So Wild a Dream

by Win Blevins

  “Name on the stern of the boat,” Sam said. He’d heard reports of a big Shawnee troublemaker, but hadn’t had the courage to ask why Captain Stuart named the boat after him.

  “Great man, great leader. He and Tenskwatawa were brothers.”

  “Goddamn treacherous red Injun,” stuck in Elijah. The giant brother was wearing his perpetual glower. Sam didn’t know which was worse, his silences or his words.

  “That’s the last thing Tecumseh was, treacherous,” the captain said evenly. Yet there was something smoldering in him that Sam couldn’t figure out. “Tecumseh’s word was accepted on both sides of all the troubles. He was passionately Shawnee, but also an educated man, read and wrote English. Taught me and Ten our first English.” He lost a moment to the past. “We lost a great man at the Battle of the Thames.”

  Elijah made a half-smothered grunt.

  “Ten’s uncle, Tenskwatawa, he’s my uncle too, he had a great idea. Shawnee should go back to their old ways, own property in common, and put down all their white ways, especially booze. Tenskwatawa had been a crazy drunk, he had a vision and reformed. Quit drinking completely.”

  “Pass the jug,” said Ten with a broad grin. As it passed, Eleven swigged deep. The captain cast him a sardonic eye.

  But then Elijah grabbed the jug away from Eleven. The giant drank deep, walked to Lam, waited for him to drink, took the jug to Ned, and last to Frenchy. He glared at the captain all the while. Ten and Eleven stared at the ground, acting like it meant nothing. Elijah finished the jug and threw it into the river.

  The captain jerked his head at Grumble, and the trickster slid into the hold.

  The captain took the moment to fill his corncob pipe, not deigning to address Elijah. “Even then the Shawnee had gone way white, their dress, farming, drinking, everything. And they were losing their lands to white settlers and clever treaties made up by Old William Henry Harrison, calls himself a general. Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh, his older brother, they started a new town for Indians to live this new way of the Prophet. Up there at the mouth of the Tippecanoe River, called it Prophetstown.”

  Grumble came back with another jug and handed it to Ten, who swigged and passed it to Eleven, who swigged and passed it on.

  “Pretty quick Harrison hears about this new Shawnee prophet. He scoffs and tells the Indians, ‘If Tenskwatawa is such a prophet, let him make the sun stand still, and the moon change its course.’ Spring of eighteen aught six, this was. When Tenskwatawa heard Harrison’s challenge, he predicted a total eclipse of the sun. It happened on June 16. Indians from hundreds of miles around come to Prophetstown then, followed Tenskwatawa’s new way. Harrison damn near choked on crow feathers.” The captain laughed, a good, strong haw-haw, with maybe an edge of bitterness.

  “My uncle probably got word of the eclipse from somebody’s almanac,” Ten said lightly. “You white men are easy to fool. You assume nobody but you speaks English.”

  “I don’t speak it,” said Eleven.

  “Me neither,” said Ten.

  “I wouldn’t speak it,” said Eleven.

  The captain used two sticks to pluck a coal from the fire and dropped it into his pipe bowl. A couple of good draws and he was smoking. “Then Tecumseh, he took to spreading the Prophet’s beliefs, and calling on Indians to rise up and throw the white man out. ‘No more fighting among tribes,’ he preached. ‘All red men join together and keep the whites out of our lands.’ He knew it could be done, if the Indians stuck together. He fronted that old fraud Harrison over and over and made him back down.”

  Stuart drew deep on his pipe, blew smoke into the night sky, and watched it disappear. “Eighteen and eleven, Tecumseh went to the South to get the Indians there to join his campaign. While he was gone, Harrison takes advantage and runs a surprise attack on Prophetstown.

  “Well, even surprised at dawn, the Indians sure enough took it to the Harrison men at first. Sent a special team to kill old Harrison. In the confusion—a battle is nothing but confusion—another officer got Harrison’s gray mount, and the man we killed, the Indians killed, was the wrong one. Tenskwatawa didn’t fight, just sat on a hill and made medicine for his warriors.”

  Stuart drew in a big breath, like he was trying to drink all the sky, and let it out. “When we missed on Harrison, he rallied his men and threw us back, threw the Indians back. Tenskwatawa’s men, they lost confidence in the medicine he was making. Before long it was over.”

