The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  It was all over. The last free war chief was dead.

  “Such trouble that man Tecumseh caused us by his life,” Deaf Man said, drawing on his personal smoking pipe and gazing into the cookfire of their newly built lodge.

  Most of what Maconakwa had to cook she had gathered from the woods and marshes. Boiling in the pot were roots and acorn meal and fish. She said nothing. She could tell by the look in her husband’s eyes that he had things to say.

  He went on: “When you found me dying by the Maumee Sipu, you remember, I was still a warrior in my heart. I count almost twenty winters since that day. You are a good wife, Little Bear Woman. You kept me alive then and you have made me content in my heart all the time since then.

  “I have been more a husband than a warrior. I have done few of the deeds of a warrior in those long years. But in my heart I was a warrior. You saw that when the soldiers came in the cold, I went and fought them.”

  She nodded. She stirred in the pot with a wooden spoon. She looked at her sleeping daughters.

  He said to her: “Hold on to my hand as I tell you this.”

  Surprised, she put the spoon in the pot and reached for his hand. He had narrowed his lips and was gazing at the far side of the lodge. His chin was quivering and his eyes were glinting. He took a deep breath through his nostrils and clenched his jaws and blinked. He said:

  “As long as Tecumseh lived, I was a warrior in my heart and we had not yet been defeated. Now I am just an old deaf man. As a husband and a father only, I will keep doing my best, in whatever world the white men choose to leave us. Little Bear Woman, I am glad the white men never took you away.”

  She squeezed his hand in acknowledgment of such rare sentiment. Now with his pipe stem sweeping, he indicated the four winds and the arc of sky overhead. “Wherever the rivers went, we could go. Where the deer were, we could hunt them. From a hilltop we could look all around, and hear the Master of Life say, ‘My Children, go wherever you please, and live long and live well, and be free.’

  “But now the white man says, ‘There is a line on the earth. Do not step across it because this land is mine.’ And the lines grow closer and tighter. We are penned in. Soon the lines will cross our graves, and one white man will own our head bones and another will own the bones of our feet.

  “Newewah, my wife, listen: Only the wind in the sky remains free. Soon a time will come when our spirits may mount the wind, and go through treetops, over water waves, into clouds.

  “Then, Newewah, we will be free of those earth lines as Creator made us to be. I doubt if even Long Knife can draw lines to divide the wind.” He looked down at their joined hands, stroking his thumb over the end of the finger that had no nail. “All I hear in my head is like the wind. When we ride it, Newewah, we must keep our hands gripping like this. So we will not become lost from each other in that wind.”

  “E heh, Nenawpamah,” she replied. “Yes, my husband. That we must.”

  He had put aside his little clay pipe, and now he drew his long prayer pipe out from its leather cover, fitted the stem into the bowl, and filled it, saying: “Newewah, now let us smoke together.”

  “Yes, husband. We will send some smoke into the wind.”

  PART FOUR

  Old Maconakwa

  1837–1847

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  July 1837

  Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania

  “Here it is, Judge Slocum,” said the postmaster, handing across the counter a thickly stuffed packet. “It’s from Reverend Bowman, down at Lancaster.”

  “Ah!” exclaimed Joseph. “Sam Bowman. Remember him? Grew up just down the street there. Big temperance fellow in the Episcopal Church now. No doubt sending me more readings on the evil of drink. Well, now, what else has thee for me?”

  “Mostly just journals, it looks like. Here.”

  “Thank thee, and good day.”

  “Beautiful day. Wish I could leave this office and go fishing, day like this!”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Joseph said, pausing with his hand on the door. “I think the canal has just about ruined the fishing along this stretch of the river. I can remember how it used to be. And I do miss shad roe. The price of progress, I suppose.”

  “True enough, Judge. But even poor fishing beats the best day in the post office.”

