Panther in the Sky (62 page)

Tecumseh thought of Ga-lo-weh and his family, and he was able to say, “Yes, some of them are good. But their way and our way cannot be, in the same land. Some wrong voice has told them they can have this land. But, Father, you remember my signs. My signs tell me that I will be the one who will wipe away all these lines they have drawn on Weshemoneto’s land, and put them back even across the mountains. Look,” he said, pointing southward. “Coming up this road I saw them putting their plows in the ground where the bones of our fathers lie. Is the Great Good Spirit pleased with that? Do you think he means for us to let them plow up the graves of our ancestors? No, Father! No! In my head and my heart I am still learning the way to push them back!”

For a moment in Black Hoof’s eyes there flickered the fierce spirit of old, as he heard these words. But then it died, and the fear and worry were there. Black Hoof had been standing on the ground by Tecumseh’s horse all this time, looking up at him, and was still holding his hand. Now he gave it a squeeze and released it and said in a low, soft voice, “Beware.” Then he stepped back and held up his hand in the old farewell, and Tecumseh left him standing there among his sorry People, an ancient red man in the white man’s clothes, in the dirt street of an imitation white man’s town.

T
ECUMSEH RODE DOWN THE VALLEY OF THE
A
UGLAIZE
until he was alone in wilderness and dismounted at a sandy fording place. Though the day was cold, he stripped off his clothing and carried it into the river. He washed and wrung it to get rid of the lice, then hung it on branches to dry, went back into the
water, and scrubbed himself with sand until his skin was tender. Though he had declined to eat any pig meat at Wapakoneta, even the corn and beans he had eaten there had been cooked with pig fat and felt unclean in him, so he drank his fill of water and then vomited to cleanse himself inside. The air was cold on his nakedness, but the autumn sun was still warm. Only the birds and squirrels, and the dry leaves in the breeze, and the trickling and gurgling of the river, covered the profound silence, like a thin skin of noises over a swollen stillness. He sat by the river until his skin and hair were dry, listening. He sat with his face to the sun and his eyes closed, and inside his eyelids swam the red-and-orange light.

After a long time something white, but shapeless at first, moved through the red-and-orange glow, swooping up and around and growing smaller until it was a dot. Then it swerved around and grew larger, as if coming toward him, and it was the white dove, flying toward him. It came closer and grew larger until it filled his mind and all was white.

And then this whiteness became the white hair of Old Change-of-Feathers, the shaman. Change-of-Feathers’ head of white hair grew smaller, as if he were moving away. Tecumseh saw the old man walking away along a path that led into a thorny thicket. The old man sat down beside the path in front of the thicket. Then he spread a blanket on the ground and lay down on it and crossed his hands over his chest and shut his eyes. Another man, a big young man, walked up the path to where he lay and stood over him, and when this man turned, Tecumseh could see the right side of his face. It had a black scarf pulled down over the right eye, and on the lip was a mustache. It was Lalawethika, Loud Noise, his brother. But when the young man spoke his name, it was not Lalawethika, but Tenskwatawa, which meant He-Opens-the-Door. And when he said the name, the old man’s hands lifted, and the white dove flew out of his chest and into the chest of the young man. The young man then walked away, into the thicket, which parted to let him walk through, and old Change-of-Feathers lay on the ground lifeless until he dissolved.

Then the young soldier called Harrison came. He wore a blue coat with gold decorations. With a disdainful look on his face, the officer picked up a dead stick and tried to bend it with both hands. It snapped in two, and he cast the pieces down. Then he cut a green stick and bent it, and it did not break, although he bent it almost double. The young man kept bending the stick back and forth and twisted it until its bark came off and the limber
wood frayed into splinters. He kept twisting it until the last limber fibers gave way and the green stick was in two pieces. Then he cast them down.

Then Harrison picked up a bundle made of dead sticks tied together. It was very rigid and thick, and he could not break it. So he put his knee against the bundle of dead sticks and gripped the bundle at both ends and strained with great strength. Sweat stood out on his face. He pulled harder, wincing. And at last the whole bundle of dead sticks crackled and broke, and he threw the pieces down, smiling.

