No one even looked at her as she went to the structure. She sat on the ground at a place where she could peek in between cornstalks. The old man had said she could look in, so she did not feel wrong about it.
She could see just a little at a time through the small opening. She could tell that the round structure was very spacious and that so many people were inside it must be nearly the whole village population. Most of them were seated on the ground and seemed to be very calm and content. It did indeed look like the other ceremony. By the center pole a smoky little fire burned, tended by an elderly man who now and then dropped crumbled tobacco leaf into it and fanned it with a hawk’s wing. Near him, just beyond the gap in the wall where she was looking in, was the drummer, a thick-bodied man whose hair was half grayed and hanging free to cover his face as he sat bent far forward. He struck a hard blow, then a soft, then a hard, making the strange water-drum tone. Someone was shaking rattles.
Around the inside walls of the structure there stood women and girls wearing aprons and necklaces and holding bowls and spoons. A line of people was moving past very slowly, and every person would stop before each woman or girl, who would chant some words and feed from the bowl with a spoon. There was much murmuring and chanting, but the word she kept hearing over and over was “Waneeshee.” It was all so kind and pleasant. It made her think of Neepah, the days in the cornfields, and the Three Sacred Sisters. She felt kindly and thought that somehow everything would be all right by and by. Everything in and around the Great House glowed in the golden sunlight of afternoon. She did not feel at all like a stranger in this village, even though she had just arrived.
“What are they doing?” a voice whispered in English right beside her. Startled, she turned and saw Wareham Kingsley there, squatting on his heels beside her. They had seldom been near enough to each other to talk during the long journey up from the other town. Now, remembering Owl’s story about Mother Corn, she told him, as if Neepah herself were putting the words through her:
“They are all thanking Mother Corn, who feeds them. If they didn’t thank her, she wouldn’t feed them anymore.”
“Hm.” He squinted in between cornstalks. “Which one’s Mother Corn?”
“Mother Corn is a spirit. Kahesana Xaskwim. She is the spirit who makes plants be food for people.”
He pointed. “There’s hundreds of people in there. Which one’s the spirit?”
“Didn’t thee learn anything? None of them’s really Mother Corn, but all of them together, they sort of are.”
Wareham hissed like a snake, turning a mocking face to her. “Girls nor Indians, either one makes any sense!”
“If thee doesn’t like my answers, Wareham Kingsley, don’t ask me things then.”
“Well, who else can I ask? Ever’body else talks Indian.”
“Thee could too, if thee were smarter!” she snapped. She was annoyed with him for breaking into the pleasure she had been feeling; it was like someone bursting into a prayer meeting. But at once she regretted her retort. And now she felt something very uncomfortable behind her and turned around.
Owl stood about ten feet behind her, staring at her with narrowed eyes. He put his palm over his mouth, frowning. She remembered what he had told her about being respectful, and realized that she and Wareham had been fussing perhaps a bit too loudly.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to Wareham. “I didn’t mean thee’s not smart. But thee could be more respectful and not so stubborn. Or thee could have learned to swim and floated down the river.” It was hard to talk in English. If not for this Wareham, she thought, I might have forgotten it by now!
She was drooling with hunger when the feast began at sundown in the dance ground between the Great House and the harvested fields. Thousands of ears of corn had been baked in their husks in heated pits in the ground. There was also corn bread and hominy. Kindly women of the village served corn and kept serving it to the hundreds of people of the town and to the ones old Owl had led up the river. Also being fed were some British soldiers, and these were not all the kind she had always seen, in green coats. There were also soldiers in red coats, with long white leggings that came down far enough to cover the tops of their black shoes. They were big, red-faced men, and they stayed to themselves on one side of the bonfires. Their voices were loud enough to be heard all around, but they spoke in such odd accents that she could scarcely understand anything they said. Some of them stared at her, until Owl moved her away from them.