  Chuckling, Joseph Slocum turned right and walked on Market Street toward the square. The market, Old Ship Zion Meetinghouse, and the courthouse loomed among the great shade trees. The city had been laid out with streets parallel to the riverbank, but the square had been set in like a diamond, at a forty-five-degree angle to all the other streets, which created a striking, angled commons in the heart of town. As he walked past the old Bowman house and angled down the west side of the square, his own grand three-story home, the first brick house finished in the town, came into view beyond the Meetinghouse. Three decades he had dwelt in that house with his wife Sarah, and they had raised five daughters and two sons. Only the youngest daughter, Harriet, now going on eighteen, still lived at home. His oldest daughter, Hannah, the wife of a state legislator, lived across the square. All the other children were married into good families, and Joseph Slocum himself, just past his sixtieth birthday now, loved this old town center, having seen every bit of its development. The courthouse just across the street from his house stood where the old pine-log stockade of Fort Wilkes-Barre had been when his sister Frances was kidnapped by warriors. Though now in the practice of law, Joseph still had the muscular solidity built on him in his early years as a blacksmith and farmer, and felt healthy and strong as a horse even though he was older than all the buildings he saw every day—except his mother’s house, which he could see off to the east from his front door, in winter when the foliage was off.

  As he crossed the corner of the square toward his house, he remembered sitting at her bedside when she died so quietly—died still believing her daughter Frances was alive somewhere out in the wilds.

  Just about ten years ago Joseph had made his last journey out west to seek her. Missionaries near Sandusky had notified him that a white woman, taken during the War for Independence, was living as the wife of an old chief not far from their mission at Sandusky, so Joseph and Isaac had journeyed out to that part of northern Ohio. He could still remember the old chief, Between-the-Logs, a Christianized Wyandot. And he could remember the chief’s big old wife, a fine, dignified woman who very well might have been Frances, but was unable to remember her original name. Joseph had believed that she was Frances—until he remembered to examine her hands and found all her fingers to be normal. That journey had taken up much of a season, and finally disheartened him entirely. Brother Isaac had sold his successful hotel in Tunkhannock and moved his family out to that rich land near Sandusky. He lived there still, building another fortune but still using his spare time to track out any clue that might lead to Frances.

  Just almost sixty years, Joseph thought. If ever there were a people who don’t know when to quit, it must be us Slocums. Even our children, who never knew Frannie, have fancies of going out to find her.

  He shook his head. I guess in a way, that’s turned out to be one of our rarest treasures in this family, he thought. We have every earthly possession or honor anyone could ask for, but we’ve got our own unsolved mystery legend as well.

  Well, Frannie, wherever thee is, thank thee for teaching us the true Godly lesson of everlasting hope.

  A buggy rattled by as he stepped onto the stoop at his front door and its occupant called a greeting to him, which he acknowledged with a wave before recognizing him. Oh, yes. One of the Catlins. Putnam Catlin’s son George had gained national fame by traveling in the Far West, for seven or eight years now, painting portraits of the chiefs of the Plains tribes, and writing dispatches to the eastern papers about the life and customs of tribes as yet unaffected by contact with the white race. Joseph had read some of those accounts with deep fascination—not just because he remembered young Catlin, but also
because the man was perhaps the only fellow from Wilkes-Barre who had traveled even farther among Indians than he himself had. Much farther, in fact. Joseph Slocum and his family had taken heart from George Catlin’s writings, because he spoke often of the kindness and hospitality the Indians everywhere showed him. Years among them alone, without a military escort, and he had not only never been harmed, he had never even been allowed to go hungry. His accounts confirmed what had been written by Lewis and Clark a generation earlier, and it was a profound comfort to the Slocums to believe that their long-lost Frances lived, or had lived, among a race of people who were hospitable, generous, and, when left alone, relatively cheerful and peaceable.

