The Red Heart by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom
“Kulesta! Our young men feel full of power now as they dance with their scalps. But our Buckongahelas, and old Captain Pipe, even Blue Jacket and Little Turtle, they know it is not over. They fear that we will never have enough warriors or guns or powder to stop those armies. In the councils now they are starting to ask: Where can we move next to keep a distance between us and the Long Knives? Farther down the Maumee Sipu? Westward down the Wabash Sipu? Northward into Canada? There are already red people there: Ottawa and Ojibwa in the north. Potawatomi and Kickapoo and Illinoi and Sac and Fox in the west. When we are pushed into their country, will they welcome us?
“Such pushing began many generations ago, even when we were more numerous than the wapsituk. Now they are as thick as maggots in old meat, and with their sicknesses and guns and their spirit water, they keep making us fewer.
“Sisters and daughters. Lenapeh’hokink, our homeland in the East, is now closed to us and full of white men. Soon this place will be likewise. I am sorry to darken your joy. I am an old woman who enjoys what she can. I am happy that my old husband got a soldier scalp in his last fight. But that was only his last fight with the wapsituk. Our children and our children’s children will have to go on fighting those fights until we are all gone and there is no land left that is not covered with white men. That is all I have to say. Daughter, help me sit down again.”
* * *
Walking slowly home in the cold, Good Face said as she helped the tired old woman along, “Kahesana, I have something to ask you, and it is this:
“I believe your words, which made the women in Council look at our tomorrows in a more somber way. But if the wapsituk will be coming into our country again, why do you want me to have a baby, as you said this morning? You have often taught that we should not bring babies when soldiers are coming.”
The old woman compressed her lips, moved them as if talking to herself, then said, “It is true that I have seen enough in this world to give good advice in Council.
“But still, you are a daughter of mine by whom I have not yet had a grandchild. Good advice or not, the way of it is that old women want to be grandmothers. Why else would we bother to be mothers?”
Wilkes-Barre
Giles snapped the long whip and whistled, and the tired gray put just a little more life into his pace for the upgrade. The sleigh’s runners hissed softly and the gray’s hoofbeats were muffled by the deep snow. “Eh, well, Ma,” Giles said, the words coming forth in a cloud, “almost home to a warm house. We’ve missed thee.”
Ruth Slocum, swaddled in a heavy dark wool blanket on the seat beside him, turned to look at him past the edge of her bonnet, which essentially confined her vision about the same as the blinders on the gray’s bridle. She was very fatigued from the long journey back from Philadelphia and not in as good a mood as homecoming should have inspired. She crinkled her nose and kept turning her blindered head to look over the town of Wilkes-Barre they were passing through in the twilight.
“I remember when snow was white,” she said. “I can remember when air was invisible and breathing didn’t stink and burn one’s nose.” From almost every chimney rose black smoke, and the snow was gray. In Philadelphia, where she had been for the big Meeting of Friends to discuss missionary work, most of the heating was still by firewood, and even though that city had been unbelievably crowded and noisy, teeming with people like an anthill, as she had thought, at least the smoke in the air had not been caustic like this. It was the anthracite. She hated to think it, but her son Ebenezer had had much to do with bringing this on. He was a big merchant in coal now. He had made at his foundry a kind of deep grate on legs, in which the hard coal, if stoked diligently, would burn hot and steady with an underdraft. He was manufacturing the grates and had sold a few. It was becoming easier to get coal than firewood in the valley, and Ebenezer expected to sell hundreds of the coal grates in the next few years. He called it his “Grate Invention.” But it required more attention than most people cared to give a fireplace or stove, and so most of his coal he still used for his foundry or sold to the blacksmiths and manufactories in the town and in other towns downriver. Ebenezer was clever and was making a lot of money, but his works were among those gradually turning this once beautiful valley into something that now and then made Ruth Slocum think of Hell.
At the house, William and Isaac came out, embraced their mother, and carried her trunk from the sleigh into the house, while Giles unharnessed the gray and fed and watered him at the barn. By the time he came back in, all were seated near the hearth, where Ebenezer’s grate glowed white and red, and a pot of tea was steaming. Whale oil lamps were burning in their sconces. It was warm and light in the room, but the mood was dark. On the kitchen table was spread a broadside newspaper printed in Boston, across the top of which were depicted thirty-nine coffins in two rows. Over each coffin was printed the name of an army officer who had been killed in the great defeat of General St. Clair’s army in the Ohio Territory. Ruth Slocum had seen the paper in Philadelphia, and was not happy to see that one of her sons had obtained a copy and brought it into her house. It was bad enough to reflect on the violent follies of man without having a paper memorial to them lying on one’s table, complete with coffins, skull and crossbones, black borders, a picture of the slain General Richard Butler, second in command, and a forty-one stanza elegy in pompous and execrable verse glorifying the sacrifice of some eight or nine hundred souls. Its headline was:
COLUMBIAN TRAGEDY
Containing a Particular and Official
ACCOUNT
Of the Brave and Unfortunate OFFICERS and SOLDIERS, who
were
Slain and Wounded in the EVER-MEMORABLE and
BLOODY INDIAN BATTLE,
Perhaps the most Shocking that has happened in AMERICA
since
its first Discovery
On the left hand of the page was a woodcut picture of an Indian warrior holding a tomahawk in his right hand and a bow in his left, in a formal and mincing pose. Ruth Slocum pointed a finger at it and said, “Has any of thee ever beheld an Indian who looked the least bit like that?”
