The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Other women who had come down the trail were darting through the carnage, stripping the soldier corpses that had already been scalped by the warriors. And the victorious warriors themselves were swarming over the field of dead soldiers, gathering their guns and swords and bayonets, pulling off their boots, coats, and capes. Good Face at last got her horses under control as they became used to the bloody mess around them, and for a moment she was able to scan the field, looking for her husband and father, before faintness and nausea blurred her sight and she doubled forward and vomited over the mare’s mane. She was so dizzy she feared she would fall, but was loath to dismount because she did not want to walk on carcasses or on an earth stained with blood, vomit, excrement, urine, ashes, soot, and even teeth and hair. As far as she could see into the drifting smoke, there were dead soldiers and horses, sagging, bullet-riddled canvas tents, broken boxes and kegs, hats, spoked wheels, smashed trunks and jugs, shreds of wet paper, arrows, bloody cloth, stove-in drums, rags on flagstaffs, kettles, and creeping fires. Shaking her head, trying to swallow back another upsurge of nausea, it seemed she was watched by the staring dead eyes of a red-haired woman who lay sprawled on her back, drenched with blood from her gaping cut throat.

  A red-haired woman, as she was herself. Good Face was transfixed by the dead, open eyes staring up at her. In years past she had tried so often to remember the face of her Slocum mother, and it was as if she were seeing it now. Her mother had looked like this.

  And while she was looking at the dead woman, a wiry little Shawnee woman suddenly appeared and crouched over the body, grabbed a fistful of the red hair, sliced around its roots with a knife, put the knife between her teeth to hold it, and used both hands to yank the scalp off with a loud, wet popping sound. The little woman jumped to her feet, looked up grinning at Good Face, then gaped in astonishment. She cried something in Shawnee, pointed back and forth between the scalp and Good Face’s own red curls, then shrugged and hurried away, leaping from corpse to corpse as if crossing a brook on stepping-stones, beginning to yip and yodel as she went. Good Face slumped forward over the mare’s withers with her eyes shut tight and retched, again and again.

  By the middle of the afternoon the looting of the battlefield had been organized by chiefs and chieftains. Good Face had given her mare and packhorses to a group of warriors led by Little Turtle’s son-in-law, Wild Potato, and they were loading the packsaddles with army muskets, powder kegs, and tools. Good Face wandered off through the carnage looking for her husband and father. She had at last emptied her heart and hardened herself so she could wade in blood and trample over bodies without fainting or throwing up.

  The dead on the ground were all white people. Wild Potato told her that the few dead warriors had already been carried off the field, and the wounded too. In the eyes of the red-haired warrior, she had seen great distress—even though, as a Miami leader, he was rejoicing in an unbelievable victory—and in that momentary, anguished glance she saw that they shared some terrible understanding, something she would need to think and pray on before she would know how to speak of it.

  Wild Potato had not said much to her, because he was not fluent in the Lenapeh tongue and she had forgotten most English words. But by using a little of both languages he had been able to tell her that there were nearly a thousand soldiers dead, that the army of the Long Knives was no more, and that the attack at dawn had been so fierce and surprising that not more than twenty or thirty warriors lost their lives, and not many more than that were wounded. He did not know who they all were, but he knew her father and her husband, and did not believe either of them had been hurt. Wild Potato had said—or she thought he said—that no Lenapeh had been killed that he knew of, and then he thanked her for the horses, and his eyes seemed to glitter with tears; but maybe they had just been inflamed, she thought. Like the eyes of everybody on the battlefield, they were red and watery. Everyone living and dead who had been in the battle was sooty from the black gunpowder and the gun smoke; the whole world seemed still to reek of it.

  Black gunpowder and red blood. Every warrior was totally besmeared and besprinkled with both—clothes, faces, hair, especially their hands and arms—as if they had been butchering game and wallowing in char all day. Red and black were the warrior colors; they stood for courage and death in the lore of the People, but it seemed to her this day that they stood for blood and gunpowder.

