By the middle of the morning the shooting had dwindled. Tecumseh sent riders down the rutted, muddy army road to look for signs of the other Blue-Coat regiment coming up. No report of them came. Tecumseh with Thick Water and Stands Firm, Seekabo and Big Fish, set up a vigil on a bluff overlooking a fording place where the army road crossed a shallow creek, about halfway between the battleground and the army’s upper fort. On that bluff stood a huge oak tree, from whose high branches the road could be seen for miles in both directions. Tecumseh said, “In Kispoko Town I remember there was a boy who was sometimes called Squirrel for the way he could climb trees.” Thick Water nodded with a slight smile, slung his gun on his back, and soon had climbed to a high fork. It was cold up here in the wind, but he could see over most of the treetops and rises of land for such a distance that he took deep breaths and smiled with his love of the country. When he looked down to the others, their horses looked the size of little dogs. The treetop swayed in the cold gusts and rocked him. Thick Water tied a thong around his waist and a limb, hooked his elbow over a branch, wiggled his feet until they were as comfortable as possible, and looked up and down the road. Far to the north a smudge of pale smoke against the lead-colored clouds showed him where the battlefield was. Because of the wind around his ears he could hardly hear any gunfire now.
Late in the afternoon Thick Water called down. He could see the remnants of the American army starting to come down the valley. For a long time they were mere specks on the far snowy meanderings of the road, coming singly or in little clusters, in no sort of order.
As they drew closer he could hardly believe what his eyes were seeing. He took every detail into his memory, as if he might need to confirm with others that this wretched sight was what they too had seen.
They came in knots and clusters, in ones and twos, stumbling and staggering, some without weapons, some helping badly hurt comrades hitch along. Some fell and remained in the snow. A few were on plodding horses, and some of the horses sagged and fell and lay in the road. Figures were strung out for miles. They were no army anymore.
When the first of them were within half a mile, Tecumseh called for Thick Water to come down out of sight. And then from cover they watched them.
Some of the soldiers were wild-eyed, some dead-eyed. Some would run a few steps, moaning and gasping, as if demons were after them. Almost all were black with gunpowder and reddened with blood. As they moved down across the ford, they turned the snow red. Their voices were a dissonant chorus of pain and misery. Tecumseh and his scouts hovered almost invisible in thickets along the road and watched them pass by.
Only a few of the Americans who went by were officers on horses, and most of these were bloody and white-faced, slumped in their saddles. One humped, thick-bodied old man came by on a bony, feeble horse. This old man wore a three-cornered hat and was cloaked in a capote stained with mud and blood, his eyes cast down, his scabbard empty. He was on down the road a way when two officers rode up to speak to him, and suddenly Thick Water turned and asked Tecumseh:
“Is that not their general?”
“That is St. Clair. Yes.”
“Should we not shoot the old general?”
“No,” Tecumseh said. “We are here as eyes, not as teeth, to watch, not to kill. And you know what I have said. I will not kill helpless men. What honor is there in killing men whose hearts are already dead?”
THE NEXT MORNING TECUMSEH AND HIS SCOUTS WENT UP the army road toward the battleground. The snow of the road was brown with mud and red with blood, littered all the way with hats, buckles, broken ramrods, bayonets, bullet bags, blood-soaked bandages, shreds of blanket, boot soles, and broken guns.
Frozen corpses lay where they had been hastily buried in snow; some of them had already been partly dug out and gnawed on by animals.
But even this pitiful trail of death and defeat did not prepare Tecumseh for what lay on the bottomlands of the Wabash-se-pe.
In the river bend, the entire valley was dotted with scalped, mutilated soldiers and dead horses. Every foot of ground was a trampled, bloody slush, strewn with smashed objects. Wagons with broken wheels, crates, and kegs lay broken and smoldering with dirty smoke. Some bodies lay over each other, in places where soldiers evidently had grouped and been surrounded. There were black smudges where gunpowder had been spilled. A shoeless, scalpless corpse lay curled on its side, both hands frozen around the haft of a lance that had gone clear through it. Buzzards were settling and hunching on bodies, picking out eyes or tearing at wounds, shaking their beaks. Town dogs skulked around the edges of the battleground, gorging themselves on the half-frozen human carrion. Indian boys from nearby villages were working over the field, harvesting brass buttons and buckles and gorgets. Every corpse had been scalped, most had been stripped of their shoes and blue wool coats. There were no guns in sight; all had been gathered up already. A cold wind drifted snow up against the dead.
