The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  But she thought of the long distance in that direction, and now and then she thought of the men down at Niagara who were said to be trying to buy her name, and she wished, wished so hard that her heart ached, mat she knew whether they were of her Slocum people.

  If they had been, and had found her, what then?

  She thought: I would have brought them to meet my old father and mother Tuck Horse and Flicker, and all would have seen that the others were good and kind people and they would have eaten together.

  Beyond that she did not know what to think might have happened.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  October 1784

  Lake Erie

  The six canoes were blessed with sprinkled tobacco and cedar smoke and prayers were given, and the forty-five men, women, and children arranged themselves carefully in the vessels. And then as the morning sun was rising over the treetops, they glided out of the mouth of the stream, heavy-laden and deep in the water. Good Face had just become used to the floating sensation in the smooth water of the stream when the canoe came out from behind the sheltering spit of land and was suddenly lifted and slammed by a breaking wave whose spray showered everyone and brought gasps and moans. She clutched and held a thwart in fright and exhilaration as the wave rolled under the vessel, lifting the stern for a giddy moment; then another wave slammed and sprayed over the bow and lifted it, and the wood of the canoe creaked with the weight of its contents and the twisting force of the waves. The paddlers, three men including Tuck Horse, laughed at the frightened voices of the women and children, which gave her hope that they were not in as much danger as it seemed. The paddler just in front of her, really not a man but a wide-shouldered boy of perhaps fourteen, looked left into the wind which was blowing his long hair, and his teeth were white in a grin of excitement. Soon the bow was steered straight into the wind, and the rolling grew less, and the waves sprayed out on both sides as the high prow cut through them.

  Straight ahead now across a wide stretch of water was a low wooded land with clearings, and a palisaded fort so distant that it looked hardly bigger than a cabin. The wide stretch of water, Tuck Horse announced, was the place where the lake overflowed into the Niagara Sipu—and he now frightened her by shouting, “If we had no strong paddlers and just drifted, that river would carry us to the Falling Water and we would go over!” Several children’s voices responded, “Paddle hard, Muxumsah!” He laughed, laid his paddle across his lap, tilted his head on his shoulder, and made snoring noises until all the children were squealing with alarm. Then he put his paddle back into the water and the canoe continued plunging into waves. Even when the frightful space of the river was safely behind the canoes, Good Face felt a persistent terror at the thought of unknown depths of water below this frail canoe.

  After the fear came the sick feeling. The constant rising and falling and rocking were having an unsettling effect on her insides. She had to keep swallowing, and the more she swallowed, the more nauseated she became. At last, with tears cold on her face, she yielded to an irresistible upsurge and spewed her morning’s hominy over the side of the canoe into the frightful water mere inches below her face. Opening her blurry eyes for a moment, she saw the mess floating backward and saw a paddle blade rise from the clear water and sweep forward. Behind her, Tuck Horse said, “So soon, daughter. How bad for you.”

  After a long time of empty retching, her eyes weeping and nose running and body trembling, she was given a wad of dried vegetation passed forward from Flicker and told to chew it and keep swallowing her spit. She recognized it as wild tobacco that she and Flicker had gathered. The mere thought of its bitter flavor made her even sicker for a moment, but when Tuck Horse growled, “Chew it,” she put it in and chewed and chewed the bitter mass and swallowed the nasty saliva. And then after a while the heaving urge diminished and was gone. Then, one by one, other adults and children in the swooping, bucking vessel leaned over the side and had to be dosed from Flicker’s herbal supply.

  For a while Good Face’s only discomforts were from sitting cramped among bundles for so long and the cold lake wind chilling her in her spray-soaked dress. After a while a great hunger gnawed at her emptied belly, and then early in the afternoon the wind died down and the dazzling sun warmed the left side of her face, making her sleepy. But she couldn’t doze because her bladder and bowels had begun urging for relief, and she was bewildered as to what she could do about them, and too embarrassed to ask in this canoe full of relative strangers. So she fidgeted, while the sun began to burn her face and reflect off the water so brilliantly that her eyes and head were soon aching.

  She remembered that this voyage was to take many days, perhaps half a moon or more, and that almost all of the daytime would be spent in the canoes. Only half of the first day was done and she was so miserable she could hardly bear it. The canoe cut endlessly through the swashing water, and the paddles rose and fell and rose and fell, but the wooded shoreline changed so imperceptibly that she sometimes had the notion that the canoes were not moving at all. She wanted to give in and cry.

  But other children in the canoe, and in the other canoes that sometimes were alongside or ahead, were not crying, even though some were half her age or less. Their little dark heads gazed about or slumped in sleep, but there was not a whimper or a cry from anywhere. And so she would not cry either.

  Further into the afternoon she became aware that Tuck Horse’s paddle was not dipping in the water beside her. She turned and saw that he was holding it across his thighs with both gnarled hands squeezed in fists and that he was facing into the sky with his mouth open and eyes tight shut, either praying or in pain, and she remembered what Flicker had said about his old scars and the wounds that had gone clear through, wounds so bad he could not be a hunter anymore. She realized suddenly how old and hurt he was, an elder with gray hair and loose skin, and yet he had been working with his paddle nearly the whole day long.

