The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

Soon they were close enough that when the shriekings died down, they could hear scuffling and bumping sounds. Minnow sprinted on, glancing along both sides of the path. Good Face was beginning to stumble and gasp from the hard running.

  Then they looked up the riverbank and there on a rise above the path were men who seemed to be crazed. To her horror, Good Face saw that her husband was one of them.

  They were a hunting party that had left before daylight; Like Wood had risen and dressed and put fuel on the fire and then had rinsed the human smells off his body and smudged himself with cedar smoke. Smiling at her, he had ducked out the door with his gun and shooting pouch. It made no sense that they would be here, still so close by the town. But the horror of it was the way they were acting. She stood crouching with her hand over her open mouth, too stunned even to cry out.

  They reeled about as if their legs were crooked and feet heavy. They crouched down and then thrust upward to howl and screech at the sky. They stumbled and sprawled on the ground, and crawled and cried. One was on his hands and knees, retching again and again with strings of drool swinging from his lips. Like Wood himself stood on limber knees with his toes turned inward, swaying, eyes nearly rolled back into his head, lips wet and slack, as if he were dying on his feet.

  She cried out: “My husband!” But he gave no sign of having heard.

  One of the men was clutching to his chest a keg, about the size of his head. Minnow pointed at it with a jabbing forefinger.

  “I knew! E heh! I knew!” she shouted, her face a snarling fury. “The bad drinking!”

  Even now the men were aware only of their own demons and did not seem to see or hear the women. Good Face was transfixed by the pathetic sight of her husband, and just realizing that he was drunk. Minnow, meanwhile, had run into the midst of the drunken men and with a wide, powerful swing of her open hand she slapped the warrior with the keg so hard that he staggered sideways and fell. When the keg hit the ground, spurting whiskey from its bunghole, she staved it in with one blow of her mattock. Only then did one or two of the men seem to see the women. They quit yelling and tried to focus their eyes on them, looking bewildered, as if these were only demons in another form. The man whom Minnow had knocked down was trying to get up, rising weakly onto one elbow; then he just shut his eyes and sank back to the ground, moaning.

  These drinkers, except for Like Wood, were not husbands of those who had come running from the cornfield, so the women just stayed at the edge of the glade watching with disgust or amusement as the men staggered about. Their howls had diminished, and one man now dropped forward onto his knees and crossed his arms over his waist. He gushed vomit from mouth and nose and then toppled facedown in it.

  Minnow, snarling in disdain, said, “Nothing can be done for them. Stay back where they cannot spew on you. Eh!” she shouted at the men. “Empty loincloths! Nothing in them but your body waste!” She turned and looked back up the path. “Here come men from the town to take care of these fouled ones. Come, we have planting to finish. Don’t go to your husband.” She seized Good Face by the arm and pulled her away from where she stood gaping and weeping.

  And as she stumbled back up the riverside path toward the cornfield, the just-budding greenery of the woods shimmering through her teary vision, Minnow’s voice hissed:

  “May you never see your husband like that again. If I see the wapsi dogs who sell our men that poison water, I will break their head as I broke their keg. With that poison the wapsituk mean to kill all the People. Listen! When your husband can think and hear you again after this, tell him he can lie with you as his wife or he can lie in his own vomit, one or the other. Not both!”

  “E heh, numees. Yes, sister. I should tell him that.”

  Minnow said, “My bad drinking husband told me that drink is great medicine, that it gave him visions. I told him no, visions are sacred. That is poison. I said, you insult the spirits by calling that poison craziness a vision. E heh! Somehow the wapsituk can drink that and not be crazed. Their god must protect them from poison.”

  Good Face, her soul saddened and in turmoil, tried to think of that as they approached the cornfield, where most of the women were still at work planting. She asked Minnow, “Do you think they have another god, not the same one?” It was one of Tuck Horse’s old questions, which he used to ponder aloud by the campfire.

  Minnow stopped in her tracks and looked at her, puzzled. “Should you not know that better than I? I have never lived as a wapsini, but only Lenapeh. You have lived both.”

