The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  She looked back. Flicker and Tuck Horse were still slumped on their horses with the bundles and bags all around them, swaying as if asleep, coming along still, coming along as always with a bluecoat army somewhere behind.

  She could not see their expressions, whether they were awake or not; there was too much sweat in her eyes.

  So she just faced forward and kept going along in the mud.

  Two days later, in their makeshift camp at Swan Creek, they heard in the humid breeze from the southwest the muffled thunder of battle.

  By the middle of the day those noises had stopped, and the people stood in mud amid their hasty shelters, Lenapeh and Shawnee, Miami and Ottawa, looking back up the river. Finally in the afternoon they saw smoke rising high in the southwest.

  They had learned after years of such things that the smoke usually meant the army had won and was setting fire to everything. But they did not say it, and tried not to think it, because it might not be so, and they did not want He Who Creates By Thinking to think of it that way, for then it would be so, if it wasn’t yet.

  The smoke grew higher and thicker and darker late in the afternoon and came rolling down to drift over the refugees like a fog. But it was not cool and clean like fog. It was full of ash, and in it they could smell what was burning: wood and bark and hay, and green corn and animal hides—everything that could burn in towns and the crops around. Tuck Horse said, “What burners those soldiers are! The world is soaked by rain yet they can make it burn like tinder!”

  Later the setting sun tried to come out from behind the clouds, but it came only as a dull red glow through the smoke. By then the news of the defeat had come down, and wounded warriors were coming, and those who were not hurt were smeared by their paint and sweat and others’ blood and had no heart left at all.

  The fallen timbers that seemed such a perfect place for defense had turned out instead to be a trap for the warriors, who were caught and pinned in the tangle by the boldly rushing bluecoat soldiers with their long guns and bayonets.

  Then, worse, when the retreating warriors had run to the British fort for protection, the Redcoats had not fired their guns or cannons at the oncoming bluecoats, but had shut the gates and kept the warriors from coming in to take refuge, and had stayed in there like cowards, white faces peering over the walls.

  “Did Blue Jacket forget,” Tuck Horse sneered, “that British are wapsituk too, and that their words of promise are as brief and weightless as a breeze?”

  In the smoky darkness that night in the refugee camp at Swan Creek, rumors and tales swirled around the bonfires; wounded men groaned under treatment, and the widows and children of dead warriors wailed. It was a sad, sprawling, shabby, muddy place, droning with confusion and despair, overcast by a dull red sky reflecting the upriver burnings. No leaders had come down from the battlefield to tell the People what was so, whether the army would keep coming down, what could be expected. Good Face went from fire to fire trying to learn anything she could, and finally made her way back to the cookfire where her old parents were resting. From a sooty kettle she served them a mush gray with soot. Just as she had gone from fire to fire to hear what she could, other people came to squat down beside Tuck Horse and see what he knew. Most of their talk was about betrayals. The people needed someone to blame for all this, and they felt that Wild Potato and the British were the traitors responsible for it all. Tuck Horse as always had opinions, and he said:

  “Here it is about Apekonit the Wild Potato: he has a hunger to be important. That is why he married the daughter of a chief who was always winning. Also it is why he joins now a general who is winning, now that the chief is losing. You will see, soon: what Wild Potato knows about Little Turtle and the Miami people will help the general put the chief under his boot, and it will make Wild Potato important among white men.”

  An old listener shook his head, gazing into the fire through the haze of his own pipe smoke: “What a people we are, always wanting to believe promises! Such a sad thing that we believe what we wish to see instead of what we do see! That has always been our weakness.”

  It was Flicker who responded then, from the other side of the fire: “So it is. But is that not how Kijilamuh ka’ong taught us to pray to him? By seeing what we wish? Are we then to blame our Creator for the times our hopes are betrayed?”

  “E heh!” Tuck Horse grunted, with one emphatic nod.

