The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Good Face now and then asked to go to the trading place with her old parents. She was curious about it, and most of the Lenapeh people loved to go there and get things. But her parents’ stern, silent looks discouraged her from asking often. They had serious reasons for not wanting her near the wapsituk, even the British ones who were their neighbors near Sookpa helluk. But they didn’t like to talk about what those reasons were.

  One sunny day on a steep path of the falling water gorge, Flicker pointed her digging stick at a clump of sumacs. “Here is much staghorn,” she shouted in her ear over the roar of the falls, and set her basket down on the path.

  It would have been stifling hot on the sunbaked face of the bluff if not for the cooling moisture that drizzled on them from the waterfall’s soaring mist cloud. Through her feet on the slippery, narrow stone path, Good Face could feel the vibration of the water’s mighty pounding far below. She was not afraid of it anymore, not even on this precipitous place, but she could remember well the first day she had seen the falls and was afraid even standing on level ground above the gorge, because of the thrumming of the earth.

  Flicker now knelt at the base of one of the sumac shrubs. Pinching tobacco powder from a pouch, she sprinkled some on the roots and summoned Good Face to come down beside her. “Kulesta, daughter, for you will need to learn the words of this asking prayer.”

  “Pray loudly, then, Kahesana, so I can hear your words!”

  “What?”

  “Loudly, so I can hear the words. To learn the prayer!”

  “E heh!” The old woman tugged her closer and spoke right into her ear as if she were praying to Good Face instead of the spirit of the sumac. “You, Plant Spirit! I come now for medicine! Two girls in my clan sent me to give you this tobacco offering. They implore your medicine to help them get well because they are pitiful! They have got sick in their woman parts by copulating with English fort soldiers. And I myself as their herb giver also pray from my heart that you will take pity on those sick ones! I want their bodies to get well forever of that which troubles them. For in you, Staghorn Plant Spirit, rests the power to bless them with wellness. Tobacco Plant Spirit prays with me that you will take pity on those foolish girls. I am thankful to you and to Creator. Zhukeh kishalokeh!” I have finished asking!

  She knelt there for a while after the prayer with her eyes closed, and Good Face thought she could see a glow, like faint fire, passing between Flicker’s bowed head and the base of the sumac. Then the old woman opened her eyes and straightened up, painfully, and said, “I will pray another time for those girls to become smart and never again do that with wapsi soldiers. And you either, daughter! Now help me dig. These, together with the roots of the horse hobble we dug yesterday, will make their disease go away in seven days. If the plant spirits listen and say yes. That is why you have to know the prayer words just as I have said them. Eh. While you dig, I will gather the staghorn berries for the good sour tea.”

  Whatever it was that the two girls had done with the fort soldiers, Good Face vowed to herself she would never do. Not if it made a girl sick.

  And likewise, not if it displeased Flicker. The old woman was a wonderful mother, and she knew even more than Neepah had, if that could be.

  Sometimes other girls or young women from Flicker’s clan would come along to help gather plants, but usually it was just Good Face with her. In marshes, near the lakeshore, in the hills to the east, along the river bluff, certain things grew in some of those places and none of the others. Good Face loved the vast lake with its blue water extending as far as she could see, and she loved the excitement of swimming in it when the waves were breaking white on the shoreline so hard they could tumble her. She remembered her long-ago friend Minnow telling her about this great lake, and she still missed her after all this time, the girl who had taught her the joyful and useful art of swimming. Because her old parents required her help so much, she had few friends here, none like Minnow, smart and free, almost a sister. She still dreamed sometimes of being with Minnow in water, or near water, or scaring crows with much banging and shouting. She liked to believe that Minnow had escaped the Long Knife soldiers somehow even though Neepah had not. Flailing and falling in the surf of the lake while Flicker foraged sedately onshore, Good Face would day-dream of playing with Minnow here.

