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return for dressed robes and, as for the effects of the liquor, I shall say
nowt about it except it sends 'em mad, but, as for the guns, they soon learned
to use them.
The harvest coming on, they gathered up their corn, a very poor, small
sort of corn, to my way of thinking, the heads just that much bigger than my
thumb, and we dug holes in the ground six or seven feet deep and what of the
corn we did not eat we dried and stored away under the earth. But the digging
was a great labour for they have no shovels or spades except what they steal
from the English so we made shift with sticks or the shoulder-bones of deer.
And if I have one quarrel with my tribe, it is that the men will have nothing
to do with this agriculture, although it is heavy work, but go fishing in the
creek or chase deer or engage in dances and such silly performances as they
say will make the corn grow.
But my mother said: "There is no harm in it and it keeps the men out of
the way."
By the time the weather turned, I was rattling away in the Indian
language as if I'd been born to it, though not a word of Hebrew did it contain
so I think my old Lancashire lady was mistaken that they are the Lost Tribe of
Israel and, as to converting them to the true religion, I was so busy with one
thing and another that it never entered my head. As for my pale face, by the
end of the harvest it was brown as any of theirs and my mother stained my
light hair for me with some darkish dye so they grew accustomed to my presence
among them and at six months end you would have thought she whom I called my
"mother" was my own natural mother and I was Indian born and bred, except my
blue eyes remained a marvel.
But for all the bonds of affection between us, I might still have
thought of journeying on to Florida as the weather grew colder, such is the
power of custom and habit, had I not cast my eye on a brave of that tribe who
had no woman for himself and he cast his eye on me but never a word he says,
it seems all along he intends to do the right thing by me, so it was my mother
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said to me at last: "That Tall Hickory you know of would like you for his
wife." Tall Hickory being what his name signified in English, and as common a
kind of name amongst 'em as James or Matthew might be in Lancashire.
And now it comes to it, I wept, for he was a fine man.
"How can I be that good man's wife, mother, for I was a bad woman in my
own country."
"A bad woman?" she says. "What's this?"
So I told her what I did to earn my living on Cheapside; and how I was a
thief by natural vocation. As for my whoring, she was very much surprised to
hear that English men would trouble to pay for such a thing as I had to sell,
for the Indians exchange it free or not at all, and, as for my virginity being
gone, she laughs and says: "If you were not good, nobody would have had you."
But she grieves over my thievery until at last she says to me: "Well, child,
would you steal away a bowl or wampun belt or robe from out of my hut and keep
it yourself and deny it to me?"
"How could I do that, mother," says I. "If I should need anything, I may
use it and give it to you again as you do with our needles and the tinder-box
and the knife. And so it is with such-a-one and such-a-one --" naming our
neighbours. "And to tell the truth, there is nowt in all the village excites
my old passion of avarice, while as for my dinner, if I need it, I may have a
share in any cooking pot in the Indian country, for that is the custom. So
neither desire nor want can make a thief of me, here."
"Then you are a good woman in spite of yourself among the Indians and so
I think you will remain," she says. "Why not marry the young fellow?"
Now, certain men of the village, such as the general, and the priest, as
I might call him, seeing he dealt with religion, had not one wife but three or
four to till their fields for them and I did not like that. I would be the
only one in my husband's lodge, a fancy of the old life that I could not lose.
And she puzzles over that, although she herself was never any man's wife,
having, so she tells me with a wink, not much liking for the sex and much
fondness for her own.
"As for ourselves, we are too seemly and decent a folk for the matter of
matrimony to come between a woman and her friends!" she says. "The more wives
a man has, the better company for them, the more knees to dandle the children
on and the more corn they can plant so the better they all live together."
But still I said, I would be his only wife or never marry him.
"Listen, my dear," she said. "Do you not love me?"
"Indeed I do," I says, "with all my heart."
"Then if your sweetheart should offer to marry us both, would you love
me the less for it?"
But I ducked my head and forbore to answer that, for fear she should ask
my beau to take her, too, along with me, since I was so struck with him I
could not think that any woman, however set in her ways, would not have him if
she got half the chance. Then she gives me a clout on the buttocks and cries
out: "Now, child, see what a wretched thing this jealousy is, that it can set
a daughter against her own mother!"
But she relents to see me cry for shame and says, she is too old and
stubborn to think of marriage and, besides, my young man is so taken with me
that he will marry me on my own terms in the English fashion. For they are
taught to love their wives and let them have their way no matter how many of
them they marry and, if I wanted the toil of tilling a patch of corn with nowt
but my own two hands, then he would not interfere with that.
We were married about the time they were planting the corn, which they
celebrate with a good deal of singing and dancing although it is we squaws who
break our backs setting the seed. The season of the anniversary of my arrival
in the town passed, winter comes again and by the spring I was well on the way
to bringing him a little brave. It was marvellous to see the tenderness of my
husband's bearing towards me when the sun grew hot and made me sweat, weary,
heavy, peevish, so that I often swore I wished meself in England again; but he
bore with all. Now, at this time, the general of our village held counsel how
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