The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Selfish or no, I’ve done good things, she rationalized. But …

  Even the lives of her sons had been altered by her obsession with that moment, she realized. Year after year, driven by her terrible anxiety, they had gone out into the frontier alone or in groups of two to four at awful risk and discomfort to themselves, to find the lost sister whom only she had consistently believed to be alive.

  Sure, she thought, they might some of them have gone out yonder once or twice of their own hearts’ volition. But ’twas for my sake they kept a-going.

  Woman, she asked herself, has thee lived by the fortitude and serenity that the Inner Light is supposed to give thee?

  I have lived a good life, she defended herself. Part of it being that I’ll not have abandoned my child as long as there’s a wisp of hope for her …

  A commotion of clumping and clattering out front, and men’s voices, jarred her out of her introspection.

  Her sons Joseph and Isaac both tried to lunge in through the front door at once, their broad shoulders wedging them both into it for a panting moment before they got in and she met them at the central hall. Their sweaty horses, she saw, had been hastily hitched to a rail outside in the blazing sunshine. Both young men were wild-eyed and both tried to speak at once when they saw her standing there with her hand clapped on her throat. At last she sorted out from their bellowing the name of Frances. She groped behind her for a chair.

  “Most surely her!” Joseph gasped.

  “Redhead, remembers she was carried off in the war!” said Isaac. “Heard of our hunting for ’er! A chief’s bringing her!”

  “O thanks dear God,” Ruth breathed as Joseph pulled the chair from the wall of the hallway and eased her back into it. “Thee saw her?” Ruth thought she would faint with joy.

  “Not yet,” Joe blurted. “Fellow bringin’ lumber down to the Ship Zion Meetinghouse said he met ’em camped ’tween the road and river. He told the printer at the Herald of the Times, and he sure reckoned who they’d be looking for, and come and told me, and I fetched Isaac. We’re on our way to their camp to bring ’em here!”

  “We stopped here t’ tell thee, Ma, so thee’ll not perish of a heart-stop when we bring ’er home!”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  May 6, 1807

  Wilkes-Barre

  From where she lay propped up on pillows so she could breathe in bed, Ruth Slocum could see out the bedroom window onto the street that led north along the riverside, past neighbors’ houses. She knew them well, all those neighbors, had seen them come and offer her money for this parcel of land and that, had seen them farm those parcels and raise their children on them, had eaten with them, had been helped by them and bothered by them, those being the ways of near neighbors; she had helped deliver their babies and the babies of their children; had seen them eventually divide their own parcels further and give them to their children or sell them to newcomers, who built still-closer houses on them, until by now what had been the farm of Jonathan and Ruth Slocum had become much of the town of Wilkes-Barre, and what had first been land-wealth was now money-wealth, which she and her children had aplenty—far more than they needed, and much of which they funneled into the Friends’ missionary efforts and other causes they deemed worthy. She had seen much change.

  The window was open to admit some spring breeze into the hot room, and noise and dust from the busy street drifted up all day: the clopping and whinnying and snorting of horses, the rattle and rumble of lumber carts and coal wagons, the clangor and clacking and banging of smithy shops and carpenters, the shouts of boatmen on the nearby river. And there was always the acrid smell of coal smoke, not just from the forges but from every kitchen. Since Judge Fell had modified an anthracite fire grate in his tavern to make the fuel still more efficient, virtually everybody was using it now instead of wood, which had to be hauled in from farther and farther away as the forests disappeared in the valley. Only by daydreaming through memory could Ruth see the Susquehanna Valley as it had been thirty years ago when Jonathan brought her here in a canvas-covered wagon from Rhode Island. All her children, the seven born in Rhode Island and the three born here, were adults now, most of them parents themselves, two of them—Giles and Judith—even grandparents. She could remember standing on a hilltop east of the valley with Jonathan, looking down into the breathtakingly beautiful, wide, curving, forested valley with the spectacular river winding through it, clear back before the Revolutionary War had swept through it.

