Minnow’s third husband had been killed in a battle with that army.
Maconakwa held her sleeping baby close and worried about the dangers. The war was starting up again indeed. Although the blame for it went both ways, depending on who was telling of it, the governor-chief called Harrison seemed to have been the one to start it because he had brought soldiers into lands he hadn’t even made a treaty for—land where he didn’t even have an excuse to be. He had invaded while the warrior chief Tecumseh was far away in the south, and while only a few hundred people were in the Prophet’s Town following a great sickness, some white men’s disease that had killed so many people in the town that doubts were raised about the Prophet’s medicine powers. Many people who talked about the battle said that Harrison had proven himself a coward by striking only when he knew Tecumseh was gone. Others said that if he was a coward, how had he fought so bravely in that battle, always in sight on a big horse, when the bullets and arrows were flying so thick that they tore the bark off trees in the woods? Yes, warriors who had fought against Harrison in that battle were now scattered in villages all up and down the Wabash Sipu and its tributaries, staying low, telling their stories about how well the Long Knives had fought, waiting for their war chief Tecumseh to come back from the south and tell them what they should do now.
Many believed they saw the great war sign that he had promised would come when it was time to go to war against the Long Knives. A bright two-tailed flying star was in the sky night after night. Tecumseh was named for having been born under a flying star, and he had predicted that the war sign would be one that could be seen everywhere. Now everyone could see the strange flying star, and when he returned from the south, they would rejoin with him to help push all the whites out of the country.
People were now as sure of Tecumseh’s power as they had been sure of the Prophet’s power six summers ago when he made the sun go dark. The Prophet’s own power was in doubt now—not only his medicine power—because he had promised that the Great Spirit would protect the holy town from destruction, and the warriors from white men’s bullets. But few doubted Tecumseh’s war sign, the two-tailed star.
Maconakwa held her baby, breathed the cold night air and the skin and breath smells of her sleeping family, and lay in the dark worrying about the return of war after such a long peace.
Now that there had been a real invasion by a white army, many warriors were hot for war. Even neutral Miamis, even people who had been taught by the Quaker men at the school farm, were ready to turn their backs on Little Turtle and Wells and join Tecumseh when he came back. Her own husband had not yet made any such talk. When the survivors of the Prophet’s Town battle talked with him, he usually just said he was too deaf to be of much use on either side. But how easily he had killed Clipped Hair! She shivered.
He was lying beside her now, breathing in that way that told her he was deep in sleep. That meant she would have to be the one to rise, leave the baby, fix the fire. It was a cold night and the fire had burned far down during her long dreams. She knew she ought to get up and fuel the fire before even the embers went cold. She could tell by the stars out beyond the smoke hole that it was not much past the middle of the night, far too early to expect those embers to last till morning. It was hard to believe she could have had such a long succession of dreams just between bedtime and midnight. In the wikwam it was almost pitch-black, and the night air on her face was so cold and dank that she shivered at the mere thought of getting out from the covers. The dreams had left her with a strange feeling of dread, as if something terrible were about to happen. She had a feeling that some strange power might have been let loose by the destruction of the holy town, where so many thousands of people had prayed so powerfully for years.
Perhaps, she had been thinking, that star moving through the skies was a sign not only for the warriors to go to war, but also, or instead, a last message from the Creator to all Indian people, women and children as well as warriors, telling them all to believe what the Prophet had been told.
She knew of many things the Creator had told Open Door that she and most people had not done. They had been told not to trade with the white men, and to stop using metal things made by the white men, and to stop getting spirit water, and even to destroy their personal medicine bags. But she still traded buttons and other things she and her daughter could make, for metal needles and awls and tools, which she used. And like most of the people she knew, she had been outraged by the order to destroy her medicine bag. Neepah had made it for her, and it contained not just the seeds of the Three Sacred Sisters, but other tiny things that had come to her in sacred ways from ceremonies and from living, such as a dried fragment from the umbilical cord of Cut Finger, and that of Round One, and now Yellow Leaf’s cord was in it also.
