The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  O Light of God that liveth in every heart, she prayed, do guide those red men to be merciful. Do calm the hearts of my little ones until this bad moment passes.…

  She heard a rustling in the fallen leaves, off to her left, and turned to see Judith, Ben, and Isaac approaching through the brush, crouched, pale with fear.

  “Mama—” the girl began in a strained murmur.

  “Judy, take the baby and hide theeself down. I simply must do something.…” She glanced toward the house again as she handed the baby to her daughter, and what she saw up there made her gasp.

  Dim against the background of the dark-wooded mountains were several moving figures just emerging from the cabin door: the three Delaware warriors, each pulling after him a child. The red men were burdened with their weapons and by bundles of things from the house, and the children’s resistance made them awkward. Ebenezer limped and hung back. Little Wareham Kingsley was so rigid with terror that the warrior almost had to carry him. Only Frances’ voice could be heard. Dragged along by one arm, she was whining a singsong “Mama! Mama! Mama!”

  Ruth Slocum discarded all caution. She strode out of the thicket into the clearing, brambles snagging her gray skirt, while Judith hugged the baby and groped, like the brambles, to keep her from going.

  Ruth was unaware that she had set her jaw so hard that one of her molars cracked. She was hardly aware of cracking a shin on one of the stumps in the clearing, and falling onto her hands and knees and clambering back up to run toward the painted warriors. She was aware only that they were heading toward the brush with two of her children and poor Wareham Kingsley, and would be gone into the autumn evening before men could come from the fort.

  “Turn those children free!” she cried. “Let them go! Please!”

  They paused at the sound of her voice and glared back at her, frightful in their face paint but young enough to be her own sons. Her voice and her approach set Frances into a frenzy of crying and Ebenezer into an arm-wrenching struggle with the one who had him.

  “Shame on thee!” Ruth shrilled, hobbling straight toward the warriors and scolding them as if they were mere bad boys. But then she saw lying before her the prone corpse of Nathan Kingsley, pale skull bone visible through his blood-matted scalp. She faltered, swallowed, clapping a hand to her throat. One of the Indians laughed, and another said something in a derisive tone. But none of them turned on her; they kept pulling the children along the path toward the woods, and she limped after them, trying to make herself heard over Frances’ wails.

  “Look thee! That boy Ebenezer, he’s lame! It hurts him to walk! What good can ’e do thee?”

  As if he understood her words, the warrior looked down and noticed Ebenezer’s dragging gait. He stopped, said something, and released the boy’s arm, pushing him away. The boy stood amazed for a moment, then, face shining with deliverance, went lurching back toward his mother. She caught him in her arms and ran her fingers through his hair.

  But now the warriors spoke rapidly among themselves, glancing downstream toward the fort. The warrior who had released Ebenezer took from the others their bundles of booty and trotted ahead of them up the path toward the woods. They seized and lifted the two small children over their shoulders like meal sacks and hurried after him with swift, effortless strides. Ruth could see that there was no chance of catching up to them. Hands clapped to her cheeks, she screamed after them, “Frannie! Frannie! Oh my dear baby girl!”

  This terrible moment, she felt with a dread certainty, would be her last sight of her red-haired daughter, the sunniest and loveliest of all her good children.

  Frannie was vanishing into the darkening woods: slung over a warrior’s brawny shoulder, curls blown wild, face wet with tears of anguish, her chubby arms outstretched toward her mother and home, her little bare feet kicking as if she were running in air, pink mouth drooling, voice now shrieking, “Mama! Oh Mama! Help me, Mama!”

  Ruth stood groaning, supporting her trembling son Ebenezer, her face a rictus of agony. She saw the girl’s flailing bare feet and thought of the new pair of little shoes that had been made for her to wear when the hard winter came, sturdy little leather shoes never yet worn, stored useless in a trunk in the house while their owner was abducted into a howling, stony wilderness soon to be white with deep snow and ice.

  The horror of what was happening fully stunned Ruth Slocum, whose mind was accustomed only to peace and the Inner Light.

