Winter 1778
Valley of the Susquehanna, Pennsylvania
Ruth Slocum with an awl in her hand was repairing one of her husband’s boots, which he had slashed open along the instep with a bad blow of a hewing adze. As she made stitch holes along the cut edges, she shook her head ruefully and thanked God again that he had not lopped his foot off at the ankle. The man was a prodigious worker, but frightfully lax about his own safety. He would always assure her that the Lord would protect him until his tasks were done. It was the same faith that had kept him from abandoning his lands in the face of the Tory and Indian raids, and of course a good Quaker wife could not argue against that kind of faith. But she could, and did, worry and pray in silence for his protection.
Just now Jonathan was up on the hill pasture pitching hay to the cattle in the snow, and she had some confidence that he would not hurt himself with a wooden hay fork—though her father Isaac and her son William should stay nimble to keep from being jabbed by it as Jonathan heaved and flung with his usual abandon. Will at sixteen going on seventeen was his father’s main helper now that his older brother Giles had gone to the devil’s work of soldiering.
Her own father still went into the fields, but he was failing, sleepless and morose over the fate of two abducted grandchildren, and always in pain from bladder stones. The poor old gent had to stand on his head or lie upon his side to urinate, which naturally he found humiliating and distressing as well as difficult. Nearly every day some member of this large family blundered upon him in such outlandish positions. But he simply could not pass water standing upright, and might well have been dead by now had he not heard of this recourse through the writings of Dr. Franklin. Still, Isaac Tripp would never loaf at home when others were working, even though he could not do much. “No man’s ever old enough to be useless” was his creed. Ruth Slocum loved and admired her father immensely but thought he had no more common sense about caring for himself than her husband had.
Or most men, she thought, pushing the steel awl through the boot leather. Having no second pair of boots, Jonathan was out there now in deep snow in woolen stockings and a pair of homemade moccasins, and probably his feet would be soaked and blue with cold when he came in. His clothes and hands were always needing to be mended or healed of cuts from axes, saws, and spokeshaves. Ruth had told him once, “I thank Heaven thee’s a Quaker, for I believe if thee were a soldier, thee’d shoot thyself before breakfast every day, or sit on a bayonet.”
How a body’s got to worry about loved ones, she thought. And then that turned her mind to little Frances, about whom she had worried and prayed so ceaselessly for some six weeks that the child had become rather more like a sickness pain in the heart than a flesh-and-blood child who was somewhere out there in the wilderness at the mercy of capricious natives who might or might not have souls. Jonathan said everyone does, and the doctrine of the Friends said so, but Ruth Slocum’s faith in that doctrine had wavered the day those men came out of the woods, killed Nathan Kingsley, and carried away her daughter. It did seem hard to believe that men with souls could do such things.
But then, Tories who were Christians had been doing such things. And her own son Giles was somewhere marching with a gun and bayonet and likely was doing things one would not believe a person with a soul could do. It was hard to take comfort from doctrines of faith while families were being torn apart.…
Ruth Slocum had to blot her eyes with her sleeve because her work with the awl was blurring through tears as she remembered her little girl’s outstretched hands and kicking feet.
She had never for a moment believed that her daughter was dead. If the girl were dead, she would have felt a hole where Frannie’s life had been in the weave of the family. No, not dead, but worse: suffering from cold and brutality and grief for the loss of home and family, perhaps little by little losing her faith in prayer, the Inner Light dimming day by day as she was dragged through the wintry forests.
Judith, sewing a child’s garment across the table, said, “Mama, will thee be needing this needle? I’m nearly done with it.”
It brought Ruth Slocum back into the room with her living, present children, those still safe around her. She dabbed her eyes again on her sleeve, coughed lightly, and replied, “No, dear. This’ll need the harness needle, and sinew, not thread.” She knew her daughter was looking at her and seeing her tears, and that made her angry at herself, because in times like these the offspring needed to see fortitude and good cheer. Judith’s own husband, Hugh Foresman, was away as a soldier, and she, still scarcely more than a bride and dizzy in love, had difficulty enough keeping tears of fear and anxiety down without seeing them in her mother’s eyes too. And, just as Giles bore in this family the onus of being a soldier, Judith bore that of being married to one, and that too kept her in a delicate disposition.