  By now most of the corpses lay naked, their white skin blood-smeared. Women and warriors had been stripping them for their woolen clothes, shoes, and boots, which would be so welcome this winter. Good Face saw a number of warriors, some of them wearing three-cornered soldier hats and long-tailed blue army coats, boisterously pulling down tents. As the tents fell and were rolled up, some of them were laughing, giggling like women and whooping like fools. Seeing that they were sharing a jug made of brown pottery, she veered away from them with remorse and loathing, remembering the time she had found her husband howling like a demon beside the river. Tents were collapsing all over the battlefield. They were a wealth of cloth, which could be used for clothing or to help keep the rain out of wikwams, cloth that was expensive at the British trading posts. And there were hundreds of tents here. Most of them were riddled with holes from the musket balls and arrows that had deluged this army, but holes could be patched. And the little tents could be used for what they were too: shelters hunters could take with them on their pack-horses when they rode out to the hunting grounds, shelters to sleep in during the rains and snows while the new villages were being built. Even in her stunned state of mind, Good Face was grateful for all this cloth and all these soldier things that could be used by her People, whose belongings had so often been burned by the Long Knife armies. So many guns, so much wool clothing, kettles, tools, gunpowder, and lead for the hunters. Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, and Buckongahelas—the war chiefs—had given their peoples more than a victory over the Town Destroyers; they had also given them things that would make their lives easier and more comfortable, without having to barter for years with the stingy British traders for them. In this way, war made a little sense; it seemed just.

  Yet her heart ached for the People. It was still a madness that everyone seemed to have, the madness to kill and make pain, the madness of hatred that caused good people to act as if they were full of maxcheekwee menaxteeum, the drink demons.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  November 1791

  By the Maumee Sipu

  Good Face separated out three little strands of her red hair above her left ear and began braiding. She looked in the mirror at the braid sometimes, but mostly at her eyes and face. It was such a novelty to see it, and she was quite taken with her appearance. It was a very pleasing face. It looked so much like her memory of her birth mother’s face that she could now remember how her birth mother had looked. Or she thought she could.

  Her husband, Like Wood, had brought the mirror home from the battlefield, one of the things he had looted from one of the big tents. It had been an officer’s mirror, he said. It was set in a round frame of smooth, reddish wood with silver-headed tacks all the way around, with a short handle that had a hole drilled in the end, making it easy to hang from a limb or from the frame of the wikwam. He had worn it home hung by a thong around his neck. From the same tent he had brought for himself a fancy wig of curled white hair. He liked to joke that of the three scalps he brought back from the battle, this was the only one he had taken without a knife. He had just picked it up from where it lay on a box beside the mirror. In the frenzy of the victory, dancing around the blazing fires, his two blood-crusted real scalps had been displayed on the end of a long pole, but he put the wig of silver hair on his own plucked bald head. Had he only the wig as a trophy, he would have been considered a contemptible clown for dancing the scalp dance in a wig, but since he had killed and scalped two soldiers and had their brown-haired and yellow-haired scalps, he was not only a hero in the scalp dance, but a high-hearted and funny hero. After the three battles
of his young life, Like Wood now had four soldiers’ scalps and a wig. To the pigtail of the wig he tied the eagle feather he had earned as a warrior. Tuck Horse disapproved of his son-in-law’s clownishness in this manner, thinking it must offend the ancestor spirits to see the feather of a warrior’s true honor attached to a white man’s wig, which the old man considered to be like a mere fool’s hat.

  But Like Wood had scoffed, pointing out that some of the warriors wore their eagle feathers attached to the three-cornered soldier hats they had brought from the battlefield. “You are too serious, Father,” he said, grinning, and Tuck Horse grunted at him and shook his head. Like Wood said, “You wear your eagle feather tied in white hair, Father. Why should I not, also? Ha ha!”

