COVER PAGE

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

In memory of Christopher

EPIGRAPH

A statue of Mary Jemison stands but fifteen miles from my present home in the woods. Some say that at a site not far from this statue, iron spikes and a single shoe buckle have been unearthed and that they belong to the vanished house that Mary’s father built on the banks of a creek, the Conewago, which continues to cut the broad valley where this story begins.

Adams County, Pennsylvania

PRAISE

ACCLAIM FOR DEBORAH LARSEN’S

The White

“Illuminated by a wonderful sense of detail and natural rhythm, of landscape, body, and the shifts and changes of time.”

—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“There is a wealth of life in this spare novel. At times the short sentences and spare language can feel light and ephemeral, but the weight of the writing is hidden in such brevity. The shards of images sink in to wash to the surface long after the last page is read.”

—The Oregonian

“An accomplished first novel. . . . Larsen handles . . . complex emotions and her dueling desires with subtlety, and her elegant prose vividly brings Mary’s world and thoughts to life.”

—Booklist

“A brave . . . stark, snowdeep novel.”

—Austin American-Statesman

“Being American is to wear a coat of many colors. . . . Larsen’s novel is an instructive, winning reminder that the coat was once woven from broadcloth and buckskin, feathers and silk, in a fabric as hard to unravel as it is to deny.”

—Daily News

The sky is pale margin. Neither flesh nor a god, it appears to dissolve at the firm edge of land where a tale might begin.

These edges of earth, muddy browns and flat blacks with offshoots of green, are marked and distinct and indeed suffer their distinctions, just as the Seneca language suffers its difference from English or French. Only the snow sometimes softens the world—its bulwarks, stiles, and mountain faces; that pier-head, this rigging, those docks beyond which lie impassable waters.

I was born a white at sea on the way to the New World. From my youth in that world I wished to own land bordered by sky, as my mother and father had once purchased woods and fields which were dappled with changing light. In time this happened in such a fashion, I daresay, as it had happened to few women before me.

But I was taken by those whom we called Indians. Nearly speechless for a time, I was beset by terrors.

My birth name was Mary.

PREFATORY NOTE

PREFATORY NOTE

IN 1758 a woman around the age of sixteen named Mary Jemison—or as some now think, Mary Jamison— was actually taken by a Shawnee raiding party in south-central Pennsylvania; she was forced from her home, which lay close to what would later be known as the town of Gettysburg.

In 1823, in New York State, the aged Mary sat for three days with a physician and local historian, James Seaver, and told him the story that he wrote down and then published. Some time after this meeting, she reputedly commented on it: “. . . but I did not tell them who wrote it down half of what it was.” I imagine Dr. Seaver as a Latinist and a rhetorician. He writes of shots as a “discharge of guns” and of his heroine as able to “render herself intelligible on any subject with which she was acquainted.”

CHAPTER I

[ I ]

Buchanan Valley 1758

MARY had loved the family axe as a glittering extension of her own arm. Her father had sharpened it the morning they were taken, and she had been splitting wood, cutting the thick white oak with ease, cleaving filamented piece from piece for the sake of warmth-filled evenings and for cooking. She imagined the flames tentative at first and then thrusting up, spending themselves in the foreign air for the comfort of her family.

And then for what seemed like no reason at all (because her father had said they could make it on their own until late spring, when the closest fort would send a militia to fend off Indian raiding parties), she saw feet in moccasins not far from the woodpile at the base of a shagbark hickory. She lifted her gaze to the impassive eyes and sculpted planes of what she would later learn was not an “Indian’s” face but that of a Shawnee.

She spoke no word at this time, though a rage started up within her. So. Feet in moccasins.

So, feet in moccasins were now pressing into the very ground that belonged to her family, and she wondered how Father would explain them away.

How could he, how could he have left them as prey to what after all had hurtled across the horizon, to what with sureness had crept through their fields? No, he had actually led his family. How could he? How could he have led them, as it is written in Scripture, like lambs to the slaughter?

WAS IT for this that she had been conceived?

And born Mary, for so she had been born and named in the yellow air below-decks of the ship Mary William, out of Ireland, bound for Philadelphia. Thomas Jemison and the pregnant Jane Erwin Jemison had sailed out onto the loose, flecked fields of the Atlantic, preferring the clear American wilderness to the Irish civilization of the day. Away from Ireland, they would feel free to want something that was actually obtainable. They wanted a farm.