  “Ain’t ever over,” said Ten.

  Stuart threw him an impatient glance. “I was fighting next to Ten’s father when he died. He bent over to help a wounded man and … Can’t talk about it even yet.”

  Another attempt to drink the sky.

  “The soldiers burned the village right down to the ground, with everything we owned, all the food we had stored. Tenskwatawa lost his reputation. Went to live in Canada, still up there.”

  “I saw my uncle when I was working in Canada,” said Ten. “He’s in exile. You know what, though? I took my English name, Ten, in his honor.”

  Stuart puffed his pipe and blew smoke into the sky, like the story had worn him out.

  Finally Sam broke in with, “What about Tecumseh’s plan for all the Indians to fight the whites?”

  “Tecumseh lined his warriors up with the British in the War of 1812, fifteen hundred of them I heard, helped capture Detroit. Later the British retreated from Detroit, Tecumseh with them, and old Harrison got on their tails and made the British and Indians fight on the Thames when they was outnumbered near three to one. Tecumseh went under that day.”

  Stuart took the pipe from his mouth and slowly tapped the ashes out on his boot sole.

  “But I left out what I was gonna tell, didn’t I? Being kin to Ten. I fought at Prophetstown that day.”

  “Oughta be shot for a traitor,” interrupted Elijah.

  “It’s ignorant asses like you make this country hard to live in,” the captain said sharply. “Let’s see, finish the story. I lived at Prophetstown from the start-up. My folks come up to the Mad River in Ohio from Kentucky in 1793. This was where Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa was born, Old Piqua, they called it, good place to live, some big springs. The Shawnee burned our cabin down and killed my folks for pushing into their country. That was the year after Mad Anthony Wayne whipped the Indians and put a stop to the fighting. I was a baby. I don’t remember any of that, don’t remember my white parents at all. Shawnees, Tenskwatawa’s sister, she took me in and treated me like her own son.

  “We went to Prophetstown with Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh right at the start-up, eighteen aught eight it was. Young Ten, here, he was six or seven when we got there, making me about seventeen. Indians from all over joined up with us, thousands of them. But it all come to naught. Harrison killed the town.”

  He cocked his head back and looked at the moon, or the stars, or the dark gaps between them. Maybe somewhere out there were the faces of the relatives and friends he saw die that day at Prophetstown.

  “After we lost the battle, my mother told me the Shawnee way was done. I should go back to the people I came from, she said. Went to work for an Indian trader, as I could speak Shawnee. He improved my English, taught me to be a white man. I’ll always be grateful to him, and I took his name, Stuart. Went into flatboating with him. He owned them and I ran them as long as he lived, until last August. This is my first trip on my own.” He smiled at Ten. “And now I only see my brother when he ambushes me along the river.”

  “Too easy,” Ten said. “One day I take your scalp.”

  The captain flipped off the cap he always wore. He was bald from the ears up. Everyone hooted.

  Ten said something fast in Shawnee, and Stuart chuckled.

  “What’d he say?” asked Sam.

  “Said I better not forget my Shawnee.”

  “We still gonna make all you whites hightail it out of this country,” said Ten. “You’re gonna think your boots are on fire.” He raised his fist, and Eleven whooped. They were grinnin
g.

  “That time’s gone,” the captain said seriously to Ten.

  “Time is a circle, brother, the way our people tell it. Everything comes back.”

  “Not in our lifetimes, or even our grandchildren’s. Bi-i-ig circle.”

  Sam sat hunched over by his miserable thoughts. He glanced sneakily at Ten on his left and Eleven on his right. He’d broken bread with them. They seemed to be good fellows—Sam really liked Ten. Now he tried to squeeze himself smaller and not be seen, so uncomfortable were his thoughts. At last he heaved breath in and out and addressed the captain. “So you were a Shawnee twelve years. Now you’re a white man. Your brother is an Indian. How does that work?”

  “In this country,” said the captain, his eyes gone remote again, “you are what you look like.”

  Sam snorted and fumed and tried to unjangle his thoughts. He slid his eyes sideways at Ten, then straightened up and looked Ten straight in the eye. “You’re an Indian. You speak good English. Can you get a job? Do people accept you?”

