Panther in the Sky (69 page)

“Then can you promise me,” Open Door said dubiously, “that on the day you speak of, there will be
Mukutaaweethe Keelswah?”

“At the middle of the day,” Tecumseh replied, smiling, remembering how Ga-lo-weh had convinced him. “Har-vard cannot be wrong.”

“Who is Har-vard?”

Tecumseh shrugged. “Someone who cannot be wrong.”

Open Door’s eye began to twinkle. “What a great thing that would be!” He rubbed his palms together. “It is not that I would want to fool our people. But it would take such a smugness out of Harrison! I must trust you, then, my brother. We will have a Black Sun. Let us call for the People from many nations to come and see my powers!”

So they sent forth the word of the miracle, and the People looked amazed. Then Open Door went away north to the Wyandot towns to hunt witches. Tecumseh sent Thick Water and some other bodyguards with him, both to protect him if he needed it and to bring back their own version of whatever he might report.

But then Tecumseh began to worry. Despite Ga-lo-weh’s confident promise, Tecumseh realized how rashly he had staked everything on some dubious white man’s information. Can you hang the fate of your brother and your People, he chided himself, on a book that says the universe is a handful of balls rolling in the air?

Star Watcher soon noticed how worried her brother was. She sensed that it had something to do with the prediction of the Black Sun, so she caught Tecumseh alone one day and probed until he told her the story of the prediction. Her eyes widened. She put her palm on her throat and took a long breath. “My brother! Have I ever told you that you did a foolish thing? I think I have to tell you now! This was you who did this deceit? Such a thing I would have expected only from your brother!”

He confessed his shame but expressed his lingering hope that the books would prove right. To strengthen her hope and his own, he told her everything about his friendship with the white family and his faith in the mind and heart of the man Ga-lo-weh.

“Then, my brother, you had better pray many times every day until that day that for once the white men’s knowledge will be right. Of course I will pray with you. You know that what has happened to our brother has saved him from the worst misery. If this caused the many People to lose their faith in him, he would fall to a lower place even than he was before!”

“Yes. And the spirit of the People would fall with him. It would be the worst thing ever. I am ashamed. I will pray. I would give my life to keep this from failing!”

And his faith grew ever fainter when he realized that in his dreams there had never been a Black Sun with the other great signs. He was nearly at the point of weeping. Star Watcher, seeing the fear and remorse in his face, did as she had not done for nearly thirty years. She put her arms around his neck and held his head to her shoulder as she had done when he had hurt himself in
child’s play. She held him this way until he was calm, and he prayed.

L
ESS THAN A MOON AFTER
O
PEN
D
OOR HAD GONE AWAY TO
the Wyandots, he returned, seething with indignation. He would say hardly anything about what had happened, so Thick Water had to relate it.

“Of the suspected witches,” he said, “your brother pointed to four. They were women who dressed and acted like white women. His followers in the Wyandot tribe started to get them ready to burn. There were many in that town who did not approve of this witch-hunt, but told me they remained silent for fear of being accused themselves.

“But then their chief the Crane, who is no timid man, called councils and shamed people. He spoke against Roundhead, who is Open Door’s best follower there, and shamed him. The Crane was so firm that the accused women finally were turned free.”

Tecumseh did not say so, but he was glad it had turned out that way. He could see that Open Door was seething with hurt pride. But that, he thought with a gloomy heart, would be nothing compared with the downfall that might lie ahead.

Thick Water sat in Tecumseh’s lodge and told him all this about the witch-hunt, and there was a strangeness in his eyes, a vagueness in the way he talked. It was so strange that at last Tecumseh perceived it, even through his own despair. He put his hand on the shoulder of his rangy friend and said, “Be open and tell me what is in your heart. Does it trouble you, this accusing of witches? It is a strong and terrible thing, but perhaps it will help rid us of the ones who go and give our land away. I do not know if it will. You can say it to me, for it darkens my heart, too.”

“I should not have gone,” Thick Water said. “Killing of women and feeble old men should not be. Please, do not send me with your brother to hunt witches anymore. I am meant to stay by you.”

“You will stay by me, then.”

