The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  And just then she heard a twangy male voice behind her say, “Heyyy, bub! I’ll take that little darlin’! How much, eh?”

  She knew without looking back that the man was speaking of the bare-bosomed one with scarlet on her cheeks, and she flushed with anger and stepped back, past Will, and snapped at the big, leering man: “Shame on thee, a father here to save his own child, and lusting over some other man’s daughter!”

  The man scowled at her, opened his mouth to say something, then saw big Will with a restraining hand on her shoulder and shut his mouth. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “I—I—”

  “This is no slave market,” she scolded. “If some lout were slobbering over thy daughter like that, as one might be somewhere, how would thee like it?”

  “He said he was sorry, Ma,” Will said.

  And the man grumbled: “I don’t have a daughter. I’m here a-lookin’ for my son. But you’re right. This is somebody’s daughter.”

  Feeling many eyes on her, Ruth turned and continued along the line, letting her blush fade. She knew she had lost her Quaker reserve because she had been imagining Frannie in the place of that pretty girl.

  She was nearly at the end of the crowd now, looking close into one face after another, when Will’s voice hissed excitedly, “Ma, up there’s a redhead!”

  Her heart leaped. She looked. There was a girl with thick red hair. “Frannie! Frannie Slocum, is it thee?”

  When she was in front of the girl, she was so wild with hope that she was already trying to make the girl’s freckled features conform to what she had been envisioning of her adolescent Frances. The girl was tall, round-faced, with full lips, with eyes that could have been Slocum eyes. She was modestly dressed in a deerskin tunic and moccasins and leggings, wearing the red cheekbone dots and around her neck only a tiny stitched leather bag. The girl was searching Ruth’s face as anxiously as Ruth was searching hers, just beginning to smile self-consciously. “Oh, my dear,” Ruth groaned, “is thee my Frannie? Doesn’t thee know me yet, child?” She reached for her hand, but the girl became wary suddenly and cringed back toward the grandfatherly Indian who stood behind her.

  “Ma, I don’t think it’s Frannie,” Will said. “She doesn’t know thee at all.”

  “Yet awhile, son. Frannie, does thee remember the name Slocum? Does thee remember wearin’ plaincloth like ours? Does’ee know the names Giles and Will and Mary and Ebbie and—”

  The girl said something in an Indian tongue, and Will said, “She says she knows thee not, Ma. I’m afraid this isn’t—”

  “Yet awhile! Ask her to show us her hands!”

  Will spoke in her tongue. The girl, warming to his words and his good looks, meekly extended both hands. Ruth grasped them fervently and looked at them, hope collapsing in her breast.

  There was no damaged fingertip. Every slender finger had a nail. Ruth sighed, looked across all the fingers again, then shook her head. Suddenly feeling a thousand years old, she lifted the stranger’s hands and bent her face down to press her cheek against the fingers, then let them go, saying, “So sorry to’ve bothered thee, dear …” And she turned away from the crowd, blinded by tears, stumbling along down the slope with Will guiding her by an elbow.

  “Thee’s hopin’ too hard, Ma,” he said. “Thee can’t wish somebody into being Frannie.”

  “Well,” she said after a few more steps, “I’ll see plainer tomorrow. And I’ll not embarrass ’ee by scolding bystanders.”

  * * *

  It was just as well that Ruth’s hopes had diminished, because in the following days there was not one person presented who could have been taken for Frances. Ruth went to the assemblage every day, seeing things happen that wrenched her heart. Half a dozen parents found their sons or daughters, aunts and uncles found nieces and nephews, and a cousin found a cousin. In a couple of instances the reunions were tearful and joyous, making Ruth’s heart ache with bittersweet sympathy and envy. But most often the captives who were identified by their relatives turned and clung to their Indian families and finally had to be taken away by force, or reconciled to the repatriation through long and tearful conferences with their Indian escorts.

  And the last haunting notion Ruth Slocum had as her sons struck the camp and loaded the horses was that, dispirited and disappointed though she was, at least she had not had to bear the agony of seeing her daughter recoil from her and cling tearfully to the arms of an Indian mother. That would have been too much to bear.

