The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Then, in her new dress, with people standing all around, she was placed to stand between the old man and woman, with the man in a fur cap standing before them. He was rolling tobacco leaves between his palms to crumble them, saying:

  “Listen, my People. I have been asked by Tuck Horse and his wife, Flicker, to do this medicine.” He walked around the three, sprinkling tobacco crumbs over their shoulders, and returned to stand in front of them, saying: “This girl, Wehletawash, has been purified by water, by smoke and tobacco. The whiteness of the wapsituk has been scrubbed off of her and her unclean garments have been discarded. Now she wears a garment made for her by this woman beside her, and she speaks the Lenapeh tongue and wears a medicine bag given her by a person of this same family. She is ready now.”

  He stooped and picked up his wooden bowl. A woman knelt by the creek and dipped up water with a gourd spoon. The man said, “Now each of you will put some of that water in with the earth I hold here.” Tuck Horse took the spoon and dribbled some water into the bowl. Then he handed the spoon to Good Face, who did the same, then gave the spoon to the old woman, who poured in the rest of the water. The man swirled the bowl, then reached in with his right hand and stirred and worked it inside the bowl. Then he held it down for them to look in. It was now half full of a smooth, dark mud. He said to Tuck Horse, “Could you separate the water and the soil from each other?”

  “No.”

  “Could you separate the water and the soil?” he asked the old woman.

  “No,” replied Flicker.

  “Good Face, could you separate the water and the soil from each other?”

  She looked at the mud, thinking that there must be some way that the old ones just hadn’t thought of. You could just let the mud dry, she thought. But then the water would be gone. She looked up at the man, who was staring hard at her, and she realized what the answer was expected to be, and she answered, “No.”

  “Wehlee heeleh. Now listen and remember. As a medicine maker of my people I have shown with this mud how the souls of these three people are now mixed together so they can never come apart. Good Face is now their daughter, filling the place of one they had before.” He made a mud spot on each one’s forehead, and said, “Zhukeh kishalokeh.” It is finished.

  And then all the people around laughed and whooped and came close to hug Tuck Horse and Flicker and their daughter Good Face, who was bewildered but felt very good, and then Flicker bent down and put on Good Face’s cold feet a soft, pretty pair of moccasins decorated with quills, the most beautiful moccasins she had ever seen, and told her, “Now you are beautiful, my daughter.” And Good Face did feel beautiful, and they all went up to feast. Everyone was happy, and Good Face was fussed over very much, enjoying the attention and kindness she had missed since leaving Neepah’s village. She felt encouraged to talk a lot, impressing the people with her ease in their language. As usual there was much attention to her beautiful red hair. The clouds cleared late in the afternoon and the sunset light from the horizon beyond the river flooded everything with a reddish-gold cross light. Just then she heard a strange, distant blaring sound, remembering that just such a sound had awakened her earlier that day.

  “What was that, Huma?” she asked as the notes faded.

  “That was the silver horn the soldiers at the fort blow in the morning and the evening, to tell them the sun is coming up or going down, so they can make their flag do likewise. You will hear that every day while we are at this place. But listen now, Good Face, and remember something.”

  “What, Huma?”

  “Not to call me that. For, old as I am, I am not your grandmother but your mother.”

  Good Face flushed with embarrassment. “I will remember, Kahesana.”

  PART TWO

  Good Face

  1784–1794

  CHAPTER SIX

  July 1784

  Wilkes-Barre

  Ruth Slocum shaded her eyes with her left hand and reached up with her right to grasp Giles’ hand and then Will’s. High on their horses, they were silhouetted against the morning sun, faces in the shadows of their wide black hat brims.

  “Godspeed, my boys,” she said. “I’ll pray every day thee finds her.”

  “Well, we’ve a trail of sorts,” said Giles. She knew he was trying to sound more hopeful than he was. She had always had more faith than anyone in the family that Frannie was alive, and she was sure of it now. When prisoners were released after the end of the war, her nephew Isaac Tripp had returned to the valley swearing he had seen Frannie at a Delaware village.

  And then, even more inspiring, Wareham Kingsley had been brought home, saying she was alive at Niagara as little as two years ago, living with an old Delaware man and woman and seeming to be well.

  Her two eldest sons rode down to the river trail and turned upstream. They were leading a packhorse, and unarmed. They turned in their saddles and waved once before vanishing in the willows.

  She had tried to dissuade Giles. As her husband used to say, Indians have long memories, particularly about promises and about grudges. Even with the war over and the new government trying to soothe the tribes, there might still be warriors who remembered that Giles had fought against them.

  But he insisted on going, reminding her that it probably was his fault that Frannie had been carried off. He saw it that way, now that the war was over. He had put aside the gun for good, and now without it was braver than ever.

  Ruth Slocum stood in the yard sending her thoughts after them, her fingers covering her chin and mouth. Their hope for getting Frannie back if they did find her was the sum of one hundred guineas, which the Slocum family had raised by selling off a small piece of land. They hoped it would be enough to ransom her.

  Ruth Slocum had no idea whether money would be of any importance to the Indians. If not, there were traders everywhere who coveted money and would know how to convert it to something the Indians wanted. A hundred guineas would buy a lot of whatever it might be that Indians wanted.

