The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Something had happened in Wild Potato to make him go back to the race of his birth. People of his own race would say that was where he belonged, that he had done right.

  She thought of her own path, wondered where it was going. She had old parents who could not move without pain and would soon be taking the Spirit Road. She was traveling to a place she did not know, as all the Indians had been doing all this time because of the Town Destroyers always coming. She had had a husband, and was betrayed by him, and now had him no more, and if she found another husband, he would probably be killed by the white men’s guns or ruined by their spirit water and she would perhaps be like Minnow, with a killed husband and a baby inside and going to another place she did not know, and so full of hatred for the wapsituk that she wanted to cut parts of them as trophies. They had started up this scorched-out valley with a heavy load of things that would have been worthless junk except that they were needed for staying alive, and now, just now, they had acquired still another burden, a stranger who had fought the white men and was dying from it and perhaps might yet die in their hands. Down that other river it would surely go on like this with the Long Knife armies always chasing and burning. She was twenty or twenty-one years old, she thought, and to judge by all that had happened in her memory, she and the Lenapeh People were on a long road to death.

  How would it be going back to the world of white people? All that she could remember of her birth people was good, and surely they would welcome her back if she went there, being now in the bloom of womanhood and clean and healthy and strong. They, those whites, were the ones who would be on the bright path because they would have everything that had belonged to the Indians they were driving down this dark path.

  Look at Wild Potato there, she thought. He must have understood all this, and he saw a moment when he could step off the doomed path and onto the bright path just by going back to his birth people, the winning people; now see him standing there so splendid and important that he can tell a boatful of soldiers which way to row that boat. If I were to call to him, he would know me, and would take us and the wounded man to a more comfortable place. And in the white men’s midst I could do as he has done and step over onto the bright path, and stop being a leaf in the wind.

  Wouldn’t that be what I should do? Like him, after all, I was stolen away from my birthright people by these Lenapeh people. I didn’t ask to get on this doomed road to death, they grabbed me and dragged me.

  Her thoughts were getting jumbled now, and she realized she was thinking in her old language, English, that she had half forgot.

  The boat was moving through the mist up the river and she was looking at Wild Potato’s back now, but she could still call and be heard.

  Or, she thought, even easier, I could run along the bank and catch up and get on that boat and nobody but those whites would know what happened to me. I wouldn’t have to see Minnow or my old ones mad at me. People disappear all the time, now that the armies are always coming.

  Anyway, if those soldiers in that boat saw that wounded man, they probably would just go ahead and finish killing him. If I just went and caught up with the boat, they’d never know the warrior or the others were back here and wouldn’t bother them and they could just go on, wherever they mean to go. Flicker and Tuck Horse would grieve, oh, I know.

  But I already have one mama and papa grieving, and they would be in joy. So it comes out.

  She remembered the old repeated warnings about the white men buying names. They would buy my name, and that’s how they could tell my birth parents where I am, she suddenly understood. It’s what I should do.

  Oh, surely it is! She remembered old dreams of people in gray.

  Her heart was pounding with the anticipation of running after the boat, and she pressed her hand over her heart and its palm touched the medicine bag, the medicine bag Neepah had made for her and had filled with seeds of the Three Sacred Sisters, corn, beans, and squash. And in there too was a hardened ball of clay from the first Bread Dance. And certain small, beautiful stones, each with a story around it.

  As she held the bag, she heard many voices. Maxkwah n’wah, the Small Female Bear. Telling her that would be her name too. And the flicker bird, at the moon hut, saying “Weekah, weekah!” her mother in that form. She heard the soft voice of Owl, the lehpawcheek, who had taken her all across the Longhouse Road, safe on his saddle with his arms keeping her from falling, and telling her of the sacredness when she first saw the Great Falling Water at Niagara. She remembered dreams of a black sun. She remembered the sound of Like Wood’s flute, her song, the song he had made for her before the spirit water had made him bad. She still had that song; it had not gone bad. And she remembered old Tuck Horse’s voice as he talked to her on the hill before walking away that night to go and fight in his last battle. And she remembered the voice of Minnow, just a few days ago, bragging about her great strength …

  Then she really was hearing Minnow’s voice, calling her. She turned and saw Minnow coming toward the river, looking for her.

