But, she always reminded herself, thinking of her father and husband and daughter, what we sacrificed for this prosperity!
She had tea ready when her sons clumped in with their muddy boots. As they stuffed sweet cakes into their mouths, she broached the news to them.
“Does thee remember,” she said, “a certain officer by the name of Proctor who passed through here when General Sullivan’s army went through? Will, I fancy thee does, especially.”
“I do indeed,” Will said. “The pompous war-eagle whose feathers got all ruffled when craven Quakers wouldn’t call him ‘Colonel.’ ”
“Well,” she said, “it seems he’s passed through again, some days ago, and didn’t do us the courtesy of stopping by to say hello, but that’s not the point, as I doubt he’d have remembered us. I’ve just learnt from Mr. Pickering the court clerk that the old soldier is on a mission into the Lake Erie country to mollify the Indians up there.”
“Oh, really!” exclaimed Giles with a mocking half smile. “Now, how strange I didn’t notice an army go through here.”
“No army, son. Just a body of commissioners going to talk peaceably to them.”
“Ah, that sounds better,” Will said. “Whose commission, did they say?”
“The Secretary of War, Mr. Knox.”
“Ah, yes, the old two-pronged strategy, or should I say two-tongued? Send a peace emissary around one flank and an army around the other. They’re already recruiting a force to go try again what General Harmar failed to do last fall. Hah!”
“Don’t thee make fun o’ peacemakers, son. If he succeeds, the army mightn’t have to go. Let’s pray that. But I think you know I didn’t ask thee here to talk idly about government schemes.”
“Idly, indeed not,” said Giles. “On the contrary, Ma, thee’s surely got a scheme thyself, and it involves us. I’d reckon it goes like this: we race up the road after Mr. Proctor and ask could we attach ourselves under his protection, then go where he goes, to look for Frances. Something on that order, Ma?”
She couldn’t keep from smiling. “Something quite on that order, yes, son. But I’d not ‘send’ thee on such an arduous errand again. I’d ask thee to accompany me till I catch up with ’em. Then thee c’d turn home, if thee’d a mind to … Thee’s both journeyed so often on what’s really just my forlorn hope.…”
Giles leaned forward over the table, tilted his head and wagged a forefinger at her. “Oh, no. That last expedition to Tioga aged thee ten years, and that was a mere jaunt compared with Erie. I’ll go, but thee’ll not. And pray thee, Ma, don’t argue the matter.”
“Giles is right,” Will threw in. “He and I’ll go. Thee’s not hardy enough, and thee’s needed here to watch the family’s doings anyway.”
“Further amendment to this grand scheme,” Giles said. “Thee can stay here too, Will. Ma needs thee here for the planting, now that Eb and Ben are become millers and miners and whatnot up in the hollow. Besides, thee can’t abide Proctor, nor him thee.”
“I could go with’ee, Giles,” sixteen-year-old Isaac said, squirming with eagerness. He could scarcely remember his sister Frannie, having been but a babe-in-arms when she was abducted, but Isaac and Joseph had both made her a legend and a mystery in their shared imaginations.
“Stop. Too many volunteers,” said Giles, slamming his palm down on the tabletop. He was thirty-two now and as solid a man as his father had been, but his short military career in the Revolution and his travels in search of Frannie on the frontier had tempered him to a harder edge than Jonathan Slocum had ever had. When he raised his voice or banged a hand like this, he was usually heard out. “Faith in everybody’s Inner Light is a lovely virtue, and I pray this family always has it. But there’s not that much Inner Light burning strong out yonder right now, considering what’s been done lately, by red man or white. While thee’s explaining the Friends’ creed, a bushloper will cut thy throat and a red man’ll lift thy scalp. Until some magnificent saint of peacemaking goes over the land making all men’s hearts right and bright, I’d as soon have as few members of my beloved family out there as possible. I’m only one, and I reckon I’m enough, and less at risk than the rest o’ thee lambs’d be.”
