John waited.

Suckahanna smiled. “Then, and only then, he opened the bag and let out the man and the woman. The man ran to hunt the deer. The man has the great richness of the deer. This is what he wanted. But the woman-” she paused and gave him a sly sideways smile “ – the woman has everything else.”

A year ago John would have called it a heathen tale full of heresy and nonsense. But now he listened and nodded. “The women have everything else?”

“Everything but hunting and war.”

“So what am I to do?” he asked her.

Suckahanna looked momentarily surprised, as if he had moved the conversation onward in one great bound. “You will get well,” she said slowly. “And then you will decide.”

“Decide?”

“Where you want to live. What kind of man you want to be.”

John hesitated. “I thought I would get well and go back to my home – to my fields up the river.”

She shook her head. “You must know by now that you cannot live there,” she said gently. “You cannot live there alone. You must know by now that you cannot survive in this land alone. You would have died there, my love.” The endearment slipped out, she flushed and bit her lip as if she would have taken it back.

“I thought – I thought I might get a servant, or a slave. I thought-” He hesitated. “I have been thinking that you might come with me?”

“As a servant? As a slave?” Her look blazed at him.

“I meant I must have someone to work under me,” John corrected himself. “And I have been praying that you would come to me ever since I made landfall. I meant a servant, and you as well.”

“I shall never lie under a white man’s roof again,” Suckahanna said firmly. “I have taken my decision, and I am with the People.”

John jumped to his feet and took a stride away from her and then back again. “Then there is nothing for me here,” he cried out. “I came to make a new life for myself, to farm virgin earth, to find you. And you tell me I cannot plow or hoe alone. I cannot keep myself or even keep my fire in. I cannot take you away from your people, and I cannot take you to my people. I have been a fool to run from one life to another and still achieve nothing.”

There was a cry from the little platform shelter where the children played. Suckahanna glanced back, listening for her own baby’s voice. They heard another woman call in response and get up from her knees and go to see to the crying child. Suckahanna returned her attention to her gardening, picked up her hoeing stick, picked out little weed seedlings from her row. Without turning her head to see if John was listening she spoke very quietly to him.

“Perhaps you could be with me,” she said slowly. “Leave your people and join mine.”

“I can’t live here, seeing you every day,” John said softly. “I want you, Suckahanna. I can’t bear to live near you and yet to sleep every night only a footstep away from you.”

“I know,” she said, so quietly that he had to lean forward to hear. But still her hands worked, her hoeing stick piercing the fresh soil and the seeds dropping quickly and accurately through her fingers. “I could ask my husband to release me.”

“Release you?” John asked incredulously. “This is possible?”

“He might,” she said evenly. “If it was my wish.”

“Your people let their wives come and go as they choose?”

She shot him a small smile. “I told you that we were a proud people. Wives are not slaves. If they wish to leave they must be free to do so, don’t you think?”

“Yes… but-”

“We would have the children,” she went on. “The little boy and my own baby. You would have to promise to love them and care for them like a father.”

“And where would we live? You said you would not live in my house?”

“We would live here,” she said, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. “Among the People. You would become a Powhatan.”

“I would learn your language? Live among you as an equal?”

“You are learning it already,” she observed. “You laughed at Musses the other day and she was not speaking English.”

“I can understand some, but-”

“You would have to join the People, as a brother.”

“They would accept me?”

“We would accept you.”

John was silent, his head spinning. This was a far greater step than his adventure to Virginia, this was a step into the unknown beyond the plantation, into the darkness of unknowable lands.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You would have to decide,” she repeated patiently, as if she had led a child around a circle of explanation and returned to the key point at last. “You would have to decide, my love.”

John hesitated at the endearment. “Do you want me to be with you?” he asked.

At once her hands returned to their work, her head bowed and her veil of dark hair tumbled over her face hiding her expression, brushing her naked brown shoulder. “You would have to decide, without advice from me,” she said to the earth. “I don’t want a man with half a heart.”


