He reached for her hands, saying something. She recoiled against the back of the chair, turning and clasping her hands at the bosom of her calico blouse, over her medicine bag, afraid he was going to grab her arms and put her out of her house. She could not get this fear out of her mind, and she was not going to let him do it. But she heard Miller saying:
“Old Grandmother, he asks respectfully just to look at your hands! Please be kind to your brother!”
“Ah, you believe what he says, hah?”
“He will not hurt you. That I believe.”
She inhaled long through her nostrils, keeping her jaws clenched, and with a scowl extended her hands. Gently, with one of his big, thick working-man hands, he took her left one and looked at it by the light from the open door. His touch was so easy and harmless, she realized with embarrassment that she had been acting like a frightened, unreasonable old woman.
“How came thee by that hurt finger?” the man asked in English, and Miller translated.
She looked at the nailless index fingertip that hurt in cold weather. She could remember. “Long ago my brother with a hammer struck it. He did not mean to hurt me. A child mistake.”
Miller translated, and she watched with amazement the sweetness of expression that diffused over the stranger’s face. His eyes looked up at her face, eyes shining, and on his lips was a smile as tender as a mother’s over her baby.
“Ah, yes! I know,” he said. “I think ’twas Ebenezer did that!”
Miller translated, and something turned in Maconakwa’s bosom. Ebenezer. That was a strange name, but it made a memory. For an instant she could almost see the narrow face of a boy, the one who had done this with the hammer, and the awful look that had come over that face when she screeched with the pain.
Not this one. This one said his name was Isaac.
The man was saying something rapidly and fervently, and seemed very happy. Miller said, “He tells you that he knows you are his sister because of the hammer on the finger!” The stranger turned and talked rapidly to Miller, who said then: “He hopes you will be remembering. He is sorry he does not please you by being here. He will go back to the inn in town and wait there until another brother and a sister come. Then they all three would like to come and visit with you together. He says they should be here in days. He could not wait for them but wanted to see you today. Now he is satisfied you are his sister, and wishes permission to see you again when they come with him.”
“Tell him,” she said, trying not to show the wistful confusion that she was beginning to feel, “tell him when he comes next, I will have my daughters here, and Brouillette. And Palonswah maybe. I like to know what Palonswah thinks of such people coming and saying these things. Miller, I do not trust white people. You may tell him that if you wish, so he will understand why my eyes are covered like the snake’s. But I will see him when he comes back with them. Maybe I will feel better when his sister is here with him. Now, please take him to town. I need to think by myself.”
When they had gone down the trail and their horses were out of sight, Maconakwa walked out of the log house with a walking stick and went up onto the rise where the burial ground lay safe above the floodplain. Here on the grassy knoll, which her son-in-law Brouillette mowed for her with a scythe at least twice a summer, stood three tall, slender poles made of saplings of cedar. At the top of one hung the frayed, graying remnants of red and black ribbons. Wind and weather had reduced the cloth to almost nothing in the six years since it had been raised to mark Deaf Man’s grave. By a short loop of tarnished silver wire there hung from the same place the ragged quill of an eagle feather, his mark as a war chief. Deaf Man had long before his death given over those duties to Palonswah, being too old and deaf to continue with them. She looked up at the shreds, which stirred slightly in the evening breeze. How she missed her old husband! Such a life they had shared. They had watched the once vast domain of his Miami people be pared away in treaty after treaty. They had raised their daughters to have hope and honor and kindness and good humor. They had begun their marriage in domed wikwams covered with bark and mats among dozens of similar wikwams under the shade trees, and ended with a rectangular two-room log house on a piece of land that looked like a white man’s farm, with zigzag rail fences, their daughters’ cabins nearby, with more than a hundred horses, large fields of corn and pasture, and a great herd of beef cattle.