Ruth Slocum looked across the table at him, one eyebrow up, her lips compressed, appraising his words, remembering the trials and the hardships and the brutal people she had seen at Tioga. She nodded, finally, and said, “Very well, Giles. Mr. Proctor told Mr. Pickering he’d go the old trail to Tioga, then Painted Post, and the usual way past the Genesee, all o’ which thee’s been over. He left here five days ago.”
“Then if I leave tomorrow, unless he’s a fast mover, I ought to overtake him at the Horseheads or thereabouts. Work hard, little brothers. Thee’ll miss me sorely at planting time.”
Cattaraugus, New York
Good Face held Flicker’s arm and steadied her on the mud-slickened path to the Long Knife soldiers’ house, following Tuck Horse, who carried a bent-wood chair.
This was the last of the chairs Tuck Horse had made here during the winter. Now spring was breaking. The old man hoped to sell this chair to the wapsi soldier chief himself, and then his family could start the long journey back to Kekionga. Good Face was almost dizzy with impatience to go back to her husband. With this spring thaw, they could start on the long path of return. They would not go back by sailboat, but by horseback, and Good Face was thankful that she would not have to face the boat-sickness again.
They had been able to spend only a few days at the sacred Great Falling Water; then they came to this town to watch this peace-talking soldier chief. The town was Cattaraugus, halfway between Cornplanter’s Seneca town and Niagara. The Long Knife soldier chief conducting this peace council was called Proctor, a hard name to pronounce. He was known to have been with the Town Destroyer Sullivan years before. He was mature and strong-looking. He was easy to like but hard to trust. It was believed that he was here to show a decoy of peace so the chiefs would be off guard, and so the chiefs had humored him by pretending to believe him. Tuck Horse in his days near Proctor’s camp had sold three chairs to lesser officers. Now Proctor himself wanted one to use in the long councils. Good Face might be needed to translate in selling this chair, as the soldiers were using money. Her skin had paled during the long winter, and so Flicker had stained her face and neck and hands with dye from last year’s walnut hulls. To hide her red hair, Good Face wore a bandanna over her head, as she had at the Niagara trading store when she was a girl.
The officers were not in council at this time of day, so a soldier led them to the cabin where the officers stayed. The soldier spoke outside the door, and the big man called Proctor came out, wearing his long blue coat with shiny boards and braids on the shoulders and shiny buttons on the cuffs and chest. He nodded to Tuck Horse, peered at Good Face intently for a moment, then rubbed his palms together and turned his attention to the new chair. He put his huge hand on the back of it, pressing the chair down hard and twisting his hand to and fro. It was so tightly made it did not wiggle or squeak, and the officer stuck out his lower lip and nodded. Then he picked the chair up, as easily as if it were a twig, and examined the joints and the woven cane. Again he nodded, then put the chair on the ground and sat on it, moving his bulk this way and that, and the chair still did not squeak or wobble.
“Good work,” he said. He held up his hand with fingers spread. “Five shillings,” he said.
Tuck Horse looked at him long, unsmiling. Then he held up both hands with fingers spread.
“Ten!” Proctor exclaimed. “Ten shillings for a chair?” For some reason he turned toward Good Face when he said this.
She remembered “ten” as the wapsi word for all the fingers, and she remembered “five” for those of one hand. It was the way she and her little brothers had learned counting, and when she heard those words, most of the rest of them came back to her. At Kekionga she had often heard the number words, and now she could remember one two three four five six seven eigh
t nine ten. She knew too that Proctor had said the chair was good. Proctor was looking at her eyes when she said, as well as she could remember to pronounce the words, “Five no. Ten yes.”
The big man drew his chin down long but with a mocking smile barely showing on his lips.
“B’God! I was a carpenter before the army, and I know that’s a fair-made chair, but no ten shillings’ worth! Seven, then.”
She had understood virtually nothing of what he said, but she knew chair, no, ten, and seven. She counted on her fingers and held up seven, then raised another, and said, “Eight.” She had no idea what it was eight of, but she knew eight was closer to the ten her father wanted than to the five the officer had said at first.