When the people had eaten all they could hold, they got up and did walking dances around the drum, a great, deep-voiced water drum struck by four men who sat around it, all their drum-sticks hitting in unison. The whole field seemed to throb with the drumbeats. Sometimes the drummers sang as they beat the drumhead, eerie tunes of only three or four notes descending, then repeated. Led by two figures in corn-husk clothes, men danced in one circle, with women in another circle inside, walking around and around the drum, each step first on tiptoe, then on the heel, in time with the drum, shaking rattles in time, laughing or with solemn faces, shuffling, swaying slightly. As night came on and the dancers were lit by firelight only, before Good Face’s sleepy eyes the world became all color and silhouette in rhythmic motion. She was exhausted from travel and her belly was full, full of that wonderful hot corn made even sweeter by dipping in bowls of maple syrup. She had gnawed it right off the cob, holding it by the peeled-back, charred husks, and had not even kept count of how many cobs she cleaned off. Now, sitting in the grass, leaning back against the leg of old Owl, who sat on a log smoking his pipe, she was almost overwhelmed by sleepiness; she had even stopped swiping at the mosquitoes that whined around her ears.
But then the pulsing of the drum stopped at once. The singing and laughter trailed off, and somewhere toward the village there was a growing commotion of angry and alarmed voices that quickened her heart and awakened her even as the lehpawcheek took hold of her hand and stood up, lifting her to her feet. Hundreds of people were milling in the firelight, and she stumbled and bumped against hips and legs, clinging to old Owl’s bony hand.
After much jostling and hurrying along in a throng of moaning, jabbering people, she found herself at the edge of a tense crowd arrayed in a circle around some chiefs and soldiers who stood opposite a bright bonfire in the Council Ground. Overhead the firelit foliage of great trees dipped and swayed, moved by the night breeze and the rising heat of the bonfire. The lehpawcheek picked her up, just as her father used to do, and set her on his right shoulder, where she could see, and held her braced there with his right hand at her waist.
“See that man coming forward,” the old man said, pointing to a tall, muscular young man with a turban on his head and a ring in his nose. “He is Kyontwahgkeh, Chief Cornplanter. He will tell us what has come to disturb our feasting.”
The young man began speaking, and his language was not Lenapeh. Owl said he knew the Seneca tongue and he would have to tell her later. She noticed as the young man talked that his ears were strange. Their rims had been cut to make loops, and one of the loops was broken, just loose flesh hanging. She had seen a few Lenapeh men with such cut ears and things hanging in the loops, but this was the first damaged one she had seen, and she was thinking how it must have hurt, when suddenly the people began trilling and wailing. It was a sound that made her scalp prickle and took her mind off the novelty of the ears. Owl himself burst out with shrill, sobbing yells, even as he held her on his shoulder. When the voices had died down a little, the chief called Cornplanter continued speaking. His voice was strong and clear even though he was speaking calmly, but his eyes were blazing with anger. Several times he stopped talking because the people’s outcries became too loud.
It was a long time before the chiefs by the fire had finished their talking. Good Face was too heavy for the old man to keep holding on his shoulder, so he set her down and she stood in front of him, and he kept holding her hand as if afraid he might lose her. She could tell that he was distressed; hi
s hand trembled. People were moving to and fro in the crowd, sometimes passing in front of her so that she could not see the chiefs or the Redcoat soldiers. Some of the old people who had come from Neepah’s town were making their way to Owl and talking with him.
And old woman leading Wareham by the hand came, and while she was talking to the lehpawcheek, Wareham said, “What are they sayin’, Frannie? What’s all this ruckus?” He looked scared.
“I don’t know yet.”
“I thought you talked their language.”
“That man’s Cornplanter. He doesn’t talk our language. I don’t know what he’s saying.”
Finally the Council ended with some shouting, and everyone began leaving the Council Ground, all talking excitedly as they went away. Owl stood with the old people and children who had come with him from the Lenapeh town, now all in their own circle again, and they talked about what they had heard. Some of the old people seemed to have understood already, but many had not been able to comprehend what the Seneca chief had said.
