The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “E heh,” said Maconakwa. “May this flesh keep my kin healthy for a long time, so they can come to see us again.”

  Now all was as good as Joseph had so long dreamed a reunion would be. Frances was no longer cold or severe. She listened, seeming deeply moved, to the story of her birth mother Ruth Slocum and her refusal to lose hope. Joseph told of their mother dying with her face turned toward the place where she had last seen Frances carried away, and Maconakwa sat with a long, far-away expression thinking of that, recalling her distant memory of the place.

  Then she was told descriptive details of current Slocum family life in the Susquehanna Valley—of the great meetinghouses and courthouse, the academy, the churches, all bigger and more magnificent than the buildings here in Peru; she heard of the wharfs on the riverfront, the great, floating boats called arks that carried coal and farm products down the river to even bigger cities of the East, and of the steamboats, huge ships that ran on mere steam, steam such as that coming from the hotel’s tea urn—yes, she said, some of her Miami people had seen such ships, on the Ohio or far down the Wabash—and she heard with awe and dismay of how the white people in that valley, including some of her brothers, dug a black stone from under the ground everywhere, a stone that would burn with white heat, called “hard coal,” and sold it for great sums of money everywhere on that side of the eastern mountains; she looked almost frightened as Joseph described the honeycomb of black tunnels that was growing under the town and the farms as that coal was dug out, and the black, stinking hills of what he called “culm,” which was the waste after the coal was smashed and screened; and when he talked of the black dust everywhere and the smoke, and the clanging of mechanics’ foundries, she did her best to envision such horrors, which to her seemed almost like the Afterworld she had sometimes heard of when Christian religious shamans had stopped at her house on their way to the Wabash towns. She listened and watched Miller try to aid his translated descriptions by making shapes in the air with his hands. It seemed that the words he had to use most often were maco, black, which was a part of her own bear name, and kotawe, which was fire, and kepekotwe, which was iron. He talked of how some of their brothers had made iron and flour, and she stopped him with a blazing look of anger when he said that some of them had made whiskey and sold it.

  “Joseph does that?” she asked.

  “No. I never have made whiskey.”

  “Isaac?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Where are those brothers now?”

  “They are dead,” he said, and started to tell her where and when they had died, but she cut that short simply by saying:

  “Eh! Good!” His mouth dropped open when he realized what she had just said.

  “Well, Mr. Miller,” he said, “I’m certainly glad I never made whiskey! I’d be put back farther than where we started yesterday!”

  “Might be, sir. She’s very strong on the subject.”

  Brouillette, standing behind Maconakwa’s chair, began speaking in Miami, with a terrific intensity in his eyes, Joseph thinking he had never seen a man of a more electrifying appearance, and Miller translated:

  “Brouillette says he is a sober man. That the people of Peru know this. That her sons are dead and he stands in their place to her, and will maintain her well as long as she lives. That if he had been a drinker, he would have been worthless to her, and she would not have lived to this age.”

  It was like a creed, Joseph thought. The devotion this sister had from her family was one of the best things Joseph had ever seen. He tried to remember the Miami words, and, standing up, he reached out and took Brouillette’s hand, and said, “Pakot wehsah! Megwesh, Captain Brouillette! Good! Thankee!” Brouillette looked near bursting with pride and pleasure after that compliment.

  The room was packed with townspeople, curious spectators who had heard through town gossip about this meeting of the elderly Pennsylvanians with the old Miami Queen. Men were smoking their cheroots and clay pipes and crowding all the windows and the door, and the room was a clamor of voices. Joseph had turned to hear something young Fulwiler was trying to tell him, and when he turned around, he was facing an empty chair where Frances had been sitting. Gone to the jakes, no doubt, after all this tea, he thought. He had so many things to ask her and tell her, and was eager for her to come back in. He had made arrangement for a scrivener from the town to write down her history of captivity as she told it—in more detail, he hoped—so the wondrous tale and its happy ending could be shared through the press in both the Susquehanna and Wabash valleys. The Wilkes-Barre journals had already reported Joseph’s hopeful journey to the West following Colonel Ewing’s miraculous letter; the towns along the Wabash had no idea yet that the history of the “white Miami Queen” in their midst was so fascinating or that it had turned out so joyously. And Joseph intended that it would all end even more wonderfully when, if they could, the Slocums could persuade their sister to return with them to the comforts and gentility of Pennsylvania civilization. He did not intend for this day’s gathering to end until that offer had been broached.

