The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Come, then, lehpawcheek,” a young woman said. “Their lodge is this way. I have never seen hair so red and beautiful, Good Face, even though there are several soldiers in the fort whose hair is red.”

  “Waneeshee,” Good Face said to the young woman, being polite, as Neepah had told her always to be.

  “A ho! She knows our tongue!” exclaimed the young woman.

  “This is a girl who speaks much, and speaks well,” old Owl said. They were walking through the village, and the smell of cooking was everywhere. The travelers had had nothing to eat all day but roasted cornmeal flavored with maple, and some berries, and the smell of meat cooking was making her mouth water. Several women of all ages had joined them, and some of them reached out and caressed her red hair as they walked along among the wikwams and cookfires.

  “There is their lodge,” the young woman said. “I will run and tell them you bring them a beautiful girl!”

  The old man called after her, “Tell them I will give them this girl if they feed me!” He chuckled, but she felt sad. It seemed that she would be leaving someone else she had come to like.

  The ground around this wikwam was strewn with wood chips and shavings. Slats and poles of fresh-cut wood leaned against the walls. Good Face remembered that Neepah’s father was a chair-maker.

  The young woman ducked in through the door of the bark-covered hut, and then came out followed by a man and a woman who did not look very old except for their gray hair. They had grave faces that were dark, round, and broad, and glowed in the golden light of the late-afternoon sun. The woman looked like Neepah, though with gray hair, so much so that Good Face wanted to run up and hug her waist. Instead she slowly walked closer, beside Owl, who was tired and walking with a limp. As they approached she saw that the woman did have an old face when seen closer. She had wrinkles and sagging eyelids and some spots that looked like freckles, even darker than the rest of her face. The old woman was looking straight at Good Face and was not smiling. The old man was smiling, but he was smiling at Owl.

  The two old men put all four of their hands together and held them for a moment, nodding and smiling. Then they sat down on a log that lay near the cookfire, which was outdoors because of the hot weather, and the old man picked up a long smoking pipe that lay in the forks of two branches stuck in the ground. He filled the pipe while the old woman laid some dry sticks over the embers and fanned the fire with a turkey-feather fan. When the fire was flaming, the old man picked out a burning twig, held it over the pipe bowl, and sucked on the stem until he was making plenty of smoke. Then he turned the stem in a circle, pointed it at the ground and then toward the sky, and finally handed it to old Owl, who puffed more smoke, letting it rise out of his mouth into his nostrils.

  The younger women sat and stood about, saying nothing, just seeming to wait, watching. The old woman picked up a small iron kettle and, with a pothook through its bail, hung it on a wooden frame to heat over the flames. She knelt and sat back, wincing, and then began morosely studying Good Face, who stood by herself being patient before the elders, as Neepah had taught her to do. Old people take their time and do certain things first, Neepah had told her. Good Face had noticed that was very true and that no matter how much one might want to start talking about things, it was no use to start until the elders were ready. Nevertheless, knowing almost surely that this woman was Neepah’s mother, she kept looking at her, wishing she would smile but afraid that if she looked at her too boldly, the old woman would not like it. The young women had started talking to each other in low tones. Far away there was still the hushing, whispery sound of the waterfall, even though they had come down the river a long way from it. Other people, seeing the lehpawcheek, had come over to stand and sit around, but did not interrupt the pipe-smoking, and little children were gathering behind the adults’ knees to stare at Good Face. She waited, feeling many eyes.

  When the pipe burned out, the old man cleaned out the bowl with a twig and set the pipe back in its forks. He had not been looking at her, but now he did, with his knobby hands resting on his knees. He wore only a breechcloth and moccasins and a necklace of claws. His skin was loose and wrinkly and veiny, but underneath his muscles still looked thick and hard. There were not many places on his chest and arms that were not scarred. Across his cheeks and around his neck were tattoos of triangles and lines. His eyes were so small and deep and keen it seemed as if she could feel his gaze touching her like pointed fingers. She had heard Neepah talk of her father Tuck Horse, and she remembered the story that he had been a great warrior who fiercely hated the wapsituk and had been fighting them all his life. Remembering that she herself was wapsini, something that she had not thought about very much, she began to be afraid Tuck Horse might hate her because she was. He certainly did not appear very happy to see her.

