The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Good Face gazed at the flags, which she thought were actually rather pretty, and thought of how these Lenapeh had learned to hate the British so much and yet still had to go from one British place to another in order to find what they needed.

  * * *

  Near the walls of the town, Tuck Horse found an ancient couple of relatives, named Joseph and Mary. Good Face was surprised to hear those names. They stirred her memory somehow. These old ones were living in a drafty house built square in the wapsi way, with oiled-paper windows to let in light, and a fireplace with a mud-and-stick chimney. They had a table and some wobbly, creaky chairs. They made much of Good Face and invited her to sit on one of the chairs. Though Tuck Horse was a chair maker, she had not sat on the ones he made to sell at Niagara, and this was the first chair she had sat on in six years. In the chairs at her Slocum home, her feet had dangled, too short to reach the floor, but now she had grown long-legged enough that she could touch the floor with her moccasin toes. These old people had a candle on the table. It flickered and guttered because the house was drafty, but it was good to see a candle burning again. Sometimes the Lenapeh burned sycamore balls soaked in bear or raccoon oil for light, but those were not as bright or long-lasting as a candle, and so most of the light in the wikwams was from the fire in the center of the floor. Good Face did like chairs and candles now that she remembered them, though she had not given them any thought while living without them.

  It was while sitting on the chair and looking at the candle flame that Good Face remembered why the old people’s names sounded familiar. She said, “Kahesana, may I speak? I remember that I had a brother named Joseph and a sister named Mary! I thought I had heard those names before!”

  That amused the elders. The old man named Joseph said, “Joseph and Mary were the names also of the father and mother of Jesus. Do you remember that, child?”

  She put her hand to her mouth, surprised again. “K’hehlah! Indeed yes, I remember now! Then you know of Jesus, Muxumsah Joseph?”

  “Very much of Jesus we know. Too much for our good we know. The missionaries called Moravians made many Lenapeh to be Jesus Indians, never to fight Long Knife Americans. No more be warriors, they said. Use guns only for hunting. Pray to Jesus all the time, they said, and if you learn anything of what the bad Indians are doing, tell the missionaries. So we would tell them and they would tell the Long Knives. We were moved here and there by those missionaries, then by chiefs who wanted to protect us. You know mekees, the animals of shepherds? Yes? We were like the sheep of Jesus. Thus we were, two winters ago, when Long Knife soldiers came to our Jesus towns on the Muskingum Sipu, and pretended to be our friends. They tricked our chief, Abraham, to gather up our guns and give them to them. Then they put a hundred of our Jesus people in the church and the missionary’s house. Mostly women and children and old men. Tied them up. Then, with a big hammer, smashed all their heads and cut off their scalps. Then those Christian soldiers burned down the church and house with the dead ones inside.…” He shook his head.

  Good Face remembered hearing about that, at Niagara, but as this old Joseph told it, it was a story she could see in her mind, and much too horrible to think about. She looked with teary eyes to Tuck Horse and Flicker, whose old faces were cold and hard as stone now.

  After a while Tuck Horse said: “Do you remember, old friend, when the missionaries came, I asked you not to go listen to their Jesus talk? Do you wish you had heeded my warning?”

  “Do I wish that? Maybe yes, maybe no. Jesus did not do that to our poor people. Jesus was good, not hurting people.”

  “But he made you weak,” Tuck Horse said.

  “The missionaries made a strong warrior into a peaceful man named Abraham and he was easily fooled.”

  “Easily fooled is a kind of weakness,” said Tuck Horse. “A serious weakness.”

  The old women had moved closer to the fire and were talking about their own weaknesses, aged bones, and were making willow-bark tea to drink for it. Old Joseph sat at the table with a dingy red blanket over his shoulders, telling Tuck Horse how the war and the end of the war had changed everything.

