Panther in the Sky (71 page)

Cat Pouncing, chilled by the sight of them, looked as if he might run back into the woods. “No, stay,” Star Watcher soothed him. “Look, they have no weapons!”

This was most surprising: unarmed white men riding straight toward a large Indian town. The white men reined in their horses for a minute to gaze across the creek at the great rotting pile of Fort Greenville’s blockhouse, then rode on toward the droning village. Warriors came trotting out; there was sign language, and then the warriors led them into town.

“Come,” Star Watcher said, “let us see who these strange people are. Maybe they are traders, with their goods on that horse. Or what if they are spies?”

They did prove to be spies—but of an open, welcome sort. They were Jesus worshipers, Open Door explained to the People in council before that evening’s prayers, but a good sort of Jesus worshipers that he had known before. They did no violence to any red men. They found inspiration in a kind of dancing. They were called Shakers. They had come to look at the holy town and had brought some seed for the town’s fields and gardens. They were, said Open Door, the one kind of white men who were welcome here. “Love them,” he cried, “and show them how joyful and peaceful we are in this blessed place!”

Star Watcher wondered what Tecumseh would think, if he were here, about white men being in the holy town, watching.

J
AMES
G
ALLOWAY TOOK THE PIPE TOMAHAWK FROM
T
ECUMSEH
and held it across both his palms, admiring its beautiful craftsmanship and decoration. Tecumseh had brought it to him as a gift, saying that it would be the pipe they should smoke together whenever they met Galloway felt quite solemn about this gift. Nearby sat Rebekah, shaking her head slowly and looking
down in disbelief at the treasure Tecumseh had brought to her: thirty delicately tooled little brooches of pure silver. He had brought gifts for the rest of the family, too, but this wealth of silver ornaments, he had explained, were for all the time she had spent helping him with the language and the reading and writing. But Rebekah in her own secret mind fancied that they were a love gift. She wanted to believe they were, and the tenderness in his beautiful eyes as he gave them to her had made her sure. She kept glancing between the silver and Tecumseh, her heart in a turmoil.

Rebekah Galloway was certain that this intriguing and stimulating man wanted to marry her. This was how Indian suitors announced their intentions, she had heard: by bringing very valuable gifts. And the pipe with her father … Oh, there was no doubt of it.

She wanted him. Oh, she wanted him!

But he was of another race! Her father was becoming one of the leading men in this growing part of the state. He was enjoying the highest form of respectability. He was important in church.

And though he liked and admired their guest Tecumseh as much as most any man he knew, surely he would be aghast at the thought that this chief wanted his daughter!

She could never live in an Indian village, of course. Now as she gazed at the soft sheen of the silver, she envisioned a hut with a fire in the center, a pallet on the floor covered with animal hides, naked children squatting around the smoky fire eating half-raw meat with their fingers, drums beating outside, and herself there pounding corn, slowly forgetting the joys of reading and writing.…

No. If by the wildest vicissitudes there could chance to be a marriage between Tecumseh and herself, he would have to adopt the dress and ways of a white man. After all, with his qualities, could he not be a remarkable man in any society? There were Indians in Ohio now who wore suits and hats and raised livestock. Surely Tecumseh could do that, and do better at it, too.

But he was of a different color! Wouldn’t that bring shame to her father in the eyes of his fellow citizens? She had heard travelers here talk contemptuously of “squawmen,” who were white men who had married Indian women. And treated most contemptuously were those white women who in captivity had married Indian men, then had been returned to white society in prisoner exchanges. If she married a red man of her own free will, what would her father’s and mother’s associates think of them then? Especially those in the church? They would be scandalized!

But she wanted Tecumseh. Oh, how she wanted him!

She had spent so many of her lonely hours in the past year remembering how Tecumseh looked, how his voice sounded, even how he smelled. And sometimes in bed at night, remembering him, she had sighed and tossed, making the cornshuck mattress rustle until her mother’s voice would come out of the dark from behind the privacy curtain: “Becky? Are y’all right, dear?”

“I’m hot,” she had whimpered, throwing off the covers, then lying there feeling the air on her sweat-damp nightdress. Once she had pulled it up around her waist and had lain there in the dark that way, growing excited in the loins, until she had remembered that God could see everything, even in the dark, and had covered herself, heartsick with frustration and shame.

