The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  And now this morning when nobody was around in the village. This seemed almost like part of the magic.

  Neepah had said all those hard things about bad white people yesterday. I am a white person, Frances thought. Maybe she means to hurt me! Now Frances was afraid to keep looking for the hidden thing.

  Her finger had stopped bleeding. She was calmed down from the scare the mouse had caused her. And though she felt vague dreads, there were two things that truly bothered her now. She was hungry and she was alone.

  So she opened the pot by the fire and ate a scoop of sweet hominy, which was still a little warm. Then she went out of the wikwam and set out toward the sound of the voices and the Council Lodge.

  When she came around the wikwams nearest the lodge, she found herself on the edge of the biggest gathering of people she had ever seen in one place. They stood or sat shoulder-to-shoulder, facing away from her into the clearing in front of the Council Lodge, where someone was talking in a deep but excited voice. There were boys in the trees, and children were sitting on the ground looking between and around the legs of people standing in front of them. The people were all listening with great attention to the man who was inside the clearing talking. Sometimes the listeners would turn and murmur to each other. Other times the whole crowd would mutter and exclaim all at once at something the speaker had said. Frances could not see the man who was speaking, and she did not recognize his voice. She had heard the village sakima talk now and then to people of the town, but his voice was high and clear, not deep like this.

  Since she could not see into the open place, Frances started around the edge of the crowd, looking for Neepah. She was sure she was here someplace, and though Frances had been upset and doubtful about her this morning, she needed her, and would not be content until she knew where she was. For one thing, Neepah was tall and strong and might hold her up in her arms or on her shoulders so she could see what important thing was happening on the Council Ground.

  She went all the way around and did not see Neepah, and when someone in the crowd now and then would turn and see her, their faces were not friendly as usual. She wandered on, feeling a growing loneliness and fear, such a fear as she had not felt since her earliest days here in the Indian village.

  At last she saw a place where she might be able to climb up and look over people’s heads: a pole frame in which a large hide had been stretched for flensing. It was a little way back behind the crowd and so it was not being used for a perch by any children except one small naked boy who was at one end. He was a boy she had seen several times at the creek but had never known his name. He looked at her for a moment as she climbed up at the other end of the frame and then looked back toward the crowd. The frame was sturdy, being lashed to poles rooted in the ground. Now that she was standing on the lower cross pole, she could see over the heads of the grown-ups and see the man who was in the center talking.

  He was a grand-looking Indian man whom she had never seen before. He was tall and lean, with no hair except a braid hanging from the crown of his head with a feather attached to it. He seemed to flash as he talked, because of little round mirrors attached to a fur yoke he wore over his shoulders; the mirrors reflected sunlight as he moved and talked, and he gestured as much as a storyteller. But what he was saying did not sound like lachimu stories; those stories were always told in a sort of singing way, and this was hard talk. His language was Lenapeh, but different from the way it usually sounded. Behind him were grim-looking men, strangers, and she saw the village sakima standing close by, listening. The Head Man usually was merry-looking, but now he looked worried.

  There were some white faces there too. Some of the green-coat English soldiers were lined up behind the sakima, and one who wore a red coat and a black hat was standing beside the talker. White men were sitting on the ground in front of the speaker, looking up at him, but she was only high enough to see their hats. On a tree limb beyond the clearing, Wareham Kingsley roosted with some Lenapeh boys. He was very visible because of his pink skin. He looked as if he too had been too much in the sun yesterday. She thought for a moment of going around to where he was, but decided it would be too much trouble; she probably was seeing as well from here as she could from where he was.

  The speaker whose voice she had been hearing all this time now stopped, and an excited murmur and a few shouts swept through the crowd. She had been too busy finding a place and looking around to pay much attention to his words, but from what she heard, she had the impression that he had been talking of things that happened far away somewhere in the direction he kept pointing. Now that he had stopped, there were other men moving around and saying things to each other, and shaking hands, and giving things to each other. She saw the English soldier with the red coat move to the center, where the speaker gave him a small belt of beads and stood aside for him. The soldier was tall too, and stocky. The crowd grew still and the soldier began speaking, and Frances, with some difficulty at first, began to comprehend some of the language she had not heard much for several moons. She recognized a few words, then gradually more, and then began to remember how sentences went together in that language. This Englishman had an accent that made him sound unlike the people at Wilkes-Barre, but she could understand and remember enough to follow his meanings.

  The soldier was saying: “We are thankful that God has brought us to our Delaware brothers that we may speak the truth to each other.” He paused.

  A warrior standing beside the soldier then said in Lenapeh what the Englishman had just said, and then the Englishman held the bead belt out high in front of his face and said:

  “You know that I can speak nought but the truth while I hold this belt.” The warrior translated, and the crowd murmured its agreement, and the soldier continued, now with his hands at waist level and the belt lying across his upturned palms.

  “All the things this messenger has just told you, brothers, are true. Those misfortunes in the West have occurred.” The translator talked again and the soldier then resumed.

