Panther in the Sky (39 page)

The narrow-faced man at whom Tecumseh had fired his first and only shot lay on the beach on his back, dead, mouth open, a bloody hole in his gullet. Two warriors were knee deep in the river next to the tethered boat, each pulling one leg of a white man who had gotten halfway into the boat. One of the warriors raised a knife and began stabbing him in the buttocks. The man began screaming, and the Indians laughed and kept cutting his seat to bloody shreds. Elsewhere warriors were kneeling, taking the scalps off the men they had killed, and two warriors were running up the shore in pursuit of a white man who had lost his weapons and was trying to escape into the willows.

Tecumseh’s heart was hammering. There were no more white men left to fight! Tecumseh held up his war club and looked at the dark blood spatters on its leather. The warriors were yelling and laughing now, waving bloody scalps, picking up weapons, piling into the boat and ransacking its cargo. The man Thick Water had been strangling had gone limp, and the big youth had
dropped him to the ground and stood over him, chest heaving, looking around in amazement. The two warriors up the riverbank were coming out of the willow thicket, dragging by its feet the body of the white man they had chased. Not one warrior had been seriously hurt.

Chiksika came panting and grinning to Tecumseh. He grabbed his shoulders and held him at arm’s length and looked into his eyes with open pride. Then he put a knife into Tecumseh’s hand and pointed to some of the corpses on the beach.

“Those four are yours. Four!” he exclaimed. “You will want their scalps, my brother, as proof to the people who will be too amazed. Four!”

Now almost in a daze, feeling suddenly so tired he could hardly move, Tecumseh went to each of his victims, knelt, wrapped his fingers in the hair, pulled up, and made a circular cut in the scalp. The trophies each came loose with a wet popping sound, except that of the man he had hit with the war club. His skull was too fragmented, and it was a mess getting his scalp off. Tecumseh was beginning to feel sick.

The scalplocks were all different. The hair of one was thick and brown and wavy. Another was the color of dry grass in autumn, straight and greasy. Another was thick and straight and black; the last was dark brown with some white hairs in it and sticky with blood. Tecumseh knew he should try to remember which lock of hair had come from each of the men he had killed. But it was too hard to concentrate now. He was swallowing hard.

It would not be good after all this for the others to see him vomit. He wondered if his body would in some way like this embarrass him every time he got into battle. So now his task was to keep from vomiting.

The only white man left alive of the thirteen was the one Thick Water had choked. He was conscious now, looking very miserable, one side of his face red with contusions. He had been stripped naked and tied to a willow tree, and his body was smudged with bruises. He looked like a man without a hope and stayed very quiet in order not to attract the attention of his captors.

Now the warriors, exultant, went about the business of gathering their booty and celebrating.

Much of the boat’s cargo was gunpowder, lead, and weapons. Some of the small kegs in the boat contained gunpowder, a great prize. Two smaller kegs contained liquor, also a great prize. Apparently Chiksika had been right; it was a military supply boat.
Perhaps all this had been on its way down to Clark’s fort at the Falls. It was very satisfying to believe that.

The warriors were exuberant; all this they had done and with no losses of their own to grieve, so when some of them chopped in the ends of the liquor kegs, Chiksika did not stop them. In fact, Chiksika himself put his face down to the rum and sucked up a mouthful and stood up and swallowed it with a smile on his lips and tears in his eyes. Then he shuddered, teeth clenched, and let out a loud whoop. “Brother!” he called to Tecumseh. “You are a man now! You must taste this! Every man should know the taste of this! Here is the white man’s most powerful medicine! With this in their veins it is no wonder they are such devils and fools!
Hi-hi-yeeee!”
And all the others of the band, who were rejoicing for Tecumseh’s bravery and his remarkable deeds, agreed that he should celebrate with the strong spirit water.