  Then, as if he had felt her looking at him, he opened his eyes and caught her gaze, let out a long breath, smiled, and put his paddle blade into the water again, his strong yellow teeth bared in a grin or a grimace. And soon after that one of the paddlers in another canoe called and pointed ahead.

  The shoreline, which had been parallel to their course, curved around in front of them, a low, brushy silhouette against the sun-blazed water. “I know this point,” Tuck Horse said. “Out of the wind and a safe place for our first camp.” His voice was tired and strained but he sounded happy. As the canoes approached the beach in the lee of the spit of land, eager voices could be heard across the water, and laughter. In a canoe off to the right one warrior was craning to scan the shore, his eyes shaded with one hand, his musket in the other.

  “A good day of going, in the wind,” Tuck Horse said. “Twenty such good days, I say we will see Detroit. Wife, we do well. How are your old bones?”

  “Like old bones, husband. E heh! You might have to carry me ashore and dig me a hole to make waste in, and very quickly.” Everybody laughed, all surely thinking likewise. Good Face certainly was.

  But she was also thinking of what Tuck Horse had said:

  Twenty more such days!

  The next morning they left the camp at daybreak and paddled nearly a mile south to clear the end of the spit and then went westward again, following the shore as they had done all the day before. Gradually the head wind diminished and the waves became less choppy, to everyone’s relief.

  During the next few days a few distant ship sails were seen far over the water in the southwest, and Good Face did not know what the white shapes were until Tuck Horse explained they were the cloth wings of great English boats ten times as long as this canoe. She understood then. Her first father had told her of ships, which he had seen in the ocean ports of Rhode Island. She was pleased that she could remember that name. It was the place where she had been born, hundreds of miles back toward the sunrise. Thinking of those long distances, and of the long way they were coming now in the canoes, still westwa
rd, she wondered if there could ever have been any girl who had traveled so far in the world, or seen such far horizons of water. She remembered then, vaguely, a story in the Slocum family of an ancestor, who as a girl had crossed the ocean with her parents in a ship from Britain. That had been perhaps a greater distance than this.

  But, Good Face thought, that girl was just in a ship. I have been carried by Indians and horses and a canoe.

  As the days went on she saw many boats with sails, but the ones close enough to see in any detail were small vessels that could sail close to shore. Two or three of those, with both Indians and wapsi men on board, passed within shouting distance of the Lenapeh canoes, going the other way, skimming along with their sails bellied out with wind, their progress looking enviably easy.

  One evening the canoes passed the mouth of a river where many boats and long canoes lay against the shore, and there were cabins and longhouses up on the low bank, with cooking fires smoking. Tuck Horse advised that they should not stop there for the night because it was one of the places where the Iroquois peoples were coming to live in Canada, since the Long Knives had driven them out of their own lands on the Longhouse Road. “Probably they would not trouble us,” he said, “but as I have said, I no longer have to be near Iroquois, so let us go on to another place before we go ashore. I am sorry the Town Destroyer threw down the English King and took away the good country, but I am happy to make much distance between us and the Iroquois, and now perhaps we can try to forget all the bad things they did to us.” Some of the other men in the canoe murmured agreement. Then Tuck Horse gazed ashore toward the flat lands they were passing and said, “But I will be lonely for mountains.”

  Good Face until now had never seen land that was flat. There had been mountains and valleys since she could remember, and mountains and cliffs and hills and waterfalls everywhere the Indians had brought her, until now. The land here was so level it reminded her of a floor, and some places along the shore the land was so low that there were only marshes and grasslands and swamps to be seen.

  As if answering her unvoiced question, Tuck Horse said: “The ancient stories tell that this land was all covered with so much ice it smoothed out all the hills.” That made her tremble.

  Millions of birds were on the wing. The marshes were crowded with ducks and geese. Sometimes so many would rise on thundering wings it looked as if the whole shore were rising into the sky.

  The voyage of the canoes settled down to a steady but unhurried pace. The days were divided between paddling westward and stopping to fish and hunt waterfowl. The paddlers had enormous appetites. And in this bountiful country, the young people could provide much of the meat, which delighted them, making them feel important and useful.

  Good Face and other girls waded in the sandy, mucky shallows with a long fishnet, while others thrashed in the water and scared the whitefish into the net, where they got caught by their gills. Good Face could feel the struggles of the strong fish transmitted to her hands by the net, and at first was horrified, then thrilled. When they dragged the heavy-laden net ashore and she saw the size of the shimmering, lunging fish—some as long as the girls were tall—she realized that she was helping feed her Lenapeh People as surely as when she had helped in the cornfields.

  The boys in the meantime would vanish among the reeds of the marshes with bows and arrows, nets and slings, then return lugging huge geese, mallards, and little coots. Some of the children brought in eels and turtles and eggs. The ease of food-getting was hard for Good Face to believe, and she loved the clean water, breezes forever whispering and stirring the reeds and brush, water waves and smoke moving, everything fresh and stirring, sunlight flashing off water, the vastness of open sky. And the novel flavors of the fish, fat ducks, eel flesh, all baked in fire-heated trenches, made her ravenous for every meal.

