Panther in the Sky (112 page)

Then Tecumseh saw his father and mother sitting outside their lodge in old Kispoko Town, a town that was no more, saw himself as a boy standing before them, saw his father’s mouth moving as he said something that he could not hear because of the murmur of all the other voices.…

The coals of the fire for a moment reappeared before Tecumseh’s eyes, filling the place where the scene of his childhood had been, and the murmur of the camp was there for a moment where the passing voices had been.

But then a thundering began, a thundering not in his ears but inside his head. And shouts sounded amid the thunder. The din of it increased, like a coming storm, roaring, pounding, the voices howling, and a pressure built behind his eyes, a powerful, swelling, reddening pressure.

And suddenly, as if the pressure had cracked open his head, light flooded in, yellow as the sun is on one’s closed eyelids, and shapes were coming in the brilliance, shapes vague, blurred by the yellow but growing more distinct as they came running toward him. He could feel the presence of Stands Firm beside him in this storm of noise and yellowness, and now he could see that the shapes coming toward him were large-headed men on horseback, white men on horses, white men with huge hats. He had seen them coming like this in other dreams. They rushed upon him, and one of them loomed to fill up all the brightness, and then the noise crashed and all was darkness at once. He felt
Stands Firm tapping him with something, then the light came again, and then all the vision faded, the men and horses dissolving in yellow mist, the noise falling to a rumble, a whisper, then a silence, and he was looking into the coals, hearing only the tired voices of the warriors in his camp.

Stands Firm had been tapping him with the pipe stem, offering the pipe back to him in the darkness, when the five chieftains had heard something pass among them like a bullet, and had heard Tecumseh gasp, and seen his body stiffen in the dim light, as if he had been shot. They started, leaning toward him in alarm. For a while no other sound came from him.

Then his voice came from his silhouette, his voice deep and resonant like a voice in a cave, saying the words they would always remember. And although they had learned long ago that he spoke only truth to them, they could not believe what he now said.

“Listen, my brothers. I have just seen tomorrow. In the battle, I will fall.”

It was as if they had all stopped breathing. None spoke. Their hearts seemed to them louder than drums of a Stomp Ground.

Tecumseh rose and stood over the glow of the embers, a dark, cloaked shape.

“I saw,” he told them. “My body will lie on the field. Listen, for I must tell you what to do when you see me fall.”

He began opening the collar button of his British cloak with his right hand. He looked from one to another of the shapes around the fire as he turned the button out and pondered on the meanings of what he had seen and felt. He could see that Charcoal Burner was beginning to move his large head from side to side. Billy Caldwell and the Winnebagoes were holding their hands out toward him from beyond the fire, as if entreating him to unsay the words. Tecumseh shrugged off the cloak and let it slide to the ground behind him. Softly, so that his words would not be heard beyond this circle, he said:

“Tomorrow when the Long Knives attack us, we will not run, not as long as I live. Brothers, we will not be long in their smoke before I fall.” Now he put a hand on Stands Firm’s shoulder and said to him, “Brother, since you will not go to a safe place, I ask you to stay near me if you can. When I fall you must come to me at once, and strike me four times with your ramrod. If you can do this, I shall be able to rise, and we will defeat the Americans. But if you cannot touch me, I am dead, and we have lost, and it will be the end of what we have tried to do. Then our warriors
should leave the field and not waste their lives for the British. Perhaps if we fight very well from the beginning, we can rout them before I fall. I did not see how the day is to end.”

Stands Firm reached up and put his hand on Tecumseh’s wrist and said, “No, brother.…”

“Yes, brother. I know you do not wish to believe. But you know that I am always to be believed. Listen …”

They were shaken. They had never felt such a fear, such a grief. He went on now in a harsh whisper:

“Have you not learned that what I say is always so? Did I not tell you that the earth would shake and houses fall, and the rivers change their courses? And did this not happen as I foretold?”

