Panther in the Sky (47 page)

He was always there in the councils, where there were many people present; he was always there when Tecumseh talked with the family and visited the healing Stands Firm. He always yipped and applauded loudest when Tecumseh was praised and honored, and he even took it upon himself to be a horn and magnify in
his own voice the exploits that Tecumseh himself understated. But when everyone else left, he left with them. Yesterday, even when Tecumseh had asked him to stay a while, Loud Noise had murmured that he had something urgent to do and would be back, but he had not come back until today, bringing Change-of-Feathers with him. For a man known as a recluse, Loud Noise had suddenly become quite a crowd seeker. They sat for a long time and talked, and with the old medicine man present, it was not a private conversation. But at last, when the old shaman had grown sleepy and begun snoring right where he sat, Tecumseh turned his full gaze upon Loud Noise and said, “My brother, I sense that you are afraid to talk with me. Why?”

“What!” Loud Noise protested, his eye shifting all around. “How can you think such a thing? I admire and love you!” But he looked away and forced a fake coughing spell, as if hoping to wake up old Change-of-Feathers, who, alas, slept on. Tecumseh reached out and grabbed his brother’s chubby chin and forced him to look straight at him, then said in a soft voice:

“When I saw our mother in the south, I had to color my words when she asked me about you, so that she would not have a sorry picture of you. And I thought, Perhaps when I return, the years will have made my brother braver and more trustworthy.

“But since I came back, I am not encouraged. I learn that you did not go to fight the army. I see that you are fat and soft. I hear that you have grown to need liquor, and that when you drink it you bully people, and take things that are not yours, and that you try to force women to lie with you. I think these are some of the reasons why you have been afraid to face me alone. You were afraid I would speak to you of these things.”

Loud Noise tried to turn his eye away from Tecumseh’s probing stare, but the strong hand still held his face. He murmured through twisted lips, “People make more of things because they don’t like me. I do not drink very much. I have not stolen, only borrowed things. And no woman has lain with me unless she chose to.” Now, though his head was still locked in place, his eye was rolling, trying to avoid the needles of Tecumseh’s gaze, which seemed to penetrate right into mind and heart. Now Tecumseh let loose of him.

“I told our mother I expect you will become a great shaman, that the signs say it will be so. But, my brother, hear me: You cannot become one just by pretending to be one. You have to become worthy of any gift, or you will not receive it. You will not learn to heal just by following Change-of-Feathers around and
talking with him. You cannot force a woman to want you. And above all you cannot draw the power of Our Grandmother down from the moon to help you when you are so drunk you see several moons.”

Loud Noise, despite his great discomfiture, almost smiled at that. If Tecumseh joked even a little with you, you knew you were not out of all favor. Loud Noise lowered his face and gazed wistfully into the fire. The old Shaman snored on. And now Tecumseh went on in a quiet voice, “If you do not believe you can be a real shaman, then you cannot be. But anybody can be good, even one who does not believe he will be great. Our father charged Chiksika not to let us become a shame to the family. He did this as he died in his arms in battle. Now Chiksika has died in my arms, and he passed this same charge on to me. Tell me if our family means nothing to you.”

“Brother,” Loud Noise whined, “our family is important to me.”

Tecumseh gazed at him for a long time. After a while Loud Noise grumbled, “Who tells you I bully and steal?”

Tecumseh did not answer that. Instead he said, “Tell me, brother. In your own heart, how do you esteem yourself?”

Firelight flickered on the walls of the lodge. Outside in the winter night the sounds of the village, voices, crying babies, were faint: the sounds of the people. In Tecumseh’s eyes Loud Noise was a shapeless lump with hair and earbobs and a feathered turban on top, abjectly looking down and away, his face hidden. Tecumseh suddenly remembered that long-ago day when the bow had sprung and the split arrow had pierced his little brother’s eye, and the memory stabbed him in the heart. He reached and put his hand on his brother’s shoulder. He felt him take a deep breath, and then the ugly face turned to him, the one eye glittering with a tear, but a kind of angry resolve showed in the set of the fleshy lips. Loud Noise began speaking.

