The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Ah!” Frances exclaimed. Neepah and Minnow looked at her, frowning. “Penn!” she exclaimed. “He was a … he was of the Friends, like my family!”

  “Kweh-kuh,” said Neepah.

  “Yes. People call us Quakers. My family, like Penn … we are always fair and hurt no one.”

  “Hm. Wehlee heeleh,” Neepah murmured, tying off an end of the string and edging over to tend the cookfire. “But Penn Mikwon is dead now and there is not a wapsini who is our friend we can trust, not anywhere. Lenapehwuk were once the Grandfathers here, keeping peace on Taxkwox Menoteh, land on the Turtle’s back. Now everyone pushes us and strikes us and tells us lies. The wapsituk are always so close we can smell them, but they will do nothing for us unless it helps them more than us. The wapsituk are many, but Lenapehwuk have not one to trust among them all.”

  “You can trust Friends,” Frances insisted dutifully, always believing this of her people.

  “You say it,” Neepah replied, but there was in her face a look that showed her doubt, and that look troubled Frances, who wanted everyone to believe her, and Neepah most of all.

  While the broth simmered in the afternoon, Frances and Minnow crawled everywhere in the wikwam looking for the nest of the mouse, and Neepah left for a while, telling them to keep a fire burning under the kettle.

  They never found the mouse nest, or even saw the mouse, but while they were looking they talked about animals of all sorts, and Frances’ thoughts eventually came to what she had heard about the turtle. She sat with both palms pressed to the floor, then asked Minnow, “Do you really think there is a turtle holding up all this land? Mountains and everything?”

  “All Lenapehwuk know that to be so. All other peoples too.”

  Frances squinted at her, doubtful. She had never heard such a thing until she came here. If her Quaker parents had known such a thing, they would have told her. They had said the world was a ball in the air, which floated and stayed steady without needing anything under it, always going around the sun. That in its own way was hard to believe—something able to stay up all by itself with nothing under it—but her father had pointed at the moon and said, “Do you see anything holding up the moon? God holds everything up where He put it.”

  Frances said now to Minnow, “Then what holds up the turtle?”

  Minnow looked at her from the edges of her eyes. “What do you say, Palanshess?”

  “I ask, what is under the turtle to hold him up?”

  “Not him. It is Grandmother Turtle.”

  “Then I ask, what is under her to hold her up with the world on her back?”

  Minnow looked uncomfortable, glancing around and tight-lipped. “Why do you ask this? Under everything is Turtle!”

  “Then under Grandmother Turtle is another turtle to hold her up?”

  Minnow shrugged. “Turtle is under everything. I told you. All people know that.”

  Frances was on a road of inquiry and enjoying it. This was like arguing with her older sisters at home until they flung up their hands, which she’d always taken to mean that she had won. “Then you say that under the turtle under the earth there is another turtle? And then what is under that turtle?”

  Minnow took a long breath through her nose with her mouth shut tight and her eyes narrowed. Fists on hips, she exclaimed:

  “See, Palanshess! It is Turtle all the way down!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  May 1779

  Wyalusing, a Town of the Delawares

  The first day of sunshine and real warmth after a long, rainy spring, Frances started to put on her ragged gray dress to go outdoors, but Neepah snatched it away from her and said, “Today this dirty thing will be washed in the creek.”

  Frances blinked. “I have no other garment!”

  “That I know,” Neepah said, folding the dress.

  “But I want to go out there. This is a lovely day!”

  “That too I know. Today we will all go to the fields and begin planting the xaskwim. But that is later, when the sun has warmed the ground. Go on now.” She motioned toward the door.

  “But I have no clothing on.”

  “On a day like this you need no clothing, little Pretty Face.”

  Frances was dumbstruck. Though she had grown used to sleeping naked, and was bathed at the creek by some of the women, she had never imagined just going out of the wikwam with nothing on. At the mere notion of it, she envisioned the expression of horror it would cause on her mother’s face.

  “Go!” Neepah exclaimed with a shooing motion. “You stand there making a mouth like namesh, the fish! Have you forgotten the language you learn so well, and do not understand ‘go’?”

  “But do you not see I have nothing on?”

  A mocking little smile began to show on Neepah’s lips. “Yes, I see that. How could I not see? Your wapsi skin gleams like Grandmother Moon. Go out and let Noox Keeshoox shine on you. Grandfather Sun will make your skin my color.”

  “I can’t! This is bad!”

  “How is this bad? Look out there and see. The little ones cannot wait for such a day, the bareness feels so nice!”

  Frances hunched in the shadows beside the door, peering out. Everywhere in the village the voices of children were squealing and laughing. At that moment a small flock of girls, most of whom she knew and played games with, raced giggling and chattering down the lane between the wikwams, Minnow leading them. The sun dapple through the young leaves above flickered over their brown skin. Not one of them had on a stitch. A moment later four boys ambled past in another direction, carrying throwing sticks and a grapevine hoop. With their long hair hanging loose, they looked almost like the girls, except for their pee spouts. She had seen those on her little brothers.

