The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  The bluecoat soldiers could be seen and heard every day, at a little distance. They were working like slaves with their axes and saws, turning a forest of trees into a fort of log walls and buildings. They carried logs in wagons or dragged them with horses, and raised them higher and higher by pulling ropes attached to poles sticking up and out from the tops of the walls, and as the walls went higher, the lifting poles went higher. It was amazing how hard these Long Knives worked and what they could do. They were always shouting and banging and making dust, but they were making a place too strong to be attacked, and were making it right here in what once had been Little Turtle’s strong town. They were also building big, solid houses of log and stone outside the fort. While most of them were working, there were always others around carrying their guns, among them bluecoats meeting near the walls of the fort with Indian men from the nearby camps.

  Often, the one who had been Apekonit, the Wild Potato, was among the soldiers in those meetings. On the sunny days he would stand there talking to them with his black hat off and his red hair shining, the way Good Face had seen him standing in the boat of rowers at the mouth of the Auglaize. It was obvious that he was important here.

  When he was near, Good Face was careful to stay in the shadows. She was not sure how bad or dangerous he was now that he had gone back to being a wapsini, but she was wary. She knew he would recognize her if he saw her, and although for a moment that day at the Auglaize she had been ready to reveal herself to him, the voices had warned her and she remembered their warning.

  But even yet, despite those cautious voices from the Chipewuk, her eyes were drawn to the red-haired man, and her heart weighed again his return to his birth people. He had seemed a strong and confident warrior when he lived as a Miami, but appeared even more so now. There was no furtive, shame-faced look about him. It was plain that he had become some sort of a chief among the bluecoats, and that the bluecoats were now dominant in this land. Sometimes when Good Face was lurking in the shade of the canoe and the mats and skins that made additional shelter around it, she would imagine talking to Wild Potato in English words. She reached into her memory for English words, and with the ones she remembered, she tried to form the questions she might want to ask him. She practiced the questions in her head.

  Is thee good in heart?

  Is thee loved of Sweet Breeze wife anyway that thee came back bluecoat?

  My birth people they love me if I go home of them?

  My Lenapeh people have hearts bad at me if I go?

  She had forgotten so much of that language. Of course, she thought, I could just ask him in Lenapeh and hand sign, as I did when I gave him the horses on the battlefield. He doesn’t know our tongue very well, but I made him understand that time.

  She would have to strain to make him understand her questions in English. But it would be in English, because she could not let her Lenapeh people understand her asking such questions.

  She would be ashamed for them to know she even had such thoughts. Minnow, especially. She had heard Minnow often express her contempt for Wild Potato.

  When Minnow spoke of him, one could tell she was again thinking of making medicine bags out of scrotums.

  Tuck Horse slowly came in from one of his prowlings. He was always spying on the bluecoats as he went about, using his walking stick and walking more stooped than he really was, using his age as a disguise to seem harmless, understanding more tongues than anyone would presume he understood. Only English, it seemed, was unintelligible to him. By going about and listening, he had learned that the Great Serpent General Wayne had been calling the chiefs and chieftains of all the beaten tribes to go to his other fort in the south and talk to him about peace. Wayne was being cordial but firm, and was not offering them anything yet. He just kept hinting that if they wanted to keep their people safe, they should go there next summer and talk.

  Tuck Horse sat and smoked for a while by the fire with a scowl on his face. Then he looked in at the emaciated, bruise-faced warrior. “Eh, young man,” he said. “Can you hear me talking?” He asked it first in Lenapeh and then in Miami, but the man did not reply. “I wish he could hear me. I would like to talk with a Miami warrior like him about what his chiefs are doing.”

  “Tell it, Father. I would like to know too. And he might hear. Sometimes it seems to me he hears but cannot answer.”

  Tuck Horse aimed his pipe stem at the fort. “Little Turtle is here today. With him are his sons Black Loon and Crescent Moon. With him also is his nephew Richardville, called Wildcat. I saw them with Wild Potato.”