  Captain Pipe’s Town.

  So this was what it was about, all the teaching of Small Female Bear and Flicker two years ago in her wiktut, and the giggly jokes of the women in the moon lodge since then, but now Good Face could not even think of the teaching or the joking because of the excitement down in her body and the wildness in the eyes of the young man who crouched over her and fondled every part of her, especially the untouchable parts. It was almost beyond belief that she and he were alone in a wikwam together all naked, neither wearing anything but a tiny medicine bag on a thong around the neck and she the vermilion spots on her cheekbones and he the tattoo marks across his forehead, and that he was going to put his thing inside her, just as the old woman had said men always want to do, and it was especially amazing that such a thrilling and frightening thing was permitted and approved of because each had decided the other was of the right kind. She was panting with impatience and the tingly place between her hips kept clenching and oozing. It was like the mouth of someone terribly hungry who smells rich food and drools for it. He seemed to know of her hunger down there, yet she was not embarrassed by his knowing.

  His name was Tchaneegeu, Like Wood, and he was her husband beginning this night. Long ago shamed for spying on women, he had since become a warrior. He had fought Long Knives when they came up from Kentuckee to burn Shawnee villages. Around his left side, under his arm, he had a long scar from the sword of a riding soldier, but he had brought the soldier’s scalp home, and no one mocked him anymore. Like Wood was not tall, really only about as tall as Good Face herself, but he was muscular and fine to look at, with skin the color of dark tobacco and straight white teeth in bow-shaped lips that gave him a heart-melting smile. He kept his eyebrows and all his hair except a scalp lock plucked out, and sometimes he reminded her of the warrior who had first taken her away from her wapsi family so many winters ago, as well as she could remember that man, which was only vaguely after all that time.

  Like Wood was proud of being a warrior, and it had made a bold suitor out of him. From what Good Face had heard women confide in the moon hut, a man’s bravery made him desirable as much as a handsome face and body did. Like Wood was both handsome and brave. But there was more too. Like Wood may have killed a man who cut him in war, but he also had something beautiful in his spirit that enabled him to make a flute and a love song to play through it for Good Face, and he had played it for her from a distance until her heart had absorbed every note, and all the little birdlike trills and sobs of the flute song, so much that whenever she heard it, she felt the yearning in her belly and hips. Even now as Like Wood opened her thighs to make room for himself, her memory of his flute song rose and curled and chirruped in her soul like the voice of a thrush.

  He caressed her breasts and then her belly and then the inside of her thigh, making all her skin quiver, and said, “How much you please my eyes!” and his eyes were indeed blazing with delight. Once this past spring while bathing in a brook she had felt someone watching her, and wondered if he spied on her. He certainly could have done it many times, because he was one of those warriors and hunters who could slip up on anyone or anything, and had made himself a master of invisibility. The warriors often practiced that art because the Long Knife armies were always so massed and strong with weapons that only stealth and swiftness could kill them. She had often heard Tuck Horse speak of these things, for war was in the air again; already the Long Knives, from whom the People had fled so far in the east, were rumored to be encroaching from the south, i
nto the O-hi-o lands they had been told to stay out of. They had attacked Shawnees, Wyandots, and Mingoes, and even their own friends the Piankashaws.

  Now, even as Good Face’s yearning grew unbearable, she knew that this was not a good time for them to be making a baby, because, as the old woman had warned her, one should not be doing so when the hoofbeats and the bugles of the enemy were coming close.

  But the old woman had said also that this pleasure could be greater than even the pleasures of eating and laughing, and at this moment that seemed more true and more important than the warnings.