  Tuck Horse himself had taken one scalp at the battle. He had walked down Girty’s Town trail from the packhorse camp that morning before the battle, walked in the frost and snow to arrive at the stream just as the eight hundred warriors charged the army camp. He had shot one of the hunting-coat soldiers who were running away at the very start of the battle, even before the cannons began shooting, and sat down in the snow beside him to scalp him, unable to kneel because his knees hurt too much from the long walk. Then he had not been able to get back up because of cramps in his old legs. “By the time I could stand up again,” he told them, “the battle had moved over across the little river into the main soldier camp, where I could not catch up, and my behind was almost frozen off from sitting in the snow. Once, the bluecoat soldiers made a hard charge with bayonets and drove our People back toward me across the river and they nearly ran over me before our warriors pushed them back in and killed them all. It was wonderful to see how our warriors danced in and out between the bayonets and clubbed the bluecoats down. Then the cannons almost broke my ears, but they only shot too high and tore up the treetops. But that was my last battle. It is no good to fight a battle sitting in the snow. I do thank Creator that my last battle was such a victory. It was better than when we killed the army of the British general called Ba-lad-ock nearly forty summers ago, when I was a young warrior. That was where I earned the first of my feathers. Now I have so many from fighting Long Knives that an eagle himself would want to borrow some from me to get well dressed. Hm!”

  Good Face and Flicker had smiled at each other. He had been acting grumpy because he was so pleased with himself, and it pleased him to gibe at his son-in-law, of whom he was actually proud.

  Tuck Horse was also proud of his red-haired daughter. She too had earned a feather, a hawk feather, for helping take the food down to the war camp and then the packhorses to the battlefield. It was for that feather that she now made the braid. The quill of the feather was decorated with green glass beads and had sinew strands by which it could be tied into the braid and worn with pride. Minnow and the other women of the pack train had been granted such feathers too. Now the three treasures Good Face owned were her hawk feather, her mirror, and the old medicine bag Neepah had put on her when she was a little girl. Minnow, whose Miami husband was burned on the chest by embers from a cannon shot, had been preoccupied with skin since the battle in two ways: healing her husband’s burns with acorn oil, and tanning the soldier scrotums she had harvested from the battlefield. From them she was going to make medicine bags for herself and all the other pack train women. Good Face knew that was what Minnow was doing and that she was to be given one, but she felt strongly that she did not want it, though she could not tell Minnow that. She would not wear two medicine bags, and she would never discard the one Neepah had given her.

  And she did not want a medicine bag with hairs on it, as those scrotums had.

  Snow squeaked underfoot as Good Face and Flicker walked through intense cold toward the Council Lodge. Flicker moved slowly, leaning on a walking staff, bent with age and pain, squinting against sun-dazzled snow. “Not since Tuck Horse was young have I known a man who would be on his wife as often as Like Wood is upon you.” Good Face blushed and smiled, but Flicker did not look amused, and went on: “Yet, every time the moon comes around, you go off to the women’s hut. I wonder why you have no grandchild coming for me. I was a grandmother when I was much younger. I should like to be a grandmother again, as a woman should be when she is old.”

  “I too wonder why,” Good Face replied. “In praying to Kijilamuh ka’ong, I try to make him see me with a baby in my arms.”

  The old woman nodded. “That is good. I shall pray more for him to see me with a grandchild. You are right. It is better to pray than just wonder.”

  “This probably would be a good time to have children,” Good Face mused. “The Long Knives no longer have an army. After what happened in the battle, they would not dare to come and bother our People anymore. For two years Little Turtle has defeated their armies. Surely it is all over by now and we can raise children without fear.”

  Flicker stopped for a moment, leaned on her walking stick, and looked sideways at her daughter through squinted wrinkles. She opened her mouth to say something, but instead shook her head once, sniffed, and plodded on, face full of thought. Good Face wondered what her mother had almost said and why she hadn’t said it.