  When he pushed open the heavy front door, his ears and nose told him that all the life in the house was presently in the kitchen: bread baking, and the sound of women’s voices. Harriet appeared, pretty despite her plain garb, and executed her little, smiling half curtsy with which she always greeted family members. “Hello, Papa.”

  “Hello, Harriet. Thee’s baking, eh?” Although some branches of the Slocum family had drifted away from the Quaker forms, Joseph and his family had not, and were reserved, not given to hugs and touching. Enough affection could be conveyed by a cheerful countenance and a warm and lilting voice, day by day; when a real need for support or condolence arose, a tight embrace and a caressing hand was then much more eloquent, from having not been commonplace.

  “Bread and pies,” she said.

  “Ah, I’ll come out.” The big house was gloomy, and the kitchen had south window light as well as aromas. He hung his black hat on the hall tree and followed her into the kitchen. There was his wife Sarah, crimping pie crust, and idling near the table was his ever-hungry son Jonathan, twenty-two years old, visiting at home. He had been born after the War of 1812 and given the name of the deceased first son.

  Joseph, taking a chair, said, “I’ve something here from Samuel Bowman, remember him?” He laid the journals on part of the table that was clear of flour and dough and opened the packet. It held a page of the Lancaster Intelligencer, and a handwritten note from Reverend Bowman, saying that a printed letter, surely of great interest, had appeared in a special edition of the paper devoted mainly to temperance documents and thus had come to his attention. Although some Slocum brothers operated distilleries, Joseph did not, and so he heard occasionally from the reverend. Samuel Bowman said he could not explain why the printed letter, dated two years ago, had only just appeared.

  Joseph set aside the letter, opened the newspaper page, and scanned it until his eye fell on the right place. He read for just a moment, straightened in his chair, and said, “Oh my! Harriet, would thee please get a cup of tea for me?” Responding to the tenor of his voice, Sarah, Harriet, and Jonathan looked up at him from what they were doing.

  The letter had been addressed originally to the postmaster of Lancaster.

  LOGANSPORT, INDIANA, Jan. 20, 1835

  Dear Sir:

  In the hope that some good may result from it, I have taken this means of giving to your fellow citizens—say the descendants of the early settlers of the Susquehanna—the following information; and if there be any now living whose name is Slocum, to them, I hope, the following may be communicated through the public prints of your place:

  There is now living near this place, an aged white woman, who a few days ago told me, while I lodged in the camp one night, that she was taken away from her father’s house, on or near the Susquehanna River, when she was very young—say from five to eight years old, as she thinks—by the Delaware Indians, who were then hostile toward the whites …

  Dear Lord, Joseph thought, swallowing hard, let us not raise false hopes again. I’m too old.…

  But the next paragraph already had him:

  She says her father’s name was Slocum; that he was a Quaker, rather small in stature, and wore a large brimmed hat; was of sandy hair and light complexion and much freckled; that he lived about half a mile from a town where there was a fort; that they lived in a wooden house of two stories high, and had a spring near the house.

  He could remember all that from his own childhood, except the details of his father’s description.

  “What is it, Joseph? Something about your sister?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But let me read it through myself here first. There’s something about it rings of a hoax.”

  She says three Delawares came to the house in the daytime, when all were absent but herself, and perhaps two other children; her father and brothers were absent working in the field. The Indians carried her off, and she was adopted into a family of Delawares, who raised her and treated her as their own child …

  Joseph’s suspicions were roiling. It’s too pat, he thought—as if written by someone who’s heard the story from our family, or read it. How could she have told all this detail after sixty years? How could she speak English well enough to speak of “freckled complexions” and “a large brimmed hat”? He had been disappointed too often on this matter to feel as excited as he should feel.

  What might someone who knows this story hope to gain by hoaxing us? he wondered. It’s known that we’re well off.

  But why would someone up to a thing like that send this letter to a town a hundred miles down the river instead of to Wilkes-Barre itself? He put his finger on the line about the Delawares who had adopted her.

