Maconakwa smiled wearily, nodded, puffed the fragrant smoke, and gave the pipe back to Acorn Top. She remembered having thought, now and then, that she would be swept away helpless as a leaf on the wind unless she set her own will to stand steady and choose what to do and how to hold on. She remembered that she and Minnow had talked of such things. She reminded herself to pray for Minnow’s safety in this, she who had lost still another husband. She would go to Metosinah’s Town as soon as she could and see how the people were up there, Minnow in particular.
“Thank you for your kind words, Grandmother. I am honored by your esteem.”
“E heh. I would like to fill your heart with strength. You will need it. The stars in the sky and the animals in the woods are troubled; you have seen that. And Mother Turtle herself is restless. I think she is not settled even yet. I feel it.”
Maconakwa pressed the soles of her bare feet to the ground. The earth felt solid, as solid as ever. She remembered when she had stood on high ground long ago on a cliff above Great Falling Water, and was afraid to stand up because of the trembling ground. So long ago! But the earth felt solid and still now, as it should be; it was like the day after the Prophet had made the sun darken at midday. We get used to the sun being bright at midday, the earth being still, she thought. They almost always are. May there be no more disturbances like those. May Mother Turtle sleep quiet the rest of my lifetime.
But the old woman was right. Three more great shudders occurred in the next two moons, the last as violent as the first had been.
Warriors who believed that the quaking earth was Tecumseh’s sign went to the Prophet’s Town, which was being rebuilt from ashes. Tecumseh had stood among those ashes and sworn vengeance against Harrison, the general who had burned the holy town. A thousand warriors of many tribes were going to join him. Now, the time for war was here, as they had feared it would be. If Open Door had made the sun go dark to mock the general called Harrison, that general had made the earth shake by burning the holy town. Once again the white nations would be at war, as they had been all through Maconakwa’s childhood, and once again the red nations would be in between them, dying on one side or the other. Tecumseh would be on the British side—not because he had faith in them, Deaf Man told her, but because they were against the Americans.
“As for me,” he said, “I will stay here and be glad for whatever the bluecoats and the Redcoats do to each other, and for whatever Tecumseh can do to keep us from losing more land. I will pray that no Miami warriors shall die between the armies.”
“Husband, I am pleased that you say you have no war to fight.”
“At Spring Council most of the talk will be of war,” he said. “As I have told you many times, I am an old deaf man, not fit to be a warrior anymore.” He looked so morose saying it that she smiled and made eyes at him.
“Old?” she teased. “I know a part of you that never acts old.”
“Ah hm! That is because there is a part of you that keeps that part of me from getting old!”
That night when the fire was low and their daughters were asleep, and they were quietly beginning to keep each other’s parts young, she prayed that the Great Turtle would not shake the earth again—at least until they were through.
It was a good time of the moon for this. She was nearing forty summers of age now, and had two girls but no boy. She hoped to give Deaf Man a son, before she was too old. She had put the names of her dead sons out of her mind so that her heart could go on in happiness, but she went out sometimes to the mounded place where their little graves were and sat there.
It was true that war was imminent and this was not supposed to be a good time to create another baby. But one would be foolish not to have the joys of life and love just because of what angry men in governments far away were doing.
Barefoot on the grass, wearing only the ceremonial loincloth, Maconakwa gripped the hoop in her right hand, looked up at the top of the pole twenty feet high against the clean blue sky, and prayed, Kiji Moneto, see me throw this hoop over the pole so that it will truly happen, and we will have your permission to do our Bread Dance and honor you in the Great House.