  But where was she? “Mr. Miller,” he said, “does anyone know where my sister went?” He had the sudden horrible fear that she had found the society in this room unpleasant and departed for her woodland haunts. Although he could see Brouillette and Cut Finger still in the room nearby, being talked to by Isaac through Fulwiler, she still might have ridden off with her other daughter.

  Miller went through the crowd toward the door, and Joseph followed him, beginning to fret. They stepped out onto the bright porch and looked toward the hitch rail. All four horses were still there.

  “Where in the world do—”

  “There,” said Miller.

  At the far end of the porch lay a bundled blanket with a pair of moccasins sticking out from the near end. It was the blanket Frances had been wearing. Alarmed, Joseph hurried with Miller toward that end of the long porch, and Miller knelt beside her. She was lying on her back, eyes shut, ankles crossed. When Miller spoke to her in a querying tone, she turned her face toward him, opened her eyes, and said something. She swung her feet down off the edge of the board porch and sat up, yawning. Miller stood up and came back, shaking his head and smiling.

  “She said she just needed a nap in the fresh air. Too many people, too much talk, too much smoke.”

  Joseph bit his lower lip, chuckling, as much amused as relieved. “We might do well to thin the crowd a little. I appreciate the townspeople’s interest, but they’ve had years to visit with her and didn’t. It would be pleasant to have just the family—and thee and the journalist, of course.” Just then he saw a movement over by the wooden privy: a whitewashed door had opened and Yellow Leaf, the younger daughter, fairly leaped out, holding her nose with one hand and with the other fanning the air with an edge of her blanket. So. She had not deserted the reunion either.

  After the curious bystanders had been politely shooed out to the porch and Frances was seated in a comfortable chair with a cup of sweet tea at hand, Joseph introduced a gangly fellow with ink-dark fingertips who was a compositor and scrivener from a nearby newspaper, and asked her if she would mind telling the story of her life with the Indians, from childhood through womanhood, with more details about her travels and the wars.

  That did not seem to please her. She looked askance at the pencils and sheets of paper the printer had taken from his writing box and laid out on the table. “That man intends to capture my words?” When Miller assured her it was only to help her brothers and sister remember her story better, she seemed to relent. But Mary could not let it go at a half-truth, and had Miller explain that the story was to be published, and what that meant, and Frances had to think about that awhile, but finally shrugged and began at the exact place: “When I was a little girl and my father was a Quaker with a wide black hat, three Lenapeh warriors came one day …”

  She described the little she could remember about that day, including the story she had heard onl
y yesterday about Mary rescuing Joseph with his breeches falling, and forward through the decades from there. Because of the pauses for translating, the writer had no trouble keeping up.

  “This is wonderful,” Mary remarked once. “We ought to write a copy to be mailed to family, so they can hear it all the sooner.”

  At one point Joseph asked her whether she had known that her brothers, and even her mother, had traveled on the frontier searching for her. She thought awhile and said, “I think I remember my Lenapeh parents were afraid someone would come and find me, that someone would sell my name … but I thought little about my first family after a while. Always I was treated well and kindly by all the Indians. Always they taught me and fed me and protected me. Always the armies were coming after us, and I grew afraid of whites. For long times I would not even think that I had been a white before. But sometimes something would remind me …” She sat quiet awhile, remembering Wells, the Wild Potato with his red hair and freckles like hers. “I do not remember one thing or another of the wars, they were so common and so bloody and so much alike each time. I did not like to see the scalps our warriors brought home, I never did like that, but I liked it that we won, when we did. That was not often, and even then, armies came again the next season. There were so many winters without food because of the soldiers.… I remember a war that came just when we lived at Kekionga, Fort Wayne now. The army of Harmar came. The women and children were all made to run north, and we got away and then the warriors beat him good. They were Lenapehs, Miamis, Potawatomi, Shawnee. As I told you, I was always well-treated by the Indian people. I was married young to a Lenapeh I had to put out, then older to a Miami, but even long before I was ever married, I was red in my heart and I did not think so much about my white family.”