The old man looked around at them and said: “It has happened, as we feared. The army was not stopped and keeps coming up the valley. They burn one town and all its crops. Then they march to the next town and do the same. They are too many for our warriors to stop. They have cannons that shoot through anything. They are a few days behind us.”
Someone said, “Then we must hurry on!”
“Yes,” an old woman said. “We must go on at daylight, toward Sookpa helluk, or the Long Knives will catch us and kill us!”
The old man held up a hand to calm them. “We should wait here for the people of our town to catch up with us, before we go on to the Great Falling Water. Cornplanter said many people are fleeing this way from the Long Knives.”
“What’re they saying, Frannie?” Wareham asked. He looked scared.
“Hush,” she said. “I’ll tell thee, but wait!”
Owl was telling the people, “It is hard to find brothers and sisters when everyone is running. Those left back there will be looking for us. We should not run away and be harder to find!”
“He is right-thinking,” said an elderly man with only one eye. “We are not rabbits, to run away so fast.”
An old woman mocked him. “You are just too old to run like a rabbit, or you would run. He, he he he!”
The old one-eyed man drew himself up tall, the bonfire’s glow showing the bony face under his wrinkled skin. “Old woman with a bad mouth, you are wrong. If I can get a musket, I will go back down the river and meet the Long Knives. I have fought them often and I do not fear them, even though it was they who made me one-eyed.”
Owl nodded. “Listen to me! Cornplanter promised that the wapsi army will not march beyond this town. Here is where they will be met by Cornplanter’s Senecas, and by the soldiers of Butler, and the Iroquois of Captain Brant. Might not such warriors as those stop the army here?”
“They have not stopped it yet,” said the same old mocking woman. “I think our men have forgotten how to fight.”
Owl glowered at her. “We should use our mouths not to make ourselves afraid but to pray for more strength, Huma.”
Good Face tugged at his sleeve. He paused and looked down.
“Will Neepah come here?” she asked.
“If she is well.”
Someone asked, “Did our town there have Green Corn Ceremony?”
“No,” he said. “The Long Knives came too soon.”
“Ehhh!” someone sighed. “Our people will starve!”
CHAPTER FIVE
September 1779
Wilkes-Barre
Ruth Slocum was churning butter in the house when her daughter Mary called from outside.
“Mama! There’s an army boat down there … and they’re … oh, they’re letting off Willie!”
She nearly knocked over the churn in her lunge for the door, calling, “Has ’e Frannie with him?” But a look down at the shore quashed that faint hope that she had been nurturing since the day William embarked with the army officer. The bateau, silhouetted against the river ablaze with afternoon sunlight, had barely touched the bank, letting Will spring ashore before it was pushed off into the current again and continued downriver, with three men rowing. Will picked up his kit from the ground where he had tossed it, glanced once at the departing boat without so much as a wave, and came limping up the slope. Running down to meet him, Ruth and her daughters stopped short when they got a look at his face.
His jaw was set and his mouth corners were drawn down. His eyes were circled with a bruise-tinged darkness and had a nearly mad intensity in them.
Ruth Slocum was almost afraid to touch her son, but she held out her hands toward him, squinting into his face, and said, “What, Willie? What?”
He dropped his kit and almost fell into her arms and, unlike the stoical and hardy lad he had become since his father’s death, began shaking with sobs. The worst of all possibilities, the one awful dread she had not permitted herself to speak of to anyone, struck her heart with such heavy certainty that she could barely gasp out the question. “Is she dead?”
For a moment he did not respond, as if he might not even have heard her. But then he stopped quaking, took a deep breath, looked at the sky, put his mother at arm’s length, and answered simply, “I don’t know. How could I know?”
Ebenezer had hitched down from the barn as fast as he could on his lame foot, and Judith and the younger children had come running from their chores, but all were struck meek and dumb by what they saw in his face.
Finally, Ruth Slocum said, “Come thee have some buttermilk, my son, and then we’d best meet for prayer.”
