The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Good Face nodded, her heart twisting at the sound of that name, and she understood all at once what Minnow was saying. She thought hard, cutting skin around one of the buck deer’s hocks while Minnow cut the other.

  “Ever since I was a child carried away from home by a warrior,” Good Face said, “I have been like a leaf blown before the storm of war. There is no sign of an end to it, as long as there are red men and white men on this same land. They make each other crazy, like drinking the spirit water, and their howling is like a storm. I see now that I must be stronger than just a leaf, so the storm cannot blow me away. To be strong, I must know what is happening.”

  “K’hehlah! Indeed that is true. Now you know the truth of it in your heart,” Minnow replied, pinching an edge of the deer’s leg skin up with hard fingers to get a grip on it. “It is for us to spring back like a bent stem, not blow away like a leaf. Women are what hold the People together. When men fight, we must be strong for them to come back to so they can devour more strength from us. No, not blown away like leaves!”

  The buck deer was hanging head-down from the apex of a hickory-pole tripod, hind legs held apart by a stout stick, while Good Face and Minnow sliced with their knives along the hocks and forelegs and inward toward the slit-open belly. With the knife edges they separated the skin from the integument underneath until they could grip enough skin in their fists to start pulling down and peeling the hide off. Strong as the women were, it was hard work. Their breath clouded in the raw air. Minnow talked between clenched teeth, and Good Face knew at once that skinning the animal had started her talking of this:

  “Somewhere in some soldier’s house are tobacco pouches with nipples, and bracelets with hair. Made from my mother’s breasts and genitals. I have seen this in dreams. The soldier shows those things to his sons when they are drinking whiskey together, and brags of how he raped her before cutting off those parts. My mother’s,” she hissed, black eyes glittering. “The same with Neepah’s!”

  “Sister,” Good Face said with a shudder, “you should put such long-ago things out of memory and not keep speaking of them.”

  Minnow replied, “Pull. We have so much to do to feed our warriors. Now you see the beautiful shape of the thigh muscles in this good animal? When I was little, Neepah had strong legs like this. Neepah whom our hearts remember, eh? The soldiers who killed her at Wyalusing Town skinned her legs and her back, I have been told. And her scalp. And of course her breasts that once fed me, because you remember how big they were!” Suddenly throwing her knife down in the bloody mud, she yanked down on the hide with both hands, and with a hissing sound the deerhide peeled off all the way down to the buck’s shoulders. Minnow made the move with such force that the tripod bucked and Good Face almost fell. “Wapsi soldier!” Minnow snarled. “This is you I am skinning! You are hanging up alive so you can feel it!”

  The power of Minnow’s hatred was frightening, and Good Face was speechless. She helped tug the skin the rest of the way down the neck. Then Minnow snatched up her sharp British-made tomahawk and with a quick blow severed the spine just behind the skull, and then with two more strokes cut the meat and arteries so that the head with its antlers fell to the ground and lay there still attached to the hide. Good Face knew that Minnow could do that because of the skill of a lifetime’s butchering, but it seemed as if the hatred and anger had guided her hand.

  Good Face thought of all the warriors who had left the villages just before the rains started and gone down to meet the army, and she knew that all of those thousand warriors hated the white men as much as Minnow did, and that they had all danced and struck the war post with at least that much fury, all of them, including her own husband. And so she wished, as she looked at the bloody mud and the cut meat and hide of the butchered animal before her, that there could be some way in which the warriors and the army would not have to meet each other.

  But that was only a vague wish, and she did not pray for it because that would have been a prayer against the purposes of the People.

  After five days of rain, Good Face one morning saw blue in the sky and frost sparkling on the ground. In the villages the women ground corn into meal, and made venison into jerky on pole racks over big beds of embers. They sliced squashes into rings and dried them in great quantities, and when they were not processing food for their warriors, they scraped and tanned hides and made moccasins. They stored huge quantities of dry corn and beans in underground pits and hid the covers of the pits so that if the army ever did get this far, the soldiers might not find the food.

  Some people were beginning to believe that the army was not going to come any farther. According to reports from the Shawnee scouts, the army was still camped inside its latest fort and doing nothing. Many soldiers were sick, the spies said, and many were deserting in the nights and going back down the trail toward the O-hi-o. Tuck Horse came in one day smiling, lit his pipe at the meat-jerking fire, turned the stem to the four winds, and murmured some thankful prayer. Good Face and Flicker waited to hear what was pleasing him so.

  Finally he said, with smoke seeping up from his smiling lips: “Some of the soldiers are hanging up.”

  The two women looked at each other, shrugged, and asked him to explain what he meant by that strange statement.

  “They got caught running away and their general made them be hung up with neck ropes until they were dead.”

  Good Face put her hand to her throat. She faintly remembered that white men had a hanging punishment for bad men. She said to Tuck Horse, “You are amused by such a sad thing?”