  And if that was not enough, the boys could just come home and get more money. As the head of her family, she had plenty of land, thanks to her father and husband, rest their souls, and now that the war was over, land-hungry people were pouring into the valley.

  She walked to the house and sat on the stoop, wiping her face with her apron. She was forty-eight years old, had borne ten children in nineteen years and suffered much grief, and she tired quickly these hot days. She left most of the field work now to Ebenezer, who was eighteen, and Benjamin, who was going on fourteen, though she could still get out and put in a good day in the harvest. She could in fact put in a better day of work than Ebenezer, who with his lame foot used up much of his strength compensating for his lack of balance. Mary was a strong and supple hand in the field now, being almost sixteen, but she usually stayed at the house taking care of the three littlest boys. All in all, Ruth Slocum’s lot was much better than anyone would have expected for a widow of her age. There was never more work than family to do it, and then of course there was all the land, which just silently and invisibly grew in value year after year because it was so close to the fort and town.

  Inside the house the little ones were talking; Ebenezer and Ben were up in the fields. Judith now lived with her husband Hugh, several miles away. Ruth Slocum still felt that all her children were under the web of her soul, no matter how far away they were. Even Frannie, about whose place she knew nothing, was still palpably out there somewhere. Ruth could feel the distance growing between herself and Giles and Will as they rode away, but they were still in that web of caring, and would be even if they went all the way to Niagara on their quest.

  She didn’t know what to think about the demeanor of the Indians these days, or what Giles and Will could expect. Officially there was peace. But all the Iroquois, and others who had been allied with the British, were abandoned by the Redcoats, who had promised always to protect them and their lands from the Long Knives. And since their victory, the Amer
icans now claimed all the land east of the Mississippi—most all of which was still occupied by dozens of tribes who had not been consulted about the claims to their land. Though Ruth Slocum as a Quaker did not concern herself with such matters as states and nations, she knew from Giles that most of the tribes were seething and confused and growing defiant. Two great Delaware chiefs, Buckongahelas and Captain Pipe, had declared to their people that the Americans were evil and could not be trusted. Two years earlier a company of Pennsylvania militiamen had massacred a hundred unarmed Christianized Delawares in their mission town in the Muskingum Valley, and that act had convinced nearly all tribes, even the ones theretofore neutral, that the Long Knives had neither honor nor mercy.

  The relentless progress of folly under flags and alliances gave Ruth little hope for peace and loving kindness among men. I reckon all one can do, she thought, is be faithful to one’s Inner Light and harm no one, and pray not to be harmed by the folly as it goes roundabout. She sighed.

  Lord God protect my sons, and help them find my little girl and bring her home safe and pure.

  … though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil … Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?… He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart …

  Niagara

  “Daughter,” said Tuck Horse as he sat on a log by firelight in front of the wikwam, “come and sit by me, and we will talk a little.”

  That surprised Good Face. Tuck Horse had never invited her to sit and talk. He usually talked only with men, or, in the privacy of their wikwam, to his wife Flicker. He had never been unkind or sour, but always watched her from a distance, as if this red-haired child who had come to him in his old age were something just to puzzle on. For nearly four years he had watched her grow taller and thinner, watched her lose teeth and grow new ones, watched her being a help and a comfort to Flicker, whose bones sometimes hurt so badly she could hardly move without wincing.

  Now Good Face had just finished scouring the supper bowls with creek gravel, and she took them in the wikwam and came back out. He pointed to the ground near his knee, and she sat down on her heels facing the fire but with her profile to him. He had filled his pipe bowl, and with callused finger and thumb he expertly snatched up an ember and dropped it on top of the tobacco, puffing and tapping the coal down with his forefinger until his head was enveloped in a smoke cloud. She had often tried to handle an ember like that to see how he could do it, but it always burned her unbearably.

  He puffed and did not say anything, and seemed to be studying the flames as if she were not there. Flicker sat on the other side of the fire, twisting strands of cedar-root bark and braiding them into rope. It was what she did when there was not good enough light to sew by. She would always say, “One cannot have too much rope.” And that seemed true; there were always uses for it. Finally, Tuck Horse cleared his throat and said, still looking at the flames instead of the girl:

  “What is fire?”

  She was surprised. She had never thought about what it was. She did not want to give a bad answer. She thought then of the old story, and said, “It is flame from the Sun, that Rainbow Crow brought down for the People when they were cold.”

  “E heh!” he said, and she knew that had been a good answer. Then he said, “That is where it came from, but what is it?”

  “I don’t know, Father.”

  “Look at it.” He pointed at it with his pipe stem. “Is it alive?”

  She nodded. “It looks to be alive.” She had never thought of that.

  “It is alive. It moves. It eats. It leaves its waste, the ash. But you can move a hand through it, and therefore it must be a spirit instead of a body. But it is alive. Daughter, when your spirit leaves your body and you cross over to Awasakumeh, the Land Beyond, your body, which has been warm, becomes cold. Why do you think that should be?”

  She guessed what he apparently wanted her to say. “Because the spirit leaves it?”

