by Shelby Foote
Again the young men danced. The moon sailed higher, silver now, flooding the mound. In the distance the river glided slow, bright silver too, making its two great curves. Then it was over; the dead were left to the bone-pickers. The chiefs rose, filing down the mound, and he heard Loshumitubbe say to one beside him:
This will stop them. This will make an end.
Yea, the other told him. This will stop them.
But some there were — himself among them: so he says — who shook their heads, now it was done and they had seen, asking themselves in their hearts: Were they savages, barbarians, to come to this?
Here was a halt, the hour being noon, and after the midday meal and the siesta we returned to the house Royal: I the Governor, together with the aforesaid witnesses and scrivener: before whom the prisoner Chisahahoma, in care of the guard, swore and subscribed and continued, making an end:
Sudden and terrible then came the curse on his people, the wrath of God. The moon was barely on the wane and they felt pain in their heads, their backs, their loins; their skin was hot and dry to the touch; dark spots appeared on their foreheads and scalps, among the roots of hair. The spots became hard-cored blisters; the burning cooled for a day and then returned, far worse, and the blisters (so he called them: meaning pustules) softened and there was a terrible itching. Some scratched so hard with their nails and fishbone combs that their faces and bodies were raw. Many died. First went Otumatomba the rainmaker, then Loshumitubbe chief of chiefs, he who had given the signal; men and women and children, so fast they died the bone-pickers had not time to scaffold them. They lay in the houses and in the street, self-mutilated, begging the god for sudden death, release from the fever and itching.
He himself was sick with the sickest, and thought to have died and wished for it; he too lay and hoped for death, but was spared with only this (passing his hand across his face) to show the journey he had gone. Then he lay recovering, the moon swelling once more toward the full. And he remembered the short trapper, the marks on his face and body when they brought him out of the pit, and he knew.
Then he was up, recovered though still weak, and was called before Issatiwamba, chief of chiefs now Loshumitubbe was dead. He too had been the journey; he too remembered the marks on the short trapper. The people still lay dying, the dead unscaffolded.
O chief, he said, and made his bow, and Issatiwamba said:
I have called; are you not the singer? This is the curse of the white man’s god, and you must go a journey.
He left next morning, taking the trappers’ canoe. Cold it was, approaching the turning of the year, with ice among the willows and overhead a sky the color of a dove’s breast. He wore a bearskin and paddled fast to keep from freezing. The second day he reached the Walnut Hills, where the white man had a town, and went ashore. But there was no house for the white man’s god; he was in the canoe, continuing downriver, before sunset. The fifth day he reached this place and came ashore, and here was the house of the white man’s god and, lo! the God himself as he had heard it told and sung, outstretched and sagging, nailed to the wall and wearing a crown of thorns and the wound in his side and pain in his face that distorted his mouth so you saw the edges of the teeth. And he stood looking, wrapped in the bearskin.
Then came one in a robe of cloth, a man who spoke with words he could not understand. He made a sign to show he would speak, and the priest beckoned: Come, and he followed to the back of the house and through a door, and — lo again, a thing he had never seen before — here was an Indian wearing trousers and a shirt, one of the flatheads of the South, who acted as interpreter.
The priest listened while he told it as Issatiwamba had instructed. The Indians had killed in the Indian way, incurring the wrath of the white man’s god; now was he sent for the white men to kill in the white man’s way, thus to appease the god and lay the plague. So he told it, as instructed. The flathead interpreted, and when it was done the priest beckoned as before: Come, and led the way through another door. He followed, expecting this to be the pit where he would wait. But lo, the priest put food before him: Eat, and he ate. Then he followed through yet another door, thinking now surely this would be the pit. But lo again, it was a small room with a cot and blankets, and the priest put his hands together, palm to palm, and laid his cheek against the back of one: Sleep. And he slept, still expecting the pit.
