Frances and Minnow looked at each other. Neepah put a stick in the hole in the top of the pot and moved the pot out of the embers. Then she held her other hand over the hole, in a fist, and allowed a handful of corn kernels to pour down into the pot. Then she put a flat stone over the hole, leaned back, looked at the girls with a funny-looking smile, and said, “Our Lenapeh sakima could not think because of what he had drunk, but wanted to be nice, so he told the wapsini, ‘It is what we agreed. You have this land and your “cheh” can sit here.’ The Lenapeh were not happy. But they had promised. The story is finished. No, the story is not finished. That was only the beginning of a longer story, for each year the wapsituk came back, they gave more to drink and did more tricks like that. They have done such tricks all the time, and you see, we Lenapeh are now here in the valley in these mountains and we can no longer even go to that shore where the ‘cheh’ was.”
The hot clay pot began making noises. Frances jerked back and looked at it. It was sputtering as if it had a woodpecker working in it. Neepah looked at Frances and chuckled. When the noise slowed and stopped, Neepah flipped the stone off the top of the pot. Steam rose from the hole and it smelled something like bread.
“Now,” Neepah said, “eight generations since then, the wapsituk are still giving drink to our sakimas and doing such tricks. Did you hear the messenger? They made some of our leading sakimas put agreeing marks on a treaty, but send an army up this valley to burn our homes.” She shook her head and her eyes flashed. “So in Council tomorrow we will talk about it. Whether we run away or stay here and fight that army.”
Frances thought of the messenger and of some of the things she had heard, and finally asked, “What does it mean, smoke in their eyes?”
“Smoke in the eyes is, you think a wapsini means his promises. Now. Here.” Neepah covered her hands with a piece of strouding cloth, picked up the hot clay pot and turned it over, shaking it above a wooden bowl, and what had been a small handful of corn kernels now made a mound of curious-looking white things that nearly filled the big bowl and smelled very good. The woman then poured some maple syrup over them and stirred the mass with the stick. She picked up the bowl and extended it. “So, eat, my girls. Palanshess, I have not cooked you this before. It is a kind of xaskwim. Eat it with fingers. Minnow is drooling. Look.”
It was, indeed, corn. It was dry and crunchy to chew and sweet with the maple syrup. Frances believed it might well be the best thing she had ever tasted. She and Minnow sat and stuffed it in their mouths. Neepah ate a little but mostly talked. She said, “Since that ‘cheh’ trick, the wapsituk took our land and tried to give us their god. But we learned their god would not feed us. Our Creator feeds us. We went back to ours. A woman chief here had a wapsi name, Esther, but got mad at the wapsituk and changed back. We tried much to trust the wapsituk. No use. Ah! You ate it all!”
“It was so good! Waneeshee, Neepah!”
“Yes. So good. Now hear something else, eh? Listen. This is of great importance. I must tell you this because now the wapsituk will be coming here.” She paused, eyes intense, and asked, “Did you ever know why our warriors brought you here?”
Frances remembered all that, which seemed so long ago. She shook her head. But then she thought, and said, “You were angry because the white men cheat?”
“Not for that reason. For a worse one. The wapsi soldiers killed a little girl.” Neepah looked as if she were about to cry, something Frances had never seen in her face. Neepah said:
“Kulesta. On that day the soldiers attacked a hunting camp of my husband and other men of his clan, below here on this river. The soldiers shot my husband outside the camp. His brothers tried to bring him back to camp; he was only wounded. But then the soldiers killed the brothers and my hurt husband, and they skinned them. Then they came into the camp. I was there with my baby daughter on one breast and Minnow on the other. I hid Minnow and tried to get away. The soldiers caught me. They chopped my baby’s head. Some soldiers held me while others did things to me that I will not tell you. When they had all made themselves too limp to do it anymore, they stuck a tomahawk handle inside me and left me on the ground. They never found this girl.” Minnow was making a soft moaning sound.
Neepah turned her head and spat on the ground. Frances could not imagine what the soldiers had done to Neepah, but she understood that they had killed her little girl, and that was terrible enough to fill her mind. She could not even speak, the thought of it was so bad.