  All her ten children were still alive, she was sure of that. Whether they were in New York or here in Pennsylvania or out in Ohio, they were all alive and stayed in touch with her by letter.

  Except Frannie, of course. Frances was still alive, Ruth knew, but her fate was still a somber cloud on the glowing sunset of her long life.

  Somebody was sitting in a chair on the other side of the bed. She turned her head. It was Joseph. She had forgotten he was there. They had been talking, of little things. Then she had dozed, and awakened to gaze out the window, and he stayed, patient, studying his law book to pass the time.

  “I’m sorry I’m not better company, Joe,” she said.

  “Company?” he said. “Why, I reckoned you were just prayin’, like me.” He put a finger in his place in the book. Praying indeed.

  “Praying … remembering. Some of this, some of that.” She raised a feeble hand and pointed out toward the street. “Right there. Right there where that fence comes out to the street. That was where the edge of the woods was. That’s where I had my last sight of her.…” She shuddered and sighed, and the sigh made her chest wheeze and gurgle, and she began coughing. Her sight of the fence blurred, and she put a kerchief to her mouth and coughed till she was exhausted. Joseph waited till she was through, then reached over and put his callused hand on her wrist, leaning close to her pillow and looking out the way she was.

  “I remember,” he said. “Hair all tousled, feet a-kickin’ …”

  “Bare feet. And thee doesn’t really remember it, son. Thee was but two then. Thee’s just heard us tell it so often, thee’s made a memory picture of it.”

  “I was going on to three, Ma. I do remember seeing it, clear as day.”

  She smiled at the rise of this silly old argument. “Dear Joe, thee was on the far side of the house, Mary a-leadin’ thee by the hand toward the fort, and thee ran so hard thy breeches fell down. One would think thee’d remember that, losin’ breeches and stumbling and falling down and all, instead of what thee imagined. Well, anyway, I accept now that that was my last sight of her, forever. For nigh onto thirty years I believed I’d see her again before I passed over.…” She felt as if she were talking in a rushing wind. “I … I s’pose I gave up that hope when that young woman came last year from the Senecas, wonderin’ if we were her family.… That was the way my heart was meant to leap up in hope … and it did then … and I guess that’s the only such a joy I was meant to have in this life. But when that poor woman came, and proved not to be Frannie, why, that … I do trust Frannie’s alive, but that’s when I gave up hope o’ seeing her myself, in this life.…”

  Joseph remembered that wonderful, awful day, the thrilling excitement of it, of riding with Isaac up to the little camp beside the river and seeing the old Seneca chieftain, a woman slightly behind him, timid, her face full of doubt. He remembered how he had stared at the red-haired, worn-looking young woman in deerskins, and saying to Isaac, “Yes, that’s just how she’d look at this age! That’s Frannie!” But later, at home, the tears of joy in his mother’s eyes had turned to tears of dejection when, remembering to examine the young woman’s hands, all her fingers had proven normal, no crushed index finger. It had not been Frannie, just another sorry victim of war. The poor thing rested, then went on to look for her real family, a pursuit that Ruth Slocum had understood.

  Thirty years of looking for Frannie, Joseph Slocum thought, putting his law book on the bed and his hand on his mother’s wrist. His mind went back over the hundreds
and hundreds of miles the Slocum brothers had traveled on the frontier, the rewards offered, the crafty-eyed traders, British, American, and French, all cunning in their peculiar ways, the suspicious, sometimes compassionate, sometimes angry expressions in the eyes of red men, the clues that would inspire and then vanish …

  And now of course with every passing year the trail would be more difficult. So many people who remembered those campaigns were dead by now, or vague with age. The tribes among which she might be living had been moved time and again, scattered like autumn leaves before the force of the white men’s advance. If Frannie were still alive and among the Indians, they must have cherished her enough to keep her from being turned over in any of the prisoner exchanges, and likely would continue to keep her hidden. No word of her had ever come back by way of the Friends’ missions anywhere, and would be even less likely to now, because of the resurgence of native religion sweeping the Indiana Territory; missionary work was faltering out there in the face of the feverish work of that fanatic they called the Shawnee Prophet. Finding Frannie seemed ever more hopeless.

