A String of Beads Read Free

functioning the same way in
     the same region for many centuries longer than the British Parliament. In the old
     times they’d called for war by reminding the chiefs that there was a Seneca who had
     been killed but not yet avenged. When they didn’t want war they would say that the
     women weren’t inclined to make the moccasins for warriors to wear as they made their
     way to the distant countries of enemies.
    As Jane occupied herself serving the cake and berries she felt the muscles in her
     shoulders relax a little. The women were all very cordial to Jane. “You have such
     a beautiful house.” “I love the flowers you’ve got in that bed along the side. My
     grandmother had tulips like that when I was a little girl.”
    Jane accepted their compliments, and felt an almost childish sense of validation,
     but she could not ignore the unusual nature of this visit. This wasn’t just Jane’s
     own clan mother stopping by for a chat. This wasn’t even a delegation made up of her moitie —Wolf, Bear, Beaver, and Turtle. It was the mothers of all eight clans assembled here
     together—something that couldn’t be meaningless, any more than the arrival of all
     nine Supreme Court justices could.
    She held Ellen Dickerson in the corner of her eye. She was a tall, straight woman
     about fifty-five or sixty years old, with deep brown skin and long, gray hair gathered
     into a loose ponytail that hung down her back. She sat on the edge of her chair with
     her back perfectly straight, and yet managed to look comfortable. Jane knew that it
     would be Ellen Dickerson who spoke first because she was clan mother of the Wolf clan,
     Jane’s own clan.
    Jane’s father, Henry, had been a Snipe. Her mother had been a young woman he brought
     home from New York City who had milk-white skin and eyes so blue they looked like
     pieces of the sky. In order to marry Henry Whitefield she should have been a Seneca
     and come from a clan of the opposite moitie from the Snipes. The women of the Wolf clan had insisted on adopting her, just as
     they had taken in captive women, runaways, or refugees hundreds of years earlier.
     In Seneca life, children were members of their mother’s clan, so a couple of years
     later when Jane was born, she was a Wolf.
    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