  Suddenly her cracked tooth and barked shin hurt sharply. She stood staring over Ebenezer’s shoulder at the grim woods where the Indians had disappeared. All her sense now was of the vulnerability of flesh to pain—of blood on cold ground, of a child’s bare feet in winter.

  Frances’ terror was so numbing that she had to strain to draw breath. The last thing she remembered seeing was her mother standing on the path with Ebbie, dropping farther and farther back out of sight. Never before in her life had she seen such a terrible expression on her mother’s face, and it had doubled her terror.

  Now she couldn’t see her. There was nothing back there but woods, branches, fallen leaves. She was aware of being carried, hanging head down, over someone’s shoulder as her father sometimes carried her in play to make her squeal.

  This man carrying her was as hard and strong as her father, but rougher, and was wearing leather clothes. Someone else was running nearby. Her dress was wet and cold against her bottom. Far back, as faint as a birdcall, her mother’s voice was screaming her name.

  That voice was so desperate that the little girl’s heart twisted and she began screaming again into the dim woods toward her mother, toward her home.

  The man stopped running. Frances felt herself thrown off his shoulder, and she fell onto her back in damp dead leaves behind a huge fallen tree. The fall jarred her. The Indian man, fierce and horrible without hair or eyebrows and with greenish stripes painted across his face, jumped on her astraddle to hold her down and clapped the palm of his hard hand over her face. His eyes were fierce. He pressed so hard her nose and mouth felt mashed. She could not draw a breath. The two other Indian men jumped down beside him, looking back, whispering sharply. She heard water running nearby. Wareham had been dropped on the ground too, and he cowered silent and white, as if asleep with eyes open, too terrified even to whimper. The Indian men were silhouetted against the gray light of the sky beyond leafless branches, and they were staring and listening back down the trail, their guns pointing back that way; a feather hung from under the muzzle of one, swaying in the slight breeze. The men looked fearsome with their shaved heads, feathered scalp locks, and nose rings, all looming blurry through the tears of her panic.

  Desperate for breath, Frances tried to move, but the man tightened his legs on her and whispered something to the other two. He moved his hand so it was covering only her mouth, and she could inhale at last through her nose. It was runny and bubbly but she breathed, until she began to gag on mucus. She racked and gurgled and tried to cough under the crushing hand. Looking down at her, the Indian slightly lifted his hand from her face, but held it cupped above. Sucking a deep breath, her heart still pounding with terror and dismay, she emitted another forlorn wail. The hand clamped down as hard as before. She understood then, even in her panic, that they were trying to keep her still because someone was following them—perhaps her father and grandfather, or gentlemen from the fort. She realized that the Indian men themselves were afraid; these terrible, swift, strong Indian men were afraid because they had done something bad. Knowing that they were afraid somehow made her less afraid of them, though no less terrified of what was happening. She stopped trying to cry out, and listened. Over the sound of the running water she could hear distant men’s voices, and dogs—hunting dogs, baying and yelping.

  The Indian rose off of her with a quick move. A knife gleamed in his hand and he moved it down toward her legs. He cut her skirt and tore off a wide strip of it from the hem. The linsey-woolsey cloth was damp where she had wet herself, but the man wadde
d it and stuffed it into her mouth, and then with another strip around her neck and face, he tied the gag in. He grabbed her up and threw her onto his shoulder again, snatched up his gun and stepped down into a rocky bottom creek, wading upstream. The other two followed, one carrying Wareham and the other the sacks and bundles from the house.

  Now as Frances looked down and tried to breathe through her runny nose, all she could see was the dark, fast creek water close below. She could not cry out, and did not even struggle, for fear the man might drop her into the cold stream.

  She remembered then, as in a dream, her mother coming forth from hiding and scolding these bad Indians for bothering a lame boy, and she grew ashamed of herself for being such a sniffle-snot crybaby, not brave like her mother. This was very bad, what was happening, more frightful than anything before in her whole life. But, she thought, I don’t ever want Mama to know I wasn’t brave. Mama says if you’re afraid, it’s because you haven’t faith in God.

