The Red Heart by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom
Maconakwa and her family rode half a block away, slowly, through low-slanting evening sunbeams, and then, like one of those flights of birds that seem to act all of a single mind, they were suddenly at full gallop down the street and vanishing around the church, toward the river, leaving only dust full of sunbeams under the yellow trees.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
October 1846
Deaf Man’s Village
Day after day Maconakwa heard the pitiful sounds up and down the valley and along the river road and she thought: To be deaf like my old husband, eh, that would be a blessing now! But I hear as well as ever! She stood in the rain by the road, day by day.
She could not keep from hearing the soldier guns. Not many guns at a time, like war. One shot at a time echoing up or down the valley of the Mississinewa. Just a few most days, some days none.
An Indian’s dog would be howling or barking far away. Then there would be a gunshot and no more sound from that dog. But always somewhere in the distance there were dogs howling.
Some of the soldier bullets were not shot at dogs, but at Indian people. She knew about many of those: Some Miami man would refuse to leave his cabin to march down the road, and there would be a gunshot. An Indian boy being driven down the muddy road toward the canal boats by the bayonet soldiers would dart out from his family and dive into the river, and there would be a gun-shot. A woman crying at the grave of her grandmother would hang on to the grave marker when soldiers tried to drag her away, and she would draw her sheath knife to cut the soldiers or perhaps to kill herself, and there would be a gunshot.
All these pitiful sounds were in the valley because the white people had finally gotten their way and the last few thousand Miamis were being rounded up like livestock to be put on canal boats and sent away west beyond the Missi Sipu, taking only what they could carry on their backs and leaving their dogs behind.
It was the worst of all times for the Miami People. To make it even harder to bear, cold rain kept falling and the paths and roads were sticky with mud that sucked their moccasins off as the soldiers prodded them along with bayonets.
To make this worst of all times worse for Maconakwa, she was not going with her People.
Her brother Joseph had made a paper with the white council in the East called Congress, and Congress had sent a paper that allowed Maconakwa and her Miami relatives to stay here because she was white.
She could stay here with Deaf Man’s grave as she had promised him she would do. But the Miami People she had chosen to stay here with instead of going back to the Quaker family in the East were being sent away from her, out of their homeland, and she knew they must hate her for this now. They had reason to.
All the Miamis had used to like and respect her. They had thought it fine that a woman with white skin had a red heart. She had been praised for generosity and admired for her understanding of plant medicine, and for helping deliver babies. Older people remembered Deaf Man, respected her as his widow, and remembered how brave and helpful she had been during the war.
Now the People she loved, and who had loved her, hated her because she was allowed to keep her part of their homeland, while they had to tie up their dogs to keep them from following them, and go down and be put on the canal boats. And her square mile of that homeland was now surrounded by white settlers, who called her a squaw and her family half-breeds. She was already having trouble with them because they felt that their thing called “law” would not care if they stole horses and cows from a squaw. So they sneaked around and took her horses and cows. Now Cut Finger’s husband Brouillette, and Yellow Leaf’s fourth husband, Bondy, patrolled the edges of her square mile carrying guns, and she lived in dread of the day when they would actually meet one of the white thieves. Brouillette and Bondy had Miami blood in their veins, and if they ever killed a white man, even for stealing her livestock, the whites would call it an Indian uprising and use it as an excuse to hang her sons-in-law and probably take her land away from her in spite of her paper from Congress.
And so now, standing in cold drizzle near the road to say farewell to her old friends as the soldiers herded them past, Maconakwa, who was seventy-three years old according to the count made by her Quaker brother Joseph, thought it might have been better if Joseph had never found her. Maybe better, maybe worse.
Joseph had meant well. He had come out a second time, bringing his two daughters. He had hired a painter to make pictures of Maconakwa and her daughters. She had tried to give him land here, so he would stay and use his “law” to protect her from her white neighbors. But like her, he was too old to move, and went back East. Then in good heart he had done that Congress paper.
In the cold her nose was red and running, and she raised her arm and wiped the tip of her nose with the edge of her blanket.
Joseph is good, she thought. With that Congress paper, he was just trying to help me keep my land.
Another family was coming down the road and two soldiers followed them wearing capes, soldiers with bayonets sticking up. Maconakwa recognized the lean young Miami man of the family. He was one she had helped deliver from his mother’s womb twenty summers ago.
Now see how he looks at me, she thought. As if he would kill me.
“Ningeah.” She felt a hand on her arm. It was Yellow Leaf, saying, “Mother, come up to the house or you will get sick in the rain.” She shook her daughter’s hand off and would not turn around to speak to her. After a while she heard her feet squishing away in the mud toward the house.