  “It is like this, daughter. The general worked well. He did not think they were very good soldiers, so he hung them up. Now, to my thinking, they are good soldiers. I should like to see all the soldiers good like those. Heh heh! Ah-heh!” He looked at her awhile, and when he saw that she was not smiling, he added, “I smile, daughter, because when an army is like that, it is less to be feared.” He puffed on his pipe, then raised his nose and sniffed at the aroma of the drying meat. “The army horses are dying because the cold weather kills the grass. Dead horses cannot carry food from one fort to another. For once, I believe, our warriors have more food than the army. That is good. It is good what you are doing. May I have that piece of meat from that end of the bottom pole? It looks very good. Waneeshee, daughter.

  “Kulesta. The chiefs have said that soon we will have to take jerky and corn down to the warriors. It will require strong women to help us old men with the packhorses. We will not go very close to the army. Will you go with us, daughter? You are good with horses.”

  Good Face felt a sudden prickling in her hair and a quickening of her heart. It was a frightening prospect, but it would take her closer to where her husband was. She looked at old Tuck Horse, who was now savoring the hot, smoky strip of venison.

  “Father, I do not want to see killing. If I do not have to see killing, I will help.”

  “I think you will see no killing. That army is stopped. It is hiding in its fort. As long as it stays there, there will be no killing.”

  Riding with the pack train, Good Face thought about long-ago times when she had been on horseback. She could even remember when she had ridden with her white father as a little girl. That was like remembering a dream, because she could hardly believe she had ever been a child in a wapsi family.

  On the second day, when the pack train left the banks of the Maumee Sipu and started south up the Auglaize, snow began falling and she daydreamed about being carried on another horse up another river, as a very scared little wapsi girl riding in front of a Lenapeh warrior whose arms held a blanket around her and kept her from falling off. She tried to remember the name of that river and finally it came back to her: Susquehanna.

  I should not let myself forget so much, she thought. If ever I were caught by soldiers or found by my first family, it would be good to remember things. Like names.

  Jesus was the name of God’s son, she remembered. I should remember Jesus. She remembered
the old Lenapehs, Joseph and Mary, at Detroit. They had still believed in that Jesus even though many of their own people had been killed by the white soldiers who believed in Jesus.

  Christians. She remembered that word. She thought hard, watching the snow begin to fill the tufts of autumn-dead grass in the wet prairie the pack train was crossing. Then she thought of the word for her wapsi people:

  Quakers.

  “Quakers,” she said. They were Christian too, but different.

  The horse blew steam, as if answering.

  The horse she was riding was a chestnut mare, one of the horses of the soldiers that had been killed near Kekionga last year. Only a few straps and pieces of its old army saddle remained, but the owner of the horse had fashioned a comfortable Indian saddle out of it, deerhide padded with an old blanket, and using the original stirrups. In her left hand Good Face held a rope that led a pack-horse and an army mule. Next behind her in line was Tuck Horse. Old grandfather-aged man though he was, he was still strong and skillful enough to lead five packhorses. She loved him very deeply whenever she turned and looked back at his white hair and his old lined face, brown and rough as jerky.

  Tuck Horse was not his real Lenapeh name. He had given up that name long ago because of bad fortune with it, and she didn’t even know what that name had been. Tuck Horse was the name he had used half his lifetime, but it was a sort of a joke name. Old Joseph in Detroit had told the story of how Tuck Horse got such a strange name. Once in a long-ago war he had been in some wapsi fort and needed a horse in a hurry, so he had just hopped on the nearest one. Long afterward the wapsini whose horse it had been saw him and pointed and yelled, “That man took my horse!” So the wapsi soldiers had called him Took Horse as a nickname for a long time, and he just kept it because he hadn’t wanted to keep his old name. Old Joseph had a hard time telling that joke-story because, although he learned to be a Christian, he had not learned much English language. Joseph had said he never believed Jesus spoke English anyway.

  So the name Tuck Horse was really only a nickname. Good Face smiled, remembering that.

  She too had had a nickname. When she was little her family had called her …

  She had been speaking Lenapeh so long that she wasn’t used to making the English sounds, but in a murmur she tried to say it:

  “Palahnee.”

  She had heard her white mother crying that name after her when she was being carried away on a warrior’s shoulder. She could remember that. There had been a wapsi boy carried away with her, and when they were in Neepah’s town, that boy had called her that nickname. She tried to remember the boy’s name but could not. She wondered what had become of him. She wondered too whether her white mother was still alive. She would be old now, maybe dead.

  She rode in the cold, thinking about that. About how little she remembered her real mother.

  But anyway, if she had died, I think I would know in my lea-peuhkun. She could not remember the English word for soul.

  She sighed and drew her blanket higher around her neck. Riding long ways caused her to daydream and drift in memories.

  This was low country the pack train was passing through. The trail was clearly marked, as the path worn by hooves and feet for hundreds of years filled with snow. She knew that people like Tuck Horse had traveled so much in their long lifetime that they knew all the trails between towns and rivers and would never be lost. Tuck Horse sometimes said that white men could not see what was before them, and that unless they had made a road with stumps and wheel ruts, they could lose a whole army. She glanced back at the old man again. He had pulled an edge of his blanket forward to cover the flintlock of his musket against the falling snow. Of the twenty riders in this pack train, five were old men and the rest were women. All of the old men and three of the women had guns. The rest of the women, like herself, had only knives and tomahawks and slings. It was not likely they would have to defend themselves, the pack train leader had said. The enemy was down in its fort, and all the warriors were around it. If any enemy were out in this countryside, it would be perhaps a few scouts, white hunters and Chickasaws hired by the general. There was always a possibility of danger when armies were on the move, but women and children were kept out of danger as much as possible.

