The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  And as she looked down the valley for a sight of the familiar sturdy figure of Neepah, scanning along the slow-moving line with her hand shading her eyes from the bright morning sun, she heard a deep, distant thump, like thunder from far down the river, and then again, then a few more times, and at each reverberation the voices of the people in the valley rose in pitch. Squinting toward the horizon to see what might have made such a noise, she saw what she thought at first might be thunderclouds, but were really not like thunderclouds. The way it hung low and dark, it looked like a pall of smoke.

  She trotted down the slope into the bottomland, moving with the village people, and soon was engulfed in the milling crowd, darting among the crush of people dressed in skins, in cloth, in rags, or in virtually nothing. Almost all the crowd was women and children and elders, and she was surprised and frightened to see that many of them were bruised, burned, or bandaged, some even limping on bloody feet. Some people were so sooty, their clothes so visibly charred, they appeared to have fallen in fires.

  As Good Face had imagined it, Neepah would have been leading her people up the river as if she were the chief or mother of them all. But now it was apparent that no one was leading, and there were so many people coming that Good Face was afraid she might not even be able to see Neepah or Minnow. Good Face was only waist-high to most of the people and could see only those immediately around her. She pushed between two groups of women who were embracing and lightening the loads of the newcomers, and almost ran into a dusty, naked little girl who was stumbling wearily forward, clutching a corn-husk doll to her bosom. Good Face had seen her before, but not in Neepah’s town. This was a child she had seen in a cornfield in some little village beside the river, during the long journey up.

  Wandering bewildered through the mob, confronted by scabbed-over wounds and seeping poultices and people with broken feet hitching along on forked-stick crutches, Good Face saw now and then some familiar face, but not Neepah, not Minnow, neither of her loved ones. She could not see them, but perhaps she could call them. And so she wandered erratically through the drift of wretched people like a twig in the eddies of a stream, nudging and turning about, a little redheaded girl in a colorless Quaker dress, calling, “Neepah! Neepah! Minnow! Neepah!”

  In the din of desperate voices, hers could scarcely be heard.

  The next day, Good Face shared Owl’s horse with another girl, one with a hurt foot. The girl rode behind Owl. They were going farther up the river and then turning westward over high hills following a well-worn trail. Now there were hundreds of people on the trail. They included most of the ones who had limped and staggered into the town the day before. They were from twenty or thirty villages that had been destroyed by the wapsi army, which was still following, still burning towns and crops. The leader of that army had been named “Town Destroyer.” Cornplanter had promised he would stop Town Destroyer, but the people who had been driven farther and farther up the river would go on ahead to Sookpa helluk, the Great Falling Water. There, at a place called Fort Niagara, the British would feed and protect them until Town Destroyer was stopped and defeated and driven back down where he belonged. The old man had explained all this to Good Face. The lehpawcheek had explained also that the smoke in the morning sky had been from the burning towns, and that the thunder noises were Town Destroyer’s cannon, which was fired morning and evening to tell the tribes that he was still coming.

  It had been hard for him to make her understand anything, because all she could think of was that Neepah had never come. In all the hundreds who straggled in, Good Face had not found Neepah, had not found Minnow. She had called till she was hoarse.

  Some families from Neepah’s town had finally arrived, being the most tired and farthest behind because they had come so far, so many of them badly hurt, but none had been able to tell old Owl what had become of Neepah, even though he asked everybody who came from that town. Some had seen her in the morning before the soldier drums started. Some said they thought they remembered seeing her in the fields helping the women harvest some of the corn before the soldiers could destroy it. Some believed they remembered her running down a path with the warriors who were going toward the army, and one of those seemed to remember that she was carrying a lance as she ran down with them, and someone else said no, she was carrying a club. Finally Owl had said to Good Face, “They have come too far and are too tired and have seen too much since that day. When people are like that, you can ask them if they saw something and they will believe they saw it because by asking them you make them see it in their minds.”

  “Maybe she was killed,” Good Face had said, almost weeping at the thought. She remembered soldier stories, remembered Minnow’s scar.

  “The people of the town were scattered,” Owl said. “Some did different things. I have seen this. Some hide in the woods or the river and some go up in the hills. And then when the danger is past they come back to their town and find others who have come back. Then, when enough come back, they build the town again, or if few come back, they set out to find the ones who left. When a town destroyer comes through, it can take a long time for all the people to find each other. But these things have been happening to us ever since the wapsituk first came to the shore of the Sunrise Water and wanted a place to put their chair, and though it has been hard for us, we still remain the Lenni Lenapeh, the Grandfather People, the same as we have been since He Who Creates By Thinking first thought us into being.”

  The old man had patiently told her all that, even though he had had much to do and many to talk to. Then he reminded her:

  “Neepah knows where you are going. Her father and her mother live close by to Fort Niagara, and I am taking you to them as she asked me to do. She knows the way there and she is a strong woman, and you will be her daughter, as that is her best dream. You have come a long way to be her daughter. Because of the deeds of this Town Destroyer, it is necessary that you must go an even longer way, but remember, you are to be her daughter. Zhukeh kishalokeh.” Now I am finished telling.

