“As close to it as we may,” her voice answered out of the gray. She waited a few seconds, and when I could not answer, she took my shoulder and followed the length of my arm with her hands, grasping my fingers in hers. “Farewell, then, Ressie. I love you. I will always think of you. I have to go. God keep you, little sister.”
As if unbidden, my hand squeezed hers. “Take me with you,” I pleaded. With Patience on one side and a man I knew not on the other, they propelled me out the gate I had found long ago, into the hands of three other Indians. One led the way up the road, and turned into the woods where a narrow path cut this way and that. We marched through the dark night until the rain stopped just as the sky turned a lighter shade of gray. The air chilled so that our cloaks and coverings froze upon us, making tents of ice. I could not feel my fingers or my feet. We moved as shadows, on and on, until one of the men called a halt. I heard water. A river appeared out of the fog. Long bark canoes, two of them, waited at water’s edge. The Indians put Patience into one canoe and me into the other. My heart sank. Would they take me into the woods and press me with their desires and kill me?
I sat in the floor of the canoe while one man before me put a rough deerskin with the hair still on it over me; a man behind me took up oars and rowed. As the hours passed I slept. The sun broke through the heavy clouds from time to time, playing warm spots upon my face. Home, I thought. We are going home. I thanked God. Thanked the Indians, too. I asked the Virgin to guide our canoe, whispering, “Ma, I’m coming.” When the sun lowered, the Indians pulled their crafts to a bank and made a small camp. They lit a fire that seemed to give no warmth at all. Patience sat near the man who had caught me at the convent. I recognized him in the firelight. He was the one whose wounds she had tended with her hair. I whispered, “Patience, do you know these men?”
Patience smiled, her eyes alive and twinkling. “Every few months, Massapoquot and men of his tribe travel to Montréal to bring slaves to the convent of St. Ursula. We were part of one group. When they came, Sister Marta had all of us in the kitchen stay up for two days, waiting upon and feeding the men who had worked so hard to save our souls from Presbyterian hell.” My mouth opened, appalled. She continued, “Every time I saw him, I felt something different. We began to talk. We knew each other. His name for me is Red Shield of Bear. When Massapoquot offered to come and take me I made him promise to get you, too. We have planned this for four years. That first rumor those two sisters would try to escape, that was you and I. But the weather was against us. Even the Indians do not go abroad when there is four feet of snow on the ground. I could not call you if there was no hope of making an escape.”
“And they will take us to Jamaica?”
“No. But they will get us near Boston. There are ships there aplenty for you.”
I huddled by the fire. “What about these other men? Do they speak French?”
“Yes, all of us,” Massapoquot said.
I looked him in the face. “Why may I not ride with Patience? Why do I have to sit in the other boat?”
The man laughed. “Why would I have to do all the work? Why, you would make them feel as if they weren’t useful.”
There was so much to think about, yet I was so cold I thought I would die of it, and I could not think. Patience had left her own child behind. She would have left me, too. She had convinced four strange men to take us to Boston and no one had mentioned coins or gold. I wondered how much it would cost, or if she had traded her virtue yet again for this journey. I could not imagine how her mind and heart were connected to my own, for all the workings of hers seemed too foreign to grasp. What was to keep these men from doing anything they wanted with us and dropping our dead bodies in the river? I said a prayer for James and begged forgiveness for leaving him behind. We rode in canoes, then walked overland, with the Indians carrying the canoes on their shoulders until we came to another river.
Eleven days we went down the river, the men paddling, Patience and I frozen to the bone. Twice they made us lie down and heaped things upon us as if we were a pile of trade goods, and one of those times, Massapoquot had to talk long and fast to some other Indian men so that we could pass unmolested. The twelfth day they banked the canoes and hid them in tall brushy plants that overhung the river. Massapoquot said, “From here, travel slow. This is English land. You speak some English; you might say them we are not here to kill you, but Englishmen bad. They will kill, no matter you have their hair and skin. They not listen. You,” he said to me, “choose you come with us. You choose. Not have to live with English. Think this.”