The Red Heart

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  The next morning they paddled past the Blown-Down Woods and the countless buzzards that drifted above it. Good Face believed that Like Wood’s body was still in there. Probably scalped. Perhaps skinned. On the air was a stink of decay.

  She paddled with concentration, looking straight ahead at the water. She knew everyone in the canoe must be thinking of what had happened in there, to so many warriors, to the Indian nations.

  But no one spoke of it. She swallowed again and again, eager to be away from that place forever.

  At noon they began to hear the Maumee Sipu rapids ahead, a rushing, hissing sound, and saw bubbly foam drifting past the canoe. Now would come a hard part of their journey.

  They sat in the canoe by the bank, with Good Face holding it steady by grasping a willow branch overhead, and studied the swift water coming down. It was Tuck Horse, with his long years on the rivers, who decided how they could pass the rapids. He explained thoughtfully, “In this season the water usually is so low one can get out and wade to pull the canoe up. Because of the rain, it is too deep and fast. We will have to take it out and carry it around by the path.”

  So they got out on the portage path, pulled the canoe ashore, unloaded everything, and made bundles. Two small bundles for the old couple, and one big, heavy one. There was the big bundle and there was the canoe. Good Face looked at it all and thought it would require two trips past the rapids, she and Minnow carrying the bundle, then coming back for the canoe.

  But Minnow said: “Too much danger for two trips. You carry the big bundle on your back. I will carry the canoe. We will all go up together one time only. Less chance to get caught walking if there are soldiers around, or their scouts. We want to get past here quickly.”

  Good Face looked at her in disbelief. “You cannot carry that canoe by yourself!”

  “K’hehlah. I can indeed. Maybe you think you cannot carry all the rest of that?”

  Good Face looked at it and wondered whether she could, but said, “Yes, I can.” All of it together would be heavier than the canoe, and she remembered that the rapids ran a long distance.

  Minnow said, “Do you want me to carry the big bundle and you carry the canoe?”

  Good Face looked at the long vessel and knew it would be too unwieldy, even if not too heavy for her, and said, “I can carry the bundle.”

  “Women argue,” said Tuck Horse. “I will carry the canoe. You all get in.”

  They all laughed. When all the bundles were made and roped for arm loops and tumplines, Minnow lashed the paddles closely parallel to each other between the two middle thwarts, leaving just a little more than enough space to get her head between the paddles. Then the young women lifted the lighter bundles so that Tuck Horse and Flicker could put their arms through the loops.

  “This is a baby’s load,” Tuck Horse grumbled.

  “Men are babies,” Minnow teased, and he grinned. “Complaining babies,” she said. “Men complain if there is too much work, and even if there is too little.”

  Old Flicker laughed, standing under her load with drops of sweat running in rills down the lines of her face. Her wattled neck looked crooked as a buzzard’s with the weight of the tumpline hauling back against her forehead, but she laughed.

  Good Face looked at her big bundle and the canoe and simply could not see how either she or Minnow could get their loads up without helping each other, which neither could do because of her own load. Minnow said, “Squat in front of this and put your arms through.” Good Face did so, but felt that if she tried to straighten up, all the weight would pull her backward. And even with her deerskin dress and the padding tied on the ropes, she knew it was going to hurt all the way. “Now stand,” Minnow said, grunting and lifting, and when Good Face was up, the load was centered over her hips if she kept her forehead pressed forward against the tumpline. At once she was aching and sweating.

  “Waneeshee,” she gasped. “I am ready, but now I cannot help you.”

  “Do not all stand talking and watching,” Minnow said. “You waste your strength waiting. Go on.” Then she squatted with her left hip against the right gunwale of the canoe, reached across with her right hand to grip the thwart on the far side, and with one sure, swiveling motion that squeezed a groan out of her she rolled it bottom side up and stood swaying with the vessel resting on her shoulders, her head up inside it. Good Face was awed. She had seen muscular men hoist canoes that way, but Minnow was half the size of such men. And she was pregnant.