They remembered all that, that wondrous and terrible thing that had happened the winter before last, just as he and only he had somehow known it would. He went on:

“You know that on the night before the battle at the Kanawha-se-pe, my father saw that he would die in the battle, and he told my brother Chiksika that he would, and it was true.

“You know that my brother Chiksika told me he was going to be killed in the battle at Buchanan’s Fort, and he died in my arms there, just as he had said. This is true sight among the warriors of my family, and is not to be denied.”

They remembered all this, and now they could not deny that he had seen tomorrow. And knowing that it would come true was crushing their hearts in their breasts.

He held his hand still on the shoulder of Stands Firm, Star Watcher’s husband, and said in a voice now almost cheerful, “Don’t you see that you must believe me and do as I ask you, my good brother? Do you not remember that the Panther Star crossed the sky when I was born from the womb?

“So you must believe me, and we must all have our hearts ready for tomorrow. Let us sleep now. It is so late.”

H
E WAS READY TO DIE NOW, SO HE HAD PAINTED THE BLACK
of death on the left side of his face. But if he died, he would die fighting his enemy, so he had painted the red of war on the right side of his face.

His father Hard Striker had fought long and well knowing he was going over the edge of death. His brother Chiksika had done the same. Now Tecumseh could feel how they had been able to do so.

The great question of what to do no longer wrestled in him. Weshemoneto had taken back into his own hands all the choices. Tecumseh’s hands were free to do the one thing: to slay his enemy. He felt as ready and strong and vibrant as a drawn bow. Though he would fall, he might kill Harrison first, and he no longer needed to guard his own life while doing it. Perhaps he might last long enough in the battle to take victory in his hand and give it to his warriors to finish.

That would be the best thing!

He was ready to die now. He had ridden up that morning and said farewell to his sister and brother. He had not told them he was going to die, but Star Watcher surely knew. Anything that was ever in his heart was also in hers.

He thought, as he rode with his chieftains toward the battleground, about how things go on after a man dies. For the man it ends there, and there is no more breathing for him on this side of the Circle of Time, and he has to lay down what he has been carrying on the earth. But what has been happening keeps on happening because those who still live carry it on with them. When his father Hard Striker had died and when Black Fish had died and when Chiksika had died, and when his white brother Brock had died, it had gone on, because he had picked up what they had been carrying and brought it forward to this day, when he himself would have to lay it down. He did not know who would pick it up when he died today. It might be his son, who had run across a broken bridge with a smile on his face yesterday. It might be Charcoal Burner, or it might be Black Hawk, or it might be
Stands Firm or Seekabo or Wood, or it might be Thick Water or some Choctaw or Muskogee he had aroused in the south, or it might be all of them or some of them carrying it together. It might be Thick Water or one of Thick Water’s sons or grandsons; yes, it might be someone who was not even born yet. Always things had kept going on around the circle even after the people who had started them had died and laid them down.

And whoever picked up what Tecumseh was going to lay down today would not have to carry it the same way he had carried it. Every right man was his own chief and would carry the thing in his own way. The messengers from the Great Good Spirit would come down and remind him to keep carrying it and give him signs and hints, but how he carried it would depend upon what kind of a man he was.

Or woman, he thought. Maybe it will be a woman who picks it up and carries it. It is woman who connects the man of yesterday with the man of tomorrow, who closes the gaps in the Circle of Time; it is woman who carries most of the burden of the People; she carries the carrier, in her heart, in her womb, in the cradleboard on her back, in the slain body of her son across her lap. It is woman who carries most of it. He thought of his mother, whom he had last seen four and twenty summers ago, and of Star Watcher, whom he had last seen no more than four and twenty minutes ago. Star Watcher was already carrying it as she bore the lives of the families on toward safety. He thought of Kokomthena, Our Grandmother the Creator, who had carried it since the Beginning. Yes, the women really carried it and now and then gave some of it to the warriors or the chiefs and shamans to carry. Yes, the shamans. His brother Open Door had carried it until he forgot what he was doing.