Tecumseh had always done what Chiksika had told him to, so now he stepped up to the rum keg, dropped to his knees, and put his face down to it. The smell rising from it seared his nostrils and made his eyes water and nearly turned his stomach over, and he wondered, How can this be good? The liquor was the color of the gum that forms on the bark of a nicked wild cherry tree, a beautiful color, but the stench of it was like evil itself. Surely the urine of the Great Horned Snake must smell like this. He did not want any. He was afraid of it; it seemed to burn the eyes and nose with invisible flame. The other warriors had already drunk some, and he could see that they were becoming clumsy and looking stupid in the eyes and whooping over anything. But they were all encouraging him to do it, and he did not want anyone ever again to think he was afraid of anything, so he put his face down through the rankling stink and sucked up a mouthful. It burned in his mouth, and he swallowed it at once.

It was as if it did not belong in a person; it tried to turn and come back up. He clamped his throat to keep it down. His eyes poured tears, and everything blurred. The fluid did not come back up, but it boiled and burned in his gullet and guts, and its fumes now came up from inside him to scorch the inside of his nose and the back of his eyeballs. He gasped for fresh air, but the air made it seem even more putrid. His lips and fingers had gone numb, and a wind was singing and hissing in his head. But just as he was making a silent vow never to let another drop of such an evil fluid pass his lips, something in him was beginning to change, and he was starting to feel grand and strong and wise and funny.

Thick Water did not go back for more of the liquor. Tecumseh asked him, “Do you not like that?”

“Not much,” Thick Water replied, making a face. “I drank some on another raid, and it made me sick when I drank it, and the next day also.” He leaned close. “I pretend to drink some.”

The warriors grew clumsier and sillier as they drank the rum and demolished the white men’s boat. Everything they wanted to keep they were carrying over to cache under a ledge in the river bluff; they would come back for it in big canoes later. As they staggered and pranced across the beach carrying things to the cache, they laughed at each other’s clumsiness and dropped things and laughed because of that, and they laughed out of sheer hilarity from their own thoughts. Then, as dusk deepened, they set to work bashing the boat apart with heavy tools they had found, and this proved to be the most uproarious fun of all. Three of the warriors fell into the river, one of them twice. One of them, pounding on the same plank he was standing on, plunged his leg through the bottom of the boat when it broke loose under his foot. His leg was gashed deeply by a splintery end, but he and the others found it all so comical that they stood helpless with laughter while he bled profusely from the leg that stuck through the bottom of the sinking boat.

By the time they had managed to shatter and sink the boat, though, their drunkenness had taken an ugly turn. Some had taken or thrown overboard things that others said they had already claimed, and these disputes had broken into quarrels. One warrior drew a knife and threatened another, and Chiksika had to take the knife away, getting slightly cut on the arm while doing it. Tecumseh’s head was whirling, even though he had not drunk any more after that first draught. When the others had coaxed him to drink more, he had put his lips to it and only pretended to drink. He did not like the feeling of losing control over himself and was determined that he never would again. It was true that the warriors were very funny in the loss of their dignity, but Tecumseh was disgusted when he saw these fine young men fall to their hands and knees and spew vomit onto the ground and then get up and stagger over to drink more from the kegs. When he saw Stands Firm retching into the river, through a bruised throat so sore he groaned with agony even as he gagged, Tecumseh thought of his sister, Star Watcher, and how this would anger her if she could see it. So Tecumseh drank no more, and he was glad when the warriors held up the kegs and complained that they were empty.

By now a large bonfire was blazing on the beach, fueled by driftwood and by broken crates and wooden artifacts from the boat. Tecumseh was kneeling by the fire, bandaging the leg of the warrior who had stepped through the boat. The injured warrior had passed out flat on his back and was feeling no pain at all. One of the warriors whooped and threw an empty liquor keg into the fire, then recoiled and laughed when a
whooshing
ball of flame leaped up from it. At once another threw in the other keg, to repeat the fireworks, and they all whooped with joy. Tecumseh cried out:

“No wonder it makes us such fools! It is like gunpowder!” He moved away from the bonfire, pulling the unconscious man after him, afraid that he might blow up if he lay too close to the flames with so much liquor in him.

But his remark about the gunpowder had stirred a reckless notion in one of the others, who apparently had not yet had enough fireworks; this one snatched up a powder keg the size of a man’s head and, with a yodel, poised himself to toss it in the fire. Fortunately Chiksika was not too drunk to react, whether to the danger or against the waste of precious gunpowder; he sprang toward the warrior and grabbed the keg out of his hands.