  Good Face was going to tell them that she could never have done what Wild Potato had done even though she too was born a red-haired wapsini, but she felt eyes looking hard at her, and turned to see Minnow standing just within the fireglow, looking at her with glittering eyes. Minnow summoned her with a motion of her head and withdrew into deeper shadow.

  “Kulesta, sister,” Minnow said when Good Face came to her and they stood in the humid night with mosquitoes whining around their faces. “Listen. I bring you away from the old ones to tell you this, because I want you to be strong and calm when you tell it in your family.”

  The tone of her voice made Good Face shiver with dread. “I listen, sister.”

  “One is gone who was a bad drinker and an empty loincloth. My husband saw him fall in the battle in the Blown-Down Woods.”

  “Like Wood?” She felt hollowed out. She had known this could happen for a long time. A year or two ago the same news would have been unbearable, would have made her scream and collapse; now it was just another part of all that was sad and dismal. It might have been better if he had been killed in the earlier battle, before he earned her disdain. She wanted to lean on Minnow because she felt dizzy, but took a deep breath and let her head clear and showed no weakness. “He was already dead to my heart,” she said. “I feel no loss, but I honor him for dying on behalf of our People.”

  “Sister, you speak well. Hold me awhile.”

  The embrace, more than the news of the death, nearly wrung sobs out of her. She clenched her jaws to keep from quaking. Minnow was sinew, but her bosom gave heat. Minnow patted her back in the embrace and murmured to her: “The way of it is, we will all become bones in the earth. All these things that happen to us, copulating and planting, harvesting and killing, are what Creator gave us to do in our lives to keep us from thinking of being just bones in the earth.”

  Day by day, under the pall of smoke, the rumors came about what the army might do. Wayne had taunted the British in their fort and might attack it; he might even come marching on through here and destroy the British fort at Detroit, the People’s last hope for refuge. In the minds of the People, Wayne was a powerful and terrible horned serpent spirit who would descend on them out of the smoky sky, though warriors who had seen him said he was just a fat man on a horse.

  Flicker was weak and tired, but she got up and went about helping women heal the wounds of their warriors. Most were slash and stab wounds from soldiers’ swords and bayonets, or gashes suffered in the wild retreat through splintered deadwood. Few warriors had gunshot wounds because the soldiers had charged with cold steel. But the warriors who had been shot had ragged wounds; the soldiers’ guns had been loaded with both bullets and small shot.

  Good Face helped her mother by gathering bark and roots, and cattail fluff for bandaging, and cutting bark for poultices and splints. She never saw Like Wood’s body, because it had not been retrieved from the fallen timber battlefield, and she tried to give him no thought. But the daily sight of strong young bodies like his all cut and torn made her remember him more than she wanted to.

  One day a Council was gathered in the refugee camp so that Simon Girty the partisan and Alexander McKee the trader could try to apologize for the shame of the British cowardice. Sitting in the crowded clearing, smelling cedar and tobacco smoke, which to her had become the very essences of prayer, feeling the presence of so many attentive people, she felt that the Lenapeh were still a living, sacred bond of people, still strong inside despite the recent defeat. She had not felt so comforted for many days.

  Although they were apologizing for
broken British promises, Girty and McKee made more British promises, and when the people realized that, they began looking around at each other with raised eyebrows, dropped chins, smirks and low chuckles. Nevertheless, the two men continued with their British promises: If the Indians would remain encamped here, they would be given provisions and blankets and ammunition, which could be brought easily by ships from Detroit. Some of the people, whose towns along the Maumee Sipu had been destroyed by Wayne, voted to stay here at Swan Creek for the winter, or as long as the British kept those promises, which they had reason to suspect would not be very long. Some of the people began, even before the Council was over, to exercise their love of gambling by placing bets on how many moons the British would keep sending the things they promised. Tuck Horse got up and made his feelings known to the Council.

