The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Minnow said to him in Lenapeh, her tone revealing her dislike of white people: “Take the leg clothes off and get in the water.”

  “She said don’t swim in breeches,” Good Face translated. “Take them off and come in.”

  Already pink with sunburn, Wareham blushed and shook his head. Good Face remembered her own recent embarrassment at being naked and understood, but remembered too how quickly nakedness had felt natural. Wareham’s breeches were so filthy there was not a hint of their original color. Obviously he had never removed them since last winter. “Don’t think I’m going to get buck naked with girls!” he stammered, and started to ease into the creek’s edge.

  Minnow fell backward into the water and began backstroking away, saying, “Tell that wapsi boy I will not stay near those dirty leg clothes! They will ruin the water!” and she laughed.

  To Good Face this was getting to be funny, and she watched his face grow more perturbed when she told him, “Minnow won’t teach thee in such filthy breeches. They’ll make the water stink.”

  Wareham stood pouting and appeared to be thinking of just leaving. But Good Face knew how much he wanted to learn so he could perhaps swim home. At last, red-faced, he turned his back to the girls and started skinning the breeches down from his waist.

  Minnow squealed with laughter. “They stick to him! Look! I thought his bottom would be white but it is brown! Ha, ha!”

  “What’s she saying?” Wareham blurted, looking back angrily.

  “Never mind what. Come in the water and leave the clothes there. You must wash them later. But swim first.”

  As he waded in with his hands cupped over his pee spout, she could see that he was far more afraid of the water than she had been even in the beginning. And before he was within a body length of the girls, the smell of him was enough to make them turn their heads. “Wash awhile,” she told him in English. “Then we’ll teach’ee to float. Wash thy hair and face too.” She remembered how she had had to be told that. She could see that he was glad to be in deep enough to hide his bottom parts, though scared wild-eyed by the current. He washed and sluiced his body up to the chest, but with his chin raised and lips and eyes shut tight. “Thee must go clear under,” she urged him, “or thee’ll not learn to swim.”

  “I had a dog could swim ’crost the whole Susquehanny with his head above water.”

  “We don’t swim like dogs.”

  “I will!”

  “Well, then, ’twon’t be Minnow as teaches thee. Learn right or just forget about swimming home, Wareham Kingsley.”

  Minnow had disappeared underwater. Suddenly Wareham disappeared underwater too, his upflung hands flailing water as he went under. Then Minnow surfaced.

  She came up laughing, shaking water out of her long hair. Then she dove under again and in a moment came up, pulling Wareham to the surface by his hair. He was thrashing, coughing and gasping air, eyes glazed with terror.

  “Now his head is wet.” Minnow giggled. Good Face had never seen this quiet girl act so delighted.

  “Did you do that? Pull him under? What if he had drowned?”

  “Eh! He is only a wapsi boy! So he drowns and never will be a soldier!”

  “But you were going to teach him to swim, I thought!”

  “To swim is to be wet. Now I have made him wet.”

  Wareham had finished coughing up water and angrily demanded, “What’re you two sayin’ about me in that damn Indian talk? She tried to drown me!”

  Before Good Face could answer, Minnow disappeared underwater again, and was invisible for what seemed a long time. Suddenly Wareham uttered a wild yelp and cried, “Make her stop! Stop it, stop it!” and lunged toward the creek bank, wading furiously.

  “What? What?” Good Face could now and then, by peering through the reflected daylight on the water’s surface, glimpse Minnow’s dusky body swimming near the bottom. When her head broke above the water, Minnow was at a respectable distance from Wareham and looking blandly innocent. Wareham was almost out of the creek, heading for his filthy breeches. “Wareham, if thee means to learn swimming, come back here.”

  “That damn little squaw-girl pinched my—pinched my—my …” His face was flushed from exertion, anger, or embarrassment, or all three.

