The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Tuck Horse came back with the pack train leader, and they told the women in the column to dismount and wait beside the trail. Then the old men mounted and led their strings of animals forward into the camp, where a hubbub of low but cheerful talk droned and the horses nickered and blew. Minnow and the other women crowded together as if for warmth and waited.

  “Listen to our men,” Minnow said, and Good Face realized that Minnow’s voice when happy was beautiful like music. “They welcome what we have brought. That makes my heart warm after this cold, hard ride.”

  “K’hehlah,” another woman replied. Indeed yes. “May some of that find its way into my husband’s belly, as it should if Creator watches over things proper.”

  Minnow said, “I wish I could find my husband and have him in my belly after all these days!” The women laughed in a bawdy way, and Good Face felt herself blush because she had just been having the same yearning.

  She said: “Might we hope that we will be allowed to see our husbands after coming so far to feed them?”

  “Do not even hope for it,” a woman scoffed. “When the horses are unloaded, we will turn around and go back up the trail we came. This is not a place for us.”

  Good Face’s heart clenched and sank, even though it was something she had known to expect. The men were on the warpath and thus in another world, even though right there amid the thickets.

  After dark the women and old men took the unloaded packhorses a safe distance up the trail and made a small camp with a fire. They heated venison broth in a kettle and sipped it, with corn cakes to eat. Little was said, though everyone was brimming with strong thoughts, as Good Face could see by their eyes. Tuck Horse at length smoked his pipe and then began telling them what he had learned at the camp.

  “Our warriors will probably strike the army before the sun comes up tomorrow.” Everyone looked intently at him, and he went on. “The army sent some of its best soldiers back down the road for some reason, so it’s now even weaker. Buckongahelas said the army camped this evening where the Wabash Sipu begins. He said the soldiers were so wet and tired they did not even build a defense. Just put up tents and built big bonfires to warm themselves. Buckongahelas said we will never catch an army so weak and stupid ever again. It is time to do it, now before they get up and move again. My friends, this night we will pray for our sons and brothers and husbands who are surely just now closing their trap around that miserable army.”

  His quiet words set Good Face’s heart to racing, and her throat tightened. She thought of the long hatred between her People and the wapsituk, and of all the ugly and bloody deeds waiting to be avenged, and of the long treks the army and the warriors had made toward each other for so many weeks. She thought of her husband, whose body and heart she knew so well, and her dread and eagerness were so great and turbulent inside her that she could hardly breathe enough air.

  A little later tobacco was offered to the fire, its smoke rising into the cold night air to carry their prayers up to the Creator above, and as if the smoke had caused it, the clouds disappeared and for the first night in a long time stars were seen. Tuck Horse sat by the fire and lit his long pipe, not his little personal clay pipe, and passed it for everyone to draw from. He turned the stem in all directions when it was handed back to him, touched the mouthpiece to Mother Earth, and then pointed it toward the stars. He closed his eyes and began speaking just audibly.

  “Kijilamuh ka’ong, He Who Creates By Thinking, your children sit here offering you tobacco. We ask you to think of our sons and brothers and husbands all safe and not hurt. We ask you to think of them going home singing of victory over their enemy. We ask you to think of the soldiers all going away by other roads, by their wagon road back down to the Beautiful River, or by the Spirit Road back to their own creator, who sent them here by mistake. We ask you to think like that, and then to think of peace for us after they have gone, so that it will be so, as you think it. Now I am finished.”

  “A ho,” the others all murmured.

  After the prayer, Tuck Horse got up from the fire and said, “Walk out with me, daughter.” With her blanket drawn around her, Good Face followed him out under the stars, southward up a sloping meadow through wet dead grass growing crisp with freezing. At the top of the meadow they looked southward. In the southeast there were still some clouds, and there was a ruddy color to them. He pointed.

