The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Did they say the red-haired girl had a bad forefinger?” Ruth Slocum asked her sons. “Did thee remember to ask ’em that?”

  “We remembered to ask, but they hadn’t noticed,” Giles said. “They thought she’d only been in the store once, and the old squaw rather protected ’er, they said.”

  “And did she look well, or sickly? Did thee think to ask if she looked ill-used, or unhappy?”

  “Of course we asked, Ma. We had just such concerns ourselves!”

  “And they said?”

  “That the girl was just like most any Delaware girl. Healthy, clean. Rather shy in the store. Though she did speak some English helpin’ the old grandma barter.”

  Ruth Slocum clasped her hands in her lap and looked down with her eyes shut tight, trying to remember the hundreds of questions and doubts that had risen in her mind and out of her memory since the boys set out those many weeks ago. She remembered back beyond that time and remembered the terrible day six years ago. She remembered Frances being carried away. She asked:

  “Did they say what she was wearing? Did they say whether she had shoes on her little feet?”

  Ruth Slocum sat with her elbows on the table, stroking her eyelids and forehead with her fingertips. She finally had asked every question she could remember to ask, most of them more than once. Will and Giles were sitting with their elbows on the table too, trying to hold their tired selves up, sipping tea now and then. Ben was tending the fire at the hearth, but it was growing chilly in the room. Autumn was advanced and leaves were beginning to fall off the trees up in the woodlot. Ebenezer, still black with coal dust, got up from the bench with a sigh, saying, “Well, I don’t want to miss anything interesting, so don’t thee say anything interesting till I get back. I’ve still a wagonload of anthracite to drive to town. Want to go along, Will? Giles? There’s folks would like to hear thee tell how it is from here to Niagara.”

  “Absolutely not,” Ruth Slocum told Ebenezer. “One son covered with soot is enough.”

  “Aye, and we’re too tired to go anywhere but bed. Thee has the glory of spreading news of our triumphant return,” Giles said to Ebenezer. “By the way, what’s thee doing with all the money thee makes selling that devil’s dirt, brother?”

  “I don’t make that much. Some goes to our household here, of course. But I aim to save and build a mill up in Deep Hollow, where there’s water power.”

  “Grist or saw?”

  “Both, likely.”

  “Why, thee’s a true factotum, Eben,” Giles joked, tapping Will’s elbow with a fist.

  “Thee’ll see for sure,” Ebenezer replied, pausing at the door. “I’ll own a good part o’ this town ’fore long. Advantage of being first in a place. One gets an early start. That’s us Slocums. This one, anyway. I mean to have an iron forge one day too. I can fuel it right out of our own ground. Thee may call it devil’s dirt, brother Giles, but mark my word, we’ll all prosper on it.”

  “May we prosper,” said Ruth Slocum in a strange tone.

  The brothers, and even the younger children, turned to look at their mother, never having heard her speak such unexpected words in such an intense voice. She was staring at the far wall of the room so intently it seemed as if she were seeing through it and far beyond.

  “Those traders,” she said. “If they were afraid to help despite an offer of a hundred guineas … I know the greed of such people. We shall go a-looking for Frannie again. And if we can afford a ransom enough, by Heaven, I’m sure we’ll get her back!”

  “We …” Will leaned back wearily. “Thee means to keep looking, then.”

  “Why, how not?” she exclaimed. “We know she’s alive and well!”

  “Ma,” Giles said, leaning forward and looking into her blazing eyes, “there were hundreds of children displaced and scattered about in the war. We can only presume the one those traders saw was Frannie. We’re not sure of it!”

  “Thee is not? Well, my son, I am.”