  She called back in a hissing, warning voice. “Minnow! Be still!” Minnow heard her and turned and saw her, and Good Face put her forefinger to her lips and with the hatchet handle pointed up the river toward the boat of soldiers, and when Minnow saw them, she simply vanished from where she stood. When she appeared beside Good Face at the elm tree, they stood together watching the soldier boat go up, fading in the mist, up the Maumee Sipu toward old Kekionga Town. At last Minnow said, “Flicker needs the fresh bark and sent me to find you.”

  “I was about to chop bark when I saw the boat.”

  “It is good you saw it before you started chopping!”

  “Yes.” She was trembling, hoping that Minnow could not in any way see what she had been thinking, what she had almost done.

  “If they had heard you chopping …” Minnow shuddered. “The spirits warn you, sister!”

  Good Face, who for a moment had almost been Frances, let out a long sigh. “We had better cut the bark as quickly and quietly as we can. There might be more soldier boats.”

  They cut lines in the bark and peeled it off and it squealed and groaned as if a live creature were being skinned. It was, of course. But its purpose was to heal a man. Flicker would boil and pound it pulpy and glutinous and slip it into the wound, and day by day as she drew it out, the healing would follow it out to the skin and the man’s lung would no longer leak and he would be well. What a good world Kijilamuh ka’ong had made, with everything one could need growing all around, and the knowledge of its use had been given to women.

  They cut and peeled the bark, stopping often to look around and listen hard. Once Minnow said: “If the boat soldiers had seen you, you would have had to cut them instead of elm trees with this hatchet. That would have been good, but there were too many and they would have got you. Catching you here, they would have used you.”

  “Perhaps not. Seeing I am red-haired, maybe they would have just taken me away to sell my name.”

  “They might have done so. But after they had used you.”

  Good Face wondered after that whether it had been good or not that she had touched her medicine bag instead of running after Wild Potato’s boat.

  She was sure that touching the bag had made the memory voices and spirit voices come. They had kept her from going after the boat. Those spirit voices, the Chipewuk, stayed near to the People and did what they thought was right.

  She had nearly gone another way, an easier way; she had been so tired and confused, she nearly had done that. But the Chipewuk called her back.

  Something, maybe those same spirits, had sent Wild Potato the other way. Maybe they knew his heart was white, hers red.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Autumn 1794

  Wilkes-Barre

  Ruth Slocum knew that Giles was the one son she could depend on to arrange his life to accommodate another search for Frances. Once he had admitted that his soldiering might have contributed to her capture, and
to the deaths of his father and grandfather, Giles had continued to hold that responsibility to heart.

  Will was tied down for now; he had been elected sheriff of Luzerne County and therefore was not free to wander abroad. Benjamin and Ebenezer had the good intention of setting out to look for their sister when it became convenient, but they were in the saw- and gristmill business together five miles upriver at Deep Hollow, and business always called. Ebenezer was also recently married to the former Sarah Davis and keeping her always with child.

  When Giles went, it would likely be Isaac or Joseph who would go with him, because of their undying fascination with the legend of Frances’ capture. Now almost men, they both claimed to remember the awful day she was carried away, though everything they said about it was based on family stories rather than anything they could have remembered seeing at such young ages. Isaac could recount the story more vividly than anyone else in the family except their mother. The two of them longed to succeed someday where all the older brothers had failed, and fetch their long-lost sister home.

  Now, on this particular snowy day, Isaac sat with his mother and Giles in her kitchen, discussing the prospects for another trip to the frontier.