The hoop was made of grapevine wrapped in hide, and it seemed to vibrate in her hand. In her mind she envisioned it flying up from her hand, rotating in the air, pausing at the tip of the erect pole, then coming down encircling the pole, and she sent that vision up to the Creator so that he would see it that way. The ceremony could not begin until someone succeeded in encircling the pole with the hoop. She could feel the hopes of the hundreds of people all pouring into her; they too were envisioning the hoop encircling the pole. Everyone wanted the ceremony, because a failure to observe the sacred Bread Dance would cause the People unimaginable troubles. And yet sometimes it seemed that Creator himself was not going to let them proceed. This was beginning to seem like one of those times. So far more than fifty men and women had thrown the hoop at the top of the slender pole, each being cheered and encouraged, but each time the hoop had fallen short or gone too high over, or hit the pole and bounced off. And each time another person had been chosen from the crowd ringing the field, and had gone cheerfully to try to throw the hoop onto the pole. It was like an athletic skill, but it was a wordless prayer for permission to start the important Bread Dance Ceremony. Seldom had Maconakwa had an opportunity to throw the hoop, and the two or three years she had, she missed badly or the hoop glanced off the pole.
It seemed a great responsibility. She felt an awful certainty that if she missed, everyone else would keep missing, and there would be no ceremony. Probably everybody else felt that urgency, but she had a heavy, powerful anxiety about it. And so she touched the edge of the hoop to her forehead with her eyes shut and prayed to the Creator to let her do it, and then she stepped forward and touched the base of the pole with the hoop, as she had seen a few others do. Then she stepped back three paces, moving the hoop in her right hand and staring up at the distant tip of the pole, hearing many people calling, “Do it well, Maconakwa!” and “Hai ai ai, Little Bear Woman!” She could hear Deaf Man’s voice, and Cut Finger’s, both very loud.
Half stooping, sweat beginning to trickle on her bare breasts, she extended the hoop back behind her right hip, stared at the tip of the pole, leaped off the ground, and flung the hoop skyward.
At the instant it left her hand, spinning upward like a rising wheel, she saw a redtail hawk crossing the sky high above the pole. Then with a pounding heart she saw the hoop do what she had envisioned: rotating, it slowed in its ascent, paused, tilted; the inside of the hoop made a small hard sound as it hit the top of the pole, and then the hoop fell wobbling and jouncing down the pole, and even before it hit the ground the crowd was howling and yipping and clapping. She clapped her palms to her cheeks and laughed with tears in her eyes, her heart swollen with thanks, and feeling not proud but joyously humble.
The hawk: she should have known when she saw the hawk, because whoever got the hoop around the pole was awarded a hawk feather for enabling the ceremony to proceed.
She went through the ceremony almost in a trance, calm at heart even though she knew the Council afterward would be mostly of war. The women at the blessing stations around the Great House honored her with warm smiles and kind voices, and hugged her tightly as she paused at each station, because she had thrown the hoop toss that made this beautiful ceremony possible. In their turn they put into her mouth a strawberry, representing thankfulness for the season’s first fruit; corn bread, representing the women’s crop-raising; meat, representing the men’s hunting; sassafras tea sweetened with maple sugar, representing the blessings of the forest trees. When she stepped in the ashes and the mud, they murmured to her their meanings, of departed ancestors and Mother Earth, and told her to take a little of the mud from her toes and roll it into a tiny clay ball to be carried in her medicine bag. All these comforting rituals and words she knew by heart, from her years among the People. The vermilion dots were painted on her cheekbones, water
sprinkled on her sun-hot shoulders, ashes dusted along her arms and brushed by a woman wielding a hawk’s wing. The line of tribespeople moved slow and soft-voiced through these and all the other sacred stations, while the heartbeat drum thudded solemnly and cedar smoke from the ceremonial fire drifted in the sunbeams that leaned into the roofless Great House.
Then she reached the pipe bearer and received from him the beautiful, carved calumet pipe, and as she turned and blew prayer smoke to the six directions, she whispered the words of thanks for all of the world’s continuing blessings that came in their seasons, finally and in particular thanking Mother Corn for the surviving seeds that would allow another year of planting to be done. In this ceremony the measureless gratitude of the People was like a richer air to walk through and breathe, and the ageless yearning for peace kept her from thinking of the war matters that would consume the Council after the ceremony and feast.
But last in the ceremony was the secret gesture by which one could vow to give one’s life in defense of the People, a gesture one could choose to make or not make, and women could forgo without dishonor.