She had known by the look of him that Will had things inside him that only prayer could bring out. After the family sat for a long time in silence with folded hands and eyes shut, flies droning in the room, cicadas shrilling outdoors, Will’s voice began, soft and low, and quavering.
“Lord God, and my loved ones … I have watched men act as if Thy Light had never penetrated their breasts. Oh, may such abominations never be seen again on this earth, Lord Jesus.…” He was quiet awhile, then went on.
“Every soldier I talked to claimed himself a Christian. But they ran into that town—it was Wyalusing, the Delaware town—a-howling like very devils. They burnt houses down with children in ’em. Rode women down under hoof … stripped girls naked and took turns ravishin’ them … laughing all the while or saying words too vile to repeat … slashed and burnt cornfields, beans … dumped out the wasted food. Didn’t leave a stick standing in that town … skinned the folks they’d kilt …”
He fell still again, shoulders quaking. After a while Ruth Slocum’s stomach stopped churning and her heartbeat settled down and she concentrated on her Inner Light to calm herself until she could speak.
“My children. Let us thank our Lord God for lighting the way of our own lives, for ’tis a world of wickedness we walk in. Pray your lost sister Frannie was somewhere far away from that. Pray that her captors not turn their grief to wrath upon her.”
William cleared his throat. “Dear Jesus, forgive me for not averting my eyes from that carnage. I wanted to turn my back from it but my task was to look everywhere for Frannie.”
Mary and Judith looked perfectly calm in their prayers, but tears were flowing down their faces. It was a long time before Will resumed.
“That officer named Proctor mocked me because I went sick to my stomach. When I told him I’d be no part of another such abomination, he was happy, as if he’d won something from me. And said he’d find me room on the dispatch boat. I reckon it proved his belief that Quakers are cowards. That satisfied him and he was glad I went up, just for that satisfaction.”
“My son,” Ruth Slocum said softly, “his satisfaction takes nothing from thee. He’s badly misguided, but thee is not. The misguided need pity, and ’tis God alone who’ll judge us all. Now this is becoming a conversation and it’s time to say amen to our prayer.”
Will loo
ked up, his eyes shining now, though his expression was still stricken.
“When next I go seeking Frannie,” he said, “it will be alone, or with other Friends. Not with soldiers.”
Tioga Town
In her dream she was Frannie, but when she awoke she remembered that she was Good Face. But where was she? Over her head was the sloping bark roof of a lean-to shelter. Around her were many children among their blankets and deerskin sleeping robes, some still asleep, others sitting up and looking around. In a lane beyond some lodges, people were running, talking and crying out. Sunlight was just beginning to gild the treetops. Now she remembered this town, and Green Corn. She saw Wareham sprawled nearby, still asleep, his thick auburn hair full of leaf crumbs and dirt from the ground. The excitement of the people in the distance then reminded her that they were waiting for the people of Neepah’s village to come up the river, and she scrambled out of her bedding in hopes that they were here and she would find Neepah. She had to pause between two lodges, impatiently squatting on the ground with her skirt spread around her while she made water, then ran out into the urgent throng of people headed down toward the river. Sunbeams slanted through the wood smoke that hung dense in the still morning air. Voices made a din. She saw old Owl nowhere.
At the edge of the village where the path sloped abruptly down toward the riverbank, she suddenly had a long view over the heads of the grown-ups and could see far down the hazy river valley. Mist was rising from the river, which was still in the shadow of the hills.
But the valley was not tranquil. Along the bottomland came a long, ragged procession of people and dogs and packhorses, straggling along the path between the cornfields, most carrying bundles and babies. They were being met and surrounded by the people who streamed out to greet them. Where the two streams of people met and intermingled, an eerie, piteous wail of voices arose. Her heartbeat quickened with the anticipation of finding Neepah and Minnow in that oncoming mass, though there were so many people that some were still coming around that far river bend from which she had first seen this village the day before.