Neepah stood up, saying, “Wehletawash? Wehletawash?” Neepah would not be trying to pronounce “Frances” anymore. The girl looked up at Neepah, who said, “Now this day I will be in the Council Lodge. We have to decide what to do about the wapsituk coming. Such councils are long. May you have pleasure today. Wash yourself in the creek. Go to the field and help the other children scare away the birds and other seed stealers. Mind what the older children tell you. Don’t play around the Council Lodge, because inside there we have to be able to hear each other speak on important things. But if you really need me, come and stand outside. The sides will be opened and I can see you. Remember, you are my Good Face. That is not just a pretty face, but a face with good in it. Come here.”
Frances, Good Face, stood close. Neepah did something she had never done. She got on her knees and put her strong arms around her and held her tight. Good Face reached around Neepah’s neck and squeezed. They stayed like that for a long time, breathing. Good Face felt warmth and strength pouring into her, it seemed, and thought she heard many voices, like the women’s voices singing in the cornfield, but not just the same. Neepah was swaying on her knees as they embraced and breathed. Good Face could feel her medicine bag with its three sacred seeds, or perhaps Neepah’s medicine bag, or maybe both bags, pressed between their bosoms, her little girl’s bosom and Neepah’s great cushioned bosom. There was a vibration where the medicine bags were, and heat, and though Good Face had her eyes shut she knew there was a glowing there also, which, it seemed, her heart was seeing. If these people did live by magic, this was some of it that she could see and feel herself.
At last Neepah patted her back and they came out of the embrace, letting go reluctantly, and Neepah’s round brown face was wet around the eyes but she was smiling, bright as a full moon. She wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands and stood up. “Now I go, Wehletawash. Live long and live well with your name. A good day with your new name will start you that way, so I wish you pleasure all this day.”
“Waneeshee, Kahesana.”
Neepah put her fist against her mouth and something quick like a pain came in her eyes and she hurried out.
It was not until Good Face was alone that she realized that she had called Neepah Kahesana, which meant Mother.
She went to the creekside after Neepah left. She went naked, by her own choice. She was Good Face; Neepah loved her. The medicine bag seemed to speak to the heart over which it lay. She could remember having been Frances Slocum, that name that did not mean something, and she could remember one by one all the family named Slocum who had been her family, but now that seemed to have been another life. She remembered that she loved her mother very much, and still had her mother in her heart. But now her mother was far away and had been for so long, and all the needs she had provided for were now provided by Neepah, so the needs did not make an empty place anymore.
Good Face squatted by the water with a stick of green willow stem and cleaned her teeth and mouth with the fretted end of the stick, one of those things she had never done as a Slocum but Neepah had taught her to do every day, like bathing. As she cleaned her teeth she saw that on her arms where the sun had burnt her, the little blisters were gone and her skin was white and dry and flaking off in patches. Because of the bear oil, the burn had not hurt since yesterday morning. She thought of the bear, which Neepah had said was the brother of the People, and was thankful for bear oil. She had a suspicion that if she ever met a bear face-to-face, she would still be scared, because bears were something the Slocums had always said were dangerous. But nevertheless she would be able to look in the bear’s face and know they were related to each other, not from two different worlds separated by fear.
The sound of the running water was very soft, but it contained many voices, some clear as tinkling bells, others vague and whispering. It was like the sounds of voices in the Council Lodge, which she could hear even from the creek bank. That, like the water flow, was a sound of many voices. Neepah had said they would decide what to do about the army that would be coming. Good Face thought of how Neepah seemed more angry than afraid of the army, although afraid too.
She remembered when she had told Neepah that the army might leave her People alone if she went back with them. When she had said that, it seemed like something that might be done.
But she was Good Face now.
She went down into her favorite shallow place in the creek and waded in to bathe. The water was cold enough to give her gooseflesh, but she squatted down and got entirely wet, even her hair. She stayed still and felt the flow of the water nudging her and caressing her as it went past. She seemed to be able to feel the high places where the water came from and the low, faraway places where it went. Neepah once had told her that if she put a stick in this creek, it could float down to the river and farther and farther down, through many lands the wapsituk had taken from the Lenapeh, all the way to the Great Sunrise Water, which Frances had known by the name of Atlantic Ocean. She had never seen the ocean, but her mother and father had seen it when they lived in Rhode Island. Neepah had also told her that if they went over some mountains not far from here, they would come to creeks that flowed in another direction and down into seas that were not salt water like the sea but freshwater. Neepah had said that her own old father and mother lived up there by the fresh waters, near Sookpa helluk, Great Water Falling, a place where a whole huge river poured over a cliff, making so much noise and mist that you could hardly hear or see anything. Neepah said too that just like a stick in the water, people in canoes and boats could go from almost anyplace to almost any other place on Turtle Island. She knew that what Neepah called Turtle Island was what she had known as America.
Good Face thought of all that while feeling the water of the creek flow around her. She thought, if she could swim, she could start swimming right here and keep going downstream all the way. She knew that the warriors had brought her upstream from her home, and that meant she could float all the way back down there. To the place called Wilkes-Barre. Almost to the door of the house where her mother and father and brothers and sisters lived.
