The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  So many beautiful things could be made from feathers, the feathers of the many kinds of brilliant birds that Creator had made. All the red peoples made and wore things made with the delicate, shimmering, patterned feathers of birds: headdresses, fans, mantles, decorations to hang up in their wikwams. The white men at Fort Wayne sometimes killed thousands of the brilliantly feathered pigeons that flew over the forests, but never used their feathers for anything. Often they didn’t even eat the birds, but just killed them and left them where they fell.

  And what did the white men do with the furs, the beaver, mink, the marten, the ermine, that they bought from the red hunters? They never seemed to wear them themselves, in tippets or shawls or yokes, as the red people did. They sent shiploads of them away, but to where? Were there white people far away who dressed in furs, while the white people who lived here near the furs never used them? Were there two kinds of white people, plain ones and fancy ones? Were there some kind of white people far away who wore beads and furs and feathers and silver?

  I wonder what the shamans of the white people wear? she thought. Perhaps they are the ones who dress in decorations. Perhaps they are beaded and feathered and colorful because they live closer to their god. Perhaps that is it. And traders and soldiers are more plain, because here, they are so far from their god.

  I wish I knew the answers to these wonderings. I wish I could understand how white people are, so I could think whether their way is more right or wrong than ours. If I knew something of that, I could better guide our women and children, and help my husband be a wise sakima.

  She thought of the Quaker teachers she had seen at Fort Wayne one day, those she presumed, on seeing them, to be her own brothers. In time they had proven not to be called Slocum, not a one of them. Their names, when she heard them, were all different. She made herself remember those names—Dennis, Ellicott, and Hopkins—in case it might someday help her to know them. After a while the leader of them, the one named Dennis, had gone away east to get more help, but he had not come back, and she had had to memorize another name, of one who came to take his place. McKinney. It was ah easier name to remember because it sounded much like her own name, Maconakwa.

  Those Quakers were growing a grain there besides corn. Little Turtle in Council kept praising the farm school. He told the Council he wanted to go see Chief Jefferson next year and ask for a grain mill for the Miamis. He also told the Council that some good was coming from Jefferson’s promise to keep spirit water from being sold. It had not all been stopped, but there was less, and fewer Miamis had been killed and hurt by drunken Miamis. Little Turtle seemed full of hope for his efforts to make his people live like white people.

  And he had warned the Miamis not to listen to the preachings of the Shawnee who called himself a prophet. “That man,” he said, “would put you on a path leading back through stones and thorns, away from the help and friendship of our white brothers who care for us. He would soon have us raise the tomahawk against them, and then they would again raise it against us, and all we have tried to do would be in vain. That false prophet has fooled too many. Somehow he learned from white men that there would be a Black Sun, and then he made foolish people think he caused it. Already the white people around his town are suspicious about him and they want him to get out of that country, where he should not be anyway because it is in the lands we granted to our great brother General Wayne, when we signed the treaty making this peace we have so long enjoyed.”

  Those words of Little Turtle had made her husband’s face crease with a smirk, and his eyes had twinkled, and later he said to her: “Having chosen the path he has, how very much our old sakima must fool himself to think ‘our white brothers’ care for us!”

  She asked her husband then, “Do you not believe that the Quaker men care for us?”

  “Perhaps they do,” he replied. “But they are here for a nation that would like to see us be never more who we always were. They care only to have our land and keep us tame.”

  That was another thing Maconakwa wanted to know: the true purpose of the Quakers who had come here—what was in their hearts.

  And so as she worked with the porcupine quills to make The Awl’s moccasins beautiful because of her love and admiration for him, she was thinking of how much she would like to find a way to talk with the Quaker men. They could tell her so much that she ought to know. It would not be easy, for she had only the faintest memory of the whites’ tongue.

  But they have been here some time working among my People, she thought. They know some of the Miami tongue and can do some talk with hand sign. Surely we could understand each other.

  The anticipation both delighted and frightened her. She wondered whether she would even dare try to meet them if the opportunity came. She would not want to make her husband suspicious or angry by talking with white men. Perhaps he might talk to them with me, she thought, but had little hope for that.

  She murmured the name Slocum to herself. I could at least ask them if they knew Quakers named Slocum. I would not have to tell them that was once my name. It would not be like selling them my name and getting in trouble. The Quakers are not the kind of white men who would take you away if you did not want to go.

  She thought long on this, as she worked the quills, as she cooked, as she nursed her baby boy, as she hoed in the corn that summer. A few families from her husband’s village lived and worked at the farm school; perhaps she could think of a reason to visit them, and thus get near the Quakers without causing any suspicion. That, or something.

  She prayed for a way to be shown her.

  And then within four days she was at the Quaker farm school. She rode up the dirt road between rail fences toward the house the Quakers had built there, riding on one of the fine mares she and her husband had raised, carrying Round One in a sling before her. Though she had not weaned him yet, he was too big to be carried in a cradleboard on her back anymore. The Awl rode beside her on his dark racing horse, with their daughter Cut Finger in front of him.

