Now the line of horses was rounding the bottom of the mountain slope and passing a stand of dead, barkless trees into a level clearing by a curving creek. Through swirling snow she saw a high wall made of upright poles, like the fort near her home. But it was not the same place. The buildings inside the wall were different.
Between the wall and the creek stood dome-shaped huts and long buildings, as gray as the tree trunks, though still so vague through the blowing snow and wood smoke that the scene was dreamlike. It was a village, and around it spread cleared fields, and there were lean-tos, brush piles, and a fence enclosing a herd of horses. The voices of women were louder and clearer now, and she saw women coming, running out through a gateway in the high fence and across the clearing to greet the soldiers and Indian men, clustering around the riders at the head of the column, crying out and laughing. The wind blew their long hair and made then-capes and blankets flap and flutter.
They were all Indian women, and with them ran many children. Behind came Indian men walking, with blankets drawn close around them, some white or gray blankets, a few red, and those red blankets were the only bright color in the snowy, smoky scene that spread before her. Many dogs came running, barking, through the snow alongside the women and children.
Then, through the thrill and dread of all this that she was seeing and hearing, something else seized her whole attention.
It came on the smoke. It was the smell of food cooking, and nothing she remembered had ever smelled so good. She was so hungry that the aroma made her dizzy. She wondered if the Indian women would feed her. Her mother had fed Indian women.
She had seen Indian women only two or three times that she could remember. When they visited the settlement with their men and their children, they had always been shy, always soft-talking, never staring, hanging back at a distance. They had come to the house only after her mother went out and invited them to eat. But these women were not shy or quiet, they were bold. Their voices were loud and saucy, their ruddy brown faces wide open with white-tooth smiles. She had never seen white women act this merry. Several of them milled around the horse on which Wareham Kingsley was carried, and the man on that horse handed Wareham down into their upreaching arms. Other women came trotting farther back along the line, shouting to the Indian men, who laughed and shouted back at them. Frances had never seen men and women act so playful with each other, only children.
Some of the women had caught a glimpse of Frances and came running toward her. Their eyes were so sharp and dark it seemed she could actually feel them. The warrior let the blanket down and with one hand he lifted and spread her red hair into the wind, saying something to the women as he did so. Frances was intimidated by their response. They crowded close, chattering and squealing, reaching up to touch her. She shrank from them, pressing back against the man who had begun her day of terror but had grown familiar by his constant closeness.
The warrior said something in a laughing voice to one big, tall woman with a broad face and glittering black eyes. She worked her way in closer, face glowing with a smile, and the man hoisted Frances off the horse’s withers and handed her down to that woman.
The woman’s hands felt as strong and hard as the man’s. She clutched Frances to her great bosom and turned with her, laughing, allowing the other women to examine her red hair. Then she started toward the village while a few of the other women trotted alongside, talking fast in their language, which sounded like singing. They thronged through the opening in the palisade, into the gray town, passing among round, bark-covered huts and outdoor bonfires, steaming kettles, pole frames with animal skins stretched in them, excited children and running dogs. The scent of cooking meat was everywhere, and Frances had to keep swallowing to keep from drooling.
She felt different from any way she had ever felt before. For the first time in her life she was in an Indian town—something she and her brothers and sisters had often imagined. For the first time in her life almost all the people around her were Indians, not white people. For the first time everyone was speaking words she could not understand. These people smelled different; their town smelled different. Like the Indian man who had carried her here, the women smelled of smoke and bear oil. Unlike the people at Fort Wilkes-Barre, these people did not have stinking breath or stinking clothes, and the streets did not smell like chamber pots.
Without the warrior’s blanket around her, she was cold again, and every snowflake’s touch chilled her. Her feet and legs were icy. Her forefinger, the one without a fingernail, ached terribly. Her heart was racing with fear and cold and vulnerability. The staring and touching of all the Indian women and children made her feel somehow ashamed, though she knew nothing she should be ashamed of.