  Now old Owl, who seemed so skinny and tall in the presence of Tuck Horse, extended his hand toward her and said to the old couple:

  “Your daughter told me to bring this child to you. She wants you to keep her here until the Long Knife army goes back and it is safe in the villages again. She asks you to be muxumsah and huma to this girl. I have traveled the Longhouse Road with this girl, and I can say with truth that she is a child who talks very much but listens well too.”

  “Has our daughter adopted this girl yet?” Tuck Horse asked.

  “They did not have the ceremony. The army came too soon.”

  Tuck Horse said, “This cannot be my granddaughter, then.”

  It took Good Face a moment to grasp what Tuck Horse had said, and she thought she had misunderstood something in the language, for she still sometimes got one word confused with another.

  But Owl, his head tilted, said, “Yes, she can be your granddaughter. Neepah will adopt her as daughter when they are together again, after the army goes away. She told me to tell you that is what she wants to do. This girl is to replace her daughter who was sent to the Spirit World by the Long Knives.” Good Face was relieved to hear Owl explain it because she was alarmed by what Tuck Horse had said.

  But now the old warrior squeezed his eyes shut and passed his hand back and forth across his face, saying, “Do not speak the name of that one!” And the man’s wife was also squeezing her eyes shut and looking away. Then Tuck Horse looked hard at Owl, who sat with his mouth open.

  “Listen, for you do not know this,” Tuck Horse said, his voice deep in his chest. “You came slowly, all along the river. But the messengers came straight from Wyalusing like a swift bird many days ago. Our daughter whose name we cannot speak, she has gone past Keeper Grandmother and is …” He swept his hand up toward the descending sun and then down to the horizon. “… on the Path of Souls.”

  Good Face cried herself to sleep that night in the lodge of Neepah’s old parents. When she slept at last, she dreamed of Neepah and the Three Sacred Sisters, who were corn, beans, and squash in the forms of young women. In the dream, Neepah and the Sacred Sisters all stood together on a mound of earth and swayed in a dance until their roots came free of the soil and they rose together into the sky. They were singing happily as they went up, but Frances stayed on the ground. She was Frances because the woman who had given her a Lenapeh name was dead.

  When she awoke in the morning, she was still unable to keep from crying, and she was cold as well. After all the heat of the long summer, a cold wind had started blowing in the night, and then sometime while she was dreaming a rainfall had begun. She was sleeping barefoot and in just her dress and there was no fire inside the wikwam because the cookfire had been outside for the summer. She was curled up on a bed of boughs and grass that had been comfortable enough when it was warm and she was exhausted from crying about Neepah, but now she was shivering and wretched, and there was no warmth in her heart where Neepah had been for so long. She knew that she was now even farther away from her real family than she had been before. Even old Owl, whom she had grown to like very much, was not here now. Sometime during her awful grief of the evening befo
re, the old man had left to go someplace where members of his clan were, somewhere closer to the fort.

  She shivered and sniffled and tried to draw her legs up far enough that her skirt would cover her cold feet, but it was in vain because she had grown, and so much hem had torn and frayed. If she could have stayed with Neepah, Kahesana would have made her a deerskin dress. Or if she had been with her Quaker mother, she would have made her a new dress or repaired this one. But now Frances had no one to take care of her that way. This old man and woman did not seem to care for her at all, and they were still asleep in their old blankets on the other side of the dark, cold wikwam. She could hear the old man snoring softly. Frances wished she could have left these people and gone on with Owl. At least the old lehpawcheek had liked her.