  It had been The Awl himself who said they should come here. She had not asked or even hinted. He had said:

  “The Shawnee Prophet pulls the People one way; Little Turtle and his Quakers pull another. We have gone to see the Prophet, and now we should go and see the Quakers.”

  She had said simply and quietly, “That would be fair.” She had not shown in her face that his idea answered her prayer.

  As she rode through the teaching farm she assessed the white people’s cornfields and gardens, and she thought they looked pitiful. The corn was planted in straight rows, and weeds flourished between the rows. The stalks were spindly and short, compared with what was growing near her village. The earth seemed dry and hard and parched. No squashes grew there to shade the roots of the cornstalks.

  On the other side of the road was a bean patch, nothing but beans, growing up on tripods of poles instead of the cornstalks, and she marveled that so much work had been done to cut down poles and stand them up again just to do what cornstalks could do.

  Both corn and beans seemed poor in their separate fields, as if lonely for each other’s natural company. And she saw no squashes or gourds or pumpkins, those excellent things, anywhere. In other fields nearby, some kind of yellowish grass with seed heads grew among leafless dead trees that had been killed by cutting the bark all around—a desolate and saddening sight. That grass, she thought, must be the grain from which they make flour. The Miami word for it was sahlomena; she remembered Tuck Horse pointing it out to her near a wapsi town somewhere and calling it “weet.”

  There were no children in the fields to pull weeds or hoe or chase birds. The fields were utterly without people. It was as if these wapsi farmers had no love for the Three Sisters, but had just planted them and forsaken them. Mother Corn must be so sad to see these lonely crops! she thought. That must be why they look unwell. Why do they want us to learn their way? It seems such a sorry way!

  Though there were several Miami families s
taying here, it appeared the Quaker men were doing most of the work. She saw them in their gray clothes, splitting rails, hoeing, repairing a wheel, while Miami men stood or sat in twos and threes and smoked and watched them. One of the men from The Awl’s town smiled at his chief and pointed at one young Quaker man whose clothes were sodden with sweat as he swung a huge wooden maul to drive splitting wedges along a log. With each thud of the tool came a tearing, crackling sound as the grain of the oak separated a little farther. The Miami said, “I have been watching this skillful fence maker for a long time. Soon I may know how he does it.” Then he chuckled, and pursed his lips around the mouthpiece of his smoking pipe. “Maybe if I watch him long enough, I might even understand why someone would want to make a fence! Heh heh!”

  Then he said in earnest: “Sakima! You were at the town of the Shawnee Prophet when he darkened the sun. Is it true that he pointed at it and commanded it, and it obeyed? We saw it go dark here, and heard he did it just so. I would have liked to be there!”

  When The Awl understood the question, he replied with a hint of a one-sided smile: “Not commanded it and it obeyed; I think he asked and it obliged. Heh. Probably you were better here than there. You learned to make a fence, but I didn’t learn to make a Black Sun.”

  Then they both laughed so loud that the rail-splitter looked around and saw them. He smiled, set down the maul, wiped away sweat, and came forward to greet them. They could see sweat actually dribbling from his fingertips as he came. He had a round head with short, dark hair hanging in wet locks onto his forehead. When he learned that this was the chief of the Deaf Man’s Town, he invited the family to sit on a log in the shade of an enormous poplar tree. Looking long out of the corner of his eye at Maconakwa’s thick, wavy red hair, he went inside the house. Cut Finger found an orange and green poplar blossom that had fallen and was showing its beauties to her mother when the Quaker man came back out of the house, apparently rinsed off and wearing a dry gray shirt, though his breeches were still sodden with sweat. He was carrying a pitcher and cups, and called to the other two Quaker men as he came. Round One sat naked in the grass watching a leafhopper.

  The white men were polite and conversed as well as possible across the language difference and their guest’s deafness. Seeing that Maconakwa listened for him, and presuming that a red-haired woman would understand English, they tried at first to talk to her in plain English, but it was soon obvious that she could hardly understand them, and for an hour or so there was much difficulty getting anything across because their grasp of the Miami tongue was little more than the names for things. After a while the white men were glancing away toward the tasks they had been doing, as if impatient to start sweating over work again. Maconakwa realized that anything her husband wanted to know about their mission here he would have to learn just by seeing, and she knew that all the questions she had—about one god or two, one truth or two, where their hearts stood regarding the Indians—all those things would go pretty well unanswered. At one point she realized that the Quaker men were trying to ask about the Black Sun. While she was doubting that she could express anything about it, her husband said to her in quick Miami:

  “We are to tell the white men nothing of the Prophet’s aims or what happens there.”

