“Oogum boogum? No, Kahesana. But he already sees I am wapsini. Let me speak for you in English.”
Flicker narrowed her eyes in a cunning look, then said, “Speak, then, but do not tell him your wapsi name.”
“And so then tell me what you want from this place, Kahesana.”
“The metal needles that don’t break, for sewing deerskin. And a bullet maker for the one my husband lost. And a piece of bullet metal.”
Good Face bit her lip, frowned, thought hard for words. “Give needles, ah, lead … ah … bullet mold, to Mother, she ask for.”
The man looked from one to the other of them and raised his eyebrows, then leaned forward and squinted. “I don’t believe that’s your mother, little lassie.”
“My mother yes,” Good Face replied, but she dropped her gaze for a moment as she said it, remembering her true mother.
“Aha!” he said. “She’s not, is she? You’re a captive, aren’t ye, from the war? What’s your name, lass?”
“Wehletawash. Good Face is my name.”
Flicker said quickly in Lenapeh, “You are not talking about needles! This man is trying to find out who you are! Talk of the goods we need, or we must leave, daughter!”
So she asked again for needles and bullet mold and lead, and whenever the man asked her name, she would ignore the question, and after a long time they had three needles of different sizes, a bullet mold with squeeze handles, a bar of lead, and also a ladle for melting the lead. The man had told them they needed a ladle to melt the lead in because it was not good to use a cooking kettle for it. He had said he would trade all those items for Flicker’s entire bundle of pelts, but Good Face had seen his eyes and sensed that he was being greedy, so she argued, and at last he accepted half the pelts for all the items. When that was done, the man leaned with his hands on the counter, smiled, and said, “Your ‘father,’ as ye call ’im, will need powder.” He held up a small bag and said, “Gimme the rest of those pelts and I’ll fill this with gunpowder.”
Good Face said to Flicker, “This man wants the rest of the pelts very much, I think. He offers you that little bag of gunpowder for the rest of them. I think it might be too much because his eyes are greedy and untrue.”
“You have done well, my daughter. Yes, they are all greedy. Tell him my husband has much gunpowder and that we are finished here.”
“Plenty my father has now of gunpowder. No more need. So …” She had to think of the old word. “Good-bye.”
“Wait, don’t go, lass.” He was tilting his head and smiling a smile that was obviously meant to look sweet, one of those false smiles she had seen all her brothers and sisters use to win things from their mother, and she herself surely had too. It was one of those kinds of smiles, but it was awful to look at because his teeth were rotten and dingy. He said, “Tell me your real name, lass, and I’ll gi’ ye a pretty.” He held up his hand with a shiny little brooch between his thumb and finger.
“E heh. My real name I tell thee, so?” She held out her hand, while Flicker frowned warily, and the man held the brooch over it.
“The name first,” he said with his false sweet smile.
“Good Face,” she replied with an equally false sweet smile, and snatched at the brooch, but he palmed it even more quickly and shook his head.
“If ye really want this pretty,” he said, shaking his head, “come back one day withoot granny there and tell me your name.”
“Why thee wants so much my name?” Flicker had seized her arm and was pulling her toward the door.
“Why, p’haps I’ll ask ye to marry me when ye grow up, lassie! Ha ha! Ha ha! Fare thee well, then, little freckle face, if ye must go!” He clapped his hand over his heart and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. Other people in the store were laughing as they hurried out.
“Wasn’t that a funny man!” Good Face said.
“He thinks so,” muttered Flicker. “He was always trying to make you say your wapsi name?”
“Yes. But I didn’t say it.”
“Kulesta, daughter. Those are greedy men. If you gave them your name, they would try to sell it, and that would be bad for us. Hurry along. I want us to be away from this fort.”
“Sell my name? How? To whom?”
“Never you think of it anymore.” She seemed cross, and was walking faster than she usually could because of her bone pains.