  “We Lenapeh tried to be friendly with the Long Knives in the war, or to be neutral. They promised help and supplies but never gave them to us. Killbuck and White Eyes found out they had been fools to believe the Long Knives. Many Lenapeh have gone with Captain Pipe to the country south across the lake. Some of the Christian Lenapeh are there, but many were led east of here, to Canada.”

  “E heh. Like mekees.”

  “Yes. Like sheep. As for the French, they angered the British by helping the Long Knives win the war. And so, many French have moved north up the river. Many other French have moved the other way, down to the end of the lake.”

  “That is a sad thing,” Tuck Horse said. “Of all the wapsituk, the French are the least bad.” He let pipe smoke stream up from his parted lips into his nostrils. His eyes were half shut.

  “The end of war treaty told the British to leave the Detroit fort, but they show no sign that they mean to go.”

  “It is likewise at Niagara, from where we came,” Tuck Horse said. “The British have two ways of keeping their promises, as you know: very slowly or not at all. But be satisfied they are still here. The British may be worse than the French, but the Long Knives are the worst of all. They want you so far away they cannot see you. Then if you go that far away they follow you and tell you that you should be dead. If they make the British leave Detroit, the Lenapeh will want to leave here too.”

  “You have heard that the Long Knives almost came here in the war,” old Joseph said. “The general called Clark Long Knife, he sent birds to say he would come. It made the French happy and it scared the British so badly they built this new and stronger fort. But he got busy elsewhere and did not come.”

  “What I heard of this Clark was that he got busy burning the Shawnee towns south of here,” Tuck Horse replied. “Another one of their great Town Destroyers. The Long Knives seem to have many Town Destroyers and corn killers. It seems to be a good way to make war. They might not win a war if they had to fight warriors, instead of women and children in the towns, and corn in the fields.”

  Good Face heard such a bitter and cruel edge on Tuck Horse’s voice that she shuddered. But she remembered what had happened to all the old warrior’s family.

  “I don’t know how long the British will keep this Detroit,” Joseph said after a while. “We might be able to live near the British until we cross over to the Spirit Road—or to Jesus Heaven, if that’s what is up there—for our seasons are few now. One does not enjoy living on and on when there is no village around, and no sacred times. Lately our people have been moved two more times by the missionary shepherds to places we never knew before. My wife Mary and I have talked of letting go of the earth before we have to endure this next winter. You see by this square shack we live in that the wapsituk do not know how to make a warm wikwam. All the heat of the fire goes up that ‘chimney’ thing, and there is no way to pack grass in the walls to keep the wind out.…

  “No, old friend,” Joseph went on, with his whole face hanging slack, “we have not lived well as Jesus sheep. But it is not the fault of Jesus. He did not tell his people to be the way they are. What He told them, they are the other way, as far the other way as they can be.”

  Joseph fingered kinnikinnick into the bowl of a smudged clay tavern pipe, stood up stiffly from his chair and lit it over the candle flame. The smoke was fragrant: there was red willow bark and mullein and sumac leaf mixed with the tobacco, and some red cedar too. In her years with Flicker, Good Face had learned to know herb and medicine and smoking plants so well that she could separate out the smells and see in her mind each of the plants, just as she could tell by taste everything that was in a stew. Flicker said such senses helped make a good healing woman, and a good cook.

  The thoughtful quiet, in which they smoked and thought of their discontents, was suddenly shattered by what sounded l
ike a thunderbolt right on top of the shack. Good Face and her chair fell over, and Flicker clapped her hands over her ears, screaming. Dust filtered down through cobwebs. Tuck Horse stood up, bent forward with his hands on his knees, shaking his head. But the other old man just smiled wistfully and blew another cloud of kinnikinnick smoke.

  “It is only the evening gun of the British. They shoot it to say the sun has gone down, in case nobody noticed. I am sorry my house is right under the cannon. But if anyone else could bear to five under that cannon, we would not have this place to live in.”

  Tuck Horse helped Good Face right her chair and get back on it, and then asked the old man where he might find the people of his clan that he had come so far to join.