  Good Face flushed, having had Wild Potato so much in her mind just now.

  Tuck Horse went on: “It unsettles me to see all those good men of that family hovering so close to the wapsituk fort. I hear they will build the Little Turtle a fine home near this fort. I do not like that.”

  “This was his old town,” Good Face reminded him. “Why should he not live where he used to live? This seems brave, that he has no fear of even these fort builders.”

  “My daughter, you will see that the reason he has no fear near them is that he will be sitting in the wapsituk lap. He will be near and he will know what they want because his son-in-law is their agent. They will all be wrapped in the Great Serpent’s wishes because of the Wild Potato, who now wants to be called only by his wapsi name, Wells. Today I addressed him four times as Wild Potato just to see him grow as red as a true Miami.” Tuck Horse spat viciously, then smiled grimly at the satisfaction of the memory. Then he said something that made her flush and start.

  “Wild Potato asked me about you.”

  “What! Why? Has he seen me here?”

  “No. He asked because he has not seen you. He remembers that I was the Lenapeh elder who had a young daughter with red hair like his. He thought I had lost you in all the troubles because he has not seen you.”

  “And you answered him how, Father?”

  “I answered him only by asking him why he wanted to know.”

  Good Face thought that had been rude, but she would not scold her old father. Instead she said, “You truly hate Wild Potato for going back to his wapsi people.”

  “K’hehlah!” Yes indeed! “He has forsaken the Miami people who cared for him twenty summers, and you will see that he now means to profit by knowing them so well and by being married to the daughter of their sakimeh. He will hold the Serpent by one hand and the Turtle by the other and will smile between them and he will take a little of everything that passes between them. You will see, daughter. I observed his whole heart in his eyes, and I saw that his heart is not a red heart, but a pale one.”

  She had never told her father about seeing Wild Potato in the boat on the river, or what she had thought. “I hide from him,” she said.

  “That is good. Because one thing the Serpent General has been telling all the defeated chiefs is that if they want to have peace when they come and talk to him next summer, they must first show good faith by bringing him all their captives from the conflicts. I suspect that is why Wild Potato remembered to ask me about you. If someone paid for your name and took you back to the Susquehanna Sipu, Wild Potato surely would get some of that reward as it passed from one hand to another. Thus are things done by his kind.”

  This was all so close to the matters on her mind that Good Face was reluctant to look at her father for fear that he might read her thoughts. Working at the little fire, looking intently at it, she said, “Will we be here much longer? He will learn about me sometime. Even with a scarf or blanket over my hair I cannot be invisible.”

  Tuck Horse smoked thoughtfully. “We have been here longer than we intended, that is true.” He sighed. “I wanted to get past these bluecoats, didn’t I, and see them no more. But as you see, I am a bluecoat watcher. Hmm! But now there are no sakimas to tell what I learn. Heu! What use?” He squinted toward the fort, which loomed shadowy blue and enormous beyond the golden haze of sunlit dust stirred up by horse teams dragging logs. Everywhere echoed the
chunking of the soldiers’ axes in wood, and their hoarse yells. He sighed. “Now they have everything around here. I heard that they even found the cannons we took from the other general and hid. They found those and put them up in the fort they built there. I am an old man, and all I have seen all my life is the wapsituk getting everything. Even when we have a victory, they soon take that away from us too. I should have lain down and died with a smile after that last victory instead of living on to see this again.” His pipe had gone out while he talked, and he snatched another little ember from the fire to relight it. “I do want us to go on soon. I have thought that now Little Turtle is here, we can take this hurt man to him. Little Turtle will know who he is and where his family might be found. Yes. That is what I should do. Tomorrow I will tell your sakima of you,” he said toward the young man, “and then my family and I will go on to a place where there are no white men yet.”

  Then, to their astonishment, the injured man spoke.

  “Ne she,” he said, his voice gurgling and barely audible.