  Lake Erie

  Good Face was dozing with the sunlight yellow on her eyelids when she heard, over the steady slap slap of waves, far thunder. The canoes were just coming out from behind another long spit of land that projected into the lake and she looked ahead to the west. There in the distance was the grim edge of a coming storm. Above and behind it were towering clouds reaching as if to devour the sun. The men called to each other from the various canoes, questioning whether there might be time to go on, up the windward side of the point, and reach the main shore before the weather struck. All quickly agreed that there would not. They turned the canoes about and paddled earnestly back the way they had come, into the sheltered waters behind the spit, and raced along looking for a place high enough to baffle the oncoming blow. Their haste was exciting and frightening. As the canoes were turned toward the beach where a low rise was covered with scrub, Good Face felt a blast of cold air so damp it made her shiver. She realized at that moment that there was an actual distinct smell that was the smell of a storm, and that she had become familiar with it while living outdoors among the Lenapeh, even though she had never heard or thought of a storm smell.

  With bewildering quickness the canoes were emptied on the beach and carried a little way upslope into a copse of bushes, turned over with their bottoms facing the purpling western sky, and tied to the bushes. The thunder was cracking and booming, and though the sun was gone, constant scribbles of lightning, now here, now there, had replaced it for brilliance. As the women and girls dashed up with the bundles and baskets and blankets, the wind was shredding leaves from the whipping, shuddering bushes on the crest, marram grasses were bent almost to the ground, and the howling wind was full of spray and sand. The people all crowded under the overturned hulls, children squealing and men shouting, and suddenly the gray water offshore turned white, and the canoe hulls above began to drum with driven rain and pulsate and creak from the beating of the wind. Good Face cringed and squinted, heart racing, and prayed that the wind would not snatch the canoe and hurl it into the lake. The rope that Flicker had spent so much of her free time braiding was now holding firm this canoe, which was sheltering several families.

  The deluge obliterated everything outside. Even the nearby beach was invisible in the seething, thundering gloom, which sometimes became a blinding whiteness. When such bolts of lightning flashed at the same instant the thunder cracked, she would then smell something which she could think of only as burnt water.

  Though the canoe was a shield against the driving rain from the west, there was no true shelter from the whirling cold rain and spray. It came under and around and gradually soaked all the huddling people. Wetness spread through the sand under them and wicked up through their deerhide clothes. Tuck Horse and Flicker sat flanking Good Face, clutching a blanket around the three of them, and they did their best to keep warm with their body heat. They tucked the edge of the blanket under their feet to keep it from blowing free and exposing them to the chilling drafts. Eventually the blanket wool itself was so saturated that she could feel water dribbling down inside and trickling along her shins and into her moccasins. No one was speaking, or if they were, they could not be heard. Sometimes Good Face would imagine she could hear, through the drumming and howling and hissing, the cry of a baby. She thought of the few other times she had been caught out in such storms. Once, in the woods near Neepah’s town, tree branches had crashed down where she and her friend Minnow were, but missed them. Once at the waterfalls, she and Flicker had been overtaken by storms while foraging, but Flicker had known the place so well that she led the way into a shallow cave under a solid rock overhang, and they stayed perfectly dry that time.

  Further back in time, when she was a little girl living with her Slocum family, she had cowered and whimpered in her bedding under a cabin roof of pole rafters and shakes, but stayed dry, and once her family had huddled like this under the canvas canopy of their wagon, lightning revealing the curved wooden ribs under the canopy, thunder reverberating between the hill
s, in some journey she could still remember as if it had been a frightful dream. She could remember all those terrors so like this, when her life and soul had seemed as delicate and extinguishable as a candle flame, but she remembered too that in those times she had just hunkered down and prayed, and had always lived through it. She had seen many a storm in her young life, but had never known of anyone harmed by a storm, as her mother used to tell her to soothe her fears. But one of her older brothers, the one called Ben, if she remembered right, once told her that the spot of brighter red hair on top of her head was a lightning spot, and that she would be hit by lightning there someday if she didn’t do what her brothers told her to. But then her sisters had told her that there was no truth in that. Still, sometimes when lightning was striking around close, she would think of that place on top of her head and it would tingle as if lightning were about to strike it. She felt that way now, which perhaps was not too bad because it helped keep her mind off her chilly, wet misery.