  “I said move ahead,” Minnow wheezed, swaying, shifting to get the weight balanced. “When I get going forward with this thing, I cannot stop to keep from running over slow turtles in my path!” She was laughing in gasps. Water from the bilges of the canoe was dribbling down onto the path.

  “Ha! It’s you who look like the turtle, under her shell!”

  “I am too busy to laugh,” Minnow said, her voice resonating from under the canoe. “Stop joking and move on or I will steer the prow of this thing right up the crack of your behind!” Good Face could hear how exhilarated Minnow was with having used her strength so well.

  Good Face was also pleased and surprised with herself, that she could bear so much. But her neck, back, shoulders, and legs were being strained with every step she took. Her old parents were laboring hard up the path ahead of her and she could only imagine how their old bones must be hurting, their old hearts pounding. If they can keep going, she thought, I can.

  In the middle of the rapids stood a high island of rock shaped like the hump and head of a buffalo. It seemed to take them an age to pass it, with the turbulent water rushing and gurgling below the footpath, so she kept a tense balance in order not to topple down the steep bluff and into the frothing water.

  Soon her thigh and calf muscles were burning with fatigue, and she felt as if her neck bones were being ground like corn in a mortar. The shoulder loops felt as if they were gnawing through her flesh and bone, and her fingertips, curled inside the loops, were growing cramped and numb, her wrists in an agony of torsion. She needed to pull her fingers out, but they might as well have been in a beaver trap. She was streaming sweat.

  Heaving for enough breath, she became aware of an opening out of the terrain along the path, and a leveling of the incline. She saw that they were coming out upon a gently sloping meadow, the path now grassy. She squinted through eye-stinging sweat to see the place.

  On the trek downriver they had passed here a handsomely sited fishing village. It was now a charred and trampled waste, with a few scorched wikwam frames and debris strewn everywhere. Every pot or implement or scrap of hide or cloth had been smashed or torn into small fragments by the soldiers.

  She desperately needed to drop the heavy load here and rest, but Minnow’s voice grated, “Move! Move! You are about to get a canoe up your behind!”

  She gasped in anger. It had been Minnow’s idea to bring everything at once, and Good Face tried to retort. But her throat was too dry. With a grimace, she simply staggered on in pain and anger.

  Suddenly, there in her way stood Tuck Horse and Flicker, sagging under their loads, heaving like a couple of blown horses. The sight of them swam and paled as she went dizzy, began to stagger …

  She saw the canoe on the riverbank beside her, right side up, and Minnow was behind her lifting the great load off. Sharp pains stabbed through the ache of her shoulders and she drew her arms out, then turned to tongue-lash Minnow. But the wiry little woman was laughing, easing the pack to the ground and exclaiming in a panting voice:

  “Oh, such a strong beast you are! That you could carry this without stopping!” Then she was lifting down the old people’s packs and exclaiming to them, “What a daughter you have! You must be proud!”

  Good Face stood blinking, muscles twitching, dizziness passing, trying to wring circulation and feeling back into her fingers, and astonished by Minnow’s praise. Her anger vanished and she felt such a rush of admiration for this sinewy little woman that her heart swelled.

  �
��Hurry, load the canoe,” Minnow was already urging. “There must be army scouts near this portage! We must hurry on!”

  Four days later Good Face smelled wet ashes, and as the canoe slid up the shaded green river toward a clearing on the right bank, she recognized a gigantic sycamore. This had been the Shawnee town of Blue Jacket. It was now a ruin, still smoking.

  As they put the canoe ashore at sundown, near the mouth of the Auglaize, they heard the boom of a cannon from the south. Tuck Horse deduced that the Long Knives must now have a fort on the Auglaize. Being deep in what must now be army country, they hid the canoe and made a secluded camp in a thicket, off the Maumee trail.

