After breakfast the men would string their bows, oil their bodies, tie back their hair, paint their faces, and go out to hunt together. John watched the laughing camaraderie of the huntsmen with the knowledge that he would always be an outsider. The men did not speak to him, he did not know if they even understood English. The women understood everything he said, but their replies were brief. Inevitably, John was learning the rhythm of Powhatan speech, picking up individual words and names. He watched the men, understanding that they were planning the hunt. Suckahanna’s husband was among them, in the very heart of the preparations. He was acknowledged as a fine hunter, a man who could kill a deer alone, without the help of a hunting party. Other braves could drop a deer with a well-placed arrow when it had been driven from one cover to another and directed toward them; but Suckahanna’s husband could throw a deerskin over his shoulder, strap the horns to his head and move so skillfully and so deerlike with his tittupping step and his nervous, flickering head-tossing, with his sudden staglike stillness, that he could go among a herd of deer and pick one off as it grazed beside him. A man had to be blessed by the deer god to manage such a feat. Suckahanna’s husband was treated with loving respect and he alone decided the course of every hunt. Even his name showed his nature. He was called Attone – the arrow.
As the men readied themselves to leave the village, the women gathered children and their gardening tools and went to the fields to plant and to weed. While John was weak from his illness and under Suckahanna’s special protection he went with her, and watched them planting. Their crop was set in a field which had been roughly cleared by burning. They left the tree stumps, left even the biggest living trees and planted around them. The edge of the field was ragged, where the fire had not taken hold. Its disorder offended John’s sense of how a tidy field should be set square on the landscape, its lines drawn clearly, hedged and ditched.
“You could get the men to help you clear the tree stumps,” he suggested to Suckahanna. “It wouldn’t take long to uproot them and pull them out. Then you could plant your crops in straight rows. Those tree stumps you have left in will only grow back within a season, and then you’ll have all the work to do all over again.”
“We want the trees to grow back,” she said. “We don’t want this field for more than a season.”
“But if you cleared it properly then you could use it year after year,” John insisted. “You would not have to move on. You could have the same fields and keep the village in the same place.”
Decidedly, she shook her head. “The earth gets weary of working for us,” she said. “We plant a field here and then we set her free. We move on to another place. If you plant corn in the same field three years running, then in the third year you will harvest nothing. The earth gets weary of hungry men. She has to rest like a woman with a baby at the breast, needs to rest, needs some time alone. She cannot be always feeding.”
“White men plant the same fields, and go back to them year after year,” John observed.
“White men did,” she corrected him. “All around Jamestown now they are finding that the land is tiring of them. The land is weary of the hungry white mouth which eats and eats and eats and cannot be satisfied and will not move on.”
She moved to the next row with her hoeing stick. In each hole she dropped four grains of corn and two bean seeds. Behind her another woman came sowing pumpkin seeds. Later, beneath the crops, they would plant the quicker-growing amaracocks for their lush, thirst-quenching fruit.
John picked up a stick of his own and hunkered down beside her. “I’ll help,” he said.
She could not repress a giggle at the sight of him, and then she shook her head. “This is women’s work, only women do it.”
“I can do it. I’m a gardener in my own country. I can plant.”
Still Suckahanna refused. “I know that you can. And any Powhatan man can do it, if he has to. But women like to do it. It is what we do.”
“To serve the men?” John asked, thinking of the delicious idleness of the hunting men when they returned to camp and found their dinner waiting for them and their fields cleared and planted, their houses swept clean, the sweat lodge heated and ready for them.
She shot him a quick, scornful look from under her dark eyebrows. “Because the earth and the women are together,” she half-whispered. “That is where the power of the People belongs, not in the war councils or in the hunting parties. It is women who have the power to make things grow, to give birth. The rest – is pipesmoke.”
John felt his view, his comfortable view of the world, shift and rock. “Men have the power,” he said. “God made them in his image.”
She looked at him as if he might be joking. “You may believe that your god did that,” she said politely. “But we are the children of the Hare.”
“The Hare?”
She stopped her work and sat back on her heels. “I shall tell you as if you were my little child,” she said with a smile. “Listen. In the very beginning when there was nothing but darkness and the sound of the running water, the great Hare came out of the darkness and made both man and woman.”
John squatted down beside her in the damp earth, watched the smile move from her eyes to her lips, and the way her hair fell over her bare shoulders.
“They were hungry. Men and women are always hungry. So the Hare put them in a bag until he could feed them. He ran through the darkness with the bag held tight in his mouth and everywhere he ran there was land made, and water made, and the great deer to walk the land and drink the water and feed the new-made man and woman. And everywhere he went there were fierce mouths biting at him from out of the darkness, hungry meat-eating mouths that would snap at his heels and at the bag he was carrying. But everywhere he ran, the mouths were destroyed, and fled back into the darkness until it was safe for him to do what he wished.”
John waited.
Suckahanna smiled. “Then, and only then, he opened the bag and let out the man and the woman. The man ran to hunt the deer. The man has the great richness of the deer. This is what he wanted. But the woman-” she paused and gave him a sly sideways smile “ – the woman has everything else.”
A year ago John would have called it a heathen tale full of heresy and nonsense. But now he listened and nodded. “The women have everything else?”
“Everything but hunting and war.”
“So what am I to do?” he asked her.
Suckahanna looked momentarily surprised, as if he had moved the conversation onward in one great bound. “You will get well,” she said slowly. “And then you will decide.”
“Decide?”
“Where you want to live. What kind of man you want to be.”
John hesitated. “I thought I would get well and go back to my home – to my fields up the river.”
She shook her head. “You must know by now that you cannot live there,” she said gently. “You cannot live there alone. You must know by now that you cannot survive in this land alone. You would have died there, my love.” The endearment slipped out, she flushed and bit her lip as if she would have taken it back.
“I thought – I thought I might get a servant, or a slave. I thought-” He hesitated. “I have been thinking that you might come with me?”
“As a servant? As a slave?” Her look blazed at him.
“I meant I must have someone to work under me,” John corrected himself. “And I have been praying that you would come to me ever since I made landfall. I meant a servant, and you as well.”