Hopeless or not, she never failed to pray for this baby. She prayed every day for all her other grandchildren, who were numerous. All her sons and daughters were as prolific in making children as she and Jonathan had been. Her children were all having just about one birth a year in each family. This baby Jonathan was little over three months old, but Ruth knew quite well—she wasn’t deaf or blind yet—that Joseph was back upon Liz several times a week. She knew that because Joseph and Liz had been temporarily living in Ruth’s house at Wilkes-Barre, using that same telltale upstairs bed with its distinctive squeak that neither carpentry nor tallow had been able to silence over the decades. Joe and Liz were about to move on up the Susquehanna to a plot of land up toward old Wyalusing, the old Indian town that had once been beyond the frontier but was now just a neighboring town where white people lived.
Wyalusing had been the place, it was believed, where Frannie had been taken right after her captivity. It was where her cousin Isaac had caught a glimpse of her one day—Goodness, Ruth thought, what, more than twenty years ago!—in one of those tantalizing incidents, so thrilling and hopeful then, so vaguely recalled now, of a search that had continued through a whole generation. She had grandchildren now who were about the age Frannie had been when she was taken away by those warriors. The roads were good enough now that the Slocums along the valley could reach each other’s homes in day trips. She could remember the ordeal travel used to be, sometimes days of painful jouncing or horseback meanderings along steep Indian paths just to cross half of Luzerne County.
Her son Will had seven of her grandchildren here in his house overlooking the river bend, seven grandchildren in ages ranging from two up to thirteen. Will’s wife Sarah was due again next spring. Will had been voted out of office as Luzerne County’s sheriff last year, and often mused aloud about setting off for the Indian country again in search of Frances. But there was a silent resolve in Sarah to discourage it. Last time he had gone, with three brothers and a herd of cattle, Sarah was left with a babe in arms, two toddlers, and one on the way. The brothers had come back that fall unsuccessful as usual, half starved and so sick from exposure that Will had been less like a returned helpmeet than another baby to feed and clean up after. Sarah was stubborn and certain she was in the right, and it was pretty well accepted in the family by now that Will would not go traipsing in the wilderness looking for his sister again until Sarah was good and ready to let him go. Ruth admired and respected Sarah for that, though she did suffer through every year that passed without at least one of her sons going out on the far trails in that perennial quest.
Ruth gave the little chestnut cradle a lingering nudge; little Jonathan was sleeping now. She hobbled out onto the porch, where Will and Joseph were loafing away the beautiful fall morning. Loafing was a luxury neither often enjoyed, and so instead of sitting on the porch bench to talk, they kept strolling about, from one end of the porch to the other, chatting over their shoulders, gazing off up or down the valley, sometimes slouching with their shoulders against the porch posts. Back and forth they had been clumping in their boots all the time she was in the house. “Well, boys,” she said, settling her full gray skirts on the bench, “if thee’d walked out that way as far as thee’s tramped to and fro on this porch this morning, thee might be in Tioga by now.” She didn’t know why she had said “Tioga.” Probably because she had just been thinking about the old quest.
Will, now thirty-eight, whose red hair was turning silver in the temples, had been pinching flaked tobacco into the bowl of a long, white-clay tavern pipe. He said, “Well, Ma, Sarah really doesn’t mind if I walk to Detroit again, as long as I don’t leave this porch.” He chuckled. “Only sheriff in this country that ever served his whole term under house arrest! Heh heh!” He groped in the watch pocket of his black vest and pulled out his magnifying glass. Joseph smiled at Will’s joke and shook his head.
Ruth watched her son go through his routine. He swung back the glass’s hinged brass cover, glanced out at the location of the sun, turned a little sideways and held the lens above the pipe bowl, moving it minutely up and down until the sunlight was focused in the bowl and little tendrils of smoke rose out. After a while he carefully kept the lens in place while drawing his head back, closing his lips over the pipe stem and starting a hard sucking. The ritual took him perhaps two minutes of concentration, but at last he got a dense cloud of smoke drifting around his head.