There were nearly six hundred dead soldiers on the battleground, Blue Jacket said. Tecumseh told him of the many he had counted on the road and of the old general going by. Blue Jacket was marked by many blows but not badly hurt. “We could not kill that old general,” he said with awe. “Whenever he tried to mount a horse, we killed it. Whenever he spoke to an officer, we killed the officer. All morning he tried to make his soldiers stand and fight, but we killed them. Many stood together and cried, and we killed those, too. He tried to make his cannon soldiers shoot, but we killed them after a few bangs. We killed his camp followers. But we could not kill him, though he was in plain view all the time. I think this means he was meant to take defeat back to their nation himself. Oh, he was a brave old man! But not smart enough. Young brother, listen! For two years we have defeated their whole army, yes, twice Little Turtle has beaten America! If the tribes always fight together, we can do this any time they dare to come again. Perhaps we can preserve the rest of the lands the Great Good Spirit gave us, after all!” His eyes were red, his bruised face aglow. “Think what we have done! Think what we can do if we stand together!”
“The Great Good Spirit favors our People,” Tecumseh murmured. But he remembered Chiksika’s prophecy that even this Blue Jacket and Little Turtle and Black Hoof would mark peace treaties under the force of the white men.
LOUD NOISE AGAIN HAD MANAGED TO STAY OUT OF BATTLE by proclaiming himself not a warrior but a healer and medicine man. There was indeed much healing for him to do, for more than two hundred warriors had been wounded in the battle. Loud Noise had learned enough from Change-of-Feathers about herbs and poultices that he was able to help mend some of the severely wounded warriors.
But in the orgy of celebration right after the battle, Loud Noise was caught up in the sanguinary madness, and he did something he had often thought about with fascination during his lonely, rum-soaked reveries in his old hut in the marsh.
Tecumseh came looking for his brother and sister in the uproar of the village after the battle. The people were in a frenzy of feeling. There was dancing, there was boasting, fueled by kegs of army liquor that had been taken at the battleground, and fresh scalps were being exhibited everywhere. But amid the rejoicing there was also the keening of mourners, for the sixty-six warriors who had died in the attack. All the people were pouring out their hearts either in warlike exultation or grief or in both. Tecumseh, with Stands-Between at his side, moved through this firelit pandemonium with a bittersweet heart, loving and pitying the People, asking this crazed face and then that one where Loud Noise might be found. At last he found Star Watcher. She was standing in front of a small lodge, very rigid, her face set hard and eyes glinting with tears. She pointed at the lodge and said, “He is there. With them.”
Tecumseh turned back the door flap and stooped to enter. He glanced around the circle of men and women who sat facing a fire in the dense smoke within. They looked up at him with glazed, red-rimmed eyes. Their mouths were painted crimson. There was a stench of liquor in the close air. Strips of flesh hung on a spit over the f
ire, and the people were eating with their fingers. There was an air of awful tension in the lodge, as if some terrible excitement had just been interrupted. Even without the red-painted mouths to explain the scene to him, Tecumseh would have known what was being done here. He knew well enough from war the peculiar smell of seared human flesh. He knew that the meat over the fire had been brought from the battleground, where it lay in such profusion.
And there beyond the fire, his one eye bulging, his lips and mustache smeared with red paint and the grease of the meat, a bowl of liquor on the floor beside him, sat Loud Noise, who had promised to subdue his appetites and do honor to his family and his destiny.
Tecumseh stared at him, face drawn with loathing, and it seemed a long time before the cloud of Loud Noise’s stupor cleared enough for him to realize that this was his own brother standing in the firelight glaring at him. He grinned drunkenly, and there was half-chewed human flesh in his teeth. When at last Tecumseh could speak, he said in a sad, low voice:
“So now you have even come down like one of the vultures.”
