The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Sisters? I saw plants.”

  “Wehlee heeleh! Corn and beans and squash, they are the Sisters. Come now. We work.” She hefted her bone tool.

  Neepah’s tool was a hoe. She chopped and worked the ground with the bone part, which she explained was the shoulder bone of a deer. The wooden handle to which it was fixed grew wet and slick with Neepah’s sweat. She had braided her long hair behind her head so it would not hang all sweaty around her bent-down face. The sweat ran down her shoulders and dripped from the nipples of her hanging breasts, which quaked every time she chopped into the ground. The deerhide skirt tied around her waist grew dark and sodden with sweat. She was working harder than Frances had ever seen a woman work, although her own mother had always been busy working. This was the kind of work Frances had seen only men do, and all the Indian women were doing it, but they were singing as they worked.

  Frances and Minnow helped Neepah, and it was hard work. The woman would dig a hole with the hoe, and chop the soil from the hole until it was fine and loose, without any clods. Boys brought baskets of creek fish up to the field, and it was the children’s duty to keep bringing fish over, to drop one into each hole. Frances at first did not like handling the slimy, scaly fish with their sharp fins and their smell, but after a while she got used to it. Neepah filled each hole with the loose dirt, covering the fish, and then mounded up the dirt to form a trough around the mound. She pressed three seeds of corn and two flat squash seeds into the soil mound and covered them. Every seed had been rubbed with bear oil, and so the bear oil and the sweat and the soil and the fish made a sticky and strong-smelling mud over everyone’s hands. Frances and Minnow went down to the creek every few minutes to fill a pot with water, and that gave her a chance to wash the mess off her hands.

  The hardest work was carrying the full water pot. She had never thought water could be so heavy. Neepah wet each mound of seeded soil with some of the water, then moved on to the next place where she had made a hole. She stopped singing now and then to explain things. The fish would rot in the ground to feed the little corn plant’s roots, she said. “Kahesana Xaskwim likes fish,” she said. “She told us that long ago and so we always feed her fish. The bear oil protects the little seed from mold until it has become a little plant. Then it can take care of itself and needs only water. If rain does not fall in the summer, we have to bring water from the creek. That is hard work in the summer. You will learn that to be so. You will feel so hot.”

  “I feel so hot now,” Frances said.

  “Not hot like summer hot.”

  “But very hot.”

  Neepah straightened up, leaned her hoe against her thigh and looked at Frances, turned her around and looked at her back and shoulders. “Ah, heh! I said Grandfather Sun would turn you red!” She rinsed her hands with water from the pot and then reached into the bear oil and with both hands smeared it over Frances’ skin, especially where she was becoming sunburned. Neepah was dripping with sweat. Her body was big and thick and brown and strong. “Now is the hide of Palanshess so hot?”

  “It feels good now. Waneeshee. But I smell like bear.”

  “Maxk’wah the bear is the brother of the two-legged. He helps us in many ways. I will tell you Maxk’wah stories one night. Now. Bring more water. Wash the pot out first so we can drink.”

  They worked on as the sun moved westward in the afternoon sky and grew hotter. Frances could hardly lug the water pot from the creek, she had become so tired, and the bear oil on her body and arms made the pot hard to hold. The women kept working and sweating and singing. Once, Neepah stopped singing and put down the hoe and shook her fingers down to spray sweat on the ground. She laughed and said, “I believe Mother Corn likes pim as much as she likes fish! Maybe our pim makes the corn grow.”

  “I do not know pim.”

  “Pim is this,” Neepah said, sluicing more sweat off her arms and flicking it on the ground. “Here is more pim to drink, Mother Corn.”

  The field was very wide, but most of it now was covered with the little planting hillocks the women had made. They were everywhere, about two steps apart. They were not in rows like the corn the Slocum men planted after making plow furrows.