  Good Face lost count of the days, but after more than a week of good weather, she saw ahead what appeared to be the end of the lake. Low land lay across the horizon. She turned to Tuck Horse, who was gazing ahead at the land as he paddled.

  “This is the end of the lake so soon?”

  “No, daughter. We are no more than halfway yet. That land ahead is only a long strip we must cross over. You will see.”

  They beached the canoes on sand and unloaded them. Women and children carried bundles and the men carried the canoes. They staggered through sand and blowing grass to the top of a low rise, and there on the other side was more of the boundless blue water as far westward as she could see. The waves rushed hissing onto the beach and drained back and rushed up again. White birds hung still facing into the wind overhead, then turned and drifted in easy arcs, mewing, floating on the wind without moving their extended wings. At great distances in the sky, chevrons of geese, thousands of them, beat their way southward over the vast lake, their strange honking voices faint and garbled beyond the whiffling of the lake wind.

  Sweaty and sandy after the carryover, the people took time to bathe. The women crossed back over to the sheltered side with their girls and babies and stripped to wallow in the shallows, while the men and boys swam on the other side. Good Face splashed and dove in the crystal-clear water, which was not as cold as she had expected, while old Flicker stood in thigh-deep water nearby, stooping to slosh water over her sturdy brown body, lifting first one sagging breast to wash her belly under it, then the other. Young mothers squatted in the shallows and dipped their babies into the water and then lifted them into the sunlight, the women laughing, the babies squealing. The sun being so hot, most of the women and girls rinsed their clothes in the water, wrung them out, and put them on wet. Though covered with gooseflesh, Good Face had never felt so exhilarated. She wanted to run on sand, dive in water, and dry her face in sunlight all at the same time. The same mood seemed to be upon everyone, and feminine voices twittered along the shore like birdcalls.

  Good Face was marveling at a white soaring bird when an angry shout went up and a woman was pointing up the rise. Good Face saw a boy spying from the brush. He was the young paddler from her canoe. The women scolded him by his name: “Like Wood! Shame, peeping boy!” They turned around and bent over to insult him with a mass display of their behinds. He scrambled to his feet and ran away over the crest. Flicker laughed and said, “We must tell the men what Like Wood did, and he will be in scorn for a while, as he ought to be.”

  As the people ate, the spying boy sat alone, head down. Then they reloaded the canoes and set off again toward the afternoon sun, their clothes already dried upon their bodies.

  As she watched Like Wood’s back, sweaty with the paddling work, she felt scornful toward him, as she believed she was supposed to, but she felt sorry for him too. He was a nice boy, and very pretty-looking. It was odd what he had done, that peeping.

  Wilkes-Barre

  Ruth Slocum shook her head at the sight of her son Ebenezer. The youth had just driven the ox-team wagon down from the bluff, loaded high with anthracite he had mined out from the hillside with a pick, and he looked as black and sooty as a charcoal burner.

  Hands on hips, she told him: “Get thee down to the river and wash up!”

  “There’s no use in that,” he said, “as I’ll be just as black again after I unload at the smithy’s.” Ebenezer was one of the few youths enterprising enough to dig and sell the dirty fuel. There was no great enthusiasm for it outside of smithys’ forges because it needed a bellows draft to keep burning, and there was still plenty of wood for charcoal making, though the hillsides were fast being denuded by settlers. The valley was becoming a landscape of stumps. “I’ll just run in the house and have a bowl o’ that stew and then be on my way down to—”

  “Thee will not eat in my kitchen without washing first,” she insisted, and pointed down toward the river, saying, “all over. Take soap down there and—” Her mouth fell open. “Our dear Lord! That’s Will and Giles in a boat!”

  But it was only Will and Giles. There was no Frances in the battered little rowboat with them.
>
  They were a sorry pair of sojourners with a scary and disgusting tale to tell, including the theft of their horses on the way back.

  They spoke of the bleak emptiness where the Indian towns had once flourished along the upper Susquehanna; they spoke of charred village sites and eroded cornfields where human skulls peeked out of the ground, of lawless woodsmen and bootleggers infesting what had been the Trail of the Longhouse all the way to Niagara, all masters at waylaying, fleecing, and demoralizing anyone who passed through, white or Indian. It was some of those, not Indians, who the boys believed had stolen the horses.

  They told of the thousands of Indian refugees living around the Niagara fort, of the families of displaced Tories living there until places in Canada could be found for them. “What a monstrous thing war is,” Will said, shaking his head and looking down at his hands on the table, “and its miseries go on long after the guns stop shooting.” Even Giles, the former soldier, nodded in agreement.

  They told over and over, in every detail they could remember, prodded again and again by their mother, what they had learned from the traders at Niagara: that there had been a freckled girl of about the right age, in the company of an old Indian woman who was probably a Delaware. But those traders, despite the offer of a hundred guineas, had claimed they couldn’t help find the girl. Will said, “We got the impression the traders were afraid to say much.”

  “Some Delaware families decamped while we were there,” Giles said. “They might have taken her away. The Indians played dumb.”