Panther in the Sky (58 page)

She was quiet for a moment, then said: “What did you do?”

“I threw it in the fire.”

“Oh! They’ll not like you for that!”

“I did it to help them. Are you saying I should not have done it?”

“Whiskey costs them much, and you threw it away.”

He looked at her silhouette in the gray light before the dawn, and he was not pleased to hear what she was saying.
“Neewa,”
he said, “you did not see how they were hurting themselves and each other, nor the fat women doing adultery in their stupor. Maybe you do not understand how bad whiskey is.”

“Husband, is it so bad for the People to enjoy themselves that you must leave your new wife alone and go out to stop their pleasures?”

Tecumseh gasped. “Cutting each other with knives is not pleasure! Screaming with your head full of devils is not enjoyment! Listen! My People are weak and foolish about whiskey, and my People are in my hands. You were asleep from a better kind of pleasure. Why should you complain that I went to help them?”

After a pause of silence, her voice came softer. “I woke up wanting you to do it to me again. I was sorry and afraid because you were not here.”

Those words, even as exhausted and upset as he was, at once made his
passah-tih
start to harden and his heart to soften, and he looked at her dark eyesockets and started to reach with his hand to touch her belly. But she said:

“I am cold. Put a blanket on me.”

He sighed, gathered his weary legs under him, and got up to get it. Perhaps if he had not been so tired and unsettled, he would have known better than to sigh at a woman’s request. When he got the blanket and spread it over her nakedness, she did not thank him. He was still too warm for the blanket, so he lay down outside it. Outdoors, some of the dawn birds were starting to chirp, and in the distance a dog began to bark. He could hear voices here and there in the village. Already people were waking up, and no doubt they were talking about the whiskey trouble and about their chief’s wedding night and about other things that concerned him. It was not likely that he would get to sleep any before morning, and he felt weak, drained by their excess of abandon the night before.

And although She-Is-Favored seemed not to want to copulate
right now, apparently she did not want to sleep, either, for she began talking into the rushing of the fatigue in his head.

“Who were the women doing the adultery?” she asked.

No, he thought, groaning. I pray that she is not one of those women hungry for bad gossip. Gossip about other people was one of the most despicable offenses against Shawnee law.

“Why do you make that groan?” she demanded. “I only asked you something.”

“I do not wish to talk about who it was. It will be dealt with when their husbands return. I need to sleep now.”

She let out a sharp breath. “These People of yours took you out of our bed for their silly problems,” she snapped. “I deserve to have your attention now.”

He sat up suddenly, appalled.
“Neewa,
” he said, keeping his voice low so his neighbors would not know he was angry with his bride already. “Whiskey is not a
silly
problem. It is one of the worst of the many evils the whitefaces have brought. It is as bad as the coughing sickness they give us. It is as bad as burning our towns and destroying our grain. Let me advise you,
neewa,
not to be selfish with my time. You are just one of the People who are in my care!” This, he realized at once, was a hard statement, even though a truth, so he added, “You are the most important of them. But they too are mine, and their care will need my time.” It crossed his mind that some people called her a spoiled woman, as her name implied. For one tired, exasperated moment he wondered whether he should have followed his own wisdom and stayed unmarried. Then he chastised himself. He reminded himself of the truth that if a person says and does wrong, it is because of a lack of understanding. And so, patiently and with tenderness returning in his heart, he said, to help her understand:

“We in this village are the last hope of the Shawnee People. We must do good. We must be strong. We must not let the white men make us corrupt. These People of ours are good. They were brave to come here with me. You yourself were brave to come here with me. We must keep our People pure. They have weaknesses, and we must help them conquer their weaknesses. We must pray to Weshemoneto and ask him to see us as good and strong and pure People. That is because what Weshemoneto sees is what is. If he sees us pure and good and strong, we will
be
pure and good and strong. All this you know from before, but now there is also this you must know:

“I am my People. And since you have chosen to be my wife, you are these People, too. Just as I must care for their needs, so
must you. You are the women’s chief now. As my time and strength and wisdom belong to the People, so do yours. You are not alone anymore. You cannot think only of yourself. Listen to the people out there.” Outside the bark walls there were all the sounds of a village stirring to life. Someone was breaking dry wood for the breakfast cookfire. Someone was soothing a fussy baby. Someone was whetting a knife on stone. Someone was laughing. Someone was grinding corn in a wooden mortar, humming. They were the beautiful sounds of peaceful life, and among them were the hushings of a light, mild wind in the leaves and the songs of birds. This was the peaceful music of life that he had heard as a child in his mother’s lodge so many years ago before the white men had started coming, and it filled his heart with caring. “Hear them,” he said to her softly. “Those are our children.” He smiled at her. Her eyes were closed as if she were listening carefully and thinking deeply. “You have been a married woman only one night, and already you have hundreds of children!”

He had thought she would laugh or at least smile at this joke. Instead, a soft snore came from her throat.

She had fallen asleep.

A
S THE NEXT FEW MONTHS PASSED
, T
ECUMSEH SPENT MUCH
of the nighttime lying awake beside his sleeping wife. She seemed to need twice as much sleep as he did, but she did not want him to sit up by the fire or go out while she slept. He tried to please her by going to bed when she did, and often she would go to sleep with their
soos
juices seeping out of her
massih
and a smile on her face. Then she became pregnant, and even after they stopped copulating she still insisted that he must always be beside her when she was in bed. For a while this great needing of hers charmed and flattered him, and he would lie beside her feeling tender about her
tap-a-lot
for him and for the baby inside her. But he could not think about those things all the time, and sometimes he would think that this way of hers was a little selfish.