Then the young officer picked up a bundle of green sticks and tried to break them but could not. Even with his greatest effort, he could only make them bend a little. He tried everything to break them, even bending them around a tree, but they would not break, and at last he fell down exhausted.

The vision faded away, and there was only the red-and-orange billowing behind Tecumseh’s eyelids, and the sound of the river bubbling over its shallows, and the cool wind in the leaves, and the squirrels chattering and scolding and gathering food. Tecumseh opened his eyes and was still sitting there naked, and the sun had moved a long way in the sky. His clothes were dry. He put them on and mounted to ride the rest of the way back to his People. He had seen something very important, and he needed to ride now and think of what it meant. He rode westward now, feeling light and pure and strengthened, out of the land called O-hi-o, toward the land they were now calling the Indiana Territory, meaning the Land of the Indians, where, as a neighbor of Breaker-in-Pieces, the Delaware, he would make a new home for his People, his few hundred Shawnee who were still free.

S
OMETHING DREADFUL WAS GOING TO HAPPEN
. L
OUD
N
OISE
knew it.

He was sober for once. He never liked the feeling of being sober, for his stomach would quiver and his hands would shake and his mind would scream silently. And when he was sober, the world was a stark, harsh place, and he could not hide from himself the truth that he was a fraud and a failure.

But now on this evening as he filled the stone bowl of his long pipe, as his trembling fingers spilled shreds of tobacco on his lap, as his fat wife sat sullen beyond the fire with still another squirming baby at her breast, Loud Noise felt something worse than his usual profound misery, worse than his usual desperate craving for whiskey.

Something monstrous was trying to get into his soul. He could sense it hovering outside and above him; he could almost hear something, though not with his ears, some woeful moaning or wailing. His heart quaked and fluttered. The fear was worse than the awful fear he had felt before the Battle of the Fallen Timbers, for he had been able to see what threatened him then: soldiers. Now he could see nothing to explain this fear. Perhaps a witch was working against him.

Yes, very likely it was a witch. Anybody might take up his personal medicine bag and invoke its powers against someone he did not like, and Loud Noise knew he was disliked by more people than anyone else in the tribe. Many suspected what he secretly knew: that he was no real master of medicine, though he worked with the herbs and incantations and sometimes just by chance his patients recovered, that their bodies healed their own sicknesses. One of the white men’s diseases just weeks ago had run its course in the village and had taken away many of the people during the winter and had left many others too weak to hunt or to plant or to repair the damage the winter had done to their
wigewas.
Change-of-Feathers had died among the first, leaving Loud Noise as the only healer in the village, and though Change-of-Feathers had taught him many of the remedies and rituals, never had Loud Noise truly felt the power, never had he had so much as a vision. The appalling fact was that Lalawethika, He-Makes-a-Loud-Noise, who claimed to be Change-of-Feathers’ successor as the tribal shaman and prophet, did not even have a
pa-waw-ka
or a Spirit Helper. He was in truth more poorly equipped to be even a minor medicine man than just about anyone in the tribe, and he was addicted to whiskey as well, and though he boasted and made claims about his powers, many people knew what a great lump of nothingness he really was, and they had good reason to do witchcraft against him. Often lately he had kept
a wary watch on the doings of animals, for he knew that witches sometimes assumed animal shapes to disguise their evil deeds. Once Loud Noise had seen a dog, a dog he had never seen in the village before, looking steadily at him with its yellowish eyes from behind a tree. Once a kingbird had flown down and struck at his head. And once, as Loud Noise had staggered drunkenly out to the sugar maple grove where Tecumseh and a group of people were making sugar, an owl, one of the chief omen birds, had silently flown three times across his path.

Yes, he feared, it could be someone working witchcraft against him.

He sat gazing with a blank eye into the fire, unable to think. He had forgotten even that he was loading his pipe. In his mind he saw the dog’s eyes, the kingbird, the owl floating swiftly through the forest. A witch usually assumed the disguise of only one kind of animal. Could this mean that several people were trying to bewitch him at the same time? That was a frightening thought, and his dread grew almost unbearable.