She looked up from her silver at him, gazing long and wistfully, seeing his white-toothed mouth as he smiled.

Almost with reverence, her father now lit the silver-trimmed tomahawk with a coal from the hearth. He and Tecumseh then shared the pipe for a while, and then they resumed old conversations as if they had been together only yesterday, though it had been more than a year.

From time to time Galloway would notice a strange, droll expression on the chief’s face, as if he were trying to keep himself from laughing. Finally Tecumseh said:

“Your promise was good, my friend Ga-lo-weh.”

“My promise?”

“Yes. The Black Sun was when you promised it to be.”

“Oh, yes! The eclipse! You saw it, then, did ye?”

“As I told you I would do. I stood outside and saw it come. I was eager, and I thanked you in my heart.” He was still trying to swallow his smile.

“Don’t thank me.” Galloway chuckled, leaning back in his chair, which creaked under his strong, heavy body. “Thank G … the, the Creator.”

“That I did, too, Ga-lo-weh.” Now Tecumseh leaned back, too, from his customary erect perch on the front of the chair seat, and laughed loudly. How he wanted to tell Ga-lo-weh the magnificent joke about Governor Harrison’s taunt and Open Door’s use of the Black Sun! But of course he could not.

Galloway was bursting to talk about something that had been the topic on the frontier for months. “Chief,” he said, “did ye know that the Corps of Discovery came back alive? That they’d got all the way to the Pacific Ocean, and home safe?”

“Ah. The Captain Clark and the other. Yes.” He had heard
things about this from many sources—from bands arriving from the west, from Girty, from British traders and agents out of Canada. It was bad news for the red man. But of course he could not say that to Ga-lo-weh, either.

“Cap’n Clark aims to set up a fur trading company in St. Louis, so I’ve heard,” said Galloway. “He claims there’s so much beaver and otter and mink out there, it keeps you hoppin’ to empty your traps. And on the far side of the mountains, seals and sea otters, the finest fur in the world, bar none. Why, that could just about put Britain out of the fur business on this continent.…” He paused, remembering the long association between the Shawnees and the English.

Tecumseh said nothing about this yet, only nodded. What had troubled him most deeply was what the western chiefs had told him: that the Long Knife Captains Lewis and Clark had gone peacefully all the way to the Western Sea and back, making strong friendships with tribes that had never been exposed to Americans before, building their trust and making them eager for trade. Some of the chiefs from far up the Missouri-se-pe were traveling to Washington to see the white chief Jefferson. Tecumseh wanted to catch these naive fools and warn them of the treacherous ways of white men. Now that Americans had made a white man’s trail out there, hundreds of hundreds of hundreds more would rush up that trail and fill up that country and kill the game, even the bison, who were so many that they made thunder when they ran. Tecumseh no longer had any delusions about limitless space and inexhaustible game. The white men, he believed now, were capable of overrunning all the land in the world and making farms out of it. So to him, the news of the success of the explorers was the worst possible news, enough even to overshadow the good thing that had happened about the Black Sun. There had also been another American journey, almost as ominous; another American army captain named Pike had explored all the way up to the beginning of the Missi-se-pe, and he had reported the richness of land and the plentiful fur animals up there, which would soon mean the ruin of another quarter of the red man’s world.

So all Tecumseh could say, out of the sense of foreboding these explorers had created in him, was, “Those captains were strong. Their father Jefferson must be proud.”

“Aye, is he ever! What I hear is, he’s making Cap’n Lewis governor of the whole Louisiana Territory, and Clark the Indian agent and militia commander. Now, I don’t know Lewis, but that
Clark lad’s the spirit ‘n’ image of his brother, the best soldier I ever served under.…” He stopped, seeing in Tecumseh’s face that all this talk was anything but delightful. Sometimes with his friend he simply forgot that he was talking to a red chief, who had reasons aplenty for seeing things otherwise. He saw a hardness in Tecumseh’s face and asked, “What’s wrong, my friend?”