It had all changed from the old ways when the Miami people had lived together in villages, when they had all worked together to plant the Three Sacred Sisters, when they had found and grown all their foods and medicines in Mother Earth with the blessing of Mother Corn. Now behind everything there was the spirit of “dollars” and trade. It had become this way because there were not enough lands or game animals left. Maconakwa and Deaf Man, like the rest of the people, had trapped animals and sold their pelts until there were few animals left. They had gathered and sold ginseng and goldenseal and sassafras. She had made and sold buttons and then brooms, and then chairs, the kind Tuck Horse made.
Now the Miami people all had mirrors and pistols and utensils and metal hoes and shovels. They had metal axes, which made it too easy to cut down trees; even the lives of trees were wasted now to get more white man goods or money.
Now the People had tin lanterns and saws and scissors, and wore clothes made of calico cloth that had to be bought. And they drank whiskey that needed to be bought. The People had grown selfish with these goods, and did not share and give away as they had in the old times. Somehow it was easier to give away things one had made than things one had bought.
Now the money came not so much from furs and handmade goods as from a thing called “annuities.” It was money the wapsi government gave the chiefs for land. The man Ewing was always in the place called Washington arranging for more land to be sold. Maconakwa had only a vague idea of how all that was done. She knew that the former Long Knife general named Tipton was a friend of Ewing, and Tipton was the Indian agent at Logansport. The annuity money came from Washington through Tipton, and much of it got into Ewing’s pockets. She knew that Ewing arranged for clearing and plowing of lands along the Mississinewa Sipu and that the work was paid for by annuity money meant for the Miamis. She knew that when Miamis got in debt for trader goods, Tipton and Ewing got their lands. Another man who was called the governor of Indiana was also a friend of Tipton, and that governor wanted the Indians out of the way so white men could have all the land. Palonswah had explained much of it to her, but some things he would not say because he too was selling his people’s lands. He had said it was not simple for Ewing, who wanted to make money both from trading and from land, and so he wanted the Miamis to stay and go at the same time. And Chief Peshewa Richardville knew how hard it was for the white men to make their schemes work, so he squeezed as much money as he could from them for the lands he sold.
To think of all this made Maconakwa shut her eyes and shake her head, and she was always afraid that some trick would be done to her by those clever people and she would lose her home, as so many others had. She wanted to trust Palonswah and Richardville, because she knew they did love their people. Many who had lost their lands had gone to live on Palonswah’s land and Richardville’s land, and the chiefs spent much of their wealth supporting them. It was mainly on those chiefs’ lands that enough Miamis could stay together to do the old sacred ceremonies. The Bread Dance and Green Corn and thanksgiving ceremonies were held in lesser ways than they had used to be, shorter, and with some of the words wrong and movements left out as the old people died and the younger ones forgot, but at least those chiefs still provided safe places where councils and ceremonies could be done. The People were being changed, little by little doing as the white men did.
Deaf Man had remained as much an Indian as he could, leaving the management of his property, the trading, the sale of beef, to Maconakwa and Brouillette, while he provided for his family as a Miami man should: by raising horses and hunting, almost to the day of his
Crossing Over. She could remember times when he had ridden out on his favorite hunting horse, forgetting to take off her bell because he could not hear it, then returning all grouchy because he could find no game, complaining that the whites had scared it all away. Brouillette still liked telling that funny story, in a fond way. Brouillette and Deaf Man had been content with each other; Brouillette had bestowed upon him the help and affection that his own two sons had not lived to give Deaf Man.
Those other two poles standing on the burial place marked the sons’ graves. They had been dead so long that not a shred of the ribbons remained on their markers. If the poles had been other than red cedar, they would have rotted and fallen by now.
Maconakwa stood among the graves and tried to calm her spirit.
She had not wanted to believe that the gray-haired visitor was her brother; that was too troubling. But his knowledge of the finger accident so long ago had virtually convinced her, although he might have known it by hearsay somehow.
And another suspicion was beginning to enter her mind: that what he wanted so fervently might not be her land, but her return to her family in the white people’s world. All the captives had been ordered returned long ago. That general so long ago, Wayne, had demanded it.