“I am more than anyone thinks I am. No one knows the things I see. No one knows what I have thought. All the earth and the sky and the waters have been clear in my mind. It is true that I am not ordinary, and the people do not know how to see me or hear me. Being as they are, being afraid, they think I am a witch, but that is not so. If I am different, it is because I am more, not less, than a usual man.”

Tecumseh nodded and squeezed the shoulder, and this little pressure of affection seemed to move Loud Noise as if it were a light from heaven. In his eye suddenly burned such an intense
love and gratitude that Tecumseh seemed to feel it in the smoky air, and he said to his brother, “That is what I have always hoped to believe. I have said it to Chiksika and to our mother, even when your conduct could have caused me to doubt. I am happy that you believe this of yourself.

“Listen, my brother. The signs are a great gift. But a great gift is a great burden. One who has it cannot live only for his own pleasures. For us it will be hard. And hardest of all is to understand it.

“Promise me one thing,” Tecumseh went on. “I have never asked you for a promise, have I? Now I ask it.”

Loud Noise almost cringed, as if afraid he would be asked to do something courageous or inconvenient. “Promise me that you will try to master your appetites. All of them. This is the first thing a man must do if he is to deserve the gifts given to him, and if he is to be of good to his People.”

It was as demanding a promise as Loud Noise had feared it would be. But he nodded and said, “I shall try.”

“Weh-sah.
Remember: We belong to the People.”

T
HE DEFEAT OF THE WHITE GENERAL
H
ARMAR HAD GIVEN
the red men great heart, and many went down to the O-hi-o to raid boats. But a hard winter came early and froze the rivers and made it hard and miserable to live in war camps far from home, so most of the warriors returned to their villages to hunt and try to keep their families alive through the frozen and hungry moons. The distance they had been pushed northward from their old towns had been far enough to make the winters harder. Up here the wind blew hard and cold. Harmar’s army had destroyed many crops before its defeat, so food was scarce again.

During this time, Tecumseh worked all his waking hours to help the people survive, and to help solidify the tribal alliances, and to harden himself for the great conflict that he felt would come in the next year. With his band of select followers, which now included Stands-Between, he wandered the upper Wabash and Maumee country both as a hunter and emissary, among the Wyandots, the Miamis, the Weas, the Kickapoos, and even the Ottawas, firming the bonds of friendship among the young warriors of those tribes, talking to the chiefs of the sacred duty of preserving the homelands from further invasion of the whitefaces. Tecumseh made himself known to the British Indian agents McKee and Elliott and renewed his acquaintance with Simon Girty, knowing that British guns and supplies probably would
be needed to resist the Americans. The city of Detroit, though in American territory since the war, was still dominated by Englishmen who were eager to keep the tribes under British influence.

And to toughen himself for the coming trials of his life, he resumed the daily ordeal that he had followed periodically since boyhood. Every morning, except when the river ice was too thick, he broke it and plunged into the river to strengthen his inner fire. Loud Noise lived in dread that Tecumseh would force him to start strengthening himself in that way. It was all he could do—indeed, more than he could do—to curb his appetites as he had promised. When Tecumseh was close by to watch him, he would resist his gluttony and would feel pious about the growling of his half-empty guts. He would not drink liquor any time when Tecumseh might detect it. But as soon as Tecumseh would leave for a while, his resolve would melt; he would gorge himself with breadwater and succotash and any kind of meat he could get, and he would scheme frantically to obtain whiskey somehow without his family’s knowledge. Then, after such binges, he would wallow in guilt or would rationalize that Tecumseh was a fanatical, unreasonable taskmaster.

Thus Loud Noise would suffer under Tecumseh’s discipline when they were together. But only when he was suffering like this did he approve of himself, only when Tecumseh was protecting him from himself. He could not control himself without Tecumseh’s will imposed upon him.

And so as the winter passed into spring and summer, his need for Tecumseh grew to be as strong as it had been when in his boyhood he had trailed him everywhere. And to his great relief, Tecumseh never insisted that he bathe in the icy river.

T
HE SMELL OF BAKING FILLED THE WARM AIR AS THE
B
READ
Dance ceremonies began.

Twelve women, the selected cooks, sat in a circle in a lodge. Star Watcher was one of them. In the center of the floor lay a hoop made of a strip of split white oak. This hoop was the Round of the World, the Circle of Time. In the center of the hoop lay a leather ball, made of two pieces of hide sewn together, stuffed tight with deer hair.