It was cold outdoors, and all the younger children were in this one room of the cabin or in the sleeping rooms above. Little Isaac and the baby, Jonathan, were asleep on and under blankets in the stair corner. Mary and Joseph were in blankets too, but were awake and murmuring child talk. Ruth looked at them and thought of how close they were, almost like a pair unto themselves within the larger family of brothers and sisters, even though Mary was eight years older than Joseph. Sometimes, rather, it seemed as if Mary were not so much Joseph’s sister as a kind of submother to him. Ruth Slocum remembered the day when the warriors came, and remembered the sight of Mary rushing away toward the fort with little Joseph going so hard his pants slid down. If not for Mary, the Indians might well have carried Joseph away as well as Frannie. Close to the hearth, Ebenezer was sitting on a three-legged stool, working on a pair of scissors with a whetstone on his lap, a butcher knife and a mortise chisel lying on the floor between his feet. He was the family’s sharpener and tinker; being half lame, he was not much good in the fields, and so had trained his hands to many kinds of work. Ruth watched him sharpening blades and it reminded her that it was what the Kingsley lad had been doing when the Delawares came and killed him and scalped him. Scalped him, yes, with the very selfsame blade he had been sharpening.
This was awful. Every thought came back around to that terrible day when they had taken Frannie away. There sat Ebenezer, whom the Indians had left because he was lame, and one was thankful for that. But if little Frannie’s shoeless feet were frozen out there in that harsh wilderness, she would be lame too, and there was no way of knowing.
But Ruth Slocum still managed to sustain hope. She now hung on to the promise her husband had made her:
Come spring, Jonathan had vowed, he would set out north, to Wyalusing and the farther Indian towns if necessary, unarmed, and keep going from one town to another, confirming his friendship with the Delawares and his neutrality in the war, and ask them to find and return his daughter to her loving family. He would make it clear to them that only Giles, of all the Slocums, and Judith’s husband Hugh, had taken up the gun, ever. He would convince them that his heart was still pure in peace and that he was not their enemy, and when they saw that, they would acknowledge their mistake and take his hand in friendship again, and they would go and get Frances wherever she was and return her—and perhaps her cousin Isaac and Wareham too. Jonathan knew the Delawares’ tongue well enough that he could effect such a fair dealing. And in the event that they demanded more from him than just his friendship, he would be prepared to pay them a ransom. The Slocums and the Tripps were not poor people. Jonathan could certainly raise enough in money or goods to buy the children back, if that was what the Delawares wanted.
Of course there would be risk for Jonathan, going out among them like that after what had happened, and Ruth dreaded that risk. But she had faith in her husband and in the Lord God, and she could dream of him returning down the Susquehanna Valley next spring with little Frannie on the horse before him and his arms holding around her as he used to when he took her riding in the meadows.
Suddenly everyone awake in the room looked up and looked aro
und at each other, eyes full of alarm.
“Those were guns,” Judith said in little more than a whisper.
There had been two reports. And now before anyone could move, another boomed and rolled along the valley, its reverberations dulled by the log walls and softened by the deep snow outside.
Ruth Slocum left the awl sticking in the boot on the table and overturned the bench in her haste to get to the door. She hardly had a hand on the latch before Ebenezer was there at the door beside her. He sometimes called himself “the fastest limper in Pennsylvania.” With all the other children in the room stirring in their places, Ruth Slocum pulled the door open a few inches, keeping a shoulder ready to ram it shut again if there was danger right outside.
The sunny snow was almost blinding. Squinting, blinking, she scanned the foreground and then searched up the slope toward the hill meadow where her father and husband and son had gone to work. The brightness made her sneeze, once, twice, three times, and she could not see anything up there.