  Neepah said behind her, “Now you see. So go and feel good before the mosquitoes are born.” And, moving swiftly, she took Frances’ arm with one hand and put the other under her little white bottom and propelled her out. Frances spun around and tried to dart back into the darkness of the wikwam, but Neepah stood grinning with her arms barricading the door. The woman said, “You cannot come back in. Now while you are naked for bathing, go down to the creek and wash the winter off. You smell like a little sheekak.”

  Frances’ mouth dropped open. She knew that meant skunk. Tossing her red hair and biting her lips tight, she turned her back on the insult and stamped away toward the creek, almost too indignant to feel shame for her nakedness.

  Because she was so white, all the children playing at the creek looked her over with curiosity, but in a moment their attention passed and they went back to splashing and squealing. The coldness of the water made her shudder, but she went in and squatted with the water to her waist to hide herself, and also because Neepah had told her she smelled bad. And the water certainly was not as cold as it had been the times when the women bathed her in the winter. There had been days then when even though the creek had ice at its edges, it felt warmer than the winter air. Since being with these Indian people, she had endured cold of the kind that her mother had warned would bring on her death, but she’d not even gotten sick from it. Neepah had told her, “One is fire inside. My father told me this. When outside it is cold, Huma Shawanawunk, South Grandmother Spirit, blows on the fire inside you. She is even stronger than Muxumsah Lowunawunk, North Grandfather Spirit, who blows on your outside. That is all, and it passes.” Frances had a hard time keeping track of all the spirit names, and sometimes thought these people lived with magic. And yet everything Neepah and the older women taught her seemed to prove true. Indeed she could endure cold.

  Squatting in the water, Frances peed and shivered and watched the other children dive and tumble and splash each other. Ever since spring began bringing up the wildflowers and making the trees bud, the children had been in a high state of excitement—but not only the children. The grown-up men and women were intense and busy, seeming like children who are expecting something. Many worked in the center of the town on a great arbor called Xinkwikan, the Grea
t House, strengthening it with new poles and sheets of bark. Neepah explained to Frances what the Great House was, and from what she had said, it was like a church. Her family, being of the Friends Society, did not have a church, but other people at Wilkes-Barre did. Frances had explained to Neepah that the Quakers prayed at home. Neepah had replied, “Lenapehwuk do the same. All the time. But in the Great House, in spring and fall, we make the Sacred Fire and give thanks to He Who Creates By Thinking. We prepare for doing that soon.” And so the excited anticipation of that event hung in the air and animated everybody, and Frances could feel it.

  Without someone holding her, Frances felt precarious in the water. She feared the deep places. Hardly any white people knew how to swim. Here in this creek were children even younger than she, as young as three years, even, who could paddle about without touching the bottom, or go down in one place and surface somewhere else. Minnow, who was well named, could go underwater from one creek bank to the opposite and back without coming up to breathe. But even though the little ones were like otters in the stream, they were always watched over by others a few years older, who helped them, or corrected them if they became too rough or reckless. They were like older brothers and sisters, even though from different families. Frances knew that if she got in trouble in the water, someone would help her. All the same, she stayed at the edge where it was shallow, taking no chances of falling into the current.

  She knelt there and rinsed herself until she was chilly and felt clean, and just when she was ready to get out into the warm sunshine despite her nakedness, she found Minnow standing on the creek bank in her way, wearing nothing but a tiny bag the size of a thumb, hanging by a thong around her neck. Sunlight filtering through the high foliage shimmered and danced on her skin, making her look for a moment like a spirit of shadow and gold, and she had appeared as unexpectedly as a spirit. Minnow said, “Neepah tells you, wash your hair too.”

  And so Frances did, though she would get colder and the wet hair would hang cold on her even after she got out in the warm sun. When she was done, and wiped the water from her eyes, Minnow was still there, and now the girl said, “Neepah says bring you home when your hair is clean. So come now.”

  They were almost back to Neepah’s wikwam, trotting along between the houses and in and out among walking people and horses and dogs, before Frances heard some boy laugh and shout “Wapsini!” which reminded her that she was naked. For an instant she remembered her mother and what she might think of this, but then the sun and mild air and the feeling of cleanness were so pleasant and all as they should be, and there was so much happening now that spring had blossomed from the gray winter, that she passed that shout out of her mind and hurried on to see why Neepah had called her home.

  Neepah had two covered clay pots sitting in the middle of the wikwam, and a tool made of a stick and a big flat bone were on them. She was sitting by the fire ring, where the fire was down to ashes and embers, working on something very small when the girls darted in through the doorway. Frances saw her quickly hide the little thing under her hand and slip it behind a bundle, like a child caught with something. Neepah got up in that graceful way the women had, merely unfolding her legs and swaying forward till she was standing erect, without using her hands against the ground at all. She met Frances with a smile, ran a hand down over her hair and acted like a dog sniffing around her, then said, “Wehlee heeleh! Not like the little skunk now. Now eat some of that sweet hominy before we go and work in the field.”