Proctor, who was pretending not to like this haggling but had a sparkle in his eye that showed enjoyment, held up eight of his own fingers, looked doubtfully at them, shook his head. Then he half bent one finger and said, “Very well. Seven and sixpence. Lieutenant, get them seven shillin’s and a half. And see if ye can find that Slocum fellow, who joined us at Painted Post, the Quaker who was looking for his sister.”
A hot flush of fear went down from Good Face’s scalp through her flanks.
Slocum!
“Why, sir,” the lieutenant said, “I think he left just yesterday for Cornplanter’s Town. Why, sir?”
“I have a notion,” the colonel said, staring intently at Good Face. She understood hardly anything they had said, but she thought: He knows who I am. She said softly to Tuck Horse in Lenapeh, “Father, we must leave.” She glanced at Flicker and saw a keen and suspicious look in her eyes; her old mother knew something odd was happening. The younger officer was walking toward a cabin.
“Leave?” Tuck Horse, looking a bit bewildered, reached for the chair. But the colonel’s big hand came down on the chair back and gripped it.
“He wants the chair, Father. But we must go. I think they—”
“Then tell them to give me the money. We need it for horses to go back.”
The colonel had raised a hand toward Good Face, then touched his lips and said, “You’re that fellow’s sister, aren’t you?” She did not understand that, and was beginning to edge backward from his penetrating eyes when he said something she did understand: “Are you Frances Slocum?”
Her gaze fell to the ground. It was not in her nature to lie, but she was afraid to tell the truth. And she was backing away, glancing at Flicker, who, it seemed, now fully comprehended what was happening. Flicker came between her daughter and the colonel, taking her arm in a hard grip and turning her away from him, hissing in Lenapeh, “Tell him nothing! Husband, they will take her from us! We must leave now. Never mind this chair of sticks or the money! We must go!”
The colonel stood with his hand on the back of the chair, his other hand stroking down his chin as they edged away, backing and sidestepping, not quite running because they all feared he might send soldiers after them. The younger officer had emerged from the cabin, and the colonel told him something in short words, then the young one turned and hurried toward them. The colonel called out something, and the young officer called out something, and Good Face took her parents’ arms to hurry them along. She heard the young man’s trotting footsteps coming closer and turned to see him almost caught up, reaching for Tuck Horse.
When the officer’s hand fell on Tuck Horse’s shoulder, the old man stopped and whirled to face him, reaching at the same time for the knife that hung in a sheath under his left arm.
But the officer was smiling. “Here,” he said.
He handed Tuck Horse a bag, shaking it as he did so to make coins jingle.
“Seven shillings six,” the young man said. “B’God, I knew Indians are stupid, but not stupid enough to walk off and leave good money!”
And, not understanding him, Tuck Horse simply reached and took the bag, saying, “Waneeshee.” He nodded once, and they walked away. When Good Face looked back, the colonel still stood with one hand on the chair back, still stroking his chin.
They did not wait to see whether soldiers would come for her. By the time the sun was halfway down the sky, they were on three horses, leading a packhorse they had just purchased, and on the trail that led through the woods south of the great Erie lake toward their distant home at Kekionga. Before next moon they would be home and Good Face would be in the embrace of her husband. She felt she had narrowly escaped from the soldiers.
Tuck Horse had learned more than he had hoped to learn: While the officer named Proctor was talking peace with the chiefs at Cattaraugus, the great Long Knife chief Washington was preparing another army to go this summer and punish Little Turtle for defeating the other army last year.
“I am sad to know of such treachery,” he said, “but I am glad that I have heard of it. Little Turtle may already know of it from other spies. But the more his ears hear it, the more ready he will be to fight them when they come. We will be there. Ahhh! How I would like to be young enough to fight those treacherous people one more time!”
But Good Face was thinking: Let there be a while for me in my husband’s arms before soldiers come again.
Kekionga
In her winter absence, her husband’s passion for her had been waiting and growing, and for two days after her return, Good Face and Like Wood seldom left their bed.