  They died about forty years ago, somewhere in Ohio. She was then married to a Miami, by whom she had four children; two of them are now living—they are both daughters—and she lives with them. Her husband is dead; she is old and feeble, and thinks she will not live long.

  These considerations induced her to give the present history of herself, which she would never do before, fearing that her kindred would come and force her away. She has lived long and happy as an Indian, and, but for her color, would not be suspected of being anything else than such. She is very respectable and wealthy, sober and honest. Her name is without reproach.

  The warmth in his soul from that paragraph told him he was putting more faith in this remarkable communication than he would have liked to do. But … a “wealthy” Indian?

  “Jonathan,” he said, “would thee kindly go to my escritoire and fetch those treaty maps, and while I finish this, see if thee can locate a place in Indiana called Logansport.” He had over the years spent a good sum on maps of the ever-changing western territories and states—wherever Frances conceivably might be—and thought he remembered a Logansport, near the forks of the River Wabash. Not far from old Fort Wayne, if his memory served.

  She says her father had a large family, say eight children in all—six older than herself, one younger, as well as she can recollect; and she doubts not there are yet living many of their descendants, but seems to think that all her brothers and sisters must be dead, as she is very old herself, not far from eighty.

  “Oh, my,” he groaned. “No, not that old.”

  “What, Joseph?”

  “Oh, this is so …”

  She thinks she was taken prisoner before the last two wars, which must mean the Revolutionary war, as Wayne’s war and the late war have been since that one. She has entirely lost her mother tongue, and speaks only in Indian, which I also understand …

  Joseph nodded. That answers one doubt, he thought.

  Her own Christian name she has forgotten, but says her father’s name was Slocum and he was a Quaker. She also recollects that it was upon the Susquehanna River that they lived, but don’t recollect the name of the town near which they lived. I have thought that from this letter you might cause something to be inserted in the newspapers of your country that might possibly catch the eye of some of the descendants of the Slocum family, who have knowledge of a girl having been carried off by the Indians—This they might know from family tradition. If so, and they will come here, I will carry them where they may see the object of my letter alive and happy, though old and far advanced in life.

  I can form no idea whereabout upon the
Susquehanna River this family could have lived at that early period, namely, about the time of the Revolutionary war, but perhaps you can ascertain more about it. If so, I hope you will interest yourself, and, if possible, let her brothers and sisters, if any be alive—if not, their children—know where they may once more see a relative whose fate has been wrapped in mystery for seventy years, and for whom her bereaved and afflicted parents doubtless shed many a bitter tear. They have long since found their graves, though their lost child they never found. I have been much affected with the disclosure, and hope the surviving friends may obtain, through your goodness, the information I desire for them. If I can be of any service to them, they may command me. In the meantime, I hope you will excuse me for the freedom I have taken with you, a total stranger, and believe me to be, sir, with much respect,

  Your obedient servant,

  GEO. W. EWING

  When at last Joseph had read through the letter twice and gone back through particular passages several times, he laid the paper upon the table, where it was snatched up by Jonathan, who started reading it aloud to the others while Joseph searched the Indiana map for Logansport. Yes, there it was, where the Eel River flowed into the Wabash. Breads and pies were forgotten; there were teary eyes, and head-shakings and sighs, and some little arguments over facts and dates. Joseph could see that his wife Sarah was balancing herself between joy and apprehension for another of his long absences. “I assure thee, I’ll not be going that far until I’m somewhat more convinced than I am yet,” he said.

  “If thee does go, Father, may I go with thee?” asked Harriet.

  “We’ll discuss that as we work this out, the whole matter. Jonathan, before we get swept away by foolish yearning, let’s ascertain—well, one thing, let’s find out, if we can, why that letter was two years and a half getting into the Intelligencer. And we ought to write to that George Ewing, and get some more confirmation. If nothing else, let him know that the Slocums have finally heard from him! He’s probably given up or forgot by now!”