The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “The Wild Potato looked often at you. One does not see many red-hair people. I expect he will come near me one day soon and talk to me about my wife, to ask about this one whose hair is as red as his own.”

  She felt a twinge of the old caution. “He should not be told anything. They sell names, and might try to take me away.”

  He shook his head, smiling grimly. “Wild Potato would not. He hates them. On the O-hi-o he decoys wapsi boats into ambush, by his appearance. No. There is no stronger hatred for the whites than his hatred. He would not sell your name to them.”

  “Still, my husband, I ask you to tell him nothing,” she said softly, mindful of Flicker’s cautions. “If someone sold me away, we would no longer have our great pleasures together. We would never have a child together.”

  Good Face believed that in all the pleasures they had taken since her return, they surely had planted a child-seed in her, just as the women of the Maumee Sipu towns would soon plant the Three Sisters seeds in the sun-warmed ground, just as it was always supposed to be in the sacred cycle of the seasons. For they had loved hard and often in the fertile time of her body, and it was springtime. Flicker had dosed her with a tea made from the manroot plant, which might help her be fertile. Shrugging, the old woman had said, “Our people do not use it for this, but people across the Great Water want it so much that most of it on Turtle Island has been dug up and sold far away. It used to grow everywhere until the French started buying it from us. If it works for French, who are a sort of wapsituk, maybe it will work for a red-hair.” She shrugged again. “There is a chance the wapsituk might be right about something.”

  But one day, before planting time, Good Face awoke knowing that her moon-blood was again upon her. Once more she would have to give up the anticipation of creating a baby human being in her belly. “I must leave for the moon hut today,” she told Like Wood as he reached for her. He drew his hand back.

  “E heh. Then Creator does not mean us to have a child yet. Creator sees another Long Knife army coming again this year, and does not want a child born to us when the Town Destroyers are in the land.”

  She rolled into a scrap of deerskin the few articles she would need in the menstrual hut, then peered in at him as she stooped to go out. “Such cheering things you say, my husband.”

  “I am a warrior. It is not sad to me that the soldiers come again. Last year I killed two. This year we will be ready when they come, and we will kill so many they will never dare to return!”

  That was the way warriors talked, she knew. But what she remembered of last year was the rattle and thunder of distant gunfire, and the days of not knowing whether her beautiful husband was alive or dead. So maybe it was right that her blood was coming down. Still, it made her heart heavy with disappointment.

  The women in the menstrual hut were talking about Wild Potato when Good Face came in. It was what Flicker called “tickle talk,” just the giggly sort of chatter that women would never want their husbands to overhear. It was usually bawdy, but not mean like gossip. Good Face recognized most of the women, but in a town this large, with tribal groups always coming and going, she was not surprised to see a few strangers. The talk about Wild Potato, about how handsome he was, took a new turn when she seated herself by the fire in the midst of the women. One looked at her and said, “We were wondering if the hair of his man-part is red too.” They all tittered and whooped.

  She smiled, wishing to be pleasant, but her heart was heavy with the disappointment of not being pregnant, and with dread about the coming of another army, and this talk seemed so frivolous that it annoyed her a little.

  One of the women, with a very saucy expression, turned to her and asked: “You are red-haired like him. Is your hair down there red too?”

  Good Face could not keep from smiling at that, and almost laughed before she could answer. “It certainly is for the next few days.”

  They went into an uproar of laughter at that answer, and it made her feel better, to have made them laugh so heartily. There was always such comfort in being among women around a fire. From her first evening in Neepah’s lodge so many years ago, when she arrived as a cold, frightened, hungry little girl, she had flourished in that comfort. With a twinge, she remembered that distant moment, remembered it with such clarity that she would not have been surprised to see Neepah’s face among these laughing and chatting women. She gazed from one face to another around the lodge. There sat a stocky woman she did not know, one whose round face did remind her of Neepah’s. Beside and slightly behind that one was a gaunt young woman, who would have been pretty except for her terrible thinness and the lines and traces of pain all over her bony visage. Her eyes seemed almost to burn with intensity, so that Good Face quickly glanced away.…

  Then something like a wordless voice, like a birdcall, chimed in her heart, making it quicken, and she glanced instantly back to the burning eyes, which were fixed on her.

  The skinny young woman got up and came around, and reached for Good Face’s hands. Touching the nailless index finger, she uttered a little groan.

  “E heh,” she said. “I greet you, Good Face.”

  “You,” Good Face said, “are Minnow?”

  So quiet and intense were these few words that all the tickle talk fell silent in the women’s lodge.

  Good Face and Minnow looked at each other in silence for a time, memories rushing.

  Minnow was so thin and sinewy and her embrace was so desperate that it was like wrestling a wild grapevine. The tears that welled in Good Face’s eyes flowed from pity as much as from joy.

  Together they remembered Neepah, who had mothered them and taught them. Sitting close, they murmured like sisters over childhood memories. Minnow laughed little, and when any tenderness revealed itself in her eyes or voice, she masked it quickly with some hard look or bitter remark. Eventually Good Face came around to saying:

  “Never have I heard anyone speak of seeing the Long Knife soldiers harm her that day. Only that some saw her going toward the soldiers in the fighting. Always I have hoped she might not have been harmed. That is many summers ago, but sometimes still I pray she is alive and our paths will cross again.”