  Good Face looked at Minnow, whose eyes caught hers with mischievous comprehension, and Minnow giggled:

  “Fishes bite, maybe, bite little worm!” She pinched her thumb and fingers together in a nipping motion, bared her white teeth and gnashed them, then laughed.

  After that, much cajolery was needed to get Wareham back into the water for his swimming lesson.

  It was late in the afternoon when Good Face and Minnow returned from the swimming place. Neepah came home from the Council Lodge while the girls were rebuilding the cookfire.

  Neepah embraced the girls long and warmly and then began heating more dumpling broth. Several times Good Face saw her pause with the spoon in her hand and gaze for a long time at the wall. It was evident that she had much on her mind, but she did not fail to notice that the girls’ hair was still wet, and she asked Good Face, “Did you learn swimming today?”

  “I swam across. Then I got out. Then I got in again and swam back. Minnow taught me and I learned so fast!”

  “Wehlee heeleh! Did you swim like a turtle with your head up?”

  “No! Head in the water! Fast like a fish! Eh, Minnow? Tell her how I swam right, and fast?”

  “Like a fish who is not as fast as a Minnow, but yes, fast.”

  “Aha. And the wapsi boy, did he learn to swim too?”

  “Ah, no, Kahesana. He swam like a mussel. Always we had to lift him from the bottom.”

  During and after their meal, women from Neepah’s clan kept coming in to sit by the fire and talk with her. Some of them were asking her to vote for running away from the army, and others wanted her to vote for staying and fighting. Some wanted to get away from the army but were afraid to leave before the spring thanksgiving ceremony for fear of offending Mother Corn, who would then not let xaskwim grow to harvest. Others thought they should retreat farther up the river to other old towns and replant the Three Sisters. Others argued that there was no place far enough that the army wouldn’t reach it.

  “Then it is not sure yet?” Good Face asked during a moment when only she and Neepah and Minnow were present.

  “Good Face, we talk a long time on such matters. Even if we choose to stay and face the army, those who want to go away may do it and no one will call them cowards. Unlike the wapsituk, any one of us may do what he thinks best for the People, not just do what one big man says. But we try to think all as one, though it is not always possible.”

  Good Face nodded. She understood that. It was like what her father had always said was good about the Quakers. No man was above other men, and men were not above women. This seemed to be the way it was with the Lenapeh as well.

  After they had eaten and a last few visitors had finished what was in the pot, Neepah knelt close to Good Face. “My own father and mother, elders, live near the English fort by Sookpa helluk, the Great Falling Water, that way near the big lakes. If you went to stay with them, they would be your muxumsah and your huma and would tell you all the stories and teach you the old ways of the Lenapeh.”

  “I think I would like that! Is your father a lehpawcheek?”

  “E heh. He is a wise man and was long a great warrior. He makes those ‘cheh’ things to sit on and sells them at the trading store there. Would you like to live with them there?”

  “I think yes! Which way is that from the army?”

  “Away from it. Far up this river and then west.”

  Good Face understood what that meant, and it frightened her: still farther from where her Quaker family had lived. She was not sure whether she should run away from the army or wait here for it to come so her soldier brother could take her home and not bother the Lenapeh People anymore. She said, “If we went to the Great Falling Water, would we all be together, you
and Minnow and I?”

  “After the Council decides what to do, we will know that. If we flee, many of us will go that way, others to hide in the hills other places where they have relatives. If we do not run away, I will have to stay here because I am a speaker for my clan in the Women’s Council and need to be where my People are, even if it is in war. If I stay, I would have a trusted man take you where my old parents are.”

  “I should rather stay where you are.” Good Face was feeling a deep fear and sadness knotting in her breast.

  Neepah gripped her hand. “If the army comes, you must not be here. If the wapsituk find white children here, it will be worse for everybody. If I have to send you away, it will not be for long that we are apart.”

  Good Face’s heart was quickening with dread. “The wapsi boy who came here when I did, will he be sent away too?”

  “For the same reason, yes.”