  Giles had a notebook he used primarily to record farm income and expenses, an occasional noteworthy proverb, and facts he thought worthy of copying from the newspapers he read at Judge Fell’s tavern every week. Now he had it open before him to the pages pertaining to General Anthony Wayne’s victory over the tribes in the Ohio country. He ran his finger down the page and read his notes, while Isaac leaned over a smudged facsimile of an old British map of the region south of the Great Lakes, trying to make some connection between the rivers written in cursive script and those Giles was trying to pronounce from his notes. A difficulty was that the words on the map were strange, long strings of syllables representing the sounding out of Indian designations, most of which apparently had been renamed before or during General Wayne’s campaign. Another difficulty was that there were now forts and settlements named in the newspapers that had not existed when the old map had been drawn, some thirty years before.

  But the brothers had determined the location of the portage place between the Maumee River, which flowed into Lake Erie, and the Wabash, which flowed southwest toward the lower Ohio Valley. There, on the site of the great old Miami town of Kekionga, General Wayne was building the final fort in his line of outposts dominating the Ohio Territory. It had been named Fort Wayne in his honor.

  “Colonel Ham … Hamtrack … no, I guess it’s Hamtramck—either he’s got the most confounding name in the country or I can’t read my own hand—anyway, this Colonel Ham-whatever is in command of the fort, and listen to this:

  “ ‘A former spy, William Wells, also known as Apekonit, who is a son-in-law of Little Turtle the Miami chief, was named by General Wayne to be the government agent and interpreter and the justice of the peace there at the fort.’ Now there, family, would be a good person to know out there, because as the Indian agent, thee can be sure, he’ll know every Indian in those parts. Now with Judy and Hugh living at Cincinnati, if they made some correspondence with that fellow Wells, or went up and met him, why, that neck o’ the woods would be on the watch-out for Frannie, if she was ever through there—though I still feel she’s up around Lake Erie someplace, maybe Detroit.…”

  Giles tapped his thumbnail on his yellow incisors and traced through his notes with the forefinger of his other hand, then continued, “The general has called the chiefs of all the defeated tribes to visit him at Fort Greene Ville next summer—that’s not on that old map there, Isaac; they just built that one last year, and it must be ’bout midway betwixt Cincinnati and Fort Wayne—asked ’em to come and negotiate a permanent peace and new boundaries for the red men and white. Think o’ that! Permanent peace, he says. Well, aye, permanent peace would be a blessing to all. To Friends, who believe in it and always did, and our missionaries, and of course we Slocums, who can’t go a-looking for our girl when the Indians’re all a-stir. But now listen to this, Ma, this is the best part I’ve saved till last:

  “Those Indians who petition for peace, to show true good faith, says the general, they must bring in to him at Fort Greene Ville all prisoners and captives, even the ones that’s been adopted. We ought to write to Judy and Hugh and see if they could go up there to Greene Ville and watch the prisoners return.”

  Ruth Slocum laced her fingers tight and squeezed her eyes shut, praying and remembering. She recalled vividly those scenes at Tioga more than five years past, all those hesitant, fearful, eager, reluctant people, the weeping Indians, the emotions cocked like gun triggers, the hardships of camp, the awful letdown. “I ought to go there myself,” she said. “I’m not sure I could bear to have my heart millstoned down like that again, but I reckon if I bore it once, I could again.” She shook her head and shuddered, then opened her eyes and her sons’ faces were blurry. The memory of all that heart-misery at Tioga had made tears well up. But the thought that the chiefs might so earnestly sue for peace that they would comply and really bring in everyone! Any time the faintest gleam of a hope was glimpsed, her frantic heart would pump like a bellows blowing a draft through foundry coal to make it burn white-hot. Like that anthracite burning in the fire grate right there across from the kitchen table.