She tried to imagine how things were planned and conceived in the white men’s great councils far away. She knew they were incredibly cunning, and that their great councillors must be men of crafty genius, because the things she had seen done by them to the Miami people could not have been devised by ordinary minds.
I was born with a white person’s brain, she thought. If I were one of those councillors, what might I think up for an old Miami widow who was supposed to go back there but instead stayed with the Indians and has nice land they would like to have?
She thought: I might send Colonel Ewing the fur trader to gain her confidence and find out her name is Slocum. Then sell that name to the white Slocums back there. Then send a Slocum to take that widow back East. Then take her land from her because she left it!
E heh! That is the kind of thing the whites would do!
She held her walking stick with her left hand and rubbed that hand with her right, and gazed over her fields, and remembered the evening she had told Ewing.
She had been sick that night and afraid she was going to die, and it seemed to her then that she should not take with her to the grave that lifelong secret—that it might be terribly selfish to leave the Slocum people forever in doubt about the fate of their relative. It had been a bitter cold night, and the man called Colonel Ewing stopped before dark and ate dinner with her family. Being in too much discomfort to sleep, she sat up by the fire long after her family went to bed. And then, although a bed had been made up for him, that Ewing sat up late with her, talking about little things. Sitting so long alone with the white man, she had been taken with a powerful notion that unless she revealed her history, she would find no rest in the Spirit World, to which one must not go burdened with lies. Out of her agitation, she told Ewing that she had something important on her mind and could not die peacefully until she told it. But then she was seized with the old fear that the whites would try to take her away from her country if they knew. So she had rocked to and fro in her chair for a long time before getting the courage to state it. Ewing seemed to have suspected that that was what she was going to tell him, and he had assured her he would protect her from any attempt to separate her from her home or children. And then as she poured out to him all she could remember, she felt as if a huge, crashing weight were floating off of her. After they bade each other good night, she had lain down in her bedding with her pain so diminished that she supped off into such a long, deep, pure slumber that her illness began to mend by the next day. Then for two years she had wondered and worried what might have come of her confession. She had seen Ewing once since then, and he told her about sending her story back East to be put in printed language of the white people, which left her feeling confused and betrayed for a while—though she had not asked him not to do such a thing—until, nothing happening, she had quit worrying, even thinking, about it. The truth had made her well and had not hurt anything in her life.
Now this Isaac man had come, and her fears had returned.
I did not lie to this Isaac today, she thought. But in a way perhaps I did. I did not tell him the thing he had come so far to hear. So now I am toting the secret again, and it is heavy.
In a distant cornfield she could see her family at work harvesting. They had a tent there. Even though within walking distance of the house, they followed the tradition of staying in the corn until the harvest was done. Brouillette had his oxen team and wagon out there. Maconakwa’s daughters and grandchildren were helping. Those harvest camps were happy. Maconakwa could remember how the spirit of corn, Mondahmin, as the Miamis called her, Kahesana Xaskwim to the Lenapehs, could be heard and felt in the corn. Maconakwa regretted being old, with painful hands that kept her from helping with the harvest. If she had been out with her family harvesting, she might not have had to talk to this Isaac person. Miller would have explained to him that the harvest spirit could not be troubled by such business.
But that Isaac would be coming back when his old brother and sister arrived in a few days. The harvest would be done by then, the ears of special corn hung up in bunches by their braided shucks, hung from ceilings where rodents could not get them; much more would be shelled and stored for the winter. And then when all those Slocums came, if Slocums they really were, Cut Finger and Yellow Leaf and Autumn Brouillette would be around her and she would be more at ease with the visitors.
You should not fear them anyway, she told herself. Are they not Quakers?
If they truly are Slocums, she thought, I will not deny who I am. I do not want to bear that secret around again.
But I really wish I had not told Ewing anything. He is one of those who do anything they do for just one reason, and that reason is money. He sends me troubling things, and he will profit by it.
She reached out with her left hand and with her stumped forefinger touched the marker of Deaf Man’s grave. “Old husband,” she said aloud, “I promise I will not let anyone take me away from our place. When I Cross Over, I will lie beside you as before. I have not forgotten our vow that we will not lose each other even in Crossing Over.”