And then he was gone, leaving only the contemptuous echo of his words and a draft of the winter air.
22
ON THE UPPER MAUMEE-SE-PE
Winter 1792
LIKE A SILENT, INVISIBLE REVENGE FOR THEIR DEFEAT, A DISEASE of the white men swept through the Indian towns that winter. Warriors who had dodged a thousand bullets and bayonets were brought low by burning fevers. Their bone joints ached until they could not move, and their lungs filled up. Women and children and old people fell into whimpering, sweat-soaked sleeps from which they never awoke.
Loud Noise boiled roots and barks to make bitter teas. He burned pinecones and nut shells to make healing smokes. He wore a wooden mask, shook a tortoiseshell rattle, and sang prayers. His decoctions made people sweat or shiver or vomit, made their bowels spew dark fluids, made them urinate almost ceaselessly in their bedding. Many of those he treated died without relief, some more miserable than the disease itself would have made them. When they were in their graves they did not say he was a poor medicine man. Some got well, because or in spite of his remedies, and these were glad to praise his medicine. So when the epidemic had run its course, there were a few people who would say he was a healer, and therefore he was. There were many people who still did not like him or trust him enough to turn to him for medicine. He was still a drunkard and a loud mouth with crazy ways. It was known now that he had eaten manflesh with members of that unpopular society, a society that old Black Hoof and most other leaders termed evil, and many members of the tribe shunned him for that reason. But some of the Shawnee secretly believed that manflesh eaters and other contrary people were in touch with special kinds of magic. Maybe it was the magic of Matchemoneto, and if a person grew desperate enough, he might eventually turn to the Evil Spirit for help. If an illness or pain was believed to be caused by a witch, extreme cures were needed. Thus it was that Loud Noise began to have a small following, and he studied hard with Change-of-Feathers to learn all he could before the ancient shaman should die and take his knowledge to the grave with him. And so Loud Noise, once useless, now had a way of making a modest living and no longer had to depend entirely upon the generosity of his family. Now he spent much time in the woods digging for roots of dogbane and sassafras and mayapple, drying and grinding them, stripping out the inner bark of elms, making feather fans and bone rattles, grinding mouse bones to powder, rubbing tobacco down to dust, and, as he had always done, talking and chanting to himself.
Beginning to fancy himself a substantial member of the tribe, Loud Noise set his mind on getting a wife. Once this would have been his most hopeless task. But his medicine had cured some men and women who had daughters, so now as a suitor he had some choices. His first choice was, of course, She-Is-Favored. But when he approached her she looked at him with a wary and defensive gaze that brought back to him the memory of the worst pain he had ever felt—his testicles seemed to have a memory of their own—and Loud Noise simply nodded to her and passed on by. And when he took a wife it was instead a round, placid, pretty-faced girl who seemed unlikely ever to twist her husband’s balls, even if he deserved it. Loud Noise had long since decided that he was not by nature a fighter, so why should he bring a fighting woman under his own roof?
LOUD NOISE WAS NO SOONER MARRIED THAN HE BEGAN SUGGESTING to Tecumseh that he, too, should enter that state so natural to man.
They sat in Loud Noise’s clean, orderly new lodge, which his bride had recently built. It was the first time the brothers had visited with each other since the night Tecumseh had found him among the manflesh eaters, and it seemed as if Loud Noise were advocating this natural condition of marriage in order to make himself seem less unnatural by it.
