Thrust: A Novel

Repeating things helped make order. To make a good trade, a carrier needs not to care about transgressing time. A carrier needs to slip her way into the barter. Sometimes you had to use objects and signs differently from the way other people did.

Penny.

Cord.

Apple.

Rope.

Laisvė pulled the umbilical cord out from her shirt, its purpled winding shape wet with river water. She smelled it, touched it with her tongue, then tucked it back beneath her shirt, next to her skin.

Thanks to the turtle’s mapping advice, she had traveled from one bay through ocean through another bay, finally to a river called the Patawomeck, an Algonquian name. The name the fish in the river used on her journey. The Natives in the Chesapeake region included the Piscataway, the Mattaponi, the Nanticoke, and the Pamunkey — the people of Powhatan. In 1613, the English colonists had abducted Powhatan’s daughter, Pocahontas, who was living with her husband, Kocoum, in a Patawomeck village. Now, on the edge of the river where Laisvė had climbed onto the shore, a tourist plaque stared back at her, confronting her with the story.

Laisvė closed her eyes and took her mind back to the volumes of history she’d read in The Brook, still likely stacked against the wall of her father’s apartment. (In her chest, an ache hole around the word father. But it wasn’t time to go get her father, not yet. He had not reached the surface.) Laisvė remembered the drawings of Indians accompanying the stories in history books. Those books were filled with lies about people and objects and animals and land. Stories they called history that were really stories of conquest. Of seizing and holding something too tightly, of ending something not yours.

Somewhere amidst the loose fabric of the lie that Pocahontas saved the English captain’s life after his capture by Opechancanough, behind the romantic notion that she often brought provisions to save the colonists from starvation, beneath the myth that she continued to serve as a sort of English emissary ever after — underneath all this, a different story seethed. The story of the baby born as Amonute, who also went by the private name Matoaka before she was abducted by English colonists and accepted Christianity as a means of survival. The possibility of any other story in the world. A hundred other possible stories of a girl. What was her suffering? Her bravery? Her desires? Her delights? Who among us can go back to recover the story of girls made into false fictions?

The umbilical cord underneath Laisvė’s shirt seemed to wriggle a bit.

She reopened her eyes and read the plaque confronting her.

INDIANS POISONED AT PEACE MEETING

According to the plaque, in May 1623, another English captain had led his soldiers from Jamestown to meet with the Indian leaders here in Pamunkey territory. The Indians were returning English prisoners taken the previous year during war leader Opechancanough’s orchestrated attacks on encroaching English settlements along the rivers that joined here. At the meeting, the English called for a toast to seal the agreement, gave the Indians poisoned wine, and then fired upon them, injuring as many as one hundred and fifty, including Opechancanough and the chief of the Kiskiack. The English had hoped to assassinate Opechancanough, who was erroneously reported as having been slain during the incident. (They would not succeed at this until 1646.)

Laisvė spit on the tourist plaque; she wasn’t quite sure why, except that it was a static marker of story, which made her angry. The river made her the opposite of angry. “Thank you, river, for bringing me here,” she whispered to the water. “Thank you, trees, for witnessing the stupidity of humans.” Unlike people, rivers and trees and animals did not misunderstand her.

There were exactly three people in Laisvė’s life who could almost understand her way of being in the world: Joseph, whom she’d met in her close future when he was younger and she was older than now, as well as in her present when she was younger and he was the older one. Aurora, whom she’d met in the deep past, and who had said, Well, there’s nothing about your story that’s harder to believe than some idiotic old man living in the heavens spewing commandments and invading the bodies of women. And her mother, who had gone to water. None of the slippages in time or lives or ages made any difference to her. None of these people ever rejected her or doubted her; all understood that time moves, or they were people for whom life no longer had edges. They did not perceive living as more important than not living; they were not afraid to die.