  That night when her parents and Minnow were in their blankets, Good Face went outside the little circle of campfire glow to wet the ground, and as she squatted with her dress up around her waist, still feeling the tight ache of the strenuous paddling in her arms and shoulder, hearing the hiss of her urine on the ground, she became aware of another sound, one that made her scalp feel cold. It was a sound like breathing, or perhaps more like snoring, with a groan or gurgle at the end of each breath. It could have been a bear, or a panther, though the sound had in it something hurt, pitiful, rather than menacing. With rapid heartbeat and slow moves, she smoothed down her skirt, and, moving stealthily sideways to keep from turning her back on whatever it was, edged back into the camp. There, she murmured into Minnow’s ear and then squeezed Tuck Horse’s arm till she knew he was awake, then told him. They all stayed low to the ground while the old man primed the firing pan of his musket and eased the frizzen back. They did not want to be seen outlined against the fireglow while pondering what to do, and Flicker suggested covering the fire with ashes to darken the camp. All this in whispers, murmurs. Instead, Minnow told them to put more wood on the fire and said she would slip out and around to see if she could see what was there. She took off her clothes so she could move silently and not give any handhold in case she had to fight someone in the dark, and took with her an old tarnished skinning knife of British steel. Good Face was both awed and chilled by Minnow’s courage, but at the same time she knew that anyone who met that steely little woman in the shadows would also need courage, and luck as well.

  As the firelight intensified, Tuck Horse slipped away to stand in its margins, blending into the shadows of a tree trunk, with his musket pointed toward the place where Good Face had heard the sounds. She prayed that he would not shoot Minnow by mistake as she prowled around out there. Good Face and Flicker stayed low to the ground near the fire, listening hard.

  Then Minnow reappeared in the firelight, coming in behind Tuck Horse so stealthily that he did not even know she had returned. She pulled on her dress and said in a normal voice, “Make a torch and bring a blanket. That is a shot man lying out there and he is no wapsini.”

  Flicker always kept a few sycamore seed balls saturated with bear oil for use as candles. Good Face split the end of a green twig, clamped one of the balls in the end, and ignited it at the campfire. Carrying it as a torch, Minnow led the others into the bush, Tuck Horse just behind her with his musket ready.

  The first sign they saw of the man was a glint of light on metal, then the sheen of sweat, and seeing where he lay, Good Face had a momentary twinge of embarrassment in having come so close to urinating on him in the dark.

  He was not unconscious exactly, but seemed to be in a stupor. His eye was red and half closed but watching the light come toward him. If he had any weapon, he was hiding it behind him as he lay propped against a tree root. With the light close on him, he was hideous.

  His head was swollen huge on the left side and smeared with yellow war paint and crusted blood, the one red eye a mere slit and the other swollen tight shut. His head was plucked bald except for a braided scalp lock at the crown decorated with a silver brooch holding the quill of a hawk feather. The metal that had glinted was either the brooch or the crescent-shaped gorget that hung by a thong from his neck.

  Flicker limped forward and took the sycamore torch from Minnow. Then she knelt close to the wounded warrior, moved the light to and fro, and suddenly shook her head and groaned. Good Face peered over to see.

  There under the large muscle of his chest was the hole from a musket ball, the flesh around it blackened and puckered. Unlike the other blood on his body, that coming from this wound was not dried but still issuing fresh and red. But worse than just the trickling of the blood was what she observed as the man breathed those gurgling breaths she had first heard:

  With each inhalation, the blood bubbled. Flicker stated what she had at once presumed. “Air and blood. He is shot through his breathing chest. This is quite bad.”

  So, air was coming out through the bullet hole because he had been shot in the lung. At least that and maybe more. Good Face felt helpless. Surely this warrior would die.

  But Flicker told them to carry him to the fire, and she rose painfully from her knees and limped, stooped, back into the light of the blaze before them.

  When they carried him into the firelight, Flicker was already getting items out of the large bundle. She told them not to lay him down but to hold him standing. They wrestled with his limp form until one of the young women was under each of his arms; they were bearing all his weight. His head hung forward and his legs merely hung down, not supporting him in the least. He might as well have been a corpse. “Turn him so I can see all,” she said, making a gesture, and they walked around him slowly until Flicker had been able to examine him all the way around by firelight.

  “One hole only. Hmm. That ball is inside, then. Bad.” She spread a wide scrap of clean deerhide on the ground. “Put him there, with the hole down,” Flicker said.