Now that such diversions were over, the attention of the intoxicated warriors began to turn toward the one thing they had not yet destroyed: the bound captive. He was plain and vulnerable there in the edge of the fireglow, white and naked, his eyes wild with fear.

This image, the frightened eyes in the blanched face, and the ridiculous patches of dark hair on the pallid body, began to work its way through the rambunctious mood of the warriors. This was a white man, maybe even one belonging to the hated Clark who had destroyed their homes once and again. This was a white man who had not only come down the river bringing weapons—weapons no doubt for the killing of red men—but had had the arrogance to land and make a camp on the Shawnee side of the river and build a fire here to cook his disgusting pig meat. He was a symbol of all the things that had hurt and killed and insulted the proud Shawnees for so many, many seasons, and here he was, helpless in their hands and afraid.

The warriors began to go over and visit him one by one. Stands Firm spat in his face, croaking in Shawnee through his bruised throat: “Here is a taste of your spirit water.”

The next tugged down his loincloth and urinated on the white
man’s feet, saying, “Here is more of your spirit water.” Most of the others were gathering around now.

Then Chiksika stepped up to the prisoner. He pointed at the patch of hair around the white man’s genitals and said, “One should not let hair grow on the
passah-tih.
” Then he clutched a handful of the hair and, with a powerful yank, pulled most of it out. The white man yelped so loudly that his echo came back from across the dark river. And this cry of pain inflamed the contempt of the warriors. The next one stood in front of the captive and drew out his knife. It was a thin-bladed skinning knife, rusty, only its cutting edge shiny from whetting. The warrior held the blade before the white man’s eyes and smiled, while reaching down and taking hold of the man’s testicles. The prisoner began to moan, tossing his head and rolling his eyes, and only then did Tecumseh, on the far side of the fire still trying not to become sick from the liquor in him, become aware of what was happening. He came around to see what was causing these pathetic pleadings.

The warrior with the knife said, “Let us see if
these
blow up like gunpowder in the fire!” And with a swift motion he brought down the knife and severed the scrotum from the man’s body. His exultant whoop and the prisoner’s agonized scream were simultaneous and sounded like one wild animal. The warrior spun away and hurled the bloody handful into the bonfire, then, turning an expression of mock disappointment on the shrieking, gasping prisoner, exclaimed: “Oh! They did not blow up! Had they no power? Too bad!”

The warriors, most of them, laughed and howled at this joke, and they were excited by the prospect of making this white man feel still more pain for the sins of his race. Tecumseh and Thick Water stood nearby, the two boys among these men, and they were not rejoicing. Thick Water’s face was in a grimace; he was inhaling through clenched teeth in empathy with the prisoner’s pain, probably because he was more sober than the others. Tecumseh was stunned, too, but his feelings were complex. The dark blood running down the insides of the prisoner’s white thighs brought back that vague feeling of shame he had experienced at the gauntlets. And in the back of his mind were many old teachings of Star Watcher, who had always said it was unworthy of a good Shawnee to inflict pain unnecessarily or to hurt any helpless creature. And his father, and Black Fish, and Black Hoof, too, had said that a brave man, even an enemy, should never be reduced to humility. But these warriors were men, and Tecumseh
was only a boy. They had been in many battles, and he had fought only in this one. His own brother Chiksika, their leader, was allowing this to happen; how could Tecumseh dare to object? Maybe this was the true way of war; maybe the noble and humane things the chiefs taught were only ideals to be told to boys. But Tecumseh was not dizzy from the rum anymore. The cruelties being done by his brother warriors had shocked him and cleared his head, and all that remained of the rum was an ache in his skull and an evil taste in his mouth.

Now the warriors had begun clamoring around the prisoner. He had not fainted from the pain, and his wailings had dwindled to gasps and whimpers, and the warriors were not satisfied. One was yelling:

“He is no good for anything now! Burn him! Ha, haaaa!”

“Burn this pale dog! Yes!”

“He should not have come here! He came to burn!”