She heard someone calling the name “Frances.” She turned toward the bank and saw Wareham Kingsley standing there, white-skinned among the Indian children who were there washing and playing. Wareham had on his cloth breeches but no shirt. He had a frown on his face. That and his whiteness made him look out of place among the Lenapeh children. She thought of him as a wapsini and of how different he seemed from her. She waded out of the creek and sat on the creek bank beside him and told him the first thing that came to her mind about him, which was that she had seen him perched in a tree yesterday when the people were in the Council Ground.
Wareham looked at her hard, frowning even more, and said: “Talk English. I can’t hardly understand that Indian talk at all.”
Only then did she realize she had been speaking in the Lenapeh tongue. Trying to think English, she said: “Thee’s been here as long as I. Why hasn’t thee learned?”
He shrugged. “It’s hard. I can’t make no sense out of it.”
She thought it was strange that he thought it was hard. But then she remembered that Neepah and several other of the women had praised her for learning things so quickly. And her mother and father at home had often praised her too, for learning such things as the alphabet so quickly. For the first time in a long while she thought of the alphabet, and about reading, which she had started to learn before she came here. She realized that she might not ever learn any more of that because the Lenapeh didn’t do it at all.
“I saw thee in a tree yesterday while the soldier was talking,” she said again, this time in English.
He nodded. “That was scary, wasn’t it? I thought the Indians were goin’ to hop up and kill that soldier. And he was just tryin’ to warn ’em. You mink if the army comes, we could escape and go home with ’em?”
The thought startled her. “Thee would go?”
“Well, sure, if I get a chance.
I thought you and me, we’d try to escape together, since we came here together.”
“Oh.” She thought about that for a little while, looking at him. It was a troubling thought: that there would come a day when she would have to choose between two good things. She asked him, “Does thee have an Indian name?”
He drew his head back and looked at her with one eye squinting, which she knew was the how-can-girls-say-such-silly-things look that boys always used, and he retorted, “You know my name’s Wareham! ’Course I don’t have an Indian name!”
“Well, I have.” She tried not to use a saucy tone of voice, though she would have liked to.
“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “Y’ even run around naked like these damn Indians. Aren’t you ashamed?”
“Isn’t thee ashamed to cuss?” She hadn’t been ashamed of nakedness since that first day of it, but now that he had asked her, she thought perhaps she should be. But she wanted to talk about her name. “My Indian name is Wehletawash,” she said. “Good Face.”
“Huh? What-a-wash?” He said it with such a mimicking tone that she knew he must be jealous.
“Don’t the people thee live with even like thee?” she said. “They’d give thee a name if they did, I should think.”
“I already have a name. Wareham.”
“Wear-a-what?” she mimicked his mimicry.
He stood up quickly. He looked as if he might cry, and she felt sorry for him. It occurred to her that he must still be as lonely and scared as she had been in the beginning, because he couldn’t even talk with them and he didn’t have an Indian name. She had seen how poorly he played with the Lenapeh boys, and thought he must feel so bad because they couldn’t understand him and he couldn’t understand them.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He shrugged, and looked less miserable, and squatted down beside her again.
She saw that he was glancing at the place between her legs, so she covered it with her hand. She said, “I could teach thee to speak their language.”
He shrugged again. “What for? I aim to get out of here as soon as that army shows up.”
“I could give thee an Indian name.”
“What do I want with an Indian name?”
“I’ll give thee one anyway,” she said. “I’ll call thee ‘Wapsi.’ That’s a good name for thee.”
He looked at her suspiciously. “I’ve heard ’em say that word to me, a lot. Wopsey. How’d you know that?”
“Oh.” She tilted her head and shrugged. “Thee’s just a wapsini, plain as day. Go tell them thee’s a wapsini, and I’m sure they’ll agree.”
She could tell he didn’t like that. He had that smart-boy look on his face again, and he stood up. “G’yawn!” he said. “I couldn’t hardly understand you when you were just a thee-thou Quaker. Now you’re a naked-arse Quaker Indian and I can’t understand you at all!” But then he surprised her by looking down at the water in the creek and saying, “I’m sorry I said that.”
“I am too. We are friends, thee knows that.” She too looked at the flowing water, and after a while she said, “Can thee swim, Wareham?”
“No. The bitsiest Indian tads can, but not me.”
“Nor can I. But I shall learn. Does thee know, Wareham, if thee could swim, thee could get in this creek right here and go all the way home?”
“Really? That’s the way back?”
“That’s what Neepah said. My … the lady I live with.”
“Then we’re not lost after all!”
“No, I guess not.”
He gave a soft whistle, looking downstream, and he seemed to be thinking far away, by the look in his eyes. “I think I’d like to learn how to swim too,” he said.
“Well, then, let us do. I know a girl, Minnow, who swims well. I shall ask her to teach us.”
“Yes. Ask her,” he said eagerly, standing up. “You know what, Frannie? I really am glad you learnt their talk! The people I’m with, they talk some English, so I just ain’t learnt theirs. Wish I had.”