Smoke from the roofs of the dome-shaped houses swirled in the wind. But the woman did not carry her into any warm house. She kept passing the huts and striding downslope toward the creek, bantering with others as she went, now and then pausing before a hut as if to show Frances off to someone who had appeared from within. It had become a small, moving, chattering crowd, with Frances, in the arms of the big Indian woman, at its center.
Then they were on the creek bank. The woman set Frances on her feet on a cold, gray, flat stone as big as a table and wet with melting snow. And there, with an abruptness that shocked her breath out of her, Frances was stripped naked; the woman pulled her long gray dress over her head and threw it to a skinny little girl, who held it up for a moment at arm’s length between two fingers while holding her nose with her other hand. Women and children on the bank laughed. Frances remembered that she had wet the dress perhaps several times and understood what the gestures were about. Then the skinny girl knelt on the edge of the bank and plunged the garment into the cold running water of the creek.
Frances had never stood undressed before other people, never been naked outdoors, never been exposed to winter air without her woolen dress. Shivering, ashamed, wretched, hungry, scared, mocked, needing to pee, she shut her eyes and began crying. She sobbed in utter desolation.
Suddenly she was lifted and dunked into the creek. Gasping, she was turned about, lifted and lowered in the icy water. Her heart felt as if it would stop. For a moment even her head was pushed under. She choked and spewed water. Hard hands scrubbed her skin with what felt like sand and gravel. She lost control and let herself pee in the creek. She gasped and sobbed while rude fingers rubbed and rinsed between her legs and under her bottom.
Then she was lifted out and set upon the flat stone again, her quaking body stung by snowflakes that were colder than the creek water had been. She opened her eyes, still gasping and whimpering. She was raw pink gooseflesh and everything else in the world was gray. The big woman was kneeling barefoot beside her, wiping the water off her body with the edges of her hands. Someone handed the woman her moccasins and she pulled them onto her feet. Someone else gave her a red blanket. She swaddled Frances in it and picked her up and set off back up the creek bank toward the town, the whole chattering crowd again moving along with her. Warriors and green-coated soldiers were unsaddling and unloading horses, wiping guns and smoking pipes in the open area among the huts, and some of them paused to watch, laugh, and make remarks. Frances was barely aware of them, being in such a desperate and mortified state. She ached to the center of her bones and was murmuring, “Mama, Mama …”
She was carried through a low door into one of the huts. The interior was dense with smoke and strange smells. What first caught and held her attention was a fire. Inside a ring of stones in the middle of the room, it shimmered and flickered, red and yellow and lovely. She could feel its warmth on her chapped face. Her mother’s own hearth fire had always been the most comforting thing in her world, and now as she looked into this living glow, it seemed to warm even the bleakness of her heart, even though she was being held here in an Indian house, far from her own family, surrounded by strange Indian people, their glittering dark eyes all staring at her. Rather than look at those eyes, she watched the fi
re and yearned for home, her heart swollen with exquisite pity for herself.
The big woman stood Frances near the fire and took the blanket off, rubbing her skin briskly with it as she did so. Frances felt her skin basking in fire warmth for the first time in what had seemed forever. Many of the people in the hut were women who had come up with them from the creek, but there were several already sitting by the fire wearing only leather aprons. Their breasts were exposed, but the women did not act ashamed, as her mother would have if people had come in and found her with her dress off. They were all looking at Frances, who now stood bare in the fireglow. The big woman had stripped off her own dress, which was wet from the creek, and was rapidly chafing Frances’ skin with her palms, as if bathing her with the fire heat. The room was full of women’s voices speaking Indian words, and it was a moment before Frances realized she was hearing something that she understood.
“Girl,” an old woman on the far side of the fire was saying. “Girl. Zhaynkee’s girl!”