Thick Water nodded and looked pleased, but there was still something unsaid. He lingered, looking uneasy. Tecumseh coaxed, and finally Thick Water said, “Yes, there is another thing. Please do not be angry.” He braced himself, seeming to fight down embarrassment. “When we were in the Wyandot town … There is a young woman there.…” He looked down and seemed unable to go on.

Tecumseh leaned back and smiled for the first time in many days. “Look up in my eyes,” he said. “Now tell me this: Is she a white woman? Or a half-white?”

“No! No! She is Wyandot!”

“Then”—Tecumseh laughed—“be bold and happy! Bring her here as your wife, if that is what you want! Ha, ha! Bring her here to stand with you and watch my brother make a miracle to ridicule the white governor!”

Or, he thought, to watch us die in ridicule.

O
N THE LAST DAY OF THE COUNTED DAYS, ON THE DAY THE
white men called June the sixteenth, the sun rose in a clear blue sky. Bird songs trilled in the meadows and glades. The dew on the grasses sparkled in the sunlight and vanished.

In hundreds of Indian towns throughout the Middle Ground, from the Allegheny Mountains to the plains beyond the Missi-se-pe, the People kept unusually quiet, aware of the sun climbing in the eastern sky. Shawnees, Delawares, Wyandots, Mingos, Senecas, Miamis, Piankeshaws, Potawatomies, Ottawas, Ojibways, Kickapoos, Winnebagoes, Sauks, Foxes, Oneidas, Munsees, Menominees, Kaskaskias, Michigameas, Peorias, Arikaras, and Sioux, all in their towns or hunting camps or at the salt licks or at fishing camps beside the Great Lakes, all knew this was to be the day of the Black Sun predicted by the Shawnee prophet. They prayed for the safety of their brothers who had journeyed to the Prophet’s holy town in O-hi-o to attend the miracle.

And in little tent camps on the prairies of the Illinois and Iowa country, government astronomers and university professors sat on chairs and adjusted instruments. When Indians from nearby villages wandered close and inquired what they were doing, they explained that they were going to watch the sun go dark at midday. The Indians were speechless with awe; even these white government men knew what the Shawnee prophet was about to do!

On a pretty tongue of land between two tributaries of the Great Miami-se-pe, in a crowded town made of hundreds of
wigewas
and lean-tos, the people prayed fervently, then at midmorning began to move toward the glade in front of the enormous council lodge of the town. They looked for their leaders, the Prophet and Tecumseh, but these two had not yet been seen. The People seated themselves and sat waiting, hardly daring even to whisper to each other. Few of them had ever experienced such a press and crowding of bodies; there were tens of hundreds, people who spoke all the known tongues, people who had ridden weeks to reach this
important place. There were people in this crowd whose tribes had long been enemies, but they sat near each other, and they grew more and more quiet as the sun moved toward the center of the sky. Men and women now and then shaded their eyes with their hands and squinted up for a moment at the blinding orb; then they blinked, half-blinded by its intensity; they felt the heat of it burning down on their heads and shoulders, and they grew ever more amazed at the audacity of their Prophet, who meant to command such power. They began to gaze toward Open Door’s lodge, whose door flap was shut. Over his house hung a dense stillness and an air of mystery. Some even imagined that they could see the roof vibrating.

Perhaps it was, for inside, both the Prophet and his brother were praying so desperately that their heads were buzzing and they were nearly faint from it. Both had the unutterable fear that nothing was going to happen in the sky. As Open Door prayed he drew a necklace of varicolored beans through one hand. Once in Wea Town, so long ago that he did not really remember it, he had seen one of the French Black Robes do this with a string of beads while praying, but now he believed the Great Good Spirit had directed him to make the string of beans as a prayer helper. Tecumseh, kneeling on the other side of the fire-ring, gripped his
pa-waw-ka
stone in his sweaty right hand as he prayed. In the fervor of their prayers, they had let the sacred fire die out and had not even noticed.