  After the incredible pleasure, she was surprised to find that she could still talk and think. She got up to put more sticks on the fire, aware of his eyes on her, and then he asked her to stand beside the fire and let him look at her, which she did until his man-part was stiff again. He stood up from their bed and prodded her belly with it, and then turned her around and prodded her backside with it with his hands reaching around to hold her breasts and knead their nipples and stroke down over her abdomen. Soon she was on the bed on her hands and knees with him kneeling behind her doing it so forcefully that their skin was smacking like hand claps, and suns were bursting behind her eyes, and such an ecstasy exploded in her that she could not hold herself up, and when she became aware of anything again, she was lying with her face on the fur of the bearskin bedding, gasping for breath and realizing that she had been yelping aloud. Outside, people were laughing and making yipping sounds, probably imitating her own. Like Wood was lying sweaty beside her and breathing fast, and he laughed and shouted to the people outside, “Yes! Like Wood pleases his Red-Hair and she pleases him!”

  Later he sat beside her on the bed playing the love song through the flute while she waited, nude, for him to be able again. She could have told the old woman now that this man was certainly a right man, not a wrong one, and she was wondering whether she would ever want to do anything again besides this. When she fell asleep before dawn from exhaustion, she saw her wapsi blood-mother in a dream, seeing the face as she had not been able to remember it consciously for years, and in her dream she was telling her mother that this husband was in every way a right man, in no way a wrong one.

  And so they coupled, frequently and joyously, amazed at their ever-renewing need of each other, but even after a whole year of their marriage, Good Face’s flint and Like Wood’s steel had not made the fire of a new life. Every moon her blood came down, and she would go to the women’s menstrual lodge, where the other women would joke with her about how hot she and Like Wood must be, judging by the sounds that came from their lodge so often. And she thought, yes, how hot, and one should not want anything more, but she did have another yearning, which was to have the fire of a life growing in her. She believed that in every way Like Wood was a right man to make a child with. And though there were war rumors, they were from far away; there had been peace and a feeling of safety here in the valley of the Tymochtee Sipu where her Lenapeh People had settled; because of this sense of peace, it seemed to be a right time to have a child, and she wanted a baby to grow out of their passion for each other, a baby to raise while there was peace.

  She was in the menstrual lodge in the moon of the Green Corn Harvest with four other women when they heard a distant hubbub of excitement in the town. Then a messenger woman came hurrying up the sun-dappled path, her face full of distress.

  War was coming again. The Long Knife wapsituk were making a new Town Destroyer army to come into this part of the country now.

  The first thought Good Face had was that her Spirit Helper, the small female bear, had kept her from getting with child because this was coming.

  And so she was thankful for the wisdom of the Spirit Helper. But she was not fully happy. She yearned to be a mother.

  As an adult now, she sat in the councils, and there she learned why the wapsituk were building armies again. These were the rumors:

  The armies would come northward from the O-hi-o Sipu to punish the Shawnee, the Miami, and the Lenapeh for having refused to go to a peace treaty the year before. The three tribes had said no, there will be no peace while the Long Knives keep crossing the O-hi-o Sipu into our country. But the whites had kept crossing the great river and cutting down trees to make forts and towns and farms. They had killed much game on this side of the river, and had even murdered Indian hunters here in their own lands. And so instead of going to the peace treaty, the tribes continued to go down to the great valley of the river and attack the wapsi intruders. That was why the army would be coming: to punish the tribes for defending their own homelands. It was the old usual reason: wapsituk wanted still more land, and having whipped the English, the Long Knives thought they could move into any land they wanted and punish any tribes that tried to keep them out.

  So it would be necessary to withdraw again from the path of Town Destroyers. The Council decided to move the people north toward some place too far away and too strong for the Long Knives to attack. Such a place existed: the big Miami trading town of Kekionga, which guarded the important portage between the east-flowing Maumee Sipu and the west-flowing Wabash Sipu. Good Face had been there with her family to trade, and she had seen that Kekionga was not just one town, but a cluster of towns around the Maumee headwaters. The chiefs there were powerful and widely known: Peshewa, a half-breed trader whose French name was Richardville; Le Gris, who hated the Long Knife wapsituk with a fury; and their war chief Michiconogkwa, the Little Turtle, who had once destroyed a wapsi army that had dared attack the place by sneaking up from the west.