Maconakwa had told her sons-in-law that if they saw any running-away Miami people crossing onto her land to hide, they must pretend they did not see them. She knew that people slipped away. When Black Hoof’s Shawnees had been driven out of their reservation in Ohio to go west, many of them had simply turned off into the woods. When the Potawatomi were herded out of their country north of the Wabash Sipu a few years ago, some had slipped off the side of the trail when soldiers were not looking and were now living hidden wherever the whites hadn’t filled in the space. She knew these things. She knew that the slipping-away people were hiding also on the lands of Palonswah’s family at the mouth of the Mississinewa, and on Meshingomeshia’s reserve up the river, and wherever wealthy or half-breed Miamis, through cooperation with the white government land people, had been allowed to keep sections of country. Of course, there would be troubles caused by these hideaways, some kinds of troubles easy to foresee and probably many kinds of trouble no one could even imagine yet. But she prayed that the ones who tried to escape from the bayonet soldiers would escape without getting hurt.
I do not want this valley all emptied of its True People, she thought, peering up the muddy road for someone she wanted to see but dreaded to see. This would be too sad a place with all of them gone, and nothing left but the howling of their tied-up dogs and the abandoned spirits of their dead.
It was not only that the Miami People wanted to stay near the graves of their ancestors, in this rich land that had always been theirs; it was not just that the land they were being sent to was far away; but that it was not a good land. Last year five Miami men had been sent by the government to see the place beyond the Missi Sipu where the People were to be sent, and one of the five had been her son-in-law Brouillette. The place was called Kansas Territory. Autumn Brouillette had come back telling of the terrible heat there and the thin, dry soil, and the dried-up creeks. Those descriptions had spread through the Miami Nation as fast as the wind, so all these who were being sent there believed they were going to a scorched place where they would have to die from want.
Far up the road she saw another group of people in the drizzly grayness, coming down the road toward her. She thought she recognized one of the horses, but it was too far to tell yet. But she felt that this would be the one she was waiting for and dreading to see. She waited, wiping her nose again. Below, the gray surface of the river was made misty and spattery by the unceasing drizzle.
Because of brother Joseph’s Congre
But Ewing was making money even from this last misery of the Miami people. Maconakwa knew this from Brouillette too: the white government had paid many thousands of dollars to somebody to do this removal of the Miamis, in something called a “contract,” and Ewing with his brothers was among the white people who had that contract.
And Ewing was also setting up to do more Indian trade business in Kansas Territory, so he would keep making money off the Miamis even when they got there. And so would others: Brouillette had seen on his trip to that far country that the route went through long gauntlets of whiskey sellers.
Brouillette, in answer to her constant prayers, was still a sober man. And he kept studying the schemes of the white men so he could protect this family against them. He had even been learning their tongue so he could hear things they didn’t know he could understand. Now he was able to advise her on the sorts of matters for which she used to go and ask Palonswah. It was important that Brouillette was learning such things, because Palonswah had Crossed Over just a few years ago.
Yes, Brouillette she still counted among the best gifts the Creator had put into her long life. He was still a good husband to Cut Finger, though they still had made no children. She had given up hope that they would. Even if they might have someday, it was unclear whether their children could stay here, because the Congress paper had written on it the names of all the people who could stay, and it said nothing about people who might be born yet.
Eh! Maconakwa now saw that the people coming down the road were the ones. She shut her eyes for a moment and prayed for the strength she would need.
She recognized two blaze-faced horses descended from a mare that she and Deaf Man had given long ago to Minnow. Minnow was now too old to be one of those walking in the mud. She would be the little, humped figure riding with a blanket over her head, on one of the horses. Maconakwa watched her coming with the soldiers following and thought of the time thirty winters ago when Minnow and her daughter had escaped in the snow. Minnow was now at last too old to escape white soldiers anymore.
Maconakwa reached inside her blanket and closed her hand around a small object. Her heart was pattering fast with cold and dread.
This person Minnow had saved her life in the old days, and helped save the life of the wounded warrior who had become Deaf Man. Minnow had been her one friend since the beginning.
She sees me, Maconakwa thought. How terrible her eyes are!
But she should remember that I have saved her life too.
Now Minnow’s horse was almost beside Maconakwa, its breath making fog puffs in the cold. It saw Maconakwa and nickered.
The horse knows me and does not hate me, she thought.
The horse stopped. Minnow was looking down, her face dark and wrinkled under the cowl of the blanket’s edge. She was wearing under the blanket the blue calico dress Maconakwa had made for her years ago when Minnow had been unable to afford trading-store cloth.
For days while waiting, Maconakwa had thought of how she would say things to Minnow if she saw her, but now she could not remember any of that. Instead she drew her hand forth and showed Minnow that she was wearing the medicine bag Minnow had made for her from a soldier’s scrotum.
