The Hidden Friendship

The first lesson was not the one my mother intended.

Abigail Bishop meant to teach me that the native girl was dangerous, that a Puritan child had no business in the forest with someone whose people God had not favored. She said these things plainly. She had virtues, my mother; plainness was among them.

I listened. I went back the next day.

She was eight years old, the same as I was, and she had already buried more than my mother would lose in her whole life. King Philip’s War had burned through the Naumkeag people only a few years before we met; what remained of her nation was signing papers, ceding land, becoming invisible by degrees. She lived at the edges of things, where the town could not quite see her, where the forest was still hers. I found her there because I had wandered too far, as I always did. We looked at each other across a rotting log and decided without speaking that this was sufficient.

She taught me things no Puritan schoolroom would have offered. Which bird’s silence meant a hawk was near, and which meant nothing. How to read a deer track from the mud and know how old it was, whether the animal was moving in haste or at ease. How still you had to be before the forest forgot you were there and went back to its business.

I taught her nothing. Or nothing she did not already know. I think that was what I loved best about her: she made no demands that I bring something to the arrangement. She only asked that I keep coming back.

When my mother learned we were still meeting, she did not forbid it. She was cleverer than that. She told me to keep it hidden.

I do not believe she understood what she was teaching me. She meant to protect our name. Our standing. The thin margin of Puritan respectability that kept Abigail Bishop and her daughter from the wrong kind of attention.

What she taught me instead was this: the thing you are made to hide is the thing most worth having.

I have been hiding things ever since. I have become very good at it.

If you have sat across from me in three centuries of dealings and believed you understood what I was showing you and what I was not, I would suggest, kindly, that you think again.

Sings-in-Woods taught me to move through the forest without a sound. Abigail Bishop taught me to move through a room without revealing anything that mattered. Between the two of them I received an education without peer.

She is the reason I know what is worth hiding. She has been the reason for most of the things that have mattered, right up through last Tuesday.