  “What!” Tuck Horse exclaimed, leaning toward him. “He says no!” In a strong voice he asked the warrior in the Miami tongue: “Can you now hear my voice?”

  “E heh.” The voice was a whispery croak.

  “Daughter, he is hearing us at last. Young brother, why did you say no when I said I would tell your chief of you?”

  They talked together in Miami for a while. Good Face could understand a few words of it, though the man could still neither hear nor speak well enough to make any of it easy to follow. After a while Tuck Horse leaned back from the man and began:

  “His name is Shapahcahnah, The Awl. Some sounds he begins to hear now. For a long time after the gun spoke in his face he heard nothing because in his head was always endless thunder and noise like the whistle of a hawk, which still goes on. But now he hears a little. He thanks us for picking him up and healing him.”

  “It is Kijilamuh ka’ong he must thank,” Good Face said. “And Kahesana. To what did he say no when first he spoke?”

  “No, he does not want to go to Little Turtle. Not if Little Turtle befriends the whites. This is a man whose heart speaks with mine!” He leaned toward the scrawny reclining figure under the canoe, the young man whose face was still so purple with bruises that he was horrible to see. “I am glad you can hear me,” he said to him in Lenapeh. “I have no warrior son ever to talk to.…” Then he remembered that he should be speaking in Miami. He did most of the talking because the warrior was too weak to speak much. Eventually the old man turned back to Good Face, seeming more satisfied than he had been for a long time.

  “This man The Awl says he has no family that have not died. He is a war chieftain with no people left. Many died at the Blown-Down Woods battle and more at the Auglaize, where he was hurt. If we can wait until he is strong enough to travel, he wants to go with us westward where there are no more whites yet.”

  “Then may he strengthen quickly, Father,” Good Face said. “I am troubled in my heart near this fort.”

  She truly did not like it. It kept her mind in two worlds, and both those worlds could not remain in the same heart. A person could not go two ways at once. Wells the Wild Potato was a doorway back into a world whose memories softened her and promised ease and comfort.

  But while she had her family and Minnow, and even this hurt man to care for, she must turn her eyes from that other world. She must not look at Wells or speak to him even to ask anything. He was a betrayer; she was not.

  She had to go down the rivers in that way toward West Grandfather Spirit. Down those rivers was an unknown. Perhaps it would be more of the same dangers, more of the same troubles, more defeats, more land forsaken and more freedom lost.

  But for a while there was land out there in which people could be free to live according to the visions of Kijilamuh ka’ong, He Who Creates By Thinking.

  PART THREE

  Maconakwa

  1800–1813

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Autumn 1800

  A Miami Town on the Wabash Sipu

  Maconakwa, Little Bear Woman of the Miami people, arranged coals and hot stones in the fire pit to bake lenapana, the sacred hominy bread, for the funeral feast.

  On a pallet of bedding nearby lay the body of her father Tuck Horse, he who had adopted her when she was a little girl called Good Face. He lay with his feet toward the west, ready to begin his journey to West Grandfather Spirit. Three lines of olumun, sacred red funeral paint, had been drawn on each temple from the corner of the eye to the ear, so the Creator would recognize him as Lenapeh when he came up the Spirit Path.

  The scent of the slow-baking bread began to fill the house. The smoky heat rose among the bundles of dried mint leaves, sassafras roots, tobacco, and medicine herbs that hung among the roof poles, a mingling of the comforting odors for living on with healthy spirits.

  It would be a Lenapeh ceremony to send Tuck Horse following close behind his wife Flicker on the Spirit Path, though their daughter, who was preparing his funeral feast, was now by marriage and by name a Miami, and was carrying a child who would live life as a Miami.

  Maconakwa still felt she was Good Face when she glanced over at her father’s corpse and thought of the life that had dwelt in it.