Minnow showed no expression. She stuck one hand out from her blanket. The hand was a solid fist. A soldier was speaking angrily behind her, probably telling her to move on. Minnow ignored him. She held the clenched hand close to Maconakwa’s face and opened it, palm up, the hand with which Minnow had combed her hair one cold morning long ago, one morning when soldiers attacked. Now the hand was full of dark, damp earth, so wet it was almost a fistful of mud, and rain was drizzling into it.
“This is from the grave of my husband. I have to take it far away with me,” Minnow rasped. “You get to stay with yours!”
Then, looking straight ahead, she kicked the horse in the flanks and went on, not looking back, down the river, down to where the three canal boats were waiting to load all these hundreds of wet and weeping Indians. How would they crowd so many people on three boats?
What would become of all those tied-up dogs left behind? She could hear them barking and howling far up the valley.
Minnow, she thought, if you could hear my soul as I watch you go, it would sound to you like all those dogs!
I have to go in now. As my daughter said, I will get sick in this rain, and die. But if I did, what would it matter?
March 1847
That winter the abandoned dogs that had been left tied up starved to death, or grieved to death, or were killed by wild animals, and for a while there were always buzzards in the sky over the valley. The dogs that were loose or got loose joined into packs and overran the valley, getting wilder and meaner than coyotes and wolves had ever been in the old days. Those feral dogs seemed to be full of bad spirits. Some had come near Maconakwa’s house in the first snow and watched her with what looked like witch eyes. Then Cut Finger got very sick. Brouillette brought her up to Maconakwa’s house for healing.
It was some kind of long, weakening sickness, with a bloody flux from her bowels. The medicine man had been sent west with the People. Maconakwa finally decided on a tea of sumac root bark, which slowed the flux, and then began feeding her corn soups and succotash with no meat to try to bring her strength back. The pain diminished but she did not get stronger. The continued weakness made Maconakwa worry about a witch spell. She burned herbs in a mussel shell around the bed every day, and prayed with all her concentration against bad spirits. Yellow Leaf came up every day and helped with the nursing and the prayers. Maconakwa seldom slept, but paid little attention to the passage of days and nights. Sometimes she would look at the food stored in the house and be surprised that so much had been used up. She would fall asleep in her chair by the hearth and would be awakened by a faraway gunshot, probably white settlers shooting another wild dog, and the fire would be down to embers, so she would put wood on and then go tend to Cut Finger.
Then she would wonder if the gunshot might have been not a white person shooting a dog but Brouillette or Bondy shooting a white person they had caught stealing, and she would fret about that until she saw them.
Through the winter the whole outdoors seemed to have something terrible and invisible sitting over it. Sometimes she would stand at the door in the early morning and look out at the snow and the gray river and the trackless road, and the absence of the People would seem like a great, silent, unseen force in the valley, and she would have to shut the door to keep it from sucking her spirit out. Nobody ever came from Palonswah’s family or from Meshingomeshia’s reserve up the river. So she thought they too considered her white.
One day Brouillette was loading axes, saws, and kettles into his wagon, and he asked her if Cut Finger was well enough for him to be gone a few days.
“Gone where, Autumn?”
“Up into the sugar trees. The sap is rising.”
She said, “Will it be worth the trouble? You don’t have enough people to work a sugar camp.”
“Perhaps enough,” he said. He was wearing a fur gustoweh instead of his turban, and his chin was stubbled. She saw in his eyes that there was something he wanted to say or did not want to say. She stared at him until he knew she knew there was something, so he sighed and said, “There are some people up there.”
“What people?”
He smiled slightly and said, “Such as those you told me to pretend not to see if I saw them.”
“Those who slipped away from the soldiers and did not go to the boats, perhaps.”
“E heh. I saw smoke in the woods, and snares. The footprints
She said, “I wonder if you ever took food from this house to them.”
“Now that you ask, so I have, a little now and then.”
“Aha. I wondered where it was going so fast.”
He did not look in the least ashamed. He said, “They told me to thank you. I can, now that you know.”
She swallowed. “They said to thank me?”
“E heh.”
After a moment she said, “If we had a cow less, or a few chickens, I would just guess white men stole them.”
He nodded, trying to hide a smile. “They will thank you for that too.”
A few days later Brouillette rode in from the sugar camp through melting snow, his wagon muddy, and he was grinning. First he went to sit beside Cut Finger, his palm on her forehead, and they talked softly. Then he got up and came smiling to Maconakwa.
“She says you are taking good care of her, and she says she feels well enough that Yellow Leaf could stay with her tonight and you would be free to come out for the sugar dance.”
“You joking man. How can I go to a sugar dance?”
He leaned down near her, an eyebrow cocked. “The hiding-in-the-woods people helped us make much sugar, and it is customary to give thanks for the sugar. They asked me if you would come out to the camp and dance with them.”