The Red Heart by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom
“Of course she heard, and took back all corn. Everywhere all the kernels of corn flew like bug swarms away from the People, back to Mother Corn.” Good Face imagined that, and it was a clear and thrilling and dreadful picture in her mind.
Owl went on: “Winter came with snow as deep as trees are high, and the Lenapeh were hungry. But their food corn had flown away, and even their seed corn for next spring.
“The People suffered much because of what the unbelievers had said, and they were starting to die. But then came an old man from the south—perhaps Nanapush, the Creator’s helper, in one of his disguise shapes. He taught them to find oysters in the Great Water, so they had a little to eat.”
He had to pause and explain to Good Face what an oyster was, and what it was like. They did not sound very good to her, especially when he declared, with chuckles, that they looked like what comes up when you hawk to spit.
“Even people who like oysters,” he said, “soon get tired of oysters only. And so Nanapush, if that is who the old man really was, again took pity on them, and went through a hole in the ice in the middle of the water, to the world where Mother Corn lived. With him he took a Lenapeh boy who could sing beautifully and dance well, and he carried a big bag of oysters for them to eat on their journey. They caught some fish along the way. After a long time they came to Mother Corn’s house.
“Kahesana Xaskwim was not happy to see human beings, because they had said they did not believe in her. She looked old and brown and mean, not green and beautiful.” In her dreamy mind, lolling in the saddle, Good Face envisioned her that way, and it was sad.
Owl said, “Then Nanapush, if that’s who the old man really was, gave Mother Corn fish to eat—”
“Ah!” Good Face exclaimed, remembering. “Kahesana Xaskwim likes fish!”
“E heh. And Nanapush, if that is who the old man really was, made her a shiny pair of ear bobs from oyster shells and gave them to her. Then he had the boy sing and dance for her while she feasted on fish, saying that the singing and dancing proved that the human beings really did believe in her. Then the boy begged her to give corn kernels back to the People so they wouldn’t starve to death.”
Old Owl didn’t say anything else for so long that Good Face craned to look back at his crinkled old face and asked, “Did she?”
“What? Oh, e heh! Mother Corn wept with sympathy, and her tears were kernels of corn, which they collected in the bag. And as she wept corn seed she grew younger and more beautiful and greener. She was smiling then and she promised that if the Lenapeh would sing and dance and pray every spring, in just such ways, to prove they believed in her, she would never withhold the corn from them again.
“And so it has been ever since. We have to be thankful for what we receive, or we are not worthy of it and won’t get it.
“And like everyone,” Owl added, “Mother Corn looks old and brown and ugly when she won’t give, but young and beautiful when she does give, for she knows that giving is a joy.”
Good Face felt uplifted by that story for a while, but it made her think of things Neepah had been worried about, and she asked Owl after a time:
“But if soldiers come and keep the People from doing the singing and dancing for Green Corn, it wouldn’t be the People’s fault! It wouldn’t be fair if Mother Corn made the People starve if the People wanted to do the ceremony and the soldiers kept them from it! Surely, Kahesana Xaskwim would know whose fault it was, and not make the People suffer!” She looked back at him again, imploring, but he shook his head.
“You cannot blame armies or make other excuses. Always remember, excuses are nothing. You must do all you can to be worthy, whatever it costs you, even if that is your life. Never forget to honor the gifts and their givers. Kahesana Xaskwim knows not of ‘fairness,’ she cares only to be thanked.”
And so Good Face was left to ponder, as they rode up the river trails, whether Mother Corn was selfish.
She remembered coming up this river last year in falling snow, riding wrapped in a blanket on a saddle in front of a young warrior man whose tongue she had been unable to speak or understand. Now she was with an old man’s arms around her to keep her from falling, just as her own Quaker father and brothers used to take her riding, but she was going farther away from that family, still farther, and much had happened, and much had changed. Now she was going farther from her birth mother and brothers and sisters, but more than that she felt she was also going farther and farther from the town where she had lived with Neepah and Minnow and where she had been very happy.
Now and then she looked down at the river far below and thought about how one could get in the river and float all the way home. She knew how to swim. Probably Wareham was thinking of this too. But he couldn’t swim.
Poor Wareham. He didn’t know how to swim or speak the language. He didn’t get to ride on a horse and hear stories. He didn’t even have a name. Poor Wareham would probably want to jump in the river and float home, if he weren’t afraid of water. But he couldn’t.
She could. But she didn’t really want to. It wasn’t that she didn’t think about it. It was just that she was missing Neepah and Minnow more than she was missing that earlier and more distant family.
Although it was saddening to be riding farther day by day from every comfort and affection she had known, Good Face was not terrified or cold, as she had been on her other ride up the valley. Now she was warm, sometimes almost unbearably so, and now she could talk to the man who held her in his saddle, and be understood. Sometimes, however, after the first days of riding, Owl seemed to pretend not to understand her.