  If there was anything Good Face disliked about living here, it was that her old parents kept her too much to themselves. It was not only that they needed her to help them; they were afraid to let her run with other children near the fort or trading post. They made her stay at home when they went to sell pelts and chairs and other things at the trading post. “Too many wapsi people here,” they would caution her, “wapsituk of the worst kinds, soldiers and traders and missionaries.”

  “I thought missionaries were good people,” she said once.

  “They too think they are good people,” Tuck Horse replied. “Not good for us, though. They argue against the one true thing, our Creator. They also will steal your name and your spirit. Stay near home, daughter. Your red hair is like a flame in the dark.”

  She tried to understand why they worried so about her, but the dangers of the place were not apparent to her; as long as one didn’t get in the river above the falls, what danger was there?

  She would have liked to try to speak some English at the fort or trading post. Without the boy Wareham here, without Neepah, who had known a few English words, she was forgetting that language. Wareham had been gone a long time. After the war against the Long Knives ended, the Indians had been told to return any wapsi children they had, and Wareham’s Lenapeh family, who had never actually adopted him by the mud-bowl ceremony, took him away somewhere eastward back along the Longhouse Road, then returned with Long Knife money they had been paid for returning him. To their unhappy surprise then, they had found that no one around the fort or trading post had any use for Long Knife money and it couldn’t be used to buy much. So they had drilled holes in it and made a necklace and a bracelet to wear. Whenever an order came from the Long Knives to return wapsi children, Tuck Horse and Flicker would simply slip away to a hunting camp on the Canada side and stay for a season away from all white people. “We would rather have you than a necklace and a bracelet,” they liked to tell her, laughing.

  And so, although she was living near Englishmen, Good Face seldom heard a word of their language. She had a vague yearning to hear it, and sometimes ran English-language sentences through her mind for practice, but the lack of English didn’t bother her much. The world she lived in now, all the people and places and plants and animals, all the prayers and songs, was Lenapeh, and English words were never quite right for the Lenapeh way of seeing and thinking anyway. There were no English words for the feelings one had in ceremonies, or for the kinds of relatives one had in the clans, or for the cleansing of both body and spirit that occurred when one washed every morning—it was not mere washing. There were no English words for the kind of tribute the Mweh mweh alewehsa demanded from the People before the Green Corn Ceremony, or for prayer smoke, or for linkwehelan, the search for one’s sacred duty, or many other such things. In truth, there was not much use at all for English words, which were based on that other world’s way of thinking and seeing.

  Good Face dug sumac root and breathed the mist, and understood what it meant that the Great Falling Water was a sacred place. The power and size and thunder of the place made her heart swell up. The waterfall was always changing its appearance with the change of light and weather but was always constant and familiar. The frothing chasm was so vast it seemed to be a whole world itself. Sometimes in the roar of water she thought she could hear Creator speaking. Often when she and Flicker clambered along the paths here, or deeper down in the gorge by the river’s edge looking almost straight up at the translucent, foaming curtains of water coming forever down, Good Face felt in her spirit something that was both fear and joy, a feeling like such intense prayer that she could hardly get her breath. It was one of tho
se feelings for which there was no English word—nor any Lenapeh word either, that she knew of.

  There were wonderful and terrible stories about Sookpa helluk that were easy to believe. Once, more than twenty winters ago during a war, Tuck Horse himself had seen horse and ox teams with British supply wagons tumbling and turning slowly through the air from the top of the cliffs to the bottom of the gorge, after Indians had stampeded them. He told her that in wars before the one she remembered, the one against the Long Knives, his People had fought against the British instead of for them. He had fought Redcoats often, he said, since he was young. Pointing from the bottom of the gorge to a high cliff one day, he told her where the wagons had come off the cliff and where they had burst apart at the bottom far below. He described it to her so long and happily that she could still see it in her mind as if she had been there herself when it happened.

  Tuck Horse also had pointed out one day a place far down the cliff of the island that divided the falls. “There is a trail along that cliff that goes behind the falling water,” he said. “I walked that trail when I was young. There was nothing back there but wet rock and thundering water. It seemed like the water was standing still and the rock was rising. I almost forgot everything and stepped over into the water to keep the rock from taking me to the sky.” It had given her shivers just to hear him tell that.