  “The British as always want to keep many of our Peoples between themselves and the Long Knives. Anyone who stays to protect Redcoats, after what they did at their fort, would be the worst fool. I will not stay here near the British. I will not go to Detroit near British. Wherever there are British, for the rest of my days I will go in the opposite way, even if I have to wade through Long Knives. That is all I have to say.”

  A few days after the battle, the Long Knife army of Wayne picked up its camp and moved. But instead of coming on down the valley, it began withdrawing up the Maumee Sipu.

  Many warriors and chieftains, who had felt themselves whipped, felt a change of heart and a surge of courage. They saw the general’s withdrawal as a retreat. Had he not failed to attack the British fort? Though he had burned everything in the valley, he was turning back. The fierce ones thus gathered and went up the river following the army like a pack of wolves following an elk herd, killing as many straggling soldiers as they could catch, while tormenting the army at night and keeping the soldiers from sleeping. Among those vengeful, eager warriors was Minnow’s husband, a stealthy hunter, who vowed that he would get close enough to shoot arrows into wapsi behinds when the soldiers relieved themselves in the brush. The stories of such things came back to the refugee camps at Swan Creek and the People began to laugh again. The evil spirit of the Horned Serpent Wayne faded as the army went farther away upriver, and children could at last envision Wayne as a fat soldier on a horse.

  But when the people began to wander a little way back up the river and saw nothing but ashes and stumps and charred rubble and smoking heaps of ruined crops the whole width of the valley, when they looked at the British Redcoats still in their fort with their mighty cannons they had been afraid to shoot at Wayne’s army, they recalled that Maxa’xak, the Horned Serpent Grandfather Spirit, could assume other living forms—surely even that of a fat soldier on a horse.

  Good Face one evening at sunset found Minnow sitting without expression beside the corpse of her Miami husband. Minnow’s eyes looked harder than ever. Good Face yearned to go close and embrace her, but thought she could feel the force of Minnow’s will pushing her away. So she sat down on the ground beside her, saying nothing, waiting to see what Minnow would want or need.

  After a while Minnow said in a low, flat voice: “I could have kept him from going after them. But he wanted to shoot them in their hind ends as much as I wanted to cut off their bags.”

  “How could you have kept him from going?”

  “I could have told him, but did not,” Minnow replied, “that his seed is planted in my womb.”

  “That is the direction we go when we cross over to Other Side World,” Tuck Horse said, pointing westward into the night with his pipe stem. “That way lies Muxumsah Wunchenewunk, West Grandfather, who takes our spirit to him when we are done with our bodies on This Side World. My wife and I are nearly done with our bodies, which are brittle and full of pain. But we can still walk and ride some, enough to go where we will never again have to see white British faces and red British coats. I say it is time for us to go that way, closer to West Grandfather.”

  Good Face was so moved by his solemnity that she sat a long while before asking him where in the west he wanted to go.

  “Daughter, west of Kekionga there flows the Wabash Sipu. It is a peaceful, slow river, and almost its whole length there are no British or Long Knives. There are some French wapsituks, but they are married into the Miamis and other people who live on that river, and are easy to get along with. We might have peace there the rest of our years. I would like to go to the Wabash Sipu at once, so that we can find a place and make a house before winter.”

  Good Face turned to Flicker. “Kahesana, it is hardest for you to travel. What say you to such a long journey to a place you do not know?”

  “Daughter, I can stay on a horse all day if someone puts me on its back. Or I can lie comfortably in a canoe. We still have our seeds and blankets, and hatchets, and your father’s gun and tools. I am ready to take all those things and go to a peaceful place. And if my body cannot make it to the Wabash Sipu, my spirit can continue in that direction, which is the right way.”

  Good Face found Minnow at her husband’s grave, which in the Miami way was marked by a tall red cedar pole with a ribbon and an eagle feather attached at the top to stir in the breeze. Good Face told Minnow where her family had decided to go. Minnow’s mourning was more like an ember of anger smoldering than like grief. She was not one to sit still and weep. So she came away from the grave saying she would help them get ready to go.