She sighed. Now her mind was too wakeful and busy to go back and try to review the dreams; the images were vanishing one by one before her conscious thoughts, before the necessity of getting out into the cold room and building up the fire. And she could feel that she would need to pass water soon; she sighed and began to stir.
As long as she could remember, she had hated to get up in the cold.
She was just easing the baby down in the warmth beside Deaf Man when she heard an odd, whispery sound from outside the wikwam, and paused to listen.
Something, or perhaps many things, seemed to be passing swiftly along the ground outside. It was an unearthly sound, like small animals running and whimpering, yet at the same time seeming full of wordless messages, as if messenger spirits were rushing through the village, or a spirit wind when there was no other wind. She came out in gooseflesh all over.
The noise passed. But now in the distance she heard owls—not just one or two, as were usually heard, but as if all the different kinds of meedagaws in the woods in every direction were muttering to each other in their various voices. That was frightening, because to most of the peoples, the owl was a death messenger. Then there was silence. She listened for a moment, then slipped out of the bed, lifting an old woolen trading-store blanket off the top to wrap around her chilled nakedness, and groped in the dark for the heap of kindling wood that was in a recess by the foot of Cut Finger’s bed. As she knelt by the slightly warm fire pit with a handful of dry twigs and bark fibers, she thought she heard wing beats everywhere outside, passing over, and twitterings.
Birds do not fly at night, she thought. Except meedagaws. And their wings are silent!
For many moons, since the springtime, there had been so many strange things in the earth and the waters and the heavens: countless thousands of squirrels rushing through the treetops southward toward the O-hi-o Sipu … endless rains and floods in the springtime, with no sun ever appearing. The two-tailed flying star. Perhaps all these were the signs long prophesied by Tecumseh and the Prophet.
Some people blamed the strange signs on the disturbance caused by a white men’s boat as big as a council lodge that had passed down the O-hi-o Sipu, without sails or oars, rumbling loudly and giving off more smoke than a grass fire. The description of it had been told everywhere. Such a thing surely would have disturbed the balance and serenity of Mother Earth, and people everywhere worried and had dreams about it.
Maconakwa hoped to find comfort in rebuilding the fire in her lodge. Fire was a good, heartening spirit. On elbows and knees, shivering, she blew on an ember and crumbled tinder over it until smoke poured off and then a flame the size of a thumb leaped up, brightening the whole interior of the little lodge. Just the sight of it warmed her heart, even though her face and hands and feet were still icy. She laid on little sticks and then bigger ones as the yellow flames spread and climbed, crackling and fluttering and sparking. As the heat rose toward the smoke hole it carried the smoke up and out. She knelt, sitting on her heels, and turned her frigid hands this way and that over the flames to warm them. For the while she was absorbed in the marvel of fire, remembering how Tuck Horse had called fire a living thing that moves and grows and eats a
nd helps people, and how it would, sometimes, like the bad in people, go out of control and destroy and harm other kinds of life. It was said that great evil boat had a fire in its belly that made it go. That could not be good!
Putting larger chunks of wood on until the blaze was lively and its bright heat began to push outward and fill the space of the room, Maconakwa glanced at her husband, daughter, and baby, whose faces were still closed in sleep. Standing up, at the very edge of the fire ring, she held the blanket open and let it fill with the wonderful dry heat. She quit shivering as the heated air enveloped her nakedness and flowed up toward the bent-pole ceiling where her dried herbs and strings of beans and bundles of sassafras root hung, so fragrant. The heated air was hottest and smokiest there under the ceiling, and she was having to squint to protect her eyes while her body warmed up. Far off in the night she heard wolves starting to wail and soon heard many wing beats again, and despite the bright comfort of the fire, she felt troubled once more; this was not the time of night when wolves sang or birds flew. Opening her eyes and looking up at the smoke pouring out through the smoke hole, she reached for a bundle of tobacco leaves hanging near her head. With one hand holding the blanket at her neck, she crumbled some of the brittle brown leaf into her palm and knelt to sift it into the fire, so its smoke would carry heavenward the prayer she was forming in her soul, a prayer for peace and safety and understanding.