  If Wareham knew these things, she thought, wouldn’t he wish he could swim home down the creeks and rivers!

  But he would sink before he got there.

  “Tomorrow I will be in Council again,” Neepah said. “You two must go to the fields in the morning as soon as birds awake, and scare them away as you did today. You can protect xaskwim from the winged stealers while we decide whether we can protect it from the wapsi soldiers.”

  Good Face when she was a Slocum had never even thought of corn needing to be protected. But here were people who seemed to be more afraid for their corn’s safety than for their own!

  The old man giving the prayer for the first day of Spring Ceremony was the chief of the Wolf Clan, and Good Face stared at him trying to imagine anything wolfish about him. But no, he was just round and wrinkle-faced, a wise old lehpawcheek who looked too kindly to be wolfish. The hundreds of people of the village stood in a circle around him as he prayed in the center of the stomp ground with his face raised and eyes shut, holding in his upturned palms a string of wampum beads. Though the day was hot, Good Face was wearing her old woolen dress, and was very proud of it because Neepah had patched its tatters and had sewn on two little round designs of red, white, yellow, and black beads, one circle on each side of the breast so that her medicine bag hung right between them.

  Neepah had also given her two purplish-white wampum beads to hold in her mouth during all the prayers of the Spring Ceremony. Between prayers she was to carry them in her medicine bag, but during prayers everyone was supposed to have the two little cylindrical beads in the mouth because wampum represented the Lenapehs’ heart, and thus prayers given with the heart in the mouth had to be sincere. “But remember them and don’t swallow them,” Neepah had warned her, and so she kept them right on the end of her tongue and pressed against the roof of her mouth. Their hardness and edges reminded her of when some of her bottom milk teeth had come loose not long ago and she kept playing with them with her tongue.

  “Elanzhuh’ndionq, waneeshe zhukeh,” the prayer began in the old chief’s deep voice: “My kindred, I am thankful now …” His voice was strong enough for everyone to hear but had a mumbly sound to it because of the wampum beads in his mouth. “… as we think on blessings we get when Kijilamuh ka’ong, the Great Spirit, remembers us. Now we have lived long to come all together for this time of living things coming up and growing. Now we rejoice when we see everything coming forth, and our Grandfather’s trees are making buds. Now everywhere in the land comes green beauty, in our corn and the fruits we will gather. We rejoice in the heat of the sun, who has sympathy for us after the cold. And in our grandfathers the Thunders, who will give us water for the growing. Everything is done by the Creator, who makes it by thinking it.

  “It is even said that all the manitus pray, and we hear them in their passage through the tops of our grandfathers the Trees; that is the wind we hear in the leaves. It should make one start thinking, and be a cause for happiness, O the good works of our Father, how they work for us all the year through. And this is the time to enjoy it and rejoice, my kindred.”

  “A ho,” said the People.

  As strange as a voice spoken with beads in the mouth was the beat of the water drum. It was as different from the bump bump of a dry drum as was speaking with beads from speaking without beads. Good Face tried to pronounce it to herself: an ordinary drum was bump bump but this was boimp boimp. It looked like an ordinary drum made of a hollow log, but inside, Neepah had told her, was some water and a piece of charcoal: air, fire, and water were inside it, she had said, all sacrednesses, and it was the moistness of the rawhide cover that made it sound different from a dry cover. “You must learn to hear,” Neepah had said. “Wapsituk don’t even know how to hear whether a sound is plain or sacred. Kulesta! Listen to our songs! Those are sacred sounds!”

  Eh o weh

  Eh o weh o weh

  Eh o weh

  Eh o weh o weh

  Eh o weh o weh

  O weh o weh o weh

  They were sounds that made her feel both happy and longingly sad, all the men’s and women’s voices in harmony, even the children’s. They all knew these simple songs. Good Face, who as a Quaker child had never sung with people, learned them and sang, and could feel sacredness in her heart from the singing.