Loud Noise exaggerated the bliss of his marriage. Though his new wife was a calm and gentle woman who kept a good house and never raised her voice, she did have annoying ways of expressing her dislike of her husband’s personal shortcomings. She would wrinkle her nose at the smell of his breath when he had had a little whiskey. A garment he had worn too long she would hold at arm’s length between her thumb and forefinger as if holding a rotten fish by the tail. These silent expressions would irk him more than if she had complained aloud, and he would glower at her and get heartburn. And when she saw his angry expression, she would cringe about in the lodge, her eyelids trembling as if she anticipated being hit—which he understood to be an allusion to his notorious bullying of women in the past. Yes, this woman looked like an ideal wife. But she would not let him sleep the day away as he sometimes would have liked to do. She would not let him nest in his own squalor as he had used to do. And when he vented his gases with his usual loudness and virtuosity, she would not laugh but instead would get up from whatever she had been doing and go outside and make a great show of breathing fresh air, inhaling until her big breasts were as high as her chin. Furthermore, she had a passion for such costly white men’s things as iron kettles and steel awls and needles and mirrors and tin cups and silk cloth and glass beads. People would say she was a perfect wife. But without a word of complaint or nagging, she had made it clear from the beginning that she did not have a perfect husband, nor a good provider.
Loud Noise was not as happy a husband as he pretended to be. And perhaps his reason for urging Tecumseh to get married was that he thought someone else in the family should be as miserable and exasperated as he. So he discussed with Tecumseh the idea of marriage, saying, “You’re going to be an important war chief. You should have a woman and children, so people won’t shake their heads and moan about you.”
“I know,” Tecumseh replied. “You are not the first to give me such counsel. I have heard it from Black Hoof. And from Stands Firm, and certainly from our sister. And from Blue Jacket. Even from Little Turtle, who is not even of our tribe.” He smiled with patient amusement and said, “The next American general who comes into our country will probably send a messenger, saying, ‘Tecumseh, you should have a wife and children.’ Ha! And I will answer, ‘Why? If I had children, you would burn down the house they live in, and destroy the food that was raised for their mouths, and chase them off the ground they play on, and then drive them into a corner and chop them with your long knives.’ That is how I would answer. No, brother. I do not want to put children onto this earth until I am sure that they will not be like leaves before the wind.” He drew from his pipe and looked at Loud Noise, then at his woman, who was moving a piece of bark to enlarge the smokehole in the roof—her silent way of saying that she did not like all this tobacco smoke in her lodge, even if it was being produced by one of the tribe’s most renowned warriors, her esteemed brother-in-law.
“But if you were to marry,” Loud Noise persisted, “you would want a woman of this kind.…” He nodded at her with a smile, speaking clearly so she would hear every word. “A perfect and obedient wife, not one of those ball pullers.”
Tecumseh smiled at this. “Of course,” he said.
“May I ask who would interest you, if you were interested?”
Tecumseh sighed. How could he make it clear to a misty-brain like Loud Noise this important conviction he had reached? He tried to say it in a way that would not offend the woman on the other side of the fire:
“The Messengers tell me that my life will be used up in fighting the white men. They tell me that I alone of the Shawnees will stand against them when all the other chiefs have put their marks upon their treaties. Until there are no more white men coming against us, I cannot divide my spirit between this task and the needs of a family. The Shawnee are my family, and I must be free to take care of them. And so, I am not interested in a wife yet. Even though …” He smiled and inclined his head toward his sister-in-law, who pretended not to be listening as hard as she was. “Even though a good wife does give her husband strength as well as comfort, as I am sure.”
Loud Noise seemed to have been listening well to all of this, and he sat puffing smoke and gazing into the fire. But then he said, “If you do try to get a wife, you would not want to get one like the Peckuwe woman, She-Is-Favored. You would not want a troublesome woman, one of those ball pullers.” He feared the maiden might tell Tecumseh of his assault.
Tecumseh sighed. Then he tilted his head and looked with mock reproach at his brother. “Why do you call that one troublesome? You know it is one of the worst offenses to say untrue gossip about a person.”
Loud Noise, suddenly afraid of being censured again, raised his eyebrows and shrugged like an innocent. “Oh … I know nothing! She just looks bold, like one of those who would not be afraid to grab you.”
Tecumseh smiled. He did not know the painful memory Loud Noise had of being grabbed by the Peckuwe girl. He himself was remembering when she had grabbed his loincloth off in the ball game. He smiled at the memory of that hilarious moment that seemed so long ago. “It is true,” he said, “that one would not be afraid to grab you.”
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