“Listen, Palanshess. You were brought to me to be in the place of my daughter. That is why we take a white person. At your house, did they kill a soldier?” Frances nodded, remembering Nathan Kingsley, scalped, on the ground. She was only beginning to understand this. “Good,” Neepah said. “That was for my husband. You are for me. White people have paid me back a girl. And you are a little girl I like. If I had not liked you so, I would have killed you to avenge my daughter. It would have been right for me to do that. But you are a gift.” She reached over and took Frances’ right hand in her left. Her eyes were so powerful that Frances could feel them looking at her heart. “You grow large in my bosom,” Neepah said in a deep, low voice. “Whatever comes to my people now is in the hands of the Creator. But you are in my hands and I will not let you be lost as my first little girl was.”
The intensity of Neepah’s eyes and words was making the hair on Frances’ head prickle, and shivers were cascading down her cheeks and back and even her legs. Her hand felt as if it would burst into flames in Neepah’s hand.
The woman eased her grip. She leaned back, taking a deep breath and letting it come out in a long, shuddering exhalation. In a little while Neepah was smiling again, very feebly and with wet eyes, and she said, “I have a gift for my little girl.”
She turned on her haunches, leaned back toward the bundle behind her, and slipped her hand inside. Frances remembered and opened her mouth to tell Neepah there might be a mouse in it, but the woman brought out her hand with something small in her palm. A thong hung from it. Neepah said, “I have not finished sewing it where the soldiers damaged it. Be careful of the needle. Look at this, Palanshess, this is my gift to you.”
What she put in Frances’ hand was a tiny deerskin bag, hardly bigger than the end of her own thumb, but decorated in quillwork with a picture of a turtle, nearly white but with a slight green tinge. It was attached to a loop of thong and had a tiny drawstring threaded through holes in its open end. In a place where a side seam lay open, a sharp little bone needle stuck through the leather. Frances knew it must have been the needle that had stuck her when she reached in the bundle. So the thing she had been searching for was to have been a gift for her. She flushed as she remembered her suspicions and her sneakiness. And something spoke to her, with no voice, but rather like an understanding that passed from the little bag into her palm, and told her that the needle had stuck her to protect the little bag from being seen by her too soon.
“This will be your medicine bag,” Neepah said. “As you have seen, all my People wear these and they wear them always. I will tell you more about it later, because there is much to know. I will tell you this now: I made this for my first daughter. Now it is yours. What little things you carry in it will be of the greatest closeness to your heart. It already has some things in it that I have placed there. I did it yesterday. Take them out and see.”
Frances, feeling as if she were bathed in some humming warmth, loosed the drawstring and turned the little bag upside down over her palm. When the three tiny things fell out, she understood why there had been a mouse in the bundle.
There was a corn kernel. There was a squash seed. And there was a bean.
May 1779
Wilkes-Barre
To Ruth Slocum, her son Giles was like a stranger in his own family. He sat arguing with her and his brother Will. The visit had started badly when she ordered him to leave his musket and bayonet outside. In exasperation he had fixed the bayonet on the muzzle and stuck it in the ground j
ust outside the door. He was a militiaman and would not leave his weapon anywhere out of his sight. Where he sat at his mother’s table he could see the butt of the musket sticking up.
“Will,” Giles was saying, “thee’s a helpless simpleton. They’ll kill thee before thee’s halfway to Wyalusing.”
Ruth Slocum wondered if her son spoke in the Quaker way among the soldiers, and doubted it. Giles turned to face her and said, “Mother, has thee not lost enough already? Does thee mean to have Will go the way of Pa and Grandpa? How could thee even think of letting him go among the savages? Damnation!”
She swelled up, arms folded over her bosom, and her eyes flashed. “Giles, we do not swear in this house. Save that for thy soldier camp. And we do not call them savages. The soldiers call them that because they kill? Then thee’s a savage too, if that’s the case. And if thee hadn’t taken up arms, thy father and grandf—”
Giles’s fist slammed the tabletop. “Not that again!” he shouted. “I am not to blame for that and I’ll not carry guilt about on my shoulders!” He glared at her and clenched his fists to keep from saying more angry words to her. “Don’t let Will go, I pray thee.”