Her heart was swollen with love for the People, and she did the secret gesture, remembering Neepah, thinking of Minnow.
“Look at Sakima,” Minnow whispered to Maconakwa as the Spring Council began. “His fine wapsi clothes cannot hide that he is sick.”
Maconakwa could see even at this distance and over the crowd that Little Turtle was indeed gray-faced and pain-bitten, and she wondered if this might be his last Council. Yellow Leaf suckled while her mother studied the old warrior chief with both pity and resentment.
Under a huge shade arbor, several hundred people sat and stood; others watched and listened in the shade of trees nearby. This Council Ground was in a narrow, beautiful lowland below Osage’s Town, near the mouth of the Mississinewa Sipu. Upstream, the cliff called the Seven White Holy Pillars gleamed amid the green spring foliage of the river bluff; downstream the river flowed into the wide, hazy valley of the Wabash Sipu. To the north across the Mississinewa’s mouth rose the roofs of the trading post of Godfroy. It was a wide, sunny, serene place, and the good spirit of yesterday’s ceremony still glowed in Maconakwa’s bosom, and she wanted to resist the bad feelings that the factions would certainly bring forth in the Council. The people had come from their villages, full of anger about Little Turtle signing treaties and Harrison’s invasion of Prophet’s Town, mystified by the flying star and the earthquake.
Minnow was among the many who believed those were signs to join Tecumseh and make war. “See how our old tame sakima keeps a traitor on each hand,” she hissed. She meant William Wells and Five Medals, the Potawatomi chief. “This ground we sit on at this moment they may have sold to Harrison already. See the wapsi gift he treasures more than his own People,” Minnow went on, voice full of contempt. Maconakwa knew she was talking about the sword that Little Turtle had been given by Washington, first Great Chief of the Long Knives, who was dead now. “He is actually proud to wear such a thing!” Minnow muttered. Sometimes it did seem, even to Maconakwa’s tolerant mind, that he should be ashamed of it instead. But again she wished that Minnow would soften her tongue, because to many in this crowd, Little Turtle was still revered as sakima.
Maconakwa noticed that Wild Potato Wells had some gray in his red hair, as she did. It was said he had been replaced as the Indian agent at Fort Wayne for some reason reflecting upon his honesty, though he remained as a sort of judge, and still influenced Little Turtle as much as before. As always, the sight of this man troubled her. It had been so many years—eighteen or twenty, she could not remember exactly—since the day she had seen Wild Potato in a boat and almost called out to him to take her into the white people’s world. To remember that moment still shamed her a little. And even though Wells had never known of it, it still troubled her to look at that strange man.
Here at Council were many Miamis whose blood was mixed with French, who had French names. The French, she knew, had lived and traded along the Wabash Sipu long before the English or Americans came. Near Little Turtle sat Peshewa, Wildcat Richardville, whose mother was a sister of Little Turtle. Wildcat had long ago proven himself a brave warrior for the Miami, but had been one of the chiefs who with Little Turtle had signed the Wayne treaty and many others since. He was well-liked by the Long Knives and had grown wealthy with special gifts and money from signing treaties with them, as well as from his trading posts.
Near Richardville under the shade arbor sat another important mixed-blood whose father had been French. This man was about Maconakwa’s age or a little younger, a man of huge frame, with a broad, dark face and large eyes. He was important to this Council because he had become the Nation’s war chief, and war would be this Council’s strongest concern. He was known by two names, Palonswah and Godfroy, and was a trader as well as a warrior. After this Council he would be required to lead the warriors of the Miami Nation to war with the Long Knives against the British, or with the British against the Long Knives, or to keep them from racing off to either side if the Council voted to take neither side in the coming war between bluecoats and Redcoats.
