The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Maconakwa knew that William Wells and Little Turtle were very worried about what was happening in this town, because the Prophet’s ways went against almost everything they were trying to achieve. The Prophet had drawn so many followers that he had influence nearly as great as Little Turtle’s, and he was trying to turn everybody away from Chief Jefferson’s plan of making the Indians into farmers and livestock raisers like the whites. The past year had proven out her fear: Little Turtle would not listen to the Ancestors if they disagreed with the chief in Washington.

  William Wells had approached The Awl and Maconakwa before they set out for this place, and had asked them to come back and tell him all that happened in the Prophet’s Town. They had simply turned away from him without replying. They had come here to observe the Prophet’s works for the good of their own People, not as a spy for a man they could not trust. And so Wells had sent this calicoed and turbaned Fort Wayne Indian to spy for him instead. They had also seen here a half-French spy named Brouillette.

  Old Black Hoof, the principal Shawnee chief and another signer like Little Turtle of the Wayne treaty, had sent spies from his reservation town at Wapakoneta, having been troubled by the Prophet’s antiwhite preachings there last winter. Here also were spies from the Lenapeh towns on the Wapihani Sipu, where the Prophet had gone witch-hunting three moons ago. There he had condemned four Christian Lenapehs to be burned for witchcraft. There were also Wyandot spies here, sent by Tarhee, the Crane, who had prevented the Prophet from burning four accused Wyandot witches.

  This was a big and substantial town, for one built so hastily and recently. There were hundreds of bark-and-mat-covered wikwams, and hundreds of tents and lean-to shelters made in the ways of the various tribes. There were shade arbors covered with boughs, and open-sided cooking huts where the women of the Prophet’s tribe labored over big kettles trying to feed the thousands of pilgrims. They did their best, stewing together corn and beans, roots and tubers and berries scoured from the countryside, occasionally flavored with the meat of small animals snared or shot by the Shawnee boys. The large game had long since become scarce in this vicinity because of the nearness of the white people, and had been utterly hunted out now by the hosts at Prophet’s Town. The creeks that flowed together below the town had been fished out, and waterfowl, turtles, frogs, and even snakes were hard to find.

  Like most of the people here, Maconakwa and her husband had brought food to Prophet’s Town when they came, and it was gone now. Like most, they ate only once a day, hoping that their own abstinence would help assure that everybody would get a little to eat every day. Many of the people were content to eat virtually nothing, having come here for spiritual sustenance instead, and numbers of them believed that fasting would lift their spirits closer to the Creator in this holy place during this holy time. Mostly it was only the children, too young to understand, who complained about being always hungry. Cut Finger, not quite six summers of age yet, tried to understand the spiritual explanation, and said she did, but she whimpered for food between explanations. It was better, Maconakwa had found, just to tell the girl that it was necessary to share the limited food because there were so many people. That she could understand and condone, because she was an unselfish child.

  As for her baby boy, he was still on her breast, even now suckling vigorously as the family sat here in the midst of the great crowd. And although Maconakwa was hungry, and had been hungry for days, the baby apparently was still well-nourished by her milk. He did not cry and nothing was wrong with his digestion yet. His lively sucking sent tickles through her.

  On one side of the vast plaza stood a long building with a pitched roof, where visitors slept if they did not or could not build their own shelters, or until they did. When The Awl and his family had slept in it, there were more than a hundred others dwelling there, all in harmony, all polite to each other even if they knew little of the others’ languages. Facing onto another side of this central clearing was the round Great House, a roofless arbor where the Prophet prayed at his tribe’s altar. Every day he preached, morning, noon, and evening, from a platform in front of the Great House. When he was on the platform, anyone in the plaza could see him. At this time, waiting for him to come forth and darken the sun, the whole great crowd was facing that platform, eager for him to appear upon it.

