The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “I was a good warrior once. But that was when I could hear voices and footsteps and drums keenly. Hearing is as necessary in battle as seeing, sometimes. My heart and body are still strong, eh. But if I had to lead my warriors in a fight, being able to hear nothing but the thunder and the hawk’s whistling that always fill my head, what would I do in an ambush? Or in a raid at night? My own warriors would be at risk because of what a bursting gun did to my head fifteen summers ago. If I had a brother or a son in my war party, and he was hurt or killed because I cannot hear, I would not want to have such a weight on my heart. You asked me and that is my answer. But if ever I saw a bluecoat soldier coming to hurt my family or my People, I would soon have his hair hanging at my belt.”

  The wikwam at Deaf Man’s village seemed half empty, even though his whole family was here: Maconakwa, Cut Finger, and Deaf Man himself. It was the absence of Clipped Hair, who was really not yet even of this family, that seemed to leave such an emptiness. He had been gone for more than a moon. Maconakwa was big and full with a baby that seemed to be all knees and elbows, but still felt an emptiness without the youth’s rich voice and eager ears and ready laughter.

  On the advice of Deaf Man, Clipped Hair had ridden down the Wabash Sipu to Prophet’s Town to learn for himself whether the Prophet and Tecumseh seemed to be leading the red peoples in a better direction. Only his own heart could tell him, and he would have to form his loyalty now, one way or another, because soon the conflict would begin.

  Warriors had entered the camps of Chief Harrison’s line drawers and broken their surveying instruments. Rumors ran the whole length of the Wabash Sipu that Harrison was looking for any excuse to bring an army up from Vincennes to Prophet’s Town and scatter all those Indians. Deaf Man often said, “Harrison cannot bear to see Indians who are not under his control.” Harrison was always sending spies and messengers to accuse the Shawnee brothers of inciting the tribes to war, saying the bluecoats’ old enemies the British Redcoats were helping Tecumseh. Little Turtle and Wells kept that rumor hot.

  The truth was, as Deaf Man knew, that Tecumseh kept telling Indians everywhere not to attack any whites, nor even let themselves be provoked to fight. His purpose was well-known: simply to make all red men everywhere agree never to sign away any more land. When all the tribes were of one heart, all whites would be told to go back beyond the eastern mountains and stay there. The Shawnee names were in all mouths: Tecumseh, imploring red men to yield no more land, and Open Door the Prophet, who had made the sun go out as proof that he was the Creator’s instrument to restore pride and happiness in the red people upon their rightful lands. The whole country was astir, full of hope and dread. Tecumseh could not let Harrison take one more clod of earth; Harrison could not let himself be stopped until he had all the land. It was as if all the conflicts of the white men and the red men of the last seven generations had come to focus in two men. Tecumseh was the blade of the red people, with all the weight of their destiny pressing him forward, and Harrison was the blade of his people, with their destiny behind him, and the two blades were now poised, pointed at each other and almost touching. It had been Clipped Hair himself who had described it in that word picture just before he rode off down toward Prophet’s Town with five other Miami warriors who were as excited as he was and wanted to see for themselves which path to take. The choice would affect their entire lives, they knew.

  The family missed Cupped Hair, and prayed for him every morning and night, this youth who had killed their child in drunken rage, but since replaced that son in their hearts.

  Maconakwa and Cut Finger were making buttons while there was still daylight, and they bent in concentration over their work. Maconakwa prayed while she worked, prayed silently that something would happen, or change, in time to prevent war from starting. She did not want any more land to be sold out from under the peoples. But neither did she want to feel the day-by-day dread of war again. She did not want Clipped Hair to go and die as a warrior, and especially did not want her daughter Cut Finger, or her yet unborn baby, to grow up, as she had, in fear and in flight from Town Destroyer armies. She prayed for something to change the course of this dangerous confrontation, if anything could.