They landed; they moved straight on out of Philadelphia to a tract of land not far from what would become the town of Gettysburg. What they marked out as their farm lay on the tangled banks of a creek named Marsh. Later they moved to larger fields, on one of which stood a good house and a log barn, and it was here now where Thomas had let them all fall into the hands of six Shawnee and four Frenchmen and where his mouth had been suddenly stopped of his stories, of his resonant Irish jests.

This is how in April of 1758 a Shawnee came to be wearing her mother’s indigo shawl; this is why Mary found herself watching a Frenchman pocket the family coins; why another Shawnee packed with great precision yesterday’s corn cakes into a sling-like bag which he hoisted to his shoulder as they all took off across her beloved fields.

They just left, then, for somewhere that must have been north and west.

Mary was in the grip of a Shawnee. She was not dead yet, but she knew that if she didn’t move fast enough he could simply cut her down and away. His companions would understand what he meant them to know by means of a mere flashing of his eyes in her direction: too much trouble, those eyes would signal; too much trouble, the white girl, too slow.

She closed her own eyes then and stumbled along, deciding to give her captor that trouble. He felt it; he jerked her and then jerked her hard again, as if she were a snag on his fishing line. She didn’t care.

Let him jerk her, let him jerk her arm until it hung loose at her shoulder, and then dressed as he was in her mother’s shawl he could shoot her or split her skull with his hatchet.

She heard her father’s voice: “Mary.”

“Mary,” he said. “Open your eyes. Watch where you are being led.”

Then the young Irishwoman opened her eyes and saw them all—her parents; her brothers, Robert and Matthew; her sister, Betsey; the neighbor and her three children. Then it was not so easy for her to be stubborn, to ask for death; to see them moving far off ahead of her now into the woods she had named for her cow: Boss’s Wood.

Besides, if she was to die she didn’t want Father’s back to her, she wanted him to see her die, to see: let him see and behold where all his good cheer, where his cracked optimism had got them.

CAPTURED by the Shawnee raiding party and headed out across her family’s fields.

The fields stood in the mild April sun looking just as they did before her capture.

Mary stared: how could they look as they did? And she answered her own thought: because, the fields are just themselves.

AT THE time of the French and Indian War the south-central Pennsylvania fields sometimes curved halfway up hillsides. With the unseen roots of a thousand things—wild onion, wake-robin, common grass, the corn and flaxseed her father had sown—the soil was held close to the gray shale that made up the sweepings of land. From beneath the rock, the earth’s pull kept the heavy red clay from flying up into a sky marked by scuddings of clouds.

BEFORE her capture, Mary had begun to think that although some things of fields—lilies, vines, choking patches of weeds—are mentioned in Scripture, yet they are not Scripture. The things of the fields are themselves. As Scripture is itself and holds only a partial account of the murderous, of good will, and of their frequent twinings.

God, she had ventured to think, may have given her the New World fields to balance the Scriptures and as a perfect refuge from the Presbyterian catechism.

“Consider the lilies of the field,” the Scripture said. The lilies did not toil nor did they spin, yet even Solomon “in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” And the lily lives just as it did in Israel, even though it has never brushed up against so much as one page of Scripture. That alone could keep her from going mad.

The lily in a field was a fact. For, she had thought, not even Scripture—in all its glory—was arrayed as one of those.

NOW THE party was on the run. The Shawnee and the French were brutally intent. They forced the colonists through sucking spring mud, over logs, up and down hills. At first the captives ignored low tree branches and the spiking shrub undergrowth pulling at their clothing, scratching their skin; toward the end of the day they felt even one brush of the smallest twig as insupportable.

A Shawnee lifted a restraining hand. The light was going; the shadows of the hemlocks began to lose their definition.

The neighbor’s son whined that he was thirsty. Two Shawnee looked at each other: one stepped aside, urinated into an empty box turtle shell, and offered it to Daniel. Mary took a step forward to protest, but her mother stopped her, saying only, “Mary.” The boy himself had already begun to drink, the thin curves of his lips at the uneven edge of the carapace, the urine spilling a little down his chin.

The captors spread a few boughs about; the dank ground was to be the communal bed for the night. There was no fire and no supper. Mary and her mother put the young ones between them; Thomas lay down somewhat apart, sighed, and rolled over, facing away from them.

The younger children drifted off. Occasionally, Jane would reach over them and touch Mary, whose moments of sleep were few.

A S MARY had grown older she had been allowed to stay up late at night and converse with her parents and other visiting adults, one of whom had told of his brother who had been tortured by Indians and had somehow later escaped. Small cuts had been made all over his body; into these slits pine splinters had been stuck and then set afire.