  Heh i yo na heh o weh

  I yo na

  Heh i yo na heh o weh

  I yo na

  Heh heh eh heh o heh o weh

  I yo na … WEH!

  In that first day of Spring Ceremony, as the water drum beat like a heart, as the men and women shuffled solemnly in their separate circles around the stomp ground with the drummers in the middle, with the voices all blending in the yearning, quavering songs, sometimes with sobs in their throats or lilts like birdcalls, Good Face realized that never in her whole life had there been anything she liked better than this singing. It was like praying, but without having to concentrate on thoughts or words.

  They were having their ceremony of the springtime regardless of the army coming. The army was still down the river a long way, very slow, stopping at wapsi forts for long times, always watched by spies who brought messages about its size and its movements. After one long day when Good Face had sat in a tree watching Neepah speak before the whole Council in a loud voice with anger in her eyes, the decision had been made not to run from the army. Neepah had explained to her that evening:

  “The green-coat soldiers of Butler have been promised to us. Cornplanter the Seneca and Old Smoke, and Brant the Mohawk, all those we can expect to help.” She had explained who they all were and what they had done before to wapsi armies. “There will be time for Spring Ceremony before the army gets here. Perhaps they will not get here even before Corn Harvest Ceremony. But in time before they arrive, mothers and wapsi children and old ones will go up the river to stay safe ahead of the army. For one or two moons only, Good Face, you and I will be in different places. You will be with my father and mother near the Great Falling Water. If we defeat the Long Knife army, we will bring you back here before next winter and all will be as it has been before. If we do not defeat them, the rest of us will retreat to that place and we will be together again there. It is a good place too, a sacred place, the Great Falling Water.”

  Good Face had unthinkingly caressed Neepah’s bare arms and asked hopefully: “Could not everybody go up to the Falling Water together and come back after the army is gone?”

  “Daughter, the Three Sisters are growing in the ground here. We must stay here to harvest, if we can, so that we may live through the next winter. If we did not try to stop the army, they would destroy all the crops and starve us, and burn our houses so the winter would freeze us. That is how they do it.”

  “That is so bad! I didn’t know armies did such things!”

  “Good Face, may you not see what armies do.”

  That was what Neepah had told her that Council day. Now all that lay in the tomorrows. But for now, there was singing.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  August 1779

  Wilkes-Barre

&n
bsp; Ruth Slocum, now and then shaking her head with sadness and disbelief, watched the passing bluecoat army: trudging foot soldiers, horse soldiers, cannons mounted between tall spoked wheels, dust rising in sunlit billows.

  Going off to kill people, and on such a scale! she thought.

  The army had been encamped downstream for several days, near Fort Wilkes-Barre, waiting for supply boats to catch up, as the rumors had it; at last the army really seemed to be setting out upriver toward the Indian towns. How will we ever find a trace of poor Frannie after such a monstrous event as this? she wondered.

  An army boat had put in at the riverbank, and an officer climbed ashore. He was crossing the broad bottomland and coming up the slope. “Hello there,” he called up as he came, taking off his tricorn hat and waving it at them. Soldiers in the column paused and touched their hats as he passed among them. Ruth knew nothing of colonels and captains, but presumed this one was important. He was a strapping, Irish-looking sort of fellow. His face was livid with sunburn and he wiped his brow with a sleeve.

  “He wants something of us,” Judith said, working the churn.

  “Lord in Heaven, what could they want that they don’t already have a ton of, I wonder,” said her mother. “I’ve counted a hundred boats so far, all heaping with stuff.”

  The officer stopped before the Slocums, who stood and sat in a cluster at the front of their cabin. All had their hands full of work, or full of their littlest siblings. Ebenezer was sharpening tools for the harvest, Judith churning butter, Will shaving a spoke to fix a broken wagon wheel, eleven-year-old Mary kneading a mass of dough that she had been squeezing and thumping on the board bench for more than an hour as she watched the army go by. All had been working, but also watching the passing army most of the day.