  Minnow made a short, sharp hiss, angry-sounding, but sad-eyed.

  “You mock my hope?” Good Face queried.

  “In This Side World our paths will not cross hers again. Only in the Other Side World.”

  “Then you know she is ong ul? You saw her dead?”

  “E heh. Yes. Let us not speak more of it.”

  A dark weight squeezed Good Face’s heart, though she had not really expected any other truth. “Please at least tell me what you—”

  “Tuk o! Tuk o kek o! No! Nothing! There is nothing you want in your mind’s pictures!”

  The hard finality made her fall silent; it was true, she did not want to see it in her mind or put it in her memory if it was bad. All her memories of Neepah were pleasurable, even after these dozen summers since.

  But Minnow herself could not keep from saying more, apparently. She breathed through clenched jaws: “Soldiers are slime serpents. They cut off pieces of her to wave and keep and laugh.”

  “Pieces …”

  “Everything by which she was a woman. But also her scalp. Perhaps to brag they had killed a warrior. E heh! She was one!”

  The intensity of Minnow’s tone, and the words themselves, had troubled the women in the lodge and they had turned to look, frowning, not liking talk of killing in the moon lodge, a place of life. Good Face was trying to keep the bloody images out of her head; she did not want them; she was stirring inside as if she would be sick, and was beginning slowly to turn her head from side to side in a slow denial.

  “Soldiers are slime serpents,” Minnow repeated, loud enough now for everyone’s ears. “I pray for a chance to skin off a soldier’s nut bag someday. I will make a little pouch of it and give it to you, sister. In honor of her.”

  Of her. Of Neepah, who had lost and suffered so much f
rom soldiers. It was so long ago, but Good Face could still remember Neepah’s story of a baby killed, Neepah’s baby whom she herself had been brought to replace, and of something terrible the soldiers had done to Neepah even before, something so bad that she had not explained what it was.

  Minnow, eyes narrowed, snarled: “I used to wonder why so many wapsituk always want to come and fight our people. But I believe I know. They want to come because of the things they hope to do to our women! They are slime serpents!”

  Minnow was married, not to a Lenapeh but a Miami. This Miami was her second husband, she said. First she had been married a short time to a Lenapeh, but something terrible had happened, which Minnow seemed unwilling to speak of very much. She preferred to tell of the places she had been to in the years of flight: Canada, Detroit, several towns near the Erie lake, one on the Sanduskee Sipu. During those times, tribes were often mingled together in villages, as they were here at Kekionga, and the warriors allied. When her Lenapeh warrior husband had turned out to be bad, she put him out of their wikwam. Then she married the Miami warrior, and that was why she was here now. They had no children yet.

  Minnow talked little, and that was about all Good Face learned about her in their four days in the moon lodge together.

  But though she talked little, she seemed to bask in Good Face’s presence, listening to what had happened to her in those lost years, listening, listening, sitting so close they touched. They were still like sisters even after the long absence. And Good Face, who in caring for her old parents and her husband had had little time for friendships with women her age, responded to this good listener by talking tirelessly. Had not her birth family had some name for her that meant a chatterer?

  When their moon time was over, they worked together whenever they could, and there was much work to be done. Lodges were being rebuilt in the villages of Kekionga, and much tree bark was needed to cover them. Families crossed the rivers and went into the forests to cut and peel and stack bark. Early spring was the best time to peel trees because the bark was limber and sappy, easier to skin off in wide slabs without tearing. Good Face and Minnow worked together in one of the bark-harvesting camps on a river-bank, their arms and hands sticky with drying sap and blood-smeared from scratches and cuts. It seemed that working made Minnow talk more easily. She said, “My Lenapeh husband was handsome, like yours, but he became an empty loincloth. So I named him Empty Loincloth and made him leave forever.”

  Good Face almost laughed at the name, but Minnow was serious. This was apparently one of the bitter things in her. Good Face waited for Minnow to explain why she had called her husband that, then finally had to ask her.

  “He began drinking wapsi spirit water and he became no husband, no good. He howled like a wolf. Cut his friends with a knife. Hurt his family. My ribs were broken when he kicked me. He stank too much to hunt, and could not shoot because of shaky hands. Worthless because of that burning bad drink. Empty Loincloth, too sick and disgraceful to raise a stiffness for me. After I put him out of the house, the Council warned him two times. Then the third time they put him out of the tribe, made him a no-person no one can see anymore. Of all things the wapsituk have done to us, maybe the bad drinking, maxcheekwee menaxteeum, might be the worst of all.” She spat on the ground, and that revealed the heat of her anger most, because Neepah had taught them both as little girls that it is in bad spirit to spit on our Mother Earth without apologizing.