  Ten spoke in a tone of plain, simple truth. “In this country you are your color.”

  Sam gnawed on that.

  When the fire was down to coals, the captain said he was headed for bed. The rest of the men rolled their blankets anywhere on the deck.

  As Stuart walked off, Elijah said, “Goddamn Injun lover.”

  Captain Stuart called back, “You just come at me, Elijah. The world needs less white men like you.”

  Sam looked at Ten and Eleven. They didn’t seem excitable about Elijah’s attitude.

  Elijah fumed off somewhere with his blankets. Micajah and another crewman trundled after him.

  Sam’s eyes followed Elijah and the others into the darkness. “Maybe,” he said to Ten and Eleven, “we better bunk down together tonight. On shore.”

  Chapter Six

  Sam stood with the sweep cocked and eyed Cincinnati. High, wooded hills cupped the town. Already ten thousand people, according to Captain Stuart, with a handful of rival newspapers and considerable pretension to respectability.

  The town was built above a high, sloping bank, one group of buildings on a kind of terrace above the high bank, then a gravelly hill and above it more buildings. Sam looked across at Ten and Eleven and grinned.

  Ten and his tree-trunk cousin stood beside Sam and Ned on the roof of the hold, all four holding their sweeps ready to plunge. Ten sang out a little ditty in French, and Frenchy sang back, like a chorus. Ten said he’d been a canoe man two years up in Canada, where he learned French, canoe man’s songs, and he said with a wink, French girls’ kisses.

  Elijah and Micajah skiffed to what the captain called the Public Landing and got the long line tied to a piling on the sloping bank. On command the sweep men put to, and for the hundredth time Sam was surprised at how heavy the boat was, and how cumbersome. Step by step he forced his body forward and the sweep backward, forcing the bow into the eddy near the shore. The two currents sucked noisily at the hull, and the huge boat bounced like a stick on a wind-tossed pond.

  The craft steadied as she grunted into the eddy. One more wide sweep and the upstream current had her in tow, pulling her slowly up the face of the riverfront. “Rest your oars!”

  The Cincinnati riverfront was a hubbub. Two other flatboats were tied up, one steamboat, one keelboat, all moored to rough pilings.

  Sam looked at Ten excitedly. Captain Stuart had said he could go into town overnight, Grumble too, the first time in a town since they’d been on the river. The men talked about looking forward to having a woman, which made Sam feel strange, since Katherine was still big in his mind. Grumble had promised Sam some fun in the taverns.

  “Hard to larboard,” said the captain, and swung the tiller. “Sweep right!” The bow of the big craft swung toward a big space just downstream of one flatboat and nosed toward the shore. Sam walked his sweep straight toward Cincinnati. He was excited.

  “Frenchy!” shouted the captain. At the bow Frenchy began heaving on the thick line. Lam and Ned ran to help. The giants watched from where she was tightly hitched. Lam and Ned held the line on the capstan until Frenchy made fast to the snubbing post. Sam looked curiously at the hitches, only half able to believe the captain would trust the safety of the boat to these ties, no matter how thick the hawser was.

  Everyone started rolling barrels to the bow. The captain had moved the barrels and crates so that Cincinnati’s freight was ready to hand. The men worked quickly, eager to start their night on the town. Barrels got off-loaded, crates put onto platforms with wheels, rolled to the bow, and run down thick planks to shore. Frenchy went to let merchants know their shipments had arrived.

  The riverfront was a clamor of colors, sounds, and motion, people bustling everywhere, straw bosses hollering to crews, men hoisting freight into carts, draught animals neighing and heehawing and mooing, everything and everyone going in every direction at once.

  “Sam, Ten, Eleven,” called the captain, “get this freight up higher.” Since the barrels were hard to roll up the angled surface, they spent fifteen minutes pack-muling barrels up the incline in their arms.

  When the work ended, the captain paid the hands in cash as they stepped ashore the last time. Sam noticed that the deckhands got five dollars a week for crew work. The captain probably gave Frenchy a lot more. Grumble, Ten, and Eleven walked off empty-handed. When Sam’s turn came, the captain said, “Son, leave that rifle. The business folks here will appreciate it.”

  “I’d worry about it, sir.”

  “This craft will be guarded at all times. It will be safe.”