  She did not know really why Neepah was dead, but she remembered that she had had to stay at her own town because she was a leading woman of her clan there and she had said her people would need her there when the Long Knife army came, and so probably the army had killed her. Frances began to sob again.

  The only person left from the beginning was Wareham, but he had never been any help. He was just a miserable, lost, whiny boy. And besides, she didn’t even know where he was now.

  She felt so sad now, with no Neepah, with the magic of her love and care gone, that she wished she had floated home down the river when she first learned how to swim. But now she was far from that river.

  And what of Minnow? she thought. Did they kill her too?

  It was so chilly, and the rain on the roof of the wikwam was so dismal a sound, a sound that made her think of winter.

  She saw the old woman, Ulikwan, Flicker, stirring in her blanket. The woman got up a little at a time, first on an elbow, then groaning to sit up, then putting her feet on the floor, like somebody who was hurt. Seeing her efforts made Frances even more sad. This woman was so unsmiling and slow that it was hard to imagine that she was Neepah’s mother. Ulikwan was a name that meant a kind of woodpecking bird, Neepah had told her, and had even pointed out a flicker to her. Frances thought of that as she watched the old woman get to her feet, draping her blanket over her head, and stoop through the door flap to go out into the rain. When Frances looked back toward the old people’s bed, she saw the old man’s eyes open looking at her, but he shut them at once and pretended to be asleep.

  The old woman came back in with a kettle. She picked up some kindling from a dry pile inside the door and put it in the middle of the firepit in the center of the wikwam. She opened a little bag and got out some things, knelt in the gray light that came down through the smoke hole, and began striking sparks with a flint and steel, into charcloth and tinder, just as Frances had seen her own real mother and Neepah do on many mornings when their fires had burned out overnight. When the tinder was smoking, the woman held it in her palms and blew on it until it glowed on one side and then flames burst out. She set it in the firepit and began adding shavings and sticks until a steady fire was burning and crackling. As the air in the wikwam filled with smoke, the old woman moved a long pole that reached out through the smoke hole. That adjusted the piece of bark over the hole so that a little more light came in, and the smoke quickly drifted and curled up and out. Then she hung the kettle from a pole above the fire. Now and then she looked at Frances and saw her looking at her, but she said nothing. That made Frances feel even more bleak and cold.

  The old woman adjusted the fire under the pot and then with pained movements got up and hung her rain-wet blanket near the fire and went back to her bed, grunting and turning until she was settled in under her husband’s blanket with him, lying on her left side facing Frances.

  After a short while Tuck Horse muttered something to his wife and she murmured back. Then she raised her head and said, “Wehletawash.” Good Face. Neepah’s name for her.

  “Ai, Huma?” Frances had not meant to call her Grandmother; it had just come out, being the way these Lenapeh addressed the old women.

  “Surely you are cold,” the old woman said, lifting the edge of the blanket. “Come in here until the fire warms the lodge.”

  Frances nodded. She got up, hugging herself, and went around the little cookfire. Their bed was between poles a foot off the floor, and she sat down on the edge and sank back into the warmth and smells of the old people’s bed, the smoky, musky, leafy smells, odors of tanned hides and tobacco, the night breath and sweat of the old woman and man. The old woman enveloped her in the blanket’s warmth and with a warm arm drew her shivering, clammy little body back close to her own body heat.

  Better than the warmth itself was simply the terribly needed closeness of someone. The old woman’s arm was over her and Frances could squirm backward until her cold back and bottom were pressed to the old woman’s bosom and belly the way she had sheltered herself in the haven that Neepah had been during the last winter. The old woman radiated not just heat but comfort. Tears welled in Frances’ eyes and made the little cookfire blur and shimmer, but now they were not the tears of lonely misery, but the tears of gratitude. She put her cold hands between her thighs and felt her Inner Light growing and spreading and she prayed a word of thanks and sent it up with the smoke rising through the roof, and then her spirit floated down into someplace that, wherever it was, was home, even if only for this moment.