The face beyond the fire was as brown and wrinkled as an apple left outdoors all winter, and was all but curtained by thick strands of long white hair. The old woman’s breasts were flat as wallets and hung past her waist. She was pointing a bony hand toward the fire and saying, “Tindeh you like! Ahh, good! Tindeh wehlee heeleh! You like! Eh, Zhaynkee’s girl?” She nodded her old head, smiling, encouraging Frances to answer, then she indicated the fire again with a wave of her hand. “Muhnuka’hazh gift to Lenapen be that, Tindeh. Wehlee heeleh! Muhnuka’hazh, waneeshee!” She made an arc over the fire from right to left and made a noise like a crow’s call. Then she smiled, nodded, and seemed to want Frances to answer.
Frances was too confused and aware of herself to comprehend much of this, which seemed to have been a story or something of that sort, but it was good to have heard a few words she knew. And, among the Friends, old people were loved and respected for their wisdom, and so she tried to produce a mannerly smile for her, and said, “Yes, fire is good. Willy-hilly. Thank thee.” Then it was amazing to her how much braver and better she had made herself feel just by answering the old woman.
“Ah-huh!” several of the women said, nodding and smiling. “Wehlee heeleh!” And the big woman who had carried her said in her ear:
“Muhnuka’hazh is Crow of Rainbow.” Then she nodded to the old woman and said, “Waneeshee, Huma.” Then she exclaimed, “Suhpahn, for girl!” She pointed to something near the fire, and a woman handed her a clay pot. With a spoon-shaped scoop made of some kind of horn, the woman dipped up a steaming mass of yellow-brown paste from the pot and sang, “Waneeshee, Kahesana Xaskwim! Waneeshee, Kukna!”
She flipped off a dab of the stuff into the fire, then held the scoop to Frances’ lips. It smelled so good that her mouth watered and she forgot the strangeness of eating without any clothes on. She sucked a mouthful off the edge of the scoop and swallowed it down, and then another and another. Its flavor was mostly corn, but she tasted maple sweetening and some sort of meat fat. She would have wolfed it all down at once, but the woman now and then set the scoop aside on the edge of the pot to slow her down.
Now, at last warm and fed and surrounded by kindly voiced women who seemed to care for her comfort, Frances began to grow drowsy and dreamy. Knowing that they spoke a little of her language, she tried to think of things she would want to ask them, particularly about whether she might be taken home, but she was too sleepy to think of how to speak to them. She watched wisps of steam rise from her gray dress that had been hung to dry on a thong stretched above the fire. She gazed at the hut’s framework of bent saplings all lashed together and remembered the rafters under which she had slept at home. She watched the curling, swirling ascent of the cookfire smoke as it rose through the smoke hole in the roof toward the dull, gray, cold sky where snowflakes soared. Her hands and feet, so cold for so long, now felt hot and full of tickles and sparking sensations. Her sight blurred as she watched the fire. Sometimes a woman’s voice or laugh would draw her attention for a moment and she would find herself gazing at brown-breasted women, some of them drawing smoke through little stone tobacco pipes, and although this was such a sight as she had never seen before in her lifetime, or expected to see, it was somehow familiar and as things should be and perhaps always had been, and she was no longer so afraid of what was happening to her, but instead was looking into the very spirit of fire, drawn by it deeper and deeper toward the beginnings, ever closer to some original fire with an original circle of firelit faces around it, feeling part of a vast family of all who had ever sat looking into a center of flames and embers.
She dreamed that she was thanking God for all the peace and solace within fire circles, but God was not necessarily called by His name, and her prayer of thanks was not necessarily in a language she had ever known. But she knew the whole meaning of the prayer and it glowed within her like the Inner Light.
In her own house with her own family, Ruth Slocum sat in silent prayer, concentrating on her lost daughter.
Her husband and her father and a few men from the fort had gone out on horseback the morning after the abduction, picked up the trail again and followed it up Wilkes-Barre Mountain to a cave near Laurel Run Gap, but then snow had come and erased it, and they returned disheartened.