She liked Palonswah; he was a good-humored and wise man and a good friend of Deaf Man, whose advice he often sought. Once when he visited Deaf Man, Maconakwa had asked him what “Palonswah” meant, for she had never heard that word in the Miami tongue. Laughing, he replied that it was the way they pronounced his French first name, which was François. And that had brought back from her memory the way Neepah so long ago had pronounced her wapsi name: Palanshess. She remembered her white girl name, which she had forgotten. Frances.
She wondered sometimes how many generations would pass before there would be no Indians left, just mixtures of tribal bloods and white people’s. She remembered the Prophet’s warning against marrying white people.
“That pretty man in a blue coat,” Minnow said, nudging her, “is another French-blood not to be trusted. He is a Harrison spy from Vincennes.”
Maconakwa recognized the man. He was less grave and more elegant than the others, dressed with a ruffled shirt and a silk turban of many shimmering colors. “Yes,” she said. “Brouillette. I know of him.” She had seen him at Prophet’s Town the day the sun went dark, and at Fort Wayne in the years since. He was a trader, but also a carrier of messages between Fort Wayne and the fort at Vincennes far down the Wabash Sipu. He was suspected of being an important spy for Harrison. But then, almost every half-blood was suspected of that, and for good reason.
“Watch your daughter,” Minnow now whispered with a sly smirk. “She seems to have eyes for Brouillette’s son.”
Maconakwa had already noticed that. Cut Finger had been stealing long looks at the handsome boy, who was perhaps sixteen years of age, and the boy seemed to have noticed her interest. Maconakwa had been observing them with amusement and some anxiety for a while, and saw that whenever the boy caught Cut Finger looking at him, she ducked her head and visibly squirmed—but even then it would be but a few moments before she was looking at him again.
It was no wonder. The boy was beautifully handsome, even more than her own first husband, Like Wood, had been. Slender and elegant like Brouillette, he looked more Indian than French, with black, glittering eyes, and a lean, sculptured jaw overset by massive cheekbones; and his shoulder-length hair was so thick it made him appear even taller than he was. The youth had a proud, straight way of standing, but there was a lively merriment in his face that kept him from looking as severe as warrior-age boys usually tried to look.
The eye-play between the two made Maconakwa sigh with the realization that any time now Cut Finger would be having her first moon-blood, and, as pretty as she was, probably would be getting married before too many more years went by. She remembered for a moment her own first moon, and the vision she had had, in which the small female bear had come to her and given her the name she now bore.
Once begun, the Council covered every part of Miami life. The old arguments c
ame up about spirit water, about selling one place or another to white men, about how the white men’s goods and manners were disturbing and changing the sacred beliefs and even the ceremonies. As the afternoon sun moved over to stand above the bluffs, Maconakwa listened to everything, because the decisions and choices made in Council would affect the lives of her children, and even all the Miami children as yet unborn, and she was in the center of these people, one part of them, as an eyelash or a drop of blood is a part of someone. She watched her daughter and the Brouillette boy and mused upon their possible futures.
When Yellow Leaf stopped nursing, Maconakwa got up and carried her to a shady place where grandmothers were tending children, and Acorn Top took Yellow Leaf in her arms, smiling up. Maconakwa returned to her place beside Minnow while Little Turtle was trying to persuade the people to come to the fort’s white doctor and get scratched with a medicine knife, to protect against the terrible wapsi disease called smallpox. He had let them do it to him, and claimed that he was now safe from the disease. Minnow snorted and said, “If a wapsi medicine man scratched me with his knife, I would at once cut his underpart off!”
Maconakwa shook her head. She turned to Cut Finger, saying, “Your baby sister is with the grandmothers over there. When you have had enough of gazing at that boy, go help—”
“Ningeah!” She tried to look indignant, but flushed and smiled. “I shall, Ningeah …”
Suddenly there was a stirring in the crowd, an excited drone of voices. The chiefs under the arbor had straightened up, some rising to stand even while Little Turtle was standing, and then they all looked off to the south. The attention of the crowd followed, and their many voices rose in excitement. She heard some exclaim, “Tecumseh!” and stood. Minnow gripped her arm; her eyes were blazing.
The Red Heart Page 52