  “Last summer, the Long Knife soldiers from Virginia did go all the way down the Ohio River, and there they did surprise the king’s forts beside the Mississippi River. Those Long Knives took those forts because the English soldiers were away.…

  “When our Governor General in Detroit learned of that, he led English soldiers and Indian allies down there to throw out the Long Knife soldiers. It was last winter when he got there, and he recaptured one of the forts. But then the Long Knives crossed the winter floods and surprised him there. They captured him and his soldiers.…”

  And when the translator had finished, the English soldier said, “Now the enemy controls the rivers in the West.”

  To Frances this was a story of things very far away, probably having something to do with the war her father had talked about, the war her oldest brother Giles had gotten into, but so far away it was not very interesting. She had never understood war and did not like to hear about it. She perched on the pole, with the smell of the deerhide strong in her nostrils. Some fat flesh was still on the hide in the frame, and in the sun it was beginning to spoil, and flies were buzzing around it. She wanted to get down, but also wanted to stay on this high place, to search for Neepah. At last she saw her on the far side of the clearing, almost hidden by a low-hanging branch of a tree. Neepah was not looking her way, but at the English soldier, and seemed to be listening very intently. When Frances turned back to look at the soldier, he was saying, with pauses for the translator:

  “… your Delaware chiefs near the Ohio got smoke in their eyes, and they signed a treaty with the Long Knife government. Those chiefs were Killbuck, White Eyes, Gelelemund, and Captain Pipe.”

  The crowd responded with an uproar of fast, angry talk, and Frances held on to the frame instead of getting down. A man’s voice nearby shouted, “You lie to us!” Many other people in the crowd started shouting that, but the soldier held the bead belt up above his head with both hands until their anger simmered down,
then he began speaking again.

  “It is true that those chiefs made an alliance with the Americans. But they were deceived. Do not condemn them. They were made false promises by the Long Knives, and when the promises are not kept, the smoke will blow from their eyes and they will return their loyalty to their true father and friend, His Majesty King George. That will happen soon, but you can help it happen sooner by remaining true to your great sakima and friend, King George.

  “Listen!”

  “Kulesta! Heh!” the translator cried loudly, and the Englishman continued, talking more loudly because all of the people were muttering back and forth now. Frances could feel danger in the air all around. She bent her knees in readiness to hop to the ground and go around to where Neepah was, but paused to hear the soldier continue. He was almost shouting now, and his face was red, and he kept the bead belt high over his head in one hand.

  “I bring you a warning, to save you! The Long Knives at this moment are preparing to march up this river—yes, this very river the Susquehanna. In spite of their promises to your Delaware chiefs in the Ohio, they are preparing to send one of their biggest generals up this Susquehanna and burn out your towns here, and destroy your crops, kill your children, and rape your women!”

  As the translator began translating that warning, he was interrupted over and over again by shouting and screaming. The crowd was stirring, some people moving from place to place, people grabbing each other’s arms, some women even breaking out of the circle to run toward the wikwams. All the chiefs and soldiers who had been sitting in the Council Ground were now on their feet, many shouting, trying to calm the people. Frances grew very alarmed by the shouting and by what she had understood of the warning, and jumped to the ground to run to the place where she had seen Neepah standing. Whatever this was, it seemed full of frightful dangers, and Neepah was the only protection and comfort she knew in this place.

  * * *

  In Neepah’s shining black eyes Frances saw so many changes that she was almost afraid to speak to her. One moment she was plainly angry, the next she was brimming with loving kindness, then fearful, then impatient, and then tender again. As a child from a large family, Frances had learned to read as well from eyes as from words, and she had seen all these same messages in her own mother’s eyes, but her mother’s moods had usually held long enough for Frances to adapt her behavior to the ways her mother felt. Before this day, Neepah’s moods had been steady and easy to read too, but now there was too much going on in her at once. Even Minnow sat abashed.

  There was little doubt that the soldier’s talk in the Council Ground was what had upset Neepah so much. Everybody had left the gathering in a high state of excitement. That was surely because of the talk of an army coming. Frances could understand the people’s fear of that. It was alarming to her, even though, if she understood correctly, the army coming must be the same army her brother Giles was in, and would not hurt her. Perhaps her own father and mother had asked that army to come up the river to this town and get her and take her home. That thought was disturbing, but not awfully frightening.

  But she did not want an army to come here and hurt Neepah or any of these Indian people. They had been good to her and fed her well and taught her much of their language, and told her many wondrous stories. The truth of it was, she had never had such a good time in her life, once she got over the fright and cold of being brought here. She had so many things she wanted to ask and tell Neepah, but was almost afraid to speak because of the storms she saw in the woman’s eyes.

  Finally, though, she did have to ask her about something she just could not understand. “Neepah?”

  “I listen for your question, Palanshess,” the woman said, though she seemed too busy with bundles and food pots to be really listening. She kept taking things out of one container and putting them in another, all in an agitated manner.

  “Are you getting ready to run away?”

  “The councils will decide. The Men’s Council, then the women. Then all. If it is agreed to run, we will be ready.”