  Good Face tried but could not remember ever feeling that she had exchanged the God of her white family for Kijilamuh ka’ong, the Creator of the Lenapeh, as she became one of the People.

  “The name has changed,” she said. “But so have all names, for that was a different tongue. I now use smoke to carry my prayer up, and did not do that before. But I do not remember changing from another god.”

  “E heh! Maybe then the missionaries lie. They said we have to turn our backs on Kijilamuh ka’ong and Nanapush and Misinkhalikun the Keeper of the Game, and turn our faces to ‘God’ and his little boy ‘Jesus’ or we will perish. Some of our Lenapeh did that. They have had ill fortune ever since. I do not know, sister. Some of the shamans say the whites’ god is stronger. Some say our Creator is displeased with us because we are trapping too many animals to trade fur for wapsi goods. And that we are being punished for forgetting our true ways. And for the bad drinking. Neolin our Prophet said the punishment would happen. I do not know. But if the god is all the same, why does he take everything away from us who honor him here in the land he gave us, and give it all to those who would not stay over there where he put them?” She shook her head. “Let us plant corn. This makes my head swirl around.”

  And so Good Face returned to the work in the corn hills and tried to stop thinking of the terrible sight of her husband full of the screaming demon. She thought of the choice she would have to give him, between her or the poison water. To tell him that would require courage. She did not want to make him choose, because he might choose to leave her, and she did not want him gone.

  She thought of the name Minnow had said, that name she had not heard since the time in the house of old Joseph and Mary at Detroit, that name Jesus. That was the son of God.

  I had nearly forgot that name, she thought.

  She had dreaded the moment when she would have to face her husband with her displeasure, but she didn’t face him alone. Her parents too were angry and disgusted with what Like Wood had done. And Like Wood, wincing with the pain in his head, and shaky and nauseated, was disgusted with himself. He admitted that after the whiskey seller had met them on the path and given them each a drink of the liquor, he had become foolish and traded the seller his good musket for the rest of the keg. Good Face could see that old Tuck Horse and Flicker were brittle with contempt. The old man said:

  “Raise your head and talk to me. We are not speaking to our feet. Now, your wife is my daughter. You are supposed to feed and protect your wife. Without a gun, I wonder, how are you to hunt to feed her? Without a gun, I wonder, how are you to protect her against the Long Knife army, which as we know is ready to return to our country? I speak of my daughter, who is the delight of my aged years, and my wife’s. When you became her husband, you promised to keep her in the sacred circle of your care and protection. Do you remember that promise?”

  “I remember, Father. I have not forgotten. I was foolish one moment only.”

  “You were foolish one moment only, you say, but that moment is gone past and you still have no gun to hunt and protect with. There are many moments of foolishness in a life that live on and on, like a baby born from the lust of two who do not care for each other. Many of the treaties that have been moving our People out of the homelands for generations, those treaties were marked by chiefs who had one moment of foolishness and accepted rum. No man is all wise, but a man can avoid being a fool at any time he is offered the bad spirit drink. All he has to do is turn his
back on it.”

  The young warrior had been lowering his head as he listened, and the old warrior snapped at him: “Did I not say we are not conversing with our feet?

  “Kulesta: In battle you have proven bravery. But bravery must be guided by sense. A man howling at the sky and dirtying his breechcloth is not guided by sense. When the army comes this way again, will you drink from a keg and stand before them howling in their faces and pissing at their feet? That will not stop any army!

  “Kulesta: I have lived two wars. I have seen them lost through moments of foolishness. If you are a fool in any way, your enemy will learn what your foolishness is, and he will work it against you. Keep looking up at my face!

  “Kulesta: That Long Knife Nation knows that they can weaken us with the bad spirit drink because they know we are foolish for it. You saw them use your foolishness to take your gun and make you unable to think. Listen! Our enemy is not just their soldiers, it is also their whiskey sellers who come among us and disarm us and melt our brains.