She already knew that old men could be that way. Her own wapsi grandfather had sometimes tired of child talk and acted as if he couldn’t understand. He once told her that he could not understand Blatherskite very well, and asked her to stop asking questions in Blatherskite. She could still remember that word. Blatherskite. “Grandpa,” she remembered scolding him then, “thee understands me perfectly well, for I’m talking English, not Blatherskite!” Instead of arguing, he snored, pretending he had fallen asleep.
Now, old Owl sometimes would not reply to her questions, just like her grandpa, and when she craned around in the saddle to look at him, his eyes were shut and his head tilted. Well, she thought, I do have a lot of questions perhaps.
Her grandpa, whom she had not thought of for so long, had been a solemn but teasing old man, and she remembered him vaguely and fondly now as she rode in a direction ever away from him.
And when she thought of her grandfather, of course she also thought of the rest of her family. She knew she had thought of them too little while she was in the Indian town. With Neepah nearby, always teaching and caring for her, and Minnow to play with, her mind and heart had simply been full of affection and wonder, almost like a spell of magic. But now in the monotony of the constant riding, with an old man who easily tired of talk, her memory and her heart often traveled back down the river, to an earlier life that had also been full of pleasure and affection. As she thought of her own family, she thought of herself again not just as Wehletawash, Good Face, but also as Frannie.
Slocum, she thought. Frances Slocum. Good Face Slocum. And she ran through her memory of the others in that family:
Mama. Papa. Grandpa. Giles. William, Ebenezer, Judith, Joseph, Ben, Mary, Isaac, and Baby Jonathan. She thought of them all and remembered their faces, as well as she could, and their voices. She thought of the way each of them had been with her, and remembered playing with the younger ones and being helped by the bigger ones. She remembered the warm jumble of children in the bed keeping each other warm on winter nights by snuggling, and remembered waking up chilled when both Joseph and Isaac had wet the mattress.
It was not that she had forgotten them. Even at Neepah’s wikwam, when so much was happening and she was always living in magic and learning, their faces and names had swum up in her memory.
But now that she was being carried even farther from them, they all se
They rode sometimes alongside the river, even crossing it at shallow places, to one side and then back, but often they were out of sight of the river altogether, going up steep mountainsides and along cliffs and ridges, through deep woods and swampy places where the air was thick with mosquitoes, past hunting camps and small villages without palisades. They rode past cornfields, and past fields that had been cornfields in earlier years, where dead stalks lay and the little planting mounds could still be seen. Good Face longed for Neepah whenever she saw women working in those fields, hoeing weeds while their children ran about and the babies in cradleboards hung on their mothers’ backs or from tree limbs close by. The women would stop work and stand up straight to watch the line of horses and people go by. Sometimes one or two would come running out of the fields to greet somebody they recognized in the procession, or to ask what news they had of soldiers.
Often the people came toward the horse she was riding on because, it seemed to her, everybody in this valley knew the old man. Sometimes the people spoke to him in languages other than Lenapeh, but he understood them. If the travelers were near towns at evening, they were asked to eat and stay. Sometimes councils would gather so that Owl could talk to the villagers. Often, people from those towns would pack up and join him. He did seem to be very important.
As they went between villages through uninhabited places where there was nothing but cliffs and trees and rushing creeks, she wondered sometimes if they might be lost. Owl just laughed at that question, and told her that nobody but wapsituk ever got lost; the red people knew all the paths and where they went.
Sometimes the old man would get down to walk and lead the horse while she rode by herself in the saddle; sometimes he would ride and let her walk and run. Eventually he gave her the reins and let her control the horse herself. He told her she was a good rider. She was delighted, especially when she saw Wareham Kingsley watching her with sullen envy as he trudged along on foot. The lehpawcheek had just made her feel as good as she ever had.
They went on through steamy heat and chilly rain. Their clothes were soaked, then dried upon their bodies. They stopped to bathe wherever the path was near a good bathing place in a creek or the river. The river was low, running slow.
In all her life until now, she had never slept without shelter. Always there had been a roof of bark or shakes overhead and walls around. The first nights outdoors were intimidating, with distant wolf howls, rustlings in the darkness outside the fireglow, and the night wind, faraway thunder and lightning, or the sheer silent intensity of the stars, and she slept fitfully or stayed awake in fright or awe. When she would fall into exhausted sleep, she sometimes dreamed of bears, and in her dreams they were the dangerous bears her Slocum family had held in dread, not the friendly bears that Neepah said were brothers to the People.
Every day they passed people going both ways on the paths. Some of them were families going to other villages down the river, but most were warriors, long files of painted young men, bald except for their scalp locks, trotting silently with their muskets or bows or lances at their sides, usually with bedding rolls tied over one shoulder, their lean torsos and sinewy legs gleaming with sweat and oil. They all ran looking straight ahead, not pausing to speak. Some groups of warriors included a few of the green-coat soldiers.