  Maconakwa herself at this time could not have said that she believed the Prophet was truly a holy man. Since her Quaker childhood, she had vaguely held to the notion that everyone was holy because of the Inner Light; though among her Lenapeh and Miami families and friends she had never discussed that belief, it was an unsaid certainty at the core of her spirit. The Indian peoples among whom she had lived so long had never told her how to believe or worship, but she had come to accept their sense that the Light of the Creator was in every living thing, animals and plants as well as human beings. She could not remember what her childhood religion said about prophets, but it seemed that she had heard of such persons long ago—those who had talked to God and learned of things to come. All the Lenapehs and Miamis she had known lived always in a state of prayer. Even when killing their enemies, or tricking each other, they never left their state of reverence, but instead recognized that there was an equal weight of badness and goodness everywhere and in everything, like day and night, male and female, pleasure and pain, life and death, happiness and grief, and that as long as those opposites were known and balanced, the world would hold together and continue.

  The preachings of this Shawnee Prophet had confused her beliefs. He stated that all the red man’s old ways were entirely good and all the white man’s ways were entirely evil, and that all would be good again only when all the white man’s evil was expelled from the land—not balanced, but expelled. She did not know whether the Prophet had lost his ancestors’ sense of the world, or had gained directly from Creator a new and true sense more correct than the old one. He even spoke of a terrible place where drunkards and other bad people went after death, to be tortured and burned forever. She had never heard of such a place in the red man’s beliefs, but when she was a little girl, she had heard of something like that, terribly frightening, spoken of by white people. She seemed to remember that that awful place was down, while good people went up.

  So she did not have an intuition yet of whether this Prophet was truly a holy man, even though his voice was like flute music and his words made severe pictures in her head when he warned of evil, bright pictures when he spoke of a world without white men. One of the things he taught was that red people and white people must not marry each other and have children because such children would have impure blood.

  If that were true, really ordered by Creator, then her happy marriage and beloved children must be cursed.

  From that fear, she almost had to hope that this was not a truly knowing holy man.

  She held the baby closer to her bosom and reached to hold her daughter’s hand. As she did so, she heard a swell of soft voices rise all around her. It was the crowd. They were saying,

  “Ah-hai! He comes now!”

  “It is time!”

  “Now we will see it happen!”

  “Or,” somebody dared to say, “we will see it fail to happen.”

  The Shawnee Prophet was a homely man. But he looked magnificent. He had stepped out of his lodge at the edge of the plaza, wearing a long robe despite the heat, a black bandanna pulled down on one side to cover his empty eye socket, and a headdress made of a whole raven’s skin with feathers, wings outstretched. From his nose hung a silver ring; big silver ear bobs dangled to his shoulders, and through his left earlobe were stuck three small ornamental arrows fletched with eagle feathers. He walked slowly through the edge of the crowd toward his preaching platform, holding in one upraised hand before him his short medicine stick, whose upper end was tufted with bright, downy breast feathers that trembled in the breeze and looked like flickering flame.

  With him walked a man as unadorned as the Prophet was adorned. In b
reechcloth and moccasins only, with only an eagle feather tied into a braid on one side of his hair, it was his older brother Tecumseh, an erect, sharp-eyed warrior chieftain, who some said was the real builder and chief of Prophet’s Town. This was a handsome, powerfully muscled man whose graceful excellence could not be overshadowed by the Prophet’s pomp and finery, even though he did walk unobtrusively by the Prophet’s off side.

  By his form and grace, he appeared to be about thirty winters in age, but he was known to be close to The Awl in age, about forty. The pilgrims at Prophet’s Town knew little about him because he never addressed them or preached. But people who had heard him in councils said that his voice and gestures and the sense of his words made listeners lean forward. In those councils everywhere, The Awl said, Tecumseh warned chiefs not to sign away any more land in treaties with the white man called Harrison. It was said that he knew the English tongue and could even read the marking language. But here in the Prophet’s Town, where the purpose was to rebuild the peoples’ spiritual force, it was the Prophet who stayed in the forefront.

  As the Prophet stepped up onto his platform, the warrior Tecumseh stopped and remained standing beside it, letting all eyes follow his brother’s grand and ominous progress. Tecumseh did keep shading his eyes and glancing toward the sun.