  Sam put it in the hold and started off, but the captain called him back.

  “Here’s four bucks. I fired Lam. You’re hired at four dollars a week. Be back here to load at noon tomorrow.” He smiled big at Sam.

  “Hot damn.” The feel of the dollars was good, first ones he’d ever earned. Getting to be a river man felt even better.

  “Let’s roll, lad,” called Grumble, “let’s have some sport.”

  Sam looked at him. Ten and Eleven waited.

  Sam knew he’d have to say it. “You want me to be your shill?”

  “Earn a dollar or two, boy.”

  Sam kicked a pebble before he looked up at Grumble. “I’d rather do something else.” He cocked an eye at Ten.

  “You got religion or something?” queried Grumble.

  “Just want to stay clear of trouble.”

  “The trouble’s the fun.” Grumble turned his eyes to Eleven. “How about you? We play cards, you lose. You act the dumb Indian. Then they play and lose. Every five coins I earn, you get one.”

  “I got no problem taking white people’s money,” said Eleven.

  As they walked off, Grumble called back, “Come to Yeatman’s Tavern later, we’ll have some fun.”

  Sam looked at Ten expectantly. “Where to?”

  “I’ll be your Indian guide, white boy,” said Ten.

  They ambled along the riverfront street, which looked unsavory. They passed taverns and shops with crudely lettered signs. “You read?” asked Sam.

  “No,” said Ten.

  “Me neither.”

  “I’ve learned to tell some words by the way they look. That one says BLACKSMITH.” Sam watched the smith hammering a red-glowing piece of iron on the anvil. He studied the shape of the word above the door. He supposed he could learn the words he really needed that way. Tavern, livery, mill, though, you could easily tell what they were by the workings. He had a yearning to know how to read words, lots of them.

  They sauntered. “Where we going?”

  “I feel the juice flowing in me. Let’s go to Annabelle’s,” said Ten.

  From the outside the house was the poshest place Sam had ever seen. In Pittsburgh a lawyer or doctor would have lived in such a domicile, and the paint might not have looked so fresh. Inside, the parlor was horsehair divans, overstuffed chairs, a settee with brocade fabric, crown molding near the ceiling, a big hooked rug, an upr
ight piano, two vases with pussy willows and dried flowers, candle sconces on the walls—Sam could hardly say what all.

  “I like it here,” said Ten, “because Annabelle welcomes all comers with money. Believe it or not, there’s more prejudice in some of the cheap houses.”

  Sam wasn’t listening. His eyes and mind were on Annabelle and the women she was introducing.

  “This is Lily,” Annabelle said in an extravagant way, her voice full of melody, her hands lively with gesture. Lily was voluptuous, and dazzlingly shown off by a low-cut gown that looked way big-city to Sam. She smiled, lowered her head, turned it, and looked sidelong at the two visitors in a come-hither way. She was in her late twenties, Sam guessed, and thoroughly a woman of the world.

  “And this is Janie.” Janie was dressed in a simple white cotton shift. She stood and did something that almost looked like a curtsey. She didn’t lift her eyes to the two men at all. She was thin, almost wasted, and had an air like she was afraid of everybody and everything. Sam put her at about sixteen, and felt a pang for her.

  Lucia was a ripe-looking black woman with big breasts and butt, decked out fancily. She went right up to Ten, and said, “Oh, I’m glad to see you again,” and took his hand and rubbed herself against him.

  Rhondalynn, the fourth woman, wasn’t dolled up, but wore a dress with plain, fitted bodice and full skirt, hooked at the neck and wrists—she might have been any respectable housewife in town. Her sultry style, though, undid that impression—she undid the neck hook like she was hot, then the wrist hooks. She danced a few steps to imaginary music. She was playing a part and enjoying every minute of it. She made Sam edgy, though. Rhondalynn was about seventeen or eighteen and … The long, curly, brown tresses, the big, brown eyes, the coltish figure—she looked nearly a twin sister to Katherine.

  “Annabelle, let’s have a dance tune,” said Lucia.

  Annabelle struck up a slow waltz on the upright piano, and Lucia strutted out with Ten. Sam quickly judged that Ten didn’t know how to dance, any more than he did himself, but he had fun doing a few turns and brushing up against Lucia.