Free Thieving Forest by Martha Conway Page B

could use more hands.”
    Susanna says, “You must be sorely in need of company if you value mine.”
    Liza smiles, a rare occurrence. “It’s fine company.”
    “Then you haven’t been listening to what people say.”
    “You’ve given yourself no airs around me.”
    The wind rises sharply and then suddenly drops as if changing its mind. Tomorrow she will go to Gemeinschaft, where her sister, she doesn’t know which one, has been ransomed. And then what? Come back here? Return to Severne? She thinks about Old Adam, whom she still hasn’t seen. Clearly he has abandoned her. Gone back to see to his pigs.
    Liza gets up and knocks her pipe ashes out. “It’s late. Try to sleep, now. You need have no worries tonight.”
    But she does have worries, countless worries. How will she pay the missionaries back for her sister’s ransom? The goods in her grain sack seem pitiful now: buttons, nail scissors, a ring. Her sisters are well beyond their worth, prideful as they are, and stubborn, and forever telling her that whatever she is doing is wrong. Where are they now? Sleeping outside without even a blanket no doubt, and probably convinced that she, Susanna, could do nothing to help.

    But she is mistaken about one thing at least: Old Adam has not yet gone back to his pigs. When she steps out early next morning to fetch water he is waiting on the dewy grass, crouching rather than sitting, his rheumatoid knees jutting out, elbows on thighs. From his mouth hangs a long clay pipe not unlike Liza’s, but when he sees Susanna he takes out the pipe and stands. He is gripping something in his other hand: the moccasins Aurelia was wearing when they found her. He holds them out to her.
    “I told Jonas to give those to you,” Susanna says. “If he saw you.”
    “He gave. Last night. But they are yours.”
    “I don’t want them.”
    His face searches hers. “You might like. Good leather. Soft. Try,” he says. The sun is behind him, the sky faintly pink. A single bird makes its claim to the day. She bends down to unlace her boots. He is right, the moccasins are surprisingly soft. Her feet feel warmer already.
    “You can remember when you look at them.”
    “Remember?”
    “Aurelia,” he says. “To speak the name is to make live again.”
    His voice is so gentle it brings tears to her eyes. She thinks of Aurelia standing by her henhouse.
    “Now,” Old Adam says. He feels inside his shoe-pouch and pulls out a narrow piece of cloth with a bit of fur on one end. At first Susanna cannot make out what it is, but then she recognizes it as a collar, a linen dress collar, only it has a small deer tail sewn onto it. The tail is reddish brown and about the length of a child’s hand. It serves to hook up the two ends of the collar like a brooch.
    She strokes the tiny hairs. “Is it your wife’s?”
    “She made it. I give to you.”
    Susanna admires the cleverness of the collar’s design, the mix of European and Indian. “It’s lovely,” she says. Then she asks him to wait while she goes into the tavern.
    “I want to give you something, too,” she tells him, coming back out with her grain sack.
    She pulls out her mother’s wedding ring but Old Adam shakes his head. Too valuable, he tells her, she might need it. He was the one, she will find out later, who went back to the cold trail in the forest and came upon the Moravian missionaries. They told him that a woman with red hair had been ransomed and taken back to their village. Susanna pulls out all the objects in her grain sack and lays them side by side on the ground. Old Adam knocks his pipe ashes behind him and squats to look. He puts Sirus’s axe back inside the sack, and then the dinner knives tied together with twine, and the nail scissors with their avian fingerholes. Susanna has already given Liza Footbound her mother’s hand mirror, small enough compensation for all her kindnesses.
    Old Adam picks up one of the cherry buttons and rubs his thumb over the