction of a wooded area which swept in a kind of S-curve down a hill.

On an evening when Mary and Tree walked out together, the younger woman spoke.

“My husband is dead.”

Tree stopped walking, but Mary continued, and Tree then sprang forward and re-established herself at her daughter’s side.

“He said he would come to us before the planting season. So since he has not, he is dead.”

From that day on, when she lay full-length on her pallet at night, she felt the space where Sheninjee had been as a weight which pressed against her with a sharp-edged, rangy force.

TWO MONTHS after that walk with her adopted mother, Mary received word that her husband had been taken ill at Wiishto and had died there. The Seneca who told her the news looked steadily at her.

“Yes?” she said.

What else did this woman want to know? The man had come through a soaking rain and was tired and uncomfortable. He had a cough.

“Yes? And what was his illness?”

“I do not know.”

She saw that he had several gray hairs. She tilted her head a little to one side, moved her feet slightly as if to balance and position herself, and then appeared to settle into a gaze.

He wanted to end this interrogation. “I think his illness was, ah . . . a fever,” he said.

“A fever.” She saw that the man had a scar just forward of his ear.

“Yes.”

“And what kind of a fever?” The man had large eyes, and just weeks ago with these eyes he had seen Sheninjee alive.

“I do not know,” he said, and then coughed.

She hated the sound of his cough. She hated his scar. She hated the coarseness of his gray hairs, she hated it that rain had streamed down his chest, she hated his odor, she hated the shape of his nose, she hated it that he was breathing.