He would have liked to get some whiskey right now. But now was when he needed it, and now none was at hand. Tecumseh had made it hard to obtain whiskey in his town, by putting all the whiskey sellers in fear of their lives. Only when Tecumseh went away, on one of his trips to talk to the chiefs and young warriors of other tribes, was it easy for Loud Noise to make deals to get whiskey.

Loud Noise knew what his brother was doing on those frequent and far-ranging trips. He had told Loud Noise about a dream, a dream of the white soldier Harrison and a bundle of sticks. Tecumseh believed that the dead sticks meant old chiefs and the green sticks meant young warriors. He believed that the dream was a message that while the old brittle sticks could be broken, or any single green stick could be broken, all the green sticks in the bundle were the young warriors of all the tribes united together.

Loud Noise still loved and admired his brother, but sometimes he was unsettled by his zeal. Loud Noise could remember all too clearly the burned towns and the devastated crops that the People had suffered almost every year while the war hatchet was up. And he could remember all too vividly the sight of Wayne’s Blue-Coat soldiers rushing toward him in the Fallen Timbers with their terrible spikes and their roaring war cry. Loud Noise had decided that one can accomplish more alive than dead, so it was a major inclination of his spirit to remain alive. He dreaded war as much
as he dreaded witchcraft and failure, and, as all those hovered near him, his burdens were terrible.

And sometimes the most shameful thought of all would get into his head and bother him so much that his heart would hurt. Sometimes, when he saw or tasted honey, he would remember his brother Cat Follower dying of beestings while he gorged himself on that honey. Sometimes he feared that Cat Follower’s ghost was near and was waiting to take revenge. This night he had thought of his dead brother that way. Loud Noise, pondering all this now, found his pipe in his hand with tobacco in its bowl, and he searched the fire-ring for a twig with which to light it.

Sometimes Loud Noise thought that Tecumseh made too much of the white man’s evil, that he was too rigid. Loud Noise himself could tolerate white men when he was among them. The ones who sold whiskey were a smiling, friendly sort of people; certainly they treated him more respectfully than most of his own people did. They made him feel he had some importance. Tecumseh hated and feared whiskey, so he deemed whiskey sellers evil men of the worst sort and would not even talk to them, except to threaten them. But they were really not that bad—at least not if you needed whiskey sometimes.

And then there were the Shakers.

These people recently had made a profound impression upon Loud Noise. Though they called their God by a different name, they had, like the Shawnees, a moral code of behavior that pervaded all the hours of their lives. Like the Shawnees, they believed that the divine spirit was released in people by dance. Loud Noise had witnessed some of their agitations in O-hi-o, where they recently had settled; he had seen them seized by such ecstasy that their bodies convulsed and twitched in a strange, frantic dance, and he had felt that he was seeing true holiness. Like the Shawnees, the Shakers believed that God is not only man but woman as well. The Creator of their sect, like Kokomthena of the Shawnees, had been a woman. And their moral code itself, calling for truth and trustworthiness, generosity and kindness and gentleness, was like an echo of what the Shawnee code had been, back in the happy days before corruption. Though Loud Noise himself was one of the most corrupt, he had become poignantly aware of the code when he recognized it in the Shaker teachings. If all white men were like the Shakers, Loud Noise suspected, there never would have been trouble with them. Loud Noise thought very often about the Shakers, in a wistful sort of way.

But of course he personally could never have been much like
a Shaker; they were against liquor and copulation, which were to him about the only things that made life worth living—until afterward when the hurting head and the crying babies came.

Loud Noise sighed and picked up a twig with his trembling hand and held one end of it in the fire until it was burning, and he looked at its flame as he lifted it to the tobacco bowl and put the stem of the pipe in his mouth. All these things continually flowed through his head, like a muddy river, but they came to nothing and only added to the misery and foreboding that pressed down on him. His heart was huge in his chest and twisted with anxiety, and he could hardly breathe. It felt as if the spells of witches were crushing him from all sides.