So now Tecumseh could not go out and seek solitude for thinking, as he had used to, not unless he wanted to hear her complain about being abandoned. And so these nights he lay beside a sleeping pregnant wife and tried to ponder on his dreams and his destiny.

All the dams against the flood of the Americans were broken, now that the old chiefs and the British had given up. Somehow, according to the signs of his own destiny, he was to build another dam. But how? He was only a warrior chief, of twenty and eight
summers, chief of his own village only. He was Kispoko by birth, and by the old law of the People, only a Chalagawtha or a Thawegila Shawnee could be chief over the whole Shawnee nation.

He did not yet have his answer. But since he had started thinking about floods and dams, he had been considering the Beaver People and the way they dammed a flow. The answers to many things were in the ways of the animals, and even animals that were not one’s Spirit Helper could teach.

No single beaver builds a dam. But many beavers, working together as if with a single will, build a dam that holds back a large and powerful stream. The answer lay in that single will of the many.

When Tecumseh was wakeful at night, his wife breathing softly beside him, he would lie looking into fire, or at stars beyond the roof, hearing the river’s liquid song and the owl in the tree and the whippoorwill in its covert, and he would ponder on what needed to be said to make the many wills of the many tribes become the same—permanently the same, as the Beaver People are permanently the same in will—so they could build a dam and stop the flow.

He could think deeply of these things only at night now. As he had feared, having a wife kept him too busy to think, until she went to sleep.

Sometimes during the days, Star Watcher would come and try to talk to She-Is-Favored about some of the little things the chief’s wife should be thinking of and doing for the women. She was appalled when She-Is-Favored would say she had no time for this or that, that she was pregnant and too tired, or when she would lean toward Star Watcher with a languid smile and say, “Sister, could you do that for me instead?”

After this had happened a few times, Star Watcher began to fear that she had served her brother ill by approving of this woman. She began to notice that Tecumseh spent less and less time among the People, that he could not sit by the fire with Stands Firm or other subchiefs in the evenings, that those with problems could not find him out in the village and talk with him.

She thought: Perhaps he will grow wiser about handling this woman now that she is pregnant and cannot put his will to sleep with her pretty bottom. Maybe he will never make her a good chief’s wife. But he must become a good chief again.

T
HE NEXT SPRING
B
REAKER-IN-
P
IECES CAME TO
T
ECUMSEH’S
town, on his way home from a visit to Black Hoof’s town at Wapakoneta.

“You would be sad to see him and his People,” the Delaware chief said to Tecumseh. “Some of them wear white men’s clothes. The men are plowing the ground.” Breaker-in-Pieces was a fierce-looking warrior chief with a terrible scar and a missing ear on one side of his head, a man famed for keeping his word. He and his People were under the Greenville Treaty, too, but at least they had not yet begun to live like the white farmers, because they lived farther west, where there was still game.

Tecumseh shook his head slowly and looked down into the fire. After a while he said, “Do they like being white men?”

“They have little heart for it. But they try. They still believe Black Hoof when he says it is the only way for them. They try to be white. But for one thing, they do not know how to control whiskey like the white men yet, and there is much whiskey. I think the whites do not eat the corn they grow, I think they drink all of it.”

Tecumseh looked over at him with pain in his eyes, and the Delaware went on: “They are crazy for it, and they are crazy from it. Anything they have, they give for it. Then they drink till it is gone. They vomit and scream and beat their families, and try to stab their brothers. Then they pass out. They wake up sick, in their own filth, and have nothing left but pain. Then they go to the trader store to get something to live by for a while, and the trader makes them promise him their tomorrows.” He sat quiet, looking down in sadness.

She-Is-Favored waddled into the house to get a bowl and went out, saying nothing. She would be having her baby soon, and she was not happy with carrying its weight, or the shape of her body, or all the silly talk all the women always had about babies. And she was worried; women always warned her that having a baby hurt worse than anything. Also, she could not understand why the other women did not admire her more than they did, for she was the women’s chief.

The main reason they did not admire her, even as much as they had used to, was because they could see that she troubled their chief. She nagged Tecumseh about the time he spent with the People’s problems and because he gave to them so much of what he had. “You are the chief, I am your wife,” she would complain, “but almost anyone in our town has more nice things than we have.”

“What do you need that we do not have?” he would ask her, and she could not name anything they needed, though she could think of many things she wanted. Then she would get angry at him because he could point out the difference between needing and wanting. So she was sullen, even in the presence of their guest. Being of hot spirit, she gave off sparks from her eyes, not tears.

Breaker-in-Pieces said nothing to Tecumseh about her demeanor. It annoyed him, but it was none of his concern. Now he said, “I am glad my town is farther from the white man’s roads. They do not come so close with their whiskey. Though even there, it disturbs us sometimes. A few of my young men have come to need it.”

“We have had some trouble with it here,” Tecumseh said.

“Yes. One day, I fear, it will ruin us all. But I have some distance from it, and from their hunters. Listen. Many of the chiefs have trouble already with the white men who come across the new treaty line and hunt in their country. The whitefaces kill more game than their own hunters kill. Then they leave much of the meat lying for the carrion birds.” He shook his head.