  Kekionga was always growing. Downstream along the Maumee Sipu from the Miami chiefs’ towns there were new villages of Shawnee, who had been moving north to keep a distance from the Long Knives.

  And so the Lenapeh would do also. Surely, the Council said, no wapsi army could come northward through the vast wetlands and swamps to attack Kekionga, where the warriors of so many nations now lived. The councils of the Tymochtee towns decided to withdraw to that stronghold, if only long enough for the army to wear itself out and go home. They would go after the Green Corn harvest and the ceremony to guarantee Corn Mother’s favor.

  They set off in late summer, northwestward through the boggy lands with everything they could carry, with rumors of the Town Destroyers close behind.

  * * *

  Good Face had never seen such vast cornfields, so many dwellings. Many new wikwams covered the north bank of the Maumee Sipu, and the fresh bent-pole frameworks of many more, still not covered with bark. In every direction spread fields of corn, beans, and squash, with pole scaffolds for the crow scarers. These villages too had already harvested their green or sweet corn, but their flour corn, beans, squashes, pumpkins, and sunflowers were still ripening in the fields. Here was so much food no one should ever go hungry.

  The Shawnee and Lenapeh refugees would be living a little farther downstream, and here Good Face and her parents began building a wikwam. They expected it to be only temporary, until the army was gone. But if for some reason they could not go back to their home village, they would be living here by Kekionga through the winter, and so they had to build well. They worked on the frame of their home as the leaves of the trees turned yellow and red, and most of the men went away to hunt for meat for the winter.

  They did not even have covering over the frame before messengers came from the south, with the terrible warning that the army appeared to be approaching.

  Old Tuck Horse said, mouth grim: “Joseph was wrong. Our old brother at Detroit. Do you remember what he said? That we were so old we might five out our years in peace before the Long Knives would ever come into this part of the country. But they are on our heels again. I am at a poor age for a man to be. I am not old enough to lie down and die in bed, but I am too old to go out and die fighting the wapsituk.”

  It was in this time of growing dread that Like Wood stopped giving Good Face the love pleasure. He explained that it was his need now to conserve his vigor for the war path.

&
nbsp; She sank down inside. But she remembered the teaching: when the enemy’s bugles and hoofbeats are coming close, it is a wrong time to he back and make children. Instead, this was the time for young women to spread out through the fields and gather all the harvest they could, to harvest food for the winter, to gather food for as long as possible before the Town Destroyer arrived, and then get out of his way and carry the harvest farther northward toward safety. Children and old people would begin leaving at once, going northwestward toward the Eel River. The warriors would go and dance at the war post, and then Little Turtle, war chief of the Miami, would do what he could against the army with the warriors he had.

  Unfortunately, he had few. Most of the men were hunting, and so far away that they could not be summoned in time. Despite the great size of Kekionga and the population of the nearby villages, fewer than two hundred warriors were here.

  The size of the Long Knife army was fifteen times that many. It had three cannons. And it had come farther and faster than anyone could have expected. Never had the plight of the People looked worse.

  Good Face pressed her forehead against her husband’s chest and smelled the war paint on him, and said, “I shall pray that until this bad time is past, you will be invisible to the eyes of the enemy.” Tears seemed to squeeze from her heart. She turned away and ran to get baskets and join the women in the fields.

  Under the bright autumn sky the leaves and stalks in the fields were yellow-brown and dry. The distant treetops beyond the fields were glorious reds and golds, shimmering in sun heat.

  Through these vast fields the women of all the tribes now moved swiftly, working together, yanking off corn ears and bean pods, filling baskets and bags and blankets. Their work made a constant rustling, hissing noise amid the dry plants, and they stirred up dust and grasshoppers as they dragged the swollen containers back out of the fields. They breathed the dust and spat mud. There was enough ripened food in these fields that the whole population of Kekionga, including all the refugees, would have had plenty for the coming winter had there been time to harvest and preserve all of it. But in this one frantic day of harvest there was time for the women to collect only a small part of it.