Lying beside him naked, exhausted, and tingling between her hips, their commingled sacred ooze cooling on the skin of her thigh, spirit glowing with love and gratitude, she dozed, dreamed, and awakened to new caresses. Once his flute song awakened her—or she dreamed that it had. They murmured and whispered, telling of what they had done and seen and endured while apart. Like Wood told her that the only real hardship he had had to endure was her absence, though he had gone on some long, cold winter hunts and a scouting journey as far down as the Long Knife fort on the O-hi-o. She said that the only hardship she had had to endure was his absence, though the sailboat journey going east had made her very ill. Returning by horseback in the cold springtime had been so hard for her parents with their old aching bones that Good Face herself had to manage all the horses all the way back—finding water and graze for them, keeping them collected at overnight camps, calming and containing them when they smelled and heard things in the night, tending to their hooves along stony trails. She had earned her father’s praise for her growing skill with horses, and she carried that praise in her heart.
She said now, “I came to know each horse as well as the people of my family.” And she laughed. She liked the unfamiliar pleasure of making a story for her husband. “The packhorse, he was like my father, grumpy but able. The white-face mare was like my mother. She was wise and patient and could see far ahead.”
“I too am your family,” Like Wood said, smiling. “Was any horse like me?”
She tilted her head and looked at him for a moment, covered her smile with her fingertips, and said, “No, husband. We did not have a stallion that could make flute songs!”
A few days after their return from the east, Tuck Horse was asked to come and visit at trader chief Richardville’s house and talk with chiefs of the allied tribes. He was to bring his family.
Peshewa Richardville, the kindly, smiling, but sly-looking chief, seemed as rich as the white men Good Face had heard of called kings. Here in his house the light of candles and lamps gleamed on silver pots and polished picture frames, the air was rich with the aromas of coffee and chocolate, and some of the women of the household wore shawls made of a cloth that was called silk and shimmered like moonlight on water.
Buckongahelas was here, the Lenapeh warrior chief with his long, strong, scarred profile and calm eyes. Here was Blue Jacket of the Shawnee, with a tawny face looking hard as stone until a narrow smile would barely show and his eyes would glitter. Between those two, the Miami war chief Little Turtle looked mild and harmless. He was not big. His forehead was shaved back to the top of his head, and his eyes were so large and guileless they looked like a child’s. But his physique was com
pact and graceful, and plainly he was the light of intelligence to whom the chiefs all turned. It was he who did most of the asking and telling and nodding. He listened a long time to Tuck Horse, and it was good to see how keen the great chief’s attention was. Good Face was proud of her father and knew that his thoughts and observations must be valuable.
But while seeming to watch her father and Little Turtle, she was covertly glancing at a strangely handsome young warrior who stood over Little Turtle’s shoulder. Her eyes were drawn to him again and again.
He was tall, dressed in a close-fitting coat of nearly white elk-hide decorated with colored quillwork in designs of wildflowers, with a wide sash of silk around his waist, a small silver-trimmed pistol protruding from the sash, and a crescent-shaped silver gorget gleaming at his throat. Several times when she was sneaking looks at this man, his eyes caught hers and she would look down, feeling flushed. She hoped that her husband Like Wood did not see her and this warrior glancing at each other. It was inappropriate for a man and woman to be looking directly at each other. Their attentions would have been misunderstood.
She presumed that he was looking at her because of her pale skin and red hair.
Those were the very reasons why she was looking at him. His long hair was as red as hers, and his complexion as light.
That night she learned from her husband something about the red-haired man. Like Wood had seen them looking at each other but did not seem to be jealous.
The man was Little Turtle’s son-in-law. His name was Apekonit, the name of a food root like a wild potato. He had been brought back from a raid beyond the O-hi-o when he was a boy of about eight, adopted by a Miami family, and, growing to be a considerable warrior, was favored by Little Turtle. He had married the war chief’s daughter Wanagapeth, the Sweet Breeze. He could always be found beside Little Turtle, in battle or in Council. He had killed many wapsituk and was a good interpreter. Like Wood said all the Miami warriors seemed to hold him in high esteem and trust. Like Wood chuckled.
The Red Heart Page 30