'You know a lot of normal people, Cliff? You have a lot of them come by to rent a car?'
'Well, no, but—'
'I’m just tired. I’ll try to screw you out of some money next time. Thanks for handling things.'
'Sure, Janie.'
The next morning when she went out to get her mail, the man from the alarm company pulled into the driveway. It took him twenty minutes to fix the window, and then Jane said, 'Can you wire the vent in the peak under the roof for me too?' She said it with a sad look in her eyes, so he didn’t argue. 'We’ll just put it on your next bill,' he said, and hurried to get his ladder off the roof of his truck.
For the next three days, she went out only at night and in the early morning to run on the long grassy strip along the river. She was too agitated and impatient to read, so she cleaned her house, then invented chores that would make it cleaner, and kept moving all of her furniture into new relationships. When she had finally settled on an arrangement that placed all of the furniture along the walls so that her living room was a vast open space, she did stretching exercises and Tai Chi in the middle of it. In the evening of the fourth day, she acknowledged that it was time to go out and face Jake.
He had been spending all of his time watching. He had painted the whole side of his house that faced hers, planted geraniums, mowed his lawn, and dug out every nascent dandelion. Finally, in desperation, he had altered the habits of his long lifetime and taken to reading his newspapers and magazines in his yard.
Jane walked across her back yard and into his and sat down on the grass beside his lawn chair. After a minute he said, 'Am I imagining it or are people getting dumber?'
'I don’t know.'
'Hardly a day goes by when I don’t read about somebody doing himself some real harm when if he’d just called up and asked me, I could have told him what to do.'
'Who is it this time?'
'Take your pick. Today it’s Washington, but there’s never a shortage of the mentally needy. I ought to hang out a shingle.'
'You’ve done everything else.'
'What?'
'You’ve painted that wall on my side maybe three times.'
'It’s the weather side. Takes special care.'
'Jake, I’ve decided we’d better talk some more before you fall off a ladder peering in my window and hurt yourself.'
'Very thoughtful,' he said.
She chose her words carefully. 'Those four men weren’t looking for me. They were looking for a friend of mine. He was the guy you saw knocking on my door. I helped him to go away.'
'I’m not supposed to ask questions, I take it?'
'I’m telling you the things you have a right to know,' she said. 'He’s safe because they can’t find him. We’re safe because they’ll know he’s not coming back here.' She stood up and smiled. ’’The end.'
He nodded, his lips pursed in thought. 'Why did you change your mind about telling me?'
'A lot of reasons. One is that I don’t want you to decide one day to have a talk with your friend Chief Dormont; you can’t be expected to keep a secret unless you know it’s a secret. Another is that if he or someone like him comes to my door some night, I don’t want you to think I’m in danger and haul out the old twelve-gauge and blow his head off.'
'You’ve done this before, haven’t you?'
She didn’t answer.
'You said ’someone like him.’ That’s it, isn’t it?' he said. 'The secret isn’t him, it’s you.'
'Telling would hurt me,' she agreed. 'It would hurt me a lot.' She stared into his eyes for a moment, until she had seen whatever she was looking for, and then she released him. 'I’ve got some shopping to do. You need anything?'
'No,' he said. 'No thanks.' He watched her go. The long brown legs and the strong, erect back made her seem taller than she was, but not tall enough for this.
Jake set the newspaper on his lap and stared off at the big trees along Franklin Street. The little girl next door hadn’t grown up to do something as normal as having a little outlaw sex. She was—well, hell—she was Jigonsasee. How could she think he wouldn’t know? Did she expect him to live for sixty years in a town called Deganawida and never bother to find out why they had chosen a name nobody could even spell? They used to teach it to kids in the grammar schools, although God knew what the hell they were teaching them now.
Maybe she was crazy. White people went crazy and thought they were Jesus Christ or Napoleon, but those two would strike an Indian woman as having no more to do with her than a couple of Australian marsupials. Besides, whatever sex was really about, one of the things it did was determine the way people thought about themselves. He had never heard of an adult woman who identified with a man.
Jigonsasee would make sense to her, he thought. Sometime in the distant past, a woman lives in a bark lodge all by herself on the trail that runs east and west below Lake Ontario a few miles from here. She feeds the warriors who pass by on their way to murder each other. One day, off the lake comes a canoe with a lone Huron in it who has paddled all the way across from the Canadian side. He’s a fugitive, a man in exile from his tribe up there. He’s been skirting the land, looking for the smoke of somebody’s fire so he can bring them his message. The message doesn’t seem like much, since all it really amounts to is that peace is better than war. His name is Deganawida.
The first fire he sees belongs to the woman. She takes in the wandering stranger and feeds him, and she is the one to whom he tells his message. And he calls her Jigonsasee, which means 'New Face.' So the solitary woman and the tribeless man meet up with a warrior driven crazy by the murders of his two daughters. His name is Hiawatha, and he has become a wanderer too and a cannibal, and together they convince all five tribes to stop slaughtering each other. The crazy cannibal combs the snakes out of the hair of the worst of the warlords. The visionary outcast foreigner tells the tribes in detail how to bind themselves together into one alliance and how to run it. And the Iroquois confederacy never changes at all after that. What Deganawida said to do is followed precisely by each generation.
Maybe three or four hundred years pass, and the two smartest men of another generation, another race— Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson—get stuck with the assignment of putting together a structure for a new society. Only all they have in the world to imitate is a lot of theoretical treatises written by dead Frenchmen and one working model of a confederacy of states called the Iroquois. By then the solitary woman and the visionary exile and the cannibal madman who invented the league are so long gone that nobody even knows the century when they did it. But the Iroquois, who are very much alive, have passed down exactly what these three said and what they did.
The one who would matter to Jane was Jigonsasee, a woman part Betsy Ross and part Joan of Arc, but mostly Mary Magdalene, still called the Mother of Nations and the Great Peace Woman, because she was the one who decided it was better to save two fugitives than to keep endlessly feeding the warriors who came along the trail on the way to butcher people just like themselves.
Jake sat in the lawn chair with the sunset bathing his face and warming his joints and the distant, tall trees waving slowly in the May breeze, all bright green with their new leaves. Jane’s secret was not the saddest thing he had ever heard. He was an old man now, and he had been to war and watched the wife he had loved and prized close her eyes and die. But it was sad enough. He admired heroes as much as anybody did, but he had no desire to see anybody he cared about taking risks just to be more like some dead person.
A girl like Jane, who was as quick and full of life as the squirrels in those trees, with so much promise—it seemed like such a waste. Saying it that way made him admit that what could promise be except an expectation that she was made to do something special, even risky? If you wasted something that was good enough, it wasn’t called waste, it was sacrifice.
And Jane Whitefield didn’t seem crazy, not even a little bit. Probably, she didn’t even know that she was trying to live the life of a thousand-year-old Indian woman, any more than his own daughter thought that when she was teaching high school she was Socrates. It was just that when she wanted to do a good job, this was the first way that occurred to her, an impulse she thought was instinctive because it had been emulated over so many generations that it didn’t even take conscious thought.