“Not let him go? I told him to go! Your father meant to go and now he cannot because of what thee brought down upon him.”
“I did not!”
Ruth Slocum leaned forward over Giles with her arms still crossed, and her narrowed eyes bore into his. “My son, in this house we do not swear or pound the furniture or shout at our mother. Now hear me. Of course I do not want to lose a son to recover a daughter, but William wants to go, and his foot is well at last, and I know of no other way to find our little girl. Tell me how a lad who’ll risk himself for the sake of his own flesh and blood is more a simpleton than one who’ll risk himself for a flag.”
“A flag?”
“For a flag, as thee does.”
“It is not for a flag, Mother! It is to throw off a king!”
“Giles Slocum, we Quakers have never let a king be upon us, and so we have none to throw off. We do have a daughter who needs to be restored to us, and soldiers cannot do that for us. A man with the Light of God inside him can go where an army cannot. William means to go up the valley and seek our Frannie.”
“The army means to go up the valley,” Giles said.
“What say thee?” William asked, sitting up straighter.
“Aye. General Sullivan’s to go up this summer and thrash Tory Butler and tame his sava—his Indians. I expect our boys will march with him.”
“Oh, dear Lord,” Ruth Slocum groaned, unfolding her arms and waggling her fingers at the ceiling before clapping both palms over her face. “If war comes up this valley now, it will scatter everything! Frannie will be done for certain if an army goes blundering up there!”
Giles sat pressing his right fist into his left palm, now looking at the tabletop. “Thee still believes she’s alive, Mother, truly?”
“I feel it,” she said, taking her hands from her face and lacing their fingers together at her waist. “Whether thee believes in such matters of the spirit or not, I believe a mother can tell. I pray. But I shall have to pray all the harder if an army goes through.”
Giles kept putting his fist in his hand and taking it out. Softly now, not pounding. At last he looked at William, staring, studying him keenly. At seventeen, William was tough as hickory from hard work, and once last year at the fort he had inadvertently wrenched the shoulders of two nineteen-year-olds while separating them from a fistfight. But Giles knew that William was wide-eyed and naive, and too full of Quaker faith to realize what could happen to him even though he had seen his father and grandfather killed. Giles sighed, and said to William, “So there’s nothing for it but thee’s going, no matter how much sense I talk?”
“Yes, Giles, I mean to go.”
“Well, then, so be it.” He compressed his lips, narrowed his eyes staring at his upended musket in the door path, exhaled slowly through his nose, and nodded. “Then rather than enlist again, I’ll go with thee. Perhaps we can get up there and seek around before the army’s close enough to stir the hornet’s nest.”
Ruth Slocum gaped at her eldest son in disbelief. After all this troubling time as a soldier, he could still behave like a Quaker. But she saw the fallacy of it at once, and said:
“No, son, thee’ll not. They might harm Will alone; if he were with thee, they’d kill thee both for certain!”
“He wants to go and I want to go, for Frannie’s my sister as well. With all respect, thee can’t forbid me.”
“Son,” she said, clasping her hands tighter to keep them from trembling, “if thee chooses not to enlist, I’ll pray thanks for that, for I’m against your soldiering, but if thee lays down the gun and takes up a plowshare, then stay here and help us with the farming. I tell thee true, Will’ll be safer without thee than with. Giles, listen to me. Five minutes’ thinking without male pride and thee’ll admit I’m right. Thank’ee for thy courage and care, but I beg thee, let Will go alone.”
Giles turned to Will, who was smiling at him but hiding his smile behind a hand. “What say thee, Will? Want me along?”
“My deepest gratitude, Giles. But absolutely not. I’m scared enough all on my own, without a bullet bait alongside.”
Giles’s mouth went slack and he cocked his head back. “Oh, indeed, now! That’s how thee feels about it?”
“It is, good brother. If thee goes, I don’t.”