Good Face was plainly not Frances anymore, because she was having a hilarious time making loud noise. In that earlier life among the Quakers, she had always been told to be quiet and seemly—never to shout or screech, never to bang or stomp or rattle. Now she was making as much racket as she could, because she was supposed to. Out here in the field with Minnow and a dozen other children, she was supposed to shriek and howl at the top of her lungs and whack sticks against gourds. A few of the children had metal pans and tin pots their parents had gotten from white traders, and those children were the best noisemakers of all, the envy of the rest as they clashed and jangled their metal vessels together and bellowed “Haooo! Haoooooo!” and whistled like hawks or barked like dogs. But most of all, they laughed, as they climbed trees around the field of the Three Sisters or chased among its planting hills. Good Face hopped and whooped with them and her heart frolicked with the joy of freedom and noise-making.
It was the responsibility of the village children to infest the gardens and fields with commotion and scare out the birds and four-leggeds that would want to steal seeds. Maybe the scent of the women’s sweaty clothes would have discouraged some four-leggeds, but it was essential to keep birds away from seeds and animals from the tender shoots. It was the children’s task to guard the field in the daytime.
It was amazing how many birds there were and how interested they were in the newly planted field. “I wonder if birds can talk to each other,” she said to Minnow.
“Yes. You can hear them.” Minnow imitated crows perfectly.
“They must watch the planting and then fly away and tell all their friends.”
“Yes, they do,” Minnow said. “Haoooo! Haooooo!” She ran at a crow that was gliding in toward the field, and a flock of smaller birds veered away too, all turning at the same time as if the whole flock were one creature. Good Face had watched them do that again and again and wondered how they could keep from running into each other. Here in the cornfield, two running children could bump into each other, yet hundreds of birds, much faster and closer together, could turn at once and never collide. It was the first time she had ever marveled at birds, beyond wondering how they could fly. Being here to guard the seeds against birds was making her pay more attention to them than she ever had.
And it was the same with the seeds themselves. Her white Slocum family had grown corn, but she had never really thought about corn, or how it grew, or that something like a corn spirit had anything to do with it. It seemed that everything was different here among these Lenapeh People. Here, everything had a spirit, not just people. Both Neepah and Minnow had spoken of the spirits of the trees, telling her to listen to them talking when the wind blew in their leaves, and she had come to believe that indeed she could hear them talking, and even almost understand them. This truly was different from being wapsini. It felt so different sometimes that she could hardly remember how it had felt to be a Slocum. She could not forget that she had been, but could not remember it as anything real; it was as if that was something she had dreamed.
And this being a Lenapeh felt better than the old dream-memory. It felt wonderful when everything around had a spirit, when one could feel prayers rush up from the ground through one’s feet and body and head and into the sky, when one could see women turn to plants and back to women, when one could get used to going naked, when one could have a noisy good time and not be called down to behave. It was good to learn something every day and hear new stories every evening; even the magic of the Lenapeh, if magic was what it was, was more interesting than scary. What these Lenapeh People said and thought and did was as good and kindly as what the Friends said and thought and did, but much more interesting and, she thought, more fun. If, when the soldiers came, they somehow got her and took her back, she foresaw that she would not be very happy to go.
Or at least it did not seem like it now.
It was certain that Neepah did not want her to go back with the wapsituk. Go
od Face thought about all the grown-ups talking about this in their councils, the men and the women talking and deciding things.
“Birds!” Minnow’s voice interrupted her daydream, and off they went again, running through the sunny field, whooping and whacking with their sticks.
“Minnow,” Good Face said when, at the height of midday, they stood puffing and sweating from all their darting about, “if Muhnuka’hazh the crow was so good as to bring the People fire, how can he be so bad as to steal their seeds?”
Minnow’s startling answer made her ponder: “Everyone is as bad as good, and as good as bad. Did you not know that?”
Other children came to the field a few at a time to scare crows, and Good Face and Minnow could leave to go to the swimming place. Minnow made Good Face lie facedown in the creek and let her feet go free from the bottom. Good Face, to her delight and amazement, did not sink. She was afloat, holding her breath. Then Minnow taught her to go forward by kicking her feet and stroking with her arms, and finally how to turn her head and breathe under her arm every fourth stroke. By the time Wareham appeared on the bank, calling for her by her Frannie name, Good Face had already swum the width of the creek several times, not as gracefully or as fast as Minnow yet, but truly swimming.
“You said you couldn’t swim,” he said, squatting on the rocks while she stood waist-deep with water draining from her hair. She remembered that she would have to speak English to him.
“Minnow taught me just now,” she said.
“So quick as that? I don’t believe you.”
“Minnow!” she called across the creek in Lenapeh tongue, “come let us teach this wapsi boy to swim in water!” The slim brown little figure plunged headfirst off the far bank into the creek and did not reappear until she burst streaming out of the water right beside Good Face. The two naked girls stood looking at the pale, woebegone boy on the shore. Other children of all ages were sporting in the water upstream and down, their voices like cheerful birdcalls.
The Red Heart Page 12