  “Should you not run now, if you believe an army is coming?”

  “Armies are slower than Taxkwox,” Neepah said. “There is time.” Taxkwox, Frances knew, was the Turtle.

  “You should run away,” Frances said. “If they are slow they could not catch you and you would not be hurt.…”

  The look in Neepah’s eyes was ferocious, but just for a moment, then she looked very sweet and said, “You do not want your army to hurt my people, do you?”

  “Oh, no! Neepah, if they are coming to get me, maybe I could just walk over to them and say ‘Here I am, let’s go home and leave Neepah’s people alone,’ and maybe they would. They could get Wareham Kingsley too. They would leave you and Minnow alone.”

  Neepah chuckled and shook her head, but when she looked up, there was nothing amused in her eyes. “Palanshess would go back then, do you say?”

  As if she had been accused, Frances stammered, “I—I would want to make them leave thee alone. I would … Yes, I would like to go be with my family.…” In the rush of confused feelings, Frances was speaking both tongues, a jumble of words from both languages, unaware that she was doing so. “But I would not want to leave thee.… If thee could be friends with my mother and father, we could all be together now and then.…”

  “Palanshess, sit there. We will eat. I have something you like. And I have a gift for you. And I have a story to tell.…”

  “A gift?” Frances had been vaguely aware that her birthday had passed, in March, two or three months ago, but with no way of knowing when it was March. Her mother and father had always given her some small gift to mark her birthday, though they did not observe other holidays as other people did because to the Friends every day was to be a holy day. Only once a year, on their birthdays, did the Slocum children receive something called a gift. Frances said, “Do you know of my birthday?”

  Neepah paused in her rummagings and looked at her with amused puzzlement. “Birth day?” She used the Lenapeh words for being born and for daylight. Then she tilted her head and said, “Every child is born. I knew you were born, yes. Even wapsi babies are born, I know. Though sometimes I have wondered are the wapsituk excreted from the waste hole like turds … But, Palanshess, you are wehlee heeleh. I know you were born.”

  “Then are you going to celebrate by giving me a gift?”

  Neepah needed an explanation then of the notion of celebrating a birthday, and finally said: “I am grateful you were born. But when a baby is born, the baby is the gift. Grandmother Moon gives us the gift which is the baby. We give back thanks. You did not come to me in birth as a baby, but even so, I give thanks for you. You have been a gift to me.”

  “But you said you are going to give me a gift.”

  “Yes. Because it is something you will always need. That is why. Not because you were born. I do not understand why I would give a gift to you for being born. How funny you think, little wapsini!” Neepah seemed to be having a good time and feeling better than she had. She was smiling and chuckling, and only now and then did she look worried.

  Neepah reached among stored things and got out a blackened clay pot about the size of her head. Minnow smiled and put wood on the fire. As it was burning down to embers, Neepah started a story.

  “Kulesta! This is not one of our old stories, but a new one. Long ago, before the wapsituk ever came to Taxkwox Menoteh, our Turtle Island, we were warned they would come and we should be wary of them. By the time they came, we forgot the warning. We were happy to see them and feed them and learn about them. They came down off a wondrous large boat, such as we had never seen.” As she talked, she spread the embers and put the pot on them and heaped more embers around the side, almost to the hole in top. While it was heating, she went on. “They brought down from the boat a strange thing to sit on. I forget its word.… All wapsituk sit on them in their house. My father learned to make them.”

  “A chair!”

  “I
t is called a ‘cheh,’ yes. The wapsi head man sat on that ‘cheh.’ He laughed and was nice. He gave our men something to drink. They never had that before. It had bad medicine. It made some howl and some fall down. They could not think. But they still tried to be kind to the wapsini. He said he would soon go away in his big boat but would come back every year. He said he needed a place to leave the ‘cheh’ so he could sit on it each time he came back, and asked them to give him a piece of land big enough for his ‘cheh.’ They did not know about ‘giving’ land because it belongs to the Creator. But they said he was welcome to put on the shore there his ‘cheh.’

  “The wapsi head man said he would need a little space in front of his ‘cheh’ to stand on when he stood up. He asked for only as much land as he could cover with an elkskin, that would be enough, and he gave them another drink and they said yes. What the wapsini did then was not nice.”

  “What did he do?” Frances asked, because Neepah had paused in her story to get something from behind her.

  “The wapsi head man got out a …” Neepah paused again, held up a hand, and made a repeated squeezing motion, saying, “You name the thing you cut with this way.”

  “Ah! Scissors! My mother has some. Scissors.”

  “So, then. With this thing the wapsini starts cutting around the edge of the elkskin, around and around, to make one long piece very fine like a thread. So when the elkskin is all gone there is all that elkskin thong. And he holds one end while his other men take the other end and go walk a long way where the Lenapeh live. They go west and then turn north and walk and then turn east and walk. When they are back at the shore the thong is around more than this village and the cornfield we planted in yesterday, and the wapsi head man then smiles nice and is saying, ‘You gave me the land covered by this elk hide. Thank you. I will be back next year.’ ”