  The droning voices of the multitude now dwindled down to expectant silence again. Hundreds were rising from the ground to stand and see the Prophet better, to be on their feet when and if he turned day and night around. Maconakwa’s heart was pounding. She held her baby boy to her chest and squeezed her daughter’s hand. She and her family stood looking at the Prophet.

  And now that strange man, Open Door, the self-named Prophet who claimed to have looked in Creator’s face, who professed that he could make Macotaweh Keelswah, the Black Sun, stood silent before the anxious multitude, pointing his medicine stick toward the sky. His mad-looking eye swept everywhere over the crowd, seeming to pin everyone’s soul for an instant, before he began to declaim in his high, nasal voice that sounded like a flute, a voice that made the birds stop singing. His statement was brief, and was at once translated into the tongues of all the tribes whose pilgrims were there:

  “That white man Harrison at Vincennes, the Land Stealer, he has been so bold as to challenge He Who Opens the Door! That Harrison told the red people, ‘Make him prove his powers by a miracle all can see; ask him if he can command the sun!’

  “Therefore, my children, so that you will never again heed the lying words of white men, I command the sun to be dark at midday!

  “Now see it obey me!”

  Maconakwa at that moment was taken by a terrible shivering thrill—not just because of the audacity of the words, but because she perceived that something was visibly happening to the daylight. Wails and moans arose from hundreds, who had begun to notice it too:

  Shadows were dissolving, their edges growing indistinct; the colors of skin, clothes, leaves, dimmed toward grayness. The light changed as if the day had suddenly become cloudy, but there were no clouds.

  What was happening was very slow, but there was no denying that the daylight was changing. Indeed she had heard the Prophet call for the sun to darken; indeed it was happening. She stood silent.

  But almost all the rest of the crowd was being swept away with awe and rapture. Their voices moaned, keened, and howled like the winds of a storm as the day grew darker. A warm wind sucked dust upward from the plaza, and where sun dappled the shade under a hazel bush nearby, the shivering shadows were shaped all like little vague crescents. The Prophet still stood with his stick pointed at the sky. Dogs howled. The people’s voices dwindled. Men and women dropped to their knees. Maconakwa’s daughter hugged her thigh and Round One let the nipple out of his mouth and whimpered. Maconakwa broke out in gooseflesh as she wondered how dark it would get and whether it would ever get light again. Perhaps the Prophet could have angered Creator by commanding the sun, and it would go out and stay out and all the world would die. There might be incredible danger in this Prophet’s boldness.

  Now the world was full of a deep, eerie gloom, and when people started looking up again, their voices crooned in amazement. Maconakwa hushed her baby and raised her hand over her eyes to peek at the sun through a gap between her fingers.

  It was totally black and round now, with a silvery brilliance around it. Bats were fluttering above the crowd. The Prophet’s voice piped in the half darkness:

  “Do you believe me, my children? Are you eager to see the sun again? Then I shall ask the Master of Life to remove his hand!” He lowered his fire stick. Slowly, slowly, the light began to return to the surfaces of all earthly things, trees, roofs, people. Birds began to twitter as at dawn, the bats vanished. After a long while the sunshine was again warm and bright on heads and shoulders and everything looked as it was supposed to look at noontime. People rose, blinking their eyes, their faces shining as brightly from within as from the restored sunlight. The Prophet stood on his platform, uplifted face shining with tears or sweat, teeth bared. His shoulders were heaving; he was either panting or sobbing.

  Deep in her soul, Maconakwa felt that the Prophet had somehow known this Macotaweh Keelswah was going to happen this day, rather than having caused it. But that did not matter.

  Those who had seen it here, and those who saw it from villages elsewhere, would believe that he caused it. And there would be few if any doubters after this. Through fear or admiration, surely every red person across the land would grant that he was the Open Door through whom the happiness and greatness of the Ancestors could be found again. This had been a day that might change their lives.