  Flicker could travel most comfortably in a canoe, and since the whole way from there to the Wabash Sipu could be traveled by water except a short portage near Kekionga, Minnow helped trade the family’s old horses for a bark canoe of the Ottawa kind, light enough in weight for a man to carry on his shoulders. Tuck Horse made some repairs on it, and when those were done, Minnow said, “Red-Hair Sister, you are strong, but not strong enough to move a canoe and two old people up this swift river by yourself, or to carry it around the Buffalo Head rapids, or over the carrying trail by Kekionga. You will need help with this vessel.”

  Good Face knew that was true. Tuck Horse had been a strong paddler on the great Erie lake from Niagara to Detroit at the end of the long war, but that was so many years before, and his hands had become so bad that sometimes now the mere effort of putting a log on a fire made him wince.

  “People will be going that way,” she said. “Someone strong enough to help, I will find, and ask.”

  “You might ask your sister of the spirit, who stands here before you hinting.”

  “You, Minnow? You would go there?”

  “The family of my husband lives over beyond Kekionga, somewhere beside that Wabash Sipu. Maybe they do not even know yet that the soldiers killed him. They are old. Probably they need me. I know their tongue well and could live with them. And I have a grandchild for them in me.”

  “Then come, please! I will not be so sad to go into an unknown country if my good sister of the spirit is with me!”

  “E heh. We were already too many years without each other. If you tried to go away without me, I would follow you and slap your behind, one slap on every freckle.”

  For the first time in many days they looked at each other and smiled.

  The weather was so hot and still when they started up the river that Good Face thought she would be unable to breathe. She knelt in the bow of the canoe and paddled on the right side; Minnow was in the stern, paddling and steering on the left side because she had been in canoes a great deal and knew how. Behind Good Face was Flicker, her painful old legs straight along the bottom of the vessel and her back resting on a bundle; and behind her, Tuck Horse, who was grumpy because they would not let him paddle.

  This time of year the Maumee Sipu should have been sluggish and shallow, but because there had been so much rain, it ran high with a strong current. Because it was so hot and the paddling was so hard, Good Face and Minnow by mid-morning paused to pull their sweat-soaked dresses off. The sun beat and burned on Good Face’s left side and arm and the side of her face, and she knew that with the sun and the
sweat, she would be sunburned badly. As if reading her mind, Flicker spoke to her and handed forward a little pot of bear oil. Good Face spread it on her skin and handed the pot back. She found that it not only diminished the burning, but smoothed the friction of the paddle on her hand, which before had felt as if it might blister. The oil was passed back to Minnow, who also anointed herself, and they went on, straining at the paddles and gasping for breath. Oily sweat coursed constantly down their backs and ribs. By midday the heat was too great, and they put ashore on the left bank where a little creek ran in. Good Face and Minnow dove into the river to cool themselves while the old couple sat in the shade of cottonwoods and sycamores. For the rest of the day they paddled only a little while at a time, stopping for swimming and shade, until late afternoon when a light breeze came playing down the river and relieved the heat.

  As they neared the British fort they saw burnt ground and trampled cornfields, and the ruins of villages and white men’s houses. The countryside looked as if the sun had come down and rolled across the earth, flattening and scorching everything on both sides of the river. Tuck Horse gazed over the devastation and kept shaking his head and grinding his teeth.

  It was almost dusk when they passed below the fort. The old man pointed up at its ramparts and palisades high on the bluff, silhouetted dark against the sunset’s afterglow, sentries moving slowly against the ruddy background of sky, looking tiny as ants at this distance. “There stands a nest of cowards!” the old man shouted. At that moment a puff of smoke billowed from the fort, the evening cannon boomed, and the flag started down its pole. “Ai aie!” the old man cried, cupping his hands beside his mouth. “You dare shoot your cannon now, British Zhaynkees! The Long Knife is too far away to hear it!”