Shadow Woman

9

Jane parked her car in the gravel driveway in front of the small frame house under the big hemlock tree. When she got out she stepped into a little cloud of dust that settled on her shoes. A dog in the back yard began to bark, then dashed toward her with menacing yaps. It was a little black mongrel with brown eyebrows, the kind that she had seen running around yapping on the Tonawanda reservation since she was a child, so she knew what it would do before it did. It ran up until it was five feet away, then straightened its forelegs, skidded to a stop on the grass, and began to hop up and down, wagging its tail.

“Maggie,” came a deep voice from the porch. “Come.” The little dog trotted happily around Jane once, then scampered up the steps onto the porch and ran through the open screen door to alert the others in the Peterson house. “Hi, Janie,” said the man. He stood up from his rocking chair so Jane could see him over the railing. He was very tall and had the square-chested, long-legged look that she remembered noting in his father when she had come here with her own father for visits in the old days.

“Hi, Billy,” she called. “Is this a good time?”

“There is no bad time,” he said as he put a sprig that had fallen from the hemlock into his book to mark the page, set it on the stack on the wicker table beside him, then folded his reading glasses into his shirt pocket.

He met Jane on the walk and let her hug him, then leaned his head down and turned his cheek to catch her kiss. “Married life agrees with you, Janie.”

He said it in Seneca, so Jane answered in Seneca. “The old man wanted to come too, but I made him go to work so I could keep being a grand lady who wanders around doing nothing.”

As they stepped up onto the porch, he saw her notice his books, and reverted to English. “Just some reading for my undergraduate course in the fall. Basic abnormal psychology.”

“What we used to call Nuts and Sluts.”

“That’s the one,” he said. “The department makes me take a turn every third year.”

The little dog pushed through the screen door again with its nose, and then a woman nearly as tall as Billy with hair like Jane’s came out from behind it holding three glasses of lemonade on a tray. “Hi, Janie,” she said. “I thought you might like a cold drink.”

Jane took a glass. “Thanks, Vi,” she said, and they exchanged pecks on the cheek while Billy took the tray to keep the other glasses level.

Violet Peterson sat on the porch swing with Jane and smiled. Jane looked around her. “Did you sell the kids?”

Violet said, “They’re in school, believe it or not. Veronica’s taking a computer class every morning, and Delbert’s doing art.” She glanced at her watch. “I pick them up in an hour.”

“So serious,” said Jane.

“It’s great,” said Violet. “If I don’t make them do something in the summer they run around in the woods like—”

“Like we did,” said Jane.

“Exactly,” said Violet. “Kids are wonderful, but anybody who says they don’t drive you nuts is in a state of denial.” Her lips pursed and she said slyly, “You’ll see.”

Jane sipped the cold lemonade and listened. The red-winged blackbirds at the edge of the marshland a hundred yards away were calling to each other.

Billy said, “You have something on your mind?”

“You must be a psychology professor,” said Jane. “It’s kind of a delicate problem. Delicate politically.”

“Politically?”

“I came to see my friends Billy and Violet, but before I go, I want to do some lobbying with Sadagoyase.”

She could feel the weight of ages as he stared at her. Sadagoyase meant Level Heavens. It was the name that had been given to the member of the Snipe clan who held that sachemship in each generation since the first Sadagoyase, one of the forty-nine who had sat at Onondaga with Hiawatha and Deganawida to establish the Iroquois League. Each of them for a thousand years had probably sat in front of the doorway of his wife’s house on a day like today, with the blackbirds calling in the hot sunshine, and listened to a woman like her who had come to talk politics.

“Is this about the gambling?” asked Violet.

“Yes, I’m afraid it is,” said Jane. “I’ll bet you’re both sick of it.”

“Not at all,” said Sadagoyase. “It’s good that you came, because I’ve been meaning to give you a call about it.”

“Me?” asked Jane. “I thought I was being clever sneaking around to the sachem of another clan. Why would you call a Wolf?”

“You said it was delicate politically. It’s been voted down four times, but it keeps coming back up. I need to know what key people think, the ones who are educated and can sway public opinion.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Everything I see about it tells me to leave it alone and let other people decide. I’m not here to offer advice about the general issue. I just wanted to make one little point and skulk away.”

“But I’m asking your advice.”

“I’m not the one to ask. Whitefields haven’t lived on the reservation in three or four generations.”

“Being a Seneca isn’t a matter of residence.”

“I had a mother who started out Irish. A colleen, as they say. It sounds like the name of a dog that’s not quite a collie, doesn’t it?”

“Cornplanter had a father named O’Bail. Mary Jemison was a year out of Ireland when she was captured. She had thirty-nine grandchildren by Hiokatoo. You want to tell their great-great-grandchildren they’re not Senecas? There’s probably nobody within rifle shot of here who doesn’t carry DNA from somebody who was adopted twenty generations back. It’s a nonissue.”

Jane sighed. “I would love it if the people could have a little dependable money coming in. There are already over a hundred Indian casinos all over the country, and I heard somebody refer to gambling as ‘the return of the buffalo.’ But I’ve got worries. If I say those worries out loud, people I love and respect are going to say things that hurt me.”

“What will they say?”

“They’ll remind me in that quiet, gentle way people around here have that I’ve never been poor. And I’ll know that they could have said more.”

“What could they say?”

“I’m one of them too. Maybe I would say it to myself. There I would be, this doctor’s wife who lives in a house like a fortress in Amherst, driving Carey’s BMW up to the dilapidated council building to tell them gambling money isn’t good for the nation.”

Sadagoyase raised his eyebrows. “Maybe living that life makes you objective. The traditionalists, the longhouse people, trust you because they know you’re at least as conservative as they are. They’re an important constituency.”

