Ruth shuddered, thinking: I know what sordidness even Christianized men will do upon a helpless female when she has no mother to guide her, no menfolk to protect her. How would lawless warriors treat their chattel?
O God help my child!
Captain Pipe’s Town
Good Face pulled strands of cord through the reed mats and tied them to the frame of bent poles. Flicker worked on the other side, doing the same thing. It was such a tiny hut they were building, no bigger than the little sweat lodges used for cleansing and healing. This little domed house would be big enough only for Good Face to sit in or lie down and sleep. The fire pit would be outside the door in front of the hut. Good Face was scared.
She would be staying here all alone four days and nights. She had never spent a night alone, entirely away from all other people, in all her life, not in her wapsi home so long ago, not in Neepah’s town, not at Great Falling Water, not at Joseph and Mary’s house at Detroit, not here at Captain Pipe’s Town on the Tymochtee Sipu. Alone outside; that was the strangest and scariest part of this. Of course, the bleeding had frightened her at first, even though Flicker had assured her that it was what all girls did when they reached the age to be women. She had said it would stop in a few days, and from then on she would be a woman, not just a girl, and that it would happen once every moon for the rest of her life, except when she was pregnant, and would not stop until she was forty-five or fifty summers of age. This first time of the bleeding she would have to live alone in her own hut and do certain things and learn certain things. All the other moon-blood times for the rest of her life she would live in the women’s moon lodge with other women who were bleeding at the same time, and would have their company. But this first blood time she would be alone, away from the town. Flicker had told her that this was a sacred time, the beginning of womanhood, and because she would be alone here, her Spirit Helper might come to her and give her her sacred name. Flicker was telling her the things she needed to know as they worked on the little wiktut, her own sacred moon-blood hut.
“Men have to have a pimakun lodge to sweat in and purify themselves, because they do not have this blood-flow to cleanse them out. That is why the sweat lodge is mostly for men. We have this bleeding time to take the poisons out of us. Tell back to me, daughter, what you have learned to be the ways of cleansing the body and thus also the spirit inside.”
“One is pim, the sweating, Kahesana. That is for men.”
“Yes, though there is a pimakun for women separately for certain purposes. Go on. Another?”
“Fasting, Kahesana.”
“Yes. And the last?”
“Bathing in sacred smoke?”
“Yes, daughter. You remember well. Those are what we can do when we need to cleanse our own spirits. This, the bleeding, is a way Creator gave only to women so they can always be purified even if they do not know or remember those others. Women have to be pure because inside them is the place where babies wait before coming into the world.”
Good Face, who had much confusion and doubt about blood coming from inside herself, asked everything she could think to ask about it. “Then is this blood that comes out of us so unclean that we have to be put away from everyone else?”
“It is medicine, daughter. It is very powerful medicine because it is part of all that is life and only women have it. It is thus a mystery to men and a taboo for them to be touched by it. Men do not know about the medicine of a woman’s bleeding. They know it is a power and they fear any power they do not understand—just as you feared it until I told you about it. Men cannot understand how a woman can bleed for four days and not die. They bleed when they are wounded and they know they must stop their bleeding quickly or they will die, but we do not die, or even weaken, and they cannot understand this power we have that they have not.”
“But how can I bleed four days and not die?”
“Daughter, the blood that comes out is only that which would have been a baby, if there was to have been a baby. This time there is not to have been a baby because you have not yet made one with a man. Please pull this string through on your side and then push it back through to me. I cannot reach around that far.”
Good Face seized the strand and pulled it tight, and then with her needle stick she pushed the end back out through the mat.
“Waneeshee.”
“I still do not understand this all,” Good Face said. “Tell me about the baby that would be but is not.”
“Kulesta! Listen, then. Do you remember when your father told you that fire is life spirit? Do you remember when he held grass to the fire and showed that it could make more of itself?”
That was years ago, back at their camp near the waterfalls, but she could remember him showing her that and saying it. “Yes, I remember that.”
“A boy is just a boy and a girl is just a girl and they cannot make life together. But when a boy becomes a man, he is like a steel striker, and when a girl becomes a woman, as you do now, she is like flint. Each one is ready to make fire, but one must touch the other for the fire to happen. Then they can make more of themselves. What you have in you now that you become a woman was ready to become the fire of a life, but it did not because no man struck it with the steel. That will happen when you have a husband who will be able to make the fire in there. But until then, what is in there in you, not being struck fire to, will let loose and come out. Every moon it will. Think of the blood as a life that would have been if Neepah Huma, Grandmother Moon, had said it is the time for it. Neepah Huma is the guide of this. She says when it will be or when it will not. If she says it will not yet be, then the life-fire-that-would-have-been is cleansed out so you will be pure each next time. You have to be pure inside when it happens because it will be a life, and as we have always said to you, a life is sacred.”
Flicker had told her to keep a fire going day and night while she was here in the wiktut because she would be brewing oak-bark tea and drinking it all the time she was here. The tea was bitter and left her mouth nasty, but Flicker said it would make her feel better while she was in her moon because it would keep her passing water instead of swelling, and it was the swelling that made one feel bad, Flicker had said. And so Good Face was diligent about her fire and kept wandering out to gather dry wood for it.