Ebenezer exclaimed beside her: “Mama! It’s Will a-coming, and he’s limping faster than I can!”
And then, her heart leaping in alarm, she saw William lurching down over the distant crest of the snowy hill and heard him yelling, his voice so frantic his words were not intelligible.
She did not need to understand the words. Maybe she would not even have had to hear the gunshots, because there was a pain and coldness blowing through her so terribly that she knew somebody was lost to her. If only Will was running down the hill, it meant something had befallen her husband or her father.
It was as if a blizzard were blowing her, and she was swaying even though standing firm against the door, and through the white swirl of the blizzard and the watering of her eyes from the sneezing she could barely see the figure of her son William shambling and lurching down the hill toward the house with a ghastly slowness, kicking up snow and snow clods that sprayed around him. He came floundering, yelling down among the snowcapped tree stumps and the big dead gray trees that had been killed by girdling, his black coat flapping around him and his voice sounding hoarse and strained as crow calls.
Ebenezer shouldered the door open and clambered down the stoop to go out to William, and she heard Ebenezer say, “He’s bleedin’!”
And then that was the last she remembered because the blizzard in her soul swept the last of the strength out of her and she was falling through whiteness.
Ebenezer helped the carpenter make the two coffins, one for his father and one for his grandfather. He said it was better to be doing something. He and the carpenter sawed and planed the boards for the coffins in the yard of the fort while Ruth Slocum and her other children sat in mourning inside. Near them in the room lay the corpses of their father and grandfather, under blankets on a table. The men who had brought the bodies down from the hill on a sledge had advised the family not to lift the blankets because both men had been shot and scalped, and Mr. Tripp had been speared and tomahawked as well.
The incident had been visible from the fort, and a man who had seen it happen kept describing it to everyone who came in to pay respects to the Slocums.
“The savages just shot from the edge o’ the woods, then run out at ’em. That boy Will, he was behind the hay, and when Mr. Tripp and Mr. Slocum fell, he lit out down the hill, yellin’ for help. Old Tripp, he was only wounded, and when a savage aimed his musket at Will, the old gent tried to grab it. That’s when they cut ’im down with a spear and a hatchet. One shot down the hill at Will and only hit his heel. I saw the whole business but it was out of range for me to shoot. I like t’ cried, bein’ so helpless to do anything.”
Finally Ruth, all red-eyed and trembling, said to the man, “Will thee please not tell it again? My children …”
“Ah!” He nodded, but looked insulted, and went outside, where he stood in the snow near the door and kept retelling it to everyone who came, and the widow and children could still hear it.
Then the banging of hammers on coffin nails began, and while that desolate sound was going on, Will came in on a stick crutch, his wounded foot wrapped in linen strips, through which blood was already seeping. The fork of the crutch he had padded with the folded leg of his boot, whose heel had been burst by the musket ball that hurt him. Will’s face was drawn and pale from pain, his lips looked swollen, and his eyes glimmered, as from crying. The man who had been retelling what he witnessed came in with Will, holding his upper arm and helping him up onto the threshold, still earnestly apologizing for not having been able to help. The Slocum children and their mother all got up to gather around Will, but he warned them away with the brusqueness of his movements and stood there sagging on his crutch, looking down with wet eyes at the blanketed corpses.
“Lad,” the man was saying, “if you’d not been behind the hay just then, you’d all three be lying there right now, three generations, not two! I saw it all, my boy, and how I wished I could have shot the damn savages!”
“Oh, yes. Shooting savages,” William said in a musing tone. “Shooting savages. Yes, that’s what’s got us all this.” He nodded toward the corpses. “This and Frannie.” Ruth had come to stand close to Will, and she knew what he was saying.
The man looked puzzled. “What?”
“He means Giles in the army shooting savages is what brought this upon us,” Ruth said in a flat voice, that statement she had kept herself from making while her husband was alive to believe it. She could say it to anyone now, and would even to Giles if Giles were here.
