And the next day and the next I would enter our home and hear him saying to someone, “Now tell me this. Have you ever heard of the Catawba before this day?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“No. See? You have not. Because of that very massacre at the place that I think is now called Clarksville.”

WHEN Seneca people were present in our home, he spoke of his exploits not against Indians but against the whites. He had a part in Braddock’s defeat; he helped take Fort Freeland, where he scalped many of the pale people.

SCALPS. The scalps Mary had seen were various: most of them were about the size of her hand, but some were much bigger, and once she saw one so large that the ears were attached. Some had been incised and then carefully lifted from the crowns of the victims’ heads; others she could tell had been crudely cut, a kind of hacked outline having been made before the scalp was ripped off like a hull. A few of the victims, to everyone’s amazement, had survived scalping; these walked about, humiliated, in caps always.

Her father had never told her that the whites sometimes scalped, too. He must have hidden this from her. Now she knew better. French, British, and rebel colonists all announced bounties and set prices.

I did not pay much attention to Hiokatoo’s stories because I had heard them so often. One day an acquaintance accused me of being callous, of numbing my feelings about my lost white family.

Before I could consider this, I found myself saying, “Time is the aloe laid to every inflammation.”

But not time only.

When I was captured and hurried across our fields, departing them forever, they looked as they had always looked. In later days the fact that I was a prisoner had not stopped the breeze nor the tubers which grow sequestered in the dark ground nor darkness itself nor the flutterings of moths nor the reedy songs of children nor the pungency of sage.

At first I was a speechless captive; then I took joy from speech. But before I was speechless and before I spoke, things existed. Someone else had spoken. Knowing this, I grasped my sorrows as someone would grasp arrows, and I was comforted.

Under the words are real roots and impending leaves. Under the wounds are sinews and bones.

In the body and out of the body but not of the body, the spirit circles and expands, refuses and allows. And sometimes in spite of itself the spirit laughs out loud and sometimes in spite of itself it groans; but always, even in bonds, even if muffled, it presides.

I do not know how much others suffer; whether it be more or less, whether it be deeper or shallower than the suffering I now own. Is there a right way to suffer? These things do not partake of measurement nor the comparisons that often lead to great, unfortunate levelings.