Thieving Forest Read Online Free PDF Page A

feels like her body is being pulled down to the ground by invisible ropes. She tries to tell Betsey T. and Mop what happened, pressing her two hands against her stomach. Why , she thinks, and the word is like a bird that won’t stay still. She can’t think what to do. Amos Spendlove comes out from around back, where he’d been working he says, and she has to start the story all over again. She can’t remember what she has already said. Afterward, she stands up and vomits into the grass.
    Betsey T. gives her water to drink. Amos Spendlove is drinking whiskey from a tin cup, which he calls tea. That isn’t unusual. His hands are shaking and that isn’t unusual either. He’s a mean drunk whom her father Sirus never trusted, but he is the only man not out in the fields.
    “We have to get them,” Susanna says. She means the men, but Betsey T. misunderstands.
    “We’ll find your sisters, honey, don’t worry. Do you need to be sick again?”
    She is called Betsey T. to distinguish her from Betsey Mowatt, wife of John Mowatt, another settler. Betsey T.’s husband died two springs ago when a lightning storm hit while he was hunting and a heavy tree limb fell on his back. Susanna decided long ago that Betsey T. was a foolish, empty-headed woman but she’s the only woman besides the Quiners who live in town. Her son Mop is foolish to the point of dim-witted but he has a rare talent for trapping and fishing, which means that he and his mother can live a tolerable life out here without farming. Besides the Quiners and the Spendloves, they are the only ones who don’t farm.
    “The men,” Susanna corrects her. “We have to call them in.”
    She stops and swallows. Her stomach feels watery but she wills herself not to be sick again. Somehow she must be to blame for all this. If only she hadn’t—what? She remembers thinking she’d had enough of their quarreling for one day, but it’s ridiculous to think that that meant anything, could do anything. She takes her turkey hen bone out of her pocket and makes a fist around it. She feels inadequate and foolish, as foolish as Betsey T., and the thought comes to her that really she is no better than a child, that up to now her deepest wishes have been childish wishes: to leave home; to have someone else do her work. If only I could go back to the world of an hour ago, she thinks. But that wish is childish too, and painful because impossible.
    “Where did you say you were at during all this?” Spendlove asks her. He is standing before her with his back to the forest, scowling. His shoulder-length hair holds a good deal of oil from the roots to the ends.
    “Between the pig’s pen and the henhouse,” Susanna says. “Behind a maple tree.”
    “And how is it they didn’t see you?”
    She doesn’t know. She can’t tell him. Mop, who left to check on the Quiners’ cabin, comes back to report on what has been stolen: all the candles, all the food, Sirus’s tools, and their horses and wagon, which they keep in their own small barn rather than the public stable. Susanna presses her left thigh with her fingertip, testing for feeling. Her shock is wearing off and the seeds of her later, full-blown emotions are beginning to emerge: grief, horror, and the fear of being alone. What little breeze there’d been earlier is gone, and the air feels warm and thick. If she leans forward she can see her own cabin and she wants to be able to see it.
    Why is nothing happening? “You go raise the cry,” she tells Spendlove. “We’ve delayed too long already.”
    But Spendlove makes no move. “The men are racing as it is to get their grain in. When they come back we’ll get together a proper search.”
    “But the Potawatomi will be long gone by then!”
    “They’re long gone now.”
    That stops her a moment. “Where’s Cade? He’ll go.”
    At the river with his brother, Spendlove tells her. “They’ll be back by nightfall.”
    “Nightfall! But Aurelia is sick, he’ll want to