One by one the cooks rose and knelt by the hoop and tied little packets of seeds along half of the circumference of the hoop—the female half. The seeds were of red corn, white corn, large squash, small squash, brown beans, red beans, melon, cucumber, and
pumpkin. These seeds were prayer offerings to Our Grandmother the Creator for abundant crops. The women smiled and sometimes hummed happily as they made these offerings. Our Grandmother liked prayers to be sincere but not solemn, because she liked the People to be happy. The packet Star Watcher tied on was the white corn. These were most important seeds, being the corn used for Indian flour.

Then the cooks left the lodge and went away to the earthen ovens outside to finish baking the ceremonial bread, ninety small breads and three large ones.

Twelve men, the selected hunters, filed into the lodge. They arranged themselves around the hoop. They tied on the male side of the hoop small patches of skunk fur, raccoon fur, and deer hair, and Stands Firm, now recovered from his wounds, tied on a turkey feather. These were the offerings for plentiful game.

When the sacred hoop was thus prepared, it was taken by a very old woman and held over the shoulders of the man who would be the leader of the Bread Dance and the other dancing after the ball game. He carried the hoop to a tree at the edge of the stomp ground. There, with everyone watching, he hung it by a thong from a limb of the tree. It would be left there and never bothered again. Sometimes a person looking through the hoop could see the tomorrows.

No woman who was impure with her bleeding moon, no man who was impure from drinking liquor in the last four days, could attend the ceremony. For this latter reason, Loud Noise was not on the ceremonial ground, and he was sulking in his lodge when he heard the cheering in the town and knew the ball game was about to start. He was disgusted with himself, and he knew that Tecumseh was disgusted with him.

A
LL THE HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE ON AND AROUND THE BALL
game field were concentrating on the leather ball, which the game starter held high above his head in one hand.

Tecumseh had won the position of leader of the men’s team, by tossing a small hickory hoop over the top of a sapling pole twenty feet high. The women’s team was led by the young Peckuwe woman named She-Is-Favored. It was at this time that Tecumseh first became fully aware of this graceful young woman, although Star Watcher once had pointed her out to him as one who was thought to have defended herself against Loud Noise’s drunken lust two summers ago.

This girl now stood opposite Tecumseh in the middle of the
ball field, an arm’s length from him, like himself in a half crouch waiting for the ball to be tossed into the air above them. All the women fit to play, young and old, were massed behind her, ready to snatch the leather ball if she could bat it to them, and behind Tecumseh were all the men, waiting for him to bat it into their midst. The men were confident that they would have the first chance at the ball, because Tecumseh was so quick he could catch flies out of the air.

It was a moment of tense excitement, this pause before the frenzy of action. All the bets—scarves, bracelets, mirrors, paint bags, and a hundred other treasures—hung colorful and glittering on a pole at the edge of the game field.

But the biggest stake of the game was the wood gathering. The side that lost would have to gather all the bonfire wood for the days and nights of the ceremonial, a very big task, and they would have to do it cheerfully, because Our Grandmother liked everything in the ceremony to be cheerful. Spectators stood all around the grassy field, almost silent, holding their breath for the moment of the jump. It was a time for full concentration, and Tecumseh had no leisure to study the look of the girl, but in this instant he was aware that he was next to an uncommon presence; he could feel the emanations of her vitality. Her body, stripped down for the game to a pair of short aprons, before and behind, was deep-chested and lean, and her lithe muscles were delineated under the oiled, tawny skin. He was aware too of the boldness of her eyes; here was a girl who considered herself second to no one. And despite the tension of the moment, she was smiling with confidence. She and Tecumseh, and everyone else, were watching the ball in the game starter’s hand. The ball was the size of two fists held together. Just as it had been the center of the sacred hoop, it seemed the center of their world now. Tecumseh looked at the brown leather ball against the blue sky, and at the game starter’s hand, watching for that first tiny tensing of muscles that would precede the throw. The jump was crucially important in a man-woman game, because the men had to propel the ball strictly by kicking or batting it, while the women were permitted to carry it and to pass it to each other by hand.