“What is wrong? Oh, Ga-lo-weh, this: When there is a governor of a territory, I know, as you have explained to me, and as I have seen happen with my eyes, there will soon be more states. You like many states, for they are your people’s states. I do not like many states, for they swallow the lands of my people. You are good, Ga-lo-weh. I suppose some other white men are good, like you.

“But, Ga-lo-weh, you face me from one side, and I face you from the other side. And that is what is wrong.”

Galloway nodded and was quiet for a while, his enthusiasm suddenly clouded by the signs of Tecumseh’s sadness and distress. Galloway sat fingering the lump of Girty’s bullet in his neck, absently. And Rebekah nearby, though little more than a lovesick girl, was perceptive enough to feel the widening of the chasm between the races even more poignantly. As she rubbed one of the silver brooches between her thumb and forefinger, she was looking at the silver ornaments in Tecumseh’s nose and was now more deeply aware of the space between their two worlds, and for the first time that evening she was not so sure that Tecumseh was there to sue for her hand. She grew frightened, troubled by a premonition of loss.

James Galloway had warned himself time and again not to jeopardize his friendship with Tecumseh by prying into his affairs at the Greenville town. But it was hard now not to say something that had been much on his mind. So he said it:

“I should tell you this, as your friend, because we are, as you say, looking at each other from different sides. There are people around here, powerful people, who want the government to move your tribe away. They don’t know what you’re doing, and they’re scared because they see so many coming and going.”

“Yes, Ga-lo-weh, the white people are always scared when we do something they do not control.” Tecumseh’s voice was low and even, but his lips were hard. “What we do there is worship. We learn not to drink liquor. Not to be violent. Not to breed with white people. Not to steal. Only to do good and keep peace. I think many white people do not like it because we worship
our
Great Spirit instead of yours. Listen, Ga-lo-weh! The white people
would rest if they believed how good our people are in that place, but to trust is not their way. That is all I want to say about it, Ga-lo-weh. It is ours, what we do there. Not of your powerful people around here.”

Galloway took a long breath that hissed in his nostrils and decided to say just a little more, since he was at it, for Tecumseh’s own sake.

“One of those people is General Kenton. He looked at your town, and he believes you’re preparing for war.”

Tecumseh’s eyebrows went up. “Ah! Let us speak of this, then, yes! This general and some other militia soldiers with him came to my town, while my chiefs and I were away. He said he is General Kenton, but some warriors see he is But-lah! I have been angry about this. Is this a true man, then, to come and pretend he is another name, not our enemy? This is deceit—”

“Oh, wait! Wait!” Galloway said, holding up his hand. “You are right. Kenton
is
Butler. He called himself Butler, back in the war, because … well, for his own reasons. But he uses his real name now. He wasn’t trying to deceive you. He is as honest a man as ever was. And people
listen
to him, my friend, because he
is
honest. He’s a friend of mine, you know; he was a scout for Gen’l Clark, just like me. He’s a fine man! But here’s what he told me. He said you chiefs were gone to the British when he went to your town. And he said your people wouldn’t give him their right hand, but only their left. That, I reckon, stuck in his craw most.…” Galloway suddenly realized he was revealing the private notions of one friend to another and stopped. There was a moment’s silence, and the words seemed to hang in the air.

Finally Tecumseh said, simply, “They gave their left hand only because they thought this man was lying about his name. That is interesting, about But-lah’s name. It is good to learn there is an honest man. Thank you for clearing my eyes on his name. My people, too, may change their name. If their life is not good under one name, perhaps it is a bad name and it will be better under a better one.” He was thinking of his brother Loud Noise, now Open Door.

But Galloway was not ready yet to lapse back into general conversation. They had at last spoken of the tension created by the Indian town, and Galloway wanted his friend to be aware. “They’re saying, my friend, that your town is inside the treaty lines, and that you have no right to be th—”

He stopped. Tecumseh’s face had suddenly flashed anger as clearly as a bolt of lightning. It passed, but everyone in the room
remained electrified for a moment. Tecumseh stood up quickly. His expression was kindly again, but his eyes were now troubled, even as he smiled at the members of the family, and he was strung very tight. Galloway had risen halfway out of his chair, a hand outstretched, hoping to calm and detain him, deeply sorry that he had said too much and caused this unpleasant moment, the first unpleasant moment they had ever had in Tecumseh’s presence.