But when they were clear of the palisade she slowed down and was cheerful again. “Ah, ai!” she said, chuckling, hefting the bundle of pelts in which she had rolled their purchases. “Waneeshee, good daughter. You bartered well!”
The foliage was reddening. One day Tuck Horse and Flicker went to a Council, leaving Good Face to make corn-husk dolls with some of her friends, who were going to give dolls to their littler sisters. They would be red-hair dolls. Good Face cut off a hank of her hair and divided it to make the hair for three dolls. It was exacting work and time slipped by quickly, and Tuck Horse and Flicker returned while they were still working, looking quite serious. That evening as they ate corn cake and sipped rabbit-meat broth, Tuck Horse said:
“Daughter, our clan will leave this place, two days from today. We will spend tomorrow packing everything we can carry by horse or canoe, and what is left we will give to our neighbors who stay.”
Good Face was startled. She loved this place and was still wrapped up in the project of the dolls. “Why? This is such a good place! Why should we leave a sacred place, Father?”
“Since the war between the Thirteen Fires and the British King ended, this place has been going bad and it will grow worse,” Tuck Horse said. “The Town Destroyer and others who followed him have taken and ruined the lands of the Iroquois, the Six Nations, and those towns of our people who had dwelt among them. We all came here for protection and for provisions that the British promised us. But now that we are no longer fighting for them, they are stingy. The British are throwing all their faithful allies into the hands of the Long Knives. The Iroquois are going to Canada. There have been so many people here for so long that there is no game left, and the soil has been planted until it needs to rest. This place is indeed a sacred place, but not a good place to live anymore.”
She could not argue with what the Council knew. “Where will we go?”
He pointed westward. “That way. At the other end of the lake above the falls is a British place called Detroit. It is about twenty sleeps from here. There we can stay through the winter if the British there will help us a little. When the spring comes again we will go south from there to where most of our Lenapeh have been going, for a long time since the wapsituk came.”
The thought of all that distance, still farther from all the places she had known, made her feel shaky. Somehow she had always felt that when the wars and flights were over, she would be returning down the same river. She had sometimes enjoyed imagining Tuck Horse and Flicker sitting at supper with her Slocum family, and being good friends, and her mother Mrs. Slocum admiring the beautiful quillwork designs in the dress and moccasins made for her by her mother Flicker.
But instead of going back toward her first family, they would be going the other way.
That night when Tuck Horse was away somewhere in the village smoking and talking with other old men, Flicker closed up a basket in which she had packed herbs and seeds for the journey, and said, “Sit here with me, daughter. I want to say something.” They knelt near the cookfire. Flicker looked into the firelight, not at Good Face, as she began.
“All that my husband tells you is true. But he does not tell enough to make you understand, I think.
“Daughter, here by this fort we have been living with the Iroquois peoples because we were all being driven here by the Long Knife army. But the Iroquois people are not our friends, and they have done many hard things to us. They helped the British take away our lands in the east. Then they put us in the Susquehanna country and ruled over us by saying who our chief would be. They did this also to other peoples akin to us, the Twi
ghtwee, the Shawnee, the Nanticoke, who also had been cheated out of their lands in those parts. It is not in our hearts to live near these Six Nations Iroquois. Your father and I have many winters in our past and not too many from here forth, and we would like to spend the rest in a place far from all who have been enemies, whether red or white. Do you see?”
“I knew that not all the people here were the same. Owl did tell me once about the meanness of the Iroquois,” Good Face said. It was always surprising to her to learn that so many people were always set against each other. First, English against rebels. Then white men against Indians. Now, Indians against other Indians.
“I want to say another thing for you to understand, daughter. You see that my husband and I are elders. Because we have so many years, we at first thought we should not take you as our daughter. But we soon became glad, and you have filled our days with goodness.”
“You are good to me, Mother.”
“My husband is still strong. But he has been hurt badly as a warrior. Some of those scars on him are from weapons that went all the way through. He cannot go far enough or move fast enough anymore to hunt, and our sons who would have lived near us and hunted for us, they were killed by the wapsituk. I am still strong. But age is in my bones and sometimes I can hardly move. The daughter who would have lived near us and helped me with work, she was killed by them too.”
