A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(4)

They all talked for a while about topics of polite conversation—the early thaw this year, the beautiful spring they’d been having. Daisy Hewitt said, “I’ve been trying to figure out when to plant my corn. The sycamore leaves aren’t the size of a squirrel’s ear yet, but it’s like midsummer.”

“I’ve got a nursery catalog that divides the country into zones,” said Mae. “This year I’ll just go by the zone south of ours.”

Then the random conversation faded, and they all looked at Jane. Ellen Dickerson said, “Jane, do you remember Jimmy Sanders?”

“Sure,” she said. “He and I used to play together when we were kids. During the summer, when my father was away working, my mother and I would go out to the reservation to live.”

“That’s right,” said Alma Rivers, of the Snipe clan. “I used to see the two of you running around in the woods. You were pretty cute together.”

Ellen frowned. “He’s in some real trouble right now.”

“He is? Jimmy? Is he sick?”

“No. The police are looking for him.”

“What for?”

“He got in a fight in a bar in Akron about two months ago. He won, so he got charged with assault I think it was. But before his trial, the man he’d fought with died.” She frowned again. “He was shot. Jimmy hasn’t been seen since.”

Jane said, “That’s horrible. I can hardly imagine Jimmy in a bar, let alone hurting somebody in a fight. And he’d certainly never shoot anybody. His mother must be going insane with worry.”

“She is.”

Jane looked closely at Ellen, who was sitting across the coffee table from her. Ellen’s eyes were unmoving, holding her there. Jane said, “I haven’t seen him in twenty years, when he was at my father’s Condolence Council. No, it had to be my mother’s funeral, when I was in college. Still a long time.”

“We want you to find him and bring him back.”

Jane’s eyes never moved from Ellen’s. “What makes you think I can do something like that?”

“We know it’s something you can do. I’ll leave it at that.”

“You know that about me?”

“We’ve never had a good enough reason to speak. Sometimes when a person has a secret, just whispering it to yourself can risk her life.”

“All this time, you’ve been watching me?”

“We watch and we listen. Years go by, and the sights and sounds add up,” said Ellen. “Don’t you think we wanted to see how you turned out? Your mother was an important member of the Wolf clan. She gave me the dress I wore to my senior prom, and helped me cut it down to fit. She drove me to Bennett High School in Buffalo so I could take the SATs and get into college.” Ellen paused. “Then she took me to lunch at the restaurant in AM and A’s. She was so beautiful. I can still see her.”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For not making her sound different because she wasn’t born Seneca.”

“Some people are born where they belong, and some have to find their way there,” said Alma Rivers. “There’s no difference after that.”

Ellen said, “Jimmy needs to be found and persuaded to turn himself in before the police find him. They think he’s a murderer, someone who killed a man with a rifle. They’ll be afraid of him, and if he resists, they’ll kill him too.”

“I knew him, and he was a close friend when we were kids,” said Jane. “But that doesn’t give me—”

“We think the one most likely to find him is you.”

“That can’t be true.”

“Who, then?” asked Ellen. The eight women stared at her, waiting.

Jane kept her head up, her eyes meeting Ellen’s, but there was no answer.

Ellen stood up. “All right, then.” In her hand was a single string of shell beads. Each shell was tubular, about a quarter inch long and an eighth of an inch thick, some white and some purple, made from the round shell of the quahog, a coastal clam.

Jane’s eyes widened. The Seneca term was ote-ko-a. The rest of the world called it wampum, its name in the Algonquin languages. Ellen placed the string in Jane’s hand. Jane stared at it—two white, two purple, two white, two purple, the encoded pattern signifying the Seneca people as a nation. Ote-ko-a was often mistaken by the outsiders as a form of money, but ote-ko-a had nothing to do with monetary exchange. It was a sacred commemoration, often of a treaty or important agreement. Giving a person a single string of ote-ko-a was also the traditional way for the clan mothers to appoint him to an office or give him an important task. “Come see us soon.”

“I really don’t know where Jimmy is.” She fingered the single string of shell beads, feeling its weight—like a chain.

“Of course not,” said Alma Rivers. “I’ll let his mother know to expect you. You were always a great favorite of hers.”

Dorothy, Daisy, Alma, and the others all stood up too. One by one, they thanked Jane for her hospitality and hugged her. They were all softness and warmth, and together they gave off the smells of a whole garden of flowers, some mild and subtle and others spicy or boisterous. Senecas were tall people. Most of the older generation of women were shorter than Jane, but when the eight clan mothers hugged her they seemed to grow and become huge, like the heroes of myths, who only revealed their true size at special times.