  And so she remembered his words as they came along this trail through higher country, which he told her was the land of the Seneca, who called themselves the Great Hill People because they had been born from a mountain here, and that was their creation, long ago. The trails here sometimes were so high and steep, traveling down into stony gray creek canyons and back up the opposite sides, that she could hardly bear to look down. Sometimes it seemed she was as high as the clouds, with nothing below but rocks and boulders and howling air and roaring, foam-white water.

  It was a hard and slow way, through woods whose trees were so tall and dense that hardly a sunbeam could reach the ground, where boulders bigger than houses stood covered with bright green mosses or blue-gray lichens speckled with orange, where fallen trees thicker than a man’s height lay black and rotting, or sometimes had been torn all to splinters by bears clawing for grubs. The old man pointed out to her such things, and showed her the kinds of flowers and plants that could be used for curing headaches and aching bones, the ones that would cure itching skin, the ones that had edible roots, nuts, and berries. “Neepah will want you to know all these,” he would say, “because a Lenapeh woman knows how to feed and heal, and how to make everything anyone could need.” There was plenty of time for him to teach her such things, because the old people and hurt ones needed to rest often, as did the horses with two or three riders.

  Whenever they stopped and sat, other old men would come and sit by the lehpawcheek, and they would smoke their pipes and talk, while the women tended to sore feet and injuries and hungry children. There were no young warriors along with these people, except a few who had been too badly wounded to stay back with Cornplanter and Brant and Butler to fight Town Destroyer. On the first and second days here on the long trail, it had still been possible to hear the thunder of Town Destroyer’s cannon in the morning and evening. Then on the third day, in the afternoon of a very hot and dry day, there had been a long rumbling from ba
ck in that direction, which then had grown faint and finally subsided under the rush of waters and the breeze in the trees, and during the time of that faraway thundering, the old men had smoked their pipes in a circle and prayed, and the women sat silently, praying too, with their jaws clenched and lips closed tight.

  And then the tired and homeless hundreds got back on their feet or climbed onto the overloaded horses and moved westward again.

  Owl told the two girls on his horse that this westering trace was the Longhouse Road. By what she saw along the way she understood the name. They passed through towns each day, and they were not like other Indian towns she had seen before. The bark-covered buildings were not wikwams, and were huge, some a hundred paces long, with several families living in each one. Pole palisades enclosed the towns. Owl told her that the Longhouse People were the tribes of the Iroquois. “They have always been mean to our People,” he said. “But now we all have the same enemy.”

  To Good Face, the people in the longhouse towns seemed very different from the Lenapeh, the only Indians she had known; their language sounded strange, their ornaments were different, and they seemed unfriendly and scornful, though they did feed Owl’s followers, let them rest within the palisades, and helped them take care of their sick and hurt ones. But even these cold-eyed Longhouse People knew Owl, and their head men came out to smoke and talk with him about the army coming on.

  And in all these Longhouse towns along the way, drums were pounding.

  Good Face had fallen into a dreaminess from the fatigue and motion of riding and was daydreaming of Neepah and Minnow, when they rode over the crest of a ridge. She heard a strong wind then, but when she looked up, the treetops were not moving at all.

  She looked about, coming back from her reveries little by little to notice the heat and familiar discomforts of the saddle. She knew she was hearing wind, that she had not dreamed it, but the woods were still, the sun dapple on the trail was motionless, and midges were twirling in the narrow sunbeams. Behind, there were the sounds of the procession, which she had been hearing for so many days that she didn’t even notice anymore unless she listened for them: the footfalls and hoof steps, dogs, drone of voices, horses snorting and blowing in the heat, and the old man’s traveling song, barely louder than his breathing, which he hummed to himself sometimes for hours at a time, a song deep in his chest that she felt, as much as heard, when she slumped back against him in her sleepy spells.

  He stopped humming and soon he said, “Kulesta.”

  “I hear,” she said. “But what is it?”

  Then a woman’s voice back in the column sang out, “Kulesta! Sookpa helluk!” And after a pause, cheerful voices were calling those words back along the column, and people back there began laughing, and others began singing. Good Face remembered what the name meant, and turned her head to look back and up at the smile-creased face of old Owl.

  He nodded. “Soon we will be at the end of this journey of sadness on the Longhouse Road. You hear the Great Falling Water. You will see it before this day is done.”

  They had been descending out of the high, steep hills for the past day of riding but were still going down long slopes through the woods, and she could see no sign of the falling water, nothing but trees, whose leaves were beginning to fade from green to yellow, sometimes edged with crimson. Now they rode on and on, the sound growing louder, becoming less a sound of wind and more a sound of thunder. The sound was so great that all the air in the woods seemed to rumble, and it covered all the sounds of the people and horses and dogs. They rode through the forest’s edge into rolling land where dead trees and stumps stood and the ground was covered with grass and weeds instead of the little forest flowers and the ferns, and the afternoon sun was so bright and hot that she squinted and began sneezing. Then she was looking at more woods and patches of clearings, and, beyond the farthest treetops, something so unfamiliar that she almost felt dizzy for a moment: a blue, straight horizon more level than a tabletop. It was a confused instant before she realized that it must be water. She remembered her father’s description of the ocean he had seen. She gaped at it, blinking, associating the flat bright vastness of it with the roaring sound. But the noise was coming from nearer by, from her left, and when she looked that way she saw something else totally unfamiliar.