William chuckled. “That’s a Boston artist. I’d reckon the only Indians he ever saw were them who dumped British tea in the harbor. Meaning, that is, white men in disguise.”
“I’m sorry,” Ruth said. “Truly, there’s nought amusing about it.” She twisted one hand in the other so hard her knuckles whitened. “So many souls! Such a pity ’tis there’s so much anger in the land. I suppose the truth is if it had not been those soldiers’ souls dispatched, ’twould have been those of the Indians.”
Giles nodded. “No doubt of that.”
She sat gazing at her teacup and remembering the Meeting she had attended, and its purposes. She realized that at this dismal time, the Quakers probably were almost the only white people in America who would credit the Indians with having souls. The mission work of the Friends was to encourage peace and tolerance between the races, and help the Indians with food and tools and knowledge, not force them to believe in the white man’s version of God. News of St. Clair’s defeat had come during the missionary meetings, and Ruth Slocum could remember the feeling that had passed through the room, a great heaviness on the spirit, an unspoken understanding that what had happened at the headwaters of the Wabash would make every aspect of the mission work harder—but also more crucial.
The mission work had long been crucial for Ruth Slocum, once she’d started thinking about it. She had said once to her sons: “If there are missionaries out there in every tribe all the time, why, that’ll be so much better than thee lads going to one tribe at a time to look for poor Frannie.”
Giles had gone up the river in the previous spring and at Painted Post had caught up with Colonel Thomas Proctor. The colonel had not remembered anything about the Slocum family, citing twelve eventful years of war and public service as an excuse, but he allowed Giles to accompany his expedition.
Nothing had come
Thus Giles had once again slumped home to Wilkes-Barre with nothing better than an expanded knowledge of frontier geography and a greater pity for the displaced tribes of the Longhouse Road. Then the news had followed that Governor Arthur St. Clair of the Ohio Territory, one of President Washington’s famous old Revolutionary War generals, was preparing to march an avenging army into the Indian country again, and any more searching this year had been rendered impossible.
And in view of General St. Clair’s fate as described in the Boston broadside with its rows of black printed coffins, it seemed doubtful that any more quests through the Indian country could be made in the near future. Ruth Slocum sipped her tea, which had grown tepid, set the cup on the table, and gazed at the printed sheet. With a sigh, she said, “It seems to me that all God’s work our Friends try to do is undone by army generals. Well, my boys, I’m a truly worn-out woman and I need to sleep for about a week. But first, let us pray for peace and mercy, and for our poor Frannie.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Spring 1793
Maumee Sipu
The field of corn was planted, and the Lenapeh women of the town walked around the perimeter dragging their sweaty dresses to scent the ground and discourage animals. In several parts of the field stood pole scaffolds where girls later would perch with lengths of trading-house cloth, pans and turtle-shell rattles, and bone whistles to scare off crows and other seed eaters. The naked women were singing.
Good Face, now twenty summers of age but still a childless wife, trudged tiredly with the other women, enjoying the mild sun and the caress of the spring breeze that were drying the sweat on her bare skin. She watched the women ahead of her, noticing how plump some of her friends had become during these peaceful seasons when no armies came to burn the crops and starve the People. Some of them ahead of her had filled out so that there were creases in the fat at their waists and their brown buttocks and thighs quaked with every step. Good Face herself was still slim in the waist and firm in the muscles, but her breasts had grown larger and so heavy that they tugged under their skin as she walked, and they bobbled in the lower part of her vision even when she was looking straight ahead, the sun-browned pair of them, and the women ahead of her were all made in that same unseparated symmetry of twos: legs and arms and buttocks, line of spine and cleft below, like so much of what grew in the world, paired—eyes, ears, nostrils, wings, the joined halves of a bean and paired lobes of fruits and nuts, of the lungs and organs of butchered game. A favorite design of the Creator, this of joined halves. She had been noticing it most of her life but had never thought about it in the front of her mind.
And into the divide of woman came the singleness of man, she thought, shuddering unexpectedly at the memory of her husband inside her. Lately he had done it less, only when he really needed relief, and sometimes when she wanted the pleasure, he would pretend to sleep too deeply to be aware of her yearning touches. A small cloud passed under the sun, and without the sunglow, she felt chilly in the still-cool breeze of early spring. Something was changing in him. Some nights he did not come home even though he was not away on hunting trips. Two days ago her beautiful mirror had disappeared out of the wikwam, and when she asked him if he had seen it, he looked down and then back up and said no and she knew he lied about it. She had started to challenge him, but he could have argued that since it was he who had given her the mirror, he could take it away again, whether she knew why or not. A thought had burrowed through her mind that, since he desired her so little anymore, perhaps he had given the mirror to another woman. She had heard her friends speak of such betrayals that husbands did sometimes. Of course, women did so too. She had never even considered it. She loved Like Wood only.