  A man of many deep scars. She had known him only as an old man, but he had fought countless battles for his People before she met him at Niagara some twenty summers ago. She remembered him paddling in a canoe the whole length of Erie lake. She remembered him walking away southward one cold, clear fall morning eight years ago with his old musket, disappearing from camp to go down to the headwaters of this very river and join the attack against the general called St. Clair. She remembered how he had always gone among the People before and after battles, learning whatever he would need to know to keep his family fed and safe. She remembered how his spirit had fought in frustration against the bodily pain and stiffening of age that had imprisoned him and made him less and less able to protect his People. She recalled that no matter where she and Flicker had gone with him in their hundreds of miles of flight from the Town Destroyers, he had already been there many times before and knew the way. She knew that the only reason so able a man had not been a chief was that his People were too scattered. He had always been on the path.

  Now he was going farther. He was going to see Keeper Grandmother, who would open the door for him and send him along the Spirit Path. And at the far end of the Spirit Path he would at last enjoy peace.

  When she thought of that, she had to swallow hard to keep from groaning, and tears would flow over her eyes so she could hardly see to carve the kinkinhikun, his grave marker.

  It was a plank split from cedar, as long as her leg. In one end she was carving a diamond-shaped hole, laboriously scoring its outline and scraping out the fragrant wood with a flint knife. She was making it from her memory of Lenapeh grave markers. It would be painted with the same olumun paint as that on his face, and planted at the head of his grave with the diamond hole at the top.

  A woman’s marker was different from a man’s. It was a cross with three diamond holes, one at the top and one through each arm. Tuck Horse had made Flicker’s marker. It was so new its paint still shone bright in the burial ground. She had passed over in spring, and after Tuck Horse completed her kinkinhikun, he had begun to let his own life force evaporate out of his body like the steam from a cooling loaf of bread.

  And so their daughter grieved for them both as she carved. She was no longer their Good Face, but Little Bear Woman. It was a Miami name, but it was the same as Maxk’wah n’wah, the name given her by the small female bear that had come to her in her vision, the first time she was in the wiktut with her moon-blood.

  Now she had not been in the wiktut since the time of Flicker’s funeral. She became pregnant shortly before Flicker passed over. Maconakwa had married The Awl in this Miami town two years after they arrived here by canoe. By then he had fully recovered from his lung wound and his head
wound, though he could still not hear very well and said that the whistling noise inside his head, the sound like a hawk’s cry, never stopped. It was so shrill and constant that he could hardly hear bird songs or children’s cries, though deeper sounds, like thunder or men’s and women’s voices, he could just hear.

  So after five years of marriage, The Awl and Little Bear Woman would soon have a son or a daughter, and The Awl was proud and intrigued. Sometimes when they lay ready for sleep he would draw the cover down and, propped on one elbow, use his other hand to caress and memorize the mound of her pregnancy, eyes thoughtful in the firelight and so absorbed that his narrow lips would be parted like a child’s. It was wonderment to him that his family blood would live on. He had been the last of his own mother’s children to survive the wars and illnesses, and he had come very close to Keeper Grandmother, but this red-haired woman and her old Lenapeh mother had brought him back from there to continue his family through this one yet to be born. She knew his love for her was strong, that it was built on gratitude.

  Maconakwa missed his presence when, as now, he was away hunting. He was not a beautiful man, as her first husband Like Wood had been; he had never made her a song, never courted her with the flute. But he was as kind and as full of desire as Like Wood had been in the beginning, and she was confident that this husband was not one who would ever try to trade her body for a jug of the white man’s spirit water. Though not tall and graceful as Like Wood had been, he was hard-muscled and quick and courageous, a keen hunter and trapper and thus a good provider. His dedication to his Miami People was as fierce and wise as old Tuck Horse’s had been to his Lenapeh. This husband was a man upon whom one could depend—such a man as Tuck Horse had been. Maconakwa had learned to love the set of his narrow lips, often tilted with sly humor, and the steady boldness of his eyes. Flicker had said before the wedding, “Here is a man like your father. If you want this man, I sing no warnings in your ear.”