  It was like a white cloud floating and swirling above the tree-tops, shimmering with sunlight, dissolving into the blue sky above, a sky devoid of any other clouds.

  The worn trail continued through clearings and clumps of woods, with the ruins of old villages here and there, sticks and bark rotting on the ground, a few arches of longhouse frames still standing weathered and gray, abandoned cornfields, the remains of pole fences.

  The trail divided in two, and Owl rode to the left, through more woods. The very air seemed to pulsate, and the horse they were riding began fidgeting, throwing its head, trying to go toward the right. So the old man halted it, summoned someone with a wave of his hand, dismounted, and lifted the girls down while a tall boy took the horse’s rein and led it aside.

  She looked up at old Owl openmouthed. Under her bare feet she could feel the earth vibrating. It was the first time in her life the ground under her feet had not been solid and still. She reached for the old man’s hand and he laughed, though she could not hear him. Then he walked her away from the horse. Other people had come near, and they all walked with him toward a line of trees beyond which the shimmering cloud of mist stood. As they walked through the woods she clung tight to his hand because she could tell there was something strange and enormous just ahead.

  And then they were standing on the very edge of the earth, and below and before them was a world of rock and spray and cascading blue-green water. It was the most beautiful but most frightening spectacle her eyes had ever beheld, and her heart felt high and fast in her breast. She felt as if the whole world were about to wash away and take her with it. She watched fascinated as tremendous curtains of white water slowly fell, ever moving but never really changing shape, and burst into a churning, whipping whiteness on great boulders far, far below. The swift water in the chasm below roiled deep blue and milk-white, drifted over by mists. Even at the top of this cliff where she stood, she could feel the cooling mists moistening her hands and face. She had seen waterfalls on this journey through hills and woods, where creeks dashed musically down cliff sides, but here so much water was pouring so mightily that it dizzied her to try to look all the way across the chasm, and when old Owl let go of her hand, she gasped and sat down hard on the ground rather than try to stand unsupported in the presence of such din and motion.

  Other old men had come to stand with the lehpawcheek, looking out over the thundering cascade. He extracted his smoking pipe from its fur bag and filled it with tobacco. He lit it as she had seen him do before, by holding a glass disk over it in the sunlight. He puffed smoke, drawing his hand along above the pipe stem as if to guide the smoke to himself, then turned the stem in a circle while saying something she could not hear but knew to be a prayer. Neepah had told her that this Great Falling Water was one of the People’s sacred places, which she had presumed to mean like Jerusalem or Nazareth or something. She saw that many of the people had come close to the edge and seemed to be praying too, some with pipes, and many of the women praying as Neepah had, by holding their palms up and facing the sky with their eyes closed. Good Face felt that she ought to pray too, but was afraid to close her eyes so near this roaring, earthshaking tumult.

  If Owl were still holding my hand, I mightn’t be afraid to shut my eyes, she thought.

  Just then she thought she heard Neepah’s voice, faint in the roar of water, not speaking words, but nevertheless directing her to pray because she was in a sacred place. She did not look around for Neepah, because even though she had heard her voice, she knew that Neepah was not really here. Somehow she knew all this, and it was strange how she could. But she remembered that Neepah was never afraid, and she was ashamed of herself for being a
fraid to pray, of all things.

  And so she did shut her eyes—though not till she had a firm grip with both hands on the grass on either side of where she sat—and she prayed a prayer that went swooping and soaring beyond any she had ever felt.

  Good Face was relieved when they returned from the high place to the main trail and rode through more woods and fields, past more old towns and some wikwams with people still living in them. The roar of the water grew fainter as they went away from it, but it could still be heard for a long while, and sometimes when she looked back, she could still see the cloud of mist above the trees.

  Then they were going down a steep slope toward a much lower level of ground, and she could look out through the trees on the slope and see the vast blue lake again, and when they came down off the slope they were on the river bluff, but not so high above the water now. Here on the low ground they began entering big, smoky villages of wikwams and skin tents and lean-tos. People came out of the camps and greeted those they knew among Owl’s followers. Someone came and lifted the other girl off the back of the horse. People kept leaving the column, but Owl rode on.

  And then at the end of the road, just beside the shore of the lake, Good Face saw a massive fort, far bigger than the one near her home at Wilkes-Barre, a fort with a huge, gray stone three-story building standing on it, so big it had seven or eight chimneys.

  She thought the fort must be where Owl was leading the rest of the people, but he turned the horse away from the river and into a large cluster of wikwams, where he was immediately greeted by many who came running forth calling to him in the Lenapeh tongue. He greeted them cheerfully, and she thought these surely must be his own people. Again he dismounted and lifted her down, saying to the people crowding around, “This child is Good Face and I have brought her to be granddaughter of Tuck Horse and Flicker.”