When he woke it was morning; he knew not where he was. The pit! he thought. Then he remembered and turned on his side, and the flathead stood in the doorway with a bucket in one hand, steaming, and soap and a cloth in the other. First he declined; it was winter, he said, no time to scrape away the crust. But the other said thus it must be, and when he had washed he led him to the room where he had eaten. He ate again, then followed the other to still a third room where the priest was waiting, and there again on the wall the god was hung, this time in ivory with the blood in bright red droplets like fruit of the holly. The three sat at table; the priest talked and the flathead interpreted, and all this time the god watched from the wall. Here began his conversion, he says, making yet again the sign of the Cross upon his person.
He heard of the Trinity, the creation, the Garden, the loss of innocence, and much else which he could not follow. When the priest later questioned him of what he had heard he found that he had not heard aright, for the priest had said there were three gods and one god; did that not make four? And the priest at first was angry: then he smiled. They had best go slow, he said, and began again, telling now of the Man-God, the redeemer, who died on the cross of sticks but would return. There was where he began to understand, for just as the Garden had been like Nanih Waiya, this was like the Corn God, who laid him down to rise again; perhaps they were cousins, the two gods. But the priest said no, not cousins, not cousins at all; and began again, in soft tones and with patience, not in anger. In time they needed the interpreter no more, for he believed and the words came to him; he understood; Christ Jesus had reached him, Whose strength was in His gentleness, Whose beginning was in His end. Winter was past, and spring came on, and summer, and he was shrived and christened. His name was John; John Postoak, for Postoak was the translation of his name.
Then, being converted, he called to mind the instructions of Issatiwamba; a duty was a duty, whether to tribe or to church. So he asked the priest, kneeling at confession: must he go to the authorities? For a time the priest said nothing, sitting in the box with the odor of incense coming off him, the smell of holiness, and he who now was called Postoak watching through the panel. Then he said, calling him now as always My Son, that was a matter to be decided within himself, between his heart and his head. And he said as before, Bless me, father: knowing. And the priest put forth his hand and blessed him, making the sign of the Cross above his head, for the priest knew well what would follow when he went before the authorities and told what he had told the day when the priest first found him in the bearskin, outside the church where Christ hung on the wall.
He went then to the sergeant of the guard, Delgado, and standing there told it in Spanish, what had been done on the mound and how and his share in the thing, and offered himself this second time, as instructed by Issatiwamba, not to lay the plague, however, but rather to lay the guilt in his own breast. Delgado heard him through, listening with outrage in his face, and when it was done gave orders in a voice that rang like brass. Then was he in the pit indeed, with iron at his wrists and ankles. He dwelt in darkness, how many days he knew not; the year moved into September, the hottest weather; and then came forth under guard to face ourselves, Governor and witnesses, in the formalities which ensued and here have been transcribed even as he spoke, including whatever barbarisms, all his own. So it was and here he stands, having told it this third time: God be his witness.
Q. If he had anything to add or take from this deposition, it having been read to him. Answered that he has nothing to add or take, and that what he has said is the truth under the obligation of the oath he took at the outset, whi
ch he affirms and certifies and says he is twenty-four years old, and he subscribes with me and the witnesses over the citation I certify:
Witnessed:
Joseph of Silva
Frsco Amangual he signs this
Chisa- X -hahoma
HIS MARK John the Baptist
of Elquezable
Lt Col Governor
DISPOSITION: BY THE GOVERNOR. In the said Garrison this September 27th 1797 without delay I, Mr John the Baptist of Elquezable, Lieutenant Colonel of Cavalry of the Royal Army, Provisional Governor of the Province of Mississippi, in view of finding the conclusion of the present proceedings, commanded that the original fifteen useful leaves be directed to the Lord Commanding General, Marshal of the Country, Sir Peter de Narva, that they may serve to inform him in reviewing my disposition (tendered subject to his agreeing in the name of His Most Christian Majesty) to wit:
Free him.
First: in that he has renounced his former worship which led him to participate in these atrocities, and intends now therefore (I am assured by the priest, Friar Joseph Manuel Gaetan) to serve as a missionary among his heathen people. Second: in that we are even now preparing to depart this barbarous land, being under orders to leave it to them of the North. And third, lastly: in that the victims were neither of our Nation nor our Faith.
For which I sign with my present scrivener:
J the B of El A Benito Courbiere.