  She said it matter-of-factly, without any sort of apology for having forgotten them.

  Now Mary Towne was sitting close before her, saying, “No matter. Now you do see us and remember us. We were not in those armies. Joseph and many of our offspring live where our father and mother used to live, the place you remember, the banks of the Susquehanna so beautiful.” Maconakwa thought of the blackness and smoke Joseph had been describing, and wondered whether Mary was lying about the beautiful valley. Or perhaps it had been changed after she moved to Ohio. Mary was saying now, “They have a way of doing things there. You may sell your farmland or house, but you can keep the mineral rights and—”

  “Ma’am,” said Miller, “is there some other way of saying that? There’s no Indian words I know for ‘mineral rights,’ and I don’t even know what they are myself.”

  Fulwiler leaned closer and said, “It means if there’s coal under land you’ve sold, you can keep rights to the coal and get paid for it when they dig it.”

  Miller expressed that to her in the best way he knew how.

  Mary said, “The Slocums have made a great deal of wealth selling land, and coal too.”

  Maconakwa shook her head. “Nothing has been worse for people than selling land.”

  “What we are saying, sister, is that if you went back home to the Susquehanna with Joseph, you could live so richly and well. We could give you property, and a big, good house, and everything you desire. Oh, do come back to your family!”

  Maconakwa shut her eyes and nodded. So that was what they were after. I was right. She seethed for a while but decided not to be unkind. These people meant this with good hearts. It was only Ewing who had done this in hopes of getting her off her land. These Slocums just didn’t know the color of her heart. She was tired and all this talking and meeting white people was making her head hurt, but she would have to make them understand her heart now or they would keep trying to take her away. She held out her hand and looked at the three siblings one by one.

  “I have always lived with the Indians; they have used me very kindly. I am used to them. The Great Spirit has allowed me to live with them. I wish to live and die with them.”

  She saw their faces growing long and sad as those words were translated. But she could see them already starting to think of protestations and arguments, and knew that what she had said was not yet enough.

  “In my house you saw my mirror. Your looking glass may be longer than mine, but if I went with you and you gave me a great, long, fine looking glass, I would still see what in it? This face. But that fine looking glass would not give me a finer face. It would give me a sadder face, because I would be far from my home. Sister, brothers, I do not wish to live any better, or anywhere else.

  “I believe the Great Spirit has permitted me to live so long because I have always lived with the Indians. I should have died sooner if I had left them.” She had to press her lips tight together to keep them from trembling while the interpreter talked. She blinked rapidly with her thoughts. The things she was going to say came to her mind in images. She saw a grassy mound with three cedar poles on it bending slightly in the wind and ribbons fluttering at the top.

  “My husband and my sons are buried here. The day my husband died, he charged me not to leave the Indians.…” She stopped, looking down, remembering how she and Deaf Man used to talk about Crossing Over hand in hand so they would not lose each other in the great journey. How could he take her hand if she went away to a distant valley? She tried to moisten her dry tongue to say more.

  “I have a house and large lands. Two daughters, a good son-in-law, three grandchildren, and everything to make me comfortable. Why would I want to go to something else? Would a fish choose to go someplace besides water, where he would die?”

  It was getting too hard to talk now. She had to squeeze her mouth and her eyes shut so these white people would not see her cry. She did not want them to travel away with a memory of her crying. She rocked back and forth with her hands clutching each other, trying to get herself able to say more. Just then Brouillette’s voice spoke behind her.