That night they were sitting vigil on a bench near the coffins in the cold room, a candle on each coffin. Ruth had been holding and nursing the baby, saying nothing, praying in silence for strength and wisdom to keep on sustaining her big family without Jonathan to sustain her. Or her father. She had no father now, and no husband. She had become a widow woman and fatherless all in one moment. Everything that had meant anything to her was all overturned, worse even than when they had carried Frannie away last month.
She felt Will looking at her and turned to look at his face looking at her in the candlelight. He was haggard from pain and fatigue and his red hair was lank. His breath clouded in the cold room.
She said, “Does thee want to take a blanket and lie down, son?”
“Thank thee, no, I’m well enough.”
She took a long breath. “ ’Tis thee and me now,” she said. “Thee’s the eldest son at home and we’ll need thee as man o’ the house. Thee’ll have to take up what thy father had set himself to do.”
“Giles is older than I.”
She said after a moment, “Giles has rather forsaken us, as thy father thought. He’s not the one to take up those burdens.”
Will sighed and nodded. His brothers and sisters were not asleep, but were pairs of dull, sad, stupefied eyes all around. How little or how much of this they were comprehending, Ruth Slocum had no notion.
She felt benumbed. It was nearly midnight now. She thought, It proves again: thee cannot remember a day thee’s failed to get through.
She said softly to William, “Thee worked close beside him; I suppose he’d told thee all he’d planned to do?”
Will nodded. “God willing, my foot will be well enough come spring to plow the north corner.…”
“Never thee mind that,” she said. “We all can plow. What thy father’d promised to do come spring is go to the Indians and bring back Frannie.”
February 1779
Wyalusing Town
Frances knew what the Indian women were doing because her family had done it the year before. She remembered it as one of the happiest times. Though it had been hard work for everyone in the family, and cold, wet feet for days, it had yielded something that tasted better than any other taste she knew, and her father and mother had told her it also meant that spring was coming.
She carried armloads of dry sticks from a pile of brush to the tindeh place, which was where the hot fire was kept burning under the steaming kettles. She was helping the o
ther children of about her age. There were boys and girls going back and forth between the brush piles and the tindeh and they were cheerful and friendly to her, and mostly very pretty. She had some favorites already. At the brush pile there was an old man who was very strong, and he kept breaking the long branches into short sticks for the children to carry. He could break most of them under his knee with a loud crack. The ones that were too big to break that way, he would put between the trunks of a pair of twin trees and push until the limbs broke. He had a brown face, all wrinkles, and long white hair. His name was Kukhus, meaning Owl, and he was known as a lehpawcheek, which meant a wise one. He was about the same age as old Grandfather Tripp and he was a merry man, always saying things that made the women laugh. Frances remembered how her Grandfather Tripp had to be upside down to pee. This old man did not have to do that. She had seen him turn his back when no children were near, and then she saw where he had peed in the snow.
Just about everybody seemed to be working. Grown-ups carried pots and pails and skin bags of sap from the maple trees in the woods, and poured it into the kettles. The village was dense with smoke and steam. The people worked all day and all night. When someone got tired, she could go into a wikwam, as their little round houses were called, and sleep while someone else took her place at the kettles. There was much laughter and storytelling. In the wikwams the old humas—the grandmothers—kept pots of suhpahn, and hominy with berries and meat, steaming by the cookfires, and one could eat at any time. It was not necessary to wait for a particular mealtime, or a particular bedtime, as in her family, and Frances rather enjoyed the freedom to eat and sleep when she felt like it. And she liked the food here.
Frances thought of her mother every day, often every day, and always pictured her in her mind when she was praying, and sometimes she got an ache in her bosom from thinking about her and her father and brothers and sisters.
The Indian woman who had washed Frances in the cold creek took care of her as if they were mother and daughter, but so did all the other Indian women; she was just the main one. The woman was called Neepah.
The Red Heart Page 5