  I shall be brave. I shall be brave. I shall be brave.…

  She was carried upstream until it was almost dark. The stream was narrow and fast and they were high on the mountainside when the Indians stepped out of the water and climbed through the woods. Now and then the man carrying the bundles would stop and let the other two pass, and would gaze back downhill with his gun ready. Then he would climb past them and lead again. Finally they stooped into a dark, low place and she was dropped rudely on hard, dry, rocky ground. The air was still in this dark place, and Frances looked about and realized that they were in a cave. She had been in a cave before. Her father had shown her a cave in the summertime. A cave far up a hillside, a cave, he had said, where Indians had camped for ages past.

  In that cave her father had shown her smoked walls and fire pits, arrow points of stone, animal bones all broken and charred, fragments of pottery. He told her that Indians had lived in this valley probably since biblical times, or longer, and that perhaps Indian babies had been born in that very cave. He said that this valley had been their home for so long, they should be respected and treated well by the white people, who had only just arrived a short while ago.

  He had said there was war going on elsewhere in the valley and that some people called Tories were paying Indians to help them fight, and that war was bad. He had told her the Slocum family was fair and kind to the Indians and thus would never be a part of the war, and that the Indians knew it and would never hurt them. She thought of that now, lying shivering in this cave beside Wareham Kingsley, a wad of cloth in her mouth to keep her quiet, three Indians with guns crouched in the front of the cave, dark against the violet twilight. That was the only time she knew of when her father had told her something that was not true. It had been while he was showing her a cave like this. It might even have been this very same cave. It too had been in the side of a high hill.

  If it were the same cave, she thought, her father would know the way to it. Maybe he would climb up here yet this evening and talk to these Indians about the bad thing they had done, and they would give her and Wareham back to him and he could take them home.

  That thought filled her with a warming hope. Exhausted by the worst day she had ever known, and now feeling like a leaf turning and turning in an eddy of water, she went to sleep dreaming that her father was carrying her home.

  Ruth Slocum was waiting just inside the palisade gate when the armed searching party and tracking dogs returned to the Wilkes-Barre fort about midnight, and she knew they had failed. Her husband Jonathan, stocky, dressed in dark woolens, came to her slowly, shaking his head. Beside him was Ruth’s father, Isaac Tripp, gray, tired, and grim. Now the poor man had lost two grandchildren: his namesake Isaac Tripp, from his son’s family over the mountain, and Frances. The searchers filed in coughing and panting, hulking in the faint light of tin lanterns, some murmuring regrets to her as they passed.

  Jonathan took his wife’s arm, and her father took the other, and they walked her through trampled mud toward the armory. Though the two men had led the search for Frances, they carried no guns. They believed guns were for hunting game animals, not people, not even kidnappers.

  “For all their weapons, our neighbors aren’t a bold lot,” he said. She knew from that remark that he would have gone farther than they were willing to. “Dogs lost the scent at a creek. Either went down it to the river or up it to cross the mountain, but whichever, they’re headed north.”

  Ruth sighed, leaning against him. The report was not as bad as it might have been; they had not found Frannie’s body. Or the Kingsley boy’s. She had feared the Delawares might kill and discard the children when they heard dogs in pursuit. But north meant up the Susquehanna, where the Delaware villages were, where the Loyalists moved among the tribes and incited them to kill settlers. Such raids in the Wyoming Valley a few months ago had cost many lives and driven most of the settlers back down the Susquehanna, leaving only pockets like the Wilkes-Barre fort, and the farms of a few Quakers like the Slocums and Tripps, who had had faith that the tribes would never harm them.

  Inside the crowded armory, dimly lit, smelling of tea and whiskey, the Slocum youngsters rose from a long bench and came solemnly to hear their father’s report. Only Judith made any comment. “I feel in my heart the little ones are well.”

  “We need to pray that it’s so,” Jonathan said. And so in the hubbub they spent a while in silent prayer.

  Then Ruth sighed and rose. “Let us go home,” she said. “I am not at peace with idle hands, or among all these guns.” She was thinking of the house standing dark and empty, of her spinning wheel and teasels and the kitchen hearth, all those familiars that would distract her from imagining her daughter’s plight.

  “Home?” her father exclaimed, jaw ajar. “On such a night?”

  She swallowed and blinked. “They were but three young Delawares,” she said. “Should three bucks at mischief drive a whole community to cower in a fort?”

