The Red Heart by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom
“Waneeshee, my wife,” he murmured. “You heard your song. I am grateful that you came.”
She opened her eyes and looked at him in the moonlight, which seemed to have doubled its brightness. In the air she smelled a sweetness something like flowers, vaguely familiar, but to some unpleasant part of her memory. In the next inhalation she smelled it again, and though sweet, it smelled unclean, perhaps like wet flowers rotting. She looked at him and said, “I had to follow my song.” She did not want to say anything about the incident at the riverside, although the shame and sadness of it were beginning to stir in her dreamy soul. But this was a beauteous moment and she knew that she had not quit loving this man.
He took her hand and gently pulled until her hand moved back and opened and the blanket fell open. When he saw that she was naked, he gave that sigh of awe that she knew so well, and she thought happily: he does not spy on other women, he was looking at me. She let him look for a moment, and he breathed long and deep breaths, and then she groped for the blanket corners and wrapped herself in it again.
“My wife,” he said, “follow me,” and his voice was so tender a murmur that she followed him. They walked silent as spirits, not toward their own wikwam but around the edge of the town, along a collapsing length of what once had been a defensive palisade of sharpened posts when an earlier town had been here; she knew where she was even though she seemed to be walking in a dream. A secretion was slickening the insides of her thighs, and with an edge of the blanket in one hand she mopped it dry, surprised at her body’s eagerness. He stopped in front of her.
“Wait here,” he whispered, and she nodded. He moved away to an old wikwam near the end of the palisade, a wikwam that she knew to have been abandoned. It stood pale in the moonlight, and she saw that where its old sheets of bark had fallen and gaped, it was now covered with the canvas of one of the tents taken from the army. A faint, warm light shone through the fabric, shadowed by the structure’s wooden ribs and bark slabs. So this is where he has been living all these days, she thought. In our own town, this close to me, staying away for shame. Pity and tenderness melded with desire as she stood waiting. She saw his shadow moving on the canvas as the firelight inside brightened. She remembered how he had loved to look at her standing nude in firelight. She heard his voice murmuring as he built up the fire and thought that he was humming a song to himself. At this unexpected thought of Like Wood being happy, a welling of tears made the moonlit and firelit images of the night, even the moon and stars, blur and swim.
His head and shoulders emerged from under the door flap and he gave the soft imitation of a bobwhite, which he had used to attract her attention when approaching home or seeing her outdoors; it meant please come to me.
She went and slipped through the door into the warm, well-lit interior, her heart swollen with bittersweet forgiveness and desire. She faced his silhouette as he stood intensely close before her. She had opened the blanket and let it fall away, and was holding a corner of it with one hand, when Like Wood moved aside and she saw her tack-studded mirror hanging from overhead, gleaming and glinting, and then she remembered that the sweet smell around him was the smell of rum and she saw the white man standing on the other side of the fire.
His shirt was off, his hairy torso was sweaty, his teeth were showing through his black beard in a grin, and his eyes, bulging and roving, were devouring her nakedness. As she started to swing the blanket around to hide herself, Like Wood grabbed her wrist in a hard grip and tried to turn her toward the big wapsi. She smelled the man’s sweat and the thick aroma of spirit water in the place and saw a wooden chest and a jumble of small kegs and weapons and piles of hides. The man was breathing hard and making a sort of groaning, growling sound that she realized were words in the wapsi tongue, and though it had been years since she had heard much English, she understood him: “Oh, thank you, m’buck!” The man stooped, picked up a keg the size of a gourd, and handed it to Like Wood, who, with his flute in one hand, had to drop it or her wrist to take the keg. He tossed the flute onto a pile of furs near the door, reached and took the keg, nodding and grinning. He had done well to keep a grip on her wrist, because she was trying to twist loose and get out the door. He squeezed so hard she thought her wrist bones would break, and began talking to her rapidly in their tongue:
“Kulesta! Eh! He desires you even as I do! He is a good man, you will like him! Do this for me. Just one night! You will have a good time with a man of your own kind, a wapsi like you, and I will have a good time with this. Only one night, eh, my wife? What is wrong with that?”
She quit struggling for a moment so that he would ease his grip. She looked at him and he was blurred by the tears in her eyes. She tried to yank free, but his grip tightened instantly and he swung his other hand at her and the weight of the keg slammed her shoulder and glanced off to hit her on the temple. A sun flashed in her head.
She heard a man talking, and when she realized it was the rum seller’s voice, she opened her eyes. Her head ached and the man was squatting beside her with two faces and two bodies. He had a rag wet with rum and was daubing at her head with it, and the smell rankled and the touch stung where she had been struck by the keg and there was a dull ache also in her shoulder. The white man had not covered her. She was lying naked on the fallen blanket. The man’s two forms slowly became one and she could partially understand what he was saying to her. Like Wood was not in the wikwam, she verified by a quick glance around.
“There, now, miss. Sorry y’ got bunged up ’ere. Your buck doesna handle himself well when he gets too thirsty, does he? Can y’understand English, miss? Ah, good! Now, pretty lass, I’ll no’ hurt ye. I’m a friendly, lonely en’p’eneur, and I have just damned utterly gone all atwitter in love wi’ ye. Can y’sit up, m’ dear?”