  But Giles’ big, hard hand came down gently on the back of hers. “No, Ma, not thee, not us this time, clear out there. We’ve already got relatives and missionaries in that part of the country. Besides, by the time we’d get there, they’d be done with all that. We couldn’t even start out till spring. I hate to be too really frank with thee, Ma, but I doubt thee’s strong enough—in body, I mean, not in will.”

  She knew he was probably right in that. She was nearly sixty years of age now and had borne and reared ten children, managed the estates of her dead father and husband, and done the rigors of traveling every year to the big Meeting of the Friends, coming down dreadfully ill after almost every one of those journeys. And now lately here in the Susquehanna Valley there was something mysterious always dragging down on her constitution. It had been written in a periodical back East that the burning of anthracite instead of wood produced fumes that were poisonous to lungs, eyes, and teeth, and that it even caused baldness. Ruth Slocum did not quite believe all that, but she did know that Ebenezer, and the blacksmith Owens, and she herself, were suffering from maladies they had not known back in the days when this had been a farming valley full of trees and fresh air and when they burned only wood for heat. Her breathing passages now where always raw and she had coughing spells and headaches.

  Ebenezer and Benjamin coughed and raked their throats and blew their noses and their kerchiefs were black and their eyes were always red-rimmed, apparently because of all the coal rock they were forever chipping and shoveling. They had exhausted the accessible outcrops of the stuff and now tunneled into the hills for it, making filthy black caves where they labored in choking dust. They could have stopped at any time, but they enjoyed a sort of exhilaration in the money wealth they were gaining, and it made them heedless of consequences. She felt sometimes that if they gave up searching for their sister, it would be because they could not give up earning money long enough.

  To her, that was an ugly notion, and not worthy of Quakers, rather more the way of the worldly.

  Fort Wayne

  It was a huge two-story fort the Long Knives were building here at old Kekionga Town, and in awe Good Face watched it grow higher and more massive.

  She watched usually from the shade of a little shelter made under the overturned canoe, where the lung-shot man lay. He was going to live. As soon as they knew he would not die, they had put him in the canoe and come up cautiously from the Auglaize to this place. They expected they would have to slip across the portage place at night, past Long Knife sentries, before they could start down the Wabash or Eel rivers toward the villages in the west. They had presumed that the land around the new fort would be nothing but a
deadly, hostile bluecoat camp, very hard to get around unseen, especially with a badly wounded warrior to smuggle through. Harmless-looking old Tuck Horse had gone ahead to look it over, and came back with the surprising news that there were Indians all over the place, living in hasty hovels and shelters right in the clearings within gunshot of the fort, the way dogs will hover near a cookfire waiting for scraps to be thrown to them.

  “They are beaten,” the old man had said. “They are waiting to be told what they may have and what they must do. They are waiting for Wayne to say those things. So we can go right by there. We can find food there. And perhaps a healer to help my tired wife heal this warrior. And people there can help us make the portage when we are ready to go on across. Maybe we will learn that there is something better to do than go down those other rivers.” He was still a spy at heart and wanted to look around. Minnow was angry at him at first for saying those things. She had threatened to go on by herself rather than stop anywhere within smelling distance of the bluecoats. If she came near them, she said, she would want to kill them. Finally, though, Minnow had settled down, like boiling water lifted away from the fire. And now that she was here near the fort, she was always out among the People, getting things that Flicker needed to take care of the wounded warrior, asking about the family of her own husband who had been killed. But she kept a sharp knife in a sheath at the small of her back, which she intended to use if any bluecoat tried to touch her or Good Face or the old couple or the wounded Miami.

  He was a Miami. Tuck Horse had learned something about him through hand-signing. The man could not yet speak, and whatever had hurt his head seemed to have deafened him. Flicker and Good Face took turns staying up and caring for him. His chest wound did not bubble anymore, even when the elm dressing was off. But he was still very weak and always in pain. He was thin as a skeleton, and although his head was not now so swollen, it was mostly the color of blueberries, the whole left side and much of the right side bruised.