  “I am married to this woman’s daughter,” he said. “About thirteen winters. I was born far down the Wabash at Fort Harrison, near Terre Haute, but I live here now, with thanks for this marriage. The whites in these towns have known me since they settled here. They know me to maintain my family respectably. I stand in the place of this woman’s sons. I mean to maintain her well as long as she lives, for the truth of which you may depend on the word of Captain Brouillette.”

  Eh, Autumn, she thought, you are so good, but you are not making it easier for me not to weep. She straightened her back and took a deep breath. “What my son-in-law says is true,” she told them. “He has always treated me kindly. My relatives should have no uneasiness about me here. The Indians are my people. I do not even have to work. I sit in the house with these my two daughters, and they do the work inside, and he does the work outside. I do not need any richer care. There is none.” She had to stop again. She did not want to sadden these good old white people. But they were saddening her. Miller told them all she had said.

  “Sister,” said Joseph in a gentle voice, “won’t you at least come and make a visit to your first home? And when you have seen it and visited with us, then return here to your people?”

  Already she was shaking her head, even before Miller finished with the question.

  “I cannot, I cannot. I am an old tree. I was a sapling when they brought me away. You know you can plant a sapling in another place but not an old tree; you cannot even move an old tree a little way and bring it back. It is all gone past, the time when I could go about. I am afraid I would die and never come back. I am happy here. I shall die here and lie in that burial place, and they will raise the pole at my grave with the white flag on it, and the Great Spirit will know where to find me. I would not be happy going away with my white relatives. I am glad enough to see them, but I cannot go, I cannot go. I have done.”

  When that was translated for them, the Slocums looked as if they were praying, with their heads wearily down and eyes shut and their hands folded in their laps. There followed a painful silence, and Brouillette apparently was too happy wit
h her refusal to let gloom prevail. In a happy and animated voice he said, “When white men take an Indian woman as their ‘squaw,’ they make her work like a slave. It was never so with this woman. She has always been honored here, at Deaf Man’s village, named after her husband. So she has lived to this age. I have done with my words.”

  Now followed Cut Finger’s voice, almost like singing, it was so lyrical and rich in tone. “We have been happy to see you. To see my mother again, later, you will be welcome at my father’s village and our home there. But not to take her to the East.” She glanced at the venison quarter they had brought as their gift of friendship. She added, “A deer cannot live out of the forest.”

  Now even Yellow Leaf, who had been painfully shy around the white people, said, “My mother should not go even on a visit. A fish taken out of water dies quickly.”

  After that the silence was so deep that even the people on the porch sensed it and quit murmuring. A few people cleared their throats. Maconakwa sat looking at her hands and then shut her eyes and thought of the village, the poles over the graves, the big shade trees, the river, the spring at the foot of the hill whose delicious cold water had always quenched her family’s thirst. Just this one day away from that place had already made her feel sick and feeble. Of course she could not leave long enough to go to their black valley of coal and smoke and iron.

  With a sigh, Joseph got up from his chair and looked around. “It is late, time for supper. Mr. Miller, please ask them to stay here and eat with us.”

  Miller talked with them, and replied: “Sir, as they feel now, and smelling the way the inn’s man cooks, they ask not to have to, and ask that you not be offended if they go home. They would like to ride home before it grows too dark, this being a night when there’ll be no moon.”

  And so the four Indians, including the one who had been born his sister Frances, held the hands of the old Quakers for a few moments, and with sad smiles, and barely glancing at their eyes, and not backing away when Mary and Isaac and he pressed their cheeks to theirs, went out to their horses. There was not a bench near the hitch rail. Brouillette stood by her horse and laced his fingers to make a step for his mother-in-law and hoisted her to her saddle, while the two daughters seemed to spring like rabbits onto their saddles. Then he turned toward the inn, gave them all a nod of his turbaned head, and swung onto his mount. The few people who were left on the porch were smoking and looking curiously, sympathetically perhaps, back and forth between the departing Indians and the gray-haired white people.