Portrait of a Lady 2

I was driving from Moira to Bombay, way way upstate. The sun shone, one of the first warm days of the spring. I passed a herd of bison munching on a dirty bale of hay that had been left for them in a sloping field.

Around the bend, and there over to the left stood a man at a horse-drawn plow. Two boys, his young sons, presumably, scrabbled away at the clods of muck obstructing the forward movement of the plow. The muddy hay of winter lay strewn across their expanse of land, which was unplowed and unplanted. They worked hard in the sunshine. The man wore a straw hat, an immaculate white shirt obscured by a black vest and jacket, and suspenders that held up his stovepipe black trousers. On his feet, leather boots. His boys wore exactly the same thing.

At last a T-junction and I turned west, on the road to the bridge to Canada. This was the Akewsasne Reservation, the heart of Mohawk country. Their Iroquois meeting house, always reliable for militancy, stood by the roadside festooned with a large billboard that read: “Yes, terrorists pass through Akwesasne! They’re called NY State Police, the FBI, US Border Control, ATF agents.”

I drove past a large casino, an IGA complex, a warehouse under construction. On the shoulder of the road in front of the last sat a buggy, with a trestle table set out. The frail black buggy looked like a toy that had somehow been multiplied in size by some 3-d printer. Between it and the table, petticoats flapped in the breeze on a clothesline. A sign read: “Baked Goods For Sale.” A horse was hitched to a post nearby. No more than twenty feet away, at the half-completed warehouse, a couple of young Mohawk men squatted on their haunches, cigarette smoke curling around the yellow hard hats. They appeared to be watching the horse, the buggy, the clothesline and the sale table.

Fifty feet further on, I turned into the parking lot of the Bear’s Den Trading Post, my last stop in the USA, where I habitually get a tankful of cheap gas and a big bag of discount Swedish fish. The post was its usual human kaleidoscope: impossibly huge upstate New Yorkers eating piles of fried things in the diner, ZZ-Top truck drivers with hair stringy and wet from using the showers in the back, French-Canadian families gripping their cartons of tax-free cigarettes while exclaiming loudly about jewelry in the Iroquois fashion store, and the usual bustle of bathroom-bound children.

Before the cooler, there she was. A tall, graceful young woman. On her head was a stiff brown bonnet hiding all of her hair and sloping bell-like down to her chin, where it was fastened by a shiny brown strip of fabric. Wrapped around her shoulders was a black woollen cape that fell down to just above her ankles. Beneath that a full-length navy-blue dress devoid of any grace notes, buttoned firmly up across her bosom and up to her neck, but still cinched at the waist, nonetheless. On her feet, handmade leather shoes, with rough coils of black-dyed cord running through a dozen or so eyelets.

Her arms hung down at her sides. At their end, holding her hands on either side, were two little girls dressed exactly the same way, down to the smallest detail. They must have been three years old, at the most.

The remarkable threesome looked at the sodas, designer water bottles and vitamin drinks, clearly nonplussed. The little girls had obviously never seen the likes of it before. Neither, perhaps, had the mother. The girls’ free hands timidly pointed out things, questioningly. The young woman spoke to them quietly, without reproach, in medieval German.

They moved on to the candy bar, tortilla chip and breath mint display. They stood before it, indecisive. The subdued German continued. From their vantage point in the Iroquois fashion store, the French-Canadian families could now see the woman and her daughters. The twang of their conversation dulled, quieted, fell to a whisper.

At last a decision was made. I got behind the Amish trio in the line to the cash register, my Swedish fish in hand. When it was their turn, the young woman pulled out from the fastnesses of her cape an enormous wad of dollar bills. She stripped a couple of singles off and wordlessly placed them on the counter. A gum-snapping Mohawk girl took them up and gave her back the change.

After paying, I went out to the parking lot. I could see the three walking back along the shoulder of the roadway. The girls still held their mother’s hands, but in their free hands were clutched yellow plastic wrappers, long and lurid. They both held a beef-jerky.

They reached the buggy. The two braves stood up and went back inside the warehouse to work.