The hut was built far from the creek. Flicker had told her that she was not to bathe during the bleeding time, even though she had gotten in the habit of bathing every day. “Your moon-blood is not to get in the streams,” Flicker had said. “You are to return it to Kukna, Mother Earth, with a pinch of tobacco.”
The other task she had to complete while she was here, besides keeping the fire going, was to make the corn necklace. She had an ear of dried xaskwim and a thread of sinew, an awl and a needle. She was to drill a hole through each kernel of the corn and string all the kernels on the thread. All the time she was drilling and stringing, she must be in a state of prayer, Flicker had told her. Then, when the necklace was full and complete, the power of the prayers would be able to go all the way around. It is the proper nature of prayers to go all the way around and meet themselves at the beginning, she had said. Prayers go to the Creator, and in being answered they return, and then prayers of thanks go back, and on and on, around and around.
Good Face was learning that hunger confused thinking. She couldn’t decide whether to keep feeding the fire with sticks or go in the hut and try to sleep. There was comfort in the fire; it was indeed like a life, and gave her company, and kept wild animals away, and she needed it to brew the oak-bark tea.
But she was tired and she knew that if she slept, these days of solitude would pass more quickly. If she went in to sleep, though, she probably would lie awake worrying and thinking too much. In the quiet of the night the scratchings of a mouse could sound like the claws of a lynx or a bear. And she knew that sleep probably would not come because of her hunger. She had made the choice that she would fast while in the wiktut, so that a Spirit Helper might come to her, a
nd give her a name, and tell her of her life to come. Now she wished she had not made that choice. After just one day without any food, she felt strange and vacant inside. With that emptiness too there were all those new and unsettling sensations of the moon time, and the sensations were so keen that she could hardly bear them. It was as bad as having mosquito bites and the itchings of the poison plants, as well as the hunger, and nothing she could do to relieve any of them. Her breasts ached and her nipples tingled. Between her hips there were feelings as relentless and annoying as the need to relieve herself, though she did not need to do that. These were feelings that made her squirm on her hips and yearn for something. She sighed, knowing that with all this and her fear of the night, it would be useless to go into the hut and try to sleep. So she leaned forward and put more sticks on the fire. The fire was beautiful. It was her friend. She finally went to sleep sitting up and looking at it until she was not seeing it anymore.
The second day she gathered wood and wished for food, sat listening to the distant sounds of voices from the village, sipped the bitter oak-bark tea, watched midges dance in the rays of sunlight that penetrated the treetops, and took journeys in her mind back through all the places and people she could remember. In those journeys she visited her white mother, though she could not see her face. Instead of seeing her, she felt as if she were in her body. When her mind came back to the little wiktut under the trees, she still could not see her mother’s face. She could not remember it. She had not remembered it for so long that she couldn’t remember when she had last been able to remember it. But it had been a long time since she thought so much about her, and this was the first time she had ever felt that she was in her mother.
She could still remember Neepah’s face, though it had been almost as many years since she had seen her.
That evening the mosquitoes came in great numbers, and since she had no bear oil to protect her skin from them, she built up the fire and fed green boughs and damp punk into it to make it as smoky as she could, and stayed in the smoke even though it stung her eyes and bothered her throat. After dark she had another time of great doubt about whether she was thinking and behaving properly for this time. She thought perhaps the reason she was so uncomfortable in so many ways was that she was thinking about herself instead of being prayerful. That was something her mother Slocum had taught her, and Neepah had told her that, and Flicker too. All three who had been mothers to her had told her that: Don’t think too much of yourself.
And so she fixed the fire to send smoke up to the Creator, and knelt in the firelight with both hands wrapped around her medicine bag, the tiny bag that contained the Three Sacred Sister seeds Neepah had given her, and a pellet of dried mud from the first Bread Dance Ceremony she had gone through, back in Neepah’s town long ago, a pebble from there, and one of her teeth that had come out before the new ones grew in, several years ago. She was not sure the tooth should be in the medicine bag, but it was a keepsake and something had told her to put it in as good luck, so she had. With the bag in her hands she began praying with all her concentration, ignoring the feelings in her body and the smoke in her breath and the whining of the mosquitoes, praying without words, trying to see the things that should be so. It was said that Kijilamuh ka’ong could see the pictures in your mind of what you prayed for, and when he saw them, he would make them be so by thinking of them. And so that was how she prayed.
She had not known what she would pray for; she had not thought about the future before. She had simply gone along day by day hoping that things would be the way her old Lenapeh parents wanted them to be. They wanted to live in peace, with enough to eat, with friends always nearby and enemies always far away, with Kijilamuh ka’ong’s approval of their ways, with Good Face safe and happy and married to a kind man who would give her good children who would be their grandchildren. Those were all things that seemed good to Good Face too, so she tried to see them in her prayers. She tried to picture a handsome young husband, particularly the boy Like Wood in this town, but his face blurred in her mind and kept fading out. He was the boy who had paddled the canoe on the great lake. Once he had been shamed for spying on bathing women, but had grown up admired and esteemed.