Then Tecumseh found the place where he would die today. He drew back on the reins. His chieftains reined in beside him. He knew it was the place. In a hundred dreams he had seen a place that felt like this.

It was not the Moraviantown high ground where General Procter had said he would stand his army; the general had apparently changed his mind again. The town of the Jesus Indians was a league farther up the road. In a part of the woods near the river and the road, hundreds of British soldiers were standing or moving about, a mass of red coats, black hats, white shoulder belts. A team of steam-snorting horses was turning in the road, pulling a cannon into place. Nearby stood another team of horses, hitched to Procter’s muddy carriage. A driver in a red coat sat
on the front seat, hugging himself, his hands under his arms. The general was not in the carriage, but Tecumseh saw him standing with some of his officers down near the cannon.

At first sight this did not look like as good a battlefield as Chatham on the Forks had looked. It had no creek, no bridges, no buildings.

Here the road passed between a bend in the river and a wood of big maples and oaks and beeches. The trunks of great fallen trees lay on the forest floor covered with moss and drifted deep with dead leaves.

Now with his chieftains Tecumseh rode to Procter. The general’s jowly face was sallow and puffy, his eyes were squinting, his nose and cheeks etched with scarlet capillaries; his hands were shaky. But for once he was able to look at Tecumseh’s eyes instead of around them, because he had stopped running from the enemy.

“You choose to fight here, not at the Moraviantown. Why is this, Father?” Tecumseh asked.

“The Americans are too close behind, I believe. We wouldn’t have time to march there and fortify the place. So we will turn and face them here.”

Tecumseh felt a wave of scorn and old anger and wanted to flail Procter for not fortifying the Forks instead—but this was the day he was to die, so yesterday did not matter, and it was too late to cure a man’s stupidity. So he said instead, “Perhaps that is better.” He thought of the refugee families that would be filling the town by afternoon. It would be better to keep the battle far from them. “But,” he said, “are your cannons not already at the town? I see only one here.”

At this, Procter’s face grew flushed, and his hands flopped at his sides. Tecumseh could see in this gesture alone that Procter had indeed lost control of everything and knew it, and that he was making his stand only because he had no more choices. He said, “Have you not sent for them to be brought here, Procter?”

“I … well … not yet.…”

“You have five cannons in a place where you have decided not to fight, and one cannon here where you mean to fight,” Tecumseh said. “Would it not be better the other way?”

Procter, pawing at his chin, turned and looked about till he saw a major, whose name he seemed not even to remember, and he stammered, “Uh, you … send, uh, somebody, and tell Trough-ton to bring the artillery back.… Oh, no, I’m sure there’s not time.…”

Tecumseh glanced toward Colonel Warburton, who stood nearby, his expression fallen into a set of resignation and disgust. Other officers were grouped around as if waiting to be told what to do.

“Come,” Tecumseh said to his chieftains, “let us look at this place where we will fight.”

It was not a good way for a general to choose his battlefield. But of course Procter could not help that, really, because this was the place the Great Good Spirit had long ago appointed for Tecumseh to die.

His hopes rose as he looked over the place. It was better than he had thought. The huge fallen trees made natural breastworks. The western edge of the old woods opened onto thickets of second growth, which would hinder any charge of horse troops and give dense cover for his warriors. He rode weaving slowly through this, having to duck and fend off branches. He emerged on the edge of a reedy swamp where dead tree trunks stood gray and barkless in the muck. Two hundred paces to his left was the road, clearly visible. On the right of the swamp was a brushy meadow and beyond it a larger swamp, extending far to the west, parallel to the road.

To his eye it looked like a fine place for either an ambush or a stubborn defense. The steep-banked Thames would protect the defenders’ left flank. The road led straight between that barrier and the woods and the small swamp. Any attacker who tried to outflank the defenders by swinging away from the riverside would be caught in a wide meadow between two swamps, facing a dense thicket. With those swamps and woods and thickets filled with warriors and Redcoats, and with cannons set up behind barricades and aimed down the road, it would be perfectly set up to trap an army.