They both looked down sadly, thinking of Neepah. Then Flicker went on: “You would help me with my work, my new daughter. You do help me. But you are a girl not even ready to be a woman yet, and what I have taught you already about the things a woman must know and do is little compared with what I have yet to teach you. We might go to the Spirit World before you know enough to take care of us.
“And so you see, daughter, we want to go and be in a peaceful country with all our own people, all who can help each other. That was always the old way. The old ones and the young ones gave to each other. The parents gave everything to the children so they would grow up and be good. And then the young ones gave everything back to the old ones so they would be contented. That was always the old way. What you received, you gave back just as much. What is so bad about war is that it blows everything away before the giving-back can be done.”
“Then I understand why. But I don’t like leaving Sookpa helluk.”
“E heh. Perhaps we will see it again. As a Midewiwin and trader, your father goes everywhere. And no matter what happens, the People always go back to see the sacred places.”
The next morning Tuck Horse said they would travel to the place called Detroit by water, instead of land trails. He said the clan would go up above the waterfalls to get canoes ready. Up there on the upper lake, the one whose waters fell over Sookpa helluk, there was a fishing and boat-building town where canoes of both the dugout and bark kinds could be obtained.
Good Face dimly remembered sitting in a new canoe with Minnow and other children in the canoe makers’ camp at Neepah’s town long ago. She remembered boasting to Minnow that someday she would ride in a canoe on a great water.
Tuck Horse, Flicker, and Good Face gathered and packed everything they would be taking. They gave their wikwam and many of their belongings to people who would be staying at Niagara. A few things they had made they would sell at the trading store: snowshoes, one last chair, some of Flicker’s quillwork and beadwork. They loaded their arms with these things and told Good Face to wait until they came back. She pleaded to go with them, to help them barter in English. To her surprise, they said no, she must stay here.
“I could help you carry, and talk in their language, as I did.”
“No, daughter. We do not want you to be seen there. The traders are too interested in you, since that time.”
She nodded obediently and watched them go, and thought about what Flicker had said about the traders. That they were greedy. That they would sell even her name, if they knew it. And that now they were too interested in her. She didn’t understand that exactly, but she remembered the ugly-mouth man and felt that her parents were right.
Later in the day, when Flicker and Tuck Horse returned, they sat down on the logs by the outdoor fire pit. Tuck Horse put down his bundle. He was breathing hard. Flicker put some sticks on the embers. Tuck Horse got out his pipe and tobacco. Good Face was inside the door of the wikwam, rearranging the little bundle of belongings she would be taking. She could hear them talking low outside, and heard Tuck Horse say a word that made her scalp tingle: “Tsa-lo-cum,” it sounded like.
She thought, Slocum? Was that Slocum? And she turned a keen ear. She heard Flicker say:
“They were trying to buy her name, I am sure. But the traders do not know what it is. They tried to get her to tell, but she did not. She is so good.”
Tuck Horse said, “When I first saw them that other day, I was sure who they were. One of them I saw with the valley soldiers at Wyoming the day I was shot down.”
“I am sure they were trying to buy her name,” Flicker repeated. “I heard the word ‘guineas,’ and that is a word of money, is it not?”
“It is. My wife, it is good that we are leaving now. We should not wait even until tomorrow to start for the canoe camp.”
“The fat trader looked at me when they were talking to him. I could see his memory working in his eyes. I was afraid they might follow us here if he spoke of her while we were there.”
“I saw you keep looking behind. I too am uneasy. Let us get her and go. I wonder where she is.”
“I am here, Father,” she said, stepping to the doorway, and when they looked around at her, she saw they were startled.
“I will go and get the horse,” the old man said. He picked up the rope halter and the pack saddle he had made the day before.