  Slocum, Frances thought, suddenly shivering with a strange feeling. She had not thought her family’s name much, hardly ever since living in this village and learning the language of these people. Frances was still her name, by which she still thought of herself, and which Neepah still could not say right. But she had not heard or thought of Slocum for so long, she realized she might one day forget it if she did not use it somehow. It was a strange feeling, added to the other strange feelings she was getting from all this effort. She felt hot but shivery, and heavy but almost delicate enough for the breeze to blow over. And she still remembered seeing women turn to plants and then back to women, but it seemed as the afternoon wore on that perhaps she had only dreamed that.

  But several times this afternoon she had felt that strange joy go up through her from the ground into the sky, like a prayer going up; it kept reminding her that she had seen what Neepah called the Three Sacred Sisters. “Slocum,” she whispered to herself, to get a hold on it again. Slocum. “Neepah?”

  “I listen, Pretty Face. Ask.”

  “Where is the third Sister seed?”

  “We’ll plant beans later in these same little hills, not today. When the corn has a stalk strong enough for a bean vine to climb on and stay up from the ground.”

  “Does not the squash need to climb up?”

  “No. It wanders on the ground. It grows wide leaves that cover the earth with shade so weeds will not grow in our field. The Three Sacred Sisters help each other, you see, just as you see all these Lenapeh women help each other now. And you, Pretty Face, you have helped us well today. Waneeshee. You are not bad, for a wapsini. Well, you are turning red, after all.”

  The pleasure rushed from the ground up through Frances again. Neepah had called her a wapsini, but in a kind way, and made a joke about her skin turning red from the sun. And she had called her good. And she kept calling her Pretty Face.

  Neepah chuckled. Frances laughed. There in the middle of a busy field full of sweating brown women and pots and fish and children, Frances laughed from pleasure. Even solemn Minnow was laughing. This was a good time. But in the midst of their laughter, Frances remembered Neepah hiding something from her.

  Then they heard a rumbling. People turned and looked about. It was the sound of hoofbeats, going fast. The women leaned on their tools and watched a small band of riders come down off the hillside out of the trees and race their horses in through the palisade. Some of the women turned and looked at each other. Then for a while the women worked without singing. They would pause and face the village, as if listening for something. But nothing unusual was heard from the town, and the field was nearly all planted, and so they worked until they were done.

  The leading huma called out something from near the creek, and all the women and children took their pots and tools and baskets down and set them on the ground on the side of the field along the creek bank. Everyone was talking happily and laughing and sighing with weariness. The children jumped in the creek, squealing with the shock of the cool water after the heat of the field. Neepah motioned for Frances to go in the creek, and she went to the edge and sat with her feet in the water, gasping and shivering. Minnow dove past her like an arrow into the water.

  Up the bank, all the women were stripping off their sweat-soaked dresses. There were dozens of women standing there, old saggy ones, strong, thick ones like Neepah, young ones with nipples that pointed straight out. They all began singing then, a different song from before, and set off walking, dragging their dresses on the ground. Frances with her mouth hanging open stood up to watch them go. She had never seen a sight like it. Their brown and golden figures, shining with sweat in the afternoon light that slanted from just above the treetops, filed around the edge of the planted field. The children paid no attention, but kept sp
lashing and playing in the creek. Frances waded out to her knees and then sat down quickly in the water until she was wet to the neck, the cold water slaking the sunburn, and wiped her body and face with her hands until all the field dust and grit was off, though her skin was still a little slick with the bear oil. Meanwhile she kept watching the line of singing women passing along in the distance, dragging their garments and making dust.

  “Slocum,” she whispered to herself. “Slocum.”

  And finally when the singing grew louder, she saw that the women had followed the edge of the cornfield all the way around and were coming back to where they had started at the creek, and then the women whooped and laughed and charged into the cold water like children, except for a few old ones who eased in carefully, bathed themselves thoroughly, and rinsed and wrung out their clothes.