Giles smiled. “Good, then. I go, so thee stays.” He smirked between his mother and his younger brother, who were looking at each other. He laced his fingers behind his head with a smug look. Ruth Slocum looked at him and could almost understand why less pacific people could smite each other. He had them stymied. By threatening to go along, Giles could keep Will from going.
But after a moment of thinking on it, she saw another side of it, and a smile of equal smugness overspread her lined face.
“Well, thank the Lord,” she said. “At least now I have one less soldier and two more farmers! Neither one goes!”
As for a way to find Frances, she would have to let the Lord give her inspiration, and she prayed it would be soon. For with every step an army took in that direction, any chance for her daughter’s survival would fade.
Neepah had repaired the medicine bag the night before, and Frances had slept with it hanging around her neck, and had dreamed of the Three Sacred Sisters in the field. This morning Neepah and Minnow listened intently as Frances told of the dream. Neepah seemed pleased. It was very early and still not daylight outside as the woman built up the fire and warmed their morning meal, which was hominy with meat, nut meal, and dried berries. As they ate Neepah said, “You slept very still last night. It was a pleasure to hold you close, both of you, one little girl to keep each side of Neepah warm.”
“Waneeshee. It is good to feel you hold me. In my family I had to sleep with many brothers and sisters and they woke me up all the time, getting up to pee, or letting stink-air in the bed and giggling about it, or talking all the time. I sleep all night long here.”
“Minnow,” Neepah said, pointing with her chin, “go out awhile. I have something to speak of with this one only.” Minnow rose and went out, without pouting or protesting, as Frances might well have expected a girl to do upon being excluded from something. When she was gone, Neepah faced Frances and said, “Now, Pretty Face. Tell me an answer to this question: What does your name mean? What is a palanshess?”
“Frances? It has no meaning. It is a name, that’s all.”
“It is not something?” Neepah persisted.
“I do not understand. It is not a thing, it is only a name.”
“I am Neepah. Means, like that crossing the sky at night, Neepah Huma. Grandmother Moon. I am Neepah because when I was born the full roundness of the moon was in the sky passing over. One should be named for a sign that is seen before you are ten days old. But when you were born your mother and father saw no palanshess because there is no
palanshess thing, you tell me. How sad that is.”
Frances looked at her, puzzled. “Sad! I was never sad because of that name.” She never had been, but now she was beginning to wonder whether she was missing something. The Lenapeh children she knew all did have names of something one could see or imagine, many of them animals. Like Minnow. Now and then she had wished she had an animal name, though she had never figured out which animal she was like. Of all animals she knew, she liked horses best, but she did not think she was in any way like a horse.
Neepah said, “I have a name for you that means something, in our way. I have thought of it already. I have called you by it a few times. I crossed your path too late to see a sign to name you by, so I must name you by what I saw after you first came here.”
“Is it an animal?” Frances was excited, wondering which animal, trying to remember any animal name Neepah had called her. Neepah held up a cautionary finger. “I would have called you Wehle Taxkwox. It was the name of my daughter, and you are in her place now.”
Frances sank in her spirit. Wehle Taxkwox meant something like Pretty Turtle, or Good Turtle. She did not think of herself as a turtle, hard and cold and slow. The quill design on her medicine bag was a turtle, so she should have known. She was afraid her disappointment would show in her face and make Neepah sad, but she just didn’t want to be a turtle in name, even a good or pretty turtle. However, Neepah had more to say:
“But I cannot give you a name another person had, for that was her own name and she has taken it with her to the Other Side World where she still uses it. So I give you a name of what I saw of you at first, and what I see still more now: Wehletawash.”
Heartbeats still quick, Frances blinked.
Wehletawash. It meant “Pleasing Face to See,” or “Good Face.” She remembered that Neepah had sometimes called her Pretty Face. This meant Pretty Face, but more; it also meant Good Face. Well! It was not an animal name, but it was certainly an agreeable name, and her mother and father used to say she was very pretty. And this name showed how Neepah saw her and felt about her. The more she repeated her Wehletawash name to herself, the warmer she felt, about it and about Neepah for giving it to her.
The Red Heart Page 11