  Her daughter Cut Finger was babbling questions. Maconakwa looked at her husband. He was staring at the Prophet, thin lips drawn tight against his teeth in a grimace or a smile.

  “E heh!” he exclaimed. “Our sakima will have to heed this!”

  Maconakwa pulled the porcupine quills between the edges of her upper and lower front teeth to flatten them, but her mind was wandering. Since her return to her husband’s village from the Prophet’s Town, she had not been able to sleep or quiet her spirit, and often gazed off, forgetting what she was doing. Now, dying to make quillwork decorations on the top of her husband’s moccasins, she brought herself back to the task time and again only by pricking herself with a quill barb she had forgotten she was handling. Then for a while she would concentrate on the moistened quills, inserting the barb of one into the base of another to make a long enough quill strand to embroider with, but soon she would be gazing off again into the smoky, quivering, gold and green distance outside the arbor: the sun-dappled, breeze-stirred summer foliage among the wikwams, the cornfields and gardens in the clearing beyond. Nothing was ever quite still; leaves, grasses, water, clouds, smoke, children: everything was always astir with living, caressed by the wind spirits. All shivering and rippling, hushing and swaying, full of mystery, it kept her from attending to her work and from concentrating on the questions she was trying to answer in her heart.

  Had that strange man actually made the Black Sun by commanding it?

  Or had he merely used some foreknowledge of it to trick the people so they would not doubt him?

  But then where would that foreknowledge have come from, unless Creator had given it to him?

  And if Creator had seen fit to give foreknowledge to that particular man, might he not have seen fit just as well to help him make a miracle whether he had foreknowledge or not?

  Her question was whether the Creator was truly coming to the red people, through that man who called himself the Open Door. If so, it would mean that Creator wanted the peoples to throw away the white man’s ways and his goods.

  And if that were so, the Quakers up at the river fork were doing something wrong by trying to make the red men work like white men.

  But she believed that the people called Quakers would never do anything they deemed wrong.

  She remembered a thought she had had in the past; it was s
omething that her father Tuck Horse had spoken of sometimes:

  That perhaps the red man had one god and the white man another god, and each told the respective people a different thing. Did that mean that one god would He? Or did it mean there were two truths, each god telling its own?

  No. How could that be? If there were two truths instead of just the one, how could anything in the world ever go right?

  She had talked this all over, again and again, with the people around her, with her husband, with her friend Minnow. They all believed there could be only one truth, only one god.

  But if there were only one god, why would he tell opposite truths to different peoples?

  Was that god a trickster, like Coyote, set on making trouble?

  She wondered how she could counsel and guide the women and children of Deaf Man’s village if she could not answer this question within herself. What would she teach Round One, who slept by her feet?

  She bent close over the moccasin on which she was trying to stitch the pattern in quills, most white, others dyed in berry juices and infusions of flowers, barks, and roots. Much work, knowledge, and patience was needed to make any little decoration.

  Yet in the white men’s trading stores, pretty things came in great quantities, already made scarves and ribbons of shiny surfaces and more colors than a rainbow, beads of deep and brilliant colors that could be used more easily than quills to decorate clothes and moccasins. Mirrors with carved frames and metal decorations. Where and who were all the white people who made all those pretty things, and how did they make them? The idea of people being able to make so many pretty things that they could sell them somewhere else was hard to comprehend. For a Miami woman to make decorations for her own family, she had to spend all the time she was not planting, harvesting, cooking, tanning hides, and house-building. A man was so busy hunting, meeting in Council, and teaching his grandchildren that he scarcely had time to carve any pretty thing for his family. There was something about the way whites did things that she just could not understand. Even when she thought back to the little-girl time when she lived among them, she had never seen white people making pretty things. As faintly as she could remember the house she lived in as a little girl, she was sure there had been nothing pretty made there. These Indian people who were now her people all had beautiful things, even though it took them days and days to make them out of the materials that Mother Earth provided. She could remember her Quaker birth mother endlessly working to make cloth, and then clothing from that cloth, but it had always been gray or black clothing, never with any color.