It was already eight o’clock. Jane and Felker were sitting on the edge of the dock, swinging their feet above the water. Felker had been silent for a long time. Jane watched him out of the corner of her eye. It was times like these, when he was stuck waiting and had time to think, that would wear him down. She knew she should do something to keep him from spiraling downward. 'Tell me what you’re thinking.'
He smiled, but he kept his eyes on the water out beyond the harbor. 'I was thinking about you.'
She looked away from him. She had made another mistake. He was at the point now where he realized that he didn’t know anybody anymore. Except the nearest woman.
'I was thinking I should apologize,' he said. 'I mean, it doesn’t matter to me whether you’re a full-blooded Indian or one ninetieth, does it? I guess I should say Native American.'
It wasn’t what she had been dreading, and she was relieved. 'Not to me,' she said. 'I’m as Indian as I can be.'
'Then where did the blue eyes come from?'
'My father looked pretty much the way you would have wanted him to. He had a face like a tomahawk and skin the color of a penny. He was a Heron.'
'A what?'
'A Heron. The bird, you know? Big long legs? That was his clan.'
'Oh,' he said. 'So why are you a Wolf—a blue-eyed Wolf?'
'Blue-eyed because my mother didn’t start out as a Seneca. She looked like a negative of one. Very blond and white and Irish.' She smiled as she remembered. 'When I was really little they started making Barbie dolls, and the first time I saw one I thought it was supposed to be my mother. I called them Mama dolls. There weren’t a lot of people in Deganawida who looked like that.'
'Or anywhere else. If your mother was a Barbie and your father was a Heron, why aren’t you a Heron?'
'It wouldn’t make sense to you.'
'We don’t have much to talk about except my troubles, and those make me nervous.'
'Okay,' she said. 'The first thing you have to know is that all family relationships go only through the mother. Your father is still your father, but he’s not a relative. The kids live at the mother’s house and belong to her clan— her family.'
'That’s simple enough.'
'It is, really. Only it carries through to all relatives. Your father’s brothers, sisters, sister’s kids are in his clan, so they’re not related to you. You with me?'
'I think so. If I could work it out on paper.'
'Okay. Then there’s marriage. The nation is divided into two halves.'
’’That much I know. Men and women.'
'Not those two. Half the clans are on one side, and half on the other. Anthropologists call them moieties. You can only marry somebody who is in the other half. My father was a Heron, so he couldn’t marry a Deer, Snipe, Hawk, or another Heron. She had to be a Turtle, Wolf, Bear, or Beaver.'
'Hey, I just realized where you’re going,' he said. 'If your mother was a Barbie and you can’t be related to your father, it kind of leaves you out in the cold, right? You aren’t related to anybody.'
'Very good,' she said. 'Except that in the old days they ran into this problem early on. See, all of the Iroquois tribes were always at war.'
'Always?'
She shrugged. 'As far as we know. The first ones to see them who could write were the French, in the 1530s. There was a war with the Algonquins that had been going on for as long as anybody alive remembered. The next time there was peace was 1783, when the Revolutionary War ended.'
'Two hundred and fifty years ...' He seemed to be thinking about it, but then he frowned. 'But how did that get you to be a blue-eyed Wolf?'
'If you fight all the time, two things happen. You lose a lot of people, and you take a lot of prisoners. They used the prisoners to make up for the casualties. There had to be a provision for that—adoption.'
She watched him for a moment to see whether he understood. Incredible acts of savagery made necessary equal acts of mercy. Hawenneyu the Creator and Hanegoategeh the Evil-Minded were twin brothers.
'So you were adopted.'
'No. My mother was. My father took her to visit his reservation on Tonawanda Creek—probably to show her what she was getting into. She hit it off with a couple of the ladies in the Wolf clan, and they got together before the wedding and did some lobbying with the old women, who made it official in open council.' Saying this brought her mother back. Mentioning her like that, casually to a stranger, was like lying, because it didn’t say who she had been.
Jane could see her now—not dying of cancer, but the way she was when Jane was a child. Probably, the picture came from the sixties. She was so tall and thin, with all that blond hair, breezing into every unfamiliar situation as though she had arranged it herself, not brash, exactly, but determined. And not fearless, but showing no fear, or even any awareness that anyone could be less than delighted at that moment: Who could imagine anything more fascinating than taking her only night off to go to Jane’s school and meet all of Jane’s teachers? If someone spoke, she would turn it into a conversation; if someone smiled, she would hug; if someone hugged, she would kiss. The Wolf women would have been overwhelmed and hypnotized at the same time. It was only after Jane was older that she realized her mother had invented herself. 'If your mother is a Wolf, you’re a Wolf. Remember?'
'So you’re fifty percent Seneca, and fifty percent adopted Seneca.'
'No. I’m just Seneca., There’s no such thing as half.' She turned to stare past him along the dock toward the shore. Felker looked, too, and saw a battered pickup truck towing a trailer pull into the parking lot. Two men got out. They had dark skin, black hair, and Oriental eyes. The older one was dressed like a farmer, in overalls and a John Deere hat, but the younger one had an earring and a T-shirt that said OTTAWA ROUGHRIDERS.
'There’s our ride,' said Jane.
'More Seneca?'
'Mohawk.' She stood up and walked down the dock, threw her arms around the younger man and hugged him, then planted a respectful kiss on the cheek of the older man. His eyes seemed to glitter with affection, but he pretended not to see Felker, who was just behind her.
Jane turned and pulled Felker a little closer and said, 'This is John Felker.' Felker stiffened a little at the mention of his name, but she went on. 'This is Wendell Hill, and this is his son, Carlton.' The men dutifully shook hands. Jane said, 'Uncle Wendell, the boat’s over here.'
'Let’s take a look,' said the older man. He walked out along the dock and glanced at it, then announced, 'We can do it.'
Carlton jumped into the truck and backed the trailer into the water, while Wendell lowered himself into the boat and rowed it onto the first rollers of the trailer. Carlton handed him a rope and he snapped it onto the bow ring. Then he kept walking onto the narrow tongue of the trailer and up to the bed of the truck and cranked the boat up with a winch. No words were spoken. Wendell stepped up into the cab with Carlton, and Jane and Felker climbed into the flatbed.
'So you’re part Mohawk, too?'
'Just Seneca,' she said. 'I told you before, you can’t be two things.'
'But you called him your uncle. He’s your father’s brother, right?'
'No,' she said. 'My mother.'
'But your mother—'
'—was a member of the Wolf clan. Wendell is a member of the Wolf clan. Everybody in the same clan is a relative. It doesn’t matter if you’re Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, or Tuscarora.'
'So your father would be related to a Mohawk in the Heron clan.'
'Theoretically, except there is no Mohawk Heron clan. They just have Turtle, Wolf, and Bear.'
'And Carlton is your cousin.'
'Please don’t make me go through all this again,' she said. 'I’m tired.'
'Come on.'
'Carlton’s mother is a Turtle, so he’s a Turtle, and I’m not related to him at all. We’re just friends. Give up. You’re never going to get it.'