  “Lay him on his wound?” Minnow exclaimed.

  “Yes.”

  They stretched him out prone. Flicker handed Minnow a bag. “Take this dogwood. Make a tea for his fever.” She gave her another bag. “This is dried elm bark. Make a slick poultice. Hm. At daylight you must find a slick elm and get fresh bark.” As Minnow turned away to cook the concoctions, Flicker told Good Face to slip her hands under the warrior’s chest, one above the wound, the other below. Reluctant, she reached under the muscular, bloody, hot chest. Flicker then told Tuck Horse to clamp the man’s nose and mouth shut, then she stooped beside the wounded man, put her palms on his back, raised her weight onto her arms, and pushed hard and slowly down on him.

  From the wound came a sound like a person with runny bowels breaking wind. A long, wet, bubbly crepitation. Good Face almost recoiled in horror as blood and clots and mucus gushed out of the wound and flooded her hands.

  “Now let him breathe in,” Flicker said, and Tuck Horse released the man’s mouth and nose. “Now shut him again.” He did, and again Flicker pressed down, forcing more air and matter out of the bullet hole. She repeated this awful process until only clean blood was running out, then told them to roll the man onto his back.

  “Ah! Wehlee heeleh!” she cried, pointing down at the dark mess on the deerskin. “There it is!” Among the gouts and slime lay the musket ball. “I feared I would have to probe for it. Or leave it in. Good, good! Daughter, offer Creator tobacco for making it come out as I prayed it to do! Oh, I am happy with that! Kijilamuh ka’ong means this man to live for something!”

  Good Face shuddered, almost sick, the warrior’s blood cooling on her hands and forearms. But her heart soared with gratitude.

  For the rest of the night old Flicker worked over the wounded man. She put a hollowed fox bone on the bullet hole and sucked and spat, sucked and spat. She explored the wound above his ear that had made his head swell, and put an elm poultice on it, and then another elm poultice over the wound in his side. She had them brew dogwood tea all night and trickle it into the man’s mouth. By daybreak they were all about to collapse from fatigue but the old woman was still working. They heard the morning cannon from the Auglaize, and Flicker looked up impatiently at Good Face and said, “Did I ask you to do something at daylight, daughter?” />
  “Ah! Yes, I go, Kahesana!” In her exhaustion she had forgotten about the fresh elm bark. She took the hatchet and went out looking. The woods were full of fog from the river. She paused to relieve herself, then began circling their little camp, looking for slippery elm. She came to the river’s edge where their canoe had been pulled ashore and covered with brush to hide it. Nearby were several young elms, as big around as her thigh. She raised the hatchet and was ready to cut a line around the biggest elm at eye level when she heard men’s voices.

  She peered around with eagerness. If these were men of the tribes, they might be comrades of the wounded man, looking for him. They could take him to a village perhaps, where he could rest and heal more comfortably, maybe even with his family, and with a shaman to help him recover. Then she saw the men. They were in a long, black boat on the river, slipping through the mist, coming out of the mouth of the Auglaize. Oars were rising and falling, oarlocks creaking. She heard a man say words in English and she understood them.

  “Swing left.” The man standing in the stern had said it. It was English, the language of her childhood life. And she recognized the voice.

  It was Apekonit, Wild Potato, the red-haired one! She peered through the foliage and across the river mist to be sure.

  It was he, and he was within speaking distance, with a big boat full of rowers. There would be room in the boat for the wounded man, who was a Miami, she was sure, a Miami like Wild Potato; he could take the man to wherever he was going up the river and get good care for him. She raised her hand to her mouth and took a breath to yell for him. There was Wild Potato just across the river, hatless, red-haired, handsome, standing with one foot on a barrel and one elbow on his knee; she recognized him even though he was wearing not deerskins but a blue soldier coat.…

  Then she remembered.

  He had betrayed the Miami people and gone over to the Long Knife general.

  She ducked behind the elm and watched as the long boat turned up the Maumee, and she thought hard. A strange feeling passed through her. She was so fatigued and hungry, she was seeing as if in a dream, with clarity.