Ruth could feel the presence of all her praying family now, even with her eyes closed. But where little Frannie would have been, she felt a terrible absence, an absence more intense than even her sunny presence had ever been.
But at least Giles, who had been gone in recent weeks, was home from soldiering for a few days. She could feel his presence there, and could also feel her husband’s anger toward their soldier son. It was not good to feel the tension between people during prayers.
Her father Isaac now cleared his throat and quoted huskily, “ ‘Cast thy burden on the Lord, and He will sustain thee.’ ” She heard him sigh, get up from his creaky chair, and go to the hearth. That meant the prayers were over, and she opened her eyes to the sight of her husband Jonathan staring at their oldest son, Giles, with pain and anger ablaze in his eyes. That sent a chill through her, for she had seldom seen Jonathan show his offspring anything more than wistful reproach on the rare occasions when they disappointed him. She was afraid of what Jonathan might say, and when he spoke, she knew what was coming.
“Right yonder at the grindstone is where they shot and scalped poor Nathan Kingsley,” Jonathan said to Giles, “and so I can only reckon they mistook him for thee, as he was in soldier clothes.”
Ruth saw Giles, in his blue uniform, stiffen. “I doubt they gave me a thought, Father,” her son replied in a voice tight with caution. “Nathan was a soldier himself, so they killed him.”
Jonathan took a deep breath and blew it slowly out through thinned lips. “I believe they mistook him for thee,” he repeated. “They have never come here hostile, until they saw thee in battle last summer. Thereupon they reckoned the Slocums to be partisan against ’em after all, and our friendship no longer trustworthy. And that put us in harm’s way.” He said this in the lowest but most precise voice, but from the response it provoked, he might have snarled or shouted it, because Giles leaped to his feet and stood facing his father with fists clenched at his sides.
“Well, I am partisan!” the youth cried out. “I am partisan against King George! But thee has no right to blame me for Nathan’s death! I’ll not bear the guilt of that! More shame to men who’ll not even raise a hand to defy a tyrant king!” He was red in the face, breathing hard. He had never said anything to his father in such a tone, and Ruth was afraid her husband might explode from his Quaker calm and knock his son down.
Instead Jonathan said, without the slightest rise in his voice: “We Friends defy kings by not raising a hat to them. And I’ll likewise defy generals, be their coats red or blue.”
Giles was a grown man and a soldier, but Ruth could see that he was on the verge of tears. She saw that the younger children were agape at these cross words. Though she loved G
iles especially as her firstborn, she would rather have had him stay away forever than bring this conflict of principles home. To Ruth, this soldier son was a strange and troubling presence, even though he was familiar in the memories of a lifetime. She herself had lain awake nights imagining Giles in the incomprehensible act of taking human life, of quenching the Inner Light of other persons.
Maybe he never had killed anyone, and she prayed that was the case. He had never admitted or denied that he had killed. Ruth believed she could surely intuit if he had, just by the sight of him, for surely he would have been transformed by it, from the Quaker boy he had been, to something entirely different. It was nearly a miracle that he was even alive. In the summer battle against the Tory Rangers, he had been one of the few to survive, having leaped into the Susquehanna and hidden under a log. She was glad that her son was alive, but she was not sure whether her husband was even glad of that, he was so disappointed in his son the soldier.
Giles had been moving his lips, groping for a reply, and now he said, “Father, thee shall never see as I see, no matter what I say to thee. But thee shall never make me feel guilt for what happened to Nathan Kingsley. Nathan himself would not, were he here in this room with us now. He knew he took his life in his own hands when he became a soldier.” Giles raised his head back, proud of making a good point.
But his father was not impressed, and replied in that same quiet, exact tone: “Our lives are meant to be in God’s hands, not our own. And whether thee’ll assume fault for Nathan or no, the fault for our little girl’s jeopardy rests squarely upon thee.”
Those words like a knife in the belly made Giles flinch and bend.
And his mother felt the pain exactly the same.
CHAPTER TWO
The Red Heart Page 4