“All that effort,” Ruth Slocum sighed, “just to raise a stink!”
“Well, Ma,” he said, “since I moved up here from Wilkes-Barre, fresh air’s been about to kill me. No coal soot. This helps.”
“I never thought I’d see the day my very own sons’d fall prey to that vice.”
He hauled in a deep lungful, puckered his lips, and blew it out in a long stream. “Well, Ma, through this delicious smoke the world looks a little different. When I haze up the visible world out there, it helps me see better with my mind’s eye. The mind’s eye, see, is better than the real eye at figuring out how things are in the world.”
“Is that so,” she said, gazing up the river. “And how is the world through that haze thee’s makin’? What I see with my real eye looks just about perfect, and I sh’d not want to change it.” Up that way she could see perhaps three miles of the Susquehanna flowing in its graceful curve between mountains filmy with sunny mist, the woods mostly crimson and gold, the bottomlands buff and yellow with corn and barley and hay fields, mostly harvested already. A mile up, on the east bank, she could see where the little Lackawanna River flowed in. Will’s house and the new little town of Pittston were situated on the outside of a lovely river bend where the Susquehanna proceeded more southwesterly, and when she looked downstream, she could see the defilade in Back Mountain, where her son Giles and son-in-law Hugh had escaped death in the massacre some twenty-two years ago; she could in fact see the sites of several forts from that war, now all silent and abandoned, thank God, she thought. And even before the Revolution there had been warfare and murder and mayhem all up and down this valley—those constant battles between the Pennamites and the Yankees encroaching from Connecticut and Rhode Island. Those little wars had been going on even when Jonathan Slocum brought her to this valley. One reason this river valley looked so perfect to her now was that at last it was peaceful. There hadn’t been a battle here in years.
Offshore from the massacre site stood Monocanock Island, a mile long, and above and beyond it, hazy at seven miles away, stood the tiny structures where Forty Fort had been, above the next bend where the river turned southward again and ran down past Wilkes-Barre, her home. Wilkes-Barre wasn’t visible from here at Will’s house, but she could see the smudge of its coal smoke hanging in the gauzy air before Wilkes-Barre Mountain’s lilac flank.
How beautiful it was, and it just kept adding to the fortunes of her family. What had started as mere frontier land purchases by her father Isaac Tripp had developed into assets by which the Slocums, it seemed, could not help prospering. Everything in the valley—land, ore, coal, wood, even falling water—kept turning into wealth. Her family, strung out now along these visible miles of the Susquehanna and its tributary the Lackawanna, grew steadily, inexorably, more wealthy with its landholdings and minerals and milling enterprises. Even those who had left for other parts—Giles to Saratoga, Judith and Mary with their husbands to Ohio—took with them stakes enough to ensure success in their new homes on the farther frontier.
She looked over the autumnal beauty of the valley and could scarcely believe what had happened here in the quarter of a century since she first saw it from the hard seat of a canvas-roofed wagon. She and Jonathan had had to stand up in the wagon to see over the top of the lush, windblown grasses. Many of the oaks had been five to seven feet in diameter in the trunk, and there were incredibly tall pines on the mountainsides. Indian tribes—Senecas, Mahicans, Shawnees, Delawares, Nanticokes, Iroquois nations—had been living in this valley continuously, it appeared, since the ancient day
s when they, or some long-lost older civilization, had built earthen mounds and fortifications. Missionaries of a sect called Moravians had come among them before the Revolution and taught them things that unrooted them, made them unstable and vulnerable to the influences the settlers then brought.…
Ruth Slocum knew, from her work with the Friends’ missionary effort, a great deal about the usual effects of missionary work, and she knew they were mixed blessings at best. Mission work was intended well, but to the tribes, most missionaries were as bewildering as liquor and war. Often she read the reports of the conditions in which the defeated Indians lived—squalor, disease, helpless drunkenness and spiritual confusion—and her grief over the probable fate of her lost daughter would so torment her that even the great fortune of the rest of her brood was overbalanced by it.