  Eventually the thunder and lightning rumbled and flickered away, but the wind and rain continued until dark, and then kept on all night, and it was impossible to sleep or start a fire. It was the longest night she had ever known, and then when daylight slowly came, it kept raining. It seemed that she would never see anything again but the soaking sand being pounded and washed down by rain, and the water of the lake hissing and spattering with rain and rising and falling in gray waves, and a constant dribbling of rainwater off the edge of the canoe before her eyes, the dribbling water sometimes falling straight down but usually being blown in on the blanket.

  Now and then she would hear a child’s cry through the hush of rain, but the absence of complaining voices was almost eerie. Good Face felt as if she could fill the whole lakeshore with wailing for all the shivering misery she felt.

  But the presence of the two stolid old people on either side of her kept her still. Wailing would only discomfort and disappoint them, and would not make her any less miserable anyway.

  Then she realized, though she did not think it out in words, that those were surely the reasons why everyone else was bearing the misery in silence.

  She snuggled closer to Flicker. The old woman, whose bones always hurt even in the best of conditions, did not stop staring out at the rain, or smile, or say anything. But she did reach over with her right hand and hold on to Good Face’s forearm a moment, and squeezed it, and then clutched the edge of the blanket as she had been doing, and Good Face felt comforted, so deeply comforted that she in turn gave Flicker’s forearm a squeeze, and they kept waiting, and tears ran from her eyes because she loved the old people so much.

  The rain diminished and finally stopped the next day, but the wind kept blowing cold and too strong for setting out in the canoes yet. There were no trees on the spit of land for firewood, and the people could not cook or get warm and dry. At last Tuck Horse said there might be driftwood on the other side of the spit because that was the side where wind would blow it. He assembled women and boys, and with lengths of rope they set off up the slope to cross over to the windy side. At the same time, men with guns started northward along the beach to hunt for birds or meat. Many carried bows and arrows too because they had little faith in their gunpowder after so much rain and damp. Some boys went to the lake with nets and fishing spears, in faint hope of catching something when the water was so turbulent.

  Soon a call came down on the wind and Good Face looked up to see the wood gatherers coming back with huge bundles of wood tied on their backs and braced against their foreheads by tumplines. They were staggering under their loads and grinning, some of them almost being blown over on their faces because of the wind on the back of their big bundles.

  Fire starters crouched under blankets beneath the canoe shelters to strike flint sparks, but it seemed as if wind and damp and their own impatience were conspiring against them. No one could get tinder going, and the more Good Face watched their efforts, the more she shivered. Finally Tuck Horse yelled, “Haaa!” through clenched jaws, grabbed his musket and powder horn, knelt behind the canoe to load the gun with powder and patch but no ball, then charged the pan. He put a wad of tinder on the sand with a stick to hold it down and fired the musket into it. Flicker snatched up a remaining clump of the tinder with a smoldering piece of linen patch still in it and blew in it until she made flame, and cheerful yells went up. Within a few minutes every family had borrowed fire from Flicker and little blazes were burning in the lee of the canoes, smoke whipping away, and the people were as if reborn. Tuck Horse stood grinning, his gray hair streaming in the wind, and put a hand on his daughter’s shoulder.

  “See them come to life!” he said. “As I told you long ago, fire is life and it makes more of itself.” She remembered his demonstration of that back in their camp at Niagara, and put her arm around his waist and hugged. She could hardly feel any real heat off the wild little flames yet, but she was already warmer inside, not even shivering for the first time in more than a day.

  “Do you see something strange about this wood, daughter?” Flicker asked as they squatted between the canoe and the fire. Indeed, she had noticed that many pieces were not branches and twigs, but flat and squared like boards; some even had traces of weathered paint on them.