  “Those are the army’s bonfires,” he said. “More times than I want to remember, such red in the sky was from our towns burning. This time I do not think that will happen. I believe this will be a time our People will always remember. I believe Kijilamuh ka’ong has agreed to see our prayers just as we sent them. I felt that it was so. Listen!”

  In the distance a few guns were banging. Good Face’s pulse began to race. “Is it starting, Father?”

  He stood watching and listening. There were a few more shots. Then silence. One or two more. More silence. Above the reddish low line of clouds the brilliant stars blazed, thousands of stars. A faraway gunshot. Silence. Another shot. Then there was nothing but stillness. He said, “It is not started yet. Their sentries are frightened. As they should be.” The old man stood looking that way and listening. He held an edge of his blanket as usual over the flintlock of his musket to keep it dry in the cold night air. Then he turned and led her back down the slope toward their little camp, where the fire twinkled, a warm yellow light in contrast to the cold-looking stars. At the edge of the woods he stopped. He put his old, gnarled hand against the side of her face and looked at her, his own face dark, only the whiteness of his hair visible in the starlight.

  “Go and sleep,” he said. “I will be on watch here. Do not worry about your husband. The Creator has put a protection over the People.”

  “You should sleep too, Father.” She felt a great swelling of admiration and love in her bosom for this old man.

  “Old people do not need much sleep,” he said. “Go. Rest well. The horses like you and trust you, and you have done well for our People.”

  Good Face had slept the deep, undreaming sleep of one fatigued in body and soul, but she did not sleep late. When she sat up in her blanket, some stars were still shining, but the sky over the treetops in the east was paling. Others had already built up the campfire and were standing or sitting close by it, and she heard one of the elders say:

  “Where is that old man Tuck Horse?”

  Good Face remembered the night before and said, “He stayed up to guard.”

  “I know,” said the elder, “but then he woke me to take the watch and I thought he came back to sleep.”

  Minnow said, “Give him time. He is probably squatting in the bushes as some old men do in the morning if they are not stopped up in the morning like some other old men.”

  “He must be stopped up himself if he has been squatting this long,” said the old man.

  Good Face stood up, a little alarmed, to look around in the half-light, and just then she heard coming from far in the southeast, a faint rattling and whistling, barely audible even in the windless quiet.

  “Kulesta!” Minnow hissed. “The army plays its waking-up music. A shame our warriors did not kill them in their sleep.”

  “Maybe my father is with the horses,” Good Face said. “I will go and see.”

  “He is not,” said the pack train leader. “I have been to the horses already.”

  Good Face was bewildered and almost frightened. Her father should have been somewhere nearby, but he seemed not to be. The sky was growing light enough that she could make out individual trees and the bushes on the sloping meadow they had walked last night, and she could see the mass of the corralled horses and even the steam of their breathing. She thought then that perhaps he had gotten up early and walked up onto the hill to look off in the direction of the army again. Of course that was the kind of thing he might do, he whose long life had been so full of oncoming armies. She decided to go out onto the meadow and look for his tracks in the frost. She would go in
to the bushes first and make water and then start up the meadow.

  She was taking her first step in that direction when she heard the first sputterings of distant gunfire. She stopped to listen and at once the gunfire ascended to a steady roar of crackling and echoes. The women and old men had leaped up from their places around the fire and were looking southward.

  Now as the roar of weapons began to fluctuate, from ferocious thundering to sporadic sputters and then thundering again, Good Face began detecting another kind of sound. It was somehow a sound familiar to her childhood memory and it took her a moment to recall it: cowbells. But it sounded like hundreds of distant cowbells, and she could not imagine why there would be such a sound in a battle. But suddenly Minnow, then the other women, and even some of the old men, emitted the shrill, trilling war cry, and with her scalp prickling, Good Face realized that was what she had been hearing in the distance—the war cries of hundreds of attacking warriors, and her heart leaped with fear and thrill. Then the cannons started booming.