Frances would be—referring to her perpetual mental calendar of her daughter’s age—twenty-seven years old now. And when Ruth Slocum visualized her, she saw a drunken, greasy harridan in ragged animal hides, smeared with crimson paint, begging around forts or, worse, prostituting herself with soldiers, probably diseased, probably leaving a wake of abandoned or sickly children, doomed like little Jonathan in there—
“Ma. Ma!”
It was Joseph, leaning near her, silhouetted against the light of the broad sunlit valley. She had been lost in that dismal daydream again, and had not heard him addressing her. “Yes, Joe?”
“Did thee hear what Will was saying to thee? Is thee quite well, Ma?”
“What? Certainly I’m well.” She realized that she had lapsed and was embarrassed. “I’m quite well.”
“Well, thee was groanin’! We thought thee was coming down with a complaint.”
She sighed. “Son, thee knows, as a family we’ve more blessings than any I know. To a pampered body, the littlest discomfort’s an agony, bein’ unaccustomed. Well, see, th’ordeal of our Frances I suppose will always sting like an open wound. Till she’s found and brought back to this family where she can share our many blessings, I’ll have pain, and thee’ll see me show it.”
Joseph put his hand on her wrist. “Ma, I’ve promised thee I’ll find her. And I shall.”
“And I’m not through either,” Will said, standing over them, still puffing tobacco smoke. “Before long, Sarah will be so tired of having me around that she’ll order me to go looking in the wilderness.” The way he said it sounded more like a joke than a promise.
After their mother had gone back in the house, Will stood puffing and gazing over the valley. He was not looking Joseph in the eye when he said softly: “Joe, sometimes I wonder if we’d do better not to humor her.”
Joseph frowned. “What’s thee mean, Will? I don’t get your drift at all.”
“Ma’s possessed by an idle hope, and we just help keep her possessed by it. By humoring her, I mean.”
Joseph flushed, troubled, almost angry. “Humoring her how?”
Now Will turned and looked at him, his face hard, lined by the cross light. “Little brother, does thee really believe that girl Frannie’s still alive?”
“By heaven I do! Thee doesn’t?”
Will sighed, his face softening, and gazed downriver. “Joe, I always did, while I was hunting for her. I mean to say, I’d not have gone on those awful treks had I not had half a hope. But since that last one, to Detroit and back … the way those poor beaten savages live … Thee saw it. The sickness, the rum and whiskey. Above and beyond that, consider this:
“When General Wayne told all the chiefs to return their captives if they wanted peace, they were wanting peace desperately, and they brought in aplenty. Now, Joe, doesn’t thee think that if Frances were alive, she’d have been brought in and exchanged then? Truly, realistically, thinking with the brain rather than the hopeful heart, Joe, doesn’t thee believe she must be perished long since?”
Joseph opened and shut his mouth several times to answer, but the answer kept switching from yes to no and back to yes. Finally he answered. “Will, the wretches we saw were only the whipped ones, the beggars. There’s a possibility, thee’ll admit, that out beyond the army’s influence, many still live free and sober and in their own beliefs. In that case, Frances might still be alive and healthy.”
“Aye, she might. But in that case, how should we ever hope to find her?”
Joseph felt the logic of that hit him hard. But he had lived almost his whole life with his mother’s hopeful dream of recovering her daughter, and he answered simply, “Nevertheless, unless a proof comes that she is dead, I shall presume she’s alive. And by my conscience, then, I could never quit the search.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Spring 1805
Near Fort Wayne
Maconakwa’s husband was older than the other riders, but she knew that did not matter. In a footrace it might have mattered, because their legs and lungs might have done better than his, but this was a horse race with horses whose legs and lungs were fairly equal, while he had long been a master of horses.
Hundreds of watchers, including white men from the fort, lined both sides of the racecourse. Maconakwa held her daughter’s hand and exclaimed to her, loudly over the drone of excited voices in the sifting drizzle:
“Now watch, Cut Finger. Can you see your father down there?”
The little girl nodded, pointing to the cluster of milling riders far down at the other end of the meadow. “There on the darkest horse!” She bounced up and down on her toes.