  “Yes. That is so. The spirit in your body is fire. Like that. When it is in you and you are alive, you move. You eat. You leave waste. You are warm. And one more thing. Look.”

  He plucked some dry grass from the ground by his foot and leaned toward the fire, holding the tuft in the flame until it was burning, then he set it aside on the ground where it burned by itself. He said, “The fire can make more of itself. When you are alive, you can make more of yourself. Another proof that the spirit in your body is fire. My wife and I have made other life, just like this fire. Two sons. A daughter. All are gone across now. They did not burn as long as they were meant to, because wapsi soldiers extinguished them.”

  She had not known that her old parents had had sons, as well as their daughter Neepah. She looked down and held one hand in the other. “My wapsi family,” she said, “did not believe in killing other people. We were called ‘Friends.’ ”

  He nodded. “I know of those people. I think that is right-thinking. But I do not understand what they do when it would be right to kill and they cannot.”

  She looked at him intently, surprised by what he had said. “Do you believe it is right sometimes?”

  “Yes,” he said. “When you are right and your enemy is wrong. I have had to do it often, when the wapsituk did evil things and I was there to stop them. Daughter, you had a brother in that Friends family. He became a soldier.”

  “Yes,” she said. She had not imagined that this old man so far away from her family’s home could know that.

  “When he became a soldier, did he not believe that he was doing right?”

  “I never asked him. But I do not think he would have done anything he did not believe was right.”

  Tuck Horse took hard pulls on his pipe stem to get another cloud of smoke up, then said, “That is a hard thing. When two enemies both believe they are right. I have not figured that out yet, how both can be right-thinking but not agree. Our people, the Lenapeh, we were told by the Creator that this land, Taxkwox Menoteh, the place on the Great Turtle’s back, is for us to five on forever. Then comes a wapsini and he says his Creator means it for him. We believe there is only one Creator. A wapsini says he believes there is only one Creator. So I ask: Did the Creator he? Or are there two Creators, one for us and one for them? If there are two, then everybody has been lying about the most important thing of all.” He shook his head, frowning. “That is the only thing I do not like about fire. When you look at it, it makes you think, and thinking is troubling sometimes. Long ago in the beginning, we two-leggeds sat down to look at fire and we started thinking. From then on we have been thinking, and it makes it always harder to be good like the four-leggeds. The four-leggeds have fire spirit inside them, but they are too smart to sit looking at it and thinking.” He shook his head again.

  Good Face glanced over at Flicker, who was just braiding cord and listening and smiling. Then she began chuckling, her shoulders shaking, and finally she said: “Forty winters ago I first heard this. I thought, ‘I want this man for my husband; he is a longheaded one!’ Now after all this time, he still says the same about it. No answer yet! He he!”

  The old warrior frowned at her, but then he began laughing too. They were both laughing and shaking their heads. Good Face felt a great rush of happiness. She loved them and she knew they loved each other, and she believed they had truly come to love her.

  After a while she said, “My people too believed this about the fire inside. They called it the Inner Light. They believed it was a part of God inside each one.”

  “Yes,” said Tuck Horse. “Like the piece of the sun that burns in each one like fire. How could it be any other way? Even if it is so that there are two gods—and may that not be so—they would surely agree on that.”

  Much of her time at Neepah’s village Good Face had spent running and playing with other children, but it was not the same here with Tuck Horse and Flicker. Her old parents worked most of the time and they needed her help.

  It was their age and the nearness of the fort
and trading post that made life here different from life at Wyalusing. Tuck Horse caught fish, but was too old to be much of a hunter anymore, and there was little game to hunt anyway because the British had been here so long in such great numbers. So the old people made their living partly by supplying things the trading post wanted. Good Face went with them all over the countryside gathering reeds and rushes and roots and barks, vines and limber poles, berries, medicine herbs, cattails, plant fibers of all kinds, waterfowl eggs, and, always, much firewood.

  Tuck Horse used much of the firewood to heat the steam pit where he bent wood to make chairs, snowshoes, and handles. In the pit he would bury the clean, green poles in hot, wet sand. When he dug them out, they were so pliable that he could bend them into the curved shapes he needed and tie them to hold those shapes until they were dry, and would remain shaped just so. His only tools were a steel knife, hatchet, awl and auger, and a mallet of wood burl, but with these and plenty of cordage and fish glue he could make many useful things for the trading post. Flicker wove lovely baskets, tanned hides and pelts, sewed and decorated moccasins and pouches and sheaths covered with designs in quillwork and beads. Good Face grew strong from carrying loads along steep trails.

  Tuck Horse was not proud that he made his living selling chairs to the British, though he was proud of how well he could make them. He and his people did not like the feeling of sitting on chairs, but the white people always needed them. Tuck Horse would shrug and make jokes about this strange work of “making wooden frames to hold their stinking buttocks up from the ground,” and said that Mother Earth probably appreciated him for doing this. And if the whites needed these strange things, he needed the strange things they would trade him for chairs—beef, salt, sugar, bullet lead or gunpowder, or sometimes English coins. As for snowshoes, both Indian and wapsi hunters needed them in the winters, and he was proud of those, because his ancestors had made them too.