A String of Beads

A year ago she had lived through a series of terrible trials. When she had reached her worst point, when she was in fiery, throbbing pain from the burns, and weak from the gunshot wound, surrounded alone by cruel enemies and preparing herself for death, she had thought about Carey, and the thought of him had not helped her. He was something good that she’d had while she was strong and happy, not a weapon she still possessed that could strengthen her when she was in a battle for her life. Thinking about Carey had only made her wish to live and get back to him, not to stay strong and live up to the promises she had made to her runners. Thinking about Carey had made her weak, the way thinking about food makes a starving person weak.

 

As she had endured the ordeal, she kept digging into the back of her mind, searching for something that would help her in those last days of life. What she’d found were her ancestors, the Seneca warriors who had fought the wars of the forests. The men who had gone off in small parties to raid the countries of enemies would sometimes find themselves in trouble. As they were returning home along the trails they might be overtaken by a party of enemies so large that they could never hope to fight them off. Sometimes one warrior would run for a time with the others, then come to a strategic point, often one with the high wall of a cliff on one side and a ravine on the other. He would stop there and turn to block the trail while his friends and companions continued on to escape. The lone warrior would stand on that spot and fight. As the enemies arrived, he would kill as many as he could with arrows, then fight hand to hand for as long as he could raise a war club or thrust a knife. His intention was to fight until he was killed, but sometimes the enemies would overwhelm him and take him captive.

 

Jane knew that captive warriors had been tormented—beaten, then cut, mutilated, flayed, then burned. A warrior was expected to remain strong and unyielding through all of it, to display such incredible bravery that his captors would be shocked and fear the next Seneca warriors who came their way. Even after the warrior knew he was too deeply wounded and crippled to save himself, he would still look for a chance to strike, grab one of the captors, and kill him before his own death came.

 

In Jane’s mind the stories about captured warriors were distilled into a vision of a single warrior. His solitude was part of his torment, just as it was part of hers. She thought about the warrior and pictured him among his enemies until she could almost see him with her eyes open. She honored him for his courage and his pride, and tried to behave the way he had. When she began to feel the weakness coming on her, feel herself becoming too tired to struggle, too hopeless to remain silent through the pain, she used the warrior’s image to fight it. She thought about the old Seneca warrior at the darkest time, concentrating hard and continuously. She knew that he had been one of her ancestors. He would have recognized her face, her hair, her skin, and the language she spoke, and understood her and known her in spite of the blue eyes she’d inherited from her mother. And during her ordeal she became, for a brief time, like that warrior. She had watched until her chance had come, until the two men guarding her had fallen asleep. Because of that she was alive tonight, walking along a highway outside Cleveland, and they and their friends were dead.

 

A part of what was bothering her now was that she could have told Jimmy about all this, but she’d had a year and still hadn’t told her husband, Carey. She had been afraid he would never understand, and might say something that would stay between them forever. What she feared was a rejection of the part of her that was Seneca. She was a modern, educated woman, and sometimes it seemed to her that it was easiest for Carey to assume that was all she was—that she was just like everybody else they had known at Cornell, or even the women they met at cocktail parties and hospital benefits. Right now she resented him for that, even while she admitted to herself that the real reason he didn’t know things was that she hadn’t been able to tell him.

 

She turned around after a few miles and walked back toward the hotel. She considered calling Carey, but first she analyzed why she wanted to call. She was feeling guilty for having thoughts about him that weren’t fair. She was afraid that she was being drawn too much into the Seneca world and a culture that he could never share. She was afraid the balance that sustained her was being disrupted. Even that thought was a problem—the Haudenosaunee peoples’ belief that all things needed to be kept in balance. And she was lonely for Carey, but also irritated at him for not seeing that she loved him too much to leave him unless she had to.

 

As she walked on, she decided that none of the reasons for calling Carey was the right one. She had told him last time not to expect a call. And she had told Jimmy that getting in touch with people at home was dangerous. It went for her too. A small risk was still a risk. There was no reason for Carey to listen to her saying over and over that she loved him and would come home when she could. If she said those words enough times on long-distance calls, they began to feel like lies.

 

She stopped in a diner and had a cup of coffee, and then let the waitress refill it while she sat thinking about her life and her marriage until she realized that she had been there too long. She got up and continued the walk to the hotel.

 

When Jane reached the parking lot of the hotel she stayed outside it until she had walked the perimeter, keeping her path out of the overhead lights that shone down to protect the parked cars. She studied the Chevy Malibu again to be sure nobody was watching it, either from another parked car or from the sort of van that the police used for surveillance. By then she was near the dark side of the building, so she walked along the brick wall. She looked at her watch. She had been gone more than three hours. It was late enough now to be sure the hotel’s side entrance was locked, so she went on to the main entrance.

 

Through the double glass doors she could see the night desk clerk. He was occupied, talking with two men who looked like business travelers who had just driven from the airport and not brought their luggage from the car yet. They were leaning on the long counter, the three of them all close and preoccupied. As Jane walked by, something unusual happened. One of the two men came around and joined the desk clerk behind the counter. He turned the screen of the computer so his companion could see it too, and they began to scroll down a page that was a series of divided sections.

 

Jane stood at the elevator and pretended to hit the button, but kept watching the men without seeming to. As she watched, the man behind the counter raised his right hand and pointed a finger at one of the lines of text. As he did, his sport jacket rode up and she could see the gun under it. Jane pressed the button and the elevator door opened, she stepped inside, and the door slid shut.

 

 

 

 

 

Thomas Perry's books