  The old man thought and sighed. “Few were ever here. You know the river called Sanduskee, where we burned an English fort for Pontiac, in that war? When one travels two days up that river, one sees that the little river called Tymochtee comes in from the right hand. Captain Pipe’s Town is there on Tymochtee Sipu. On the other branch of Sanduskee, Half King has his Wyandot town. In a day’s walk are six towns of Wyandot and Lenapeh, many people. You know that is a rich and good country there and is as far from Long Knives as anyplace one can find.”

  Tuck Horse nodded, squinting at the ceiling with remembering. He said, “That has a good sound. Far from the Long Knives. Or British too.”

  “Perhaps there will be peace for you in your remaining seasons. If you get far enough from them. Two days’ walk south of Captain Pipe, our other great sakima, Buckongahelas, has a town, and beyond him stand about ten towns of the Shawnee, on the Miami Sipu and the Mad. They are strong. They stand between our people and the Kentuck Long Knives. Near them is the trading post of Loramie, a man you remember, so your people can get what they need of white man’s things without traveling far. Unless you intend to live a very long time more, you should live peacefully there among our people for the rest of your life before the Long Knives take that place too.” He crinkled his eyes in a grim smile.

  Tuck Horse grinned, but it was a grin without humor. “I will live in peace as long as I can. But I do not expect the Long Knives to stay out of that country and leave me alone. And my daughter Good Face as you see is very young, and she will surely have to keep moving much of her life to keep out of their way.”

  Now the old man and his wife turned to gaze at Good Face again, slightly smiling, and looking her over so long that she began to feel squirmy. Finally old Joseph said, “Tuck Horse, that looks to be a fine daughter you have got. You never were a man to avoid trouble, and I see that you are still the same. That red hair growing on her head can be seen like the flame of this candle. In a time when such things are happening between the wapsituk and the Real People, you may expect troubles to come around the way the dusty wings come around the candle.”

  “Ha ha! My old brother, you may be right. But this trouble, for once, I did not seek. She was handed into my life by no asking of my own. But I have come to see her as a gift from the Creator. She has been no trouble. But if trouble comes, I think her to be worth it. This one is marked to be a great woman among the People.”

  She had never heard him, or Flicker, say such a thing, and she wondered what he meant by “marked.”

  She wondered if it was the lighter hair on her head that her white brother had called a lightning spot.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Spring 1787

  Wilkes-Barre

  Joseph and Mary, Ruth Slocum thought, as she listened to the vows making her daughter Mary the wife of Joseph Towne. Joseph and Mary. Aye!

  That night the couple went upstairs to a bedroom in Ruth Slocum’s grand new two-story house. Gradually the wedding guests who had stayed over went to their beds in other bedrooms and in the old log house nearby. Ruth and her thirteen-year-old son Isaac saw that every guest had a candle or lamp and a washbasin with a pitcher of fresh water. The tall clock was bonging eleven when the last guests were put away. Isaac tended to the guests’ horses and then went to his own attic room. The younger boys, Joe and Jonathan, were already asleep, having exhausted themselves by the excitement of so much company and the mystery of matrimony, and perhaps they were dreaming of the thrilling idea that their new brother-in-law Joseph Towne would be taking their sister away to the wilds of the Ohio River country. Joseph meant to pioneer in that newly opened land.

  Ruth Slocum was still too full of emotions, the whole bittersweet range of them, to think yet of retiring to sleep, so she sat alone in the kitchen where a single candle burned and sipped from a dainty teacup. In case anyone came in at this hour, she did not want to be seen with a glass of sherry, and so she took it from a cup. She used it seldom and sparingly, but at times like this it would help her go to sleep, or so she hoped.

  It was Giles who had first brought any kind of liquid spirits into use in the Slocum family, having got used to it in his soldiering days. Will hardly touched it, afraid of making himself a fool if he drank. Therefore it was Ebenezer who drank with Giles when any significant imbibing was done. Ebenezer rationalized that it cut the anthracite dust from his throat.