  Then when they were dressed again in their wet clothes, with gooseflesh on their skin, and starting back toward the village with their children through the long shade of the trees, carrying pots and tools and baskets, the afternoon light growing deeper gold and the shadows more blue, Neepah said, “Those men came with something to tell that perhaps is not good. Men come home making happy noise if all is well.” She sighed. “May I be mistaken. This is a joyful and important day, you will remember I said it would be. This was the day to plant and the Three Sisters blessed the day. There should be nothing bad brought to our village today. It must be to do with the wapsituk. When messengers come fast, it is usually that.”

  “Neepah, why did they all drag their garments and walk naked around the field?” She had been wanting to ask that.

  “Why, to mark.”

  “Mark?”

  “So all the little four-leggeds who would like to steal seeds will smell the pim of the two-leggeds, and will say, ‘No, this field belongs to the Lenapeh, and we must stay out.’ ”

  They walked on in the lovely waning daylight with the sun glowing in the pale green catkins and young leaves of the maples on the hill. Neepah finally seemed tired, breathing hard with the things she was carrying, and there was a grim and angry look about the way her mouth was set, and her eyes were glittering with anger or fear, and finally she spoke again.

  “How good it would be if we could scent the ground of our country with sweat and the wapsituk would say, ‘No, this land belongs to the Lenapeh; we must stay out.’ But no. Even scenting it with blood does not teach them it is ours.”

  A few steps farther and she looked down. “You, Palanshess, I ask you, think that you are ours. May you not go back to such a bad people.”

  I keep telling you, Frances thought, my Slocum family are not a bad people! But something inside told her that this was not a good time to say that.

  Neepah quickly built the embers in the fire ring into a small blaze to warm their food, but kept looking out the door of the wikwam and going out to talk to anyone who went by. They talked in quick, low voices. Frances knew that Neepah was hurrying and worried, which gave her a fearful feeling. It was the same as when she had watched her own mother to know whether everything was all right or not. But Neepah did notice that Frances was shivering, and told her to lie down in the bed and sleep until the food was warm. “I think you never were this tired,” she said, “since the warriors first brought you here. Sleep a bit, Palanshess, or you might be sick. Minnow, go down and wash her cloth clothes at the creek right now and they will dry by the fire. She will need clothes. Tonight will be cool.”

  The sun had gone down beyond the forest, and through the smoke hole in the roof Frances could see that the wisps of cloud still had a tinge of red in them. She was looking at those clouds from the bed where she lay with a soft deerhide over her, and when she awoke there were stars outside the roof, and all around the fire women were sitting, talking with Neepah. Their words, through her weariness, were incomprehensible murmurs. Frances’ body was so tired it hummed, and she closed her eyes again.

  She dreamed of being in the cabin with her mother and her brothers and sisters, but her father and grandfather were not there and so she thought they must be up on the hill. The next time she opened her eyes and looked up, there was daylight sky outside the smoke hole and smoke was rising out into it and she needed to pee so urgently that she had been dreaming about peeing, and knew that if she had not awakened she would have done it in the bed. Her arms and buttocks and shoulders and thighs hurt where the sun had burned her skin, and her stomach was so empty it was talking, as her mother used to say. All of this came to her at once, with the awareness that she was alone in the wikwam. Frances remembered that she had gone to sleep waiting for supper to warm, and had not even awakened to eat it. As she slipped out of bed to run out and relieve herself, she saw that her gray dress was hanging near the fire on a thong. There were no voices outdoors, as there usually were after daylight.

  Outside there was no one in sight, and so she just went around to the side of the wikwam and squatted on the ground instead of going down the path to the women’s dirt trench as she knew she was supposed to do. The sun was not up above the trees in the east and it was still chilly, even though her sunburned skin was hot. She saw that she had little white blisters on her arms and thighs, and thus probably had them on her bottom too. The cool air gave her gooseflesh even on her hot skin, but it was above all the absence of people that made her shivery. This made an awful strangeness. She wanted to see Neepah, Minnow, anyone she knew. She had never been all alone before.

  Hugging her arms around her body as she went around to the door, she heard voices at last. They were distant, muffled, many, and came from the center of the village, where the Council Lodge was.