  Tuck Horse said: “Those are pieces of wapsi boats. In the driftwood over there are many pieces of boats and ships. There is even an old wrecked ship in the shallow water. It looks like a dead giant animal with its ribs sticking out of the water.” Her eyes went wide as she imagined it, and he explained. “Many ships are there at Detroit,” he said, pointing west, “always going in and out. As you have seen, storms come up very fast on this lake and many ships get blown against the land or sink far out. I have traveled on this lake many times in the younger years of my life, and I can remember where many dead ships are. A big ship can bear mighty weather, but the Creator is mightier and he does not like to be mocked by wapsi fools who stay out too long on the great waters when the storms are plainly coming.” He watched a piece of plank blacken in the windblown flames, with his mouth set in a hard line, and nodded once at the meaning of his own words.

  “Yes,” he said. “The wapsituk are such a people for forgetting that they are not gods but only two-legged animals. And then the big things they make die with them, when they offend the Creator by trying to push up against him.” He gazed into the fire, filled his pipe and fit it with an ember, able to enjoy it for the first time in two days. He puffed, saluted the four winds, earth and heaven, then mused on:

  “They have become a great bother to us for many generations. But the way they push up against the Creator, they surely cannot last many more generations, I believe. K’hehlah!” Yes indeed!

  The water was calm now. Through the mist Good Face could see shorelands both left and right. She had been asleep, huddled between bundles for protection from the wind and spray, but now the wind was down and the waves were not very high, and that was why she had slept so well. The sky was still gray with smudgy dark clouds. Gazing around, she saw a few snowflakes spinning down and vanishing in the gray water. The voice of Tuck Horse, wheezy with the fatigue of paddling, said, “We are in the river of Detroit, daughter. It has been a long and hard way, but we have come and we are all well.” She sat up.

  The river narrowed and the canoes passed islands. On both riverbanks and on the islands there were clusters of wikwams amid cornfields already harvested, and here and there white men’s square houses. She gazed at a windmill, its white sails turning. She saw wagons, and small herds of cattle and horses, piers and moored boats along the shores, light gray wood-smoke drifting. She was expecting to see a fort, but for a long time as the river curved to the right there were only islands, villages, and farms. The river was about as wide as the Niagara River had been at the fort, but there was no high land; no hills or cliffs were anywhere to be seen. Many small boats were on the water, some rowed by white men with oars and some moving along under sails of various shapes. And there were Indian can
oes, some so small they carried only a small family, some even bigger than these in which the people had come so far on the lake.

  She saw the ships’ masts before she saw the town or fort. They were as tall as trees and strung together with ropes. For as long as she could remember, she had had in her mind an image of ships beside a town, from the description her father had told her, and that old picture in her mind was not very different from what she was seeing now, except that she always envisioned it with blue skies and plump white clouds overhead and sunny-sided mountains behind the town.

  As the canoes moved closer she saw how big and solid the ships’ hulls were, massive as walls, painted black and white. She could see men moving on the ships, and they looked as tiny as ants on a shoe. Two ships were anchored out in the river, but most of them were close along the shore, tied at wharves right along the riverbank. Two-story and three-story buildings with steep roofs were built on the riverbank slope, and a palisade of vertical logs ran from the water’s edge far up onto the flatland to protect the town. Farther from the river rose the earthen ramparts of a palisaded fort overlooking the town. Carts drawn by horses and oxen moved slowly along the embankment above the river, going to and coming from gates in the log walls. Overlooking every gate was a blockhouse atop the palisade. On poles above the fort and the town there were flags blowing in the wind, the same kind of flag she had seen at the Niagara fort, blue with red and white lines radiating from the center. It was the British flag, Flicker had told her.

  Flicker had been seeing that flag most of her life, either hanging above forts and trading posts or being carried by soldiers. That flag, Flicker told her, was the main reason why the People had not been able to stay in one place, as they had in the old times. Good Face looked at the flag and thought of what she heard Flicker say often about the British wapsituk: “They gave us a few pretty things and useful things and made many promises. But their promises were so false they have ruined everything, and if it would do any good, we would give them back all their needles and mirrors and guns and pots, and ask them to give back our lands and all our warriors who died for them.” Tuck Horse would say sometimes: “If I had had the power to foresee, I would have killed the first British I ever saw and each one who then appeared.”