  She awoke once because a strange, blaring sound penetrated her slumber, but its distant tones had died by the time she was awake. She was alone in the bed and knew she had been asleep for a long time and she should go make water, but she was too tired and comfortable to move yet and so she let herself fall into sleep again without thinking of anything, without even opening her eyes.

  She woke up again and opened her eyes enough to see that the old woman was sewing by the fire and the old man was not in the wikwam. She still needed to pee, but not desperately yet, and all was calm in the wikwam, so she went back to sleep, aware only that the rain had stopped and people were talking outdoors.

  Then suddenly she was awakened by the blanket being thrown off of her, and old Tuck Horse was standing over her saying, “Get up. Come.” He took hold of her arms with his hard hands and lifted her so quickly onto her feet that her knees weren’t ready yet and she almost fell down. He grabbed the hem of her dress and pulled it off over her head, and she was so startled to find herself standing naked that she almost wet herself. Tuck Horse threw her dress down on the bed and, seeing the little bag, he took it between his thumb and finger and looked at it and said, “Did my daughter give you this?” She nodded, shivering and pressing her knees together. He let go of the medicine bag and took her hand and wrist in his big hand. He pulled her toward the door, lifted the flap, and led her out.

  Many women and children were standing around out in front of the wikwam as if they had been waiting for her, and they began talking fast and low when they saw her. Old Flicker stood there by the outdoor fire, holding a bundle in her left arm. The ground was cold and wet and squishy underfoot, with puddles of rainwater all about, and the sky was dull with low, ragged, fast-moving clouds. The strong breeze was making everything ripple, wave, and flutter—foliage, grasses, hair, feathers, clothing, even the water in the puddles. A man wearing a fur cap and a fur yoke covered with little round mirrors was kneeling by the fire. He scooped some embers from the fire with a shallow bowl, then crumbled some dry leaves over them to cause a thick white smoke. Then he carried it around her and Tuck Horse and Flicker. The old couple made motions of washing themselves with the fragrant smoke, which the wind dispersed at once. Then the man put down the smoking bowl and picked up a wooden bowl containing what appeared at a glance to be dirt, and turned to walk away, with everyone following. Tuck Horse led her by his strong grip. She knew some sort of medicine was being done and was a little afraid, but mostly she was in desperate discomfort from needing to pee; she was covered with gooseflesh and already starting to dribble as she walked.

  They led her down a slope between two rows of wikwams and to the edge of a stony creek.
There the old couple and several women stepped out of their moccasins and waded into the creek with her, while the man with the wooden bowl stood on the bank and began chanting softly.

  The women immediately took her out of Tuck Horse’s grip and dunked her entirely under the water, head and all. They let her up for a gasping breath of air but kept her body submerged and began scrubbing her skin painfully hard with handfuls of sand and gravel from the creek bed.

  She remembered all this. It was what Neepah had done to her that first day. And, just as she had done then, she let loose and emptied her bladder in the creek.

  It felt as if they would scour all her skin off every part of her body. It hurt so much that she almost cried. They dunked her head in the water again and twisted and pulled her hair to wring the water out. Neepah had not been nearly this rough or ruthless. It felt as if they were trying to scour her to death.

  But soon they were done, and waded out of the water with her. She looked down and saw that every part of her was red from the scrubbing, and there were even places where little tendrils of blood were seeping from the abrasions.

  Old Flicker opened the bundle she had been carrying, and with a wide swatch of clean cloth rubbed and patted her dry until her skin felt aflame. But then the old woman dipped into a pot of greenish grease and anointed her all over. It was bear oil with something in it, and at once it took away all the stinging and burning as if by magic.

  Then the old woman stooped back to her bundle and lifted up a folded piece of pale deerskin, which fell open and showed itself to be a small, fringed dress, beautifully sewn. She helped her put it on, and Good Face was astonished, then delighted, and exclaimed, “Waneeshee, Huma!” For the first time, she saw a trace of a smile, but Flicker shook her head.