She noticed that when the warriors passed, the lehpawcheek would hold up a greeting hand to them. They might glance up, but they did not respond. She thought they did not seem as friendly as the people she had known in Neepah’s village, and said so to the old man.
He replied: “They have made themselves ready for war, and their hearts are on that other path. They will not look at the eyes of people who are not on that same path. When the fight is over and they go back to their villages, they will have another ceremony to purify themselves again and return to the good-heart path. I know about that. I was often on that path.”
That was how he explained it to her. She did not really understand, but thought of it every time more of them went by with their strange cold eyes.
“Are they going down where the Long Knife army is?”
“K’hehlah. Indeed yes. They go to meet that army.”
“I thought they were,” she said with a nod. What would happen when all these warriors met the army was beyond her power to imagine, and she thought of it in terms of the one thing she knew: that Neepah, who had been like a mother to her, had stayed at her town and expected to be there when the army came.
One day they crossed a river a little way above a place where two rivers met, and after riding on for a while they came around a bend and saw ahead of them an Indian town of many wikwams. Up the side of a hill above the town were the gray shapes of many dead trees, a swath of them among the live green trees of the forested slope. She had seen that at other towns and knew that the dead trees were the ones whose bark had been peeled off to cover the wikwams. Owl told her the town was called Tioga.
Soon she could smell the smoke of fires and the familiar scents of corn cooking in many ways. She was hungry, very hungry.
Now over the hoof steps of the horse she began to hear a sound like a heartbeat. It was a drum, she realized soon, a drum beating in the town.
And as the column moved around the bend, she saw something she had never seen at any of the other villages. “What are those white things?” she asked Owl.
He said they were the cloth lodges of the British soldiers. They stood in a double row, straight and high-peaked and conspicuous, outside the palisade. “This village,” he said, “is where English Soldier Butler camps.”
“Are those soldier drums?”
“Ha!” he laughed. She turned and looked up at him, and his old face was wrinkled with a smile. “Not soldier drums. It is the drum of Green Corn. Rattles too, hear? This is good!”
That gladdened her heart. She remembered that if the People thanked Mother Corn in that ceremony, there would continue to be corn for the People. The people in the column seemed to be gladdened too. They were talking cheerfully, and despite their weariness they were moving more quickly toward the town.
The drum continued as they rode into town, and there were few people among the houses. Between the huts she had glimpses of a large pole arbor, and it was toward that arbor that the travelers were hurrying. It had no roof, just long rafter poles joining at a peak in the center.
Suddenly two hideous creatures leaped into the path with such terrible quickness that Good Face screamed and the horse shied. The old man’s hard, skinny arms tightened so instantly to hold her and control the mount that her ribs hurt.
The creatures were covered with wild, shaggy, yellowish-brown hair. Their faces were round, scowling, little-eyed, bright red except for black foreheads and chins. They did not look like any living face she had ever seen on man or animal. These two ghastly beasts were bounding and cavorting toward her, and she wanted the old man to wheel the horse around and flee, but instead he was using his strength to make it stay still. People of the procession were squealing and scrambling to get out of the way of the monsters.
Voiceless after her first shriek of terror, she heard Owl command her in a quick, sharp voice:
“Kulesta!” Listen! “Give them this or they will smear you with mweh mweh!” She felt him press something small into her palm and she almost threw it because of the disgusting word he had just spoken, but his hand held hers, pressing the object in so she couldn’t fling it. She did glance at it and thought it was dried dog excrement such as one finds lying in the dust in one’s path. “It’s k’sha t’he, tobacco,” he hissed in her ear. “Give it to him or you will get dung in your face!”
One of the monsters was beside the horse and reaching toward her face, and she could see in that instant
Old Owl was chuckling. As her wild heart subsided and they rode on toward the arbor house, he said, “Those are the Mweh mweh alewehsa, the dung daubers. You give them something at once to show that you mean to honor Kahesana Xaskwim this day. The smallest gift, even an acorn, tells them your heart is for Mother Corn. If not, you deserve mweh mweh in the face.”
In the dust and throng they were approaching the great arbor, and it seemed to stand in a field of tall corn. But as they rode closer she saw that the cornstalks were actually the walls of the structure. Hundreds of cornstalks, still green, were tied upright around the frame, screening the inside from view. She saw smoke rising from inside and heard, besides the drumbeats, voices chanting. A few of Owl’s followers had gone to the corn wall and were standing close to it, some of them touching the stalks.
“May I go and see?” she asked.
“You must watch from outside, because it has already started without us. You will see it is much like the Spring Ceremony you were in.” He dismounted and reached up to lift her from the saddle. “Girl, you are a red-hair and they do not know you in this town. Be quiet and respectful and stay out of the Great House. If they ask how you came here, say Owl the Midewiwin carried you.”