  “You must have been very brave,” she had said with proper awe.

  “I was young and brave and strong then,” he said with a funny-looking smile. “Sometimes if I was in too much of a hurry to climb the cliff, I would just swim up the falls.” He waited a moment for her to turn her unbelieving eyes upon him, and then laughed. That same day, he had pointed out great tree-trunk posts on the cliff of the island and told her that with big ropes on those, the British sometimes would lift big things, even boats, from the river below. “The wapsituk make much effort to do such things, daughter, though I fail to understand why they wish to work and think so hard to move things about, for whatever Creator put in one place, whether it is trees or game, he also put in all other places. But it seems the wapsituk are not satisfied unless they are having a hard time moving something back and forth, up and down, here to there. Heh heh.”

  And Tuck Horse had also told her stories about boats and canoes that got into strong current in the river and plunged over into the froth below. When she stood in the roar and the mist, the stories had a thrilling magic. She did not even think the same way here as she did in ordinary places.

  She could remember one time when the waterfall had been silent. It had been in deepest winter, when it was cold enough for the trees to crack like gunshots and the snow to squeak underfoot. Her old parents had come up from the village, walking on the river ice, to see Sookpa helluk frozen still and silent. It had been a great wall of enormous icicles shimmering in the cold light of the winter sun, locked in absolute quiet, like a crystal mountain. Once she had seen that, she could always remember exactly how it was, even though it seemed impossible when she was standing here immersed in deafening noise and motion.

  “Eh, daughter,” Flicker said now as they put chunks of staghorn root into the basket to make medicine for the girls who had done something foolish. “Look.” Flicker was pointing high with her digger stick.

  There in the mist above the falls, far, far up, arched the rainbow colors, intense against a dark western sky. It was so beautiful Good Face nearly sobbed. This was a sacred place.

  Sometimes Tuck Horse went away for days. Some of his absences had something to do with Owl, and other lehpawcheeks who were of that healing brotherhood called Midewiwin that Neepah had mentioned. During such an absence, old Flicker loaded herself up with a bundle of cured pelts and one of Tuck Horse’s new chairs and got ready to set out with the awkward load, telling Good Face to stay home and keep the cookfire going until she returned.

  Good Face saw an opportunity. “Kahesana,” she exclaimed, “let me go with you and help you carry. Please! I know it hurts you to carry loads! I can help. And I can help you barter-trade, in their tongue!”

  Flicker frowned and shook her head, but Good Face jumped to her side, grasped the chair, and looked up as pleadingly as she knew how, smiling to show all her eagerness.

  At last Flicker said: “If you stay close by me. And no, do not talk English. Hide your red hair with that blue shawl. I do need you to carry, but I want no trading-store wapsini to get curious about you.”

  They set off up the lanes through the Lenapeh encampments, and as they approached the clearing around the fort, they passed the longhouses of Senecas and other Iroquois refugees. The air was smoky and dust drifted from the road, where wagons and carts, horses, oxen, and groups of Indians and white people walked and stood about. Through the gate in the palisade Good Face could see the stone building with its many chimneys and a high flag.

  As they approached the store, Flicker pulled her aside whenever white people walked near. They wore every sort of garb, green soldier coats, red soldier coats, deerskins, frocks with braid and lace; the few white women she saw were either in dull and tattered dresses or shimmering, bright ones. She saw none dressed as she remembered Quakers. Most of the whites were so busy talking to each other that they didn’t even notice her or Flicker, but a few, men and women, paused and tilted their heads to look at her, squinting, raising an eyebrow; a few even pointed at her. Though she was in deerskin and moccasins and her head was covered and she was brown-skinned from the sun, she suspected they could see she wasn’t an Indian girl. Three riding soldiers passed very close by, looking, and one said, “Now how comes an old squawr to have such a red-haired colleen?”