  One thing not yet known was the heart of the new white men’s chief in Washington. For some reason Maconakwa did not understand, the one called Jefferson had been replaced by another man. It was not that Jefferson had died. The Long Knife council somehow had a way of replacing its chiefs now and then. The new one’s name, learned from Wells, was Madison. But no one knew what would be in his heart about the Indians. Maconakwa thought it would be well to pray that Madison liked Indian people.

  The bit of the drill made its little plunge as it pierced through the other side of the antler, hit soft wood underneath, and stopped twirling. She pulled the bit out of the hole and set the button in the basket of those for Cut Finger to smooth and polish. She tipped her head back, eyes closed, and tried to shrug the ache out of her tired shoulders. When she opened her eyes, a low-slanting sunbeam flashed in them through the leaves of the big trees. It would soon be time for the sun to set. How quickly the days passed when one was making things. This was a most beautiful time of day, when the trunks and limbs of the huge oaks and maples were reddened by the sinking sun. The voices of the people in the village drifted to her ears from all around, and she could smell meat cooking and even distinguish the different odors of the woods being burned in the cookfires. She could smell the mossy freshness of the rocks from which the springwater ran, and the mud of the riverbank. This was such a good place where her husband had made his village, and she thought how bad it would be ever to be forced to leave it.

  As if speaking directly into Creator’s ear, she whispered, “May there be peace, not a war,” and her whisper blended with the sound her daughter made rubbing a button on the stone. Her husband had lit a pipe bowl of kinnikinnick, with its rich good odors, and she could identify most of its ingredients, many of which she and Cut Finger had picked and foraged and dried for him—leaf tobacco, sumac leaf, willow bark—when the soft sounds of the evening were slammed through by a gunshot.

  Then a shrill, yipping howl sounded, like a coyote’s but in a human’s voice. Deaf Man might not have been able to hear the distant voice, but he had heard the shot, or felt it pulsate in the air. He dropped his pipe, snatched up his musket and powder horn, and, following the direction of Maconakwa’s pointing finger, sprinted down the riverbank edge of the village, calling for other men to come. Maconakwa and other women meanwhile gathered bundles and herded children toward safety in the other direction, thinking of soldiers, the baby’s mass swinging heavily in her as she hurried on.

  But it seemed strange that there had been only one gunshot, if soldiers were coming. And though the breeze was coming from that direction, there was not a hint of the noise or smell of an army: no rustle of men and horses moving through vegetation, no clink or rattle of arms, none of that stink of sweaty uniforms she knew so well from Fort Wayne.

  And no more shooting. She stopped, holding her daughter’s hand, looking back. She could hear voices back there, distant shouts, but their inflections were not like white men’s.

  She wondered then if it might be hostile warriors instead of soldiers. Old tribal grudges and hatreds had been stirred up by the tension between the Prophet’s aims and those of the government Indians. And Little Turtle’s last treaty signing had stirred the fury of Tecumseh’s followers, as well as the tribes who lived on the land lost by the treaty. Some might blame any and all Miamis for what Little Turtle had done, and come raiding.

  But still, there had been only the one gunshot, the one wild cry. She felt that this was no attack on the village, but something else. She turned Cut Finger into another woman’s care and slipped back along the river path into the village. The evening sun was down beyond the dark trees, the village under the canopy of tree-tops lay in a green gloom, the twilight air rich with wood smoke from the abandoned cookfires. Two dogs
trotted through the lanes between wikwams, looking for unguarded food. Slipping through the door of her own wikwam, she reached up and got Deaf Man’s war club, a heavy, crude weapon he had made from the trunk and root bole of an ironwood sapling; only the handle was smooth, carved to fit his grip and comfortable in her own large hand. The loop by which it had hung was a leather thong looped large for his hand to go through. She ducked back out through the door and went toward the sound of men’s voices. She heard her husband’s loud deaf-man voice and knew he was all right, but there was an unusual strain of anger in his tone. Then she saw them coming up the river path.

  Sundown had brought a wind that ruffled the surface of the river and started the trees swaying; twigs and nuts rained down and leaves turned underside up. In the distance a muttering and grumbling of thunder began.