In the nights at home she heard wild animal noises and worried that these sounds came from the throats and cupped hands of Indians. When the next day her family would find entrails, the remains of owl or bobcat pillage, she would be relieved. The noises had come from real animals.

At the same time, her relief made her feel guilty: was not the bobcat as an Indian to the possum; was not a great owl an Indian to the vole? Did not the possum and the vole feel terror and pain?

THE NEXT morning the Shawnee and French parceled out bread and a little meat from the Jemisons’ own provisions. Thomas received his portions into his hands, but then opened his fingers and finally turned his palms down so that the morsels fell to the ground.

“Thomas,” his wife said. She looked at his piece of meat, at his piece of bread; after a moment he moved his head and followed her gaze, but his expression did not change.

His eyes, Mary thought, are as fixed as the eyes of a newly dead person. She positively didn’t know him, she decided. This man, whoever he was, meant to die and leave them. What good was he to them anyway? What good could come of a man who in mere moments had turned passive, a man who had mentally abandoned his family?

In her contempt, she felt more capable of pity. He had become a child. He was almost her child now.

“Thomas?”

He looked at his daughter. She had called him “Thomas.”

“Thomas. You should eat.”

And Thomas, as he had been ordered to do, picked up the piece of meat and began to lick it with the approach and in the manner of a cat.

One of the Shawnee stepped out of the woods and spoke a sentence. He had backtracked, scouting: the whites from the valley they had just raided were in pursuit. The Shawnee spoke again, this time a mere phrase.

Another Shawnee thrust corn husk moccasins into Mary’s line of sight. Then he bent, pulled off her shoes, and replaced them with the moccasins. When he had straightened, he gave her a look which said that what he had done was significant.

She turned from his look. How dare he? Whatever he meant by it was secondary. What she hated was that he was there at all, that he was real and meaning anything by such an expressive look.

But the Shawnee turned also from her and was already placing moccasins on Daniel’s feet.

And her mother suddenly stiffened, sensing impending separation. She spoke out in a rambling way, saying that it might have been better if her child, Mary, had been stillborn; that had the infant girl died, the loss would have been sweet compared to this capture and this manner of parting.

Then Jane seemed to recover herself and, whispering, she addressed Mary directly. “You will have to be strong now. Remember three things.”

A Frenchman and a Shawnee gestured to Thomas to get up.

“Do not,” Jane said, “forget your English.”

Now the raiding party had roused all the whites.

“Carry us,” her mother continued, “in your heart with your English and the Scriptures. And, Mary. Do not cry.”

After they were led away—the father, the mother, Matthew, Robert, Betsey, the neighbor woman and two of her three children—one of the Shawnee squatted. He became fully absorbed in regarding Daniel, and then Mary.

IN A marshy area about a mile from where Mary and Daniel were under scrutiny, the party of whites led off by the Shawnee and the Frenchmen were brought to a standstill.

Since the light was going, both the bodies and the long knives being thrust into them were silhouettes, as were the captives’ heads and the rifle butts which hit them and the tomahawks which sank into them. It would have been hard to see that the long hair a Shawnee finally wrapped around his hand was a rich auburn color.

MARY opened her eyes and saw that it was morning. All were asleep—Daniel, the Shawnee, the Frenchmen. Her mother’s blue shawl lay on the ground. Where her mother had left it? Where the Shawnee who was wearing it had left it?

SETTING downed grasses up as he went, one of the Shawnee ran backward. Forward of him, Mary and Daniel were forced to run through the reaches of underbrush.

ABOUT a year earlier, on a cloudless day, she had climbed up a hill and then had decided to try walking backward on the top of it. Her dog, Molly, had noticed and had evidently hated it, had barked in great anger to see what seemed an unnatural and unexcellent aspect showing itself in the young woman who was her mistress: this walking backward. Shaking herself, Molly had barked: stop this, stop this; stop this thing, these doings.

ON THE third night out they were among thickets and drank a dense, cornmeal-like liquid which did not taste of cornmeal. She pinched the skin above her thumb to try to stop her tears. She pinched again and again and harder and harder until she drew in a breath with each sharp pinch. Her mother had told her not to cry.

But she had cried anyway and now she felt ashamed; she must redeem herself in her absent mother’s eyes if not in the Indians’, who, surprisingly, seemed not to care if she cried. They only wanted her to hurry.