Then she pictured something she had not expected to think of. She saw some white men and women, dressed in black and gray, who had come to her home to talk with her. They were asking her to go away with them. This was not something she was sure she wanted Kijilamuh ka’ong to see her thinking and so she stopped praying and opened her eyes.
She gasped; her heart slammed in her bosom.
A bear was on the other side of the fire. It was just sitting there on its haunches, looking at her. The closest she had ever seen one before was across the river. This one was less than five steps from her. It was bigger than a fat man, all black except for a brown muzzle and brown around its eyes.
For a moment Good Face was ready to leap up and scream and run, and would have except that she was frozen with fear and could not even utter a sound.
Then a strange calm passed over her. The bear’s eyes were not angry or menacing. The bear reached up with a paw and rubbed its ear, then licked its paw and rubbed the ear again, and gave what sounded like a sigh. The lachimu stories said bears were kin to human beings. Maxk’wah was the bear. Good Face swallowed and spoke.
“Maxk’wah?”
At the sound, the bear cocked its head. It seemed to have known its name.
“Maxk’wah, are you my Spirit Helper?”
It did nothing and made no sound, but just by sitting there quietly it seemed to be saying yes.
“Maxk’wah, did you come to give me a name?”
The bear cocked its head again. It opened its mouth so that its red tongue and the white lower teeth showed. It looked as if it were smiling. Then it made a soft gurgling sound, not quite like a growl. It did not sound the least bit like words, and yet it seemed to have said, “Maxk’wah n’wah.” If that was what it had said, it meant something like “small female bear.”
And it did seem to be a female; though Good Face had no way of knowing, it gave the sense of being female.
A rustling sound came from the direction of the town, and the bear looked that way and suddenly rose on its hind legs. It gave a low growl, then turned to look once at Good Face, and as the sounds came closer, the bear dropped to all fours and vanished into the darkness. A moment later Good Face heard panting, snarling sounds, and then three yellow-gray dogs from the town ran through the firelight and into the darkness where the bear had gone, snarling and beginning to bark and bay. The sounds of pursuit faded into the woods.
Suddenly feeling very sad and dizzy, Good Face went into the wiktut and lay down on the bed of boughs. She was so terribly lonely that she wept for a while in the darkness. When she opened her eyes, it was daylight and a shaft of morning sun was shining through the door into her face. She could see just the speck of sun through the foliage, with long, shimmering rays blazing all around it. Birdcalls were twittering and chiming and chinking everywhere around the hut. She got up and went into the bushes to urinate. As Flicker had told her to do, she covered it with dirt and leaves and crumbled tobacco over it. There was still a little blood in it. Then she returned to the front of the hut. She thought the fire was out, and was upset with herself for not tending to it. But deep in the ashes there was still an ember, and she crumbled bark and twigs over it and blew on it until she had a small blaze going again, and she built it up and then gathered more wood. She kept thinking about the bear that she had dreamed of the night before. Or had she dreamed of it? She was not sure. It had seemed more like a dream than anything real.
The long hunger and loneliness were making her see things in a strange way. Tiny things were clear and large. She watched ants working on the ground and wondered what Creator had told them to do, and why. Then a bird with red stripes on its cheeks, like war paint, came scampering across the ground, licking up ants. It stopped and looked at her out of its left eye. The eye grew
huge in the center of her attention and was studying her closely with understanding and concern. Then Good Face recognized the bird as the very kind that Flicker was named for, and knew, or believed she knew, that this was actually her old Lenapeh mother, come to watch her in her solitude. Realizing she was supposed to be in prayer all the time she was here, and that she had not been, Good Face lowered her eyes and tried to concentrate on praying.
She was in prayer for a long time, not just praying, but seeing things she had never seen before. She saw the sun go black, she saw towns burning, she saw blue-coated armies marching, and then she saw the strange white people in their black and gray clothes again coming to talk to her, and though they were speaking what she knew to be English, she could not understand it at all. When a mosquito bit her cheek and made her open her eyes, it was dark and the fire was almost out, but in its feeble flickering light she saw the bear sitting on the other side looking at her again.
This time she was not startled to see the bear. It was as if the bear had not been gone, but had only been unseen while her eyes were closed in prayer. She had the feeling that the bear was and would always be there. And again it gurgled the word meaning “small female bear.”
“Maxk’wah n’wah,” Good Face said. “Is that your name or are you giving me that name?” The bear, though it had appeared large the first time she saw it, truly seemed to have the air of a female about it, as she had sensed before.
The bear, without words, said yes, it was its name and it was giving it to her.
At that same moment there came the voice of an ulikwan, a flicker, and Good Face looked around to see the bird perched on top of the wiktut, saying, “Weekah! Weekah!”
Good Face was worried that the dogs might come again and chase away the bear as they had before, but none came. She remembered them baying off after the bear. She looked at the bear, wondering about that. And the bear, as if reading her thoughts, told her, without words as usual, I took care of the dogs. Now you. Do you not have something to take care of too?
The Red Heart Page 25