  She saw that the men on the path were leading a horse, and then she saw that her husband was the man in front, and he was yanking a rope that was not the horse’s halter but was instead around the neck of a stumbling, staggering man whose arms were held by two village men. She stopped in the path, her heart clenching and jaw dropping open. It was Clipped Hair, and in his face was the stupid whiskey craziness.

  Deaf Man saw his wife and came toward her with wild eyes and hardened lips. “I was going for that,” he said to her, reaching for his war club. He took it from her without looking at her eyes or waiting for her to say a word or ask a question. He handed his musket to one of the warriors and gave the club a slight toss to shift his grip on the handle.

  Clipped Hair’s eyes were rolling and senseless. On the wind, Maconakwa smelled whiskey and old vomit odors off of him, and she remembered the first day she had seen him, and a heat like fire rose in her face. She said nothing as her husband dropped the rope with his left hand and with his right cocked back the ironwood club. With a grunt and a whipping sound and a wet thud, the left side of Clipped Hair’s skull was smashed in. He would not be their son Round One after all. Maconakwa’s fists clenched against her swollen belly and her eyes were squeezed shut on hot tears, and so she did not see his body go sideways and lifeless like a dead tree falling over.

  In the storm of lightning that came over that night, a giant sycamore tree in the village was shattered and split. In their wikwam Maconakwa’s husband sat wordless with a face like stone, but she saw by the lightning flashes that tears were trailing down the deep lines that curved out around his hard mouth. So much rain poured down all that night that by morning the blood from Clipped Hair’s execution had all been washed away off the river path.

  Wilkes-Barre

  Joseph Slocum raised his eyes after the eulogy for Will. He gazed at the brilliant red and gold foliage on the distant mountainsides above the curving Susquehanna and tried to find solace in their beauty, but the smell of the raw earth of his brother’s open grave brought such an upwelling of tears that the far panorama blurred in his sight, and the late-October chill made him shiver—either the chill of the northerly breeze, or simply the chilling sense of mortality in his own generation of Slocums.

  Three short years ago his mother had died right under his nose while he sat daydreaming. He had not been ready for that loss, but at least he had known she was old enough and sick enough that she might die, and so that had not been an utter surprise.

  But here, down in the gaping ground below, just in the prime of his life at forty-eight years, lay William Slocum, justice of the peace for Pittston Township, formerly sheriff of Luzerne County.

  Here lay William. After escaping from the Indians who had killed his father and grandfather, after travelling unarmed all over the frontier with his brothers looking for Frannie, after being sheriff for four years, after trekking right along through a hard and vigorous life limping because an Indian’s musket ball had shattered his heel bone—good, strong, durable, brave Will Slocum had suddenly done this astonishing thing: died. Died and left Sarah with their brood of nine children. Nine, suddenly all fatherless.

  Joseph took a deep breath of cold air and shuddered again.

  “I needed thee myself, Will,” he thought, looking down on the unvarnished wood coffin. “Needed thee to help me keep looking for Frannie.” Some of Will’s children around the grave had heard him murmuring and were looking at him with their sad eyes, making him realize he had spoken his thoughts aloud. He saw the children vaguely through a new wash of tears. Their dark wool clothes flapped in the wind and their noses were red.

  It was true that there could hardly be a worse time for Joseph to go to the frontier, even if he could leave his four little girls and a new law practice. Probably would get scalped certain, he thought. He had read, and heard from Friends’ Meeting, awful things about the territory lately: tame Indians siding off against the wild ones. Quaker missionaries and teachers being threatened. Government surveyors chased off by Indians. Spies all over. Witch hunts.

  Just this summer, said the gazettes, the Shawnee Prophet’s brother had visited Governor Harrison of the Indiana Territory, argued with him, called him a liar to his face, and threatened him with a raised tomahawk. Reports from Friends’ missions out there said that even some of Little Turtle’s Miamis had gone off to support the Shawnees’ confederation, defying the very chief who had defeated two American armies.