Two of the Shawnee opened a deerskin bag and took out flattish, curved objects. Scalps cut from flesh, damp as they are, soaked with blood, spoil easily. Two Shawnee set them out near the fire with some hoops fashioned from saplings. Now they deftly stretched the circumference of thin skin at the edge of the scalp over the hoop and held the whole to the fire for a time for drying. Next they trimmed any excess of skin away as if it were a scrap of savory-pie crust.

They were careful: no bit of soft tissue escaped the knife’s cutting and scraping. Later, they combed the scalp hair and painted it red. But they did not paint her mother’s hair, for it already partook of the color red.

In this manner, Mary beheld the cloven flesh of her family; she could distinguish scalp from scalp by means of the differing patches of hair.

As it was written, “The very hairs of your head are all numbered.” But where was the God who, implying extravagant concern, had said that? Where was He who kept count of all the hairs of all people? Where was He now?

Daniel asked what the Indians were doing, but Mary turned her whole body away from the fire.

The young-looking Shawnee with the auburnhaired scalp turned it admiringly in his hands. In Shawnee he said, “Rare.” He said that it was perhaps a conjuring scalp, and he thrust it in the direction of Mary’s back and then raised his voice and said that a reddened head could conjure.

But the prisoner gave him no response. Angered, he shouted at the young woman’s back. “Reddened head,” he barked. “Reddened head! Reddened head could conjure.”

Her mother, Mary decided, had been right: better to die than to endure this. And her own first instinct had also been right when on the day she was taken she had not cared about being killed. Let them, just let them, she had thought. She should have died with her family.

In this fashion, she came to the decision to tell her captors that her life should be taken.

“I want to die.”

The Shawnee and French, smoking tobacco and sprawled about on the ground, looked at her.

She raised her voice. “I wish to die.” She swallowed, grasped her own long hair, pulled it up high above her head, and with the other arm made a swift cutting motion at the level of her scalp.

A Frenchman sat up.

She addressed him and repeated, “I wish to die. Kill me.” And then she said, “Please.”

The Frenchman turned to another Frenchman, who turned and said something undecipherable to a Shawnee. Then the second Frenchman said in a laconic manner, “Non.”

“Please.”

“Non,” said the Frenchman. “NON.”

After a while, the oldest Shawnee regarded Mary and then spoke briefly to the youngest Frenchman, who in turn approached her. He tilted his head and stared down at his boots as if they would speak for him. Mary also directed her eyes downward.

Finally he looked at her and tried to tell her that earlier too many prisoners had been slowing them down, that other whites were probably in pursuit of the raiding party by now, that it had been necessary to kill some of the captives.

He threw out his arm as if to gather up, to embrace the taut scalps on their hoops. “Absolument nécessaire,” he said. As if he were speaking to one who could not hear, he raised his voice. “ABSOLUMENT NÉCESSAIRE!”

Mary’s gaze was still fixed on his boots, so she did not see him turn toward the oldest Shawnee and shake his head.

Since the party was diminished, it moved more quickly the next morning.

Mary now took the short steps she had been made to understand she should take. The simple repetition, the quick laying down of one foot and then the other would help her inure herself to thought and feeling. Walk, walk. One foot, the other.

Don’t think, she thought. Don’t think, don’t think; do not think. Be part of this whole; let it rush forward, let it rush you forward, be part of the sky and the ground and of the inevitable progress of this raiding party. But do not think.

With his hand, one of the Shawnee brought the column to a stop.

Mary was aware of trees here and there and then a break and more trees and breaks and then the sound of water.

A Shawnee said, “Monongahela.” The Falling-In-Banks.

“Monongahela,” one of the Frenchmen said. “ Et Allegheny.”

“Mon Dieu,” another Frenchman sighed. He leaned toward his compatriot.

“Duquesne,” a Shawnee said.

In a makeshift shelter just outside Fort Duquesne, candlelight bobbled and spilled into the woods and onto the poison ivy; the light made the curls of the shagbark hickory throw shadows. The candles leaked their yellowy wax onto the crude table at which a Shawnee stirred carnelian paint and appraised it and again stirred it.

Mary and Daniel had been brought to the lean-to, and they stood together and watched. Finally, the Shawnee appeared satisfied with the results of his stir-rings; he picked up a rag and beckoned to Mary. His gesture was an odd, jerking, snapping motion of his wrist and hand. She moved forward.

She had withdrawn her energy from the consuming fire of hurt and anger. Let him tell her what to do, let him do as he wished, let him do anything; it didn’t matter if he touched her, let it be a blow, let it be anything: let it be death.

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