“I’m an anomaly, and they know it,” she said. “I’m a leftover Indian Rights radical from ten years ago. A lot of what I know comes from the Old People, but a lot doesn’t. It comes from staring at old archives at Cornell and Rochester that were written by Europeans who studied us the way doctors study viruses. I’m not a radical now. I’m a spoiled rich woman who has a hobby.”

“Good for you,” said Sadagoyase. “I’m a professor teaching the theories of a dead man from Vienna. Now answer my question and I’ll listen to whatever you came to tell me.”

Jane shook her head and smiled sadly. “All right. Here goes. I’m not a spiritual believer in the Gaiiwio of Handsome Lake. I don’t believe there’s anything left after we’re dead, at least not in broad daylight like this. But whatever happened when Handsome Lake got drunk and passed out in 1799, he woke up with some sense. I think there wouldn’t be any such thing as a Seneca now if he hadn’t.”

“You want to be more specific?”

“Don’t sell any land. Accept as much education as you can get, but keep up the ancient cycle of celebrations. Drinking liquor might be fine for whites, but for us it’s poison. Don’t abuse your wife and kids the way whites do. And—here it comes—don’t gamble.”

She glanced at her old friend, but Sadagoyase was waiting in silence. She said, “He didn’t mean don’t play the peach-pit game or bet on snow-snake matches. He was a warrior, brought up in the Old Time. He got his scalping knife wet at Devil’s Hole. He was saying, ‘These are the temptations that the modern world is sending our way. Watch out.’ I think he was right.”

“What about now?” he asked. “Is he still right?”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “For hundreds of years the Five Nations kept the peace, managed a unified foreign policy with fifty or sixty other nations, and played the Dutch, English, and French off against one another. Now on half the reservations there are competing governments and splinter groups, and Iroquois burning their own buildings and taking shots at each other. And every time one side looks like it’s losing, they call for intervention by the New York State Police or Quebec or Ontario Provincials, or the Canadian or American federal governments. They’ve always gotten it, and they always will.”

“Are you worried about hard feelings or loss of sovereignty?”

“I don’t think those are two issues. They’re the same. I’m not saying all of that would happen at Tonawanda. But it would be especially stupid if any of it happened here. Everybody around here knows that in 1838, when the state was kidnapping chiefs to force them to sign the land treaty, not one single chief from Tonawanda let himself be caught. I hope people remember that the reason for that was that the chiefs were willing to risk their lives to disappear, and the people were willing to risk theirs to hide them. That’s not just why we’re still here. It’s who we are.”

“So what you’re afraid of is just that I’ll get dehorned?”

“Not you, Billy—Sadagoyase. Once gambling comes in, you’ve got to think of what else happens. New York State will want a vested financial interest the way they did with the Oneidas, and they’ll have to police the gambling and everything around it.”

“That boat sailed in 1821,” said Sadagoyase. “The State of New York versus Tommy Jimmy.”

He needed only to allude to the case because it was one of the legal precedents that had established the boundaries of the modern Seneca world. A witch named Koquatau had murdered a man at Buffalo Creek, and Tommy Jimmy had been appointed by the council to act as her executioner. He had followed her into Canada and, as soon as he had her back on Seneca land, had cut her throat. He had been defended at his trial by Red Jacket, one of the greatest orators of his time, and acquitted on the grounds that he was following Seneca law. After that, the state had asserted its jurisdiction.

“Same principle, different consequences,” said Jane. “There’s a big difference between having the cops investigate a crime every ten years and having dozens of them move in with you to protect the financial interests of the legislature and its cronies.”

“What cronies?”

“Building hotels and casinos can’t be done without money from outside. That means some big corporation with investors and boards of directors is going to have more to say about what goes on here than we are. It may have occurred to you that Senecas haven’t had a lot of luck trusting either the state of New York or corporations in the past. This state has a perfect record. It has never, even in the most minimal way, lived up to any agreement that it has ever made. It has never even felt itself constrained by federal laws.”

Jane could feel that she had talked herself into an agitated heat. She paused, let the passion cool for a moment, and said, “I guess I’m working up to what I wanted to say. I read in the paper that there are already offers from gambling companies on the table. One of them is an outfit called Pleasure, Inc.”

“That’s right.”

“If the decision is that we’re not in the gambling business, forget I ever told you this. If there is gambling, make sure no agreement includes Pleasure, Inc.”

“Why not?”

“I met a man who used to work for them. They’re criminals in the usual ways: skimming money from the casino, feeding illegitimate cash into the games and redeeming the chips with checks and credits to launder it, investing secret profits in illegal enterprises. They’re capable of killing people when it suits them.”

“How in the world did you meet anybody who knew that?”

“It’s just one of those crazy things that happens if you travel a lot. You meet people you wouldn’t otherwise.”

“You should have paid the airline for an upgrade,” said Sadagoyase. “Why would he tell you and not the police?”

“He was afraid of them, and he wasn’t afraid of me. I just have that kind of face.”

“But—” he began.

“No more questions. I won’t answer them, and that will spoil this beautiful day. Use the information as you think best. If you think it will help in council, you can use my name. I can’t tell you his.” Jane stood up to leave.

“What will you do if gambling comes in?”

Jane gave a little shrug. “I’ll give myself an extra fifteen minutes to drive out here in the traffic, and another fifteen to find a place to park.”

“All Senecas would be entitled to a share of the profits. Would you take it?”

She shook her head. “No. That I couldn’t do.”

He watched as she bent down to kiss Violet, her long straight black hair swinging to touch his wife’s; she came to him and did the same. Then she turned and walked to her car. As she passed under the big hemlock and the sunlight fell in bright dapples on her head and shoulders, he felt himself losing perspective. He could not help feeling he had just received an official visit from his grandmother’s grandmother.