As Flicker carried bundles and cargo baskets out of the wikwam, Good Face asked her what men they had been talking about, and Flicker replied: “A child should not listen from behind a wall.”
“I did not mean to. Who were the men, Kahesana?”
“I do not know them. Your father saw them days ago and we both saw them today. I told you the traders are greedy and would sell names. There are wapsituk who come since the end of the war and will pay for names. Then perhaps they steal the people away and sell them to the Long Knife wapsituk. We want to be gone before they find you. You are our daughter in our hearts and we will not have you stolen from us.”
It was an explanation that made sense to Good Face, and it frightened her so much that she too was eager to get away.
And yet she kept wishing she had been allowed to go to the trading post with them so she could have seen the men who were trying to buy her name. She had heard Tuck Horse say the name “Slocum,” she was sure, and now and then she thought of her father and brothers. “What did those men look like?” she asked.
“Wapsituk,” Flicker said. “They all look alike to me. Some fat, some thin. They were wapsituk. That is how they looked.”
They rode off the main trail for a last look at the waterfall. The sun was so low in the west that the roaring water was in bluish shadow, but the mist cloud above the farther cataract was so full of sunlight it looked like a sky-high flame against the blue. Tuck Horse smoked a prayer pipe there, as old Owl had so long ago, the first time Good Face saw the waterfall. Then they rode on up the river to the canoe camp on the shore of the upper lake. There they found the people of their clan who had already come up, and since it was dusk, Flicker made no shelter or cookfire. The other families gave them food, and then they slept in their blankets under the stars. It grew chilly, and Good Face woke up several times in the night shivering and thinking with dread of how soon winter would be here. She wondered if it would be warmer in the place called Detroit, where they were going, than here at Niagara in the winter. Then she thought for a while of her father, of the Slocum family, and tried to remember what he looked like. But she could not make his face appear. She could recall her mother’s face fairly clearly, but it slipped away because she was cold and k
ept thinking of winter instead.
It made her sad that she could not remember them better.
In the morning, Tuck Horse led away the packhorse and went down to the lake with some other men of the clan. They came back later without the horse, and as they ate the morning meal they said they had traded the packhorse and one other horse for a canoe big enough to carry three families. It was a good, light canoe, they said, one made of birch bark by Ottawas from up north. It had been used the length of this lake and the Huron lake several times in recent years. It needed new pitch to seal some of the seams, and two ribs would have to be taken out and replaced because they had been broken by a hard landing on a rocky shore, but that could all be done today. Other families had already obtained canoes or dugouts and were fixing them up. The men had discussed whether to go along the north shore of the lake or the south shore, and decided that the north shore way was a little shorter and a little better protected from the west winds at this season, and so they would go along the north shore, which was the English Canada side.
Good Face listened to them talk about all that and thought she understood, although when she looked at the lake, she could see nothing but water to the horizon, coming in endlessly as waves sloshing and splashing on the shore. A little strip of land lay just off the shore farther south, where a small stream entered the lake, and the canoe-making camp was sheltered from the lake waves by that. There were many canoes on the bank, large and small, and men and women working on them, laying out sheets of bark on the ground, chunking on wood with tools, splitting off long slats of wood, soaking wood strips in water to curve them, the way Tuck Horse did when he made snowshoes and chairs. There were also men making dugout canoes by burning and scraping logs, as she had seen before. Many poles sticking out of the water showed where nets and weirs had been set to catch the whitefish and trout that were spawning in the shoals. Adding to the pall of smoke over the canoe camp were families smoke-curing fish. Good Face sat and smelled the odors that came to her on the cool wind blowing off the lake. Somewhere at the far other end of that lake was the place called Detroit, Tuck Horse had said. It was many days’ travel and they would be in the canoes all day every day unless the wind was too strong, but they would travel close to shore and would go on land every evening to hunt and camp and sleep. He had assured her that they would never be out of sight of land, and that had made her less fearful of what lay ahead.
The Red Heart Page 21