The wing beats were coming again, but they were drowned out by a rumbling that swelled quickly to thundering. The ground shuddered. She was rolled off balance. As she fell she saw the embers and flaming sticks of the fire leap and swirl, and the air was filled with sparks. She landed in the fire pit, gasping, but was immediately tumbled back out of it. Even as a scream tore out of her throat she thought that her wikwam had been hit by a shot from a Long Knife cannon. Everything was lurching, tumbling; the things hanging from the ceiling swayed violently, flew loose, fell, bounced, caught fire. The very earth of the floor was bucking like an untamed horse, and she, and her husband and daughter, all of them naked in the blizzard of sparks, mouths gaping and eyes wild with panic, tumbled about, unable to rise even onto their knees because of the trembling, tilting, side-slipping earth beneath them. Deaf Man and Cut Finger, hurled straight from deep slumber into this chaos, were crying out, but their words could not be heard over the rumbling, which went on and on. This could not be just a cannon shot, she thought. Turtle Island itself seemed to be shaking apart.
The old wikwam, dry, ground-rotted, and fragile after so many years as their home, was falling in bit by bit with every shudder of the earth; the mats and bark and thatch with which the dome-shaped house was walled and insulated were crumbling and coming loose from the arched-pole frame and falling inside all over the floor. Pieces ignited in the fire ring, and the flames spread. Sparks swirled up against the sooty ceiling.
Unable to stand or even crouch, Maconakwa grabbed for Yellow Leaf, gathered her in one arm, and tried to creep over the quaking floor and drag her out of the firestorm. Sparks and brands were raining on every part of her, burning and stinging like a flurry of wasp stings, and she smelled hair burning. She wasn’t sure where the doorway was, and she knew not what terrors would meet them outside if they did get out.
But now the roof of the wikwam was catching fire and raining flaming debris down, and they would be cooked alive if they did not escape. Through a flaring blaze she saw Cut Finger crawling like a lizard, shrieking.
And at the same time that fire was spilling down, cold water was coming up, oozing and welling all muddy and bubbly from the earth under her hands and hips, stinking like fish and decay. As she crept forward still clutching her baby, finding at last what seemed to be the doorway, a hissing rush of cold water came spreading over the dark ground as if the river had overflowed its banks; it sloshed over her face and shoulders as though trying to wash her back inside.
Outdoors it was dark and cold, but not dark enough to obscure what appeared to be the collapse of the world. As she pulled her baby clear of the flaming lodge and saw her daughter and then her husband slithering through the swirling water, another wave of river water washed around her, quenching the pain of the many burns all over her body but momentarily blinding her again. Blinking and squinting and gasping, she glanced quickly around for someplace to go. Her heart quaked at the sight.
Water, full of debris and reflecting the fires and sparks of other burning wikwams, was rushing everywhere she could see, shallow but swift, now running one way, then washing back the other way.
She could see silhouettes of people crawling. Sycamore and cottonwood trees leaned slowly over, roots coming up; a big one was toppling toward a row of wikwams near the river’s edge. People and dogs and animals, even wild animals—she glimpsed a deer and a raccoon—were floundering and sprawling, trying to get up, eyes panicky. Big birds were flying over. The air was full of smoke and steam as burning wikwams collapsed in the water. Some cabins built in the white man’s way had already been shaken down, though they were not on fire.
Maconakwa lay stunned. She pulled and hugged her baby girl and Cut Finger close, looking for Deaf Man. He was just behind her, spraddled on hands and knees, silhouetted against the pyre of flame that their wikwam had become; he was looking back at it as if thinking of the things in there they would be needing when this ended, if it ended. She too thought of those things—the gun, the knives, tools, seeds, and garments necessary for even the barest sort of living. Foremost in her whole mind and soul was the knowledge that they had escaped being burned to death—but could yet freeze or starve or be killed by falling things, or drowned. Nearby villages too would be gone.…
And the great unworded question: What was this? Was this the consequence of the destruction of the holy town? Or of the evil fire boat? Was this Tecumseh’s great signal that all men were to see?