  Now Good Face heard excited voices from farther ahead in the pack train. The front of the column had left the little prairie and was in snowy woods, so she could not see what was happening yet. But as she rode in she found the pack train stopped. The riders were listening to someone who was speaking. Then a warrior, dressed in a blanket coat and wearing a fur gustoweh cap on his head, rode out of the crowd and trotted his horse swiftly northward, back along the path in the direction from which they had come. His face was serious and intense, and though he nodded to everyone he passed, he did not stop. He was no one Good Face had ever seen.

  Then the leader of the pack train, a strong old man who was a friend of Tuck Horse, came riding back. He told the riders that the warrior had been one of the Shawnee scouts and was carrying the word northward to the towns: the army had come out of its fort and started north, but in less than a day the soldiers had stopped and set up a guarded camp where it seemed they intended to stay awhile. It was believed they were waiting for their supplies to catch up, because a column of packhorses was following the army.

  “So the army is out,” Tuck Horse exclaimed. “This late in fall they continue toward our towns? What a fool their general chief must be!”

  The pack train chief gave a short, harsh laugh. “A fool, and he moves as slow as swamp water. Our warriors could starve while waiting for him to attack. So. Let us go on.”

  And so the column moved on. Good Face was a little afraid, knowing that the army was out of its fort and on the land. She thought of soldiers and what she had heard of them. She thought of them cutting off parts of women. She thought of Minnow’s hatred of them, and wondered whether she was afraid of them now that they were riding closer. That evening when the little camp was set up and the horses were corraled, eating hay that some of them had been carrying, she hunkered in firelight under a brush lean-to with Minnow and asked her if it scared her to be getting so close to where the soldiers were.

  Minnow replied: “I am not scared now. Maybe I would be if I saw soldiers. But if I saw soldiers I would run toward them, not away. I would skin one’s balls, at least, before they could throw me down, and I would rejoice.”

  * * *

  After all these days of riding, Good Face felt that she and her mare were one. The column moved slowly. The snow had stopped but each day was colder. Every day they were passed by messengers, and now and then an unloaded packhorse string would pass them, returning toward the villages. Occasionally the column was surprised by warriors from Little Turtle’s force who were ranging the countryside hunting for fresh meat, and they would have more news about the army, which they told to Tuck Horse and the other old men, staying away from the women because they themselves were in the warpath spirit and any of these women might be in her moon time.

  The reports of the army were so strange that sometimes they caused the old warriors to shake their heads and laugh. Sometimes the army would stop and sit for days in a swampy place as if to give the soldiers plenty of opportunity to suffer. Soldiers kept deserting. Two or three hundred loud-voiced women and crying children were always with the army, and as slowly as the army moved, those camp followers were even slower, often strung out far behind the soldiers. Sometimes the noise of the women and children and the arguing and complaints of the soldiers could be heard all night by Tecumseh’s scouts, who were always all around the army. Sometimes the general could be seen, and he was obviously an old man with bad bones, so sick that he could not come out of his tent some days, and sometimes when the army was creeping along, he had to be carried on a litter slung between two horses. The general seemed always to pick the worst route, so his eight cannons and numerous wagons were often deep in mud. Tuck Horse relished these accounts of the army’s
miserable blundering, and he told Good Face and Minnow one night, “Ah, if I were young, I could be down there like a wolf going around that army, and all day and all night they would hear me howling and laughing at their suffering and their stupidity. I would shout to them, ‘You, sick and hungry and cold wapsi army! This comes upon you for marching into a country that is not yours!’ Daughter, may they all die here. I would like to be young so that I could be one of the wolves to kill them!”

  It had rained again, and the world that had been brightly dusted with snow was gray and dun and black. The horses’ hooves squelched in the sodden ground, churning up mud as the long pack train passed down the trail. But as the day grew colder, the rain turned to light snow again, snow that melted on the wet ground and failed to whiten the country. Even with a blanket over her head and shoulders, Good Face was chilled all through, often shuddering uncontrollably. At last, with dusk coming on, she became aware of many voices ahead, and Tuck Horse rode forward past her, leading his five beasts, and told her to stop.

  She sat shivering on her saddle, becoming aware in the dim, snow-blurred evening light that hundreds of men were about. Their voices were a droning murmur. She could smell tobacco smoke and bear oil and horse dung. Though there were no bonfires, as one would expect in an evening war camp in such weather, she could make out the shapes of a few small shelters in the woods, with firelight gleaming faintly within. It was the kind of camp that could not be seen or heard from half a mile away, and so she presumed that it was Little Turtle’s main camp and that the army camp must lie not far beyond it. This thought made her tremble as much with excitement and fear as with the cold. Her thoughts turned then to her husband, and Minnow’s. They must be somewhere in or near this swarming, unlit camp.