  She went into the wikwam. She felt her dress and it was dry, so she pulled it down from the thong and started to put it on over her head, but it scratched her sunburn, so she took it off and dropped it on the bed. She was perplexed and was becoming frightened, here all alone and feeling this way.

  She remembered how the bear oil had soothed her sunburn the day before, and looked around for the little oil pot. She found it sitting behind a bundle, opened it and dipped her hands in. As she spread it over the hurting parts, she felt that she did indeed have blisters on her bottom as well. This time when she pulled the shabby, raveling little garment on, she could bear to have it against her skin. Squatting to replace the top on the oil pot, she was drawn toward the bundle. She remembered Neepah yesterday sneaking an unseen thing into it. She remembered that she had thought of looking in but had not had a chance because Neepah and Minnow were here. But now they were gone.

  Half afraid, Frances went to the door and looked out, both ways. There was not a person in sight. She went back in and knelt by the bundle. Down inside her heart, her conscience started trying to shame her. But in her mind she thought that this was not an unfair thing to do, because Neepah was being sneaky about it and deserved to have it found out.

  She slid her hand into the opening where she had seen Neepah put the thing, the voice of her conscience growing louder.

  Then there came through her something that was not her conscience, something that was stronger. It passed through her as the good feeling from the earth had passed through her yesterday, but it was not a good feeling like that. It was a feeling as if her stomach might heave up. And she thought she heard a noise that was a part of that feeling—very faint, like a flapping of bird wings, and a shadow seemed to pass over. But when she looked up, her heart racing, the sky outside the smoke hole was still cloudless and bright.

  She made her fingers crawl in the bundle, seeking deeper. She felt a strand, thin and threadlike, probably sewing sinew. Then she felt a lump, small and rounded and soft, like deerskin. The shadow passed over again and was gone, and there was the flapping, fluttery sound. But she kept probing.

  Suddenly she went ice-cold all over, as if she had jumped in the creek. Something was scrambling over the back of her hand and up her arm. And as she yanked her hand out of the bundle, something stuck her finger. She had jerked her hand back so quic
kly that it flung something through the air. The little object hit the bark ceiling and fell to the ground in the light inside the doorway. Gasping and shuddering, she looked toward it and saw it move this way and that, and then it ran out of sight between the wall and the kindling wood stacked inside the door.

  Axpo’kwess. A mouse.

  Frances was shuddering and her heart was racing. A mouse was nothing to fear. But there had been those fluttering warnings and the strange feeling. And her conscience. And being sneaky while all alone with everyone unexplainably gone. She thought about the magic again. These people used magic smoke and changed from one thing to another, from women to plants. Was that mouse really Neepah, guarding her secrets? Or had Neepah put that mouse in the bundle to see whether she was sneaky? Was the hidden thing she had seen Neepah slip into the bundle yesterday a mouse? Frances felt almost sick from the dread of this strangeness and what it might mean. Her heartbeat was slowing now and she could again hear the faint voices in the distance, but still no laughter of children in the lanes between the wikwams.

  She looked at the side of her finger where something had stuck her. A drop of blood stood on it. She thought at first that the mouse must have bitten her, but then she remembered, by the sensations that were still in her skin, that the sharpness had jabbed her finger after the mouse was already running up her arm.

  Maybe Neepah had put a snake in there too, to catch her being sneaky. She drew back from the bundle, stood up, and sucked the blood off the stuck place.

  No, she thought. Snakes eat mice. Neepah would not have put them in there together.

  But of course there could be Indian magic that would make a snake not eat a mouse, she thought.

  Frances had been among these people long enough that she had thought axpo’kwess instead of mouse, but there had not been much magic to scare her before, even though they told many magic stories.

  But yesterday had been a strange day something like magic, with women becoming plants, and going around with nothing on and forgetting that she had nothing on. And then there had been the night, when she went to sleep without any supper, as she had never been able to do before, a sleep so deep and long it might have been a spell, such as she had heard of in old tales back home. Maybe Neepah had cast a spell on her.