In powerful storms, of which she had seen many, the skies were wild and turbulent with lightning and wind and racing clouds, only the earth underfoot still and solid. Now the earth was unstable and rumbling like clouds of a thunderstorm, while the sky stood still and clear overhead, the stars fixed, the two-tailed sign star still visible above the horizon. It was an upside-down storm. Who had ever seen an upside-down storm?
If this was a sign, a sign so terrible must foretell an enormous misfortune. She shuddered with fear, and then the tears came.
As is often so, it was the elders who brought calm and eased the fear. The old ones had felt the earth tremble before—though not so violently as this—and it had not ended the world. A white-haired grandmother called Acorn Top showed up in front of Deaf Man’s burned wikwam as soon as the ground was steady enough to walk on, and she had a blanket to wrap around the naked Maconakwa and her baby Yellow Leaf, whom she as a midwife had helped birth.
“Remember,” she said, “the land rests upon the back of the Great Turtle—and she is not a dead turtle, but one who needs to move, as anyone needs to move who lies still a long time.”
When the earth was still and the waters had drained back into the river, Deaf Man and the old men prowled by firelight and torchlight in the cold mud and wreckage, gathering all the hurt people and bringing them to a bonfire where the old women salved their burns and soothed the terrified children. The elders kept bringing blankets and hides to bundle up the little ones against the winter night.
Maconakwa, with no clothes, found cord to belt the blanket around herself like a dress, and went to work making a bark splint for a boy’s broken arm, trudging on numbed feet and kneeling in the icy mud, her spark burns hurting terribly with the blanket wool rubbing them. She worked with one hurt person after another, and the old ones’ working with her inspired her, reminding her of her old Lenapeh mother Flicker, who had knelt on aching knees all night saving the life of The Awl. Cut Finger huddled near the bonfire with her baby sister Yellow Leaf and rocked her to sleep in her arms. Gradually the calm helpfulness of the old ones worked its way down through the tribe’s other women, and dow
n even to the children, who stopped whining and squalling and began bringing firewood, and water in pots for medicine tea, and taking charge of the smaller ones. Pain and fatigue and cold became things really not that important; the needs of the others made it all easier to endure.
By morning light they saw that most of the damage to houses had been from fires and falling trees. No house frames had actually been shaken apart, though the bark siding had fallen off several of the older wikwams. One cabin built the white man’s way had been damaged by the collapse of its heavy stick-and-clay chimney.
Acorn Top and three old widows brought in moccasins and clothes and skins they had salvaged from the mud and cleaned up. Then Maconakwa directed the saving of the food cached in pits, so the water in the ground wouldn’t ruin it. In the afternoon it was all being smoked and dried, when Maconakwa at last looked around and saw nothing else urgent she had to set a hand to. Suddenly such a weight of fatigue crushed her that she thought she must fall and die. But it was just then that she heard old Acorn Top’s voice croak behind her, telling someone:
“This wife of our sakima! Eh! She deserves a feather!”
Maconakwa encouraged the town’s adults to repair and rebuild shelters and wikwams at once, while the sun was out and the air was dry, before hard cold and snow returned. Everyone in the village was busy. There was no time to moan and whine.
Old Acorn Top kept working near Maconakwa, and when she sat to rest, the old woman would light a pipe of kinnikinnick and make her share it with her. And the old woman would give her suggestions on what could be done next. It was like having old Flicker back, a kahesana to amaze her with the endurance of the elders. Once again the old one heartened her by saying, “When bad things happen without warning, people need to be led to do what they know they should do, but don’t think to do because they think Creator is angry. You are right-thinking, and you make them get busy.”
The Red Heart Page 51