She nodded. It hurt almost as much to nod as to try to sit up, but she had all her will aimed toward the moonlit night outside that door flap a few feet away, and she could not get to it lying down. She knew pretty certainly that if she made a quick move, he, for all his love talk, would jump on her and keep her down, perhaps even knock her out again if she cried out. So she forced a smile and sat and tried to think of how to get out of this. It was hard to think of anything, and she was trying to remember how to say things in her old tongue and what to say if she could remember how. She could remember some words, but the Lenapeh did not put words together as the wapsi did, and it was the putting together of words that she had forgotten. She said, “Sir. This I want not. Thee I want not. This was my husband did. Thank thee for be kind but go I do want?”
With a quick shrewd look in his eyes he swung around to sit on one hip, with his thick arm over her waist, and with a wet-lipped smile he said, “Now, me lassie, I did pay a muckle for the honor o’ your company, and yeer handsome buck-o did make me a promise that y’d stay wi’ me a night. Please be kind, and by God I’ll be likewise. Maybe y’d like a sip o’ heart-warmer. O’ which I happen t’ ave aplenty at hand.” As he spoke his just-intelligible words, he kept sweeping her with his eyes, and with the palm of a sweaty hand he molded her breast and weighed it, and groaned. “Ha’ ye ever had a taste o’ sperrit water, me dear? Yeer buck-o likes it a lot.”
She thought fast. The mirror turned slowly in the rising heat from the fire pit and glinted. She said, “No. Never have I. I would like, you say?” Some of that had come out in Lenapeh, but apparently he understood, for he gave a great grinning sigh and rose up to fetch some. But he grasped her wrist and pulled her up to stand with him, and kept a tight hold. As he pulled her toward the kegs, she held back and pointed at the mirror, which she presumed Like Wood had traded for spirit water. She pointed at her head wound and then the mirror. “I look? See my hurt?”
“Hen! Aye, the justifiable vanity of a lovely lass! Aye, well, it’s no’ so bad as it feels, so, sure then.” He reached up, tugged the thong, caught the mirror as it slid free, and put it in her hand. Still holding her wrist while she looked in the mirror at the lacerat
“What was yeer name ’fore ye b’come a savage?” he asked. “D’ye remember? What would they’a named a pretty red-haired bairn, d’ye remember, or should I guess all night as I’m puttin’ the auld skean dhu to ye.…”
When his gaze was on her lower parts, she pitched the rum into his eyes with one hand and with an arm toughened by woman’s work swung the mirror at the side of his head. The splashed rum flared up in the fire pit. She stooped and darted to the doorway, snatching up the blanket as she went while the man roared and flailed about. Her last sight as she scrambled into the cool moonlight was the wapsi rum seller falling on his rump in the fire pit with his rum-soaked whiskers ablaze.
At home Good Face put all of Like Wood’s belongings outside the door and left them there. Neighbors went by for two days, seeing them, knowing that he had by their tradition been divorced. On the second of those days it rained, and all his things made of rawhide, the quiver and rawhide chest and the painted rawhide envelope containing his war feathers, went soft and lost their shape and his gunpowder was ruined.
On the day when he slunk up to the door to begin carrying things away, neighbors were pretending not to watch. He gathered them up, eyes bloodshot from spirit water and forlorn for many other reasons. She was inside, peering out at this wretch she had loved so much, and he probably was relieved that he did not see her about. But when he had everything so loaded in his arms that he could hardly see over them, she slipped out of the wikwam that had been their home and stared straight into his eyes for a long time. Then, remembering the old puberty teachings, she set her teeth and reached down between his legs and got his scrotum in her work-hardened grip and squeezed and twisted and pulled until his knees began to buckle and he was about to drop everything. It had required a terrible provocation, but for the first time in her life she was angry enough to deliberately make someone hurt. Minnow would be proud of her.
“Now go!” she said loudly, releasing him. “Your name is Empty Loincloth!”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
August 1794
Maumee Sipu
The old ones spoke true about vengeance, Good Face thought. It is never satisfied. As Flicker had warned the Women’s Council, the wapsituk had raised another army to avenge the loss of the last one.
She walked on, legs burning with fatigue, back and shoulders and neck aching from the weight of the pack basket, her sweaty forehead chafed by the tumpline, her wrist sore from tugging the horses’ lead rope. Her moccasins and leggings were soaked from the wet grass and weeds, and the wet leather was blistering her feet, the sodden leather of the moccasins stained red with blood.
It was as it had been so often before. The People were going along a river bluff with everything they could carry, and there was a bluecoat army somewhere behind them. Just as Flicker had warned them last year, the wapsituk had grown themselves a new army, a bigger and better army, and had returned to punish Little Turtle and his allies for killing all those soldiers.
She twisted painfully to look back at her old mother, who was on one of the horses she led. Flicker’s eyes were shut with the pain of riding so long.
This army’s general was not stupid, as the ones before had been. This general kept coming along all summer. He kept scouts out all around and his army tight together, and had built a fortified camp every night guarded by sentries who never shut their eyes. These soldiers were well-disciplined and seemed not to be afraid. This general never got into a place where he could be ambushed.
