A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(8)
She took Allegheny Road to Java, where it became Cattaraugus Road. She drove south to the mechanic’s shop that was owned by the Snows. She pulled close to the garage doorway, got out, and walked to the front of her car.
“Janie?”
Jane turned her head and saw a dark-skinned man about her age wearing blue work pants, steel-toed boots, and a gray work shirt with an embroidered patch above the pocket that said ray. Jane stepped up and hugged him. “It’s great to see you, Ray. I was afraid you would be on vacation or something.”
“No, the guys who work for me get vacations. I’m always here, like the doorknob. Got a car problem?”
“I wondered if you could do the scheduled maintenance on my car—you know, oil, filter, lube, check and replace belts and hoses—and then keep it here safe for at least a week or so.”
“I’d be glad to. You staying around here?”
“I thought I’d go on a hike, like we used to when we were kids.”
Ray Snow’s brows knitted. “You trying to find Jimmy?”
Jane looked around to see if anyone else was in earshot. She smiled and said, “Not me. That’s the police’s job. I wouldn’t want to get involved.”
“Well, that’s good. A person would have to be stupid to do that.” He whispered, “Give him my regards.”
4
Jane pulled her backpack up over her shoulders, adjusted the waist strap, and began to walk. She had known from the visit of the clan mothers that it might come to this, but she had not been sure until she talked with Mattie. She had not been able to tell Jane where Jimmy was—had not known, specifically—so what she did was let Jane know that maybe the answer was already there, inside Jane’s memory.
Jane wasn’t in doubt about how to get there. When Jane and Jimmy were fourteen, they’d saved money all spring. They had spent a few days collecting road maps, hoarding clean socks and underwear from the laundry, and planning. On the third morning after school let out in June, they set off toward the south.
Today, as Jane walked out of town away from Ray Snow’s mechanic shop, she made a hundred-yard detour so she could walk in the footsteps of the fourteen-year-old Jane. She and Jimmy had begun their journey on the reservation and walked to the south. The first big moment for Jane was when they crossed Route 5. It was an old road, one that white people had made by paving the Wa-a--gwenneyu. Underneath the pavement was the trail that ran the length of the longhouse-shaped region that was Iroquois territory, from Mohawk country at the Hudson River to Seneca country at the Niagara River.
The reason for their trip was personal and complicated. They told other people they wanted to explore a bit of the region. But what they were looking for was themselves. Jane and Jimmy had lost their fathers when they were eleven and twelve. Later, after Jane had become an adult, she realized that this coincidence must have been what drew them together and launched them on their trip. Without their fathers they had lost part of their link to the past, to the long history that had produced them. Changes that had taken place before they were born left them as two lonely Senecas, survivors among countless millions of other people in a world that sometimes bore no resemblance to the one that had formed their culture. Jane had been especially lost without her father, because her mother was white and didn’t speak Seneca even as well as Jane did, and they lived in a city miles from the reservation. Jane and Jimmy had seen nothing in junior high school that made them want to be part of the wider world, learned no point of view that gave them an acceptable place or a purpose in it.
When they talked about this during their thirteenth summer, they had made a pact to go on a trip the following summer, when they would be fourteen. They would travel as the old people had, speak only Onondawaga, and visit places that had not been changed, deforested, tamed, or demolished. Maybe they would learn something about who they were. In their fourteenth summer, they went.
Jane and Jimmy had hiked only a few miles by the time they reached Route 5, but when they crossed the highway they became travelers, not kids going for a walk. They were going back to the indeterminate time before the arrival of white people, when the eastern woodlands still extended from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and from James Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. Whenever Jane and Jimmy stepped a hundred yards into the woods between the roads it could have been two hundred or ten thousand years ago.
A couple of miles farther on would be the New York State Thruway. Jane looked at her watch when she reached it, and remembered. It had been noon by the time Jane and Jimmy had arrived on this spot. The thruway was a serious barrier. There was a high chain link fence, then a weedy margin about two hundred feet wide, and then a two-lane strip of highway full of cars driving sixty or seventy miles an hour toward the west. Next came a central island of grass and trees, and then the two-lane strip going east, and another weedy margin before the next fence. Kids from the reservation knew that the thruway was a fearsome barrier that kept deer, foxes, and other animals captive on one side or the other. The thruway was a toll road, so it had few exits a pedestrian could use for crossing. Some were thirty miles apart.
Jane and Jimmy had stopped to eat their sandwiches and study the traffic on the thruway. Their maps said they’d have to go east as far as Le Roy to reach the next exit, or chance a quick run across the pavement. They had begun their journey already knowing which it would be, but they took their time sitting side by side in a bushy area outside the first chain link fence and watching the cars go by, the nearer ones from left to right and the farther from right to left. Jane knew a car going sixty covered eighty-eight feet per second. If they could start right at the moment when a car passed, they could be across the pavement before the next arrived, but there was a problem of visibility. If a state police car came by at the wrong moment, they’d be picked up and suffer serious but nonspecific consequences far beyond the anger of their mothers. In the end they climbed the fence, crawled close to the pavement, pushing their backpacks ahead of them, and waited. They watched cars coming, evaluating each one, and finally saw a break in traffic that was inexplicable but welcome, and dashed across the two westbound lanes into the stand of trees in the center margin. They sat and laughed, not because there was anything funny, but because their fear had made them giddy. A state police car passed on the side they had just crossed, and it was twenty minutes before they dared to make the second crossing.