  Sometimes Joseph, in his own private soul, did think the family had humored their mother too much. It was like an obsession with her, not just ordinary hopefulness.

  We do lose children, he thought, and we just have to accept that. His own first child, Jonathan, had died an infant, and he and Liz had had to accept it and go on. They vowed that if they ever had another son, they would call him Jonathan, to give that name another chance. But they hadn’t tried to keep a lost soul.

  Well, things go one way for a while, he thought, and then they go the other, and I reckon that by the time I can get myself and Will or Ben or somebody freed up to go searching again, the frontier will be simmered down and we can hunt safe and thorough. I can study a law book as well on the road as at home, I guess.

  He thought about the upcoming yearly Meeting of the Friends. They were expecting Indian chiefs to come and report on progress and ask for more and different kinds of help. One called Little Turtle was expected to be there.

  If I could get down to the Meeting, he thought, maybe I could ask some of those Indians personally if they know of Frannie. Maybe some of the mission teachers will be there and I could ask them. I’ll go if I can. Ma used to always go, but she can’t do it anymore.

  He patted her hand. “Ma,” he said, “I feel just like thee that she’s alive yet, and with all the prayers and trying we’ve done on her behalf, the dear Good Lord will reward us when he’s ready to. Never doubt, Ma. I’ll find Frannie. Ma … Ma?”

  He realized that there was no pulse or vibrancy in the old hand under his.

  Ruth Slocum’s face was gray and serene, still turned slightly toward the window, eyes lifeless but still on that place up the street where so long ago she had seen her little daughter vanish into the woods.

  Deaf Man’s Village, on the Mississinewa

  From somewhere amid the midday shrilling of the insects, a voice was calling her, or so it seemed. Maconakwa was half asleep, naked, her husband’s juices still oozing from where he had put them into her, and she was aware that he was asleep beside her. His presence was so comforting that she did not want to wake up. She could never at any other time sleep so richly and happily as she did when they had stolen time in the early afternoon like this to couple while the children were out playing in the village. There were not many opportunities for a village chief and his wife to disappear from all their duties to the People and to their children and simply take pleasure in each other and then doze off for a little while, some part of their bodies touching: a hand on a thigh, a cheek on a shoulder, or the front of one’s knee in the back of the other’s knee, while the raspy dry cries of the insects wound down out in the sunshine beyond the smoky-smelling shade of the wikwam, and the laughter and calls of the children mingled with bird songs. Perhaps the voice she thought she heard calling her had been simply the distant shout of a child, or of someone calling a child. Maconakwa’s mind and soul hummed with sweet sleepiness, and shimmering, sparkling patterns of light billowed behind her eyelids. She was still tingling from pleasure but slipping into deep languor. When that voice sounded again, deep in her soul, she realized that it was a voice dimly remembered.

  And it was not calling her Ningeah, Mother, as her little son would have, or Maconakwa, as women in this Miami town would have, or Wehletawash, as the Lenapehs would have. It was a voice mellifluous with love, but it was not the voice of Minnow, or of old Flicker, her Lenapeh mother, or of Neepah before that. It was a voice remembered from further back even, a voice in a dream memory.

  Frannie! Frannie! That forgotten name, from so long ago.

  She was being carried. Not by a horse, but somehow slung over someone’s shoulder. Dead leaves covered the ground. Behind her, where she had been carried from, there was a woman with red hair and gray clothes calling after her.

  Frannie! Frannie!

  The woman in gray clothes was calling after her and reaching imploring arms toward her, wanting her to come back, calling for her.…

  And so she went floating back toward her, to a still-earlier time, and as she drew closer, the agony in that white woman’s face changed to happiness, tenderness. She was enveloped in the woman’s arms and knew that it was her mother.