  “Zhukeh kulesta! Now listen: Before the soldiers return to this country, you must purify yourself from that poison. You must fast. You must sweat until the poison is all out of you. All your heart must be in this. You have this moment to choose: whether you will be the husband of my daughter and a protector of your People, or a fool who howls at the sky and vomits in the path of his enemy.

  “Kulesta: You know that a wife can put her husband outdoors from her house if he breaks his promise to be a good husband. My daughter and I have spoken of you together, and she has told me that you will be one or another: her husband in her house, or a drinker of the white man’s poison, away from her house.

  “What you have done will be spoken of in Council. They will warn you. If you drink the poison water again, your wife will throw you out and the Council will warn you again. There will be no third forgiveness from your Council. You will be expelled like a turd from behind your People and you will be no one. That is worse than death. Look up! We are not talking to feet here!

  “When you purify out your poison, remember first that your wife is ready to throw you out, and second that your People are ready to throw you out. This is not a little shame that can be snickered at and forgotten, like a boy spying on naked women. This is whether you choose to be worthy, or to be a reeking turd in a puddle of whiskey vomit. Zhukeh kishalokeh!” I am finished!

  Like Wood’s eyes turned to his wife. Good Face saw that he was afraid. He did believe that she might throw him out. Choosing to forgive him or not was thus a power she had. Never before had she known any power over anyone. It was not comfortable. Her friend Minnow had used this power, and it had made her proud but bitter.

  “Go get clean,” Good Face told her husband. And he went.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Autumn 1791

  By the Maumee Sipu

  To Good Face, the endlessly beating war drum had grown as familiar as her own pulse. Over its beat rose and fell the shrill, quavering, nasal screams.

  Above the roofs and treetops around the dance ground a few dim stars and a half-moon were dimmed by glowing smoke and soaring sparks. Around the roaring bonfire the war dance had gone on and on for most of the night, going on and on with that tireless slamming heartbeat of the drum, those chilling, trilling screams.

  Everyone was here watching the warriors perform in their frenzy, putting themselves into a state of being that would allow them to kill or die, to be merciless or fearless. Good Face herself watched with a racing heart, staring so hard she scarcely blinked, a sweat of excitement trickling down her ribs and between her buttocks, watching the mad-eyed, grimacing warriors crouch, stalk, spring, whirl, jab, swing, enact all the swift and brutal motions of combat, their naked physiques painted and shiny with grease and sweat, exerting themselves until their veins stood forth and their muscles were ropy and knotted. She had been watching that dance for a long time, her unblinking eyes growing red from smoke and dust, her own body arching and feet shuffling, driven by the drum like all the other watchers. She watched the warriors spring to the center of their circle and strike the red-painted war post with their clubs and tomahawks, each time howling with murderous triumph.

  And now she saw her own husband Like Wood stalk toward the post in a stealthy crouch, all his beautiful muscles gleaming in firelight. He leaped high with a tremolo scream and knocked a chip out of the very top of the war post with his sharp tomahawk.

  That at last was too much for her, and she clapped her hands over her face. Feeling suddenly such an intense dread that it nauseated her, she staggered out from among the transfixed, yelping spectators and trotted, weak-kneed and stumbling, to her family’s wikwam, where she gulped water from a gourd and stood wringing her shaky hands, gasping, turning to and fro as if lost, not yet knowing what was really wrong inside her. Finally, sobbing, she sat down on the bedding in a state of fear and shame and confusion, hands over her ears to shut out the drumming and howling of her People.

  She knew the nature of their war dance. In her heart she was Lenapeh. She had come to understand, despite the tenets of her peaceable birth family, how a people must sometimes respond to force with force. She knew the Lenapeh were a peace-loving people—not just the women, but the men too—and that they had to be transported by this dance into that state of being where they could without hesitation send other people, the enemy people, out of this life and into the Other. She understood all that while watching the dancing build up; even her own soul had been involved—until that moment when she saw her own husband, whose body and soul she had known with the most intimate thoroughness, leap from a crouch with a pulsating shriek, just as he had those few weeks ago beside the river while the liquor demon’s madness surged in him.