  She could feel the great thumps through the soles of her feet as well as hear them. Somewhere she had heard cannonfire before, she knew, and then she remembered that it had been all those years ago when the old man called Owl was taking her up the river with the other people from Neepah’s town, fleeing from the Town Destroyer. More than ten years that had been, and still there were Town Destroyer armies coming. She remembered that those long-ago cannons had boomed in the mornings, far down the river. These were much closer and louder. She knew they were not really close because of the distance of the red sky she had seen over the army camp the night before, but they were close enough that their bangs shook her nerves. She was already half frantic over the disappearance of her father, and now she was flinching at the thought of her husband who was, she knew, somewhere down there in the midst of all that shooting. The sun had started to rise and in its pale light the frosty grass up on the slope of the meadow shone like silver against the sky’s deep blue. She remembered that she had started out to look for Tuck Horse’s tracks up the slope, and she did see a faint line of bent grass cross-lit by the light of sunrise. Without a word she darted out of the woods and ran southward up the meadow, veering toward the trail. It came to her mind that her father must be up there where they had stood last night and that he was probably looking toward the battleground. Now she was sure she would find him there and she ran through the frosty grass up the slope.

  Now she saw that the others were running with her, after her. Minnow passed ahead of her, running full tilt. The cannons boomed on and the rattle of gunfire and the ringing sound of the war cries she could still hear over the huffing and swish of her running.

  At the top of the slope, heart pounding, she stood with the others and looked toward the south. There was really nothing to see except woodlands to the horizon, the remaining red and yellow leaves of autumn hanging like tatters on the trees, only the treetops yet gilded by the morning sun which had barely cleared the horizon; the low ground still lay in bluish shade. The sky was utterly cloudless, but above a distant vale, smoke was rising, and the people looked at that place and watched the smoke roiling up white and gray to a height above the trees where it leveled and spread like a mist. The faraway thundering and howling of the battle went on unabated, and the people on the frosty rise gazed in that direction with glittering eyes, not talking, but sometimes moving their lips as if praying. After a short time there were no more cannon shots, and Minnow shut her eyes, bared her teeth, and emitted another piercing ululation, then another and another, her palate vibrating.

  But Tuck Horse was nowhere to be seen.

  After a long time, with nothing changing except the angle of the rising sun, Good Face felt so immensely saddened that she had to do something besides listen and watch the drifting smoke, and so she began walking about, looking for her father’s trail. The sun had dissolved the frost. Looking back toward the camp, she could see the traces of bent grass where this morning they all had come up the slope. She went back down that way. No one followed her or even looked after her. The smoke of the campfire hung along the treetops like a wispy little imitation of the distant battle smoke. The horses were still in the rope corral, nosing in the dead grass, a few watching her. She walked in a circle around the little camp, found a trail and followed it into a thicket and saw there where somebody had left body waste. She went back to resume her circle, and then saw another vague trail of bent grass. She stood and looked at it for a moment, her ears still filled with the drumming noise of the faraway battle. She could see where the trail led. It went southward toward the old sunken, long-trodden war road.

  “Ah, no!” she said aloud, and bit her lip, looking down the path and blinking, hugging herself. Then in the bright cold sunlight she went back up the slope toward the people, who were still gazing toward the battle smoke, which was thicker now and billowing higher. It was mid-morning by now and the din had not diminished at all. Three of the women had sat down in a circle on the forward slope and were singing a lamenting song in unison, softly, mournfully. Minnow, still standing and staring southward, turned and watched her come up, then reached out and grabbed her arm. “What, sister?”

  “My father,” she replied in a voice almost choked with dread. “He wanted to be young and go on the warpath. I believe he has gone there.”

  Minnow stared at her for a moment, then pulled her close and held her and took a deep breath. And then she cried out:

  “Ha! Wehlee heeleh! What a man is Tuck Horse!”

