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?”