  It was the sameness of the two kinds of madness that had all at once made her stomach turn over and a hopeless fear drain through her. It just did not seem that God, or Kijilamuh ka’ong, could mean for such madnesses to be—yet they were, and she and her loved ones were in their path.

  The white men’s army was not yet close enough to see or hear, but it could be felt. It came on the lips of messengers from tribes in the west and the southwest, where armies had appeared in the valley of the Wabash Sipu in the spring and then in the summer, burning villages and crops of the Kickapoo and of the Eel River and Wea tribes of the Miami Nation.

  Now another army, three times as big as those, was coming through the Shawnee country from the south, coming to try to do again what it had tried to do to Kekionga the year before.

  It was such a slow-moving army. Scouts came and told how the army had built two roads side by side, so its cannons and supply wagons could be pulled through the forests, and had built a fort on the Great Miami River, then left that fort to march on, to a place still closer, where it stopped again and began building another fort. The army loomed immense in the People’s imaginations. The People, even the oldest ones, had spent their lives feeling the wapsituk coming on like a great dark storm, and always moving before it, looking back and seeing smoke in the sky where their homes had been. Of this year’s army, the councils had vivid descriptions day by day. A young Shawnee chief of scouts called Tecumseh kept a relay of spies and messengers always reporting to Little Turtle and Buckongahelas and Blue Jacket; every day came a rider with the news of what the army had done the day before. The army from the beginning had been troubled by bad supply lines and bad discipline and weak, sick horses, but it was still coming on.

  Good Face listened day by day as the Council discussed those reports of the oncoming army, and she could almost see it in her mind’s eye; she imagined she could feel it creeping forward like a great beast from the south. It was a terrible weight on the soul and patience. It was not the natural way of the People to worry about any one thing for so long.

  But the slowness of the army was actually a good thing. It was giving the war chiefs time to gather and organize many warriors for the defense of the country. This time the army would be met not by fe
wer than two hundred warriors, but perhaps as many as a thousand. Warriors from the Miami and Kickapoo villages had come, burning to avenge the destruction of their towns. And now besides the Miami and Shawnee and Lenapeh there were war chiefs and warriors from other nations—Roundhead and Crane, and White Loon of the Wyandot; Crippled Hand, Black Partridge, and Topenabee of the Potawatomi; Walking Turtle of the Winnebago, and Kathadah of the Ottawa. Little Turtle now had the support of all those famed chiefs, and the youthful energy and intelligence of his son-in-law Wild Potato, who had a talent for organizing and keeping track of many things at once. Almost like a white man’s army, the warriors were named into groups of twenty, with four or five of each group chosen as hunters to bring meat.

  Another advantage of the army’s slowness was that it had still been at some distance when the crops ripened for harvest. Now the Three Sacred Sisters would not be standing in the fields for the soldiers to slash and burn. Whatever this wapsituk army might be able to do this year, it would not be able to starve the People.

  The councils learned that the British in Canada had a new leader who seemed more bold about providing the tribes with guns and powder. It seemed as if the British were not as afraid of the Long Knives as they had been for a while. The longer the army took in coming, the more supplies could come down from the British.

  But the best thing about the slow-moving army, heard over and over, was that its leader, an important old general whose name was St. Clair, did not know very well how to scout his path or defend the edges of his army. The army sprawled and straggled as it came along, and never had any pathfinders out in front. Such a weakness might give the tribes a chance to ambush the army before it even got to Kekionga. That could mean not only the women and children and elders would be in less danger, but that perhaps, for once, the towns themselves would not be burned.

  Good Face learned as much of all this as she could, because she remembered from the last year the terror and confusion of not knowing what was happening. “Listen,” Minnow told her one cold, dank day as they began skinning a buck deer, “even in men’s matters a woman should not be ignorant. Remember Neepah: she always knew what was going on. And so she was like a warrior because she knew.”