  He also joked privately that because of his lame foot, no one in town would notice particularly if he staggered and reeled from it.

  People in the town did notice, of course, because Ebenezer did most of his public imbibing down at Judge Fell’s tavern, where he spent frequent evenings with the smithys, artisans, and millers who were his peers and friends. With proceeds from his coal-selling, he was already building his mill in Deep Hollow, hiring laborers to dig the sluiceway and making most of the machinery himself. As soon as the mill was done, he said, he would build a distillery, a logical next step in the use of grain and the making of money. He was bent on becoming one of the earliest millers and distillers in the valley. Because of these ventures, he was always too busy to consider going with Giles or William when they planned their excursions to the far country in search of Frannie. But he was always willing to contribute to the ransom money. And he had also helped finance the building of this fine new house for his mother, although much of it had been paid for by selling off sections of the land she had inherited from her father and her husband.

  Now Ruth Slocum, a widow at the half-century mark in her life, sat with her sherry cup and mused, as she did at least once every day, on her lost daughter, whose unknown fate still brought tears to her eyes. She envisioned Frannie at Niagara, the last place where there had been any report of her.

  Upstairs the telltale creaking of the nuptial bed was accelerating for the second time since she had been sitting here. It was disconcerting to be sitting here alone and aware of what was being done to her girl Mary, whom she knew in every detail of body and soul. She tried not to envision it. Joe Towne was obviously a lusty young man. She could only hope that Mary was being pleasured by it too, but she could still remember after thirty years the mixed pain and pleasure of being deflowered and then ridden through the night by her own husband. Jonathan had been twenty-two then, and though shy in manner, like a stallion for force and endurance.

  “Oh my!” she murmured aloud, blushing at her thoughts and memories. Or maybe it was not blushing. Ruth had only recently quit having her monthlies, and was still overcome now and then with flushing and sweating that had nothing to do with embarrassment.

  During these last few days before the wedding, Ruth had been in a strange and undefinable state of sympathy with Mary, something too deep and sanguine to be really understood or spoken of with the bride. It was as if she were feeling in her own veins, or heart, or head, or soul, every fear and every one of Mary’s yearnings and sensations—as if they both were conduits of the same river of life, with the same flow passing through, daughter downstream from mother, but not separate; overlapping, rather. It was a part of the oneness that she had always sensed with all the children of her womb, so that she seemed to be able to feel their closeness or distance, but it was deeper and more intuitive with the daughters than the sons. She imagin
ed that would be so because she had felt everything her daughters had felt inside, Judith, Mary, and Frannie, while the feeling of maleness surely was another thing.

  And now thinking of this, or feeling it, she seemed to feel also the flow of Frannie’s inner being, despite the distance and the long, sad absence. Frannie was now thirteen—no, fourteen, it would be—and surely in the tides of the moon by now, ripening, full of that mysterious moist power of fertility.…

  Ruth Slocum shuddered and shook her head, blinking, unable yet to reconcile what she knew with what she remembered. For all these years since that frightful November day nine years ago, she had remembered her youngest daughter as the little five-year-old slung over a warrior’s shoulder, reaching back, screaming in terror, red curls in disarray, bare feet flailing in the air, her little treasured chatterbox of a child, scarcely even of a gender yet; so abruptly had Frannie’s age been frozen in her mother’s imagination. And yet now she would be … perhaps shoulder height? With a young woman’s lines, with breasts, probably flossy under her arms and on her netherlips. Not a five-year-old child, but a woman.

  And then with a clenching of her heart, she thought of her daughter desirable and viable among a people whose mores surely were promiscuous, whose rituals surely would be lewd, whose males apparently did and took what they wanted swiftly and with no mercy. If Frannie had been helpless, cold, and miserable among the Indians as a child, what sort of degradation would she have to suffer now?