At midday the women rested. The fields they were working were distant from home, too far to return to the village for the usual meal, prayers and rest. They ate a little cold gruel and fruit which they had brought with them, they said their brief prayers to the sun which stood precisely above each and every one of them, blessing each and every one with light and warmth on the exact center of her head. Then they rested in the shade of the trees. Suckahanna’s baby was at her breast as she lay back, the little boy playing stalking or marksmanship with his tiny bow and arrow, with the others. John rested near Suckahanna, listened to the ripple of talk, picked out words, one word after another, all of them making more sense to him. He watched her openly now, wondering how it would be if they were married. If she could indeed leave her husband and come to him. If he could indeed become a Powhatan. If he could ever be recognized as a man among the People.

When they returned to camp he touched her arm. “I need to take advice from a man,” he said. “Can one of the men speak my language? Someone I can trust to tell me how a Powhatan man might see this? Not a friend of your husband?”

At once her dark eyes lit up with laughter. “Oh! You don’t trust me!”

“I do-” John heard himself stammering. “Of course!”

Suckahanna turned her head and babbled a string of words at her sister-in-law who was a few paces ahead. The woman screamed with laughter and turned back, laughing at John, and pointed an accusing finger at him. John picked out among the rapid flow the few words: man, Powhatan, talk, talk, talk, everything.

“What is she saying?”

“She says you are a true man, a Powhatan already. She says all men need to talk, talk, talk among themselves, to make the decisions which are already known.”

“Known?” John queried.

Suckahanna veiled her eyes with the downward sweep of her eyelashes. “Everyone thinks that you love me,” she said quietly. “Everyone thinks that I love you. We are all just waiting…”

“Waiting?”

“For you. To decide.”


John went that night before supper to the house of the werowance, the senior man of the village. It stood foursquare at the head of the village street, near the dancing ground, at a distance from the smoke of the cooking fires. It was walled with tree bark, and roofed with bark roughly cut in shingles. In the heat of the day the bark walls would be rolled up like curtains, but as the evening grew cold the old men closed out the chill night air. The werowance himself was sitting on a raised platform at the end of the tent; at his side were two of the old men of the tribe. They all carried their sharp hunting knives, John noticed. They all looked grave.

John stood in the doorway, awkward as a boy.

“You can come.” The werowance spoke in heavily accented English; but there was neither welcome nor warmth in his voice.

John entered the darkness of the house and sat, obedient to the small gesture, on a pile of soft deerskin. For a moment he was reminded of King Charles’s wordless gestures to his servants, and the thought gave him a little courage in the darkness of the strange house. He had served the greatest king in England, he could surely bear himself like a man before someone who was nothing more than a savage chief clinging to the edge of unknown land.

“You desire Suckahanna?” the werowance said briefly.

John found he was looking at the length and sharpened cane blades of the hunting knives.

“I knew her before she was a married woman,” he said. His voice sounding weak and apologetic, even in his own ears. “We were promised to each other. I promised I would come back for her.”

The werowance nodded. “But you did not come back,” he observed.

John gritted his teeth. “When I got to my home in my country my father had died and my children needed care. I had to stay.”

“She waited,” the werowance pointed out. The old men on either side of him nodded, their sharp faces like stone eagles on a lectern in church. “She trusted your word.”

“I am sorry,” John said awkwardly.

“You have a new wife and children in your own country?”

John thought of a swift lie, thought he might tell them that the plague had taken both his children as well as Jane. But a fearful superstition halted his tongue. “Yes, I have children,” he said quietly. “And a wife.”

“And is your wife now the one who waits?”

John nodded.

The werowance sighed as if John’s infidelity was a riddle, too tedious and complex to unravel. There was a silence that stretched for a long time. John’s back ached, he had sat awkwardly and now he felt too uneasy to wriggle back on the pile of skins and lean against the wall of the house.

“Where do you want to be?” the werowance asked him. “With Suckahanna or your wife?”