She pinched tobacco powder out of a pouch and sifted it over the graves, then limped off the mound and across the fields of the river bottomland where the leaves of the trees in the copses were reddening and yellowing. The lazy dogs greeted her with wagging tails, without getting up from their sunny places, and she went in the cabin, filled and lighted her clay pipe, went back out and sat in a patch of sunlight by the cabin wall on a hickory splint chair she had made when her hands were still good. She sat among the sunning dogs and listened to the breeze in the treetops and the flowing water of the river and watched her smoke swirl away and the leaf shade tremble on the ground. She thought of her long-ago travels to come to this place, and the longer time she had lived here in war and peace, and she thought that no matter how cunning the white people were, they were no more likely to move her from this home place than to make the Mississinewa go someplace else.
* * *
Joseph Slocum jounced and swayed on the buggy seat, his shoulder now and then bumping Isaac’s. Whenever he heard Mary groan in the backseat, he would crane around and give her a sympathetic smile. She was going on seventy, the oldest surviving one of their generation, and had endured an eternity of bouncing and jarring over the ruts and the log corduroy roads of Ohio and Indiana to meet her brothers here.
Joseph felt so good being in the presence of his brother and sister again, and so excited about the end of their lifelong search, that this Wabash Valley seemed like the most enchanted place he had seen in his life. It wasn’t rugged and steep like the Susquehanna country, but the placid, misty river and deep soil and the magnificent hardwood trees in their fall splendor seemed like a garden of paradise.
Their young guide, Miller, reined in his horse until the buggy was alongside him and said, “Gentlemen, Mrs. Towne, if you don’t mind fording the Mississinewa, we’d do well to stop at Godfroy’s trading post before we go on up to your sister’s. It’ll ease her mind considerable to know he’s looked you over. She puts much store by his judgment, y’see.”
“Well, lead on then, if it’s not too far out of the way,” Joseph said, and he flicked the reins as Miller spurred ahead to join his fellow horseman, a young friend named Fulwiler who had come along because of his fascination with the story of this lost sister. Joseph said, “When I think of all the wilderness we all scoured looking for Frannie—and now we find her in a place that’s almost as civilized as Wilkes-Barre.” He shook his head and chuckled. There were plantations all along the river road.
Isaac pointed to a cluster of cabins, huts, and fields ahead. “They say this was the town where Tecumseh walked in on the Miami Council, just before the war, and tried to whip them up to fight General Harrison. Of course, Harrison burned down the town a time or two during the war, but there’s always been somebody living here. Watch for Harrison to run for president again, by the way. He showed pretty strong out here last time.”
Joseph laughed. “What’s this, a Quaker talking on worldly politics?”
Isaac nodded with a shame-faced smile, then pointed ahead. “There’s the mouth of the Mississinewa. Godfrey’s store is on the far side.”
They rattled and clopped down through the collection of huts, through wood smoke and the sour smells of hide-curing. A few Indians, most dressed in calico, were working or idling outside their dwellings, or off in their cornfields harvesting. There was a forlorn, sullen look about them. Joseph felt reproached for his whiteness. Though some of the Indian men raised a half salute to Miller, they seemed never to look directly at these three somberly dressed elders in the rattling buggy. Still, Joseph felt that he was being studied hard. They went up the Mississinewa a little way and crossed at a riffled place, climbed to an elevated clearing, and entered a fenced compound of log buildings, one very large. Here Joseph stopped the buggy where the young men had dismounted, and the three got down stiffly from the buggy and followed Miller into the store, wending among barrels, counters, stacks of hides and blankets, shelves of tools, stacked bags of meal, saddles, hanging harness, pots and china, coils of rope, and Indian men and women. The big room smelled of pitch and oakum, hides, tobacco, sassafras, smoked meat, tallow. Suddenly the aisle before them was filled with the form of a giant, brown-faced man.
The Red Heart Page 59