  Cedarwood smoke, a smell that Good Face loved, drifted up toward the high, cobwebbed ceiling of the Council Lodge, swirled under the smoke hole, and then rushed upward, carrying the prayers and words of the Women’s Council toward Creator. The elders and clan mothers got up one by one and talked of the matters in their hearts, with the light from the smoke hole shining in their hair and making their jewelry gleam. These were beloved and respected women in the village. Though they worked alongside all the other women and cared for their children and helped them at childbirth, and were like aunts and sisters, here in Council they were strong voices for the wishes of all the women, and were invested with the power to debate even against the tribal chiefs themselves on behalf of the Lenapeh women.

  Even so, they had to concern themselves with small and ordinary matters as well as grand ones. In this long Council these women listened to the women of their clans and spoke on every sort of matter. A Council always began with old matters and tried to resolve them before new matters were brought forth. This day there were tiresome discussions about the uses and the sharing of army tent cloth. Then there was much talk about the use of the portable forges captured from the army. After that there followed a long, tearful, angry dispute resulting in a second Council warning to a gossiping woman, who looked at the floor and clenched her jaw as she was told that if she gossiped again, she would be expelled from the tribe.

  At last the Women’s Council proceeded to the matter of the Lenapeh People’s future now that the Long Knives had been so thoroughly defeated. They talked about moving back to the Tymochtee Sipu country where they had been two summers earlier, where they did not have to mix with so many people of other tribes and enjoyed better hunting because the towns were smaller and not so close together. A clan mother reminded them that although alliances of tribes were good for defense, as had been so well proved, Creator had given Peoples their own languages and ceremonies so they could be distinct. Then Flicker asked to speak.

  Good Face helped her stand up. She stood with her white hair glowing with sky light and her eyes, mouth, and cheeks sunk in dark shadow. Here among these councillors, age and frailty had power in themselves.

  “Sisters and daughters,” she began in her dry, whispery voice. “Many of you are too young to have dwelt in Lenapeh’hokink, our true old homeland between the Eastern Sea and the mountains, and so you may think wapsituk are few. When they come through the great woods, even their armies look small. A victory such as we had in the past moon makes them look even smaller. You think they were all cut down and that is the end of their armies.

  “Do not soothe yourselves with such thoughts! Most of my long life I lived in Lenapeh’hokink, and I have seen their numbers. In one town will dwell more white people than there are of our People between Kekionga and the mouth of the Maumee Sipu, and they have more such towns
than one can count. You have seen anthills, where so many ants swarm that the earth itself appears to be moving? It is like that in those towns. They are a people as white as the maggots of flies, and they breed that fast.

  “Why do you think they keep taking our lands, as they have been doing for the last ten generations? I will tell you why: because they grow to be so many that they would have to stand on each other’s shoulders if they could not spread out!

  “Kulesta! Once there was a time when Taxkwox Menoteh, Turtle Island upon which we live, had upon it just enough red people of all nations that they could eat plenty and move about and be happy. There were many hundreds of hundreds, but Turtle Island is vast, and we were never crowded. If it became hard to get enough food, we stopped having babies. Surely there was not a better or happier land anywhere than Turtle Island. But then came the wapsi boats. On their boats were sickness rats, and the white people themselves were so dirty they had sicknesses our healers did not know. We died, they bred, and soon they were more in numbers than we.

  “They put lies on paper and called our land theirs. Then they brought a race of black-skin people from across the sea, and made those black-skin people cut down the woods for them and plow the ground. They made those black ones breed like flies too, so they would have more people to work for them. They caught our people and tried to make them work, but we ran away and would not do it.

  “But listen, my sisters and daughters: I am sure the white men are ten or a hundred times our number now. Even their black people are more numerous than we are now. If we had a hundred victories such as this one, they could just keep making guns for new armies and keep coming. They can grow a new army every season. We are foolish if we think that we have won over them! Next year, or two years from now, another bluecoat army will come back to make revenge for what we did.