At last, exhausted by the concentration, Tecumseh opened his eyes in the hot, brown gloom. A ray of sunlight coming in through the smokehole shone almost directly in the fire-ring, which meant that it was now midday and that the sun was still shining. A fly buzzed loudly, passing back and forth through the dust motes in the sunbeam, and outside there was the vast, buzzing murmur of the waiting crowd. Tecumseh looked at his brother, who was still pulling his beans through his fist, his eye closed, his lips moving. Open Door, despite the intense heat in the closed lodge, wore a long robe, and over the black bandanna that covered his bad eyesocket he wore a headdress made of a raven’s skin and feathers, the wings outstretched. On his lap lay his short medicine stick with its fire feathers and copperhead’s skull.

“Come, brother,” Tecumseh told him in a soft voice, nearly choked with dread and desperation. “It is time. They are waiting for you.” Oh, what a delightful joke on the white governor it had seemed at first, so many weeks ago. But now, it seemed, his poor,
strange brother, who had spent his whole life as an object of ridicule and for just a few seasons had risen above that to a position of power, was about to be hurled back down into even more ridicule, and all because of Tecumseh’s own rash acceptance of a white man’s absurd idea. Oh, my poor brother, Tecumseh thought, what have I done? And then with a great pang in his heart, he decided something:

I shall take the blame onto myself for the failure of this prophecy.

To do so surely would damage his own reputation severely. But he knew in his heart, by the Shawnee code of fairness and honor, that he could never let his brother suffer the ignominy for this great folly.

Now Open Door opened his eye, and the first thing he saw was his brother Tecumseh sitting there, handsome and perfect, gleaming with sweat in the light from the sunbeam, this brother of his who had always been favored by everybody, by Chiksika and Star Watcher and their mother, by Black Fish and Stands Firm and by all their playmates, and Open Door looked at him, hopeless, angered beyond words by what Tecumseh had done to put his fame in such jeopardy. And Open Door thought of what he had decided to do:

I will just go before the People and tell them the truth, that this was Tecumseh’s prophecy, not mine. Let him look like the fool for once!

They rose like condemned men and went to the door, pushed the flap aside, and stooped out into the sunshine, Open Door going first. They kept their eyes down so the sudden brightness would not hurt their eyes or make them sneeze. To sneeze now would be ridiculous upon ridiculous. The sun was blazing down as it always did.

The crowd had left a narrow pathway open between Open Door’s lodge and the front of the great council house, and as the brothers moved along shoulder to shoulder between the masses of waiting people, Open Door felt as if they were marching to the stake. Maybe Twisting Vines and the other accused witches had felt this way. The sun was at its greatest height, and they were walking upon their own shadows. The presence of the People was like a terrible, yearning pressure.

Tecumseh was watching his own shadow moving along the beaten earth in front of his feet when he noticed the strangeness of its outline. The shadow seemed to have three edges, not just one.

His heart surged. He remembered the eclipse he had seen, in his boyhood nearly thirty years ago, the
Mukutaaweethe Keelswah
that had augured the coming of Clark, and he remembered that the first sign of it was this blurring of shadows. Praise to the Great Good Spirit, he thought. It is happening!

Maybe no one else had noticed it yet; the crowd seemed to be intent upon the brothers only, moaning and murmuring for them. As they came to stand before the council house, Tecumseh said softly but urgently in Open Door’s ear:

“Brother, command the sun! Now!”

Open Door in his forbidding raven headdress looked out over the masses, startled by Tecumseh’s intense words, and he saw that the daylight was strange, that the faces in the crowd were graying. He heard that all the bird songs had ceased. His heart blossomed with joy. At once he thrust his medicine fire stick above his head, pointing it toward the sun, and in his eerie flute voice he cried:

“That white man at Vincennes has been so saucy as to challenge your prophet! He told the Delawares, ‘Make this prophet prove his powers by commanding the sun.’ Therefore, my children, so that you will never again heed the words of white men, who are all liars, I have commanded the sun to be dark at midday, and now see! It obeys me now!”

A moaning, wailing noise arose from the mass of people, who were just now noticing the ominous change in the daylight. Hundreds dared to glance up at the sun from under their hands and saw that it was no longer round, that it was being eaten away from one side. Women hugged their bosoms and looked down at the ground in terror, watching their own shadows dissolve. Men who had been standing dropped to their knees. Even those who had seen this happen before were fully awed, because they had heard with their own ears and seen with their own eyes that it was this time the doing of their prophet!