  “Mischief?” Jonathan said. “Killing and scalping a boy is mere mischief?”

  “It was because he was in soldier clothes.”

  “ ’Twas Giles’ fault!” Judith blurted.

  Ruth gave her a hard look to silence her. Giles, their oldest son, had taken up arms in the Wyoming troubles, which his father considered a sin against God’s will as well as a betrayal of the family. It always seethed in Jonathan, though he strained not to mention it.

  Ruth said only, “Our daughter’s in jeopardy. There’s no use placing blame on anybody. What happened this day is simply the way of an unenlightened humanity.” But even as she spoke those calming, conciliatory Quaker words, she was trembling within, still envisioning her daughter’s outreaching hands and kicking feet and thinking, O God, if she only had shoes!

  “Come daylight,” Jonathan’s deep voice said beside her, “we’ll go a-looking for the trail again. I truly doubt they’ll hurt her. All the Delawares in this valley know we’re Friends.”

  When Ruth looked at him, he was gazing into a corner of the ceiling with a wistful half smile on his lips, and she wondered how he could be smiling at a time like this. He caught her bewildered gaze and said, “Does thee remember the warrior who came and stayed with the Maddock children?” She stared at him, expression blank. “When they went away to Meeting,” he reminded her, “and left their youngsters at home, with a kettle of stew? And that warrior from Wyalusing stopped in off the trail?”

  “Ah, aye. Appalled that the parents had left them alone …”

  “And so he stayed the week and took care over them till the parents returned. And then scolded them for negligence …”

  “As they well deserved!”

  “No man’s without the spirit of God in him,” Jonathan said, patting her wrist, “and I mean red men as well.”

  He was trying so hard to reassure her, she knew. She pressed her knuckles to her mouth, clenching her jaws so hard to suppress sobs that her cracked molar felt like a needle jab in her eye.

  “Thee’s right,” he
went on after a moment, “we ought to go home. Rest till day. Then I’ll follow their trail again. Pray I can find them and remind ’em of the Lord’s tenets of decency. They’re afoot, and burdened. Mounted, I can probably overtake ’em. If I do, I’ll turn their hearts, and bring the wee ones home.”

  Ah, Jonathan, she thought. What a faith thee has!

  Frances was yanked from her nightmares by ungentle hands, and was at once aware that her mouth was full of something she could not swallow. In confusion and terror she tried to cry for her mother, but could make only groaning sounds.

  She was being lifted in darkness. When she felt herself thrown belly down over a hard shoulder, it all came back to her: the Indians had her and were carrying her away from home in the night. She remembered being taken into a cave. She was cold and sore everywhere, and she knew that someone had her and would not let her go, someone who was mean and did not care anything about how she felt. There had never been a time like this in all her life, and she could see no hope for the end of it, no hope of being in the comfort of her family again. She heard a child murmur and sob, and remembered Wareham, who had been carried here with her. She heard a man’s voice mutter harshly to the boy.

  Then she felt cold rain on her back, and knew she was outdoors again. It was scarcely lighter here than in the cave, but she sensed the outdoors around her and felt the drizzle and heard drops falling on leaves. She could make out against the darkness the darker shapes of trees, and by twisting her neck she could look back and see the dim form of another Indian man, the one carrying Wareham. She could sense that they were coming along a high path and that the mountainside sloped away far down to the left. That much she could sense of the world around her, even in her fear and misery, and she knew she was still being carried in a direction away from her home. She remembered that there were sounds of men and dogs behind earlier, and the Indians had been hurrying as if afraid of them. But the night back there was all quiet now. She remembered thinking that her father was following them, and that he might catch these bad Indians and make them give her back. But somehow she did not feel that way anymore. She remembered only her last sight of her mother, standing hopeless and calling after her, farther and farther behind and unable to follow, until her voice had stopped calling through the woods. At the thought of that, the girl’s eyes began streaming and she convulsed with sobs. With her mouth still gagged, she could only whimper and groan. Her mouth and jaws hurt from the gag and the tight strip that tied it in. She was about to wet herself again, and every step the man took jarred her and made that worse. Her nose ran and her feet ached with cold.