  The girls ate. Frances loved the sweet flavors of maple sugar and berries in the hominy, but much of her mind was on what Neepah had so quickly tucked out of sight. She had come to trust this woman like a mother, so it bothered Frances to have caught Neepah hiding something from her. While she ate she slyly watched Neepah pick the little secret thing up from behind the bundle and slip it inside the bundle. She pretended she was not doing anything, and Frances pretended she was not watching her. It was like being home among brothers and sisters, where they all had done sneaking, including Frances. They had seldom done anything bad, but even innocent things or good things had been done secretly, if only to know something the others did not. Frances hoped that Neepah would go outside so she could look in the bundle, but then she felt ashamed for having thought that. Anyway, if Neepah did go out and she peeked, Minnow probably would tell on her.

  But it did not matter, because Neepah did not go out. When the girls were finished eating, Neepah stuck the scoop back in the hominy pot and picked up the tool and one of the covered pots and told the girls to carry the other pot by the rope net it was slung in. “Kulesta,” she said. Listen. “They sing as they go to plant! Come now. This is a day of joy and importance!”

  And Frances could hear the distant voices of many women beginning to sing, a simple, repetitive, slow song that swelled and faded on the breeze. It was a strange and lovely sound. She had hardly ever heard singing before; the Friends did not favor it.

  They walked through the village in the direction of the singing, catching up with other women and children going toward the gate in the palisade. The others were singing, and Neepah began singing the song with them. So did Minnow, but Frances did not know the song and did not try to sing it.

  Eventually all the women and their naked little children were in a circle in an open field outside the palisade, a level bottomland where old tree stumps stood rotting. There was no underbrush in the field and no weeds. The ground was strewn with bleached dead cornstalks. The people in the circle faced inward, still singing, their bodies slightly swaying as they shifted their weight from one foot to the other. In the center of the circle was an aged huma standing with her white hair loose in the breeze. She held some kind of a bowl in her hands and smoke was coming from it. The old woman turned to face every direction, then bent to extend the smoke bowl toward the earth, then raised it toward the sky. The others stopped singing. Two motherly looking women stood beside the old one, looking very serious. They raised their hands toward the sky, palms up, and the old one began to pray. All the women in the circle, standing with their faces turned up toward the sun and holding their tools and pots and baskets, were totally quiet, and even the youngest children grew quiet. The scalp on the back of Frances’ head tingled.

  The huma began talking toward the sky. Her voice was feeble and Frances could not hear many of her words, but she did hear her speak to Kahesana Xaskwim, who she already knew was Mother Corn. The old woman often said “Waneeshee” and spoke of buds and leaves, of sun and thunder and rainwater, and she spoke about the prayer sounds one could hear when wind blows through the tops of trees. She said the People rejoiced when things began to grow. She spoke of the Three Sisters. Frances had heard the stories about Mother Corn, that she was the spirit that made plants give food the people could eat. But it seemed strange and wrong to her that prayers should be offered to someone besides God. She had heard that at home since she could remember: there is no one between thee and God; there are no priests and no sacramentals. Frances was not sure just what a sacramental was, but from what she had heard of them, they were the things that priests handled while praying, and she wondered if the smoking bowl might be a sacramental. Frances, who had never dreamed that she would ever be standing outdoors with no clothes on in a circle of Indian people, including grown women with their teats bare, was reaching back into her fading memories of what she had been taught all her life before, and she was a little frightened by all this. She wished her mother and father were here so she could ask them if this was right or wrong. Certainly they always knew what was right and wrong.

  But even while she was thinking about these doubts, something was beginning to happen that made the doubts simply float and scatter away like the smoke from the old woman’s bowl:

  Those three women standing in the swirling smoke in the center of the circle slowly disappeared. When the breeze blew the smoke away, there were three plants where the women had stood. One, in the center, was a cornstalk tall and dark gr
een with its shiny long leaves and crowning yellow tassel. The others were broad-leaf, twining plants; one’s vines twined up the cornstalk, the other’s crept over the ground. The plants were there where the women had been standing, and the singing could be heard again. But the women and children in the circle were not moving their mouths, and the singing seemed to be rising up from the ground. Frances could feel something rising up into her through the soles of her feet, and it was not any usual feeling like wetness or cold or heat, but the music itself, so that although she did not understand the words of the song, she understood that Kukna, Mother Earth, was singing that she was ready for seeds and would nourish them now. That was all the song said, though there were no real words to be understood. Instead of the words there was simply a tingling happiness that rose through her and went out through the top of her head into the sky, a feeling she had felt only a few times ever before, when she had been praying and knew that God heard her prayers.

  In a moment the joy was gone and there was left only a memory of the singing, fading and echoing into the wind, and the three women were standing in the center where they had been before, the smoke swirling from the bowl, the three plants no longer visible. Frances looked around and all the women in the circle looked very happy, talking to each other and hugging each other and their children, and walking away from the circle into various parts of the field. Frances felt a warm hand on her back and looked up to see Neepah smiling down. “Palanshess saw them, the Three Sacred Sisters?”