Chapter 1 #2
In one particularly awful experience she was injured and left barely able to breathe.
She was hospitalized for weeks. After Jane left the hospital, she spent months in mandatory rest and recovery in the McKinnon house.
While summer ended, and the western New York fall turned the leaves fiery bright and the sky dark, and then winter winds battered the trees and left them bare as skeletons and froze the world solid, she was getting her health and strength back.
But something else had happened. Jane had become pregnant.
The doctors were no more able to explain why it had happened now than why it hadn’t before.
For most of her pregnancy she still ran as she had since she’d learned to walk, still did tai chi, lifted weights, punched the heavy bag.
In time, the runs became walks and swims. The martial arts became yoga, and she thrived.
That was true until this morning, when she decided to make a trip to the big-box store.
The ambulance was moving fast, and the siren was blaring.
Every bump on the pavement seemed to be jarring her spine, and she was beginning to feel contractions.
During her lifetime, Jane had learned to know pain.
She had trained herself to study it and locate what was hurting and make herself tolerate it.
As the ambulance zigzagged through the stopped cars, she began to understand this was going to be different.
The contractions did not stop for long spaces of time and reappear.
They were much more frequent than she had expected, and each one was stronger than the last. She worried about what that meant. Was she losing the baby?
She realized there was no way they were taking her to Buffalo General, the hospital where Carey worked. What was the closest to here? Probably Kenmore Mercy on Delaware, or even DeGraff Memorial in North Tonawanda. She could call him and let him know where to go.
In another couple of contractions, she could feel the ambulance making a right turn, slowing to bump-bump over a big obstruction and then swing to the left and back up.
Strong hands pulled her gurney out of its berth, through the door of the ambulance so she was staring up at the sky, past doors that were automatically huffing open, and into the hospital.
The pain grew. It was everything other women had said it was.
It made sweat appear on her forehead and made her feel as if she was being torn apart.
People walking beside the gurney were fiddling with her, pulling back her sheets and talking to each other.
“Take her right to Maternity. Room 5 is open.”
This time there was no fighting back, nothing to do but accept what was happening and hope it would end with the baby she had loved unseen for months.
She had taught herself not to cry out when she was hurt, because when it had happened before, letting the pain out with her voice would have been speaking to an enemy, like shouting to him, “Here I am, too weak to save myself. Come finish me.” This time there was no fighting back, nothing to do but accept what was happening.
She heard a female voice say the word “Epidural?” but another replied “Not enough time.”
The pain grew more intense and she strained to help the baby out, felt the release, and heard nurses murmuring and oohing to reassure her, and then the loud, screaming cries as the baby reached the world.
“Nya:weh-sgeh,” she said in Nundawaono, the ancient language: “Welcome.” “I’ve been waiting for you for so long.”
Jane Whitefield had been born and raised in a home that people called traditionalist, meaning that in these families, children were taught the stories Senecas had been telling each other forever, their ways of looking at the world, in the language they had always spoken.
Their religion was the old one, last modified by the visionary Handsome Lake during the years following his prophetic dreams in 1799, and still repeated in each of the Seneca reservations in New York and Ontario on a rotating basis.
If asked, as a modern woman she would have said she believed only in science, but advocated preserving the rich culture she’d inherited.
At other times, maybe in one of the hard, dark, terrifying places where she’d been, she might have given a different answer.
Jane’s family followed the custom of giving a baby an English name and a Seneca name, often called the “real name.” For the English name, people tended to avoid the names of Christian saints.
Jesuits had introduced Christianity to some of the northeastern nations in the 1600s, but they’d only lasted a short time with the Senecas before the Senecas killed them.
Jane and Carey had talked about the English name, and decided on May Dawn McKinnon.
The Seneca name was always, ideally, the reuse of a name that belonged to the mother’s clan, a name that had been passed down from someone who had died. The names belonged to the clan, so Jane could not simply take one. The proper way was to wait for her clan leaders to decide.
On the third day after May was home, Jane heard a knock on the front door.
She went to the bedroom window to see who was at the door.
She looked down at Ellen Dickerson, clan mother of the Agata:yonih, the Wolf clan.
Jane’s father had been Snipe clan, and when he had brought the blond, blue-eyed woman he had met in New York City back to his world and let it be known that they wanted to marry, the women of the Wolf clan, part of the opposite moiety of the nation, had adopted her, the traditional way to do things.
When Jane was born, she was a member of her mother’s clan.
From her upper window, Jane saw other people who were members of her clan, male and female, a dozen of them—not counting Ellen’s husband, Ray Dickerson—Wallace Golden, the chief who represented the clan and attended the Haudenosaunee Six Nation events, and Jane’s friends the Caines, and Jimmy Sanders and his mother Mattie.
Jane made her way downstairs carrying May and opened the door.
The singing began before Ellen took her first step inside.
It was a song that the people had sung on occasions like this for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, to welcome a new baby.
It was impossible not to hear and feel the joy, and not to see the assembled people as at once themselves and their most distant ancestors.
Jane kept herself from crying when the time came to bestow May with her real name, the one the Creator would know her by.
It was Dayeno onyo: k, which meant “people will be thankful.” To Jane that sounded like an auspicious name, and she was thankful.