  Soon it was obvious that this had been a futile visit for learning or sharing anything of importance. Everyone was awkward, and the few Miamis doing any work on the farm had stopped and were using this gathering in the shade as an excuse to sit down, smoke, and enjoy some good loafing and cool drinking water. Soon several of the men were smoking with The Awl and talking sign to him about the Shawnee Prophet, and he had half turned away from the Quakers to keep them from understanding any of it they might have been able to comprehend.

  Maconakwa pounced on that moment, afraid that the visit was going to yield nothing whatsoever, and guiltily, recklessly, she blurted to the round-headed Quaker man:

  “Know thee Quaker Slo-cum?” She enunciated the name with care.

  He leaned forward and squinted at her, pursing his mouth in a quizzical smile. Then he shrugged and replied: “Slow come? Yes, ma’am … uh, it took us a long time to get here … and tools, well, I sometimes wonder if they’ll ever get here.… It’s such a long way from Maryland.…”

  She did not understand any of what he was saying except that it seemed he had said, “Slocum yes.” She searched her memory for English words, and, hoping they would understand that she was asking about the health of her Quaker family, she stammered,

  “Slo-cum … g-good?”

  “Well, ma’am, uh … coming slow is good enough, I suppose, as long as it gets here. We intend to be here as long as thee’ll have us.… Say, ma’am, I’ve been looking at thee and thinking, by the look of thee, does ’ee happen to be Mr. Wells’s sister, or something?” With his forefinger he pointed at her red hair and made a circle in the direction of her face. She understood “Wells” and “sister” and remembered that others had said they looked like brother and sister, but it vexed her. She was trying to find out something about her own good family, and this man mentioned a man she thought bad.

  As she and her husband rode out with their children a little later, he said, “It was a pleasant day to ride. But I learned little.”

  She answered, “I learned that they know nothing of growing food! Such hard work to make straight lines, but their crops are in misery!”

  “To like the strange ways of white people, one would have to go into their country, as Little Turtle does,” he said, and shrugged.

  She said after a while, “When I was there, I was just a little child and did not need to understand it. Now I am not there and I do need to understand it. Perhaps someday I would like to go there to see it and try to understand what I did not understand then.…” He looked at her, frowning, and she added: “But I would not go unless my husband took me there and brought me home.”

  He smiled at her, then looked at her with that slow, wandering, up-and-down look in his eyes that told her he was thinking of getting upon her and inside her as soon as they could be alone together. Riding the horse always put her in the mood for that, so she started yearning to be at home instead of in white men’s land.

  Wilkes-Barre

  “I am not long for this world,” Ruth Slocum said aloud, though she was alone in the house. She put both palms on the table and leaned hard on them, putting her head down, shutting her eyes and gasping for breath. In her chest, as always lately, there was that tickly, bubbling impulse to cough, even though her whole abdomen ached from coughing all the time and sometimes she felt that if she coughed once more, all her guts would squeeze out through her other end.

  She opened her eyes and saw swimming before her the letter case and ink stand on the table. She blinked to focus, then sat down on the hard chair, thinking that if this attack of misery passed, she would get back to the correspondence she tried to maintain.

  It was all important correspondence, in her opinion, important enough to justify doing it however wretched she felt. Much of it was with her daughters Judith and Mary, both of whom were in Ohio with their husbands and who therefore, Mrs. Slocum faithfully presumed, always had some chance of running onto the trail of their long-lost sister. She had no clear notion how two housewives in that vast state would actually happen to find a woman in an Indian tribe, but they were almost certainly closer to where that tribe, whatever it was, might be. According to the newspapers and journals, there were still Indians in Ohio, including one troublesome Shawnee magic man who appeared to be stirring up the whole frontier with some kind of native evangelism. She had read in the journals about how he was drawing such crowds of pilgrims to his holy town that the settlers were in a state of fear.

  All of her other correspondence was likewise important, being concerned with the Friends’ committees on antislavery and the Indian missions.

  She had taken up the abolition cause years ago, when the notion came to her that as a captive, Frances might have been
used somehow as a slave or servant by the Indians. The notion of any sort of bound servitude always galled Ruth’s Quaker soul, its bitterness exacerbated by her imaginings of her poor daughter’s fate.

  At this moment, with her sense of her own mortality whetting her inner vision, and the correspondence for humane causes lying before her on the table, Ruth Slocum had a stunning revelation: that most everything she had done in these last three decades of her long life had been influenced by her quest for Frannie.

  Ruth was seventy years old now, wealthy, esteemed in her community and the Society of Friends, with many successful children and flourishing grandchildren—as much a satisfactory life as a woman could have dreamed of—but her driving force for three decades had been that one shortfall from complete happiness.

  Every day of all those years, she had envisioned her little girl being abducted on an Indian’s shoulder into the curtain of woods, her little bare feet kicking in the cold air, her piteous cry shrilling back.

  Lord, it’s true, she thought, feeling an eerie sense of shame, I am selfish in everything I do!