The sun had come out from behind the cloud. The women were walking cheerfully down to the river to bathe and wash their sweaty dresses. Good Face felt a strange, unpleasant caution. She felt as she waded into the water that someone was watching. She dove under the water, tense against its coldness, then surfaced, and as she squatted in the river with only her head and shoulders out, covered with gooseflesh, she scanned the fresh green foliage along the riverbank.
She saw the white man first, seeing a speck of pale color that was not the flowering of dogwood but the linen of a shirt. His eyes seemed to be upon her and so she pretended to be laving her forehead while looking at him between her fingers. He was not twenty paces away in a thicket on the shore. He was thick-bearded, and she recognized him as a man she had seen at Traders Town: a stalwart, burning-eyed man whom Minnow had warned her against as a woman grabber as well as a rum seller. Good Face stared through the thicket until she was certain there were no more than two men there, the other being better concealed in shadow but his form visible. She remembered what the women bathing on the lake beach had done a long time ago when they discovered the boy Like Wood spying on them, and, suddenly hot with indignation, she pointed and cried to the other women over their splashing and laughter:
“Look there! Wapsi men who want to see our hind ends!”
They followed her gesture and saw the two voyeurs, and charged like a swarm of hornets, surging out of the shallows, shrilling. This time it looked as if the women were going to attack the men, not just give them the backside insult; some of the women were grabbing up their grub hoes and mattocks and charging toward the thicket. Minnow was among those in the forefront, and Good Face had an awful notion that this white man’s scrotum would soon be a medicine bag like the one Minnow had given her, which she kept hidden but never wore. Good Face herself was boiling up out of the river with the others with her wet deerskin dress in one hand. She was irate enough to go after the men with her hoe too, and was glancing around for it, but then looked up toward the thicket and what she saw made her halt, mouth falling open in astonishment, pulse pounding in her ears.
The two men having come to see naked women apparently were seeing more than they had meant to and now had broken from cover, sprinting across the sunny, new-planted cornfield, the white man in his linen baggy-sleeve shirt and brown pants running heavy-footed and stumbling through the fresh-worked seed hills, kicking up clods as he went.
The other was swift and light-footed as a deer, and it was her husband, Like Wood. Good Face was at once so heavy with shame that she just stopped on the riverbank and stood there with the cold, sodden deerskin dress pressed against her face, crying, the first time she had cried in years.
Ohhhhh, she thought in the direction of the shrieking women. Catch him, sisters. Kill him.
No, don’t.
Yes, do.
No, don’t.
Like Wood and the rum seller had escaped unhurt. Good Face felt wounded by shame, and avoided the other women, staying at home with Tuck Horse and Flicker, who were ill with fevers. She kept herself busy gathering and preparing dogwood bark into a strong tea to cool their fevers. She would not talk about what had happened, not even with Minnow, who came by now and then and tried to assure her that Like Wood had proven himself unworthy of a moment’s despair. “He runs with a rum seller!” Minnow snarled.
After a few days, when her parents were over their fevers, Good Face went to her lodge and noticed that something was missing from among the belongings that hung from the wikwam’s supporting poles. With her index knuckle pressed to her lips she studied everything until she realized that what was gone was her husband’s flute, with which he had first wooed her. The marten-skin case was absent from the place where it had always hung by a thong. Her sadness deepened and she tried to harden her heart against him, thinking that he would now be away in some other village, drinking rum and spying on women with his wapsi friend, and then, probably, using his flute to seduce whichever one he found most desirable. Her emotions were a jumble of jealousy, contempt, and remorse, all fed b
The flute was so faint that the hiss of her water drowned it out. Standing, she wrapped the blanket about her again not because she was cold but because she was naked, as she always slept. In the moon dapple through the trees the wikwams of the sleeping town stood round, dark, and shabby like sleeping bears. Here and there came snores or soft voices, brief coughs. A crepitant, forced breaking of wind, as of someone farting as loudly as possible, followed by snickering and giggling in two voices and then two more harsh eruptions and more giggling. She did not smile even at that, but trod on silent bare feet toward the flute song. She did not think or know what she would do when or if she found the flute player. She could only go toward her song. This was very much like a dream.
Past the last wikwams a cornfield lay in the moonlight, a field of fresh dirt heaps not yet sprouted up enough to see, and there against the misty bluish silver of the clearing was silhouetted a sitting figure under a hazel bush. The flute went silent in midnote and the figure rose to stand before her. It was he. Slender, broad-shouldered, the gracefully muscled physique she knew so intimately and for which her body had been yearning so much. In this dreamlike encounter her anger and contempt barely muttered in her soul, as if from the wakefulness outside the dream. He came close, cautiously reached out, and put a hot hand on the side of her face. He wore only breechcloth and moccasins. The moonlight gleamed on his skull, and half the planes of his face were in shadow. She shut her eyes and pressed her face against the warm palm of his hand.