  The accent was odd, and she wasn’t used to hearing English, but it seemed to her that the man had said something about a “red-haired queen” while looking at her. She quickly tucked away a lock that had slipped out from under her head shawl and fallen over her shoulder. The riders’ voices were drowned out by other noises, and then the soldiers were gone.

  She wished Flicker had not forbidden her to speak English in the trading store. Hearing the soldiers just now had stirred vague memories of words, faces, sensations, from that other life. And the sight and sound of rattling, trundling wagons brought back memories from a world in which, unlike her Lenapeh world, there were wheels.

  For one dizzying moment the whole far memory of being a girl in a Quaker family, called Slocum, with brothers and sisters and parents and a grandfather all living in a log house near a river, suffused through her. It was strange that so much of that past life was still in her head but she thought of it so little.

  She followed Flicker past strange-smelling, dirty, unsteady people, over a threshold into a big, smelly room; for the first time in many years she felt a wooden floor beneath her soles and saw a ceiling of straight beams instead of bent saplings, a room with corners instead of curved walls, a room with actual furniture: benches along the walls, a tablelike counter, and behind the counter, shelves, barrels, cabinets, a huge clerking desk. These all revealed themselves to her as her eyes became accustomed to the gloom after the outdoor brightness. She also began seeing a greater clutter of diverse things than she had ever seen in one place, even before her life with the Lenapeh had begun. Piled and hung everywhere behind the counter were colorful hanks of strung beads, clusters of powder horns hanging by their straps, leather bags, wooden canteens, harness, ropes, chains, blankets, bottles and jugs, hats, boots, belts with brass buckles, axes and tomahawks, shovels, knives, pots and kettles, tin cups, bolts of cloth, plumes, guns, white clay pipes with long stems, twists of tobacco, silver bands and gorgets, ribbons, whistles and tin horns, saws and scythes, and cloth bags of many sizes. Chairs that Tuck Horse had made were hung high on pegs.

  Stacked everywhere too were animal hides both tanned and raw, bunches of dried herbs, baskets and beaded belts and bags such as she had seen the Lenapeh women sew, and several pairs of snowshoes she recognized as Tuck Horse’s work.

  And her nose was as busy as her
eyes, identifying odors familiar from both her lives: tea and coffee and candle tallow and camphor and tarred oakum evoked her early childhood; tobacco, bear oil, sassafras, mint, sweetgrass, beaver gland, muskrat, brain-tanned hide, and wintergreen were more lately familiar.

  But the strongest smell in the room by far was that of men who never washed or changed their clothes. Such men were sitting on the benches and working behind the counter, where Flicker was trying to barter with a tall, fat, stinking man who could not understand her. Good Face could understand some of his talk, though it was not the same English she had known as a child.

  “Och, Benjy,” he called over his shoulder to someone deeper in the room. “This auld hag’s Delaware or Shawanoe or such-like. Doesna speak Iroquois. A’canna make nowt o’ her blather!”

  The other, who was measuring ribbon off a spool, replied, “John’s never here when those buggers come in. Well, just hand-talk till she trades. What’s she got there?”

  “Mink and fisher skins. Fair good’ns. Well, old woman, what is it ye want for these, eh? What? What want? Oogum boogum! Gimme a hint, granny!”

  Good Face, who had grown to be almost as tall as Flicker, leaned close to her and said in Lenapeh, “Kahesana, tell me what you want and I shall tell him in English.”

  Suddenly wary, Flicker answered, “No. Don’t talk English here.”

  “Mother! Here’s where it can be useful to us!”

  Flicker hesitated, slightly shaking her head but apparently seeing the practical sense of that.

  The man behind the counter was looking at Good Face now, and he said, “Hoot, lassie! Tha’s nae Indian. Can ’ee understand me?”

  “Oogum boogum!” she replied. He blinked and tucked in his chin, then scowled at her. She wanted to laugh. But she wanted more to speak English and help Flicker get what she had come for.

  Flicker was looking peeved, and she said: “Was that English you spoke, when I asked you not to?”