This general’s name was Wayne. Everybody knew his name because he was always sending ahead peace offers. Little Turtle had given Wayne the name He Who Never Sleeps, and finally Little Turtle had said the unsayable: that perhaps it would be better to smoke the peace calumet with this general instead of fighting him. To the other stunned chiefs, Little Turtle said he doubted it was possible to defeat three Long Knife armies one after another.
When the other war chiefs, still proud of their defeat of St. Clair, said they would not talk peace with Wayne, Little Turtle had astonished them by stepping down as their war leader. They had elected the Shawnee named Blue Jacket to replace him, and Little Turtle assumed command of his Miamis only. He would help the other chiefs but he would not lead them in a cause he believed was lost. So now it was Blue Jacket who was trying to stop He Who Never Sleeps.
It was steamy in the valley of the Maumee. There had been many rainy days during the People’s retreat down from Kekionga, down past the towns at the mouth of the Auglaize, down past the Blown-Down Woods, down past the British fort. The path was churned to slick mud, and the work of walking made sweat flow from every pore. Good Face could hardly see the people and horses and travois dogs ahead of her on the path because of the sweat in her eyes. The still, hot, damp air seemed almost too thick to breathe. The People made wretched gasping and groaning sounds as they slogged along. And their spirits were low because Wayne had reached the Maumee lands before harvesttime. Just now the heat and exhaustion made it hard to think of anything else, but Good Face from time to time did think of the lost harvest, and that when winter did come, there would be nothing to eat and there would be no shelter.
Wild Potato had betrayed his father-in-law Little Turtle and joined General Wayne. He had gone back to be a wapsini. Good Face thought of that sometimes even in this misery. Tuck Horse said that betrayal had broken Little Turtle’s heart and that was why he wanted to quit fighting. Maybe that was so, maybe not. She wondered how Wild Potato could have done that. She would remember his face and his red hair, and the way they would sometimes glance at each other, she a red-haired Lenapeh, he a redhaired Miami. She remembered the way his face looked on the battlefield two winters ago when the snowy ground was bloody and covered with dead soldiers, soldiers of their birth people. Sometime between then and now he had decided that his heart was white instead of red after all. Or at least she thought he must have decided that. One could never judge what was in another’s soul, except by seeing what that one did.
As for me, she thought, I don’t believe I will ever do what Wild Potato has done. It seems like the wapsituk are winning everything now and we are losing everything, but I still don’t believe I would ever go back to that side. Maybe it is easier to live if you are winning. But these are my People.
She had been along this valley before. On foot sometimes, in canoes sometimes. She and her parents had come down this river to get on the French sailboat on the Erie lake. She knew this river’s rapids and the Bull Head Rock in the river, and the British fort up on the north bluff, and the Blown-Down Woods, where a powerful whirling wind not long ago had blown down much of a forest on the north bluff of the Maumee Sipu, leaving a tangle of dead and splintered giant trees lying and leaning on each other. It was so hard to get through that these fleeing people had veered far northward around it, though the circuit added much distance to their retreat down the river.
Good Face slipped sideways on the muddy path and almost fell, but caught herself with her left hand and righted herself with a groan of effort and pain. She was top heavy with the pack basket, and its weight had jammed and sprained her hand and arm. The pain of it flickered behind her eyes like lightning, but no one even noticed. Eveybody was slipping, and many had fallen. She remembered telling Minnow, that year when the last army was coming, that she would not be helpless like a blown leaf again in front of these calamities—that
E heh, but I feel as much like a blown leaf now as I ever did, even though I have tried to know what is happening, what is planned, what is hoped for.
She knew what was planned and what was hoped for. Blue Jacket planned to fight the army at the Blown-Down Woods, which was like a natural fortress in the general’s way. Every army before had finally come too far, past a safe point, and finally been whipped. Wayne had come farther than the others and was ready to be whipped. Blue Jacket now had nearly as many warriors as Little Turtle had had the last time, and they were massing for an ambush behind and under the tangled big trees of the blow-down. Not even a smart, brave General Who Never Sleeps could push through a place like that filled with warriors; it would be like slapping a hornet nest. That, she knew, was Blue Jacket’s plan and his hope, and she prayed that he was right. The British in their fort had promised Blue Jacket and Buckongahelas that they would help.
These refugees would go on down the river to Swan Creek, almost to the Erie Lake, and wait in safety there until Blue Jacket defeated the army at the blow-down and chased them back. Then the People could go back up the river and return to living at Kekionga, though they would have to rebuild homes again.
There were many parties of warriors passing the other way on this path, going up toward the fort and the Blown-Down Woods. They had ammunition and food supplied by the British. Whenever warriors passed, Good Face glanced to see if Like Wood might be among them. She had not thought about how she might meet his eyes if she saw him. For a while she had thought such things, but much happens in living, and such concerns fade away. He might be a warrior among these going to help Blue Jacket stop the general, but to her and her family, he was Empty Loincloth. Once, they had loved with passion, but her pleasure memories were pale compared with her memory of the drunken man who had tried to sell her to a rum trader.