Maconakwa’s stake in the race was not merely her husband’s glory. She had helped him gentle and train several horses in the last four years, and this mare he was racing today had been her particular charge from the day it was foaled. She had raised the dark filly virtually alongside her daughter, Cut Finger. Working with her husband’s small herd, she found that she had almost a kinship with them, could almost read their thoughts and make them read hers.
Raising, training, and trading horses had become the occupation of her husband, The Awl, more than hunting now. Fort Wayne was one of the main places where he could race and sell or trade his horses, because there were always great numbers of people. Here, where the Kekionga Miamis had prospered by controlling the portage, the Fort Wayne whites now prospered by controlling the Miamis, and the welfare of the tribe depended upon the whites. But with the white men at Fort Wayne had come their spirit water, which seemed to flow as plentifully as river water from the portage place, and it was ruining the People.
Little Turtle was tamed. He lived almost in the shadow of the big fort called Fort Wayne, near where his old town had been. The old chief lived well here, in a big house of the sort white men built, and he sat on furniture and ate with silver utensils. He enjoyed benefits stemming from his son-in-law’s position here as the government’s Indian agent to the Miami People. Wild Potato, now known again by his wapsi name of William Wells, had a big and rich farm near the fort, and he and his wife Sweet Breeze had given Little Turtle three grandchildren, who had Miami names they used when they were with their grandfather, and wapsi names the rest of the time; one of the boys even had as a middle name Wayne, in honor of the general to whom Wild Potato had betrayed his Miami People.
The Awl often wondered aloud how Little Turtle could have forgiven Wild Potato and come to trust him again. But he had. He had even gone east with Wells, wearing a blue suit and a black hat, to visit with the famous war chief called Washington, who had become sakima of the whole wapsi nation by that time. Washington had given Little Turtle a sword, since he promised not to fight anymore.
Then Wells had taken Little Turtle to see the next wapsi chief, called Adams, and on that journey Little Turtle had begged Adams to stop the flow of spirit water. It was the most desperate problem talked of in the tribal councils. In just one year the liquor had caused three thousand Miamis to die. They had never lost so many in a whole generation of war as in one year of peace, because in peace the liquor sellers could work.
Maconakwa secretly prayed every day that spirit water
would not get into the blood of her present husband as it had the blood of her first husband. The Awl was a solid and cheerful man who did not seem as if he would ever weaken to it, but so had many others seemed before they succumbed, and then their lives had descended to dirt and cruelty and misery, the hurting of their families, and death. The present Long Knife chief, Jefferson, had not yet stopped the flow of spirit water into the Indian country, and sometimes in Council, Little Turtle hinted that perhaps the Long Knife chief actually wanted the red men to die off from it.
But of course as a signer of the treaty surrendering to the Long Knives, Little Turtle could not come out forthrightly and condemn them for anything. He did not like telling the tribal Council that the Miamis had to keep begging the Great White Father in Washington for everything that Wayne had promised them in his treaty ten years ago.
As the horses began lining up at the distant starting place, Maconakwa was delighted to see her old friend Minnow among the people lining the other side of the racecourse. Minnow waved to her, said something to some women with her, broke away from them and came trotting across the racecourse, wearing a nearly white dress of fringed elkhide and a mass of necklaces that jounced as she came running, laughing. That was not all that jounced, and Maconakwa hugged her, saying in Lenapeh, “So I see you are baby-carrying again, sister!” Minnow had married a hunter from Metosinah’s Lenapeh village on the Mississinewa Sipu, about a day’s journey east of The Awl’s Miami town. The two women seldom saw each other except here at the fort and trading post, or when traveling to and from councils.
“And I see you are also, sister.” Minnow laughed, putting her palm on Maconakwa’s mounded abdomen. Then she frowned. “But you were pregnant last spring Bread Dance too, I remember. How is this?”
Maconakwa’s heart clenched and she looked down and bit her lips. “That was a boy one, dead when he was born. I thought you would have known. I sent word to you by one of Metosinah’s nieces last fall.”
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