  Good Face was astonished. She opened her mouth, about to cry. But then something struck her heart and she saw in her mind her father’s craggy face and his yellow teeth bared, and though her eyes were blurred with tears, she laughed hard and sharp, over the rumble of the distant conflict. Tuck Horse now could be happy. Minnow threw back her head and trilled the war cry. And for the first time in her life, Good Face drew a deep breath and shut her eyes against the brilliant sky and, from her own glorying, swollen heart she too poured out the thrilling tremolo.

  There came a lull in the shooting and shouting, and then it resumed after a little while. Now it seemed to be farther away as the listeners on the meadow interpreted it. At last the old man who was the pack train leader called everybody together. The three women who had been singing came, their eyes shining.

  “I have never seen such a thing as this,” the old man said. “No one comes running back from the battle. Always the armies pushed us back. But it is all going that way.” He pointed to the southeast. “It must be that our People are chasing the army home. It must be that our People are winning. Listen:

  “I was given charge of bringing food to our warriors while keeping you distant from harm. Now hear what I have been thinking. My friend Tuck Horse has gone down with his old gun, so it seems. After such a fight as that has been, our horses surely are needed. There will surely be dead and wounded to carry. Some of you women I know to be healers. Now I ask if any of you want to help me take these horses down, instead of back, if any healers will go that way instead of homeward. Listen:

  “Any who do not want to go with me may walk on the path home, and will be fairly thought of. As for me, I would like to follow Tuck Horse that way and see whether I can do more good down there. That is all I have to say. Tell me what you will do, and we will go our ways.”

  Everyone chose to go toward the battlefield. By the time the horses were strung together and the riders mounted, the battle sounds had nearly faded out.

  As the pack train moved down the trail, it was joined by other groups of people with and without horses, mostly Shawnee and Miami, surging eagerly but fearfully down the war road.

  After passing through the encampment where the horses had been unloaded the night before, the accumulating crowd moved for a while through a deep woods and then down a gentle slope through fallen autumn leaves into open ground through which meandered a pretty little river. Here in the bottomland there still remained some snow on the ground. Beyond the s
hallow river the land ascended a few feet onto a level meadow, and upon that land there was a scattering of fires and dense gray smoke, and white shapes that revealed themselves gradually through the smoke to be not snow, but hundreds of tents, many of them burning. Riding down to ford the shallow stream, Good Face heard a hellish din of voices: screams, war trills, howls and laughter and wailing, a great buzz and ringing of excited human voices, male and female, and sometimes the piteous shrieks of hurt horses. Her own mare was becoming jumpy and stubborn, and Good Face was too preoccupied with controlling her and keeping her string of pack animals coming along to look over the confused jumble of unfamiliar sights yet, but the sounds were so demonic and eerie that she was almost afraid to look ahead. It was when her mare was about to wade out on the other bank that she saw swirls of red in the river water beneath her and recognized that it was blood. Her heart quailed.

  She saw then that the snow on the low riverbank was a trampled, churned pink and brown slush of blood and mud. Her mare shied away from some lumpy thing in the mush, and when she looked directly at it she gasped.

  It was a muddy snarl of limbs and clothing, part blue wool, part wet deerskin, a moccasin and a boot and a bare, bloody foot, a white face frozen with its mouth open and blue eyes staring up, a crimped, bloody hand, and the profile of a painted warrior’s face: two enemies locked together in an embrace of death as intimate as her copulations with her husband. Then the mare scrambled up the slope onto the level ground and began whinnying, shying and wheeling, in a panic because there was nowhere to step but on corpses.

  Minnow leaped off her horse, abandoned her pack animals, and darted past Good Face with a scream as shrill as a whistle. She leaped among the corpses, searching with crazed eyes, then knelt with a knife in her hand, slashing at uniform cloth, and in an instant jumped to her feet with a scream of triumph. “A fine medicine pouch this will be, see?” she screamed, holding overhead a severed scrotum. When Good Face’s panicked mare danced past, Minnow was stooping to find another and was lost to sight beyond a pile of soldier corpses smoldering on a bonfire near the wheels of a cannon.