  To make it all worse, England and the United States were growling war at each other again. A War Hawk faction in Congress was clamoring for a Second War of Revolution against England, because the British were blockading American ships and inflaming Indian discontent in the Great Lakes. Joseph expected to be reading war news in every new gazette. There was even the safety of his sisters Mary and Judith and their families in Ohio to worry about now.

  Beside Will’s grave Joseph sighed and shook his head, and then the great lump came up in his throat and the tears again felt as if they were scalding his eyelids. It seemed as if all the awful sadness and folly and cruelty of man’s brief whirl on earth had come to his brother’s graveside to mock and torment him. He felt so useless. One tries to believe, he thought, in a higher and kinder sojourn in this life, but no matter how steady one’s Inner Light burns, it might as well be burning under a hat, for all it changes the mass of men bent on their misdeeds.

  Poor Frannie! Imagine what it must be like, he thought, to be living as an ignorant Indian woman in a hut, trying to feed and protect children, while armies are galloping all about, burning towns and crops.

  He had Will to thank for those images of soldiers ravaging the Indian towns up the river—this very brother Will, lying deep in the ground now—what horrors he had seen: soldiers, professed Christians, killing, scalping, skinning, raping.… Well, Will was on his way to a better world, far above such atrocities.

  Lord God, welcome my brother.

  And protect all my sisters in the West.

  Deaf Mans Village

  Deaf Man stooped and came into the birth hut, which was warm inside and dense with the damp odors of childbirth. The old midwives moved back to make room for him beside his wife. He placed himself so that he would not block the daylight from the door. It was a day of misty drizzle, with little brightness, and he wanted a good look at his new child, who lay quietly on Maconakwa’s bare bosom. Sticking on the dark, damp wool of Deaf Man’s blanket was a large, vivid yellow basswood leaf, which had fallen on him while he waited outside under the tree.

  He looked back and forth between the baby and mother, back and forth, nodding and smiling, and occasionally would shake his head from side to side and chuckle. Finally he said, “Newewah! My wife, you do not even look tired!”

  “This one gave me no work to do. She fell from me like that autumn leaf on you.” He was trying to read her lips because she could not sign and hold the baby. But he saw her look at the leaf, and he looked down and noticed it, and picked it off and held the bright, heart-shaped leaf by its stem. It was beautiful with the light shining through.

  “Ozahshingkwa, eh,” he said. “Yellow leaf that fell easily. E heh.”

&n
bsp; She was wondering whether it was the infusion of black-cherry bark that had made it so easy. The midwife had said it would. But surely not that alone would make it so easy, she thought.

  “Ozahshingkwa,” he repeated. “This is the sign. Yellow Leaf. A good name.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  December 16, 1811

  Deaf Man’s Village on the Mississinewa

  Maconakwa awoke in the middle of the night from a muddle of troubling dreams—towns burning, Indian men and women bleeding from bullet wounds, lights bursting in the night skies, horses and deer falling down, floodwaters rushing. She lay with her heart racing and tried to remember images she had seen in the dreams, to sort them out so she might understand what they meant. In the dreams, so many things had been happening in heaven and earth, so many different journeys, so many stories, perhaps not connected to each other, that it seemed she must have been dreaming for hours. She remembered a white man talking to her in one of the early parts of the dream, telling her she should go home to their people, and she thought that must mean the Quakers. She remembered seeing a basket woven in the shape of a man. She knew what that was; the Shawnee Prophet had had an effigy of himself made and blessed it with his own sacred powers so it could be carried to one village while he went to another, so his holy presence could reach more people than he could alone. In the dream that effigy had burst into flame; the picture of that in her memory was so vivid it crowded out other images she was trying to remember. The effigy had caught fire in other dreams she had had in the past moon. She thought she knew why: the real effigy probably had burned up last moon, when a Long Knife army burned the Prophet’s Town.