  She awoke to cries: “Ningeah! Ningeah!” coming closer. It was Cut Finger’s voice. Her husband was still breathing deep in sleep. One of the blessings of his deafness was that village or family noises never woke him. Maconakwa scrambled up from bed, drew on her skirt, and covered her husband’s nakedness with a blanket just as her daughter ran in under the door flap calling for her. The girl, now seven summers of age, wore just a lap apron tied on by a thong around her waist, and her hair was long and black, thick and shiny. Maconakwa felt strange, knowing she had had some sort of a spirit dream, but was unable to remember it because she had been awakened so abruptly. And now looking at the panic in the girl’s face, she cried, “What? What happens? Where is Round One?”

  The girl’s eyes were stammering with tears and her mouth was drawn down in crying fright.

  “Ningeah! Come! He is hurt!”

  A thrill of alarm cascaded through Maconakwa from her scalp to her knees, and as she stooped to shake her husband awake she heard cries and shouts and wailing from somewhere in a distant part of the village. “Is it soldiers?” she cried to her daughter, remembering what had always caused such alarms in the earlier times. She was ready to sign to her husband that bluecoats were attacking; he was sitting up with unspoken questions dispersing the sleepiness from his face, at once alert to the urgency.

  “Ne she, Ningeah! Drunk men fighting!”

  “Aihee!” A bolt of fury almost blinded her. Since her other husband, she had hated what drunken men did; when they raged and fought, they often hurt others nearby.

  When she ran out, she met other people running toward her with anguished faces. The Awl bounded out of the wikwam with just his hastily tied breechcloth on, barefooted, his musket and powder horn in one hand. The people were jabbering as they all ran back toward the edge of the village. By the time they got there she already knew the story of what had happened: a drunken man had thrown a hatchet at another drunken man and it had hit her son.

  Round One lay in the lap of an elder woman whose tunic was drenched with blood. Maconakwa dropped to her knees beside the woman with a howl of grief and reached for her child.

  It seemed a long while in which she knew nothing of what was happening or what people were saying or shouting; she was not even aware of what her husband said or did. She only held the child across her thighs and saw the gaping deep cut under his ear and jaw. There was no blood pumping out and she knew that he was already dead and there was no fixing and no medicine that could bring him back.

  When she stood up with the little corpse in her arms, her heart as hard and dark and small as a musket ball, and looked around for the drunken man who had done this, she found that someone had already tied th
e man up to a pole where he sat with hands trussed behind him and his head lolling, eyes rolling, mouth drooling. He wore a deerhide tunic and there was vomit down the front of it. She knew him just a little. He was not twenty summers yet, a Miami from Fort Wayne who did not even belong in this village. He had one relative here, an aunt. His aunt was the woman who had been holding Round One as he bled. This aunt, strong and grim, walked with Maconakwa to the place where the tied-up drunken youth slumped in his ropes. The Awl was standing stock-still in front of the youth, so tense his muscles and veins all stood forth, trembling with a terrible rage and dismay, his eyes blazing. He was holding his musket tensely in his hand but looked as if he had not thought of using it either to shoot or beat the young man; it was as if he were more shaken by the senselessness of it than by anger at the drunkard. Even Maconakwa herself despaired at how useless it would be to kill the youth in vengeance, and the young man’s old aunt, with tears in her eyes and jaw set, stroked Maconakwa’s back and said:

  “The demon is in him and he knows nothing. By the old law of our People, I give my relative into your hands, to replace the one you have lost.”

  It would be their choice whether to kill him, enslave him, or adopt him. When he returned to his senses he would have to stand before them and accept their decision when they announced it at Council.

  But for this moment there was no sense of tomorrow or of vengeance or lightness; Maconakwa was in the bewildering present moment, heart feeling wrenched and shrunken, holding a little corpse whose blood trickled along her forearm while her husband’s semen trickled down the inside of her thighs, while she stared at the limp form of a young man who might not even remember tomorrow what a tragedy he had inflicted while crazed by the spirit water. Two sons she had borne to her husband, and both had died babies. There was a moment of joy and pleasure when the seed of life was planted, but from then on being a mother was a story of pain and the constant risk of more pain.