  Some other things were being done in the improper spirit way. A few of the men possessed swords and bayonets taken from soldiers killed last fall, and because they were metal blades, they tried to use them to make the bark-cutting and peeling easier. Tuck Horse scolded some of the young warriors for slashing and gouging the trees with war weapons—particularly wapsi war weapons—which he said would bring bad spirit to wikwams covered with bark harvested that way. The young men soon enough learned that the weapons were not good tools anyway; swords made for cutting flesh were soon bent by wood, and bayonets pierced bark instead of prying it loose. Before long the bark was being taken in the traditional ways, peeled by tools made of wood and antler, after a tobacco offering was made to each tree. Then the long, wide, limber sheets of bark were loaded on rafts and pirogues and taken back to the towns, where they were laid over poles on the ground, crisscrossed with more layers of bark and poles, and weighted on top with stones to keep them from curling as they dried. It was a hard kind of work, sometimes in cold spring rain and on muddy ground. Everyone’s hands were scratched and bruised and strained.

  With his chair maker’s skill with tools, Tuck Horse was more productive than any of the younger people, but he complained: “In the good days before the wapsituk started coming, this work only had to be done years apart. Now almost every spring we have to skin more trees and make new wikwams because the armies are always burning them. Surely Creator is not happy to see wasted so much bark from trees, and should stop the wapsituk from any more town-burning so the trees can rest. And we too.”

  Like Wood, overhearing his father-in-law, said proudly, “Buckongahelas and Little Turtle will keep the army from burning these towns again, if the Creator doesn’t!”

  Tuck Horse straightened slowly, painfully, and stared at Like Wood with a frown, staring until Like Wood felt it and turned. Old Tuck Horse growled at him, “Did I hear the husband of my own daughter say that? Kulesta! Whether the war chiefs can stop the army depends not on them. It depends on the wish of He Who Creates By Thinking. There are things that are so, in the Old Ways. Such as not using weapons to make houses. Such as always remembering that we are in the hands of the Creator. You are a good son. But do not forget the old true things. E heh. I have finished. Take that end and help me move these sheets of bark.”

  Good Face was relieved to see how graciously her husband took the scolding from her old father. For it seemed to her that whatever was happening to the People, the things that were so by the Old Ways would always be so and should not be forgotten. Living with her old parents had given her a solid faith in that. It was because of such faith that it had troubled her to see Minnow spit on the ground.

  They had not planted together since they were little girls helping Neepah, but now Good Face and Minnow were working together as women in the moist, sun-warmed, scorched soil, hoeing the earth into little mounds, making holes to put in fish and water and the seeds, the fine dirt and bear oil making a dark slime between their fingers and thumbs, while children brought pots of water from the river, and the women’s voices sang the planting song. This was the way it always had been, this was the way it was supposed to be. Kahesana Xaskwim, Mother Corn, had been asked in the prayer to make the seeds grow, these seeds that had been saved from the army the year before, and Kahesana Xaskwim had made her presence known, so every kernel planted in the ground was blessed and was full of hope. Good Face had braided her hair so it would not hang over her face. Sweat was running down her arms to drip on the ground, and she remembered Neepah saying that Kukna, Mother Earth, liked to drink pim, the sweat of women. In the side of her vision was Minnow, so spare and slender she looked like a boy with breasts, but wiry and strong and tireless, sunlight gleaming on her sweaty back and shoulders. Tools munched the earth and women’s voices murmured in talk and song. The work was like a trance, or a long dream, and Good Face felt herself to be connected with all women who had lived before, as if they all were still alive and working and singing too, but elsewhere on the rolling circle of the world. It seemed that no one could die; everyone was always alive; Neepah, for example, must be somewhere else on the great turning circle, planting and sweating, just somewhere distant over the curve of the horizon, as well as all of the grandmothers and great-grandmothers a thousand generations gone. And always the corn would be sprouting and growing and being harvested. And all the men of all time would be hunting and fishing, protecting the women and children, growing old and wise and grumpy like Tuck Horse, full of knowledge and honor.…

  The women had been planti
ng for most of the afternoon when they began to hear a howling that sounded like an enraged panther. They straightened up from their hoeing and looked about. The noise was so uncommon and so piercing that it was hard to tell at once whether it came from upstream or down. Soon the women were sure it was coming from downstream. Then it was joined by wild squealings and yips like the night-sing of a coyote pack.

  But coyotes never did that at this time of day. And there were some deep-throated screams beginning, as if men were being hurt. Children came running into the field to their mothers, alarmed.

  Minnow was the first to act. She looked less scared than angry. There was a fire in her eyes that was frightening. She sent a runner upriver toward the town to get some men, but she did not wait for men to come. She spoke in a quick and hissing voice to the women nearby:

  “Bring the tools and follow me!”

  Good Face, though scared badly, followed Minnow with a few others, and they sped along the riverside path, running crouched and peering ahead through the lacy budding foliage. As they ran closer to the wailings, there were moments when the awful sounds simply trailed off to silence, then would erupt again. Though Good Face felt strong with the elk-shoulder mattock in her hand and was inspired to courage by Minnow’s example, she was just as ready to turn about and run back as to go on. There were only four or five women coming; the rest had remained in the cornfield. Minnow ran ahead so fast it was hard to keep up with her, her stringy muscles moving under her sweaty skin, ribs and spine bones visible. It was astonishing that she showed no fear of whatever lay ahead.